Page 5755 – Christianity Today (2024)

It’s a pity, as the Bicentennial year dawns, that we’ve picked the wrong year to celebrate. I agree that it’s too late to call off the nation’s two-hundredth birthday party. After all, the streamers are hung, the table is set, the guests are on their way. Nevertheless, I propose that the date we should be celebrating is not the organizational birth of the nation in 1776 but its organic birth in 1740. What occurred in that year was nothing less than an inner American revolution, a spiritual declaration of independence that made the political reshuffling thirty-six years later an inevitability. The year 1740 was the crest of that wave of spiritual power called the Great Awakening. Let’s look back to this awakening to see what it was and why it deserves credit as the real birth of the American consciousness.

To understand this inner American revolution of 1740 we must take the spotlight off Boston, Lexington, and Concord and shine it on the Raritan Valley of New Jersey, the quiet hills of eastern Pennsylvania, and the trim hamlets nestled in the fertile Connecticut Valley. In 1727 in a small Dutch Reformed church in New Jersey, T. J. Frelinghuysen began stressing in his preaching the need for “heart” religion. This novel emphasis broke through the frozen crust of his congregation’s complacent Calvinism like an ice axe. The Tennent family of the greater Philadelphia area lit a similar fire beneath the chilled Presbyterianism of the middle colonies with the same exciting results—hearts of men and women were set aflame. In the late thirties the tranquil Connecticut Valley shook with the fervor of the renewed Northampton Congregationalists led by their brilliant and godly pastor, Jonathan Edwards. Edwards publicized these dramatic effects in a small book entitled A Narrative of Surprising Conversions, an eyewitness account of spiritual transformations that soon became a best-seller on both sides of the ocean.

All that remained was for these regional revivals to be channeled together to create a mighty movement of spiritual power. The one man who more than any other accomplished this task was the firebrand British evangelist George Whitefield, who was then twenty-five years old. His open-air meetings stirred thousands of colonists throughout the southern and middle colonies. After a successful campaign in Philadelphia, in the waning weeks of 1739 he was led northward to New England. Thereafter New England was flooded with new conversions and renewed commitments. The impact of Whitefield on New England as the Great Awakening reached its crest can best be described in the words of Nathan Cole, a farmer of the Middletown, Connecticut, area, who wrote this eyewitness account:

Then on a sudden, in the morning about 8 or 9 of the clock there came a messenger and said Mr. Whitefield preached at Hartford and Wethersfield yesterday and is to preach at Middletown this morning at ten of the clock. I was in my field at work. I dropped my tool that I had in my hand and ran home to get my wife, telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr. Whitefield preach at Middletown.… And when we came within about half a mile or a mile … I saw before me a cloud of fog rising. I first thought it came from the great river but as I came nearer the road, I heard the noise of horses feet coming down the road, and the cloud was the cloud of dust made by the horses feet.… And as I grew nearer it seemed like a steady stream of horses and their riders … all of a lather and foam with sweat, their breath rolling out of their nostrils with every jump [The Great Awakening, edited by Heimert and Miller, Bobbs-Merrill, 1967, p. 184].

Cole continues the build-up until finally the climax is reached, Whitefield’s appearance before the crowd of thousands:

When I saw Mr. Whitefield come upon the scaffold he looked almost angelical; a young, slim, slender youth, before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted countenance. And my hearing how God was with him everywhere as he came along, it solemnized my mind and put me into a trembling fear before he began to preach; for he looked as if he was clothed with authority from the Great God … and my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. By God’s blessing, my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me [p. 186].

This scene was repeated scores of times in that climactic year of 1740. Dozens of itinerant evangelists took Whitefield’s message to the most remote backwaters of the colonies. An inner revolution had taken place that forged a bond among the colonies and weakened the ties with Europe. What was awakened in 1740 was the spirit of American independence.

The story of the Great Awakening is an exciting one, but is this idea of an inner American revolution necessary to explain the armed rebellion of 1776? Can’t the political issue of taxation without representation sufficiently explain the widespread disaffection of the previously loyal thirteen colonies? There are three reasons for seeing the spirit of ’40 as the essential inner power behind the political eruptions of 1776.

First, the message of personal commitment and individual decision central to the Awakening reached a wider audience than the issue of taxation without representation. The merchant class of the port cities might be inflamed by the irritating tax laws, but how much popular appeal did that issue have? Colonial America was a rural society. One authority states that only one out of twenty Americans lived in the city. While Boston was certainly a powerful radiating center, it could influence only a minority in the northern colonies, and by no means the whole seaboard. To inflame the colonists sufficiently against Great Britain there had to be embers that were rekindled by the taxation issue, not created by it. The spiritual independence fostered by the Great Awakening saturated the colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia, from the Atlantic deep into the Appalachians.

Secondly, as a cause for rebellion the Great Awakening had a deeper appeal than the taxation issue. The spiritual appetite aroused in 1740 created a search for “something more,” a dissatisfaction with the status quo that refused to fade with time. Two centuries before, the Puritans of England had followed religious impulses that led to the beheading of King Charles. Is it any less likely that in 1740 transformed hearts would seek a transformed society and would want to free themselves once again from a monarch’s rule?

An example can be found in the career of the political radical Herman Husband. In 1760 he joined a southern guerrilla force that attempted to overthrow the colony of North Carolina. After failure and expulsion he moved north, where he worked tirelessly for independence from Britain. What was the source of Husband’s radicalism? In an account of his religious conversion under Whitefield and his subsequent spiritual journey, Some Remarks on Religion, written in 1750, he provides an answer. One historian comments about this interesting document that “his longing for a more abrupt and soul-ravishing experience hints at why he, along with other Americans for whom the Great Awakening was still a vivid recollection, responded as they did to the next great ‘crisis’ in the life of their society” (The Great Awakening, p. 637).

Lastly, the Great Awakening had a deeper impact on the political revolution than did the issue of taxation because of longer exposure. By 1776, three and a half decades after the flood of revival, the message of the Great Awakening with its heavy emphasis on individual responsibility had had a chance to soak deeply into the consciousness of the common man. Even granting the activities of the Sons of Liberty, the pamphlet war, and the rabble-rousers’ constant diatribes, to assert that merely thirteen years after the end of the bloody French and Indian wars the colonists would become so deeply embittered with their constant ally, Britain, that they would take up arms against her and seek the embrace of their constant enemy, the French, over a tax problem that had only limited appeal to a limited number over a very limited time—this assertion leaves unanswered questions. There had to be a previous alienation of heart and mind throughout the length and breadth of the Thirteen Colonies. The Great Awakening was the occasion of America’s alienation of heart. For three decades its impulses saturated the colonies with the message of inner freedom.

Admittedly, some of America’s leaders during the Revolution did not come to the Great Awakening type of faith; among these were Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. But they too were influenced and carried along by its stream. We can therefore say that the Great Awakening, not the trigger issue of taxation, transformed the colonial consciousness to create the American identity through its wider audience, deeper appeal, and longer exposure. In the opinion of the noted church historian Winthrop Hudson:

The Awakening played an important role in forming a national consciousness among people of different colonies whose primary ties were with Europe rather than with one another. As a spontaneous movement which swept across all colonial boundaries, generated a common interest and a common loyalty, bound people together in a common cause and reinforced the common conviction that God had a special destiny for America, the Awakening contributed greatly to the development of a sense of cohesiveness among American people [Religion in America, Scribners, 1965, p. 76].

So enjoy the parades this year. Visit the historic sites. Celebrate the nation’s birthday to your heart’s content. But in the midst of all the talk about the spirit of ‘76, remember too that more important spirit—the spirit of 1740.

The Christian feminist counterpart to the cigarette slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby,” decorated the gold and blue banner: the words “We’re on our way, Lord,” under a huge ascending balloon. In front of the banner at the opening session, the women sang, “Mary, Mary don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.” They had come from Washington and Florida, from California and Canada, by ones, twos, and twenty-fives, converging on Washington, D. C., on Thanksgiving weekend for a historic event—the first national meeting of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus.

Over 360 women and men (a handful) came from thirty-five states to discuss “Women in Transition: A Biblical Approach to Feminism.” Preannounced speakers included Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, professor of English at William Paterson College of Wayne, New Jersey; Letha Scanzoni, a professional writer from Bloomington, Indiana; and Lucille Sider Dayton, assistant director of the Urban Life Center, Chicago.

The meeting began Friday afternoon with an informal get-acquainted hour during which participants crowded into a stuffy room to draw pictures representing their “centers” or core of thought and feeling. Over the din, one voice asked, “How can one find one’s center in such a mess?”

In her welcoming remarks, Heidi Frost, one of the conference planners, urged participants, “Get what you need from the caucus” and “Don’t expect a party line.” All were asked to pray for 2,000 Catholic “sisters” meeting in Detroit to discuss women’s ordination. At a roll call of denominations, more than twenty-three were represented, the Presbyterian and Mennonite groups being the largest.

Friday evening’s keynote address by Virginia Mollenkott—she received a standing ovation—emphasized the need to “de-absolutize” biblical culture. She called for distinguishing between what was written for an age and what transcends particular cultures. Mollenkott repudiated the “idolatry of the male” found in many recent books on the woman’s role, particularly The Total Woman. With Paul Jewett, author of Man as Male and Female, she roots masculinity and femininity in the Trinity, basing this on Genesis 1:26 and 27: “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.…” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Judy Brown Hull, another conference planner, spoke about some of the costs in her own pilgrimage to wholeness. Her husband, Roger Hull, pastor of the Broadway Presbyterian Church in New York City, told the gathering that he was a “converting male chauvinist in process” and that he believes the Spirit of God is at work in the women’s movement.

Participants were divided into small “discovery groups” of six that met throughout the weekend to talk about needs, frustrations, models, and goals. Between meetings, browsers mingled around a book table well stocked with feminist literature. Free handouts included issues of Daughters of Sarah, a feminist journal published by the non-profit Peoples Christian Coalition, issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY dealing with the ordination of women, and a two-page guide to picketing “Total Woman” seminars. (Marabel Morgan’s best-seller, The Total Woman, grew out of the seminars she conducts on the subject.)

The Evangelical Women’s Caucus had its roots in the following statement from the 1973 Declaration of the Evangelicals for Social Action: “We acknowledge that we have encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity. So we call forth men and women to mutual submission and active discipleship.” In 1974, the Women’s Caucus, one of six task forces of Evangelicals for Social Action, drew up a series of proposals dealing with such areas as life-style, sexist literature, job opportunities, consciousness-raising, and the Equal Rights Amendment. From there a small nucleus of women began thinking about a national meeting of women to discuss biblical feminism.

Principal planners of the conference were Heidi Frost, field ministries director of Faith at Work in Columbia, Maryland; Judy Brown Hull, wife, mother, and an elder of Broadway Presbyterian Church in New York City; Karin Granberg Michaelson, a seminary student in Washington, D. C.; and Cheryl Forbes, assistant editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. AS the October 15 deadline for registration approached, only seven applications had been received. Heidi Frost told the participants: “We were tempted to cancel the whole thing, but we didn’t want to lose the money that had already been invested.” The first contributions totaling $1,000 had come from the pockets of male sympathizers among the Evangelicals for Social Action. (Other donations included a $500 gift from a relative of one of the caucus planners, speakers’ honorariums, planners’ time and telephone bills.) The cost of the conference had been kept at a nominal $25 per person, which scarcely covered two nights and five meals at the National 4-H Center near Washington D. C.

In early November, applications began pouring in, and by two days before Thanksgiving a capacity crowd of 350 was registered and applicants were being turned away. Scholarship funds worth $3,000 were made available to help forty-eight registrants with costs and travel expenses.

Cafeteria-style meals at long tables invited lively bull (cow?) sessions. Stewardesses exchanged notes with medical doctors, Ph.D’s poured out their gripes to secretaries. An ordained minister from Mississippi remarked to a Harvard student over lunch, “I sure wish I could have brought my husband and my whole congregation to this conference.” A minister’s wife and mother of five told new acquaintances she was attending seminary, studying Greek, because “I got tired of waiting for a younger woman to write a book on the differences between the Bible cultures and ours.”

On Saturday morning, Lucille Sider Dayton and Donald Dayton, who teaches at North Park Seminary, provided a “Historical Base for Christian Feminists.” (Their article on this appeared in the May 23, 1975, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.) Nancy Hardesty, co-author of All We’re Meant to Be, read excerpts from books written by women over the centuries depicting their struggle and agony.

In the afternoon, participants attended any two workshops out of a total of twenty-six. Some of the most popular were: “Paul and Jesus and Feminism,” “Establishing a Career in a Man’s World,” “Being a Mother and a Person,” “Eliminating Self-Defeating Behavior,” and “Relationships: Male and Female.” In a workshop entitled “Models for Marriage,” author Betty Elliot Leitch, who attended the caucus as a participant, not a speaker, carried on a friendly repartee with Letha Scanzoni over egalitarian marriage.

Letha Scanzoni spoke about “life-style” on Saturday evening. She urged women to balance freedom with responsibility, confidence with control, and hope with love (not bitterness) in their quest for wholeness. Alternative life-styles were stressed: singleness, childless marriage, egalitarian marriage, and communal living. Responding to Scanzoni, conference committee member Cheryl Forbes told “how I met my single life” (a variation, she explained, on the usual question, “How did you meet your husband?”) and regretted the fact that a single woman often presents a threat to the Christian community.

Karin Granberg Michaelson offered mutual servanthood as a model for marriage. Her husband, Wes Michaelson, an assistant to Senator Mark Hatfield and a contributing editor of the Post American, told the assembly that he was “awed by the love you’ve shown me.” “Rarely does an oppressor feel such love from the oppressed,” he added.

At a business meeting Sunday morning, participants voted to send a telegram to Detroit reaffirming solidarity with their Catholic sisters in the struggle for ordination. A resolution supporting the Equal Rights Amendment was passed with eighteen opposing votes, although some grumbled about “ramrodding.” An interim committee of five was formed to discuss the possibility of another national meeting and regional workshops. Participants gave over $4,700 in cash and pledges to get the proposed actions and incorporation underway. A temporary national office was established in Minneapolis.

During the informal testimony period at the emotion-packed final worship service, Rufus Jones of the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society rose and told the group he had been struggling with a certain Bible passage and then “yesterday a Priscilla came and expounded to me the way of God more perfectly.”

Some spoke of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus as a “mountain-top experience,” a “highlight in my life,” “the greatest encouragement in my struggle to be whole.” Another said, “I never realized there were so many of us wrestling with this issue.” But one from Chicago said of her group, “Before we came out here we said we didn’t think we’d learn anything new, and we haven’t.”

As Heidi Frost had warned, there was no party line. The caucus made no attempt to iron out differences or draw up a platform. Any attempt to do so would surely have caused friction, given the widely varying backgrounds.

Surprisingly, the differences did not seem to matter as much as the common feeling that all were sisters and brothers in Christ struggling to find a more perfect way, the way of Galations 3:28, which became the byword of the caucus: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Formed: Reformed Forum

Representatives of five small denominations of Calvinistic heritage met in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, this month to form an organization named the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council. According to the constitution, its main purpose is to “facilitate discussion and consultation between member bodies on those issues and problems which divide them as well as on those which they face in common.”

The charter members are the Christian Reformed Church, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (Convenanters). None is a member of the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, or the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. A membership application from the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church was received. It must await approval by vote of the founding denominations, a process that can take two years.

The first chairman of the new group is John Galbraith, overseas missions executive of the Orthodox Presbyterians.

The new council, in which the five denominations are represented officially, took note of the existence of the unofficial National Presbyterian and Reformed Fellowship, in which ministers and lay leaders from ten denominations are involved. It recorded its encouragement for NPRF’s plans to hold a North American Congress on the Reformed Faith.

Religion In Transit

In a joint effort by the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church, a bicentennial television series entitled “Six American Families” is being produced in cooperation with the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company. The series will deal with the day-by-day ethical and moral decisions that face families. It is being partially funded with a $125,000 grant from the Lilly Endowment.

A reportedly secret document of the Czechoslovakia Communist Party uncovered recently reveals that the government intends to take “harder and more direct” measures against Christians in the country. “It is vital that we select our policies in such a way that the church’s opportunity for activity becomes more and more limited,” says the document. It says this objective will be achieved by urging directors of all factories, schools, and offices to call on people to withdraw from church membership. Western church leaders who have visited Czechoslovakia say persecution of the church now is the worst in decades.

Churchmen from both eastern and western Europe called for universal disarmament and said that the money saved should go toward developing Third World countries. The appeal came from some fifty representatives of Reformed, Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, and Lutheran churches in fourteen countries who were gathered at an East German site for the eighth assembly of the Geneva-based Conference of European Churches.

OMS International is sending to every telephone subscriber in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, an edition of the New Testament prepared especially for new readers of English.

As the first full-time secretary of the French Canada Mission Board of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada, clergyman William L. Phillips will direct that denomination’s expanding operations aimed at Quebec’s five-million-plus-French-speaking population. He is a former president of the trans-Canada fellowship of 375 English and French-speaking Baptist churches, and he has been active in French Canadian evangelization for nearly twenty years.

Professor Thomas F. Torrance, 62, of Edinburgh University has been nominated moderator-designate of the Church of Scotland general assembly.

Dr. J. H. Pickford, former dean of Northwest Baptist Theological College in Vancouver, was elected president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada (FEBC) at the denomination’s convention in Winnipeg. The FEBC has 375 English-and French-speaking churches.

MESSAGE TO MILLIONS

The Christian-oriented World Satellite Network, a non-profit organization owned by the Sun Oil Company, is launching a six-hour Christmas Eve program entitled “The Messaih 1975” (to be aired at 9:00 P.M. EST). Beamed from an RCA-owned satellite, the show will be the first gospel presentation from outer space to appear on television and will reach much of the Western Hemisphere. Astronaut James Irwin will host the program, and well-known speakers will blend Christmas messages and music with an outer-space emphasis.

A videotape presentation is available through the network for local cable systems or television stations that do not have satellite hookup facilities.

Christians have done some astonishing things through the centuries. But have they done anything more astonishing than to take the cheerful and exhilarating thing that New Testament Christianity is and make it into the solemn and joyless and weary routine that so often passes for Christianity these days? We have succeeded in something nearly impossible: we have made Christianity dull.

Of course, we pay lip service to its joyfulness. There is too much in the New Testament about joy for us to do anything else. We sometimes even sing hymns with words like,

Floods of joy o’er my soul

Like the sea billows roll

Since Jesus came into my heart.

But when it comes to living out the faith, there is precious little of the joy to be seen.

Take worship. We begin by clothing ourselves in something uncomfortable. Then we sit in uncomfortable pews and get ourselves into a decently uncomfortable frame of mind. Only then are we ready to worship. We sing hymns in the tempo of a dirge. We take the service with the utmost seriousness and regard it as quite wrong to laugh at any point. We listen to a sermon (the very word has a solemn ring) in which we are exhorted to some Christian duty. Churchgoing has become a duty, not a joy.

There is an element of caricature in this. But churchgoers will recognize that there is also an unpleasant amount of truth. Joy is not a quality anyone spontaneously associates with being Christian. C. S. Lewis entitled his autobiography Surprised by Joy, and he was right. To most it comes as quite a surprise to find joy anywhere in Christianity.

Where did we get all this? Not from Jesus. The Gospels give the impression that he was the most welcome dinner guest in Capernaum. He was sought out by all sorts of people, which never happens to the joyless.

And Jesus, alone I think among the great religious teachers of the world, attracted little children. Do you remember the time when he wanted to teach a lesson about humility? Luke tells us simply that “he took a child” (Luke 9:47). He did not have to send for one. There was one there. When he wanted to teach a lesson about tax money, they had to go and get a coin (Matt. 22:19); the master did not have one. But when he wanted a child there was one there. I think there were often children where our Lord was. He certainly knew about their games and could incorporate lessons from them into his teaching. He could take them into his arms and bless them (Mark 16:16).

Now, children do not gather round gloomy and unhappy people. Their elders may do this out of politeness. Not children. That they were found with Jesus is evidence that he was a cheerful person, one that the kids liked.

Sometimes a note of humor sounds in his teaching. Take, for example, the day he was speaking about the problems confronting the rich. Jesus pointed out that their riches did not help them get into God’s kingdom. Some of his hearers were amazed. At this point he could have pressed home his teaching in a variety of ways, but he chose to use the method of burlesque: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:26).

I have read learned commentators who try to work out how the camel could perform this feat. They sometimes discover a little gate near the main gate of a city through which the camel could shuffle on its knees and call it “the eye of the needle.” Or they cut the camel down to size by altering the word slightly so that it means “rope”! Such solemn souls have missed the twinkle in the eye of our Lord. He was perfect in having a sense of humor as well as in being morally upright.

Jesus could describe the hypocrite as trying to take a speck out of someone’s eye while a great plank sticks out of his own. He could picture a Pharisee going into his garden and counting up the stalks of mint so that he could give a tenth of them to God. He could think of the same Pharisee as carefully straining a little insect out of a drink and then proceeding to swallow a camel.

The note of joy runs through the New Testament. We can scarcely miss some of it. But we do not always realize that in Greek the word “grace” (charis) is practically the same as “joy” (chara). Grace basically means “that which causes joy.” Grace is bright and cheerful. One of the words for “forgiveness” is charizomai, where again we have the basic chara. These days there is a lot of talk about the “charismatic” movement, pointing us back to charisma, another one of the joy words. And this in turn reminds us that joy is part of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). Where the Spirit of God is there is real joy. The derivatives of chara occur with startling frequency in the New Testament, and we do not understand the Christian movement unless we see this.

Of course, there is a solemn side to the Christian understanding of man and his world. Sin has put a barrier between man and God, a barrier that man cannot demolish. I cannot think of anything more solemn than the New Testament view of a Christless eternity, and I do not wish anything I say to minimize the seriousness of the matters involved nor the certainty of judgment on the finally impenitent. That is serious indeed.

But the Gospel is good news, not bad news. It tells us that in the fullness of time God sent his Son, sent him to live among human beings and show us how we ought to live, sent him to die on a cross to put away our sins. And that must be the most joyful story that ever hit a sad and sin-sick old world.

That is why Christianity is so full of joy. It is not the slick and shallow happiness that fails to take note of the serious problems of life. Jesus knew those problems, all right, knew them better than anybody else does. But he knew also that God has the answer.

So when Christians celebrate the coming of their Lord on that first Christmas day, they are not engaging in some mindless happiness that has no regard to the realities of life. They are well aware that there are problems, and they are not confident that they know any more about how to solve them than anybody else does.

But they know that God does. And that God cares. They know that God did something about this world’s mess: he sent his Son.

So they rejoice, not because they are unmindful of the world’s agony, but because they remember it, and know that God is concerned. Because God sent His Son into the world, there is and must be

Joy to the world!

LEON MORRIS

I write this from Nairobi, Kenya, where the weather is warm, the sun is shining, and the World Council of Churches is meeting. The next issue of CT will carry a fuller news report as well as my own evaluation of what is taking place.

I wish to send Christmas greetings to all our readers with warm hopes for a happy new year. I am pleased to report that we will end the year in the black and anticipate continued progress in 1976.

In a recent editor’s note I explained the code printed on our address labels. Many readers have sent in long-term renewals that bring their “ITG” (issues to go) figure above 100, but since the computer prints only the last two digits of that figure, it seems as if their ITG has suddenly been reduced by 100 or multiples of 100. May this note help reduce reader anxiety over computer antics!

This report was filed as delegates gathered for the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches. Complete coverage of the deliberations is scheduled for the January 2 issue.

Church workers meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, for the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches faced a rash of reports of difficulty in supporting the council’s varied programs. The pile of documents reaching most delegates before they started their trips to Africa contained enough discouraging data to keep them at home. Those getting to the assembly found still more reports of problems they were expected to solve.

While money matters loomed large, they were not the only concerns that surfaced at the opening of the eighteen-day meeting. The assembly, in a sense, fell heir to the compounded problems of fifty years of organized ecumenicity. In his report, General Secretary Phillip Potter reminded the assembly that although the council was not formally organized until 1948, the first international ecumenical conference of officially appointed representatives of Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican communions was held in 1925. The Stockholm Life and Work Conference was the first in a series of meetings that culminated in formation of the WCC.

Several of the documents received by delegates reminded them that the dream of the Stockholm meeting’s chief architect, Archbishop Nathan Soderblom, has not been realized. His vision was of a council of churches that could speak for the whole of Christendom. While the number of communions belonging to the WCC has continued to grow, reports showed that membership is still far short of the total envisioned by the Swedish archbishop. Implied in other documents was the understanding that communicants of many of the member denominations do not consider the council their spokesman.

Notably missing from the list of 271 denominations eligible to send delegates to Nairobi was the Roman Catholic Church. After the Fourth WCC Assembly, in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1968, hopes were high that the Vatican would join before the Fifth Assembly. The application was never sent to WCC headquarters in Geneva even though Pope Paul VI paid a visit there in 1969.

Collaboration between Geneva and Rome has increased during the past seven years despite the non-member status of the Catholic Church, the council’s Central Committee reported. “Nevertheless,” said the committee, “it must be recognized that the present pattern of relationship does not meet the Uppsala Assembly’s ‘conviction that the guiding principle of future effort should be to bring’ the one ecumenical movement ‘towards complete manifestation.’ ” A Vatican delegation of sixteen representatives was appointed to the Nairobi meeting. Eleven Roman Catholics are council executives, and a number serve on policy-making subsidiary bodies.

Delegates also got a brief reminder in the Central Committee report that many of the world’s evangelical Christians are not represented in the membership. Less than a page of the report was devoted to the question of evangelical membership, however, while about three pages were devoted to the absence of the Catholics. The document did concede that “a large part of the constituency” of member denominations “is of evangelical persuasion.”

Differences within the communions over a variety of questions, including social and political matters, are reflections of the divisions within the wider human community, a preparatory document suggested. The report admitted that “the powerlessness of this fellowship is starkly revealed” in the expression of these conflicts.

Readers of the Central Committee report were told that “there are growing indications that the World Council is accepted outside its own constituency,” but the site of the assembly itself raised questions about this. Nairobi was second choice. The meeting was originally scheduled for Jakarta, Indonesia, and some preliminary documents were printed listing Jakarta as the site. The change became necessary in mid-1974 when the South Pacific Island nation sent word that it would rather have the WCC meet elsewhere.

There was also evidence in the report that the council is not accepted wholeheartedly in its headquarters nation, Switzerland. The WCC’s newest subsidiary, the Ecumenical Development Cooperative Society, was incorporated in the Netherlands in November. Its offices were located there because of the difficulty of getting new council personnel into Switzerland. An executive hired in 1974 to fill a vacancy in another WCC department was delayed at the border nearly three months before he was allowed to go to his Geneva desk. The finance committee reported to the Assembly that some consideration has been given to leaving Switzerland because of the difficulty of getting work permits for foreigners as well as because of high operating costs there.

Primarily because of financial pressures, the council is continuing to make drastic cuts in its work force. In 1970, the Central Committee directed that no new positions would be created and that most vacant posts would be left unfilled. The committee’s chairman, M. M. Thomas of India, reported that there were only 295 on the payroll this October.

General Secretary Potter, in his report, suggested that the financial crisis might make the council “a fellowship of penury.” The Central Committee’s preparatory document said the funding problem was due to two main causes, the international monetary situation and money problems within certain member churches.

One of the factors facing council decision-makers as they considered budgeting was the large proportion of income from the United States and Germany. Each furnished 38 per cent of the 1974 WCC income. Most of the American funds are given by member denominations and their agencies from voluntary offerings, while most of the German contributions have come from the federal tax that supports religion. Member denominations in a number of other nations give little or nothing to the council budgets. For example, twelve of sixteen member communions in Indonesia gave nothing to the 1974 general budget, the audit revealed. There were similar reports from other countries.

Preparatory materials showed that the financial problem also was tied to the structure problem. Neither the assembly (held every seven years) nor the Central Committee (which meets annually) controls all seven council budgets. Related agencies in the member denominations, by their cash allocations, often determine council priorities. The Central Committee asked in its report, “How can the WCC secure the funds necessary for its work, and should it be ready to refuse certain funds in order to preserve the integrity of the fellowship?”

Indications were that delegates would be asking many questions about integrity of program, financial structure, and fellowship before finishing their task.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Catholic Bishops: Abortion The Issue

The more than 200 Roman Catholic bishops who gathered in Washington, D.C., for the annual bishops’ conference in mid-November declared an all-out war against permissive abortion. Under the Supreme Court ruling of January, 1973—known to anti-abortionists as the “Black Monday” decision—women, in consultation with their doctors, have the right to have an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. Abortions have been averaging 900,000 a year.

The churchmen said the Catholic Church would not be getting into the grass-roots political fight for a right-to-life amendment to the Constitution directly so much as it will be encouraging local groups of Catholics, along with others of similar views, to organize “citizens’ lobbies.”

People in these lobbies would “infiltrate” political units at various levels and from there monitor the stance of political aspirants. The anti-abortionists’ aim would be pressed home to the aspirants, clearly with the objective of making them think twice before they advocated anything that went too far afield of a right-to-life amendment.

There was no clear-cut answer about how much the church would back the grass-roots efforts financially, but New York’s Cardinal Terence Cooke, who is spearheading the drive, doesn’t deny that some funds are forthcoming. Most of the money, however, is to be raised by the citizens’ lobbies.

The church got into trouble last year when the Women’s Lobby sued it for not registering as a lobby under the Federal Lobbying Act. Subpoenaed records showed that the bishops poured $4 million into the anti-abortion fight in 1973 alone, not counting what was spent in local situations. The church finally registered with Congress as the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment.

Cooke said the anti-abortion efforts are made necessary because “those who favor permissive abortion laws have been very aggressive and forceful … and have made it very difficult.… We find ourselves in the position of being forced to say, ‘Hold on; wait a minute!’ ” The effort, he said, arises in large part out of the fear of a “rejection of moral imperatives based on belief in God and his plan for creation.”

The bishops’ objectives drew immediate praise from the Christian Action Council, a Washington-based organization trying to mobilize evangelical Protestants in the fight against abortion and headed by former CHRISTIANITY TODAY associate editor Harold O. J. Brown. But the CAC cautioned that the effort should be ecumenical in nature, not solely Catholic.

Opposition to the bishops’ plan appeared just as quickly. The National Abortion Rights Action League charged that “the attempted imposition of Catholic beliefs upon our society is clearly a violation of [separation of church and state] and leaves no room for our constitutional right to freedom of religious beliefs. Not only is the church hoping to impose its moral beliefs on non-Catholics, but also on the thousands of Catholics who support abortion rights.”

“Trying to make this a Catholic issue—that’s a big hoax.… That’s just ridiculous. It isn’t just a Catholic issue,” Cooke retorted. “Our surveys show that the vast majority of American people are unhappy with permissive abortion on request, and also are unhappy with the pressure that is being used, going beyond the Supreme Court decision … threatening the very rights of an individual to serve his own conscience.”

Whatever pro-abortion forces feel about the Catholic action, Cooke served warning that politicians will have their work cut out for them if they don’t take a proper stance in favor of some kind of right-to-life amendment. “We’ll stick with this if it takes three, four, five, six—even ten years.”

In other actions the bishops commended the progress of Jewish-Catholic relations ten years after promulgation of Nostra Aetate by Vatican Council II. The document paved the way for Catholic-Jewish dialogue. At the insistence of Philadelphia’s Cardinal John Krol, however, the bishops’ resolution reminded Jews that the bishops do not take lightly tactics of some Jews against aid to parochial schools. Some Jews have been “hateful” in their attitudes, Krol said.

Resolutions also passed calling for “a decent home for every American” and a job for everyone who wants one.

WILLIAM F. WILLOUGHBY

Christmas has a special new meaning for thousands of persons in Managua, Nicaragua. They are among many in Latin America who for the first time are celebrating the day as Christians, thanks to evangelist Luis Palau and and his Continente ’75 crusade, one of the most ambitious mass-communication efforts in church history.

Billed locally as Nicaragua ’75, the $200,000 Continente project used a three-week evangelistic crusade in Managua’s earthquake-battered baseball stadium as a launch pad to reach all of Latin America. This was done through a communications satellite and a radio hook-up of fifty-six stations in twenty countries. HCJB, the 400,000-watt mission radio station in Ecuador, relayed the satellite signal to the other stations. Also, on the final three days of the crusade, a series of taped half-hour programs were shown on 100 television stations in twenty-three countries. These included stations that serve Spanish-speaking communities in California, Florida, and New York. Stations in every capital city in Latin America except Havana, Mexico City, and Lima aired the programs.

The telecasts featured Palau—probably Latin America’s best-known evangelist-discussing questions on youth problems, the home, and death. Listeners were invited to send for Palau’s booklet, The Fall of the Twentieth Century, provided by Bible Literature International of Columbus, Ohio. The full response to Continente will not be known for some time, but letters were pouring in daily early this month to Palau’s office in Mexico City, according to a Palau spokesman.

Managua, crippled by a devastating earthquake three years ago (see following story), was an unlikely site for such a historic endeavor. The stadium, all but the outfield bleachers rendered useless by damage, sits on the southwestern edge of the vacant expanse that used to be downtown. Bus service in the area is limited and virtually ceases citywide at 9 P.M. Much of the population has been relocated far from the city’s center—and the stadium. Many of the people are too poor to afford an auto, or even a nightly bus ride. Government censorship prohibits live broadcasts, even news; Palau therefore had to do without the live telephone talk shows on TV that here help spark crusade attendance.

As a result, the crowds were not as large as anticipated. They fluctuated from 20,000 on opening night, 10,000 the second Sunday, and 22,000 the closing Sunday to a week-night average of between 3,500 and 5,500. Even so, attendance was impressive by Nicaraguan standards (an audience of 4,000 in 400,000-population Managua is equivalent to 100,000 in New York City). And a number of taped programs were shown on local TV. People in some outlying areas assembled in churches to listen to crusade broadcasts.

Nicaraguan church leaders say the crusade was the largest evangelistic campaign in the country’s history. It enjoyed the support of most of Managua’s 125 Protestant churches and many Catholics. Catholic charismatic groups attended.

Managua’s Protestant constituency is estimated at 30,000 persons (including children and nominal adherents), according to a recent survey by the Evangelical Committee for Development (CEPAD). Some missionaries feel that figure may be inflated, but so far the CEPAD study is the only in-depth attempt to arrive at an accurate church census. Several mission leaders say their constituencies have doubled since the earthquake. The CEPAD survey shows 550 Protestant churches with a constituency of 180,000 among Nicaragua’s population of 2.1 million. These include 40,000 adherents in the Moravian Church.

Evangelicals have been badly divided over the years, and there have been numerous splits within denominations. After the earthquake many congregations banded together to help with relief efforts. This move led to the formation of CEPAD and later to the decision to sponsor the Palau crusade. Some churches and missionaries opposed to Pentecostalism refused to support the crusade because of its cooperative nature, even though Palau himself is not a Pentecostal. Officially, the Central American Mission declined to back the campaign, but the three largest of its six Managua churches did participate, and contributed important leadership to it. (The Dallas-based CAM has a constituency of 3,500 in fifty churches in Nicaragua, with a missionary force of twelve.) Similar reports came from other groups.

In interviews, a considerable number of pastors and lay leaders alike remarked that the crusade had brought their churches together for the first time. They expressed hope that the new sense of unity will continue. Several new churches have already been organized as a result of the crusade, say local leaders.

Hundreds of persons walked forward at every service in response to Palau’s appeal to receive Christ. Of the 6,000 recorded decisions, the vast majority were first-time professions of faith, and 75 percent were by persons under age 25, according to follow-up workers.

“The young people of Nicaragua have a deep spiritual hunger, and many are accepting the Lord,” commented Ernesto Duartes, 16, of Managua’s First Nazarene Church, himself a convert of only a year.

When Palau first hit town, a slugfest of words broke out between the city’s two dailies, and other reporters and commentators joined the melee. Several writers in La Prensa, a liberal tabloid with a circulation of 60,000, suggested that Palau was a tool of wealthy Americans to lull back to sleep the now socially aware Latin Americans. They also accused Palau of exploiting the psychological condition of the earthquake victims, and they charged that the evangelical orientation of the crusade violated the modern spirit of ecumenism.

Novedades, a conservative tabloid of 25,000 circulation, struck back with sympathetic coverage of the crusade. It checked with the archbishop and reported that he had no problem with the Palau campaign. Editorial director Antonio Diaz Palacios, who says he became a follower of Jesus in a Catholic charismatic meeting about six months ago, defended Palau in front-page articles as “a preacher who tells how to love God and one’s own fellow men, and not how to hate them out of one’s own political and personal interests.” He chided La Prensa’s newsmen for “trite and infantile” statements, and he advised them to read the Bible “before mixing religion and politics.”

The news executive brought one of his reporters to the crusade on opening night, and the reporter walked forward with others at Palau’s invitation to receive Christ. At a meeting a week later the newsman’s wife was the first to respond. After interviewing Palau, another reporter for Novedades sought counsel from Palau regarding marital problems. At the following Sunday rally he walked forward with his wife and all fourteen of their children.

Another who professed Christ was the 17-year-old son of one of La Prensa’s writers who had bombarded Palau. The writer is also an Anglican priest who started out as a fundamentalist Baptist but then drifted into theological liberalism. A prominent Baptist pastor close to the situation said the priest’s household was thrown into turmoil by the son’s decision. Perhaps the boy will be the key in restoring the home spiritually, said the pastor.

Palau devotes a lot of attention to family-life themes in his messages, publications, and broadcasts. He blankets Latin America with daily five-minute and fifteen-minute radio broadcasts on some forty stations. Programs on family-life topics prompt the most mail, he says.

Born in Argentina, Palau, 41, is married and the father of four young sons. He studied at St. Albans College in Buenos Aires and Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon, where he maintains his home. Of independent evangelical background, he is associated with the Overseas Crusades mission agency, based in Santa Clara, California.

Palau holds four major crusades a year in Latin America, each in conjunction with a mass-media outreach. For the latter he usually sits in an easy chair in front of a TV camera and discusses questions telephoned to him by viewers. He has led a number of callers to Christ while on the air. Viewers making decisions for Christ are encouraged to meet with him at the studio or another meeting place before or after crusade rallies.

Palau is always under pressure to speak out about Latin American politics and to use his crusades as a platform for social-justice issues. He resists doing so, citing the need to retain evangelical unity and to keep the doors of certain countries open to his ministry. But he acknowledges that he is deeply disturbed by the poverty and corruption so rampant in the Latin world, and that he struggles with the question of speaking out.

Members of the Christian Social (Democrat) party, Nicaragua’s third-largest political party, handed out pamphlets that welcomed the crusade to Managua. The tracts implored Christians to become politically active. Christians say that Christ alone can save and change an individual, stated the pamphlet. But, it added, changed individuals must be the ones to save society.

An evangelical tract of questionable taste landed Palau in hot water with La Prensa. To promote the crusade, the Bible Society of Nicaragua advertised it on tens of thousands of tracts showing a Managua earthquake scene with the headline, “Not Even Punishment Breaks Them.” “I caused the hunger.… I destroyed them with a catastrophe … but they did not turn to me,” quoted the tract from Bible passages bearing the caption, “The Lord has spoken.” Palau disavowed the tract, but the outraged La Prensa blamed him anyway.

Human-interest stories were plentiful. For example, physician Ernesto Lopez and his wife persuaded a couple who are their best friends to accompany them to a crusade meeting. Lopez had received Christ in February at a luncheon for professionals (Palau was speaker), then had become part of the Catholic charismatic movement. His wife and daughter also became Christians.

The Lopezes’ friends were among the first to leave their seats that night as Palau invited those who wanted Christ to come forward.

“There have been great changes in Managua,” said Lopez, his voice choked with emotion. “It’s like Christmas, having a crusade like this.”

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Evangelical Development In Nicaragua

As was their custom before retiring, Norma and Adonirum Salazar were on their knees praying by their beside. It was about one-half hour past midnight on the morning of December 23, 1972, and the sky around Managua, Nicaragua, had an eerie red glow. Weeks earlier, in preparation for a trip to the United States, the couple had packed their things and moved from their rented house to the guest home of the Central American Mission, for which they worked.

Suddenly the room began to sway violently and the lights went out. Instinctively, the couple ran to another bedroom to get their children. Along with two other families in the house they stumbled their way to the safety of the patio outside.

Mrs. Salazar remembers vividly the roar from the earth, the trees around the patio whipping back and forth, the crashing and tinkling of articles falling inside the house. Later, they would find the TV and dishes smashed and the stove and freezer moved nearly a foot from the wall. Miraculously, the house stood.

There were two spasms of side-way shift in quick succession, lasting less than a minute, followed forty-five minutes later by a vertical oscillation.

Across town a wall caved in on a hospital nursery, crushing thirty babies. At the Grand Hotel downtown the roof and top floors collapsed, killing two dozen guests. A huge chunk of the presidential palace tumbled into the crater of a dormant volcano, but General Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the president, was unhurt.

Christmas parties were in full swing in many homes and clubs when the earthquake hit. Many of the revelers perished. The Hotel Intercontinental withstood the quake, but billionaire recluse Howard E. Hughes fled from his seventh-floor suite and spent the rest of the night on the parking lot. He left Nicaragua soon after daybreak.

The Salazars joined others who drove in the morning darkness to downtown Managua to check on relatives and friends. From the crest of a hill they could see three large fires downtown burning out of control. The central-district streets were impassable. Buildings were down everywhere. Gone was the home the Salazars had been renting. Dazed and injured people were wandering about. Rescue workers were probing debris. Screaming children tugged at motionless forms prostrate on the sidewalk.

In all, perhaps 10,000 people died, and 20,000 were injured. More than 50,000 homes were destroyed, as were most of Managua’s schools, shops, factories, and office buildings. Overnight, 50,000 lost their places of employment. (Church leaders say fewer than thirty Protestants lost their lives in the quake.)

It was like a war movie set, only real, recalls physician Gustavo Parajon, a Baptist and a leader in the evangelical community. After checking to make sure some relatives and missionary friends were okay, Parajon proceeded to the Baptist hospital. It was a shambles. The main building was badly damaged, and most medicines and supplies had been destroyed. Parajon and others set up makeshift facilities outdoors and worked around the clock until medical volunteers and mobile hospitals arrived from abroad.

To help dispense the relief aid flowing in, Parajon assembled leaders of eight denominations on December 27, and under a tree in front of the Baptist high school they formed a disaster aid committee. By March, thirty denominations were represented on the committee, and attention shifted to long-range rehabilitation and development projects along a broad front. The name was changed to Evangelical Committee for Development, known as CEPAD (the abbreviation of its name in Spanish).

Today, thirty-two denominations along with the Bible Society of Nicaragua and Alfalit, a literacy organization, are members of CEPAD. They represent most of Nicaragua’s 550 churches. It has a monthly budget of $30,000, staked by Church World Service ($200,000 per year), the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, the TEAR fund of British evangelicals, Christian Aid of Britain, the Mennonite Central Committee, Bread for the World, World Vision, and others.

Parajon serves as president. The paid staff includes Executive Director Benjamin Cortes-Marchena, a former bank officer who doubles as a pastor, and Gilberto Aguirre, a Baptist who directs CEPAD’s program activities. Aguirre, 30, a former high school teacher, served as coordinator of last month’s Palau crusade in Managua (see preceding story). Both the elected and staff leaders of CEPAD are evangelicals. Oversight is in the hands of a general assembly and a six-member executive committee.

So far, CEPAD has granted $400,000 in loans for low-income housing and small businesses. It has constructed 450 houses itself and operates a training center for carpenters where small prefabricated houses are built. It conducts sewing courses for women, seminars on family life, health, and nutrition, and conferences on development, management, and agriculture. With branches in six cities, it operates day-care centers, urban and rural clinics, and scholarship and literacy programs. CEPAD sent thirty tons of food and tools and $5,000 in cash to Honduras hurricane victims. It also sent Aguirre to help set up a relief operation similar to CEPAD.

In cooperation with World Vision, CEPAD sponsors pastors’ conferences that have drawn together the majority of Nicaragua’s Protestant ministers. One of the topics discussed, says Aguirre, is the social responsibility of the Christian. “Pastors change suddenly because of this course,” he says. “They begin asking, ‘What can the Lord do through me to help change the condition of my people?’”

A few churches and mission groups have backed away from CEPAD. A spokesman for the Central American Mission says he fears the heavy support of Church World Service, the relief arm of the National Council of Churches, will lead to NCC influence over CEPAD. He also complains that some CEPAD seminars have been led by liberals.

In interviews, Parajon, Cortes-Marchena, and Aguirre all discounted the possibility. Parajon said there are “absolutely no strings” tied to the CWS money. A CWS worker who was in Managua for two years, Lutheran Gerald Akers (“a real brother in the Lord”), returned to the states months ago, he said. Cortes-Marchena stated that he is counting on CEPAD’s staff leaders and representatives to maintain CEPAD’s evangelical stance. Aguirre agreed but lamented that CEPAD has had to hire some non-evangelicals in special areas because evangelicals have not always been willing—or competent—to help out.

At any rate, there is plenty for CEPAD to do. Nicaragua, with a population of 2.1 million and a land area the size of Alabama, has many problems. About half of its people are illiterate. Poverty is everywhere. Many people live in small shacks with dirt floors and no electricity, running water, or sewage. Wages are low (a laborer earns $50 to $75 a month, a secretary averages $150), and the cost of living is high (a can of peas costs $2).

Five per cent of the people own 85 per cent of the land. Nicaragua has some of the richest soil on earth (even the fence posts grow), but much of it is badly mismanaged. Improper farming methods are used, and vast stands of valuable forests are being stripped with no planting of new trees.

Corruption and bribery are a way of life. Part of the reason is political. President Somoza and his relatives own many if not most of the country’s commercial enterprises, from banking and utilities to manufacturing and construction. They hold a virtual stranglehold on government, business, and the press. The U. S. government meanwhile has pumped $140 million in grants and loans into the land and is responsible for much of what little reconstruction is taking place.

There are some bright spots for the churches. Tides of revival are flowing in many churches, especially among young people. Some denominations have doubled since the earthquake. The quake and its aftermath, according to church leaders, have led to a search for God—with much response. A handful of Catholic cursillo members after the quake visited charismatic leaders in Honduras, then planted the movement in Nicaragua. Today, say leaders, there are more than 7,000 Catholic charismatics, 4,000 of them in Managua, and the end is not in sight.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Guides To Middle Earth

Tolkien’s World, by Randel Helms (Houghton Mifflin, 1974, 167 pp., $5.95, and A Tolkien Compass, edited by Jared Lobdell (Open Court, 1975, 201 pp., $7.95), are reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITYTODAY

Happily, J. R. R. Tolkien is not the exclusive property of Christians. Unlike many writers who profess the Christian faith, Tolkien is read and reread by atheists and agnostics as well. And that is how he wanted it. In The Lord of the Rings and in The Hobbit, his short stories, and his poems, he meant to tell stories, and wanted to appeal to people who enjoyed the kind of story he did.

But what sets him apart from the vast and growing number of other fantasy taletellers of this century is his vision, which stems from his faith in Christ. All sorts of people love him. Those who do not believe as he does, cannot escape the realization that Tolkien knows and sees something they don’t. And that is part of his appeal. Helms, in the afterword to his fine book, without defining the source of Tolkien’s vision as I do, points out why the medieval stands apart from the other fantasy writers of the latter half of this century:

Fantasy that is worthy of us, that gives us what we need without degrading us, will require of its author not only a strong narrative gift and a vivid imagination but a vision as well, a vision of man’s potential nobility, of the kind of heroism suitable to the second half of our century. It seems to me that Tolkien’s popularity is an index to his successful pursuit of that vision [p. 151].

Helms not only pinpoints Tolkien’s success in this afterword but also succinctly explains why we need his vision now.

Helms writes out of love for The Lord of the Rings, but that doesn’t blind him to what he sees as Tolkien’s weaknesses in some of the minor works. To me, he wrongheadedly and harshly criticizes The Hobbit as a dry run for LR. In claiming that the story is all right for children but not fit for adult consumption, he perhaps knowingly plunges headlong into a fallacy one might have thought had been once and for all dispelled by Lewis, that a children’s story unfit for adults is nevertheless fit for children. Despite that, most of his book contains astute criticism. There is some humor, as in his parody of Freudian criticism in the chapter “Hobbit as Swain,” which could be titled “The Sexual Development of Bilbo Baggins.” Helms also writes well, with a clear, straightforward style, and while some of what he writes will interest only serious scholars or critics, all Tolkien types will benefit from the book.

The same can be said for most of Tolkien Compass, a reliable tool for Middle-earth travelers. It is a good companion volume to Helms’s book.

Dorothy Matthews in “The Psychological Journey of Bilbo Baggins” does in earnest what Helms handles in jest. Several of the essays consider themes found in sections or all of The Lord of the Rings; these should most interest the everyday readers. What is Tolkien’s view of power or the city or paradise? Is Middle-earth ruled and ordered by an omniscient being, or does free will or chance operate? (see page 10 in this issue).

The selling point of this book is its final section, “Guide to the Names in the Lord of the Rings,” a kind of glossary that includes etymologies written by Tolkien himself and edited by his son, Christopher. It is divided into three sections, Persons and Peoples, Places, and Things.

The person who wrote the witty back-cover blurb is also to be commended. “How many times have you read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings? Is your grey cat named Gandalf? Your summer cottage called Rivendell? What! You named your son Bilbo! Then this book is definitely for you, Middle Earth dweller.” And so it is.

So You Want To Be A Writer?

The Christian Writer’s Handbook, by Margaret Anderson (Harper & Row, 1974, 270 pp., $8.95), You Can Tell the World, by Sherwood Wirt (Augsburg, 1975, 127 pp), How I Write, by Robert Hastings (Broadman, 1975, 57 pp., $3.95 pb), Wanted: Writers For the Christian Market, by Mildred Schell (Judson, 1975, 160 pp., $4.95 pb), and Handbook For Christian Writers, by Christian Writers Institute (Creation, 1974, 155 pp., $3.95 pb), are reviewed by Janet Rohler Greisch, free-lance writer, Ames, Iowa.

Everywhere I go,” Flannery O’Connor once said, “I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” Anyone who has read the scores of manuscripts that arrive at an editor’s door in one week is likely to agree. Too many people seem to think that whatever else they can or cannot do, at least they can write. And too few people who know better dispute that notion.

The same criticism applies in varying degrees to these five books. This is surprising because four of the five authors are editors. (Mildred Schell edits children’s church-school materials and perhaps is not deluged with unsolicited manuscripts.) It is even more surprising because all these books are about Christian writing, and Christian writing should never be mediocre but often is. Sherwood Wirt makes the strongest demand for excellence: “Our task is to find new ways of stating scriptural truths, vividly, imaginatively, compellingly.” Robert Hastings echoes him, and Mildred Schell makes a strong plea for accuracy and integrity.

The notion that anyone can write demeans the art. Good writing is hard to do. It should not be lightly undertaken. “A writer,” says Schell, “is one who … is willing to admit that writing is work.” Also a writer knows there are no shortcuts.

The value of a writer’s work depends on what goes into it; “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” and the typer writes. But wide experience and deep insight are not all a writer needs to succeed. Flannery O’Connor spent three hours every morning at her desk, which, incidentally, faced away from the window. She did not always produce pages of immortal prose, but at least, she says, she was ready to write if something came to her.

Ideas when they come are generally unruly beasts requiring rigid discipline to corral them into some kind of structure. Wirt claims that “a writer with average gifts can turn out a book, a good book, if he has a good outline, if his material is organized.”

When the time comes “to clothe those dry bones of your manuscript with living flesh,” as Hastings puts it, these books assume their greatest value. How I Write offers Hastings’ Laws, a dozen chapters on such solid flesh as clarity, word choice, conciseness, emotion, and brightness. Margaret Anderson’s Christian Writer’s Handbook goes into great detail about beginnings, endings, transitions, and other elements of genres from puzzles to fiction. She includes a “Challenge Assignment” at the end of each chapter. Hers is the only book that deals with writing book reviews, and only she and Schell discuss fiction writing. Schell also includes sections on poetry, audio-visual materials, and drama.

Once a piece is written it must be rewritten. Word by word. A writer is not worth his return postage until he respects words for their sound as well as their sense. Wirt spends two of his eleven chapters on the significance and use of words. Schell even discusses and advises the use of non-sexist words. Only when every word seems precisely right is the manuscript finished.

Marketing it requires as much care as the actual writing, and the choice of market should not be left till the piece is finished. All five of these books provide useful information about selling manuscripts; Handbook For Christian Writers also has an essay on writing for Christian radio. Schell lays it on the line about payment: “The workman is worthy of his hire; writers deserve to be paid for their efforts and to be paid as well as possible.” Only the Handbook For Christian Writers lists names and addresses of religious markets. Although the listings do not provide names of editors, that information is available in some of the books in Anderson’s and Schell’s bibliographies.

The Christian Writer’s Handbook provides the most extensive information on copyrights and reprints. It also gives step-by-step instructions on how to keep track of manuscripts, and the attention to specifics seems excessive at this point. Careful record-keeping is obviously important. Any writer published so frequently that he can’t remember what went where must be clever enough to attend to that detail.

You Can Tell the World and How I Write are good reading, delightful as well as informative. Wanted: Writers For the Christian Market is a good springboard for the leap from amateur to professional writer. The Christian Writer’s Handbook and Handbook For Christian Writers are useful reference tools. Although similar to other reference books available for writers, these have the advantage for the Christian writer of speaking specifically about religious publications.

The ability to write well is a gift that study can refine. An aspiring writer could learn a great deal by reading Sherwood Wirt’s little paperback for inspiration and rereading it with perspiration, discovering how Wirt practices what he preaches. Then, if that call for crisp, forceful elegant writing fails to discourage, let him write. If his skills are as strong as his ambition, his manuscript may find its way past the editor and into print.

New Testament: Jewish Background

Judaism and Hellenism, two volumes, by Martin Hengel (Fortress, 1974, 314 and 335 pp., $34/set), is reviewed by Edwin Yamauchi, professor of history, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

The professor of New Testament and early Judaism at Tubingen first came into prominence in 1961 with a major study on the Zealots. Most of his publications have not been translated, and we are most grateful to John Bowden and to Fortress for the English edition of this important study of the relation of Judaism and Hellenism.

This work is an expanded version of the author’s Habilitationsschrift, the second dissertation expected of professors in German universities. It was first published in German in 1969.

Judaism and Hellenism is not for the average laymen. One encounters untranslated passages of Greek, Latin, and French. Two thousand learned footnotes make up the second volume. The author’s immense erudition, which encompasses archaeological, numismatic, inscriptional, and papyrological data, will be a bonanza for the serious student.

The first volume has four chapters: (1) Early Hellenism as a Political and Economic Force, (2) Hellenism in Palestine as a Cultural Force and its Influence on the Jews, (3) The Encounter and Conflict between Palestinian Judaism and the Spirit of the Hellenistic Age, and (4) The “Interpretatio Graeca” of Judaism and the Hellenistic Reform Attempt in Jerusalem.

Each chapter and the volume as a whole have helpful summaries. A bibliography of fifty pages, tables, and indexes contribute to the reference value of this work.

The period examined extends from Alexander’s conquest in 332 B.C. until the Maccabean Revolt in 167–164 B.C. The primary areas of study are Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Phoenicia, and Egypt.

In the first chapter Hengel gives a compressed account of the incessant conflicts between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids over Palestine in the third century B.C. (cf. Dan. 11): “Palestine was to savor to the full the fearfulness of Hellenistic warfare in the twenty-two years between the death of Alexander and Ipsus (301 B.C): it was crossed or occupied seven or eight times by armies.…”

In tracing the development of Palestine’s economy in the third century we can follow the fascinating career of Joseph, a member of the influential Tobiad family (cf. Neh. 2:10; Ezra 4:7–23), who became the chief tax collector of Syria and Phoenicia for Ptolemy III (246–222 B.C.). Hengel observes:

“Even the milieu of the parables of Jesus, with its great landowners, tax farmers, administrators, moneylenders, daylabourers and customs officials, with speculation in grain, slavery for debt and the leasing of land, can only be understood on the basis of economic conditions brought about by Hellenism in Palestine” [I, 57].

In the second chapter Hengel discusses the evidences for Greek language, education, and literature in Palestine. His basic contention is that “from about the middle of the third century BC all Judaism must really be designated ‘Hellenistic Judaism’ in the strict sense …” It is noteworthy that Jason, the high priest who pressed the Hellenistic “reforms” (2 Maccabees 4:7–10), ended his life in Sparta.

Hengel describes the importance of the gymnasium as the chief educational and social institution of Hellenism. It bears reflecting that the nude athletics of the Greeks, which caused such consternation among the orthodox Jews, are used as sermon illustrations some two centuries later by an ex-rabbi and “Hellenist” from Tarsus.

One must balance Hengel’s emphasis on the Greek elements in Palestine by remembering that the vast majority of Jews spoke Aramaic, and that others such as members of the Dead Sea Scrolls community still used Hebrew.

Furthermore, as Hengel himself notes but perhaps not sufficiently, the noted Hellenistic writers of Gadara, a city of the Decapolis—Meleager, Philodemus, and Menippus—were non-Jews. That is, they are examples of Hellenism in Gentile Palestine and are therefore not directly relevant for the issue of Hellenistic Judaism.

The third chapter deals with the intellectual influences of Hellenism in Jewish literature. It is both filled with brilliant insights and based upon certain disputable assumptions. Hengel discusses certain books of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, the Hasidim, and Essenism. He considers the last to be “the most impressive theological contribution produced by Judaism in the time ‘between the Testaments.’” He notes that even the Essenes of the Dead Sea Scrolls community, who opposed Hellenism, unconsciously succumbed to its influence in accepting the dominant astrology of the day.

With great skill Hengel sketches the social and economic situation presupposed by Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), written about 190–175 B.C. He contrasts the latter’s confidence in divine retribution in the present with the rise of the apocalyptic interpretation that expected an imminent end to history.

More controversial are his ready assumptions of Hellenistic dates for Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), Job 28, Proverbs 1–9, and Daniel. (On the latter see my Greece and Babylon, Baker, 1967, and D. J. Wiseman, et al., Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel, Tyndale [London], 1965.) Quite speculative is his suggestion that the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8 was created by the transference to Wisdom of the attributes of Isis-Astarte by Jewish wisdom schools in the third century B.C.

In his final chapter Hengel interprets the outbreak of the Maccabean Revolt by following Bickermann’s thesis, “that the impulse to the most extreme escalation of events in Judea came from the extreme Hellenists in Jerusalem itself” But this presupposes that Jason, Menelaus, and the Tobiads had a calculated program to transform the Jewish state into a Greek polis so as to overcome the separation between the Jews and the rest of the Hellenistic world.

Such an interpretation has been criticized by other scholars, such as Tcherikover. In my view, it gives far too much credit to the Hellenist Jews, who may have simply been interested in power and position, and it hardly does justice to the role of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid ruler who authorized the anti-Jewish measures that precipitated the revolt.

Hengel concludes that the reaction against these Hellenists led to the later Jewish exaltation of the Torah, which in turn made it difficult for the Jews to accept Christianity with its emphasis upon Christ rather than the Torah.

However one may differ with the author in particulars, one will be indebted to him for his brilliant and provocative study. Without doubt this is one of the most important studies of the intertestamental period, if not the most important one, to appear in our generation.

Fuzzy View Of Love

Dimensions of Love: East and West, by James Mohler (Doubleday, 1975, 392 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Robert Brow, associate rector, Little Trinity Anglican Church, Toronto, Ontario.

If you want quotations about love from all the main Eastern and Western religions, plus Plato, Ovid, Dante, Freud, and the Jewish Kabbalah, try Mohler’s book. My difficulty with it is that the result is a string of unrelated beads. There is a minimum of analysis, criticism, or classification. It is as if someone were to produce a supposedly scientific work on plants and animals by collecting those that have blue as part of their coloration. The situation is even worse when the common element is a word with a vast imprecision of meaning. What would one find in common between the love of an S.S. man for his Fuehrer, the Good Samaritan’s love, and “I love Bach”? And the uses of the word “love” in religion can cover anything from fertility cults, sacred prostitution, and the lusts of Greek gods to Gnosticism.

Chapter eight has a collection of quotations from Ovid’s love poems, then parts of Ovid’s Art of Love and his Remedies of Love. Now, it makes sense to collect and compare love poems and love songs. You could also compare Ovid’s seduction manual with the Kama Sutra and the many modern examples of the genre. What you cannot do is to suggest that in moving from falling in love, to seduction, and then to Plotinus and Augustine in the next chapter you are dealing with the same topic.

In chapter 4 the Kama Sutra is grouped with several quite different forms of Hindu bhakti, and the author asks, What is the relation between them? The answer should have been, None whatever, apart from the use of the word “love” in both. The Kama gives us techniques for catching and holding another by means of sex. Bhakti is the relationship of a worshiper to his god. Mohler could have used Rudolph Otto’s classic book on Bhakti, India’s Religion of Grace, and Christianity: Compared and Contrasted (1930) to indicate some of the vital contrasts that need to be made between the different schools of Hindu bhakti and the Christian faith. There could have been comparisions with devotion to Buddha in Mahayana Buddhism and the love of God in Islamic Sufism. There we can find points of contact. What I question is the juxtaposition of “love” in a Hindu sex manual, love for Krishna, and the homosexual relation between philosopher and pupil in Plato’s Symposium, and the consequent suggestion that all these illuminate a true Christian view of love for God and man.

Admittedly the author tries to excuse himself from the rigorous critical task of making distinctions and evaluations. He claims in the prologue that he wishes merely “to present different views and let the reader make his own comparisons and parallels.” But by suggesting comparisons between incomparables he promotes theological confusion.

The key to his own theology is his rejection of Nygren’s distinction between two forms of love in Agape and Eros (1937). Mohler’s only argument against Nygren is a quotation from D. Morgan’s Love: Plato, the Bible and Freud (1964), which he takes to be authoritative. He then asks the good question, “What is the difference between Christian, Jewish, and Platonic views of love?,” but in one brief unsatisfactory page he confuses the answer. He claims that eros is as much of divine origin as agape, which is true, and that “the ascending view of love had added much to the growth of mysticism in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam,” which is also true. But the conclusion we are to draw is the false idea that the New Testament agape from God for sinners, which then flows out in love for the brethren and the world, is after all only another form of the Greek eros. Mohler fails to see what Nygren clarified so well, that agape loves regardless of the goodness of the object, whereas eros loves only the beautiful, the pleasing, the self-gratifying.

In panning this book am I merely reflecting my own theological stance? Obviously I do assume that neither manuals for sexual conquest, nor Krishna’s affairs with the milkmaids, nor the seduction of beautiful boys to impart philosophy, has anything to do with a truly Christian experience of God. I also assume that all forms of devotion that begin with man’s desires, as opposed to the unmerited grace of God, are fundamentally mistaken. I am convinced that comparative religion must insist on making careful distinctions instead of assuming that all religions are somehow doing the same thing in the general direction of the same God. I take it that Mohler either rejects my assumptions or refused to make his views plain.

Perhaps Dimensions of Love should be viewed by an impartial observer as a brilliant work of Christian syncretism. The syncretism suggested is much greater than the old assumption that all religions somehow relate to the same God. Here we have the love for gods and men in all religions linked to the whole of what our modern world calls sexuality. Human love in whatever dimension illumines and is illuminated by love for whatever one cares to worship. That is a very modern and extremely appealing notion. As Mohler points out from selected texts in the Old Testament and the New, one could make a case for saying the view is biblical.

The author’s method is also very modern. You avoid logical distinctions and theological clarity, avoid or dismiss all contrary views, and arrive at your end by letting the reader become entangled in his own confusion. That is what worries me. The book is thoroughly bad theology by my standards, but I have a feeling it will be hailed as liberating in all seminaries of the new syncretism.

Mohler is a Jesuit. If he represents the current trend of thinking in his order, the right arm of Rome has moved a long, long way from the Council of Trent. The trouble is that the new confusion seems to me far far more perilous for the Church than the old bigotry.

Harvest time in many parts of the world brings golden glow of changing leaves, balanced beauty of grapes thick in triangular clusters, heavy branches of apples red, yellow, or green streaked, rows of brown tassled corn with hidden yellow kernels popping with juice, curling spirals of sweet-smelling smoke from burning leaf mounds, the rich odor of charcoal roasting chestnuts.

What are the crops? Terraced vines climbing old stone pillared arbors on Italian hillsides, or wrapped around individual wood or iron sticks in Swiss fashion, bring forth grapes. Neat garden patches in suburban gardens produce peas, beans, beets, broccoli. Orchards in the American northwest fill endless boxes with individually wrapped pears or apples or plums for distant customers, while people in warm climates are packing crates of tangerines and grapefruits from their groves. The universal answer to the question “What are you harvesting?” is, “What I planted.” A harvest consists of what at one time or another was carefully, or carelessly, planted.

The time to pour over seed catalogues or tree descriptions is before planting season. It is too late when harvest time arrives to change one’s mind and say, “I really wanted blackberries, not raspberries.” “I don’t like spinach. What I actually wanted was cabbage.” And God means the yearly time of harvesting to remind us of the solemn reality that there is an unbreakable connection between what we plant and what we harvest.

God has warned us, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Don’t let Satan deceive you, God says to us. Don’t let your own foolish optimism fool you. Your choices of what to do with your days and years, the decisions you make, are like seeds. A reaping time will follow, and your harvest will be apparent to you and others.

It would be good to stop and read the whole book of Proverbs in this context. “My son, forget not my law.… Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct they paths” (Prov. 3:1, 5, 6). So much has been given us as warning, as direction, as signs of the dangers we can so easily tumble into through our own weaknesses or Satan’s carefully placed traps.

What are we sowing? Are we looking day by day into the “catalogue” of God’s Word, to find the precious seed we need when faced with a pressing problem, a titanic decision, a strong temptation? Our decision in this moment’s need, our choice among the alternatives that come into our minds, will affect our reaping. We can’t put off planting time; in the land of the living we plant every day right up to the end!

Going to Galatians, let us think soberly for a few moments about another statement of this principle. “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting” (Gal. 6:7, 8). This faces us not only with the basic and central decision—that of choosing to accept what Christ has done, to be born into God’s family with the assurance of being indwelt by the Holy Spirit—but also with the fact that it is possible for us as children of the living God to “sow to the flesh” and “reap corruption.”

This happens when we deliberately put self first. An angry Christian can create much destruction or corruption. A Christian giving in to pride, or engaging in malicious gossip, can be sowing corruption that will result in a corrupted harvest. A Christian saying inside himself, “I don’t care what God wants me to do; I will do thus and so; later I can do the Lord’s will, after I finish what I am determined to do first”—such a Christian is sowing seeds of corruption, no matter how good the thing he is doing seems to be.

As Paul begins this sixth chapter of Galatians, he says very carefully that if we find a fellow Christian who has been overtaken by a fault, we who are “spiritual” (and no one is spiritual except through the cleansing blood of Christ, and the strength of God that is made perfect in our weakness) are to “restore such a one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.… For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself” (6:1, 3).

The Word of God to us as individual Christians is very strong here. Not one of us is above doing the thing we are with meekness to point out in another person. “Spiritual” persons fall. We are told to watch out that we don’t get filled with a blinding kind of spiritual pride and miss the trap Satan will set before our feet. To think that we cannot fall, that we cannot ever sow the wrong seed, is the first wrong move. We are not heeding God’s warning if we shrug it off with the feeling that it no doubt applies to someone else, but not to ourselves.

“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Gal. 6:9). “But ye, brethren, be not weary in well doing” (2 Thess. 3:13). There is a danger of saying, “Why bother to do this hard thing, to put in a lot more working hours than the others, to care about the burdens of other people, to try to live according to the Word of God,” when one is surrounded with others who are tearing off to do “their own thing.” There is a danger of turning away from the absolutes of the Word of God and making up a list of rules for living that fit into the hedonistic self-first pattern.

Come to Hebrews 10:36–38: “For ye have need of patience, that after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise. For yet a little while and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith; but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him.” It takes patience to go on and not draw back, not be weary in well doing. It takes patience to go on with a desire and willingness to do the Lord’s will, no matter what he unfolds it to be. It takes patience to wait for the promise to be fulfilled of the Lord’s coming.

But we don’t have to wait until the coming of the Lord to be affected by our sowing. He has warned us. Our earthly lives will be greatly influenced in future years by what we are sowing today. “But this I say, he which soweth sparingly shall reap sparingly, and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully” (2 Cor. 9:6)—that is true in this life. Today we can bow before the Lord and ask him to help us in today’s sowing, and tomorrow’s, that the harvest might be changed.

This is true of churches, universities, towns, states, and nations as well as in individual lives. As we read the newspapers each day we see reaping of what has been sown. What will be tomorrow’s harvest? What responsibility do we have in our personal decisions for the wider “reaping,” locally, nationally, and internationally?

EDITH SCHAEFFER

When asked what his hobby was, Joseph Parker responded, “Preaching.”

G. Ray Jordan points out in You Can Preach that “if there is blood in a man’s preaching he will have to make preaching the great business of his life. Other important matters will not be excluded; rather they will give one’s message vitality and life.”

More than anything else a preacher must like to preach. If he doesn’t, then he is in the wrong calling. Preaching must course through his veins until he lives and breathes the message. The message will compel him, drive him, even explode within him. So great will be the desire to preach that he will find it difficult to wait for the time to deliver the message of God.

“The pastor,” notes G. B. Williamson, must be “primarily a preacher. Any excuse for failure at that point is invalid. God’s call is not to be an organizer, promoter, a mixer, or an ecclesiastical mechanic, but a preacher of the Gospel of Christ, which is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth. The understanding that preaching is primary will have far-reaching effects” (Overseers of the Flock, Beacon Hill, p. 30).

If the message is to have “far-reaching effects,” then the preacher must make that message relevant to the needs of his hearers. And relevance permits no lackadaisical approach towards preaching. There must be discipline, study, and hard work. God will not do for the preacher what he can do for himself.

Without discipline the preacher will not accomplish anything worthwhile. Without study his mind will be empty, and an empty head and heart make empty pews. We have had enough misty-eyed orators delivering book reports and ear-salving messages that stir no one. What is needed is a message direct from God, supported by Scripture and delivered as banner-headline news for this confused age.

Preparing for preaching that is relevant will require the preacher to shut the door of his study and seek his message from God. This is not a plea for monasticism, but sermon preparation calls for sweat, even tears at times, and this can best be done behind the closed door of a study when the preacher is alone with God.

James S. Stewart has asserted: “There is no short cut to escape the burden and the toil. Any evasion of the cost will inevitably rob a man’s ministry of power. Any refusal to accept the relentless, implacable discipline will result in diminished spiritual influence. Put into your sermons your unstinting best” (Heralds of God, Scribners, 1946, p. 118). No matter how great the preacher’s zeal and enthusiasm, they can never be a suitable substitute for study.

How often the sentiment has been expressed by a learned layman: “My preacher is as dry as dead bones.” Perhaps one conspicuous reason is because the preacher has failed to make adequate preparation. And thorough preparation cannot be made if the preacher waits until the eleventh hour to seek God’s help and message. Thomas Shepard puts it like this: “God will surely curse that minister who lumbers up and down the world all week, and then thinks to prepare for his pulpit by a hurried hour or two on Saturday night.”

“In equal condemnation,” says G. B. Williamson, “is the man who allows his time for preparation to preach to be lost in idleness, pursuit of pleasure, or preoccupation with secondary considerations. He comes to the pulpit empty in mind and soul, prepared to do nothing better than thresh over old straw—to feed the hungry sheep nothing but chaff and to substitute a little perspiration for inspiration, expecting much heat to make up for a lack of light” (Overseers of the Flock, p. 50).

The sermon that lives, that moves and compels, that draws the net, will be a sermon made up with up-to-date illustrative material, including a trace of humor, and two or three potent, practical points that continually draw attention to the text selected from the Bible. This is to be packaged and kept within a space of time that can command the listener’s close attention.

Preparing for this kind of preaching is hard and rigorous work. There is no room for lightly held opinions or shallow notions. Such preaching is the only kind that will repeatedly bear fruit—The Rev. C. D. HANSEN, First Church of the Nazarene, Lowell, Indiana.

Always Winter, Never Christmas

Despite our decades of squandering our oil resources, it took decisive action by our friendly neighborhood oil sheikhs to provide us with the prospect of winters without heat. There is one thing the Arabs can’t take away, however. Unfortunately, our government seemingly can.

At a recent meeting of the local P.T.A.—our first—we were informed of the school’s educational philosophy, which seeks the development of the “total” child, academic, psychological, and social. What is missing? Not just athletics. Morality may be left out, but curiously, mythology isn’t—at least not in this local school—for the walls were gaily decorated with witches on broomsticks, jack-o’lanterns, and the like. The school had a bit more trouble with Thanksgiving, the religious implications of which were not only noted by the Puritans but brazenly proclaimed by that famous zealot Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Local public radio has suggested a way out by broadcasting the revisionist historical view that the first Thanksgiving was primarily for food and games.

Hallowe’en strong, Thanksgiving fading, and what about Christmas? I am told that in another jurisdiction Christmas Vacation has been replaced with Winter Recess. Those who object to totally desymbolized school premises (no creches, camels, cribs, or Wise Men allowed where Federal Funds have entered in) may take some comfort in the fact that in at least one suburban public school I know they do have Hanukkah candelabras. Why are menorahs kosher (so to speak) where stars and shepherds are not? The principal of a school featuring the one and banning the other explained that Hannukah is not religious but historic. (Besides, banning Hanukkah might seem anti-Semitic, and while anti-Semitism may be in at the U. N., it’s still outre in the U.S.A.—and rightly so.) If Hanukkah ever was a religious festival (and to deny it seems a little odd to Eutychus, but he is not on the federal payroll), then denaturing it seems a high price to pay for the privilege of posting menorahs on first-grade bulletin boards.

The Arabs may take away the oil, but it takes the government to do away with Christmas. Perhaps we should paraphrase the late John Kennedy’s stirring words thus: “Ask not what your country can do for you … but what it can do to you.” Still, in a reasonable world, where witches are licit in the classroom, there must be a place for Wise Men. Winding up a sometimes obscure, occasionally mystifying, and frequently consistent term as Eutychus VI, I bid faithful readers farewell with this admonition: let the government take winter if it must, but draw the line at Christmas!

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

Ageist Editorial

In light of the respect and authority the Bible gives older persons, I was dismayed at CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S editorial “Time to Step Down” (Oct. 24) aimed at forcing Justice William O. Douglas off the Supreme Court because he “is seventy-seven … [and] is obviously a sick man.” I suppose that CT, to be consistent, would have demanded Moses’ removal as a leader of the Israelites on grounds he was too old and had a severe speech problem. Older persons are one of the great unused resources of our society. I suggest that CT follow the biblical example in their regard.

WESLEY G. PIPPERT

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Justice Douglas is seventy-seven. He is also ill. But there is no evidence he is incompetent to serve on the nation’s highest bench. He has, as you said, an impressive record.… Unless Justice Douglas is proven to be incompetent or criminal, he must be allowed to serve out his term—unless he chooses otherwise—of life. Your suggested coercion on the part of the rest of the court, in party to the Congress, is nauseating. Such an action would set a dangerous example for the future. Dislike someone’s minority opinion on the court? Presto, zingo, the rest of the bully-boys on the court come in dark robes and with candles to inform the offending member that she or he is to step down.… Strictly from the Christian perspective, your article represented ageist tendencies. The law, remember, was given to Moses who “was a hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.”

JAMES HUFFMAN

Chicago, Ill.

Continuing Coalition

In his discussion of the recent changes that have taken place in the Christian World Liberation Front here in Berkeley (“Whatever Happened to the Jesus Movement?,” Oct. 24), Ed Plowman has described those of us who have chosen not to go in the direction Jack Sparks is going as “dissidents.” It is true that we are “in disagreement” with certain things Jack and the apostolic band are teaching. However, the word “dissident” has very strong negative connotations in our society today, and we are very sorry that Mr. Plowman chose to use this word to describe us.

The Berkeley Christian Coalition is continuing the ministry of the Christian World Liberation Front as a non-denominational evangelical Christian organization. Twenty-six out of the thirty-one former CWLF staff are now with the Coalition. All of the CWLF ministries have stayed in the Coalition intact—Right On newspaper, The Crucible study program, Dwight House (ministry to Berkeley’s transient youth), and the Spiritual Counterfeits Project. The exception is the street-theater ministry. Two of the seven members of street theater, including the director, have chosen to function under Jack Sparks’s church in Berkeley, while the other five members are continuing street theater in the Coalition. As a community of Christians in Berkeley, we are excited about the opportunities God has given us to serve him in this important American city.

BILL SQUIRES

Director

Berkeley Christian Coalition

Berkeley, Calif.

As Plowman can attest, having been one of the San Francisco ministers to whom he made reference, Moishe Rosen was drawn to the Bay Area largely because of information that a significant proportion of converts from the counterculture were Jewish. He was welcomed by the Evangelical Concerns group and became an active participant in its ministries. No further documentation on Jews For Jesus is necessary. One would be going too far to claim that the Jesus movement was the sole cause of JFJ’s emergence. But it was certainly a major factor. Rosen should be credited with astute recognition of the right time and place for his movement’s beginning.

JOHN MACDONALD

Blossom Hill Baptist Church

San Jose, Calif.

• Space limits required us to select a few ministries that are representative of what is happening. Jews for Jesus and some other groups will be featured in a forthcoming follow-up account.—ED.

Only One Alternative?

In a recent editorial (“Capitalism: ‘Basically Unjust’?,” Oct. 24) you say that the “time has come for Christians who believe in capitalism … to make themselves heard.” But if capitalism is truly “in need of correction,” by what ideological standard (or is it a moral standard, which may be a different matter) do we decide which changes to implement? I agree that to call capitalism “basically unjust” is absurd, but to suppose that Christians do or should “believe in capitalism” is a little silly too. Moreover, to imply that the only alternative to capitalism is the sort of economic system to be found in the Soviet Union (and, somewhat differently, in China) is quite misleading. Whatever happened to democratic socialism—e.g. of the Swedish sort? The point is, it is not very helpful to say “I believe in capitalism” without also saying in just what ways one would like to see some of its admitted evils corrected. One error of fact which ought to be corrected: according to all of the available information—and the information is ample—Chinese socialism has in fact succeeded in “producing enough food to feed the people.” Perhaps not the same can be said of Russia.

F. R. STRUCKMEYER

Department of Philosophy

West Chester State College

West Chester, Pa.

Capitalism is not merely an economic system which is inherently good save for a few flaws which can be worked out. The fact is that at the very base of this system are concepts which are antithetical to the Christian faith. Our whole consumer economy is built upon the endless accumulation of material wealth. Is avarice still considered a vice or has it been made an article of faith? The market economy elevates the principle of competition and aggressiveness so that man looks upon his fellow man as merely a means to a material end. Indeed the entirety of God’s creation is viewed as a commodity to be exploited toward the ultimate goal of greater profit.

Capitalism is not a Christian economic theory.… It is a humanistic philosophy based upon humanistic values. Any attempt at synthesizing Christianity with a pagan value system is tantamount to idolatry and leads to a diluted syncretism.

Socialism is not the alternative to capitalism. It is an alternative. The NCC is basically correct in its rejection of capitalism, but if this leads them to baptize Marxism, then they have only fallen into the same trap since this economic theory is also based on similar humanistic values. For instance, it has essentially no different view of God’s created resources from that of capitalism.…

It is rather ironic that the editorial about capitalism appeared on the same page as the one concerning values. You are most certainly correct that there is a difference between man-made values and biblical values. I suggest that you take your own advice and not be “pressured to accept—e.g. a … philosophy [economic or otherwise]—that has won high acclaim in some circles but weighs in poorly on the scale of biblical values.”

DAVID KOYZIS

St. Paul, Minn.