Page 5924 – Christianity Today (2024)

Robert taylor begins his book, This Damned Campus, with a poem found tacked to the campus Protest Tree. Its first lines: C is for Chaplain, a regular guy, Who’s keeping his thumb in that pie in the sky.

Unjust indictments aside, let it be a challenge to make us occasionally probe with our other thumb into the contemporary cultural scene. Most churchgoers and non-attenders alike are ingesting a steady diet of the music, drama, and literature of the times. Yet the busy pastor, his attention riveted on the special concerns of the kingdom of God, is often unaware of the very mix in which he seeks to win and disciple new followers for Christ. A study of the current culture, despite its leanness in moral and spiritual content, can impart to the man of God a strategically beneficial awareness of his age, and of the real nature of the secularly soaked “Aquarians” to whom he ministers.

The risks are obvious. Reading certain best-sellers or attending “R” rated movies can have an addicting effect, siphoning off deep commitment. The study will require the highest integrity lest it degenerate into academic license for side trips into Vanity Fair. The pastor who dares to be a cultural apologist must daily reinforce his spiritual lifelines through prayer and Bible study. In every probe he must have the honesty to determine whether he is really acting to understand his culture, or is beginning to condone or even assimilate some of its ungodly aspects.

Beyond this, there is such a continual flood of contemporary materials that to try to sample the entire field would indeed be a foolhardy abuse of time. And a continuous input of contemporaneity can render a pastor so “this worldly” that he will be unable to represent sufficiently the other world of which he is both citizen and ambassador. But for a pastor with the maturity and consecration to manage it, this laboratory understanding of his culture will enable him to do several things communication-wise in confronting people where they are.

First, he will be able to combat the newer philosophies of despair. Many novelists and playwrights are turning out works whose central theme is human futility and despair. This is certainly true of such existentialists as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Tom Stoppard. But it can also be seen in Peter Weiss, Frederico Fellini, and Tennessee Williams.

This despair is substantially different from that pictured in older works such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, the non-fictional Diary of Anne Frank, and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. When despair is pictured in these works, it is hopelessness imposed on the despairing by the culture—“from without.”

In modern literature (including screen plays), however, the despair originates philosophically in the human struggle for ultimate meaning. It is angst, the hunger for validity of life. Imposed “from within,” it originates inside the vacuous egos of playwrights and novelists who suffer not from a lack of material affluence or public adulation, but from a purely subjective dialectic that offers them only existential pessimism.

Since the Christian minister is a dispenser of the gospel of hope, he has a valuable contribution to make to the current scene. But before he can offer the angst-infected secularist the solution of Colossians 1:27 or First Peter 1:3, he might be asked whether Waiting for Godot is a more realistic view of life in an orbit of hopelessness. How much more authoritative if the pastor—while setting forth Christ as the only hope of humanity—could show the deficiencies of Samuel Beckett’s alternative!

Not everyone can have the intense awareness and deft skill of Francis Schaeffer (The God Who Is There) in countering this cultural despair with ultimate hope. But every pastor should seek a basic understanding of this hopelessness motif, then speak out positively.

Second, he will be able to make a pertinent apology for biblical morality. Cultural familiarity furnishes insight into the modern moral scene. One need not rear far in The Love Machine or The Couples or Portnoy’s Complaint to discover where part of the culture is. All restrictive behavior codes are apparently abandoned in favor of unrestricted hedonism.

How far ahead of practice the novels are running in their lurid portrayal of urban sexuality is open to debate. Whatever that gap, “Hefnerism” is the dominant socio-sexual philosophy in America. It is one thing for the pastor to have an awareness that a Playboy cult exists behind a facade of intellectual respectability; it is something else for him to understand the complicated stranglehold that Hefner and his disciples have on American morality. Bunny Clubs are more than just dens of indulgence. They represent a persuasive philosophical apologetic that underlies a movement. Further, the Playboy machine is evangelistic. It seeks with missionary zeal to eradicate Victorianism from the earth.

There is little value, of course, in debate-for-points with the new permissiveness. But the tuned-in pastor will know best how to build the case for God’s version of morality—complete with absolutes—as he addresses those who secretly seek escape from moral anarchy.

Third, the pastor will be able to point the way more clearly to true fellowship and social responsibility. Our age abounds in abdication of community responsibility. Themes of social rejection prevail in Easy Rider, Alice’s Restaurant, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The emphasis on cultural separateness in these films glorifies the individual but negates his social obligations and reciprocal role in the family of man. A man is not his brother’s keeper. Often, he is not even his own keeper. He just exists, a child of fate. “Freedom,” pot, motorcycles, hom*osexuality: these are among the surgical tools by which the revolutionaries excise themselves from the social body.

Openness to these cultural amputees will be difficult for the pastor whose orientation is so vastly different. Yet he must read them and grasp the rationale behind their schismatics if he is to communicate reasonably with them. He must feel into their lonely struggles. (Surface gregariousness is often a case of “loners together.”) Many of them believe they have really tried, only to find the respective Establishments to be deaf-mute mechanisms without nervous systems.

Jesus was open to everybody. He knew the culture of his day. His words and deeds were on target, lives were healed. The ultimate needs and answers are the same today. The culture is different, yet it is possible, as a first step of ministry, for the pastor to crack the cultural codes of his time. For the sake of Christ and the lost, he must!—THE REV. CALVIN MILLER, minister, Westside Baptist Church, Omaha, Nebraska.

WHEN ANGELS DANCED

Many of my friends are eccentrics. I state this without shame or regret, mindful of the birds-of-a-feather business. One of them collects unanswered or unanswerable questions. He delights in formulating questions to which the answer is obscure like “What was the significance of Bill Bailey’s fine tooth comb?”

He’s even happier when he can find a question that seems unanswerable—such as “What is the explanation for Hamlet’s seeming inability to take decisive action?”

The ultimate accolade of “unanswerable” is given to a question when two or more authorities give diametrically opposed answers.

I remember one occasion in high school when he discovered that medieval theologians posed such questions as “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” He went into an Ichabodian blue funk.

The shock of the sudden realization that he had been born into the wrong century was almost too much for him. “How could God do this to me?” he questioned. At the time I was even less of a theologian than I am now and had no answer. Eventually he recovered and went on to new heights of doubt.

A few weeks ago I made the mistake of giving him a collection of recent theological publications I was discarding. I didn’t see him again till we met yesterday at an alumni meeting.

He came over to my table happily waving a sheaf of papers. “Gee, I don’t know how to thank you!” he said. “Those religious magazines are great!” I was puzzled at first. “I didn’t really know you were so interested in theology,” I said.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m interested in questions. And these things are gold mines,” again waving the sheaf of papers.

Then I realized the papers were pages from those nearly discarded magazines.

“Why didn’t you tell me before this?” His tone was slightly accusing. “I’ve stayed away from religion because I thought it was full of ultimate answers. Here I was contenting myself with superficial questions like ‘Where did Cain get his wife?’ when I could have been asking ‘What is ecclesiastical renewal?’ and ‘What is the anachronistic mind of the believers in the old Individualism?’—or even ‘Who or what is the cosmic Christ?’”

“As a matter of fact,” he continued, animation mounting, “I have found so many conflicting statements by the theological experts that I have already classified several questions unanswerable: Is there a God?, What is mission?, and How can you know anything?”

I said hesitantly, “Now that you’ve read those publications, why don’t you try reading the Bible?”

“Why?” he eagerly responded. “Is it full of questions too?”

Next time around I’ll burn my old magazines.

KEEPING SIGHTS STRAIGHT

The article on religious broadcasting, “The Problems and Prospects of Evangelical Radio,” by William R. Wineke (Jan. 1), was superb.… I also find that you pack one surprise an issue and I found it this week in editorials. “Disobeying Orders” was about the best defense I have heard against the rhetoric of the far right.… I could go on and … praise the reviewer of Tom Skinner’s latest books but suffice it to say that I find your publication invaluable in keeping my sights on the goal of the Kingdom and its universal quality.

Oak Brook, Ill.

Your editorial on Commander Eustis did not go far enough. When the axe falls it should get the root of the tree, not just do a little pruning. You blistered Eustis as well you should. But what about … the tarnished brass at the top?

Taylor Avenue Church of God

Lebanon, Mo.

WEAK REASONING

I found the article “Second-Class Citizenship in the Kingdom of God” (Jan. 1) to be exegetically weak and scripturally out of context. Galatians 3:28 was grossly misused. The New Testament, including Galatians 3:28, does not abolish the natural, creative orders when a person becomes a son of God. If we follow the reasoning of the author to logical conclusions, we will not only abolish the male, female order of headship and submission, but also all creative differences must be abolished.… Perhaps Paul’s question in Galatians 3 would apply to the article: “Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?”

Mount Olive Evangelical Lutheran Church

Anoka, Minn.

I have now seen it demonstrated that you can quote the Bible to prove anything. Although I do not always agree with the position taken in your articles I can usually respect the scholarship of the author and the quality of the article. I am sorry to say that Ruth Schmidt’s article has absolutely nothing to commend it.

Are we to understand that Paul’s explicit instructions concerning women’s role in the church are only his “personal bias”? Should we not then conclude that they are not “profitable for doctrine, for reproof …”? The author apparently does. I am surprised that CHRISTIANITY TODAY would allow such a low view of inspiration in its pages.

Electra Community Church

Electra, Tex.

I am in full agreement with Ruth Schmidt! God ordained that women be used in his worship services long before Christ came to this earth. They were used in such high offices (as judges), and even a prophetess named Anna confirmed what Simeon told the people about Christ.

Springfield, Ohio

Thank you so much for Ruth Schmidt’s article.… I’ve been watching … for one like that for several years now. We can only hope that soon evangelical Christians will see that there are more options open to women to serve Jesus Christ than ever before.…

It was heartening to note that the author clarifies the difference between wives and women. So often verses are used to keep women down when they are referring to the marriage relationship and not relationships between all men and all women.

(Mrs.) BEVERLY WILLIAMS

Saint Cloud, Minn.

OPINIONATED IMPLICATION

Contrary to the inference in the editorial “Religion on the Big Board” (Jan. 1) the Lutheran Church in America does not endorse pre-or extramarital intercourse.

Part of the statement on sex, marriage, and family adopted by the fifth biennial convention of the Lutheran Church in America at Minneapolis, Minnesota, in June and July of 1970 reads:

Because the Lutheran Church in America holds that sexual intercourse outside the context of the marriage union is morally wrong, nothing in this statement on “Sex, Marriage, and Family” is to be interpreted as meaning that this church either condones or approves premarital or extra-marital sexual intercourse.

It should be the goal of every editor to have the facts carefully separated from his opinions.

Blaine Lutheran Church

Blaine, Wash.

OPINION VS. COMMANDMENT

I was quite surprised to read that Dr. Runia in part two of “What Do Evangelicals Believe About the Bible?” (Dec. 18) does not believe that there is any place in the Bible where Paul distinguishes between what he believes as his personal opinion … [and] what he is writing as “God’s word.” Yet, Paul says in First Corinthians 7:6: “I speak this by permission and not of commandment.” And in First Corinthians 7:10 Paul writes, “And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord”.… [These and similar] references make it perfectly clear, it seems to me, that there were times when Paul wishes to make it very clear that it is Paul the man who is giving his opinion of judgment, and that it is not God, who is speaking with the binding authority of divinity and eternity.

Lexington, Mass.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

The introduction to the article by Hendrik Kraemer, “The Church in Search of Mission” (Jan. 1), failed to indicate that his book, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, from which the essay was taken, is still available through Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49501 ($5.95).

Kregel Publications

Grand Rapids, Mich.

NO LACK OF LIBERTY

In the editorial “Holding the Line on ‘Parochaid’” (Dec. 18) you state that the more the government gives money to independent schools, the more their liberty will be sacrificed. This is a popular misconception, and I think that careful reflection will reveal the opposite.

Financial favoritism to one kind of religious philosophy, namely, the humanistic secularism of the government schools, is a realistic way to stifle educational liberty. For most people are unable to pay for two educations: one in the government schools and another in an independent school.… Few tuition-charging schools can compete against the free schools of the state.

If CHRISTIANITY TODAY is to continue its opposition to equal aid for all children in all schools regardless of race, color, or creed, it should abandon its stance of trying to rescue the independent schools from government control. For in reality its stand is causing the schools to close down daily and send their children to humanistic schools against their religious convictions.

Executive Secretary

A Contemporary Translation (A.C.T.)

Wayne, N.J.

ARTFUL CONFUSION

After having read the note in Personalia (Dec. 18) of the National Press Club’s annual art show entry—a bust of Vice-President Agnew—entitled: “Judges 15:15, 16,” I wasn’t sure if the allusion was to the V.P. as an ass, the jaw-bone of an ass, or as Samson. Neither could I be sure that within the scriptural context there wasn’t an allusion to the Press Club as the 1,000 slain, the uncircumcised, the hollow place, or the god who clave the hollow place out of which all must drink.

Hyland Baptist Church

Henderson, Ky.

GOD IN THE STADIUM

Your editorial “God and Games” (Nov. 20) indicts all of the clergymen who have ever prayed at such sporting events. The majority of these men, I believe, were sincere before God. It would also indirectly indict all Christians who attend such events, for if God can’t be invoked there, should Christians be there?… [Such prayers] encourage many hearts to look Godward.… Would not the singing of the national anthem also be perfunctory to many? If so, should not such “disrespect” be eliminated by banning the song? And what about prayer at … the presidential inauguration?

New Life International

Long Beach, Calif.

DISMAYED

I am continually dismayed at the cynicism and sarcasm your writer uses when writing on the subject of hom*osexuality. I have been a recipient or subscriber to CHRISTIANITY TODAY since its inception. For me it has always filled a great need in reporting evangelical Christianity, and I have defended it against what I believed to be unfair criticism.

For some reason unknown this area of life seems to be galling to your reporter, and the material is not presented in an unbiased manner.… Some research into the subject … would prove helpful to him and to your readers.

Dean

Samaritan Bible Seminary

Los Angeles, Calif.

• Samaritan Bible Seminary is sponsored by a group of hom*osexually oriented churches which Mr. Ploen serves as elder.—ED.

NO DESIGNATION

In reference to Paul Witte’s article “Can Catholics Learn Anything from Evangelical Protestants?” (Dec. 18) I have only one question. Why any designation at all? Why can’t we be Christians only?

Overlake Christian Church

Kirkland, Wash.

All citizens, Christians most of all, should be troubled about our environment’s pollution. “Ecology” is a vital concern. Clean air is essential to health, as is clean water. Contaminated food should be eliminated as should roadside pollution.

Air pollution has come with the industrial age and the automobile, and water pollution results when we dump waste into our streams and rivers. Excessive noise also is part of the problem.

At one time we hailed DDT as one of man’s greatest boons, but now we know this poison remains in the ground or in the water harming our natural resources. The discovery of wide-spread contamination of fish with mercury is shocking.

Suddenly we are talking about “life or death,” or “life and breath,” and some are panicking. Pollution is a great danger, but if our scientists work on it, and the population cooperates, the problem will be solved.

But what about the ecology of the spirit? What about those things that are polluting the minds, hearts and spirits of all people? The answers to these questions lie with individual Christians and with the church.

The tragic fact, however, is that the church is not fulfilling her responsibilities in this area. The concern about social, economic and political issues increases, while the concern about spiritual pollution wanes.

Unfortunately, the church is contributing in some instances to the lowering of moral and spiritual values leading to spiritual pollution. (This began with church endorsem*nt of “situation ethics.”)

Three major denominations cooperate in publishing Colloquy, which provides “resource material” for those engaged in Christian education. In the March, 1970, issue an article by a guest editor derided parents who taught their daughter Christian principles about sex but approved of the girl’s pre-marital sexual activities and drug-taking. This magazine continues to be published with the official approval of the denominations involved.

Two of these denominations cooperate in the publication of another magazine, Church and Society. In the March–April issue a prominent woman employee of the church wrote an article, “Female and Single—What Then?,” in which she advocates that the church encourage lonely, retired persons to live together, unmarried, to provide “loving companionship and sexual enjoyment.” She also suggests that single women should be permitted to establish “sustaining relationships” with married men that could involve coitus, and that the church should be “open” to such arrangements. Finally, the author derides fidelity to the marriage vows and urges the church to consider establishment of communes patterned after those in Scandinavia. In these communes men and women form “families” without marriage.

I protested to a staff member of my own denomination, whose name appeared on the masthead, asking him what had been done about this article and its author. Without approving or disapproving her ideas, he merely defended the author’s freedom to write such an article.

Then I wrote to the executive secretary of the Board of Christian Education of my denomination. His courteous reply stated that one in his sister denomination revealed that “a Task Force on Sexuality … had asked that this particular article be written and made available to conversation.”

After receiving his answer I sent copies of the article along with a personal letter of protest to individual members of the Board of Christian Education. I haven’t received a reply; the board is hiding behind the action of the General Assembly that approved Colloquy as “source material.” But the offensive article appeared in Church and Society.

Soon after this I read an article by a minister of another denomination who had attended a “continuing education seminar” in a Midwestern city. Not only were revolution and violence advocated, but one day was devoted to an “encounter with human sexuality.” (One speaker told how LSD had “enlarged her sexual appetite.”)

During a regional conference for students, a youth leader of my own church had hung on the walls of his hotel room pictures so offensive that the head of the hotel forced him to remove them.

Why recount these sordid facts? Because unless the church comes to her senses and banishes from places of leadership those who are aiding the pollution of the spirit, God’s judgment will fall.

The Bible is explicit about these things. One of Christ’s beatitudes has to do with purity of heart, a purity he typified. All things that contribute to pollution of the spirit should be denounced and those who espouse them dismissed.

The word of the Lord to Ezekiel can be applied to the church today: “Her priests have done violence to my law and have profaned my holy things; they have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean …” (Ezekiel 22:26).

The apostle Paul lived in a time of licentiousness and degradation, and writing to the Ephesians he warned: “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is a shame even to speak of the things they do in secret” (Eph. 5:11, 12). Before this he said: “Let no one deceive you with empty words, for it is because of these things that the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience” (vs. 6).

Today’s trend is increasingly brazen in portraying and exploiting immorality. Only the church is left to stand for purity. Only the church has the message to make men’s hearts and minds clean. Only the church knows of the detergent that makes pure the souls of men: “The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7b).

Those concerned for the welfare of our young people, and for the witness of the church against any and all things that contribute to the pollution of the spirit, need to know who is teaching what in this area. If the church contributes to the spiritual pollution of our generation, “Ichabod” will be written across her portals.

EDITORIALS

At the beginning of his public ministry Jesus returned to the synagogue in his boyhood home of Nazareth and read to the congregation from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” Then Jesus declared: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:18–21). The mammoth convention of students at Urbana, Illinois, at the close of 1970 (see News, page 29) was essentially a reaffirmation of this startling announcement.

“The Liberator has come!” With these words, evangelist Tom Skinner concluded his address on the second night of the convention, and brought the twelve thousand member audience to its feet with thunderous applause—applause for the speaker, yes, but even more for the Liberator he proclaimed. Among the many titles of Christ, “Liberator” has not been in common use, though “Redeemer,” a term with similar meaning, has been. But as the world gropes about in the anxious seventies, the designation of Christ as Liberator seems especially appropriate. Certainly it was implicit in many of the currents at Urbana.

Christ liberates from aimlessness. Men in rebellion to God have become captive to Satan and hence to the loss or perversion of purpose and meaning in life. Urbana reaffirmed the concern of God that men walk in the ways that he has intended. Only in this way the peace and joy that God intends to accompany life will be found. And the eagerness with which students sought information and counsel from older Christians, as well as from one another, testifies to the desire of many young people to follow God.

Christ liberates men from oppression. Both the victim and the persecutor are (in differing ways) in bondage. Jesus wants to set both free. While still enslaved in body, the Christian can be free in spirit, as has often been demonstrated through the centuries. But in America many white, middle-class Christians are, at least passively, more often identifiable with those who do the oppressing. Many of the speakers at Urbana dealt with this theme at varying lengths. It often goes under the name of “social concern” but it is as much in one’s personal interest, in anticipation of being called to account by God for what he has done and left undone, for all men to be liberated from acting as oppressors.

Christ liberates men from nationalistic and racial bondage. Too often the cause of Christ has been identified with the causes of some nations. The applause of the students at various remarks indicated their approval of the disentangling of the Gospel from Americanism. “Jesus Christ does not wear red, white and blue,” declared Leighton Ford. Christians who, even if unintentionally, imply that Christ is an American must rightly expect the rebuke of the liberated generation. So also with race. Black Christians pay a high price in the disapproval by their unsaved peers for associating with their white brothers. But they do so willingly because Christ has liberated them from having to draw their meaning in life solely from racial solidarity and exclusiveness. White Christians who maintain myths of racial superiority and practices of racial discrimination need the stinging rebuke of those who have, by Christ, been liberated from such worldly bondage as racism.

Christ liberates men from bondage to self. Hell is for those who want to be individuals unrelated to others. Those who are bound for heaven have been set free into a community of brothers and sisters to work and worship and love in every dimension of life, personal and corporate, sacred (for Christians only) and secular (aspects of life in which non-Christians participate as well). Urbana reaffirmed the social implications of the good news that the Liberator has come, while at the same time making it clear that each man must, for himself, accept the Liberator as Saviour and Lord.

Throughout the centuries God has repeatedly used young persons to break forth into new conquests for Christ and to reclaim lost or understressed aspects of the truth which he has revealed. If the enthusiasm, sensitivities, and dedication of those who came to Urbana is representative and persistent, God is indeed bringing new vitality into his people. Such vitality is especially welcome at a time when the world is trying to run its affairs apart from the creator and sustainer of all. May older Christians join in mutual penitence and joy with younger Christians to proclaim through word and deed the good news that the Liberator has come.

A Gulf Spanned At Calvary

Two and half years ago Calvary Chapel, astride the Santa Ana-Costa Mesa boundary in southern California, had a typical cross-section congregation of 150. In 1970 more than 4,000 accepted Christ in the church (see News, page 34). Pastor Charles Smith has baptized more than 2,000 in the Pacific Ocean since May. Thousands of others trace their spiritual heritage to Calvary.

This population explosion was touched off when the church opened a house from which it could reach into the youth drug scene for Christ, and hired a bearded young convert and his bride—Lonnie and Connie Frisbee—to head it up. Soon, in a new sanctuary that seated 300, Calvary had to schedule double, then triple morning services. Recently the church knocked out walls; services are still crowded out.

Most of the thousands of new faces are young “street Christians” who look and talk very much like their peers out in the streets, except that their faces radiate joy and the subject of their conversation is—more often than not—the Lord Jesus Christ.

Calvary is living proof that non-institutional-minded contemporaries and tradition-bound elders can worship together in mutual acceptance and respect. Only five members left because of the youth influx. The cultural gap was bridged, says Smith, during common labor on church building projects: “Businessmen making $25,000 a year and hippies who never held a job saw the love and joy of Christ in each other.”

Smith, who studied at Biola Bible College and the American Baptist seminary at nearby Covina, insists that his preaching is no different from before, and the same order of service is followed as five years ago. His morning sermons are expository, based on ten new Bible chapters assigned to the congregation for study each week. Evening services are question-answer sessions on the same chapters. (Interestingly, the street set prefers to use the King James Version.) Smith is a charismatic, but speaking in tongues and healing are not emphasized in Sunday services.

Why do so many thousands of young people flock to Calvary? Linda Mehler replied that she had been an Episcopalian and a Morman but that Calvary’s people were different: “They weren’t into religion and church; they were into Jesus and the Bible and love.”

A growing number of parents and even grandparents, having seen dramatic changes in the lives of their young, are now attending—and finding Christ and a fellowship of love. Middle-aged Look photographers Jack and Betty Cheetham said they ended a “hate trip” at Calvary (see News, page 34).

The love does not stop at the door. Converts from Calvary are fueling much of the spiritual fire now burning in West Coast states. These activists are proving the song they sign is true; “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

Refreshingly, Calvary is pointing the way in a day when so many young Christians tend to write off the institutional churches and when so many older-generation believers, if not downright hostile toward the young, turn their heads and pass by on the other side. We firmly believe that a great spiritual ground swell is building up and may soon flood into the American scene. Christians, young and old, need to open the floodgates to the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Key 73: Bridge Over Troubled Waters

At a time when the nerve for mission seems cut by a lack of confidence within the Church, can evangelicals be used by God to help rekindle the Christian faith? “We can,” says the Reverend Joe Hale, “if pointedly, specifically, and openly we invite other Christians to walk with us, or, perhaps more importantly, we walk with them the road of witness in 1973.”

Hale, director of ecumenical evangelism for the United Methodist Board of Evangelism, was talking about Key 73 during a conference on New Styles in Cooperative Evangelism at the United Methodist Congress on Evangelism in New Orleans this month (see News, page 32). Key 73 is an evangelism movement that seeks to confront every person in North America with the Gospel more fully and forcefully through witness at the individual, congregational, and national levels. Varied programs, determined by the churches that join, will culminate in a year-long effort in 1973.

Hale pointed out that the Key 73 Central Committee, in its meeting last December in St. Louis (see January 1, 1971, issue, page 43), voted to invite Roman Catholic and Orthodox participation in Key 73. Some conservatives in Key 73 have reacted negatively to that decision. Nevertheless, we feel it was wise; there are many in the Catholic and Orthodox communions who are committed to biblical evangelism.

Evangelism and the euaggelion are for the whole Church; the Gospel is not a bone to be growled and fought over by segments of the Body of Christ. The planners of Key 73 wisely drew up broad outlines: the common bond for participants (there are now seventy-three denominations and religious groups involved) is allegiance to Jesus Christ. “Differences in doctrine will be recognized and respected,” a policy statement says. “Varieties in evangelistic expression are expected and will range from traditional forms to vastly new, innovative styles of witness.”

To quote Hale (his enthusiasm is contagious) again: “The concept of Key 73 turns me on.… It is the whole Church speaking.… It may generate a movement of Christian advance that will extend like a tidal wave around the entire globe.” We hope and pray that when our brethren in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches receive their invitations, they will respond with wholehearted support and participation.

Christian Endeavor At 90

This magazine reported last year that the once-great Christian Endeavor youth movement was showing new signs of life after a period of decline, and this year CE Week (January 31-February 7) is getting more attention in local churches than it has had in a long time. The Rev. Charles W. Barner, general secretary of the International Society of Christian Endeavor, says requests for organizing kits have hit a thirty-year high. Thus CE enthusiasts mark the movement’s ninetieth anniversary February 2 on an optimistic note.

New interest in Christian Endeavor comes at a time when church youth programming materials produced by many large denominations reflect a secularizing trend that is often stoutly resisted at the grass roots. Planners of all theological stripes are somewhat at a loss as to how to adapt to today’s youthful turbulence. The rally idea used successfully by Youth for Christ after World War II now seems to have limited appeal. The Bible-club approach still has momentum, but innovations are needed.

Development of effective new curriculum materials is probably the big challenge and opportunity facing CE—and, for that matter, all other youth programmers. We have the most literate crop of young people the world has ever produced, and unless their minds are creatively engaged with the cause of the Gospel, alien ideologies will wrest their attention. CE can best honor its late founder, the Rev. Francis E. Clark of Williston Congregational Church in Portland, Maine, by applying itself to the task with renewed intensity.

Though officially creedless throughout its history, CE in its primary thrust has been unabashedly evangelical. It currently has impressive representation in the inner city as well as in suburban and rural areas. These factors point to a bright future if CE leaders bring more young people into their decision-making processes and develop materials that are relevant to the crucial needs of these days.

Financing Murder

One of the most apparent manifestations of moral rot in America is the recent liberalization of state laws on abortion (see also Current Religious Thought, page 38). Human life is now being exterminated at a rate probably not equaled in any war this country has ever fought. Authoritative estimates indicate that 250,000 legal abortions are performed in the United States each year. Precious few voices are raised in protest against this mass homicide of unrestricted abortion on simple demand. And at a time when Christians are becoming involved, on all levels, in political and social efforts, to ignore the question of abortion is a serious mistake.

Compounding the evil is the fact that government (through Medicaid) and insurance companies are defraying the costs of an increasing number of abortions. Society, instead of protecting the helpless unborn, is financing their demise. Never mind that millions of people regard abortion as murder. Their tax dollars and insurance premiums are appropriated along with the rest.

God does not overlook such evil. Let it be no great surprise when America is subjected to severe judgment. The guilt belongs not only to legislators and insurance executives but also to rank-and-file citizens who fail to speak against this wickedness.

Bang Bang

These days, clothes talk. Perhaps the loudest accessory to hit the fashion bull’s-eye recently is a three-pound belt of brass cartridges linked together and fastened by several dummy bullets. What the bullet belt aims to communicate is not entirely clear. Some charge that it says, “Bang, you’re dead.” Others claim its message is, “Better belt it than blast it.”

At least, say those fired up about it, the bullet belt is loaded with fun. Perhaps, but their good humor shoots down good taste. The belt may even be a plowshare of sorts—a macabre sort that retains sword-like characteristics. That it belts a potential big bang even the United States Treasury Department warns: converting cartridges into live ammunition is not only hazardous to one’s health but also illegal without a license.

There must be a more telling accessory for the fun-loving, fashion-conscious peacemaker. A Bible belt maybe? At least that’s a belt with something to say.

Neighborhood Pilgrims

Beginning in February, more weekend pilgrimages will be possible through the new holiday schedules. Although boredom already threatens a generation frantic with efforts to keep moving, leisure time continues to increase, and many advocate a four-day work week. In this mobile age, pilgrims flock to beaches and ski resorts, parks and camps. The variety of weekend pilgrims rivals Chaucer’s famous congregation (many of whom journeyed to Canterbury for diversion, and not because of relitious fervor).

Traveling was popular long before Chaucer made it prominent. Today people seem to consider it the only way to spend holidays. Suggestions to relax, putter, or read are disregarded. Reading and meditating seem rather incompatible with what we call the pace of modern living. There is no time for such things, people insist. Well, there is—particularly on a three-day weekend at home. Read about those pilgrims to Canterbury. Better still, take another look at Acts and learn about a famous pilgrim for God—Paul. And after reading about Paul and his fellow travelers, discover what you, in your own neighborhood, can do for God and your fellow pilgrims.

San Francisco: Sodom Revisited

Last month San Francisco Examiner publisher Charles Gould and his editors decided to stop abetting “the dispensers of depraved ‘entertainment’” by bringing advertisem*nt practices into closer alignment with what the newspaper’s editorial pages preached. “We do not seek to impose the Puritan ethic on the community in general or our readers in particular,” they announced editorially. “However, we can no longer permit our advertising columns to be exploited by the panderers of moral pollution.… We should have thrown this ugliness out … long ago. We are sorry we delayed. It is out now. And it will stay out.”

We applaud their decision. They said that for years they had urged movie makers and night club operators to “upgrade and improve” their ads. But this approach, they correctly observed, “merely laundered the advertising … and thus tended to hide the slime of the shows being presented.” The “slime” they cited: movie houses showing women engaged in sex acts with animals; films showing groups of perverts performing vile acts that demoralize hom*osexuals who seek a higher way of life; films showing prostitutes performing sordid acts that defy description; films showing young girls being beaten, raped, and defiled in sexual aberrations practiced “only by those with maniacal or criminal minds.”

They could have mentioned more. The topless clubs on Broadway feature not only nudity but also simulated sex acts. Shops that openly sell hard-core p*rnography flourish throughout the city. Nearly one hundred bars, nightclubs, and theaters cater to the hom*osexual population, estimated to be over 50,000 on weekends. These and other conditions are giving San Francisco an international reputation as the Sodom of our day.

The Examiner’s editors received no guidance from the courts, whose permissiveness has opened a sewer outfall into the very lifestream of society. The Supreme Court decreed, for example, that “community standards” should determine what is and what is not obscene. But, declared the editors: “After witnessing the results of this decision, we are now convinced that community standards do not determine what is p*rnography. Quite the contrary. We believe the results in San Francisco are proof positive that proliferating p*rnography creates debased community standards.… We are denouncing the sexual depravity on film and stage that can—and does—breed moral pollution and social degeneracy.”

The depressing situation calls for action and prayer. The city’s Christians should firmly and vocally support the Examiner’s position in the face of threatened lawsuits. It is time for the courts to re-draw the boundaries between liberty and license, this time favoring the greater welfare of society rather than the greed and corrupt nature of the moral subversives. And citizens, without flagging, should prod both government and the filth merchants. We commend the hundreds of young Christians who picketed in protest on Broadway a few months ago; “business” almost came screeching to a halt. The youthful evangelicals did more than protest. They reached for the ultimate solution—changed lives. Dozens of persons received Christ during witness encounters on Broadway.

The Christian effort is admittedly only a drop in the proverbial bucket. More than 450,000 of the city’s 750,000 population claim no religious affiliation whatsoever. In some neighborhoods of 10,000 or more, no churches exist. And the moral spiral speeds downward with little restraint.

We challenge the Christians in and around San Francisco to get involved in the spiritual struggle for the soul of that city. God said he would spare Sodom if some righteous people could be found.

Getting Things From God

One of the purposes of prayer is for Christians to get things from God. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills and he will supply the needs of his children if they petition him to do so. Getting things from God, of course, is not all there is to prayer. Adoration, thanksgiving, and confession too are a part of praying. Here, however, we want to consider the question of getting specific answers to prayer for personal needs, loved ones, friends, and others.

With three words—ask, seek, knock—Jesus laid down the principles of getting things from God. These words have important differences in meaning; yet they are related.

To ask means we should come to God telling him what we want. James says that “you have not because you ask not.” Stated another way, “he who does not ask does not get.” God has graciously ordained the method by which we can expect to get things from him—we must ask!

Asking must be complemented by seeking. Seeking is the human side of this prayer relationship with God. At times there is nothing that Christians can do except wait on him. But most of the time action is necessary. The man who asks God for a job should go out and look for one. The farmer who prays for crops should plow, plant, and cultivate. Asking God does not remove man’s responsibility for doing what he can to bring about the desired result. A story is told about Dwight L. Moody traveling on an ocean liner when a fire broke out. A dear brother in Christ suggested that they go to their cabins and pray. Mr. Moody said, “You pray; I’ll pass the water buckets.” There is a time to pray and a time to work.

Jesus also said we are to knock. This means twofold perseverance; we are not to stop asking until we have received and we are not to stop seeking until we have found. It is always too soon to quit. We are not to become fainthearted and we must continue the pursuit until the answer comes.

Asking, seeking, and knocking are God’s orders for those who expect him to give.

More From C.S. Lewis

God in the Dock, by C. S. Lewis (Eerdmans, 1970, 346 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Cheryl A. Forbes, a member of the staff ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

These essays were collected and edited by the late C. S. Lewis’s private secretary, Walter Hooper. Written over a twenty-four year period, they were originally published in various obscure newspapers and magazines.

Hooper has divided the book into three parts. The first section contains essays that are theological, focusing on miracles. The title of the book comes from the second part: “The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock” (p. 244). This group of essays discusses problems that are “semi-theological”—they are neither theology nor ethics. The essays in part three treat various ethical topics. The editor has concluded the book with letters by Lewis to various newspapers and magazines on many of the same topics. The tone of Lewis’s essays is never somber, but always serious. His ideas are presented with wit and clarity, without gloom and pessimism.

Some of the ideas found here also can be found in his other books. The essay on miracles is a simplified, greatly shortened version of his book on the subject. But most of the essays will be new to the majority of readers. Some overlap each other, and a few are repetitive. “The Trouble with X …” and “‘Miserable Offenders:’ An Interpretation of Prayer Book Language” say the same thing. In too many of the essays example and illustration are repeated, but there is enough variety to compensate for this.

The topics range from miracles and the question of animal pain to sociology and vivesection. One essay, “Priestesses in the Church?,” should infuriate all members of the Women’s Liberation Movement. But his argument cleverly developed from Pride and Prejudice should delight any who admire an intelligent, well-conceived argument.

An interview of Lewis conducted by Sherwood E. Wirt in May, 1963, will interest many evangelicals. Wirt’s language is not that of Lewis, and his attempt to translate Lewis’s ideas into the language of “decision” is interesting but unnecessary.

For those who know little of C. S. Lewis or his ideas this book is a good introduction, perhaps better than Christian Reflections (also edited by Mr. Hooper). God in the Dock contains some of the best of Lewis’s witty apologetics. And for those who have long known and loved the writings of Lewis, this volume is a welcome addition.

Scholarship Come Of Age?

The Bible and Modern Doubt, by Mack B. Stokes (Revell, 1970, 286 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Watson E. Mills, associate professor of philosophy and religion, Averett College, Danville, Virginia.

One ironic consequence of the historical-critical method of biblical study has been that, just as the human race was “coming of age” and advancing into the future with unprecedented rapidity, scholarship was learning how to push the New Testament backward into the past and even imprison it in a specific time segment. The result was a vast chasm being opened between the first and the twentieth centuries. A serious historical dichotomy was born creating a painful paradox: the more we understand the ancient faith, the more irrelevant it appears for our twentieth century world. It is indeed tragic that critical reconstruction has gradually, however unwittingly, served to make the New Testament more and more remote and less and less relevant.

It is no wonder, then, that there has been a resurgence of interest in hermeneutics. Professor Mack B. Stokes, Associate Dean and Parker Professor of Systematic Theology at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, has given us a stimulating volume that aims at challenging the Christian to think about his Bible. Stokes hopes—not in a critical sense—to engage the reader in a dialogue by reflecting upon some of the contemporary doubts about major themes of the biblical revelation. He is writing for the general reader rather than the sophisticated theologian—an extremely commendable and refreshing direction!

The author builds his case upon four assumptions: (1) that the major teachings of the Bible are true, but this cannot be taken for granted any longer; (2) while the Bible is relevant, this must be shown through careful interpretation; (3) the major teachings are indispensable to the Christian religion; and (4) the major teachings move in a direction opposite from prevailing modern ideas (pp. 5, 6). Given the audience to whom the book is directed, these suppositions, however simplistic, seem acceptable. He follows this with four principles of biblical interpretation that are well worth pondering. These undercut biblical literalism that results in a piecemeal view of revelation, and encourage the reader to regard the biblical record in terms of the living God whose revelation is dynamic, not static, and confirmed in experience, not in the laboratory.

Parts one through four are respectively theological, anthropological, soteriological, and ethical in emphasis. Part four is the most readable and rewarding. Specifically, chapter fifteen, dealing with race relations, will afford the layman a needed look at the problem from the perspective of sound biblical theology. Stokes suggests specific biblical passages that bear upon the problem, and shows how commitment to the truths of the Christian faith necessarily excludes racism.

While the author presents the major alternatives to such crucial issues as God, alienation, and redemption, the basic question seems to be whether or not Christians are willing to take the Bible seriously. This well organized volume deserves serious consideration because it presents the issues clearly to that segment of Christendom that so desperately needs to know what the questions are as well as how to move toward positive answers. This volume gives a resounding “amen” to a statement made a few years ago by Leander Keck: “There is a way to read the Bible which opens the door to vital faith, without shutting the door to critical thought.”

Christianity Anti-Sexual?

The Christian Response to the Sexual Revolution, by David R. Mace (Abingdon, 1970, 142 pp., paperback, $1.75), is reviewed by David E. Kucharsky, associate editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

David Mace, a Quaker, is professor of family sociology at Wake Forest and former executive director of the American Association of Marriage Counselors. He seeks to “bring home plainly the urgent need for a Christian reinterpretation of sex.” He is deliberately vague on what behavior pattern should emerge, but the direction is clearly away from an objective code. “Sexual intercourse in marriage,” he contends, “can be as immoral and exploitative as it can be outside marriage.”

Christian standards of sexual morality should be based “on the ethical teaching of Jesus,” Mace suggests. The criteria by which the ethics of any sex act should be judged are seen in these questions: “What would it do to me as a child of God and a follower of Christ? What would it do to my sexual partner, who is my neighbor to be loved as myself? What would it do to the family, and to the well-being of children?”

This is regarded as the “healthy” biblical view of sex as opposed to some of the things Paul taught about women and marriage which, Mace intimates, were conditioned by Greek philosophy. The writer of Revelation is accused of having been corrupted by Oriental and Neoplatonic dualism because he said that the 144,000 had not been “defiled with women.”

Mace sees some objectionable aspects in promiscuity and p*rnography, but what bugs him most is that Christianity has been an “anti-sexual” religion these 1,900 years. And it seems not to occur to him that repressive attitudes toward sex with all their unfortunate consequences have nonetheless been more conducive to human progress than pagan permissiveness.

Missionary Vision

Student Power in World Evangelism, by David M. Howard (Inter-Varsity, 1970, 129 pp., paperback, $1.25), is reviewed by Donald McGavran, dean of the Graduate School of World Mission and Institute of Church Growth, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Student Power is the best brief book available on the evangelization of the world. It is fair, balanced, and soundly historical. It sees world evangelization in perspective. It uses facts correctly. Its picture of the part students have played in world mission is accurate.

The book, rising out of the student movement, is written by a young man for the now generation. Howard knows college and university students and their hangups about missions. He uses the contemporary dialect well—and is up-to-date enough to call “tell it like it is” a cliche. He will be read with pleasure and profit in universities and colleges all across the United States and should be translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and other languages.

Brevity enhances the value of the volume. A sound, biblical base in both Old and New Testaments, a wide historical approach, and contemporary issues have been compressed into 120 interest-packed pages. Readability is high. Thought moves briskly. Young men and women will study the book chapter by chapter with a sense of newness and advance at every session.

In the current confused era following the collapse of European empires and the rise of over a hundred independent sovereign nations, foreign missions is concluding a major job of self-renovation. Inevitably, reconstruction has been accompanied by criticism and disparagement of the old. Voices, sometimes shrill, denounce “paternalism” and “cultural imperialism.” The errors of missions and missionaries have been overemphasized. The goal was to make missions more effective; but the Church-at-large, seeing missions clobbered every sunrise, grew rather pessimistic about the whole enterprise. David Howard restores the balance. He says each student should ask himself: “Even if missions have made mistakes, what has this got to do with my obedience to God as regards the evangelization of the world?” Student power has still to be applied to the fullest in evangelization of this generation.

This small volume has been produced for the more than eleven thousand students who attended the Ninth Inter-Varsity Missionary Convention, and it was used there to good effect; but it should be used in thousands of other places. Missionary-minded ministers and laymen all over America should get this little volume, study it, and use it with their youth. Student Power can help denominations everywhere recapture their missionary vision and obedience.

Newly Published

One Divine Moment, edited by Robert E. Coleman (Revell, 1970, 123 pp., paperback, $1.95). The revival that began at Asbury College on February 3, 1970, is vividly described along with some of its effects in following months elsewhere.

The Theology of Altizer: Critique and Response, edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. (Westminster, 1970, 269 pp., $7.50). The respectful criticisms of nine scholars representing various positions (none evangelical), together with Altizer’s responses.

King James II New Testament, by Jay P. Green (Associated Publishers and Authors, 1970, 252 pp., paperback). Despite the choice of name, this is not a translation in honor of the last Roman Catholic king of England (1685–88), the one that was finally defeated in the north of Ireland by the forces of William of Orange. The format, English style, and textual basis are all little changed from the King James I. Regrettably, there is no indication where changes have been made or where alternative renderings are possible.

Philosophy and Education in Western Education, by John A. Stoops (Interstate, 1971, 424 pp., $7.95). A textbook that introduces the concepts of philosophy, touching on a few important philosophical orientations of Western civilization (idealism, Thomistic synthesis, pragmatism).

Four Minor Prophets: Their Message for Today, by Frank E. Gaebelein (Moody, 1970, 252 pp., $4.95). These expository addresses on Obadiah, Jonah, Habakkuk, and Haggai have been extensively revised to make a devotional commentary. The author was at one time co-editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Pray in the Spirit, by Arthur Wallis (Christian Literature Crusade, 1970, 126 pp., paperback, $1.25). Starting with the importance of baptism of the Holy Spirit, the author explores the Spirit’s role in prayer, including tongues-speaking. He cites numerous examples of mystical experiences.

The Opaqueness of God, by David O. Woodyard (Westminster, 1970, 160 pp., paperback, $2.65). A brief introduction to Barth, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Van Buren, Ogden, Buri, Pannenberg, and Moltmann.

Ezekiel, A Commentary, by Walther Eichrodt (Westminster, 1970, 594 pp., $12.50). A translation of perhaps the most important recent scholarly commentary on this major prophet.

This Little Planet, edited by Michael Hamilton (Scribner, 1970, 241 pp., $6.95). The only drawing factor about this book, which rehashes the basic issues in ecology today, is the introduction by Senator Edmund S. Muskie.

Roger Williams: Witness Beyond Christendom, by John Garrett (Macmillan, 1970, 306 pp., $7.50). A valuable scholarly work portraying Williams as the biblically guided figure that he was.

Preaching From a Pentecostal Perspective, by Sam F. Middlebrook (Vantage, 1970, 112 pp., $3.75). Sermons by faculty members at the leading Bible college of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

Eyes on Europe, by W. Stuart Harris (Moody, 1970, 156 pp., paperback, $1.95). A helpful, popular, somewhat subjective, country-by-country survey of evangelical presence.

Ben Israel: The Odyssey of a Modern Jew, by Arthur Katz with Jamie Buckingham (Logos, 1970, 207 pp., $4.95). The author leads us through his search for meaning in life—from Communism to hedonism and finally to the recognition of Jesus as Messiah. He found peace when he entered into a “covenant” relationship with God.

Quattlebaum’s Truth, by Mark Gross (Harper & Row, 1970, 145 pp., $4.95). A poor attempt at originality in the discussion of the standard “Who am I? Who is God?” questions.

Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis, by John Herman Randall, Jr. (Columbia, 1970, 242 pp., $7.95). Useful for studying the religious background in which Christianity arose, culminating in Augustine, but the author’s evaluations (of Paul, for instance) do not commend themselves.

The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, by Willi Marxsen (Fortress, 1970, 191 pp., $2.95). By one who does not believe it actually happened, yet still claims to be a Christian.

Between Honesty and Hope, translated by John Drury (Maryknoll, 1970, 247 pp., $2.95). Thirty documents since Vatican II issued by Roman Catholic leaders of Latin America.

Conquering the Fear of Death: An Exposition of First Corinthians 15, by Spiros Zodhiates (Eerdmans, 1970, 869 pp., $9.95). Those who liked the author’s other prolix commentaries (i.e., James, John 1; Matt. 5; 1 Cor. 13) should like this one, too.

Dictionary of Pagan Religions, by H. E. Wedeck and Wade Baskin (Philosophical Library, 1971, 363 pp., $10). If you want to know about Oannes, Hohodemi, Ba, and the like, here’s your source.

Some of the above books will later be reviewed at greater length.

In The Journals

A scholarly journal devoted to the person and work of the Holy Spirit from the Pentecostal viewpoint is Paraclete (1445 Boonville Ave., Springfield, Mo. 65802; single copy $.75). Articles in the Winter, 1971, issue include “The Working of Miracles” by R. L. Dresselhaus, “Chrysostom and the Charismata” by A. T. Floris, and “The Spirit’s Authority in the Old Testament” by D. B. Pecota.

Just before the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, I was on leave from the Royal Air Force and read an article by Norman Grubb on the future of missionary work. He expressed the view that although for many years Great Britain had been the leader of the world-wide missionary enterprise, a new day had dawned. Just as political, economic, and military leadership had passed from the old world to the new, so would spiritual and missionary leadership.

As I look back over the intervening twenty-five years, two facts stand out. First, it was striking that at a time when everybody was thinking of little else than how to finish the war, here was one man who was already planning the peace—so far as missionary work was concerned—and doing so with remarkable accuracy.

The second fact that comes to mind is the difficulty I had in accepting the truth of what he had written. When one’s own country has dominated the scene for many years, it is not easy to accept the fact that her influence is on the wane, and this was much harder for the older people than for the young ones. I remember showing the article to an older Christian who rejected it indignantly and commented, “Britain is not finished yet.” National pride and objective judgment make uncomfortable bedfellows.

Now we can see how accurate that forecast was. Before World War II, Britain supplied approximately two-thirds of all the Protestant missionaries in the world. Soon after, it was the United States that was providing two-thirds of the personnel, as well as a much larger percentage of such specialized services as Christian radio, literature, aviation, and linguistics. But Britain was not finished. Although in the past twenty-five years the contribution of the British church to the cause of world evangelism may have dwindled statistically, anybody who has seen the impact of the ministry of John Stott at the Inter-Varsity Missionary Conventions at Urbana, or seen something of the impact of the British Inter-Varsity publishing program overseas, or the influence of British and commonwealth missionary personnel, knows that it still has a vital role to play.

Just as 1945 marked a change in missionary leadership, so could 1970. Kenneth Scott Latourette has observed that missionary leadership has usually been exercised by the nation that holds the place of economic and political leadership in the world. Historically this has been so, but the present age has several distinctives that may radically change this principle. We need to ask ourselves, Does this mean that missionary leadership is about to pass from the United States? And if so, to whom is it passing?

It is likely that future historians will consider 1956 one of the turning points in world history, and it is instructive to review some of the events of that year.

1. It was the year that Great Britain was discredited by her disastrous venture in the Suez Canal.

2. There was the revolution in Hungary that was suppressed with such brutality by Russian tanks that even many people who had been pro-Russian were disillusioned. This disillusionment was felt not only in neutral countries but also in the Communist parties of such countries as France and Italy.

3. Khrushchev denounced the Stalin cult of personality.

4. France granted independence to Tunisia and Morocco.

All these events gave impetus to the movement toward national independence and weakened confidence in the big nations. Prior to that year, the whole world had been mesmerized onlookers as the two giant powers, Russia and America, maneuvered for position and advantage. Now the small nations gained in number and confidence as they were wooed by both East and West.

General de Gaulle seems to have been one of the first statesmen to see the implications of this, at least as far as the eastern European countries were concerned, and to shape his policies accordingly.

We have witnessed a significant reversal of the pattern of history. Previously the pattern had been for small nations to be eliminated by various great nations. Now we have seen a situation in which great countries are continually bringing about the creation of new small nations. One out of three people alive today lives in a country that has been independent for twenty-five years or less. This is the day of the small nations, all of them conscious of their rights and privileges. And these attitudes bear directly upon missionary work.

This process coincides with remarkable developments in the United States itself. In the fifties and early sixties, America experienced a remarkable degree of prosperity in religion in general and Christianity in particular. Americans who have not spent extended time in older countries—and have therefore not seen a contrast—rarely appreciate the extent of this boom, or the effect it had on the missionary contribution.

Recent years have witnessed a decline of much of this interest. Although the decline has often been exaggerated by talk of the “post-Christian era,” church attendance is indeed diminishing, and the state of the Church in America today should lead us to think furiously (though not to panic).

Accurate comparative figures for missionary recruitment are hard to compile because there have been changes in the pattern of missionary service. There are now more specialized and service agencies, more short-term missionaries, more forms of non-professional missionary service. Moreover, some missions do not like to be very frank lest their supporters get the impression that the mission is on the decline. It is probable, however, that there is a fall-off in the number of recruits. Among college students I have seen more interest in foreign missions but less commitment to actual service.

Some of this is to be expected. The increase after World War II was somewhat artificial in the sense that the war itself left a backlog of missionary recruits, a manpower reserve that swelled the number of missionary recruits for some years as men finished their education.

Fifteen years ago there was a period when all over the United States missionary budgets were expanding and money was relatively easy to get. To have a missionary budget that grew larger year by year was the hallmark of a spiritual and vital church and a badge of evangelical respectability. The financial resources of the evangelical church in the United States are still enormous compared with those in other countries, but they no longer seem inexhaustible. In many well-known missionary churches, a plateau seems to have been reached. There are as many explanations of this as there are missionary speakers, but they are beyond the scope of this article.

In many parts of the world there is a growing disenchantment with things American, and it does not make missionary work for Americans any easier. It is no new experience for missionaries to be working among people with whom they are not popular; what is different now is that we are no longer in the age of gun-boat diplomacy, and countries can easily expel all missionaries. Even if they let missionary work continue, they are apt to be choosy about whom they want in their country.

And the critical attitude toward the Westerner is not limited to the governments. A good number of evangelical Christians in churches overseas resent interference and are far less tolerant than they used to be of American leadership. Often the most innocent of actions and opinions are wrongly construed. A missionary friend of mine who is unusually progressive and sensitive was on a panel with some other men when a question was asked about birth control. When my friend pointed out some of the problems of the population explosion, he was told bluntly that he took that view only because like all other Westerners he wanted to keep down the population in younger countries lest he be outnumbered. This critical attitude is sometimes accompanied by a request for financial aid “with no strings attached.”

The situation is further compounded by the internal anguish that is tearing apart the social structure of the United States. The alienation of youth from the Church is a threat not only to the home church but also to its missionary program. To be sure, some churches are coping with this problem; but too many young people have told me they have given up going to church because it is irrelevant and dead for me to take this development lightly. What makes it so serious is that many of these young people have not “lost their faith,” nor are they malcontents; they are consecrated, idealistic Christians who feel that their churches today are out of touch with reality. And often their view of missionary leadership is similar to their view of church leadership.

What should be our response to tighter money and falling recruitment? Probably the most obvious reaction is to upbraid the youth for their unwillingness to undertake a missionary life of sacrifice, and to criticize the Church for lack of sacrificial giving. It is certainly good to consider the fact that what we see is a failure on the part of God’s people, and a healthful type of self-examination is always in order. However, another possibility should be considered.

A decline in the number of American missionaries overseas could be the will of God for this time. It may hurt our pride to admit that God can push us aside and use other nations, but we shall do well to remember that God used Germany to be the spearhead for his purposes during the Reformation, and that it pleased him to use Great Britain for leadership in world evangelization a century ago just as certainly as he used the Church in the United States for the last twenty-five years. God can easily pass on this role to other nations, and indeed it might be to the everlasting good of those nations if he did. The missionary hope of the world is not the United States of America; it is the Lord (though to hear some missionary addresses one would not think so).

There are strong churches in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and in these days when there is so much resentment against the white man it would be appropriate for spiritual leadership to be exercised by a group of nations in a kind of fraternal partnership rather than by one giant.

Will this be so? It is too early to know. But if it does happen, will we be ready to recognize it and accept it in good grace, or will our national pride get in the way?

To some extent we have been too influenced by the thinking we developed during World War II, when we learned that sheer weight of numbers and economic production coupled with American courage and ingenuity could bring victory against any foe. But we are living in the day of Viet Nam and have learned that victory by the great and powerful is not always so easily guaranteed.

We have not always used our missionaries well. Perhaps too often exorbitant amounts of money have been spent in sending large families to the field so that the expensively trained man can spend his time in maintenance work that could be performed more economically by a national.

With our passion for measuring spiritual blessings by statistics and our confidence in methods and techniques, we may yet need to hear God say to us as he said to Gideon, “The people with you are too many … lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, ‘My own hand was delivered me.’” It is well to note that the Lord said that only after the “Spirit of the Lord took possession of Gideon.” After all, in the eyes of the statisticians, Jeremiah was something of a washout, and in the eyes of the specialists in church growth, Samuel Zwemer left a lot to be desired!

Spiritual blessings cannot be measured by the acre, nor missionary effectiveness by the body count or the budget. The American role in world evangelism in the future is going to demand a great deal of imagination and, above all, humility. God can fit his Church to meet this hour.

Eric S. Fife is a former missionary director of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. He has written “A Highway for our God” and is co-author of “Missions in Crisis.”

Is there a touchstone by which all religions may be compared to determine their truth and value? Many have thought there is. Before the modern era, it was common to seek this basis of comparison in the doctrine of God, or of man, or of salvation, or some other central doctrine. But within this century other touchstones have been sought. Schweitzer sought to find it in either their affirmation or their denial of reality to the world, life, and morality. Tillich says it is in their explanation of the meaning of purpose of existence. Toynbee says it is their handling of the problem of suffering. Radhakrishnan says it is their common unity and tolerance found in common symbols and inner certitude of the same truth in all.

Two of these with a Christian orientation, Schweitzer and Tillich, go on to conclude that Christianity is superior to other religions when judged by the touchstone they regard as best. The other with a Christian orientation, Toynbee, ends up about equally divided between Christianity and Mahayanian Buddhism. The fourth, Radhakrishnan, with a Hindu orientation, concludes that ultimately all religions will find their fulfillment in something resembling Hinduism.

All efforts to analyze religions and the history of religions merit study. Each of the four just mentioned is in its own way meaningful. And just as in Christian theology the many theories of the atonement add to our understanding of that mystery, so in the history of religions the many theories of their relations help us to understand more of that mystery. But just as in any theory of the atonement the preeminence must always be given to the Person, Jesus Christ, so in the history of religions the preeminence must always be given to the person or persons around whom each religion is built. And that, it seems to me, is the clue to the supreme touchstone by which all religions may be most properly compared.

In his book Why Christianity of All Religions?, Hendrik Kraemer has pointed to the uniqueness of the personality of Jesus Christ as being the thing above all others that proves Christianity to be the only religion that can claim to be a revelation from God. This is in line with what has been his major premise ever since the publication of his first great work in 1938, that Christianity is “discontinuous” from all other religions.

The proposal I am making approaches the problem from another angle. This proposal gets strength from our experience with the Old Testament as well as the New. The exact relation between the Gilgamesh Epic, including the account of the Creation and the Deluge, and the biblical record of those events, the exact relation between the Code of Hammurabi and the Hebrew Book of the Covenant, is not clear; there are both similarities and differences between them. But the real difference is on the personal level, in the concept of the God who was behind all these events and who gave all these laws.

So when we compare Christianity with other religions, we may expect the touchstone of comparison to be that of the personal founder of each religion, the person in whom each religion centers. We have a right to expect this because we are persons and our problems are personal problems. Truth is not something abstract. Ethics is not something abstract. Both truth and ethics ultimately have a personal foundation. Brunner’s statement, “Schemes of ethics will differ as metaphysics differ,” is nowhere more apt than in the comparison between Hinduism and Christianity. What a religion thinks about distinctions between good and evil depends on what it thinks about the person in whom it centers. And we have a right to expect that the founder of a religion, or the person around whom a religion is developed, will in himself, by his acts, his teaching, and his manner of life, collectively or separately, provide an answer to our problems.

All the great religions are centered in some person or persons. Yet if we removed from each its founder, all except Christianity would still go on. If we removed Jesus Christ from Christianity, however, there would be no Christianity. At first glance, this seems to be a weakness of Christianity and a strength of other religions. It seems to show that other religions have an inner strength, an inner truth, an inherent reason for existence, apart from the founder, that sustains them; that they depend for their following, not on the attractiveness of their founder, not on the strength of their founder, but on their appeal to the reason and conscience of their followers.

But we need to look deeper. We are persons. Our problems are personal problems. And ultimately we need a religion with a personal founder who has given more than a speculative answer to our questions, more than a dogmatic solution to our problems, one who has personally exemplified for us what is involved in his teaching. We cannot be sure of the ultimate truth or value of the religion we follow until we see its teaching proven in a person. It is at this point that the proposals of Schweitzer and Tillich and Toynbee and Radhakrishnan are inadequate for proving the comparative truth or value of religions. These proposals are based too much on speculation.

The reality or non-reality of the world, of life, and of morality—these are profound speculative problems with which all religions have dealt. The solutions to these problems must be found preeminently in a person, and the point where the solutions meet will be personal. Tillich is essentially Greek in his constant reiteration of the meaning of existence as our basic problem, and his assertion that God is the Ground of Existence. To him, our problems are basically philosophical. So his approach to the truth and value of all religions is philosophical. But the more basic question will be: What light does the founder of each religion in his own person give us regarding the meaning of existence?

Krishna’s self-consciousness led him to claim that he came into existence again and again from age to age by his own power of Maya. “Many of my births have passed away,” he says: “Though unborn, though My Self is eternal, though Lord of Beings, resorting to my own material nature, I come into being by my own mysterious power” (Gita 4:5, 6). To Buddha, the whole world seemed filled with suffering, and he became the Enlightened One when he realized the truth that escape from the wheel of suffering could be achieved by the cessation of desire. The teachings of both Krishna and Buddha were based on the doctrine of transmigration and reincarnation. And their claims are antithetical to the claim Jesus Christ makes when he speaks of the glory that he had with the Father before the foundation of the world (John 17:5, 24). With Christ there is no mention of a previous birth or of a previous incarnation. Jesus Christ is set forth as the incarnation of God in full reality, full of grace and truth, once and for all—the Word become flesh, who was tempted in every way that we are, but did not sin (John 1:1, 14; Heb. 4:15; 9:28). The personal claims of the founders, then, are different, and become the points at which the basic differences of the religions may be tested.

For a further example, note how the doctrine of salvation is made personal in the personal claims of Krishna and Christ. Each claims to be a saviour; each claims to be easily accessible; each claims that knowledge of and faith in him is necessary to salvation; each claims that he will come and abide in the one who believes in him. But when we ask what kind of salvation each provides, a great difference appears. Krishna offers salvation from the round of rebirths to identification of the Individual Self with the Supreme Self. Christ offers salvation from sin to righteousness, from Satan to God. The chief antithesis is in the Person, not the claim made by the Person. Christ is an atoner; Krishna is not. Krishna is a saviour who saves without cost to himself; Christ is a saviour who suffers the agony of a cross in order to redeem.

We may find some common metaphysical grounds for all religions, many common ethical ideals, and many common symbols of faith. But this does not justify the conclusion that all roads ultimately lead to God. Some lead to a dead end. Some wander around aimlessly and never get anywhere. And on the road that leads to God, one can go two ways, toward God and away from God. It is not only the power of the person who was lifted up on the cross to draw all men unto him that is important here. It is the assurance that he himself by his death and resurrection has become the Way, the Truth, the Life, and the Resurrection, and that he will draw us along the right road. For no founder of a religion except Jesus Christ has ever claimed—to say nothing of proving his claim—that he himself is the one sure road that leads to God.

Truth and love and life and resurrection are more than abstractions. They are personal. And it is at this personal level that all religions can most properly be compared to determine their truth and value. If the reality of the world and of morality is to be affirmed or denied, it must be at the personal level. If the meaning of existence is to be found, it must be at the personal level. If the meaning of suffering is to be found, it must be at the personal level. If there is anything common to various forms of religious faith and symbols and experience, it must be at this personal level. And it is preeminently here that all other religions fail. The persons in whom they center or from whom they originate do not bear either the holiness or the love, either the authority or the submission, either the majesty or the humility, of the Person of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, our Saviour and our Lord. Yet it is by this touchstone of the person that the real gold in each religion may be found.

Jesus in his Person was Truth. He exemplified Truth. He personified Truth. He did more than teach truth; he was Truth. He exemplified Love. He personified Love. Others have exhorted their followers to love one another. But Jesus could point to himself, to his example, and add the dynamic: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, as I have loved you.” The new thing was not love for one another but “as I have loved you.” Jesus did more than teach love; he was Love.

The problem of suffering is probed deeply by the Hindus in their doctrine of karma and retribution, based upon transmigration and reincarnation. But even they recognized their need for some other explanation when their Great-Souled One, (Mahatma) Gandhi, was assassinated in 1948. His death contradicted their laws of karma and retribution. The theories and speculations were not enough, and they turned to the cruel death of another person, Jesus Christ, for an explanation of the sufferings of their great leader. But that was as far as they could go. They could not go on to the resurrection of their Mahatma. Jesus did more than teach about resurrection. He was and is the Resurrection.

Jesus did not speculate on how temptation entered the world, nor why it should be there. He met it head-on, conquered it, and returned from the conquest filled with the power of the Spirit. He did not lecture men on sinlessness. He lived a life of complete holiness and love, and silenced his critics with the challenge, “Which of you can convict me of sin?” He did not argue that God answers prayer. He prayed, sometimes all night, and when he met men in the morning the power of the Lord was with him to heal. He did not attempt to argue how pain and sorrow in the universe can be compatible with the love of God; but he took on himself at the cross the very extremity of the pain and tragedy and wickedness of man, and thereby revealed the love of God. As E. Stanley Jones once said:

Many teachers of the world have tried to explain everything; they changed little or nothing. Jesus explained little and changed everything. Many teachers have tried to diagnose the disease of humanity; Jesus cures it. Many teachers have told us why the patient is suffering and that he should bear it with fortitude; Jesus tells him to take up his bed and walk. Many, like Socrates, have argued the immortality of the soul. Jesus did not argue. He raised the dead.

One who has been a devotee of one religion and then converted to another can see their comparative truth and value better than one who has remained loyal to his own religion while studying others from the outside. And the experience of Sadhu Sundar Singh rings true and valid in that light. He came to Christianity from the Sikh religion, a reform movement that grew out of Hinduism and condemned its idolatry. He exemplified religious devoutness; his name, Sadhu, means “holy one.” After his conversion he was approached at a youth conference by some young people who wanted to get his answers to some of their questions. They began by asking, “Sadhu, why did you feel it necessary to leave the Sikh religion and join the Christian religion? Was it the higher moral code of the Bible? Was it the belief that the Christians are right in claiming that the Bible is the inspired Word of God? What was it that made you change?” The Sadhu did not have to spend much time in thought before he gave the answer: “My reason for changing was Jesus Christ.” The students pressed further. “Sadhu, what did Christianity offer you that your mother’s religion did not offer you? You say your mother was your example of devoutness. What did you find here that you didn’t find there?” And he answered slowly with only two words, “Jesus Christ.” Then they tried another direction and asked what the central doctrine of Christianity was. Again came his reply, “Jesus Christ.” Finally they asked, “Sadhu, what reward does Christianity offer you that no other religion offers you?” He solemnly replied: “Jesus Christ.”

The touchstone of truth and value in religion is the personal founder in which the religion centers. We are standing on bedrock when we point to the Person, Jesus Christ, as the center of our faith and the center of our proclamation.

Maurice Blanchard, pastor of Austin-Second Baptist Church, Chicago, was for twenty-five years an American Baptist missionary in India, serving 1951–66 as a seminary president and New Testament professor. He has the Th.D. (Northern Baptist Seminary), and has written twelve books in the Telugu language of South India.

“But do the students stand for anything?” As a university professor, I was participating in a panel discussion of the issues involved in the student strike of May, 1970, when a member of the audience asked the question. The setting for this discussion was significant: university professors, students, and interested non-students were gathered in the fellowship hall of a large evangelical church after the Sunday evening service. The discussion engendered some moments of animated exchange, particularly when members of the audience spoke of the “negative” aspects of student protest, especially at public colleges and universities supported by tax funds: the destruction of property, the repudiation of government policy, the rejection of nationalist pride, and the nonconformist modes of conduct.

Several in the audience had come to the forum, not to listen, but to react because they felt that their values, derived from their social background, education, and religious belief, were threatened. Others, sharing these same values, had come to ask questions and to listen because they were genuinely puzzled about why students were acting as they were. In general, the impression of the campus protesters held by the audience was that students were sure of what they were against but had nothing positive to offer society, that “if the Viet Nam war were over tomorrow,” students would find some other issue about which to demonstrate.

My reply that evening to the question was inadequate, for I merely emphasized that today’s students, like the young people of any era, are idealists and that the ideals dominant on the campuses of the 1970s require special insight from society in general. To speak, however, of a single, monolithic student population with a single set of goals is misleading. Rather, the student body on the larger campuses of the nation has the heterogeneity of any urban community in America. Special interest groups often have specific aims that may not be shared by the rest of the student body: black separatists are such a group, as are other disadvantaged students, Marxist revolutionaries, and the few anarchists. A large percentage of the student body echoes the pragmatism of middle-class America; these students may be politically concerned, but they are inactive with regard to most social questions. Their code of conduct is largely governed by what society expects of them, and they plan to achieve security by following their parents’ life style, despite the generation gap on such issues as sex, marijuana, ecology, and war. As a result, these students are content to “get an education,” find a job, marry, and buy a home. And if a student who is motivated toward achieving material and social security is not already a member of the middle class, he may well be the son or daughter of a blue-collar worker, aspiring to the life pattern of those above him socially.

Another significant number of students are engaged in actively rejecting this same middle-class life style. Usually raised in an atmosphere of material security, these students have worked out a set of ideals so different from that of their parents and of those holding power in society that they feel alienated—and unable to communicate with anyone outside their peer group. These are the “idealists” of the student body in the sense that they reject the materialism of capitalistic society. They are also secular in their approach to life, for they have no religious training and operate as though God were irrelevant to their personal needs. “Pascal should not try to convince us that his God exists because for us it doesn’t,” wrote one of my students concerning the Pensées. In essence these secular idealists are cultural relativists; they would not dream of imposing their personal life styles and codes of conduct on anyone else, though they often try to persuade society that it has humanitarian obligations. Such students pose a unique challenge to the evangelical community, for they espouse many of the ideals of Christ but reject the institution of the church and the life style and world view of most church members.

Perhaps the slogans and slang of the secular idealists provide a key to their attitudes. (Many of these idioms have passed easily into the national vocabulary and have already been replaced by others within the closed social group of the young.) They always use the phrase “up tight” in a pejorative sense to describe anyone who is nervous and tense about small—or important—matters. Certainly the expression denotes one kind of reaction to the neurotic world of the suburbs: the stresses of business competition, the co*cktail circuit, and the accumulation of status symbols. But it is also the phrase of a generation profoundly aware that they are the children of an “age of anxiety” and that anxiety cannot be a way of life without destroying the individual. Another negative expression describes the evasion of reality, responsibility, or truth—“copping out.” Anyone can cop out, but parents and the “establishment” are particularly guilty. They have hypocritically mouthed ideals and willfully refused to acknowledge their failure to follow these ideals, creating a world of hatred, suffering, and injustice. A third phrase has a positive force, representing the desire of college youth to liberate themselves from restrictive inhibitions and to decide what they think is best for themselves. To “do one’s own thing” is to declare one’s independence and define one’s own personality—to do what one feels comfortable doing without worrying about what other people think. Key slogans that indicate other positive values of the idealists might be “make love, not war,” or simply “peace.” If there is one aspect of the religionless life style of such college youth that should challenge the religionists of our era, it is certainly their belief that love, selflessness, and sharing are important goals in life. While the situation ethic of the young may occasionally seem shockingly immoral or impulsive to those who are orthodox, few Christians could deny that love, selflessness, and sharing are laudable concepts.

So a generation of youth has opted for honesty, self-expression, freedom from inhibitions, spontaneity, sharing, love—and has rejected authority as hypocritical and the middle class as materialistic. The choices these idealists are making are fraught with dangers, however, for they are frighteningly on their own. Let me cite as an example part of an essay written by a sophom*ore who was expressing the relevance of Voltaire’s Candide to his personal life.

Candide and I are both lost. We are both traveling through different areas to seek some sort of purpose and meaning for living. Candide moves through the physical world, while I move through the different regions of thought, world travel being not as easy to accomplish. Both of us have left the surroundings which nurtured us. Candide was thrown out of the castle … in Westphalia. I myself have mentally left the middle class values by which I was reared. Together we travel through lands filled with hostility. Candide comes into contact with Bulgarians who try to regiment him into their way of thinking. I myself every day am bombarded by those who would wish to make me conform to a loyalty to which I have no heart felt allegiance, as Candide had none for the King of the Bulgarians. Candide witnesses senseless feuding between groups such as the Bulgarians and the Abares. I, too, feel caught in the middle between different groups fighting one another, but who both neglect the dignity and rights of people that Voltaire was trying to stress in his day. Extreme radicals and extreme reactionaries with their demagoguery are both trying to control the thoughts of the people of this land, while each rejects the life of the individual if he interferes with his plan. I find myself in the same situation as Candide, just trying to find a place where I can live my life in a style suitable to my own desires.

Man rarely can “make it” on his own, and students are human enough to make mistakes, to be caught up in fads, to experiment. Their unusual attempts to find a workable life style often get the public’s attention. They seem to replace faith with hedonism, occultism, mysticism, drugs, rock music, communal life, political activism, and social work. These contradictory choices all represent the reactions of withdrawal from or involvement in society of a generation dissatisfied with a world it did not make, but the reactions of both withdrawal and involvement are explicable in terms of the “new” ideals of the secular student who either tries to reform society or leaves it.

What, then, is the responsibility of the evangelical church member to these students to whom the biblical notion of personal sin is alien and the institutionalized church, anathema? Looking at rebellious youth from the vantage point of maturity, hard work, and a strict upbringing, established Christians may feel a condemnatory spirit of judgment. Are not these students rebellious, self-centered, lazy, coddled, and undisciplined? In certain cases and from certain vantage points, this is true. Perhaps we should begin with an open mind, however, and ask whether we may indeed be unconsciously materialistic and hypocritical. Is it possible that the evangelical Christian equates certain political, social, and economic values with the claims of Christ and biblical truth, when indeed these values are the product of his place in history and society? It is possible, and the students demand of the Christian that he live daily the life of Christ while constantly holding up for examination his everyday values. For instance, does the call of Christ that impels me to work in Sunday school or youth groups also require me, if I am white, not to sell my home when blacks or Puerto Ricans move into my neighborhood and I fear property values may decline? Or does the call of Christ that asks the church to minister to all people also challenge the middle-class congregation not to forsake the inner city for the suburbs? Or does the call of Christ that asks the follower to be a “good soldier” also require that he think carefully about the power of the military in America and the nature of the wars the nation fights?

The students thus challenge all evangelicals not to be stumbling blocks to those seeking truth by either personal or institutional hypocrisies. When students see living examples of Christ, they are open to the Gospel, and dialogue becomes possible. Dialogue is not possible, however, when either side is intolerant of the superficial life style of the other. During the student strike, for instance, many students, still hoping to “rap” with non-students, cut their hair and dressed “straight” so that they could go out into the community and not be rebuffed; often they were rebuffed anyway.

Chances for direct confrontations with nonconformist students may be rare, but church members also have a responsibility to pray for and support Christian students, faculty, and organizations that present the gospel, directly and indirectly on secular campuses. Sooner or later, many secular idealists have an experience that shows them they are inadequate in their own strength. And in such situations, they are often eager to let Christ transform their lives.

Patricia A. Ward is assistant professor in the Department of Comparative and World Literature, State University of NewYork at Albany. She has the B.A. degree from Eastern Nazarene College and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

Many secular theologies seem to be unrealistic about the rich complexity of existence, ending with an outlook upon the world that simplifies issues to the point of insipidity. This has implications for evangelism. Let me illustrate.

In his book Secular Christianity Ronald Gregor Smith speaks of faith as “the very means of true secularity.” He writes:

Faith is not concerned to proselytize. It cannot proselytize, because it carries no equipment, and peddles no wares, which it may offer to the passerby. Its only way is to carry in the body, that is, in the historical existence in the world which it both maintains and endures, the marks of Jesus. But these are not the sacred stigmata of the kind the crowd longs to see and touch. They are the marks of absolute openness, which is absolutely engaged with the historical possibilities of the hour.… The End in Christ is here and now in our present history only in the form of Faith’s openness to the future [Collins, 1966, p. 200].

Now, such a statement leaves me puzzled. I am puzzled by its combination of assurance and vagueness, of willingness to lay down hard-and-fast laws and unwillingness to explain these laws.

Faith will not proselytize (Smith is certain) because it has no wares to peddle. Now, if he means that Christians ought not to haggle in the secular marketplace in secular terms, then I am with him. Christians ought not to ask people to be converted in order to lose their neuroses, gain self-confidence, make friends, or get places. Yet I cannot forget that the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah pictures God himself as a peddler crying his wares—wares he alone has to offer; or that Jesus lost no time telling the woman at Jacob’s well that he had wares to give to her (John 4:10). So Smith’s new commandment, “Thou shalt not proselytize,” does not seem to me to weigh very solidly over against the command Jesus made to his followers to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19).

Similarly, Smith is very certain that life in Christ is fully exhausted by an attitude of “openness to the future.” Now, the more often I meet this phrase—and I meet it almost every time I open a recent religious book or periodical—the less it conveys to me. Surely, like “accepting the universe,” being “open to the future” is something no one can really avoid, and about which he has little choice. Being closed to the future is really impossible, because the future does not lend itself to manipulation. Even suicide, as Hamlet once said rather well, leaves the future decidedly open. Smith recommends absolute openness. This, surely, is to recommend idolatry. Nothing can be absolute for a Christian except the will of God, which is in itself absolutely “good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). Once, hearing the phrase “Art for Art’s sake,” a wit asked, “What is this Art that it should have a sake?” I would ask, in the same vein, “What is this Future that it should demand of me absolute openness?” The future, like everything else in this created universe, depends absolutely upon God and is in his hands. (That is why Bonhoeffer, incidentally, believed that living from day to day in this world is our education in faith. Just because we do not order our future in advance, therefore we must throw ourselves unreservedly into the arms of God, committing each hour, as it comes, to him.)

Smith has learned, from some unacknowledged source, that the marks of Jesus are the marks of absolute openness to the future. Although he forbids Christians to proselytize, he seeks to make us proselytes to this dogma. If he means by this “absolute openness” absolute obedience to the Father’s will—the active and passive obedience perfectly given by Jesus of which the old dogmatic theologians spoke—then one would not disagree. Nevertheless, it cannot be simply “the future” that receives such openness; it must be the future under God. There is a pagan openness to the future that puts life under the control of Fate and Fortune, and there is a vitalistic openness that sees history as an unfolding of the world-soul or the emergent evolutionary Principle. Moreover, the claim that such openness is the sole embodiment of the marks of Jesus, or that the End of Christ is present only in this, has little support in biblical evidence. The living Christ lays his hand upon the whole of history, past, present, and future. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb. 13:8).

The Christian awaits the future confidently because, whatever it brings, it cannot separate him from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:38, 39). He is enabled to do this because he is also able to confess, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). His openness to the future is based on his being committed to a belief about what God has done in the past. The marks of Jesus carried in the body of his Church are the marks of the One who was obedient and the One who has laid upon his body, the Church, obedience to him, its Head. That obedience includes readiness to confess the faith by which the body lives: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

The paragraph from Gregor Smith’s Secular Christianity brings us, I believe, to the heart of much that goes under the heading “the new evangelism.” Today a theology of the secular is certainly needed to inform and direct evangelistic effort in our secularized world. But a secularizing theology—that is, theology that treats the secular as though it were sacred, or as though the process of history were itself the source of revelation—this theology can only mislead the Christian concerning his proper stance in relation to the world. It will lead him to be silent where he ought to speak, and to be confident about issues where he ought to advance only in fear and trembling.

Writing in 1965, Gregor Smith shied away from all “specific blueprints” for Christian action in society. He declared: “We cannot define any concerted action which could claim to be the manifest Christian course of action” (p. 204). But, since he wrote, the cause of “revolutionary theology” has been taken up with enthusiasm in many quarters. We are widely urged to discover “what God is doing in the world,” and to be “God’s vanguard” in initiating “social change.”

Carl Braaten, writing just recently, asserts that two themes stand out for him: the theme of the future and the theme of revolution. Together they show where Christians can act in freedom and unity. He explains:

The church’s mission to the world is to keep it from getting bogged down in the present.… When the world is swallowed up by hopelessness or is bored by its stagnant present, the church can lift up public symbols of the future that generate new possibilities in the present. The church is needed as the voice of prophecy in the world to regenerate the social and political images that inspire the world to change for the better. The church cannot limit its mission in history to salvaging individuals from a meaningless world; it works not only in history but for history, not only in culture but for culture, not only for persons but for communities, not only in the present but toward the ultimate future [Projections, Doubleday, 1970, “American Historical Experience and Christian Reflection,” p. 107].

Yes, the Church of Jesus Christ is needed in the world; were it not, Jesus would not have founded it, loved it, and given himself for it (Eph. 5:25). But the reason the Church is needed is surely not that the world is apt to get into a rut and needs a little inspiration to get on with the job of building the future. The task for Christians cannot be to act as cheerleaders crying, “On world, on world, on! Change! Change for the Better!” This is really only old-type individualistic self-help and peace-of-mind religion turned inside out. Yesterday we were being told, “Unlock your faith-power. Turn inferiority feelings into creative energy.” Today the message is, “Regenerate the public symbols of hope for the future. Work for genuine community, culture, and a happy tomorrow.”

The Gospel is more than individual. It is also more than social. The first error is the mirror-image of the second, and neither will do very much to heal the real and deep wounds of the world.

The tragedy of the conversion-to-world approach is that, instead of letting the light of Christ shine upon the world’s dark places, it follows the world’s definition of light and promises to get more of that. More than thirty years ago Karl Barth noted that Christianity had become the cultural religion of Western man to the extent that it thought itself most Christian when it was most slavishly echoing cultural trends. Medieval Christendom was a sacral society, said Barth, and so it preached the salvation of souls through the ecclesiastical institutions of that society. The modern world became secular and activist. The traditional churches seemed pale remnants of the old order. So Christians suddenly discovered how, in Barth’s words, “the Church or Christianity might be a useful and usable force for education and order in the service of the new secular glory of Western man” (Church Dogmatics, 1/2, p. 335). “It accepted modern man with his energetic attitude to himself, asking how best Christianity could be commended to that man. It took up the role allotted to it, and was at pains to make itself indispensable to it … pointing out how the doctrine of Jesus Christ … has the secret power of giving to men the inward capacity to seek and obtain the aims and purposes which he has independently chosen” (p. 336).

Not much has changed since Barth wrote those words, except the fashion in slogans. Now, instead of “a useful and usable force for education and order,” we are hearing Christianity recommended as “a revolutionary force to instigate social change.” Energetic Western man is flattered by being called “co-creator” with God, “the steersman of the cosmos,” and is asked to spare time to look at Christianity now that it is “action-oriented.”

Now, it would be foolish as well as ungrateful to pretend that nothing positive has been achieved by the new emphasis upon the social dimension of faith that has stemmed from the secular theologies of the sixties. Anything that stirs us up and prevents us from settling down “at ease in Zion” does us a great deal of good. The determination to be doers of the word and not hearers only was a healthy reaction to the sometimes self-satisfied religiosity of the fifties, when at times religion seemed to fit all too easily into the pattern of the North American way of life. As Christians we believe that God’s providential guidance is constant. In the revival of understanding of the corporate dimension of salvation in the Bible; in the reaction against cheap grace and the churches’ over-preoccupation with internal housekeeping; in the compassion for the underprivileged and the vulnerable in our inequitable society, a compassion that could not stop short of active engagement—in all these things, we may believe that God was leading our age, and still is.

But God’s Providence is always twofold. It meets us in mercy—but also in judgment. When men transfer their belief from the Providence of God to the Process of History, they drop the judgment side, very largely if not altogether. This is the procedure I have been speaking about: the simplifying procedure that will not hold sacred and secular in tension but wants to reduce the one to the other, and on the way loses the complex truth about the world and the searching reality of the Gospel. Why are we so sure that it has been left to us to publish, at long last, the version of Christian faith that really “tells it like it is”—so sure that we can lay down the law about what religion “must be” if it is to win the future and not die? Why are we so ready to accuse previous generations of Christians of not seeing what we see, and of being those who killed the prophets—whereas, of course, our ears are open to the prophetic word today? Can it not be, just possibly, that it is not solely our faithfulness to the Gospel that makes us denounce the “hypocrisy” of earlier days? Could the desire to be on the popular side have something to do with it? No doubt there was recently “a suburban captivity of the churches,” which is still to some extent with us. But is it so very different for Christians to conform when conformity is respectable, and to commend revolutionary Christianity when talk of revolution is in vogue?

I notice that many religious books I open these days quote Karl Marx’s dictum about philosophers’ having explained the world, whereas our task is to change it. The time for words is over, so theologians are saying, and the time for action has begun. Yet all they are actually bringing us is a printed page, full of words. The oldest trick of the demogogue is to shout that he is a man of action, not of words—and then continue orating for two hours. Have Christians never acted before now? And will the substitution of the word “Christopraxis” for the word “theology,” as some suggest, really get us to love and serve our neighbor better? I personally have strong doubts whether it is the Holy Spirit that is leading so many Christian leaders to the conviction that their task is, at every opportunity, to join in vigorous denunciation of the status quo. If that is the prophetic voice needed in our time, the earth has never been so thickly populated by prophets.

Maybe the word that Christians might be injecting into the present scene is a word that, as Bonhoeffer suggested in his day, might sober us up from the intoxication of thinking that we ourselves, and not God, can restore to wholeness a fallen world ruled by death. Maybe they could point out, for instance, that socia’ change does not necessarily mean change for the better. Carl Braaten, having given the standard quotation from Marx, comments: “This is more in line with the Christian spirit that seeks the transformation of that which is, and looks upon the urge to conform to that which is as a manifestation of sin” (Projections, p. 107). He might have added, but does not, that “the body of death” which is the world denying Christ cannot change its nature by manifesting itself in some new form, and hoping that it will do so is equally a manifestation of sin.

Perhaps, too, Christians should sober up to the fact that the secular world, whether clinging to the status quo or bent on revolution, is not likely to be impressed by our pleading “Look at us, and notice how secular and revolutionary we are. We’re just like you.” Secularists, or any sensible non-Christians, are much more likely to be interested in just how and why we are different from our contemporaries. As it is, the outlook of the detached observer who looks at the Christian witness today may well be along the skeptical lines Gerald Sykes has recorded in his book The Cool Millennium. Sykes comments that the churches are trying to make up for their intellectual and moral bankruptcy by taking up popular social causes.

As I see it, the false belief that words are an alternative to action and the half-truth that thinking must be consciously action-oriented are the principal causes of the inadequacy of the “new evangelism.” The new emphasis trusts in “Christian presence” and in Christian service rather than in direct proclamation of the Gospel in words. There is need here of more thinking-through of a situation that calls for tough-mindedness as well as for tenderness of conscience.

The reaffirmation of the Servant Church in our day is something for which we must be profoundly grateful. We have much to learn, in our wrestling with day-to-day events, about the implementation of the servant role of every committed Christian in the ministry of Christ’s Church to a world given over to the worship of force and violence. But comparatively little attention is being given to the role of individual members in the Confessing Church. Yet this is, in its own way, equally important. Here the reaction against the institution of Christendom, and against a narrow pietism concentrating upon “winning souls,” has turned all too many away from attending to an area of faithfulness to the Christian Gospel that is absolutely essential to the wholeness of that Gospel.

The confusion, I believe, is a result of missing the vital connection between witness in word and witness in action, and the impossibility of reducing either to the other. Such a confusion is parallel to the confusion of the relation between the secular and the sacred.

Witness to the Gospel in word through the proclamation of the saving truth of Jesus Christ, his incarnation, atoning death, resurrection, intercession at the right hand of God, and coming again: this is the witness the Church is called upon to give continually, in season and out of season (1 Tim. 4:2). Now, the utterance of words is no proof of living faith in the one who preaches the Gospel of our salvation. Paul knew that, as well as anyone today (1 Cor. 9:27). I may say all the right (orthodox) words, and in my actions belie my words. That is a matter between God and myself, though, of course, like everything I do, it does not involve only me personally, since my hypocrisy may be a stumbling block to others and turn them away from the way of faith. Yet, the faultiness in the preacher gives him no excuse for failing to preach, or the Church would be condemned to dumbness until the end of history.

Nor is action, in itself, proof of faith. Popular worldly wisdom pronounces, “Actions speak louder than words.” And, generally speaking, they do. That is why the martyr is given that name: marturion, witness. His is the supreme witness in life, since he puts all he has to offer and counts it less than enough to give as his testimony of faith. We honor, of necessity, martyrs to faiths that we think to be mistaken or wicked, since it brings us face to face with the poverty of our own faith. Yet martyrdom does not prove the rightness of faith, or even the goodness of the martyr. Because we are human beings, who must seek to relate ourselves to the truth through words, we cannot escape the necessity for bringing words into relation with the one who has given his witness in life, asking: “Why did he die? And for what?” Jesus himself appealed to his actions as confirmation of his message (John 14:11). Yet he taught in words, and told his disciples to repeat those words. Those who rejected him (and today still reject him), rejected equally his words and his actions. Actions and words are not simply separable. Nor can actions replace words, or stand alone securely where words fail.

Were Christian faith merely a matter of words spoken, then Christianity would have faded out of history long ago. Yet the converse is equally true. Were Christian action self-authenticating in the absence of words, then evangelism through words recalling Jesus Christ, God with us in Galilee and Jerusalem, the Victim upon the Cross and the Victor ascending to Heaven—that would have been discovered to be superfluous, and the name of Christ Jesus (mere words, after all) would have disappeared from human memory.

No, Christian presence witnessing in life cannot be enough. The task of the Church is certainly to serve human life, to be secularly active in the secular sphere, to be in the world (as Jesus Christ was) in the form of a servant. But the task of proclaiming the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, Christ crucified and risen, is an equally pressing obligation. And, since no one can claim without presumption to live the life in Christ to the measure of Christ himself, the proclamation in word is primary, in the order of life in the Church—just as, for the individual Christian before God, to be Christ’s true disciple is primary and his duty to proclaim the name of Christ and tell his story is secondary.

The victory that overcomes the world is our faith (1 John 5:4). Faith is lived in the world. In the world it must also be proclaimed.

SLEEPING STARS

“In Asia great

luminaries sleep

who shall rise

again on the last

day” huge & silent

stars burning beneath

the ancient Roman

stonework

their amazing brilliance

seald

in earthen shadow

turns inward

to the central

Light, whose shine

they are, in whom

they sleep

We too “sleep

in Ephesus”

& when the Sun rises

we too shall ascend

& live in

his light flinging brilliance

into brilliance, in

constellations of eternal

love

F. EUGENE WARREN

Kenneth Hamillton is professor of systematic theology at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He received the Th.D. from Emmanuel College, Victoria University, Toronto. He is the author of a dozen books, including “What’s New in Religion?” and “In Search of Contemporary Man.” This article is from an address given at the Canadian Congress on Evangelism.

The plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union continues to worsen. The reduction in the death sentences of some Jews convicted of a hijacking offense that never became airborne indicates no change of mind or heart by Soviet officials. It is specious for Soviet scientists to appeal for acquittal of Angela Davis when justice and equity are virtually non-existent in their own country. I think it would be helpful for the Russian scientists to come to America and watch the trial of Angela Davis and for representative Americans (including some of Miss Davis’s friends) to go to Moscow and watch Soviet legal proceedings.

None of this, however, should cause us to forget the suffering Jews in the Soviet Union. Their plight reminds me of the Jews’ captivity in Egypt and of God’s great deliverance of them in the Exodus. It is difficult to understand why the communists are unwilling to allow the Jews—whom they hate and persecute—to emigrate to Israel. I should think that they not only would be delighted for them to depart but also would do all they could to encourage and assist them.

I ask prayer for the son of a former assistant editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Robert Cleath, Jr., who was critically injured in an automobile accident last month. His brother who was also injured has recovered. The family needs our prayers.

An evening at the humorous but amateurish Chicago production of Promises, Promises reminded me that the last truly memorable pieces I had seen on the American stage were Hadrian VII with Hume Cronyn and the Chicago Old Town Players’ rendition of Jack Richardson’s The Prodigal. Promises, Promises also recalled my promise (in this column of July 17) to supplement my discussion of the French cinema with an article on the current Parisian stage—whose vitality contrasts so markedly with its American counterpart.

“But the French stage is dirty and immoral!” cries the reader who had the misfortune to suffer through a “Paris by Night” segment in his guided tour of Gay Paree. Actually, it is no fairer to evaluate the French legitimate theater (which few non-Frenchmen ever attend, owing to the language barrier) on the basis of cheap nightclub acts than it would be to prejudge Hadrian VII by way of Las Vegas nightspots. The stage production of most questionable taste in Paris today happens to be the American import Hair, and it has elicited a response that would be hard to imagine in our own country, where we have come to accept “Woodstock” operations as part of the cultural landscape: playwright René Ehni, already famous for his mockery of the left-wing intelligentsia in Que Ferez-Vous en Novembre?, brought out a new play, Super-Positions, in which the mentality of those who create productions like Hair is surgically analyzed and exposed to ridicule.

In point of fact, the Paris legitimate theater remains the best in the world. For every Hadrian VII in the United States and every 40 Years On in London, there are scores of plays each season in Paris that encourage—or even force—the theatergoer to rethink his existence. Why is this? In part the answer is (and I hope my rightest readers ponder it well, especially those who in Indiana even opposed federal aid to public libraries) that the French state directly subsidizes the theater through its Ministry of Culture!

More vital as an explanatory factor for the quality of the Parisian stage is the remarkable lucidity of the French mind at its best (the quality termed “Cartesian spirit”). Descartes’s insistence that everything be made clear and explicit—deriving from the classical precision of the orthodox Christian theological thinking from which Descartes ironically departed—has colored the French mentality to such an extent that art is invariably made to wrestle seriously with ultimate questions. Even Frenchmen such as Camus who drank deeply at the founts of non-rational existentialism have been incapable of achieving the intellectual turgidity of a Heidegger! How many American playwrights, whose perspectives seem to have difficulty rising above the levels of nudity and profanity, could analyze their task as Roger Planchon did his work of reviving Racine’s Bérénice? Said he in a Le Monde interview in April, criticizing the very fallacy that theologians of the New Hermeneutic have baptized with their “hermeneutical circle”: We must “come properly to grips with the work itself” and not be “content to use the classic as a mouthpiece or echo-chamber for our own ideas.”

“Granting all this,” our critic retorts, “isn’t the Parisian theater largely devoted either to depressing descriptions of the human predicament, without a hint of a solution, or to idealistic and perfectionistic expressions (as in escapist operettas) that go to the opposite extreme?” But one must distinguish lack of explicit solution to man’s predicament from hopelessness. Many current French stage pieces offer man “no exit” (to use Sartre’s famous phrase) but so clearly distinguish the nature of his malady from naïve and false diagnoses that they constitute a first step toward cure.

For example, Jean Anouilh’s Les Poissons Rouges strikes directly at the fundamental Marxist fallacy that man’s problems, like the state, can “winnow away” through the establishment of a classless society. The hero of the play is, by his background, education, and upbringing, a superior person, and therefore all those who have contact with him wish to whittle him down to their size, by giving him a guilty conscience for having genuine ability. The message? Literary critic Poirot-Delpech rightly catches it: “The playwright is convinced that since innate differences are stronger than differences of wealth or social rank, there will always be one man who seems to be getting the best of it; he becomes the other man’s bourgeois and incurs his revenge.”

The Paris revival of Henry de Montherlant’s historical drama Malatesta stresses the self-deception of man. The despicable fifteenth-century condottiere and all those associated with him—“even those who are thought to be the salt of the earth” (these are the playwright’s words)—display “the generalized blindness of human beings. One should never forget that Julius Caesar, who was a genius, bequeathed enormous sums to his murderers.” Ionesco’s Amédée, subtitled “How to Get Rid of It” (i.e., a corpse that mysteriously appears in an apartment and then commences to grow in size until it completely fills the living space, brings the theatergoer an even more profound analysis: sin cannot be evaded, though humans try to do so either by assuming blasé pseudo-indifference or by childishly refusing to face up to the nightmare of their existence.

The lesson that honesty concerning oneself is the first step to salvation is preached in Un Sale Egoїste, starring Paul Meurisse as a superlative “dirty egoist.” He differs from others only in that he is willing to admit his egoism. His only close friend is the abbé (“someone I can understand: a true egoist,” declares the hero); after all, the “Christian martyrs weren’t unselfish—they got an exultation from sacrifice.” Precisely: Christianity does not idealistically pretend that unselfishness is possible; it ruthlessly faces it so that it can be redeemed. At the end of the play the possibility of such redemption opens to the egoist through the love of a girl who, like him, sees the heart of man as it really is.

Are Paris operettas superficial? Some, surely, but not all. Tino Rossi, a popular singer for over a generation, has been starring as Le Marchand de Soleil at the Mogador, and he merchandises not only sun but pre-evangelism. The merchant is a Christ-figure who turns “deus ex machina” into a way of life! He appears out of nowhere to solve the insoluble again and again. Effectively, the production works into it Rossi’s most famous song, the Christmas tune, “Petit Papa Noël.” Sing the children of this world to Father Christmas, the Christ-figure par excellence: “When you come down from heaven with your gifts by the thousands, don’t forget me. I haven’t been very good, but please forgive me.” Our Lord tells us that the door to the Kingdom is open only to those who become as little children: children in recognizing their need, children in seeking God’s answer outside themselves. The Paris theater, by God’s common grace, silhouettes these truths.