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The single most paradoxical aspect of American history is that though the country’s Founding Fathers were deists and not Christians, the nation got off to a Christian start nonetheless. Both the American Revolution and the founding documents arising from it turned out to be—often in spite of the motives of their creators—fully compatible with historic Christian faith. In this sense our national origins might be said to exemplify the fundamental principle of divine economy that men are saved by God’s free grace and not by their own works—“lest any man should boast!”
True enough, as Staughton Lynd (Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism) and others with radical axes to grind maintain, the deists were the ones who in particular strove for revolution, having confidence in their own ability to define the eternal moral law and lacking any restraint from biblical revelation. Moreover, studies of the Loyalists by Mary Beth Norton and other specialists have emphasized the extent to which the Christians among them relied upon Romans 13: the believer’s duty to be subject to the governmental powers under which he lives. Indeed, in the Federalist reaction that occurred some years after the Revolution, President Timothy Dwight of Yale—one of the great names in evangelical Christianity during Revolutionary times—could say that the Revolution had “unhinged the principles, the morality, and the religion of the country more than could have been done by a peace of forty years.”
But the support of orthodox Christians for separation from the mother country was at least as powerful as opposition to it. One thinks at once of Revolutionary general John Peter Muhlenberg (eldest son of pastor Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, the “patriarch of the Lutheran church in America”), who saved the American forces from annihilation at the Brandywine; or of John Witherspoon, distinguished Presbyterian clergyman and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Particularly among Calvinists, who looked back with approval on the beheading of Charles I and the era of the Commonwealth, revolution was justified when a sovereign so exceeded his legitimate powers that he could be said to have abrogated his proper sovereignty. Since he was no longer sovereign except in name, the people could topple him from his throne without violating Romans 13.
This viewpoint harks back at least to Thomas Aquinas’s definition of human law in the Summa: law is “nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.” By such a definition, laws that are not reasonable or for the common good can be regarded as no laws at all. Those who ignore them or oppose them by revolutionary action can do so without falling into sin.
But such an approach oversimplifies the issues and is highly dangerous theologically. Who is to determine what laws are really for the common good or are truly reasonable, or whether a sovereign has exceeded his powers to such a degree that Christians can oppose him by revolution without violating the apostolic command to subjection? In a sinful world where untainted laws, princes, and governments never put in an appearance, such a political philosophy theoretically allows Romans 13 to be deemed inapplicable in any given case—and thus saps it of all meaning!
The proper theological answer to this dilemma of maintaining authority yet opposing tyranny comes with recognition of the lesser-of-evils principle in Christian ethics. Over against Aquinas (whose casuistic, hierarchical ethic is at the opposite pole from central Reformation teaching), Romans 13 applies universally, for it is an unqualified assertion: it is always wrong to oppose constituted authority, for God himself has established the ordered structures of life to prevent us as sinful men from anarchically destroying ourselves. Even the worst laws and rulers are better than none, and they too fall within the purview of Romans 13.
However, another fundamental scriptural teaching has to be taken into account: the absolute necessity of freedom of choice in order for genuine acceptance of Christ to occur (John 7:17). Curtailment of freedom of choice may destroy effective gospel preachment, and this may become a greater evil than the (admitted) evil of revolution against constituted authority.
The agonies of such a situation for believers are tremendous, and not every Christian will weigh the pros and cons identically: some will agonizingly opt for authority, while recognizing that they sin by aiding and abetting tyranny of conscience; others will opt for revolution, aware that they are perhaps unleashing the demons of anarchy on an already sin-impregnated earth. Werner Elert, in his Christian Ethos, has well described the Angst experienced by German Christians who faced this choice in the early years of the Hitler régime.
Were the American revolutionaries correct and the loyalists wrong? To the casual observer, it may appear very doubtful that in an age of increasing Parliamentarianism George III really offered a serious threat to English liberties, and taxation without representation seems a considerable distance from that abridgment of free decision-making which would imperil the Gospel. Likewise, the belief of many colonial pastors that the potential establishment of the bishopric in America would unify church and state so as to eliminate free expression religiously and politically (cf. Carl Bridenbaugh’s Mitre and Sceptre) perhaps appears to be little more than a typical example of escalation-theory among the clergy. However, we of the twentieth century have—or should have—a perspective on totalitarianism that the eighteenth century itself lacked, and we can now see how fragile a flower liberty is and how readily its abridgment in one respect can lead to its destruction in general.
The American revolutionaries, whatever the theoretical justification they personally offered for their action and however unbiblical the beliefs of some of them were, did in fact choose to preserve the scriptural ideal of liberty and became the chief torchbearers of that ideal in the modern world. As so often happens in a fallen creation, to opt for one teaching of Scripture is to run afoul of another, and our revolutionary forefathers can well be criticized for the ease with which they glossed over the obligations of Romans 13 in choosing the “liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” But their dilemma is the dilemma of every person in a fallen world, and—looking back on their decision from a 200-year vantage point—it is difficult to believe that they erred in creating a nation dedicated to the principle of individual freedom, where decisions for Christ could take place without fear or favor.
JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY
Arthur H. Matthews
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Conversation under the magnolia trees was perhaps more subdued at the 1976 Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) general assembly than it was in 1969, but the topics were the same. This year’s assembly, held on the Stillman College campus in Tuscaloosa, was the denomination’s first in Alabama since the Mobile meeting seven years ago.
Some of the Mobile actions, particularly the authorization to draft a new confessional stance, were the signal for an exodus of thousands of conservatives. Many of those who left in the aftermath of the 1969 decisions became a part of the Presbyterian Church in America, which reported a communicant strength of over 60,000 at the end of 1975. Meanwhile, the PCUS continued its decline in communicant strength, recording a net loss of 12,000 in 1975 to a total of 878, 126 on the rolls at year’s end.
One of the committees named to implement Mobile’s major actions brought its final recommendations to Tuscaloosa, and their approval may pave the way for still more defections. The assembly’s 330-to-55 vote for a new doctrinal position is the first of three steps necessary for a change in the PCUS constitution. Before the committee’s package becomes the official theological stance of the denomination, it must be approved by three-fourths of the sixty presbyteries (district governing bodies) and by a subsequent general assembly.
The package that the presbyteries will be inspecting in coming months includes new ordination vows, a book of confessions, and a new contemporary declaration of faith. The United Presbyterian Church adopted a similar, but not identical, package in 1967. If the PCUS proposal becomes its official doctrinal position in 1977, an early vote on union with the United Presbyterian Church is anticipated.
Another of the 1969 actions that displeased conservatives was the authorization to begin merger talks with the United Presbyterians. A plan of union for the nation’s two largest Presbyterian bodies is now being studied at all levels of both churches, but it has not been submitted for formal approval in either. Under the PCUS constitution, both union and doctrinal changes require approval by three-fourths of the presbyteries, and the merger advocates are waiting to see how the vote goes on the confessional question before submitting the merger plan. Meanwhile, the 1976 assembly went on record in favor of reunion of the churches, divided since 1861.
When plans for the “continuing church” (later to become the PCA) were announced five years ago, some of the leading evangelicals who stayed in the PCUS identified union and doctrinal change as the decisive issues for them. They made the point then that one assembly’s expression of its opinion on either question was not a constitutional mandate to the church. Consummation of a merger or inclusion of new doctrinal standards in the constitution would be cause for separation, however, some of them explained. Those who hold this position may need to take a new look at it next year since both proposals are expected to be closer to constitutional status.
The political facts of life in the denomination have also changed in the last five years. Not only has much of the conservative leadership departed, but the voting patterns have been altered. The number of presbyteries has been reduced, with boundaries changed in many places.
If the presbyteries follow the patterns of the 1976 assembly, most of the debate on the new theological stance will be over the contemporary declaration. The other elements in the new package, the concept of a book of confessions and new ordination vows, got little attention on the floor of the assembly.
The declaration written by the ten-member committee would be one of ten documents in the book of confessions. The denomination’s current doctrinal standards, the Westminster Confession of Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms, would be included also. Others in the proposed collection are the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Geneva Catechism, the Scots Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Barmen Declaration.
If the new theological stance is incorporated into the church’s constitution, future ordinands will vow that they “sincerely receive and adopt the confessions of this church as, in their essentials, authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do,” and will affirm their intention to “be instructed and led” and “continually guided” by the ten creedal statements.
Currently, lay officers and clergy vow that they “sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.”
The vow concerning the Bible was nearly doubled in length. Currently it reads: “Do you believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice?” The new question, to which all ordinands would be required to give an affirmative answer, is: “Are you convinced by the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as unique and faithful witnesses to Jesus Christ, are the Word of God and therefore the authoritative standard by which your faith and life are to be directed?”
Only one of the elements in the vows as proposed by the committee was changed at the assembly. The committee, in fact, proposed the vow that has been in use many years, “Do you promise subjection to your brethren in the Lord?” As amended, it would require submission to “brothers and sisters.”
It took only a voice vote to defeat a proposal that the three Westminster documents be retained as the primary standards of the denomination, with the others in the book serving as supplementary standards. One of the principal speeches against staying with Westminster exclusively came from a former moderator and retired seminary professor, Ernest Trice Thompson of Richmond, Virginia. He warned against a “narrow confessionalism.”
One of the principal opponents of the entire new theological stance for the PCUS was a member of the ten-person panel that brought the package to the assembly, Robert T. L. Liston, retired president of King College, Bristol, Tennessee. He submitted a written minority report, but no motion was made to consider it.
Only minor amendments were accepted in the committee’s declaration. At one point the word “free” was substituted for “liberate” in deference to members of the assembly who had expressed fears that the document might appear to promote “liberation theology.” Even with the change of this word, the chapter on “the Christian mission” retains an emphasis on achieving changes in the structures of society.
One of the critics of the chapter on mission was the veteran missionary who was elected moderator of the assembly. Jule C. Spach, who has served as a lay missionary in Brazil for twenty-five years, won the top post on the second ballot. He got 204 votes to the 193 cast for Sara B. (Mrs. John D.) Moseley, chairman of the denomination’s Division of International Mission and the wife of the president of Austin College. He says the closest he came to having his record ruined was in 1950 when he was taken to a Wichita Falls hospital for surgery. By vote of First Baptist’s deacons, the Sunday-school class was moved to his hospital room.
Spach turned presiding duties over to Mrs. Mosely during most of the debate on the confessional issue. He did not speak from the floor on the issue, but prior to his election he had said he thought the declaration was weak, especially in the mission section. He told reporters at the end of the meeting that he was happier with the doctrinal package than he had been when he came to the assembly and that he could “back it” as he traveled around the church.
Whether the moderator’s position will be strong enough to swing votes in the presbyteries remains to be seen. The overwhelming vote of the assembly for the new stance was seen by some observers to suggest that the proposal will get through the presbyteries without much difficulty. Organized evangelicals who have remained in the PCUS are expected to mount a campaign to get more than a quarter of the presbyteries to vote against it. A leader in that fight will be Harry Hassall, new executive editor of the Open Letter, a publication of the independent Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians. As a commissioner in Tuscaloosa he called for defeat of the whole package, which he described as inconsistent with the Scriptures and with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. Hassall charged that the new declaration was based on a low view of Scripture. Among the other deficiencies he cited were its lack of a clear statement on the physical resurrection and the physical return of Christ, an “agnostic” view of heaven and hell, and a universalistic approach to salvation.
Among the former moderators attracted to the debate were J. McDowell Richards, retired Columbia Seminary president, and Matthew Lynn, the 1969 presiding officer who appointed the drafting committee. Richards asked for a delay in sending the matter to the presbyteries, but Lynn spoke successfully for dispatching it immediately. The vote will be the first in the PCUS requiring a three-fourths margin since 1968–69, when the necessary number of presbyteries approved a plan of union with the Reformed Church in America. (The RCA did not muster enough votes on its side to consummate the union.)
The assembly also:
• Ruled, as the church’s highest court, that presbyteries cannot commit to any other body (such as the East Alabama Presbytery commission that honored dismissal requests from more than twenty congregations in 1973) the power to dismiss churches to other denominations, thus setting the stage for civil actions by “loyal minorities.”
• Refused a presbytery’s request that an outright condemnation of homosexual practice be issued, referring the proposed document to a unit that has been studying the issue several years.
• Authorized a study of the unofficial organizations in the denomination, a move prompted by some commissioners’ objections to the assembly-related activities of the Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians.
• Reaffirmed its continued participation in the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) by defeating an attempt to halt funding for the church’s COCU delegation.
On finances at the national level, the assembly adopted a plan that supporters said would encourage more people to give to keep missionaries at work overseas. The plan, if fully funded in 1977, would still not guarantee a specific number of workers abroad, however. Supporters hope that it would keep at least 300 at work through the year. From a high of over 500 earlier in this decade, the number is being cut to 310 by the end of 1976. Even if the assembly-approved plan succeeds in 1977, the amount of money available to those missionaries as work budgets would be further reduced from the amount available this year.
Technically, all members of the denomination are represented when the church governing bodies assemble for a vote. The “votes” that will be watched just as carefully in the remainder of 1976 and in 1977 are those collected when the offering plates are passed in every congregation every Sunday.
PERFECT ATTENDANCE
When Bill T. Adams was 7 he showed up for a Sunday-school class at a small church in Colorado City, Texas. That was seventy years ago, and he hasn’t missed a Sunday since, according to a Dallas Morning News story. The retired educator now attends First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls, Texas, where last month he marked his seventieth year of perfect attendance in Sunday school.
Pulpit Vacancy
Ernest T. Campbell, 51, minister of the 2,500-member Riverside Church of New York City since 1968, resigned unexpectedly last month. His last sermon was on July 4. Citing “pressures and demands” of a recently enlarged administrative role that deprived him of “joy and satisfaction” in the ministry, he said he has no immediate vocational plans. During his tenure, the ministerial staff shrank from seven to four, membership dropped by more than 600, and budgets were trimmed (last year’s income was $35,000 short of the $450,000 budget goal). There were social-action controversies, but the church weathered them (responding with more than $400,000 in minority-aid programs). Board members, describing themselves as “shocked” by Campbell’s announcement, say the minister has been under no pressure to resign.
Campbell, a Presbyterian, succeeded Robert J. McCracken, who followed the famed Harry Emerson Fosdick (both were Baptists) in Riverside’s noted liberal pulpit. The church is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ.
COMING SOON
Important congressional hearings on cult leader Sun Myung Moon and on religious repression in the Soviet Union were held in Washington last month. Reports on these hearings, along with coverage of evangelistic outreach during the Bicentennial, will appear in the next issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
Cristival ’76
One of the spin-offs of the European Congress on Evangelism in Amsterdam in 1971 was a German coalition called AFEVA (an acronym for the German version of Working Group for Evangelistic Action). Last month AFEVA sponsored Cristival ’76 in Essen, a week-long program of Bible study, career-oriented workshops, modern music, and seminars on contemporary issues that attracted 10,000 German young people. It was capped by a Sunday-morning service in a stadium at which evangelist Billy Graham spoke. Open to the public, the rally drew 40,000.
At the request of organizers, Graham refrained from issuing an invitation to receive Christ at the end of his message. The evangelist said he was not entirely happy about that arrangement but acquiesced anyway. Leaders explained that by avoiding an invitation, “a basis of credibility” for extensive evangelism later could be better established with the state church (whose Lutheran members are unaccustomed to traditional evangelical styles).
A special AFEVA committee with 150 advisors worked successfully to enlist the cooperation of state-church congregations. (Many churches in the Rheinland and Westphalia districts took part, and contributed the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars.) A state-church youth pastor, Ulrich Parzany, was named Cristival’s chairman. The vice-chairman was Peter Schneider, general secretary of the German Evangelical Alliance and a key figure in AFEVA.
Part of the inspiration for Cristival came from two other youth events, SPREE ’73 in London and Eurofest ’75 in Brussels, said Schneider. “They showed us what could be done in Germany,” he commented. Like those two events, Cristival featured a big bookstore and many display booths sponsored by a variety of Christian organizations and institutions.
There was a heavy emphasis on missions, and correspondent Robert P. Evans reports that the participants gave a sizable offering to Anglican bishop Festo Kivengere of Uganda, one of the Cristival speakers, for his evangelistic work throughout Africa.
Canadians Concerned
About 1,100 persons were on hand for the opening meeting of the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s 102nd general assembly, but many had to watch on closed-circuit television from the basement of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and two other locations in Arnprior, a town of 6,000 near Ottawa. It was the first time an assembly had met in so small a town.
The commissioners (delegates) elected as moderator A. Lorne Mackay, 61, minister of Central Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, Ontario. (Mackay says he intends to speak out, especially on society’s moral permissiveness.)
Taiwanese Presbyterian executive C. M. Kao outlined church response to recent troubles on Taiwan involving alleged repression of religion, including the confiscation of Scriptures in minority languages.
In response to a presentation by missionary Glen Davis, who serves with the Korean Christian Church in Japan, the assembly sent a cable to Korean president Park Chung Hee. In it the commissioners voiced distress at the way government critics are treated, and asked for mercy and compassion in the case of Kim Chul Hyun, a Presbyterian theological student convicted of spying for North Korea and sentenced to death. Davis implied that Kim may have been manipulated into confessing to the crime after spending five months in jail and seeing a lawyer only once.
Correspondent DeCourcy Rayner reports that the denomination’s communicant membership decreased by 2,764 in 1975 to 171,791—part of the reason a study of the state of the church was ordered for the next assembly.
Church-history teacher Allan L. Farris, 56, was elected to head Knox College in Toronto.
DEATH
WILLIS J. KING, 88, retired United Methodist bishop and educator; in New Orleans.
Sticking With The Wcc
Twice there were neighborhood bomb alerts during the general assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church in Belfast, but participants simply moved away from windows and the proceedings continued. A nearby explosion caused no damage to the meeting hall—or to the assembly’s agenda. Among the resolutions passed were some about various aspects of Northern Ireland’s political troubles. One paid warm tribute to the police and security forces; another asked the media to refrain insofar as possible from using the words “Catholic” and “Protestant” in reporting on the violent situation.
The predominant issue was that of membership in the World Council of Churches. A motion to withdraw, backed earlier by three of the denomination’s five synods, was vigorously debated. Eventually, the assembly voted 481 to 381 to “withdraw … only if the basis of the WCC is so altered as to deny the fundamental doctrines of the faith confessed by the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and/or its constitution is so altered as to infringe upon the freedom of our church to order its own life and witness.”
The church’s general secretary, Jack Weir, formerly a missionary to Manchuria, was elected moderator. American consul W. Alan Roy gave an address on the role of Presbyterianism in the founding of the United States. He singled out for special praise Ulster minister Francis Mackeemie, who founded the Presbytery of Philadelphia and helped to establish freedom of religion in America in a landmark case in 1707.
S. W. MURRAY
Religion In Transit
The Democratic party’s plank on abortion is “irresponsible” and “morally offensive,” declared Archbishop Joseph L. Bernardin, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, last month. He said the so-called compromise plank amounts to “opposing protection for the life of the unborn and endorsing permissive abortion.” The mildly worded plank states that an attempt to pass a constitutional amendment to overthrow the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion is “undesirable.”
Following protests by right-to-life forces, Macmillan Science Company of New York announced it will no longer offer human embryos embedded in plastic through its catalogues that are distributed to teachers. A spokesman told Religious News Service that the firm has sold no “fetal material in over a year.” He also denied that any embryos were the result of “induced abortions.”
Some Harvard scientists want to experiment with creating new forms of life (at U. S. government expense of $500,000), but fellow scientists and city officials are opposed. They say the genetic experimentation (in which simple and complex organisms are mixed) is a health hazard.
Of the 130 bishops expected to attend the general convention of the Episcopal Church in September, 82 will vote for approving ordination of women to the priesthood, predicts northern Ohio bishop John H. Burt. The decisive vote will take place among the clergy and lay delegates in the House of Deputies. As of now, the vote in this body is shaping up as an extremely close one, with a slight edge expected for the pro-ordination forces. In another development, Presiding Bishop John M. Allin was quoted as telling Milwaukee bishop Charles T. Gaskell in a letter that he is opposed to approval of women’s ordination, an apparent reversal of an earlier stand.
Rose Kennedy, mother of the late President, declared her son “did believe in and practice his religion.” Her comment came in response to New York Times columnist James Reston’s comment that John F. Kennedy was not “a deeply religious man” like Jimmy Carter. Kennedy attended church regularly and understood the meaning and value of prayer, said his mother.
Officials of Aide Olympique, an agency coordinating Christian outreach at the Olympics, expect up to 3,000 young people to hit Montreal this month in a vast and varied outpouring of Christian witness. Some recruiters, however, say they are having trouble signing up participants to help reach the anticipated six million visitors, the 10,000 athletes, and the city’s three million residents. Organizers meanwhile say adequate housing is available for the young missionaries.
Several publishers are scrambling to get into print with books on presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter. Logos International had advance orders for more than 150,000 copies of its June 28 release, The Miracle of Jimmy Carter, by journalists Howard Norton and Bob Slosser.
The National Courier, a biweekly tabloid published by Logos International, will switch from covering both the secular and religious beats to reporting only religion stories, according to an announcement by editors. Hassles with the Internal Revenue Service are partly to blame, say sources.
World Scene
The government of Nepal has ordered the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Wycliffe Bible Translators) to withdraw its overseas workers. Some ninety adults from several nations are affected by the order. They were working on twenty minority languages. No official reason was cited for the action, but sources surmise that the conversion of some nationals to Christianity prompted it. Elsewhere, Wycliffe’s future appears more secure: government and university officials in Columbia have toned down opposition in recent months, and national leaders in Peru are asking the government there to rescind its Wycliffe ouster order.
An estimated 2.6 million persons, slightly more than half of them women, have been sterilized in India as part of the nation’s population-control program, say government sources.
Israeli archaeologists have discovered an ancient Judean fortress on a hill overlooking a plain north of Mount Sinai. Inside: a rare collection of Hebrew and Phoenician inscriptions dating to about 800 B.C. The fortress was apparently built by King Jehoshaphat to protect a trade route between southern Judea and the Red Sea port of Elath. Bedouins still use ten ancient wells at the foot of the hill.
Methodist bishop Emilio Julio Miguel de Carvalho of Angola claims Protestants in his land have more freedom under the present Marxist-oriented government than they did under former Portuguese colonial rule. Protestants are opening up churches that have been closed since 1961, when a nationalist uprising was followed by arrests and deaths of many Protestants, he says. The state is supervising education, but churches are still operating schools, he adds, and Sunday schools and seminaries are open.
Despite President Ford’s evacuation advice, hundreds of Americans were still staying in Lebanon early this month, including a number of missionaries (six Southern Baptists were among them).
Italy’s Communists won thirty seats on Rome’s Municipal Council—the most gained by any party—and garnered 35.5 per cent of the city’s total vote (676,000 to 630,000 for the Christian Democrats, the next highest of eight other parties). Thousands of Communists marched through Rome, chanting “Rome is red, Italy will be.” A coalition headed by the Christian Democrats, however, still holds the balance of power—and the mayor’s chair.
The Canadian parliament voted 133 to 125 last month in favor of abolishing capital punishment.
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Despite muggy weather, a record registration of 18,672 messengers (delegates) trying to jam into a facility with a capacity of about 11,000, and some potentially divisive issues making the rounds back home, the three-day annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Norfolk. Virginia, ended with most feelings remarkably intact.
The highlight of the meeting last month was a fifteen-minute address by President Ford. It was the first time an incumbent President addressed the SBC in its 131-year history. Ford’s speech revealed an awareness of SBC history and concerns (thanks to input by former SBC pastor Richard Brannon, a White House executive), and he was applauded numerous times. The longest applause came when he challenged Southern Baptists to avoid the “shifting sands of situation ethics” and to adopt instead the stand that says, “This is right, this is wrong; there is a difference.”
His remarks were cast against a background of unfolding sex scandals in Washington and the more-distant Watergate revelations. He said America needs a strong moral foundation, and he maintained that public officials “have a special responsibility to set a good example.” He decried the “abuse of the moral imperatives of honesty and decency on which religion and government and civilized society must rest.” The answer, he asserted, is not only in good government, but in “the Bible, the church, the human heart.” Ford said that in his own life he has found the Bible “a steady compass and a source of great strength and peace.” He spoke of praying for God’s guidance.
In his introductory remarks, the President noted that the last time he spoke to an SBC audience (a men’s breakfast at the 1974 convention in Dallas), he was introduced by SBC layman Jimmy Carter. The comment evoked some good-natured chuckles and applause.
There had been some objections to Ford’s appearance during a campaign year, and there were a few attempts to get the program committee to invite Carter to give an equal-visibility talk, but these were dismissed with little debate.
Sample interviews indicated that the predominantly Southern audience will give Carter solid support in November for both religious and cultural reasons, but a surprising number of clergymen expressed reservations about Carter’s “ambiguity on the issues,” as one minister put it.
Ford may have picked up some votes at the convention, but he probably lost some, too. Only the first 10,500 registrants were issued admission tickets to the speech in the Scope center, and the view of many of these was blocked by a huge press platform erected on the main floor. Angry pickets outside complained they had traveled thousands of miles and spent hundreds of dollars only to be shut out of their own meeting. Overflow facilities next door and miles away in Virginia Beach accommodated up to 4,000 others through closed-circuit TV (although the speech was televised live on a local station). Those left stewing in the afternoon heat blamed it all on Washington and Nashville (SBC headquarters).
In reaction later, the messengers passed a resolution that banned future conventions in any city with a hall that seats fewer than 16,000 and with fewer than 6,500 easily accessible hotel rooms. Officials argued in vain that this would restrict meetings to only a handful of cities.
Except for the furor over facilities, there was little else that ruffled feelings.
In a first-ballot decision the messengers elected James L. Sullivan, 66, as president of the 12.7-million-member body. He is the retired executive of the SBC Sunday School Board.
The office is one of prestige rather than power, but there had been a lot of pre-convention controversy over the presidency. Some leaders had called on Pastor Adrian Rogers of the large Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis not to run. His candidacy was being promoted by the conservative Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship, of which he is a director. Opponents alleged that he would divide the convention.
Weeks before the convention Rogers announced he was not a candidate and would decline if nominated—a pledge he carried out at the convention when he was indeed nominated. He said the Holy Spirit had clearly led him to make that decision.
His friends feel the attacks against him by several editors of SBC state newspapers and other critics were unfair and unwarranted. Rogers was president of the SBC pastors’ conference for the past year, a post that traditionally has been a springboard to the SBC presidency. His critics accused him of “loading” this year’s pre-convention conference program with fellow members of the Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship (BFMF). In reality, however, only one of the many participants was a BFMF member; a number of the speakers were prominent SBC personalities, including two former presidents. There were no factious remarks from the podium, and a number of the 6,000 pastors attending said it was the most inspiring conference in years.
Pastor Jerry Vines of Dauphin Way Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama, was elected to succeed Rogers. Vines said he was not a member of the BFMF, but he has addressed two of its national meetings since its founding in 1973.
“Many people have prejudged the pastors’ conference as a political cause,” Rogers told a reporter. “That is simply not true.”
The BFMF leaders feel that the SBC is drifting from its evangelical moorings, especially at the seminary level. A main issue is biblical inerrancy; the BFMF’s people say it is no longer taught or believed in many seminary classrooms. They say they want to awaken the grass roots to what is happening, and they accuse the denomination’s leadership of adhering to a peace-at-any-price philosophy.
Quizzed in a press conference about his position, president-elect Sullivan—considered a middle-of-the-roader—said that some of the BFMF leaders were personal friends but that they were wrong to organize formally into a group intent on fragmenting SBC fellowship. BFMF executive-editor William A. Powell of Atlanta asked Sullivan if he believed the original manuscripts of the Bible were without error. “Yes, certainly,” replied Sullivan. “But we don’t have a copy.”
In an address to the convention before his election, Sullivan urged Southern Baptists to continue to look to the Bible and to the commandments of Jesus as the source of authority for the Church.
The messengers adopted a $55 million budget for the coming year along with resolutions that:
• Affirmed the biblical view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, but also affirmed the “limited role of government” in abortion matters and the right of mothers to a full range of medical services (two anti-permissive abortion amendments were defeated).
• Expressed “commitment to the biblical truth regarding the practice of homosexuality as sin” (a phrase expressing compassion for homosexuals was deleted in favor of one expressing “concern that all persons be saved from the penalty of sin through our Lord Jesus Christ”).
• Reaffirmed support of religious and political freedom for all, calling especially for the release of imprisoned Soviet Baptist leader Georgi Vins.
• Opposed government support of teaching Transcendental Meditation.
• Supported Sunday as a day of rest.
• Opposed use of alcoholic beverages and pornography.
The most hostile confrontation came during a report of two SBC units that had studied a controversial social studies curriculum series called MACOS (Man: A Course of Study) used by some public elementary schools. The report recommended that the convention neither endorse nor condemn the material. Georgia pastor Herschel A. Markham then denounced the curriculum as “Satanic” and demanded time to read passages to the messengers, threatening to sue if he were turned down. But he offered no motions or amendments, and the debate ended with messengers denying him time to read the passages and adopting the report. (Markham, 42, was later picked up by police in Atlanta after warning passersby there was a “time bomb” in his briefcase. He was apparently referring to the MACOS samples, but he was arrested and held for psychiatric observation.)
Outgoing president Jaroy Weber, a Texas pastor, urged his listeners to become more involved politically and to support candidates who can lead the nation back to Christian principles. He did not say they should vote for Carter, but there were some veiled and some not-so-veiled suggestions to that effect from the podium. Louisiana pastor Bill Hale, one of those who wanted a place for Carter on the program, said: “We’ve been talking about the need for Christian statesmen. Now that we have one, let’s just unwrap him and show him.” And Pastor Bailey E. Smith of First Southern Baptist Church of Del City, Oklahoma, suggested in the opening-night sermon that the nation needs a “born-again Christian” for President. “While it certainly would be improperforme to name that man,” said he, “his initials are the same as our Lord’s.”
The scores of reporters covering the convention had a field day with that remark.
IMPROMPTU PRAYER
Rabbi Maurice S. Sage, 59, president of the Jewish National Fund of America, was about to present a Bible to Betty Ford during a dinner fete last month when he collapsed. As Secret Service agents and others tried to revive him, the First Lady stepped to the podium at New York’s Hilton Hotel and asked the stunned audience to stand and pray for Sage. “I’ll have to say it in my own words,” she said.
She prayed: “Dear Father in heaven, we ask thy blessing on this magnificent man. Rabbi Sage. We know you can take care of him. We know you can bring him back to us. We know you are our leader. You are our strength. You are what life is all about. Love and love of fellow man is what we all need and depend on. Please, dear God.”
Then she asked everyone to join together in silent prayer for the rabbi.
The program was concluded abruptly. Sage, apparently the victim of a heart attack, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital a short time later.
The (New) Law Of The Land
In the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rash of major decisions were some that dealt with church-state issues.
The court voted 5 to 4 to uphold as constitutional Maryland’s five-year-old program of direct financial aid to church-related colleges. Maryland’s only restriction is that the funds must be used for “secular” and not “sectarian” purposes. The ruling, which will affect similar plans in other states and make it easier for church institutions to get aid, upheld a lower court’s 1974 decision involving four Catholic colleges, one of which no longer exists. Originally, Western Maryland College, a United Methodist school, was included, but the school disaffiliated with the denomination in order to qualify for uncontested aid and withdrew from the case (see May 9, 1975, issue, page 49).
Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, argued that a “hermetic separation” of church and state is impossible, that the Maryland law does not have the “primary effect” of advancing religion, and that “excessive government entanglement with religion” has not been proved in the law’s application. He also pointed to the “essentially secular educational functions” of the four schools in contrast to the religious character of parochial elementary and secondary schools. The courts have struck down a number of state-aid programs involving the latter.
Dissenting justices objected to any public subsidy of religious institutions, and John Paul Stevens—the newest justice—warned that state subsidies carry with them the “pernicious tendency … to tempt religious schools to compromise their religious mission.”
Reaction in the church community has been mixed. Some denominational officials see the ruling as a way of preserving the existence (and affiliation) of their hard-pressed schools; some conservatives tend to agree with Stevens, and they fear subsidies will lead to controls.
In a 7-to-2 decision, the court ruled that private schools may not refuse to admit black students. It stressed, however, that the decision does not affect the right of a private school to admit only those of a particular faith. It also said that the decision would not stop a private school from keeping out members of one race, if that were done “on religious grounds.” Many of the academies and other private schools set up in the aftermath of the high court’s landmark desegregation decision years ago were established by Southern churches. Presumably, most of those schools that still exist will cite religious reasons for keeping blacks out. The ruling grew out of a case involving two secular schools in Virginia that have since integrated.
In another action, the high court ruled that civil courts have no right to decide internal disputes in hierarchical denominations. The civil courts, according to the decision, are bound by decisions of such denominations about “their own rules and regulations for internal discipline and government.” The decision overturned a 1975 ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court. That court said the 1963 defrocking of Bishop Dionisije Milivojevich of the Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church was impermissible because it was not in accord with prescribed church procedures.
Under the final decision, the question of who owned church property formerly under the bishop’s control must also be settled by the church’s authorities, not by civil courts.
Rectifying An Omission
One of the most important contributions to the American Revolution went largely unnoticed in official Bicentennial celebrations. The part played by colonial preachers and churches received relatively little recognition, and evangelist Billy Graham tried to do something about that during the days preceding the Fourth of July.
His organization produced a television special in Colonial Williamsburg and placed it on more than 250 stations across the nation during the July 4 weekend. Graham preached twice at a Bicentennial “festival of faith” crusade in Williamsburg in late June and then delivered a Sunday sermon at the Washington Cathedral.
In both the colonial capital of Virginia and in today’s national capital he paid special tribute to George Whitefield and other eighteenth-century evangelists.
“His impact upon the thirteen colonies cannot be measured,” the twentieth century’s most widely traveled preacher said of Whitefield. “He traveled and preached in them all.… The leaders of the thirteen colonies did not know each other, and it was George Whitefield more than any other person who introduced them to each other. By the time he died at the age of 56 in 1770, the way had been prepared for independence.”
The role of the itinerant preachers was far more important than just that of news-bearers to the patriots, however, Graham indicated. Many signers of the Declaration of Independence sat under the preaching of Whitefield and other Great Awakening evangelists. Biblical concepts were written into the founding documents. The clergymen founded the schools that trained the patriots.
“I do not see how anyone could study the history of America without recognizing religious influences that have helped mold this nation from the beginning,” Graham said. “Time after time in our history there have been appeals to the Supreme Judge in seeking to build a new nation. This idea of freedom as a ‘right’ of all men everywhere is absolutely unique among nations.”
The cathedral was packed for the North Carolina preacher’s sermon, and officials there estimated the crowd at 3,700. The Washington Post said the congregation was about three times larger than usual for an 11 A.M. Sunday service.
In Williamsburg, Graham preached in the College of William and Mary coliseum, and about 9,000 attended each night. In keeping with the Bicentennial theme, programs for both services featured patriotic hymns, and decorations were red, white, and blue. Otherwise, the usual crusade format was followed. More than 500 decisions for Christ were recorded. Many of the decision-makers were out-of-state visitors to the historic area.
In both Washington and Williamsburg the evangelist noted that the nation is ripe for another great awakening. “I believe that every problem facing us today as Americans is basically a spiritual problem,” he said at the cathedral. “Crime is a spiritual problem. Inflation is a spiritual problem. Corruption is a spiritual problem. Social injustice is a spiritual problem. The lack of a ‘will’ even to defend our freedoms is a spiritual problem.”
At Williamsburg he mentioned such worldwide crises as food shortages, war, uncontrolled scientific developments, and repression of free expression. Crises often bring wholesome changes to nations and individuals, he said.
He explained his emphasis on the historic themes by saying that he had declined an appointment to the commission planning the Bicentennial. The evangelist said he turned the job down because he did not want to spend a lot of time in meetings but later regretted the decision.
Graham told reporters in Williamsburg that he had spoken at a Senate Prayer Breakfast in Washington before the crusade. The attendance of over forty senators was the largest on record, sponsors told him. He also revealed that he had just returned from a European trip that included a day’s visit in East Berlin. He was a guest at the American Embassy there and had no public meetings. However, he said, East Germans who had seen him on West German television approached him on the streets and asked for autographs. Some identified themselves as Christians.
ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS
Congress Coming
For nearly a hundred years Catholics have been getting together for an event called the International Eucharistic Congress. It started out in Lille, France, in 1881 as a study assembly attended by 800 people. Held only once before in the United States (in 1926), the congress will convene in Philadelphia the first week of August, and organizers are expecting about one million participants from all over the world. Rooms and dormitories have been booked as far as 100 miles away, and virtually every stadium, convention facility, and assembly hall in the city will be in use for the various celebrations, conferences, exhibits, and workshops. Leaders say the congress is being held to help stem a decline in the practice of faith, apathy towards God, and a lessening of religious and moral values. It was still uncertain this month whether ailing Pope Paul VI would be able to attend.
Show Stopper
Four years ago nightclub entertainer Susan Haines, billing herself as Miss Nude Universe, performed in the altogether at Oklahoma City’s Playgirl Club. Police arrested her, but the indecent-exposure charges didn’t stick, and the city has had to put up with an increasing number of nude shows ever since.
Last month a large ad in the Oklahoma Journal’s movie and nightclub pages announced that Miss Haines, 29, was back in town—this time to give her “testimony for Christ” at suburban First Southern Baptist Church of Del City, sponsor of the ad. Seems she had a run-in with the law in 1974 and somebody gave her a copy of Hal Lindsey’s book, Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. She became a follower of Jesus as a result. Now she and her husband, residents of Jacksonville, Florida, are planning to visit the fifty cities across the nation where she worked as a dancer. This time she intends to bare her soul.
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True Radicalism
The Roots of American Order, by Russell Kirk (Open Court, 1974, 534 pp., $15), is reviewed by Thomas Howard, professor of English, Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.
The key words in the title of Russell Kirk’s book, “roots” and “order,” are germane to any Bicentennial reflections on what America is and where it is going.
The political left has pre-empted the word “radical.” Indeed, a case can fairly easily be made that as the word is used in popular politics now, it means merely “drastic.” It pertains to a view of things that, while proposing sweeping changes in social and moral conditions, seldom has the patience and modesty to go to the radix, the root. In other words, “radical,” at least as we know it in the United States now, means its own opposite: superficial (viz., the student revolts of the late sixties, or the various brands of “new” politics that appear weekly).
The other word in Kirk’s title is equally germane. Order. Any society—feudal, Maoist, or Jeffersonian—has to have some understanding of the nature of its own ordering of things if it is going to preserve and defend that order. Order is what makes moral and social existence—in fact existence itself—possible. Chaos and anarchy stand, not just over against moral and social order, but over against existence. Mao knows this as well as Genghis Khan.
In this study Russell Kirk goes all the way back. His thesis is that order is necessary to any existence called human, and that this order is moral. He asserts that this thesis has been demonstrated in history.
Kirk begins historically with “The Law and the Prophets.” The Old Testament is not always included in discussions of American democracy. Indeed, popular imagination often sees, no doubt, an antinomy between this democracy and the dreadful, absolutist, supernaturalistic, legalistic, Yahwist order in ancient Israel. But this is to miss our debt to Israel, which is at the very least the understanding that God is the source of order and justice, and that what binds a healthy society together is covenant, not just between man and man, but between those men and God. The prophets kept alive the ethical meaning of human existence by their shrill denunciation of sin—not just of fornication, as is often suggested in caricatures of the prophets, but of all forms of violence, corruption, oppression, indulgence, and so forth. A great legacy from Israel to us is the notion of man under God, and the corollary notion of the impossibility of any humanly constructed utopia.
The history of Greece furnishes us with a “cautionary tale” of class conflict, disunity, and internecine violence. “The ancient Greeks failed in this,” says Kirk: “they never learned how to live together in peace and justice.” Kirk argues that, while Plato and Socrates were not direct influences on our founding fathers, yet their vision was there, in the fabric of Western tradition, “reminding some men that there endures a realm of ideas more real than the realm of appetites … insisting that if men’s souls are disordered, society becomes no better than a cave or a dust-storm.” On the other hand, “the Greeks’ conviction that religion and culture must be bound up inseparably with the city-state went against the grain of American individualism.… The Greeks would have been astounded that such a nation-state [as America], unconsecrated to the gods, could endure for a decade.”
Our debt to the Roman ideas of ius civile (law for the franchised citizens), ius gentium (for all the people), and ius naturale (fundamental principles founded on ethical norms) is well enough known, and Kirk emphasizes this. His account of the decline of Rome, with the insoluble problem of centralization, and the increase of taxation and bureaucracy, and the draining off of the ancient religious order into the vagaries of emperor worship and the mystery cults, is self-evidently relevant to our own experience. Over against the public moral decline stood the lonely figure of Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor, whose view did not carry the day.
The Christian order, such as it was, supplanted the Roman order in the West. The chaotic nature of the “Christian” centuries itself may bear out the Augustinian canon that we live in a sinful world, and that there is no salvation to be looked for from the political order. To the Christian outlook the American fathers owed their ideas of individual worth, of the equality of all men before God, and of the limitation of earthly authority. The medieval patrimony of law, of slowly developing representative government (especially in England), of the effort to achieve a balance between church and state, of language, of commerce, and of learning (viz., the great universities) “was so much taken for granted by the men who founded the American Republic that they did not even trouble themselves to praise it so much as they should have done,” Kirk observes.
The American fathers shared the Reformers’ rejection of the Renaissance as a blending of “licentious paganism with corrupt Catholicism.” But among the legacies of the Reformation to America, we must also include the great energy and individualism that characterized the formative years of our civilization.
In seventeenth-century England we find Hobbes, whose influence on English and American thinking was enormous, divorcing as he did politics from religion; and Bunyan, celebrating the meaning of individual life as a pilgrimage towards God; and Locke, urging the ideas of natural contract and the right to property. In our own colonial order we find a growing toleration of religious and philosophical outlooks, a rejection of aristocracy (notably in South Carolina), the rise of representative assemblies, and the appearance of Deism, which, despite the influence of Wesley, Whitefield, and Edwards, eventually dominated official American imagination. In the eighteenth century, influences that Kirk touches among others are those of Hume (politics as the art of the possible), Blackstone (the notion of precedent as a determining factor in jurisprudence), and Edmund Burke (civil liberty comes, not from Nature, but from experience, convention, and compromise).
There is very little similarity between the American and the French revolutions, in Kirk’s view. The American Revolution attached itself always to history and experience rather than to slogans and utopian ideas. Our Constitution reflects the tension between order and freedom, and presupposes religious belief. Our fathers insisted on a government of laws, not of men.
Kirk advances his last chapter with a small demurral. It is entitled “Contending Against American Disorder.” This might appear to be going beyond the terrain he set himself in his title, but, he argues, it is necessary “to say something about the troubled reality of order, and the idea of order, in nineteenth-century America.” This is fairly familiar to most of us, but Kirk provides an angle on it that very, very few of us will have encountered in our schooling. He advances the name of Orestes Brownson as perhaps the most perspicacious critic of nineteenth-century America. Brownson, a New Englander, moved through most of the varieties of American religion (Congregationalism, Presbyterianism, Universalism, Unitarianism, and the like) in his search for authority. He was finally received into the Catholic Church, a very un American move in those days. But his move makes sense, though it may have cost him the attention of American historians. He criticized the merely democratic suppositions that were at work in American imagination (suppositions that no orthodox Christian can quite buy), and he insisted on a fixed moral order as necessarily underlying any healthy political life.
Kirk has chosen an astute commentator on American life for the ending of his book. Brownson’s observations need no updating.
Two things remain to be said. First, Kirk has included a large chronology, bibliography, and index to his book—always welcome in a work of this magnitude. Second, anyone who wishes to reflect and talk on the topic “America,” and especially any Christian who wishes to do so, will do himself a favor if he reads Kirk’s book.
World Religions And Political Revolutions
Religion and Revolution, by Guenter Lewy (Oxford, 1974, 694 pp., $17.50), is reviewed by James Tinney, Ph.D. candidate in political science, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
By examining case studies of the interrelationships between religion and revolution in more than a dozen countries, Lewy seeks to test the often repeated charge that religion is a political opiate of the people. While he does not think it is possible to identify any certain number of variables that would enable one to predict the “revolutionary index” of a particular religion, he does note three ways in which religion often contributes to revolution: (1) by supplying a sense of militant nationalism when a colonial regime is indifferent to indigenous religion; (2) by seeking to preserve the legitimacy of its own mission or leaders when they are threatened with replacement by political regimes; (3) by developing theologies of revolution.
While Lewy develops a strong rebuttal to the argument that religion is anti-political or anti-revolutionary, he is careful to balance his arguments with case studies that also have been used by his opponents. The major conclusion is that religion may serve equally as a protector of the status quo and as a revolutionary force. It both integrates and disrupts society. It bars and promotes change. The same set of facts and circumstances may be variously interpreted by religious leaders, and used either to sanctify or overthrow rulers-that-be.
Some differences are observable in the political roles of the major religions, however. Lewy concludes that Hinduism offers no basis for social change or protest since it does not view human beings as equal before God. Pre-Muslim India knows of no successful popular revolt, he claims, although Hinduism does hold that kingship is subordinate to divine law and, if not representative of divine law, may justifiably be overthrown.
Confucianism teaches that the difference between the ruler and the bandit depends entirely upon who holds power (the ruler) and who does not (the bandit). They are positioned as they are because of their virtue, or lack of it, though their roles might be reversed. In such cases, the coups are generally bloodless because of Confucianism’s emphasis on kindness and peace. Only the ruler can petition heaven itself; the people are given a plethora of lesser gods to petition. If the people were to pray to heaven directly, this would be interpreted as a plea for political power.
Buddhism accepts inequalities and teaches, much as Protestant fundamentalists do, that any transformation of society must be the result of personal transformation of individuals. Good rulers might become future Buddhas, and the monks’ collection of much property leads to royal pat onage. Thus whoever becomes an enemy of Buddhism also becomes an enemy of the ruler.
Judaism teaches strict adherence to tradition and law, and the perpetual reign of David’s throne, says Lewy. This is not divine kingship in the perfect sense, though the ruler carries God’s blessings in administrating the theocracy. The nation is messianic itself and eschatological, but some look for an eschatological messiah to usher in a perfect kingdom.
Islam sees no division between the church and state, politics and religion. The country is a commonwealth where God and his word are supreme; Muhammad was his vice-regent on earth. The caliphs who followed often died an unnatural death. When this happened it was interpreted as God’s judgment (indeed, whatever happens is, in Islamic teaching, justified). Islamic sects include the Seceders (who killed all who disagreed), the Shi’a (non-Arab Muslims who seek equality and look for the return of a personal messiah or Mahdi), and the Isma’ilis (whose secret knowledge supposedly frees them from obedience to the law of the land).
Christianity has been variously interpreted by its followers, says Lewy. Some have proclaimed Christ as a Zealot revolutionary bent on destroying oppression by Roman imperialists. Others have looked for his messianic return to set up a millenarian paradise and/or accomplish an eschatological judgment of nations. Followers have been sometimes defenders of the just war (such as Aquinas), separatists, or establishers of church-state linkages.
Lewy pays particular attention to “revolutionary millenarianism.” This is an admixture of several trends; he defines it as “a religiously inspired mass movement seeking imminent, total, ultimate, this-worldly, terrestrial, collective salvation” to be achieved through both human action and the aid of a supernatural agency.
Lewy also devotes a chapter to the development of liberation theology among Latin American Christians. His own conclusion, supported by Jacques Ellul, is that Christian intellectuals specialize in joining struggles that are virtually over.
Enough struggles continue in this world, however, and this author believes that religion will play a role in many of them, as it has in others in the past. This book provides a very comprehensive treatment of the subject.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Two nineteenth-century evangelicals who were among the most influential not only in their own time but down to the present have finally received appropriate biographical treatment. Fanny Crosby (1820–1915), by Bernard Ruffin (Pilgrims Press, 257 pp., $8), is about a blind woman who is best known today for some of her 9,000 hymns but who did far more than write. George Müller (1805–1898), by Roger Steer (Harold Shaw, 351 pp., $7.95), is about the Prussian immigrant to England who is chiefly remembered for his huge orphanage houses and the unsolicited gifts that sustained them. However, his activities were of far wider scope. Both of these books belong in church and school libraries. They require a little more effort to read but are much more inspirational than the “pop” testimonies by contemporary personalities.
Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe, edited by Béla Király (Columbia University, 227 pp., $12), contains a dozen essays focusing on particular aspects of conflict from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries in the region now largely Communist. It serves also to show precedents for more recent persecution. Religion and Atheism in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, by Bohdan Bociurkiw and John Strong (University of Toronto, 412 pp., $17.50), presents twenty essays largely concerned with post-World War II developments. Both books consider persecution of other religions than Christianity. (There are, for example, probably no more than 500 working mosques in the U.S.S.R for a Muslim constituency of some 40 million.)
Bicentennial fare from three denominations: Notebook of a Colonial Clergyman, by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (Fortress, 250 pp., $3.50 pb), selections from the journals from 1742 through 1787 of a leading Lutheran; Bibles and Battle Drums, by Truett Rogers (Judson, 158 pp., $7.95), about David Jones, a Baptist pastor who served as a chaplain with Washington’s army; and John Witherspoon: Parson, Politican, Patriot, by Martha Lou Lemmon Stohlman (Westminster, 176 pp., $5.95), an informal biography of the Presbyterian leader who was the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence.
The key paradox of the American ideal, the legacy of which still affects the nation momentously, is the subject of two scholarly but readable studies, Slavery and the Churches in Early America 1619–1819, by Lester Scherer (Eerdmans, 163 pp., $5.95), and American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund Morgan (Norton, 454 pp., $11.95). Morgan focuses on Virginians, who were leaders in drafting the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, who served for all but four of the first thirty-six years of the American presidency, and who held 40 per cent of the nation’s slaves.
What does the Bible really say about the role of women? And what are the applications of biblical principles for today? Four evangelical women offer their answers. In Search of God’s Ideal Woman, by Dorothy Pape (InterVarsity, 370 pp., $4.95 pb), is a thorough examination of all the New Testament passages and is probably the most important book on this subject so far this year. Up From Eden, by Kathryn Lindskoog (David C. Cook, 139 pp., $2.95 pb), and A Woman’s Worth and Work, by Karen Helder DeVos (Baker, 101 pp., $2.95 pb), are more informal and focus on the present with flashbacks to relevant Scriptures. The Magna Charta of Women, by Jessie Penn-Lewis (Bethany Fellowship, 103 pp., $ 1.50 pb), reprints a 1919 exegetical study by a widely traveled woman preacher.
One aspect of the widespread interest in the role of women is their status as religious leaders. Christianity has traditionally offered a much greater leadership role than have other religions, but many contend that what it has offered is not good enough. Toward a New Theology of Ordination, edited by Marianne Micks and Charles Price (Greeno, Hadden. 111 pp., $3.95 pb), presents nine essays with biblical and theological bases for ordaining women to the Episcopal priesthood. Carter Heyward, who was one of the eleven supposedly so ordained in 1974, tells her own story in A Priest Forever (Harper & Row, 146 pp., $6.95). In the United Presbyterian Church, women have full ordination rights; Elizabeth Howell Verdesi tells the story of power bases in official agencies won and then lost twice in this century within that denomination in In But Still Out (Westminster, 218 pp., $3.95 pb). Although concerned with women, this study of denominational politics will be of interest to others who feel left out. A variety of denominations, including Judaism, are represented in chats with some thirty women who are engaged in pastoral ministry in Women in the Pulpit, by Priscilla and William Proctor (Doubleday, 176 pp., $6.95). The varying motivations, experiences, and frustrations, rather than heavy theology, are the subject.
In the wake of books advocating change it male-female patterns there are still many defending a more traditional role. Three from Christian Herald House are Marigold Mornings, by Dorothy Evslin (213 pp., $6.95) Where the Heart Is, by Florence Roe Wiggins (131 pp. $5.95), and Let Me Be a Woman, by Tyndale (190 pp., $5.95). A similar book is A Woman’s Place, by Mark Kinney Branson (Accent, 160 pp., $1.95 pb).
The Liberated Palestinian, by James and Marti Hefley, is the story of Anis Shorrosh, a leading Palestinian evangelical born in Nazareth (Victor, 172 pp., $2.95 pb). He is now in full-time evangelism. His story illuminates the less-known side of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Following the post-World War I challenges from neo-orthodoxy in academic circles and from fundamentalism at the grass roots, theological liberalism and the related social-gospel movement were thought to be dead, both in theory and in practice. Not so, according to these two fine studies by supporters of the movement. The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America, edited by Ronald C. White, Jr., and C. Howard Hopkins (Temple University, 306 pp., $15, and $6.95 pb), intersperses primary and secondary sources in a running narrative review of nineteenth-and twentieth-century religion-based social activism. In The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Harvard, 347 pp., n.p.), William Hutchinson finds there was indeed a definite theology of liberalism and of social reform rather than merely an attitude of “openness.” which is what fundamentalists contended all along. The author finds himself now more sympathetic to that theology than he was in earlier days when he was influenced by neo-orthodoxy.
Christian teaching in the first few centuries after the apostles is the subject of three expensive but essential books for theological libraries. Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer have arranged fifty-eight excerpts from the major church fathers into the traditional categories of systematic theology in Documents in Early Christian Thought (Cambridge, 268 pp., $22.50). A Scripture index would have helped. Ethical Patterns in Early Christian Thought by Eric Osborn (Cambridge, 252 pp., $21) focuses on Clement, Basil, Chrysostom, and Augustine. Osborn examines various aspects, such as love or natural law, in the light of current discussion. A widely heralded classic on the history of Christology is now available in a major revision: Christ in Christian Tradition, Volume One: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon, by Aloys Grillmeier (John Knox, 599 pp., $22). About one-third of the book is new material.
Three notable books about blacks and prayer: The Prayers of African Religion, by John Mbiti (Orbis, 193 pp., $7.95), and Prayer in the Religious Traditions of Africa, by Aylward Shorter (Oxford, 143 pp., $7.95, and $2.95 pb), gather by subject scores of prayers from the tribal religions; The Prayer Tradition of Black People (Judson, 142 pp., $6.95) has more interpretation and treats Christianity-based praying of Afro-Americans.
Jerome, by J.N.D. Kelly (Harper & Row, 353 pp., $15), is the first major biography in English of one of the most influential figures for early and medieval Christianity.
What happened before the events of the book and movie, The Hiding Place? See Corrie ten Boom’s In My Father’s House (Revell, 192 pp., $6.95).
NEW PERIODICAL
Books, cassettes, visual aids, and other communications resources available to religious educators are noted and continually reviewed in Religious Media Today, which began quarterly publication with the April, 1976, issue. Catholic participation in the project is high, but liberal and conservative Protestants are involved also (432 Park Avenue South, New York, N. Y. 10016; $8/year).
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Carl called me aside at the end of a committee meeting. I knew from his face that he found it hard to speak.
“You haven’t seen Pete around much lately, have you?” he asked. Before I had a chance to respond, he hurried on. “I thought you ought to know. Apparently you offended him by something you said.”
I had noticed that Peter had not been regular the past several weeks. I had also noticed that he was not particularly friendly when he did come.
“Offended him?” I asked, wondering what I could have done.
“One Sunday after the service he was trying to get into the church office and the door was locked. You came by and said something like, ‘Hey, Pete, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you trying to get inside the church. Usually you’re one of those trying to get out.’”
I vaguely recalled the incident. I remembered that Pete had laughed and had made some humorous retort as I unlocked the door for him. In fact, as I replayed the whole scene in my mind, the first part of it became clear. He had actually started the lightness by saying something like, “Some people can’t wait to get home for dinner. They lock the doors as soon as you say the last amen.”
“Why, Carl, I was only kidding him.”
“I know. That’s the way Pete is. He’s touchy. He can hand out the banter and even hurt people himself. But you’re on pretty thin ice when you turn around and kid with him.”
“How did you find out?”
“He told his brother-in-law, who told Bill Rosen, and Bill told me.”
I nodded my head. Typical story. Someone gets offended in the church and by the time the information gets to me, it has been filtered through three or more other people.
“Thanks, Carl,” I said.
The conversation bothered me. First, of course, I had hurt someone, though unintentionally. I reviewed the conversation over and over in my mind. It just didn’t seem to me that anyone would have misconstrued it. Yet Pete had.
“Then he ought to come to me!” I remember telling the Lord as I drove home. “Jesus said that if your brother offends you, you go to him!”
And I could hear the words echo back, “He ought to.…”
“Lord, I’m tired of this. Innocent remarks get twisted around and misinterpreted, feelings get hurt, and I’m always supposed to be the reconciler. People don’t seem very disturbed when they hurt my feelings!”
For the five minutes that it took me to drive home, I railed against Pete in particular, church people in general, and the inequity of being a pastor. I didn’t feel a lot better when I reached the house. “It’s still his responsibility to tell me!” I said as I slammed the front door. I wanted to dismiss the matter. It was Pete’s move.
But I knew I couldn’t leave it at that. I had gotten the message. And while I felt I had done nothing wrong, the fact remained: Pete was hurt.
Forty-five minutes later I rang Pete’s doorbell, reminding myself of Jesus’ words, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
I straightened it out.
That incident and several others that have happened since then have made me do some serious thinking. The fact that I had had to hear the information through the grapevine method made me angry. It also forced me to examine myself and realize that I had played the game, too. Perhaps not in the touchy way of Pete, but my guilt had to be dealt with.
Like the time Bert complained about the youth leader. “He’s just not doing his job with those teen-agers. I’m not going to allow my boys back in the youth activities until he’s there when he should be. There’s no proper supervision, no leadership from him half the time when he is there.”
And what did I say to all that? “Bert, I’m sorry you feel that way.” From there I began working with Bert on his feelings. Later I talked with the youth director about his leadership and control. Bert’s name was never mentioned.
I know what I should have done: I should have made Bert face up to his feelings and then talk them over with the youth director.
My chance came recently. Patsy complained about the kindergarten program. “It’s absolute bedlam! I don’t want my twins in there with that confusion! I send them to learn how to live like Christians. They’re learning to behave like devils!”
“Patsy, have you ever told Gloria that? Since she’s the department head, she ought to know how you feel.”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell her. I wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings.”
“But you want me to tell her so I can hurt her feelings.”
Patsy blushed slightly and said, “Well, that’s not what I mean. You can do it so much nicer and—”
“Wait a minute, Patsy. If you were the head of the department, wouldn’t you want a parent to tell you if she or he were unhappy?”
“Sure. But … it’s kind of hard to tell someone that.”
“I know.”
She fidgeted for a few seconds before I spoke again. “One more question, Patsy. Do you care—I mean, really care—about the kindergarten program? Or are you just upset over the lack of control? If you care about the program and about the children, then you’ll face Gloria and tell her. Perhaps you could volunteer to help keep order.”
Patsy never talked to Gloria. I wish she had.
Patsy acted the way a lot of people do. We pass the buck when we’re upset. But if we care about what happens and about the people involved, then we can’t let matters slide or pass the complaint on.
Caring means being honest with people, confronting them when necessary. I’m learning to encourage people to do that. Dealing honestly with one another is a vital step in our maturity as Christians. It used to be that when conversations like these came to me, I kept the names confidential. When I had to confront a third person, I’d skirt the issue by saying, “Someone told me that …” or “I’ve heard that.…”
“Who told you?”
That’s a reasonable question. And I’m tired of dodging it. I can help the situation most by urging the offended to face the offender.
In fact, we have actually twisted it all around from the principle Jesus gave. He said, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother” (Matt. 18:15). But in practice, it often is handled differently, as in a situation that happened to me last week.
Fran cornered me after the evening service. “Go see Rita this week.”
“I’d be glad to,” I said. “Any particular reason?”
“Well, she’s hurt.”
I took a deep breath. “What did I do wrong?” I asked as evenly as possible.
“You didn’t ask about her father. She was gone all last week. She had told you he was very sick, and you had prayer for him. Now she’s back and you didn’t ask about him.”
“Fran, I’m sorry. Frankly, I forgot. But if she was concerned to let me know, why didn’t she tell me herself?”
Fran shrugged.
“I’ll see her this week. But you can help me if this kind of thing comes up gain. Urge the person to speak to me directly.”
“Rita would be embarrassed and say it’s such a small thing—”
“But not too small for her to get her feelings hurt.”
Fran flashed a smile at me. “You’re right, Cec. I’ll try next time.”
That’s how the twist operates. The one who did the wrong may be unaware of the effect created. Nonetheless the offended person waits for the offender to smooth it all out.
Perhaps that’s the way the wisdom of this world works, but it’s not the way Jesus instructed his followers to deal with hurts. If I’m hurt, then I have a moral obligation to tell the person who offended me.
I said something like this recently to Mark, who had been angered by something his teacher said to him in class.
“He knew he rubbed me the wrong way. I’m not going to him. He’s the one who said the things. Not me.”
“You mean you’d rather sulk about it, lose your peace of mind, keep yourself stirred up inside while you wait for him to come around? First of all, he may not even be aware that you feel this way. Second, you really ought to think about Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:15. And third, what’s more important: putting the blame on him or getting differences reconciled?”
Mark is a very open young man. He talked to his teacher. I don’t know what happened. But I did notice Sunday morning that when they walked out of the classroom together, the teacher had his arm around Mark’s shoulder. And they were smiling as they talked.
As a pastor and as a Christian, have I allowed people to shirk their responsibility to one another? Perhaps even encouraged it by being the man in the middle? The Apostle Paul writes about speaking the truth in love. A lot of us need to read that verse—Ephesians 4:15—often.
So I made a promise to myself. I’ll no longer bear the second-hand messages. I’m going to urge people to confront one another. I intend to care enough to help them be honest and faithful.
I don’t enjoy saying hard things to people; I’m as uncomfortable about it as the next person. But Jesus spoke the truth in love. So did the Apostle Paul. I know I can do it, too, if I really care about the people involved.—CECIL B. MURPHEY, pastor, Riverdale Presbyterian Church, River dale, Georgia.
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Have you ever been in a storm at sea? Thunder mingles with the roar of waves beating against the side of the boat. Lightning zigzags across the sky and seems to pierce the froth of the wild breakers. Passengers slip and slide and clutch at rails at the side of the corridors, or collide with furniture as they try to cross a cabin.
The sailors in the ship where Jonah was peacefully sleeping below did everything they could to keep their boat afloat before they began their search for someone to blame for the storm. It was Jonah’s fault, you remember, because he had turned from the word of God to him at that time to do an exactly opposite thing. His refusal to believe that God’s word to him was of primary importance, and to act upon it in that moment of history, affected not only himself but other people—the sailors at that dramatic moment, and also the people of Nineveh. Jonah was the “troubler,” responsible for a physical storm affecting other people, and responsible for spiritual ignorance on the part of a whole city.
Happily for the sailors, and for Nineveh, Jonah learned a tremendous lesson within the great fish’s belly. Jonah had a great change within, and God answered his cry for deliverance. He gave Jonah another opportunity to consider the importance of His word to him, and to act upon it. Jonah’s proclamation of the word of God to Nineveh affected the people of that city to the extent that they repented, and their history was changed.
For whom are we in danger of causing trouble? What people are we plunging into a storm at sea? Is “compassion” simply a musical sounding word in our mouths? Are we unwilling to pay a price to act compassionately toward those who are affected by us?
Another person in the Bible spoke about “troubling”: “Art thou he that troubleth Israel?” A drought had brought famine for a long time, and the one asking the question was King Ahab, who accused Elijah of being the cause of this trouble. The answer was swift and spoken with the authority of a prophet of the living God: “I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father’s house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the LORD, and thou hast followed Baalim” (1 Kings 18:18). (In chapter 16 we were told that Ahab had made altars to worship the false god Baal, and had done more to provoke the Lord God of Israel than any other king of Israel.)
It is right at this point in First Kings 18 that we have the marvelous story of Elijah’s confrontation with the 450 priests of the false god Baal. The children of Israel, these who have been led astray by Ahab their king, gather around. “And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? If the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word” (1 Kings 18:21).
Elijah then told the prophets of Baal to put a bullock on the altar and then call upon their god to send fire to burn it. He said he would take a second bullock and do the same thing, calling upon the living God to send down fire.
All day long the prophets of Baal called, cried, shouted to their god, even going into a frenzy and slashing themselves with knives to make their pleas more effective. Nothing happened. Elijah mocked them and told them to cry louder—perhaps, he said, your god is asleep, or taking a journey. Their cries and self-mutilation continued until the evening, but there was no answer, because there was no one to answer.
After putting his bullock on his altar, Elijah poured so much water on the altar that the wood was wet and a trench around the altar was filled with water. Then he lifted up his heart and said, “LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word. Hear me, O LORD, hear me, that this people may know that thou art the LORD God, and that thou hast turned their heart back again.”
What an answer! “Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt-sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The LORD, he is the God; the LORD, he is the God.”
Elijah had his prayer answered, and he was vindicated, right after he had been called “the troubler of Israel.” The result was that many were brought out of the darkness into which Ahab had led them, into the light of the truth.
Centuries later the accusation thrown at Elijah was thrown at Paul and Silas. Some men caught them, brought them to the rulers, and said, “These men, being Jews, do exceedingly trouble our city, and teach customs which are not lawful for us to receive, neither to observe, being Romans.” As a result Paul and Silas were stripped and beaten and with many raw wounds on their backs were thrown into prison.
The result of this confrontation between those who were set on punishing Paul and Silas for preaching the truth of God’s Word and powerful living God himself was not only the earthquake that freed the men from their stocks and chains but the “inner earthquake” that freed the jail keeper of the chains of doubt and brought him to the place of asking what he should do to be saved.
We need to ask the question today, “Who is the troubler of Israel?” First, there are the Jonahs who are believers, servants of the true and living God, but are turning away in the opposite direction geographically, or doctrinally, or turning from some specific message or task, thereby bringing storms on innocent fellow sailors, or depriving groups of people from hearing the truth. Second, there are the Ahabs, who have turned away from God’s Word while in leadership of his people, while at the same time accusing the true prophets of disturbing the peace. Third, there are the Pauls and Silases, who are being persecuted and falsely accused of being “troublers of the city,” while they are obediently speaking and teaching the word of the Lord.
It is important to be sure that in God’s sight we are among those who are falsely accused, rather than in Ahab’s or Jonah’s place. “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”
EDITH SCHAEFFER
Ideas
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Evangelization of the two-thirds of the world’s population that has yet to hear of Christ might seem to be an impossibility. At the time of the International Congress on World Evangelization held at Lausanne two years ago it was estimated that 2.7 billion persons had not been evangelized. And the birth rate continues to outstrip the growth rate of the Church.
“We are ashamed that so many have been neglected,” declared the Lausanne Covenant. “It is a standing rebuke to us and to the whole church.… The goal should be, by all available means and at the earliest possible time, that every person will have the opportunity to hear, understand, and receive the good news.”
But how? Is it realistic to think the Gospel can be presented to every person on earth in this generation? The Christian leaders from around the globe who signed the covenant believe it is. The conclusion of the document included these words, “We enter into a solemn covenant with God and with each other, to pray, to plan, and to work together for the evangelization of the whole world.”
The goal is not new. Three-quarters of a century ago it was a rallying cry for missionary recruitment in North America. The Student Volunteer Movement was determined to send abroad enough young people to accomplish the task. Those who responded to the challenge wrote a glorious chapter in missionary history, but they fell short of the goal.
Why does a new generation of Christian leaders think it is possible, even though there are more millions to reach? For one thing, improved means of travel and communications make the unreached far more accessible. Another promising factor highlighted at Lausanne was the emergence of missionary-sending societies in African, Asian, and Latin American countries that formerly only received missionaries. A third reason for optimism is the resurgence of evangelistic zeal among young people in the traditional “sending” nations.
Even with these encouraging factors, the goal seems remote. Yet signers of the covenant believe it is achievable. They acknowledged that one element is missing in the lives of many Christians otherwise committed to evangelization. Said the document: “We cannot hope to attain this goal without sacrifice.” Few believers have wanted to win the lost enough to sacrifice to get the job done, though every generation has had a few missionaries and others who were willing to give up everything so that others could learn about the Lord.
Signers of the covenant were very specific about the need for sacrifice. They said, “All of us are shocked by the poverty of millions and disturbed by the injustices which cause it. Those of us who live in affluent circumstances accept our duty to develop a simple life-style in order to contribute more generously to both relief and evangelism.”
The “simple life-style” section of the Lausanne document has probably attracted more attention than any other. One prominent North American who was active in both planning and following up the congress said this section is mentioned every time Lausanne is discussed in his hearing. Regrettably, some of those who are talking about simpler living are looking at it in isolation. It is not an end in itself in the covenant; it is a means by which the more affluent Christians can share the abundant life with the desperately needy.
Are North American and European (and other affluent) believers taking this “simple life-style” suggestion to heart in order to give more to relief and evangelism? Encouragingly, the answer for a few is yes. One survey of some American participants in the Lausanne congress showed that, to varying degrees, they are living more simply than they did before. For many of them, however, “more simply” is still far from “simple.”
One family, for instance, started observing “austerity night” once a week, and the parents and three children were all fed for under $1 at that meal. The difference between that dollar and the normal cost of a meal was sent to a Christian relief agency. The practice lasted for about a year.
Another family, about to buy a second car, decided it could manage with one. A pastor and his wife examined their insurance program and stopped paying premiums on one policy so that they could give more for missions. Other people are fasting on occasion. To a degree, consciences have been quickened. Christian leaders are asking their constituencies to consider their priorities, and some organizations are cutting out some frills in their meetings.
Actions like these are commendable. But many are short-lived, and most involve very little self-denial. At best, they are experiments and not basic changes in life-styles, though they nonetheless could produce a considerable increase in the flow of money to missions and relief organizations.
Most of us are still far from sacrificial living. Until we get serious about reining in our affluent ways, there is little reason to be optimistic that the physically hungry and the spiritually hungry will be fed.
College Aid: Restrain Rejoicing
Friends of financially hard-pressed evangelical colleges may have rejoiced when they learned that the Supreme Court had approved annual payments from the Maryland state treasury to three Roman Catholic colleges in the state, along with a dozen non-sectarian private colleges (see News, page 51). But before deciding to press for similar grants in other states, they should consider carefully the court’s description of these Catholic colleges:
“Though controlled and largely populated by Roman Catholics, the colleges were not restricted to adherents of that faith. No religious services were required to be attended. Theology courses were mandatory, but they were taught in an academic fashion.… There were no attempts to proselytise among students.… With colleges of this character, there was little risk that religion would seep into the teaching of secular subjects, and the state surveillance necessary to separate the two, therefore, was diminished” (italics added).
We see no justification for keeping religion from “seeping into” secular subjects in a professedly Christian college. If religion is to be confined to Bible and theology courses, why not just set up a study center adjacent to a secular campus? (Actually, evangelicals should be making such courses available near all major campuses anyway, but that is another topic.)
The court’s majority was careful to observe that “faculty hiring decisions are not made on a religious basis. At two of the colleges … no inquiry at all is made into a [faculty] applicant’s religion.”
Could evangelical colleges solicit gifts and recruit students in good faith and still meet, or come close to meeting, the Supreme Court’s criteria? They could not if they sincerely believe that Christian revelation affects at least to some degree all that is taught. They could not if they believe that all teachers should be professing Christians who are interested in the spiritual as well as mental development of their students. Potential donors interested in supporting Christian higher education would be well advised to look at schools other than those receiving state aid if in qualifying for aid those schools are meeting the court’s criteria.
There is a positive note in the decision for evangelicals. It assumes that the colleges receiving tax money do not discriminate religiously. That should mean that evangelistic groups, such as Campus Crusade and Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, that have generally been unwelcome on Roman Catholic campuses will be able to work on the state-aided ones now. Schools receiving government funds ought not to be able to keep out responsible advocates of religious views other than those of their founders.
The dissent from the majority opinion by the newest justice, John Paul Stevens, is worth noting. This father who has two children in parochial schools decries “the pernicious tendency of a state subsidy to tempt religious schools to compromise their religious mission.…” He has properly labeled the danger to Christian institutions, and he has reminded their supporters of the need for keeping religious schools truly independent.
Swear Not—It’S An Insult
Public profanity is increasing. In books, magazines, and newspapers, in films, on radio and TV, and on other public platforms, the names of God and Jesus Christ are dishonored with distressing frequency. A prominent example is the film All the President’s Men. The one who blasphemes reveals, not imagination, not masculinity, not sophistication, but poverty of language and spiritual decay.
Judaism has generally provided a good example of respect for the name of God. Even in oath-taking the Jews preferred to swear by the Temple or the altar rather than by God. Jesus made it clear that for those who love God, all that is needed is a simple affirmation; one need not call upon any outside person or thing to validate it.
In James Russell Lowell’s The Biglow Papers there appears the line, “It’s ’most enough to make a deacon swear.” For the Christian, nothing, absolutely nothing, is enough to make him take God’s name in vain. But many Christians use so-called minced oaths such as “Goldarn it”; surely language like this cannot be pleasing to God.
It’s time to speak up against the public use of blasphemous words. Common courtesy alone should cause those who speak in public to refrain from uttering insults to the God whom many of their listeners hold dear.
Meeting Expectations
In a most unusual statement at the time of his election to a new term, James E. Andrews, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, spoke of strain on the family life of denominational leaders: too much is expected of them, and their schedule keeps them away from home too much. The same could be said for many local churches.
If the families of the leaders break up, the rank and file has poor examples to follow.
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Representative Of The Year
One does not have to be a brilliant semanticist to know that a representative is one who represents. And no one is more representative of the American people today than the Honorable Wayne Hays of Ohio.
He “portrays” and “typifies” (to use my dictionary’s words) us well. We Americans admire cantankerous, tough leaders. (Didn’t Blood and Guts Patton become a folk hero during the Nixon years?) We appreciate people who understand power and are not afraid to use it. And Hays fits the bill. According to Washington insiders. Hays ran the House Administration Committee and the Congressional Campaign Committee with an iron and vindictive hand.
Hays also represents us sexually. Many of us participate in and wink at sexual indiscretions. We’re like the old man reported by Time magazine who wanted to know Hays’s secret for sexual potency after age sixty-five. We good-naturedly elbow each other in the ribs when we hear of hanky-panky. And evidently Hays hanked and panked. He bragged of his nightly exploits almost daily.
Most of us don’t call such indiscretions sin. We call them “peccadillos,”’ which means “a slight offense; a petty fault.” (I previously thought peccadillos were assistants to Spanish bullfighters.)
We Americans also admire those who know how to use money to achieve goals. Hays does. The way he wrapped purse strings around power is legendary on Capitol Hill. And Hays typifies us too well when it comes to the use of others’ money for our own ends. (Think through your own use of expense-account, income-tax, and “tithe” money.) But when Wayne represented us too well in this area, we rebelled. He could have his peccadillos, we said, but not with our money. And so the Honorable Wayne Hays has fallen.
When historians sit down to write of his decline, will they say he fell because he bullied people with his power? No. Will they say he fell because he messed around with members of his staff, hustled his secretary back in Ohio, and divorced his wife of thirty-eight years? No. Historians will say he was brought to his knees because the American people rebelled when he used their money to support his mistress.
Wayne Hays represented us too well, and he fell for it. He probably deserved to fall. But he also deserves to be named the American people’s Representative of the Year.
EUTYCHUS VII
For More Poetry
Thank you for the fine article on poetry by Rod Jellema (“Poems Should Stay Across the Street From the Church,” June 4), and for Harold Lindsell’s candid editorial confession that he is “somewhat dull” on the theme of poetry; quite frankly, the magazine reflects his unfortunate attitude in a rather subtle way. It is Jellema’s expressed opinion that the Church isn’t serious in its search for good poetry; it is apparent that Christian journals such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY are also not very serious in this search. The magazine should not only print more poetry, but it should acknowledge when it does so by itemizing poems in its table of contents rather than treating them as journalistic filler. By the way, when was the last time CHRISTIANITY TODAY reviewed a book of poems? Please give us more poetry.
ALLAN R. ANDREWS
North Shore Community College
Beverly, Mass.
As a Christian who writes poetry for both secular and religious readers, I do not feel that what my poetry “embodies has little to do with [my] opinions or even [my] beliefs.…” To the contrary, … all my perceptions—like everyone else’s—grow out of a personal belief system. Mine, a God-in-Jesus-Christ world, influences my sensory input and how I select symbols to evoke meaning in the receiver. The fact that I am a Christian puts no limit on the subject matter or the technique, but it does impose upon me a prophetic (forthtelling) function to deal with themes of divine purpose, judgment, love, forgiveness, and hope. And that’s the “message” I want to get across, although how it’s said has many variables.
CAROLYN KEEFE
Department of Speech and Theatre
Westchester State College
Westchester, Pa.
I do not believe that “poems should stay across the street from the Church”.… A Christian is “whole,” his awareness is on all levels, “layer upon layer,” permeated with his faith and love, and there is no conflict between his beliefs and his “growing creative vision.” The poetic gift is indeed a gift from God, and is used most magnificently when it glorifies him.… Let us have poetry in the church, and not just across the street.
DOROTHY M. MACLEOD
Willowdale, Ont.
A Break From Brickbats
May I thank you for your very kind editorial about me (“Worthy of Her Hire?,” May 21). In the midst of the pressure and brickbats, your column was like a lovely oasis.
BARBARA WALTERS
ABC News
New York, N. Y.
Better A Hobbitt
Lord of the Rings is no substitute for Holy Writ. Habitual reading of it, and this may be what is disturbing Lionel Basney (Refiner’s Fire, May 21), trains one in trivia, not spiritual maturity. Having said that, however, is not to negate fantasy as a legitimate approach to Christianity. “Hold all things in moderation” applies to fantasy as well as pagan culture. Eliot, Becket, Joyce may very well be authors of greater literary stature than Tolkien. Lewis probably writes better literature than Tolkien. But the question is not literary. It is a question of what may lead a man to Christ. I think that fantasy, when rendered by a redeemed imagination, may very well be a viable avenue.
It has been suggested that without imagination there can be no spiritual maturity. Scripture reiterates that without faith, God cannot be pleased. Imagination, purified, directed, is the vehicle for faith. We “see” what is required of us and move the tangible realities to an adjustment with the imaged qualities of Godlikeness. Generally spoken of in more pietistic terms, it is also an act of the imagination. Instead of creating a subworld, or secondary world, by faith, we see the Primary World and live there, instead of here, at our mailing address and zip code. God created that Primary, spiritual world as well as this one, and he promised us a part in both.
The literature of Joyce and Becket and Vonnegut says our lives are petty, sordid, ridiculous. Yes. We agree. But to say there is no other world is inaccurate. Rejoicing in common humanity may be better than religious isolationism. But in the final analysis, if all are drowning, does it matter if each has his own raft or if we are piled helter-skelter (rejoicing in our common humanity) on one raft? The difficulty with faith and the literature of realism is that despair is the result instead of hope, and the repudiation of the imagination withers the heart of faith.… Yet Satan will lose. Some day. And the relief and pleasure accorded thereby won’t be tainted by skepticism. So Gandalf is a truer guide to Christ than Godot. Redeemed fantasy is a mirror image of the Greater Fantasy that is all life. It is safer reading for an unbeliever, because it awakens the sehnsucht that eventually led Lewis to confront God. It is legitimate enjoyment for a Christian because it is all a parable about the greater Fantasy to which we have committed our own futures. Better to be a Hobbitt in Middle Earth, than to battle Virginia Woolf for a season.
JUDITH L. BROWN
Silver Spring, Md.
The Singles Challenge
I was very pleased with your lead editorial in the June 4 issue: “Serving Singles—Don’t Play Mix and Match.” This editorial brought to mind some important facts and figures about singles and challenged churches to meet the increasing demand for ministry to singles. In addition.… I feel that there is another important area where persons’ attitudes could be changed. This concerns the place of single persons in full-time church or Christian work. Today it seems that many denominations won’t consider a single person for church staff positions.… The single person who feels a call to special service … feels that the local church has no place for him in this respect either. Today many singles are feeling God’s call to special service but must turn to organizations outside the church.
C. DARRELL MOBLEY
Oklahoma City, Okla.
Thanks For Thought
Thanks for “Did We Love Her Out of Hell, Guys?” (Eutychus and His Kin, April 23). It was thought-provoking, which, I assume, was the intent.
STAN DREW
Instructor
Christian Education
Northwest College
Kirkland, Wash.
Arthur Simon
Common questions with replies by an expert.
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The following questions were submitted to Arthur Simon by the editors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. They are an attempt to express some points that often trouble people who are confronted with information about worldwide hunger. Mr. Simon is the executive director of Bread for the World, an interdenominational citizens’ movement on poverty and hunger (235 East 49th Street, New York, N. Y. 10017). He has an S.T.M. from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, and was formerly a Lutheran (Missouri Synod) pastor in Manhattan. Among the books he has written are Bread for the World and The Politics of World Hunger.
1. What happened to the food crisis we read so much about last year?
Hunger usually has to reach extreme and massive proportions to make the front page or the evening news. Dramatic famines come and go. They were in the news for a while and are largely gone today, thanks to favorable weather in most poor countries. But dramatic famines are only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath, the situation has not changed for at least 400 million victims of acute malnutrition. They don’t make the front page. They simply suffer in quiet obscurity, get sick too often, and die too soon. So the crisis may appear to be gone, and in one sense it is—for a while. But the magnitude of the problem remains basically unchanged.
2. Food shortages sound like a relic of a time when man had little control over nature, something more understandable in, say, Old Testament times than in our technologically sophisticated age. Why does the world have this vast hunger problem now?
It’s a combination of factors. For one thing, the earth has more people to feed than ever before. Combine that with uneven distribution of resources and technology, and you have a lot of hungry people. Actually, world food production has increased faster than the population growth rate for the past couple of decades. But a disproportionate amount of those food production gains has occurred in the United States and in other rich nations.
3. Why don’t the poor stop having so many children and making the problem worse?
That sounds plausible, but it gets at the problem backwards. The rule of thumb is that where you have hungry people you also have large families. Let me illustrate. A peasant couple in, say, India has no social security except surviving sons. If adequate nourishment and basic health care are beyond reach, that couple needs many children to insure surviving sons. That’s not the only reason people have large families, to be sure, but it is an important one. China, Taiwan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and even Kerala, a poor state in India, have substantially lowered their population growth rates. Why? Because minimal but adequate nutrition, health care, basic education, and usually jobs are available to all or at least most of the people. In this context family planning works. But without these gains, people will continue to have many children, no matter how much birth control is pushed.
4. Most of us work hard for what we have. Couldn’t the hungry learn to feed themselves if they were willing to work hard, as we have done? Isn’t poverty a result of moral failure?
In part, yes. But primarily moral failure on the part of us who are not poor and who disregard the plight of those who are. Think of Amos and Isaiah—or Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It’s tempting, of course, to think of the poor as lazy, because that gets us off the hook. But hunger is debilitating and produces the symptoms of laziness. Moritz Thomsen was a farmer from the state of Washington who entered the Peace Corps and served in a rural village in Ecuador. He was outraged by the villagers’ laziness—until circumstances forced him to eat what they ate. Then he learned what it meant to be able to work only a few hours a day at half pace. As he said, “There are only so many miles to a gallon of bananas.”
5. Is there anything other than a spirit of generosity and compassion that should motivate the rich nations to help the poor ones? We haven’t helped to create their problems, have we?
In part we have. Some hunger and poverty today is a legacy of practices that were carried out over a long period of time when rich Western nations exploited overseas colonies, carting off their raw materials, for example, or pushing them to produce cash crops for sale abroad rather than developing crops for local consumption. And some of these practices continue. Or think of the relationship between slavery and poverty in our own country. But assessing blame is a difficult, and I think a largely unfruitful, enterprise. The point is, we could be doing more than we are—a great deal more. What should motivate us to do more? Enlightened self-interest, perhaps, because we would be investing in a world that would be better for all of us. But Christians can be prompted by God’s love and human need. And we in turn can help the nation to make some better choices.
6. Isn’t the U. S. government already the most generous one on earth? And when private giving is added to governmental aid, doesn’t the United States make an impressive showing?
We overrate our generosity. Most U. S. citizens think we play the role of Santa Claus in the world, but we don’t. Do you know what percentage of our total national income (Gross National Product, or GNP) goes for development assistance to poor countries? One-fourth of 1 per cent—and that’s by inflated government figures that count loans as though they were grants. Add private aid and it reaches maybe one-third of 1 per cent. That’s less than one-tenth the assistance we gave to Europe at the height of the Marshall Plan. In 1974 the United States ranked fourteenth among seventeen developed countries in the percentage of the GNP given as development assistance. But hunger isn’t just a question of aid. It has even more to do with trade, with monetary policies, with military spending—and with the need for internal reforms in the poor countries themselves.
7. Is there hunger in the United States? If so, doesn’t the government owe it to our own people to eliminate hunger here before trying to feed others?
Yes, there is hunger here. Nobody knows the exact number of hungry people, but it clearly runs into several million at the very least. It’s not an either/or situation. We can and should deal with both hunger here and hunger elsewhere.
8. Have any nations solved their hunger problem—and if so, how?
Hunger has been virtually eliminated in China and Japan. These countries have vastly different political and economic systems, but they have decided that their people are their chief national resource, and they put a high priority on planning so that people can work and feed themselves adequately. We could do the same much more easily than either of these countries.
9. We are told that we Americans are consuming more than our fair share, that we constitute only 6 per cent of the world’s population and use 35 per cent of its natural resources. But doesn’t a lot of that 35 per cent go back to other countries as manufactured goods?
The United States is closer to 5 per cent of the world’s population now. Okay, let’s say U. S. exports would cut that 35 per cent back a few points. That still leaves one-twentieth of the world with roughly one-third of the world’s resources.
10. Our economic system is based on the profit motive. Could it ever be profitable to help the poor countries through more beneficent trade patterns, or must we keep trying to do end runs around the profit motive?
If we gave poor countries trade preferences and lowered the barriers on imports from those countries, this would have a generally beneficial effect. It would reduce prices for consumers. But it would adversely affect some North American industries and workers, who would need and deserve adjustment assistance.
Where does that leave us with respect to the profit motive? I think that because human nature is selfish, the profit motive can be a useful incentive. But let’s also recognize that the profit motive nourishes greed, and greed has enormous destructive capacity. So for the same reason—sinful human nature—the profit motive has to be restrained and directed. For example, the profit motive will not lead private industry to clean up the environment. Society as a whole, through the mechanism of government, has to step in and say, “You’ve got to live up to certain standards for the common good.” I think this applies in other areas as well, including trade. That doesn’t mean doing “end runs” around the profit motive, but it does mean keeping the profit motive within bounds so that people and human needs come first. I’m for approaching social issues in a pragmatic way, not with ideological blinders.
11. Doesn’t a lot of the food and other supplies that both public and private agencies send to hungry countries fall into the hands of corrupt or negligent officials and never reach the needy?
Private agencies have a pretty good record. Government aid is more easily abused because, for one thing, it is done on a larger scale. We should work to eliminate such abuse. Abuse, however, is no reason to do nothing. Look at Europe after World War II. A lot of our aid to Europe ended up on the black market, yet that aid saved countless lives and helped to put millions of people back on their feet. So let’s not think that today’s poor countries have a corner on corruption. What about the U. S. grain companies currently under investigation—and some of their officials are under indictment—for having short-weighted grain and falsified the quality of grain that they shipped abroad for years, much of it to hunger-stricken countries?
12. If we try to help hungry countries by paying more for what they have to sell, isn’t it the well-fed who would profit—e.g., the owners of the banana plantations?
I think we should pay fair prices for what we import. That’s number one. Number two, what we can do to insure fairer wages and a more just distribution of income in poor countries is admittedly limited. But we can do some things. We could set a better example in our own country. We could increase our assistance and link it to certain reforms, such as land reform, tax reform, and rural development among impoverished farm families. Steps such as these would help—and they would, incidentally, undercut the appeal of Communism, which thrives on hunger and poverty.
13. We Americans think we’re paying a lot for our food now. How do we compare with people in other developed countries? And don’t we waste a lot?
The average U. S. citizen pays about 18 per cent of his or her income for food. That’s noticeably less than the average in Europe or Japan, about half the average in the Soviet Union, and only a small fraction of the average in poor countries. Waste? Visitors from poor countries and missionaries returning from those countries frequently say that one of the things that shocks them most is our garbage. We are a profligate people.
14. Will changes in our own consumption, such as eating less grain-fed meat, help, or are we just fooling ourselves to think so?
I think that we need to live more sparingly, to consume less and to share more. But eating less grain-fed meat will not by itself transfer any food to hungry people. It might simply mean more grain sold to feed Soviet livestock, or lower prices for U. S. farmers. If you eat less meat and give the money you save to your own denominational relief and development agency or to such groups as CROP or World Vision, that would help. Above all, deal with the public-policy side of the issue. Help insure that this country and others will attend to the necessary mechanisms, such as the establishment of a world food reserve program. Otherwise changes in eating habits may give us the illusion—and only the illusion—of helping.
15. Bread for the World has been supporting the right-to-food resolution, introduced in Congress last year, which asserts that “every person in this country and throughout the world has the right … to a nutritionally adequate diet—and that this right is henceforth to be recognized as a cornerstone of U.S. policy.…” What is this right based upon?
The right to food is based upon the right to life. The Declaration of Independence says “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life.…” Do we mean it? The right to life is stripped of meaning if it does not include the nourishment that is necessary to sustain life. Of course, the right to food should be linked with other rights and responsibilities, such as the right and responsibility to work for those who can and should work.
16. Is “the right to food” compatible with Scripture?
Yes. Biblically the right to food is based upon the extraordinary value that God places on human life. It is anchored in the revelation that we are stewards, not owners, of God’s earth and therefore accountable for the way in which we use its resources either to enhance or to diminish the lives of others. That’s where we start. Then you have to grasp the truly overwhelming case that the Bible makes against tolerating hunger. For example, the Old Testament law gave poor people the right to glean the fields after harvest. It gave them a tithe of the harvest—required every year from each landowner—and spelled out repeatedly the admonition: “You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in the land” (Deut. 15). The Hebrews sang of justice for the poor and hungry in their psalms. The prophets proclaimed it. So did Jesus and the apostles. The Bible doesn’t say in so many words, “People have the right to food,” any more than it says, “People have the right to breathe,” but the intention of God is abundantly clear.
17. If this resolution were enacted, would it mean that hungry nations have the right to demand that we, the well fed, feed them—that we give them the food that is “rightfully” theirs? If not, what positive results could we expect?
The resolution is not a food-handout proposal. It calls for self-help development so that hungry people can work their way out of hunger and become more food-productive. That’s how the forty religious leaders, from Billy Graham to Cardinal Cooke and including the heads of all major denominations, understood the resolution in their appeal to Congress for a favorable vote. They also said that passage of the resolution “might very well be recognized by future historians as a landmark in American history, the one single act that could cast a glow of new light over the bicentennial year and on into the future.” Why? Because it would set the stage for a far more comprehensive approach to hunger than anything we have seen to date. It would help us consider issues such as trade, assistance, military spending, and employment in the light of a clear commitment to reduce hunger. A lot of people in Congress, including Mark Hatfield, the chief Senate sponsor, are convinced that the resolution would provide real leverage.
18. Does our world have the ability to overcome hunger, or has the problem reached the point of no return? Can the land be made to produce enough food to feed all the world’s people?
The world has the capacity to overcome hunger. The question is primarily one of will. Redeemed people should be the first to summon the will, because despair or inaction reflects unbelief. Take the “triage” or “lifeboat” approach to hunger, for example. This approach suggests that we’ve done all we can about hunger, that it hasn’t worked, so there’s nothing left to do but protect our own privileges and let the multiplying population starve. This approach not only fails the test of realism—it’s an excellent way to insure higher birth rates—but more important, it is a morally bankrupt view, alien to the Gospel of Christ. Of course, the world cannot indefinitely sustain a multiplying population, so we have no time to lose in reducing hunger and in furthering other development gains that provide the necessary context for slowing population growth. But we don’t need to despair. We need to summon our own and the nation’s will to help reduce hunger.
19. Can you give us, as individual Christians, some guidelines on giving to fight hunger—not how much to give, but how to put our money to effective use?
The first and most important guideline is that the offering of our citizenship is far more important than the offering of our money. I don’t mean to diminish the crucial role of our church relief and development agencies. We should multiply our contributions for their work. It’s just that one vote of Congress can have the effect of wiping out all the hunger-appeal money that’s channeled through all our churches for an entire year. A recent vote reduced by $200 million an amount that Congress had previously authorized for development assistance. In church we gave to relieve hunger—but by our silence on public policy we locked people more deeply into hunger. No matter what else we do, if we neglect public policy we have a formula for failure. That’s why Bread for the World was formed to be a Christian citizens’ movement on public policy. We invite Christians to offer their citizenship to the Lord for the sake of hungry people. Our time, our personal effort, and the willingness to contact our own members of Congress regarding targeted issues such as the right-to-food resolution—this is needed far more than our money.
20. Hunger around the world is an overwhelming problem. What reason do we have for hope?
Christians root their hope not in human ideologies, in the latest U.N. projections, or in some social scientist’s analysis, but in the God who raised from death our Saviour, Jesus Christ. He calls us to celebrate life in his Kingdom. How do we celebrate the Kingdom? One way is to break bread at his table. Another is to break bread with the hungry. In the John 6 account of the feeding of the multitude, Jesus tells us that these two responses are deeply related to each other. In today’s complex world we break bread with the hungry primarily by working for justice so that they may be fed. This is a work close to the heart of God, and it is a sign of the Kingdom. We can’t always measure the results of this work, nor can we guarantee that the world will be less hungry a dozen years from now. But it is God’s work and it is never wasted. We have been born anew to a living hope, so we do that work with joy.
We must build on our Christian hope. Let me illustrate. I invite people to work against hunger by using their power as citizens to change government policies. There’s often resistance to that kind of response. We’re not used to it. But I believe that we can get many compassionate Christians to use their citizenship for the hungry provided two conditions are met. First, they need to be convinced that there is little chance of reducing hunger without public-policy changes—and that case is increasingly easy to make. Second, they need to sense that such a response is not alien to the Gospel but is an authentic expression of our life in Christ.
- More fromArthur Simon
- Food
- Hunger
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Ronald J. Sider
Institutionalized sin is an offense againstGod and neighbor.
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A group of devout Christians once lived in a small village at the foot of a mountain. A winding, slippery road with hairpin curves and steep precipices without guard rails wound its way up one side of the mountain and down the other. There were frequent accidents, often fatal.
Deeply saddened by the injured people who were regularly pulled from the wrecked cars, the Christians in the village churches decided to act. They pooled their resources and purchased an ambulance so that they could rush the injured to the hospital in the next town. Week after week church volunteers gave faithfully, even sacrificially, of their time to operate the ambulance twenty-four hours a day. They saved many lives, though some victims remained crippled for life.
Then one day a visitor came to town. When he heard about the accidents, he asked why they did not try to get the deadly road over the mountain replaced by a tunnel. Startled at first, the ambulance volunteers quickly pointed out that this approach was unrealistic. The road had been there for a long time. Besides, the mayor would bitterly oppose the idea; he owned a restaurant and service station halfway up the mountain.
The visitor was shocked that the mayor’s economic interests seemed to matter more to these Christians than the many human casualties. Somewhat hesitantly, he suggested that perhaps they should speak to the mayor. After all, he was an elder in the oldest church in town. If he proved stubborn and unconcerned, perhaps they should elect a different mayor.
Now the Christians were shocked. With rising indignation and righteous conviction they informed the young radical that the Church dare not become involved in politics; the Church is called to preach the Gospel and give a cup of cold water.
Perplexed, the visitor left the town, a question churning in his mind: “Is it really more spiritual to operate ambulances to pick up the bloody victims of destructive social structures than to try to change the structures?”
The neglect of the biblical teaching on structural injustice, what we might call institutionalized evil, is one of the most deadly omissions in evangelicalism today. Sinful social institutions and bad economic structures harm thousands and millions of people. Slavery is an example of institutionalized or social evil. So is the Victorian factory system, in which ten-year-old children worked twelve to sixteen hours a day.
In the twentieth century evangelicals have been more concerned with personal sins than with social evils. The Bible, however, condemns both. Speaking through his prophet Amos, the Lord declared: “For three transgressions of Israel and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell … the needy for a pair of shoes … [and] trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted; a man and his father go in to the same maiden, so that my holy name is profaned” (Amos 2:6, 7). Biblical scholars have shown that some kind of legal fiction underlies the phrase “sell … the needy for a pair of shoes.” This mistreatment of the poor was legal! In one breath God condemns both sexual sins and legalized oppression of the poor.
God revealed the same thing through his prophet Isaiah: “Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land. The LORD of hosts has sworn in my hearing: ‘Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.…’ Woe to those who rise early in the morning, that they may run after strong drink, who tarry late into the evening till wine inflames them” (Isa. 5:8–11). God condemns the wealthy who amass large land holdings, doubtless at the poor’s expense, and the drunken.
Some young activists have supposed that as long as they were fighting for the rights of minorities and opposing militarism, they were righteous, regardless of how sexually promiscuous they were. Some of their elders, on the other hand, have supposed that because they did not smoke, drink, or lie (though they might stretch the truth a little for income-tax purposes), they were morally upright, even though they lived in segregated communities and received stock dividends from companies that exploit the poor. God, however, has shown in his revelation that personal and social ethics are equally important. Robbing your workers of a fair wage is just as sinful as robbing a bank. Voting for a racist because he is a racist is just as sinful as sleeping with your neighbor’s spouse.
God reveals his displeasure at evil institutions in Amos 5:10–15. Israel’s court sessions were held at the city gate. “They hate him who reproves in the gate [in the court].… I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who … take a bribe, and turn aside the needy in the gate.… Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate.” In other words, get rid of the corrupt legal system that allows the wealthy to buy their way out of trouble and does not give legal satisfaction to the poor.
And it is not only dishonest and corrupt individuals who stand condemned; God clearly revealed that laws themselves are sometimes an abomination to him. Consider Psalm 94:20–23—
Can wicked rulers be allied with thee,
who frame mischief by statute?They band together against the life of the righteous,
and condemn the innocent to death,But the LORD has become my stronghold,
and my God the rock of my refuge.He will bring back on them their iniquity
and wipe them out for their wickedness;
the LORD our God will wipe them out.
God wants his people to know that wicked governments “frame mischief by statute.” Or as the New English Bible puts it, they contrive evil “under cover of law.” God proclaims the same word through the prophet Isaiah:
Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees
and the writers who keep writing oppression,to turn aside the needy from justice
and to rob the poor of my people of their right.…What will you do on the day of punishment
with the storm which will come from afar?To whom will you flee for help,
and where will you leave your wealth?Nothing remains but to crouch among the prisoners
or fall among the slain.For all this [God’s] anger is not turned away
and his hand is stretched out still [Isa. 10:1–4].
It is quite possible to work oppression legally. Then, as now, legislators devised unjust laws and the bureaucracy (the scribes or writers) carried out the injustice. But God shouts a divine Woe against rulers who write unjust laws and unfair legal decisions. God will wipe out wicked rulers who frame mischief by statute.
Social, institutionalized evil can be so subtle that one can be entangled in it almost unawares. God inspired his prophet Amos to utter some of the harshest words in Scripture against some cultured, upper-class women of his day: “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan … who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to [your] husbands, ‘Bring, that we may drink.’ The Lord GOD has sworn by his holiness that, behold, the days are coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks” (Amos 4:1, 2). These women probably had no contact with the impoverished peasants. They may never have realized that their lovely clothes and spirited parties were possible only because of the sweat and tears of toiling peasants. In fact, they may even have been kind to individual peasants they met. Perhaps they gave them “Christmas baskets” once a year. But God called these privileged women cows. They profited from social evil; hence they were personally and individually guilty before God.
If one is a member of a privileged class that profits from social evil and if one does nothing to try to change things, one stands guilty before God. Social evil is just as sinful as personal evil. Over and over again, God declared through his prophets that he would destroy the nation of Israel both because of its idolatry and because of its mistreatment of the poor.
The both/and is crucial. We dare not become so preoccupied with horizontal issues of social justice that we neglect vertical evils such as idolatry. Modern Christians seem to have an irrepressible urge to fall into one extreme or the other.
The following passages from Amos are similar to many other passages in Scripture: “Because you trample upon the poor, and take from him exactions of wheat, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not dwell in them …” (5:11). “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying, ‘When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain? And the sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale … and deal deceitfully with false balances, that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the refuse of the wheat’” (8:4–6). “Behold, the eyes of the Lord GOD are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from the surface of the earth …” (9:8). In fact, within a generation after the time of the prophet Amos, the northern kingdom of Israel was wiped out—forever.
God works in history to destroy evil social structures and sinful societies where wealthy classes grow richer from the sweat, toil, and grief of the poor. Probably the most powerful statement of this fact is in the New Testament. In the Magnificat, Mary glorifies the Lord who “has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away” (Luke 1:52, 53).
What does this biblical teaching mean for us affluent Westerners? Are we exploiting the poor of the world in the way the wealthy did in Amos’s day?
The answer, I think, is yes. Stan Mooneyham, the president of World Vision, speaks of the “stranglehold which the developed West has kept on the economic throats of the Third World.” He says: “At the heart of the problem of poverty and hunger are human systems which ignore, mistreat and exploit man.… If the hungry are to be fed … some of the systems will require drastic adjustments while others will have to be scrapped altogether” (What Do You Say to a Hungry World?, Word, 1975, pp. 128, 117).
It would be wrong to suggest that 210 million Americans bear sole responsibility for all the hunger and injustice in today’s world. All the rich, developed countries are directly involved. So too are the wealthy elite in poor countries. Ancient social patterns, inherited values, and cherished philosophical perspectives in countries like India also contribute to poverty.
But surely our first responsibility is to pluck the beam from our own eye. We need to understand and change what we are doing wrong. How then are we a part of sinful structures that contribute to world hunger?
First, and most important, the industrialized nations have carefully manipulated the patterns of international trade for their own economic advantage. Eighty per cent of all money that moves from rich to poor nations moves through international trade. Most of the exports of the poor countries are unmanufactured primary products. The prices of these have fluctuated widely in the past twenty-five years. Industrialized nations have managed to increase the price of manufactured goods that they sell to developing nations while at the same time they have held down the prices of primary products exported by the poor nations. Between 1950 and 1970, the value of primary products and raw materials declined relative to manufactured goods and other high-technology items.
A few examples will illustrate the effect. In 1954, it cost Brazil fourteen bags of coffee to buy one U.S. jeep. By 1968, that jeep cost forty-five bags of coffee. The government of Tanzania reports that one tractor cost five tons of sisal in 1963; in 1970, the same tractor cost ten tons of sisal. In 1960, a rubber-exporting country could purchase six tractors with twenty-five tons of rubber. In 1975, the same rubber would buy only two tractors.
In 1973 and 1974 there was a substantial increase in the prices of raw materials exported by developing countries. But it was short-lived. The prices then fell drastically. Overall, the Overseas Development Council’s 1976 Agenda for Action estimated that “the purchasing power of primary commodities … is estimated to have fallen by about 13 per cent during 1975.” The result of the lower prices and declining purchases (because of worldwide recession) was that non-oil-producing poor countries lost $8 billion in 1975, the report says.
While poor countries were losing money because of the declining prices of their exports, the United States was making a handsome profit. Even in 1972, before grain prices tripled, the United States had a $1 billion surplus of trade with poor countries. (We exported $16.3 billion of goods to developing countries and purchased only $15.3 billion from them.) But then the price of our grain exports tripled. In 1974, the United States earned $6.6 billion from farm exports shipped to poor countries. In 1972, the amount had been only $1.6 billion. The extra $5 billion resulted from the tripling of grain prices. Because of the low prices paid for their raw materials and primary products and the high prices charged for our manufactured goods and grain, we earned a total net profit of $5.5 billion from countries where one billion people are starving or malnourished.
Certain patterns of international trade are unjust, and we in the rich nations benefit from this injustice. God has said that he abhors structural evil. Do we?
International trade is not the only way in which we are implicated in structural evil. The rich nations use a very unfair share of the earth’s limited, non-renewable resources. Is it just for the 5 per cent of the world’s people who live in the United States to consume approximately 33 per cent of the world’s limited, non-renewable energy and minerals each year? We use 42 per cent of total annual aluminum output, 33 per cent of all copper, 44 per cent of all coal, 33 per cent of all petroleum, and 63 per cent of all natural gas. Is it just, then, to demand an ever expanding economy and an ever higher standard of living?
Our eating patterns are a third area where we are caught in institutionalized sin. Dr. Georg Borgstrom, an internationally known professor of nutrition at Michigan State, pointedly underscores our involvement. He shows that we ought to measure world population not merely by the number of human beings but in terms of the total “feeding burden.” When livestock as well as people are counted, one discovers that spaceship earth already has, not 4 billion, but 19 billion inhabitants (“population equivalents”) (see his Hungry Planet, Macmillan, 1967; I am drawing also from a lecture he gave in September, 1974). The feeding burden of the United States is accordingly not 210 million but 1.6 billion. India has three times as many people as the United States has. But when one adds in its livestock, India has only 1.2 billion population equivalents.
Many affluent persons deplore the rapid population growth in the poor countries. And in fact during 1972–1974, the developing world added 140 million persons while the rich countries increased by a mere 22 million persons. But that, Borgstrom shows, is only a part of the total picture. When one figures in the additional livestock added in those two years, then the rich world increased the world’s “population equivalents” by 404 million. The poor majority added 280 million population equivalents when livestock are counted, and one-fourth of its livestock increase was for the export of meat to the rich world. Adjusting the figures, Borgstrom concludes: “The satisfied world, one-third of the human family, has in these two years in effect added 463 million population equivalents to the globe’s strained feeding burden as against the poor world, two-thirds of the human family, contributing 264 million.”
It is simply unfair to say that the population explosion in the poor countries is the sole cause of widespread hunger in the world. Our ever increasing affluence is also right at the heart of the problem. It is not just that North Americans consume five times as much grain (counting that fed to the animals they eat) as most Asians do. It is not just that each day we eat twice as much protein as our bodies need. It is not just that we consume so many extra calories that millions of us are overweight. We can do all these foolish, unjust, greedy things in part because the poor world exports vast quantities of food each year to the rich world!
Because Canada and the United States export huge amounts of grain, North Americans tend to assume that they grow all their own food plus large quantities for export. But the picture is not so simple. For example, the United States is the world’s largest importer of beef, and it imports large quantities of fish also. “The United States alone imports about twice as much fish, primarily in the form of feed for livestock, as do all the poor countries combined,” asserts Arthur Simon in Bread for the World. Two-thirds of the total world catch of tuna comes to the United States, and we use one-third of that imported tuna to feed our cats. We import beef not just from Australia and New Zealand but also from many countries in Latin America—approximately one million cattle every year from Mexico, for instance.
Honduras is a poor Central American country where one-third of the people earn less than $30 a year. Despite widespread poverty, Honduras exports large amounts of beef to the United States. The United States recently raised the import quota of beef from Honduras from 27.8 to 34.8 million pounds. Beef for export is grown by a tiny wealthy elite (around 0.3 per cent of the total population) who own more than one-fourth of all the arable land.
A struggle rages in Honduras. The poor peasants want more land. The powerful Honduran Cattle Farmers’ Federation, which represents the wealthy farmer, naturally objects. The rich farmers want to continue to grow beef for Americans.
The infant mortality rate in Honduras is six times that of the United States. The World Bank indicates that malnutrition is either the primary cause of or a major contributor to the death of 50–75 per cent of all one-to four-year-old children who die in Latin America. Who’s responsible for those dying children? The wealthy Hondurans who want to protect their affluence? The American companies that work closely with the Honduran elite? You and I who eat the beef needed by hundreds of thousands of hungry children in Honduras?
Are not our eating patterns intricately interlocked with very destructive economic structures?
International trade patterns are unjust in many ways. An affluent minority devours most of the earth’s non-renewable resources. Food consumption patterns are grossly lopsided. Unless you have retreated to some isolated valley where you produce everything you use, you benefit from unjust structures that contribute directly to the hunger of a billion unhappy neighbors.
The conclusion is not that all our international trade and investment in poor countries is immoral. Nor is it that the U.S. economy would be destroyed if these injustices were corrected. Only 5 per cent of the total U.S. income comes from abroad. Foreign trade makes up only about 4 per cent of the U.S. Gross National Product. Rather, the conclusion is that injustice has become embedded in some of our fundamental economic institutions. If they are faithful to Scripture, biblical Christians will dare to call such structures sinful and work to change them.
By this point, the reader probably wishes that international economics were less complex. Or that faithful discipleship in our time had less to do with such a complicated subject. But in fact to give the cup of cold water effectively in the Age of Hunger often requires some understanding of international economic structures. Perhaps the story of bananas can help to focus these complex issues.
Have you ever wondered why apples grown in a neighboring orchard or state often cost more than bananas imported from another continent? American newspapers reported in April, 1975, that United Brands, one of three huge U.S. companies that grow and import our bananas, had arranged to pay $2.5 million (though only $1.25 million was actually paid) in bribes to top government officials in Honduras. Why? To get them to agree to cut by more than 50 per cent a proposed export tax on bananas. To increase profits for a U.S. company (and, incidentally, to lower banana prices for you and me), the Honduran officials agreed, for a price, to cut drastically the tax revenue desperately needed by its poor masses.
The daily newspapers, however, did not tell the whole story. In March, 1974, several banana-producing countries in Central America agreed to join together to demand a $1 tax on every case of bananas exported. Why? Because banana prices have not increased in the last twenty inflation-ridden years. Producers were getting no more for their bananas then they had in the early fifties. But their costs for manufactured goods had constantly escalated. As a result, the real purchasing power of exported bananas had declined by 60 per cent in that time span. At least half of the export income in countries like Honduras and Panama comes from bananas. No wonder they are poor. No wonder one-third of the inhabitants of Honduras earn less than $30 a year.
What did the banana companies do when the exporting countries put this $1-per-case tax on bananas? They refused to pay. Since three companies control 90 per cent of the marketing and distribution of bananas, they had powerful leverage. In Honduras, for instance, the banana company allowed 145,000 crates of bananas to rot at the dock. One after another the poor countries gave in. Costa Rica finally settled for $.25 a crate, and Panama, for $.35. Honduras, thanks to the large bribe, eventually agreed to a $.30 tax.
Why are bananas in North American and European supermarkets usually cheaper than apples? We profit, often unwittingly, from very unjust patterns of international trade.
The words of the apostle James seem to speak to the situation: “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you.… Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you.… You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter” (Jas. 5:1–5).
What should be our response? For biblical Christians, the response to sin is repentance. Unconsciously, at least to a degree, we have become entangled in a complex web of institutionalized sin. God is merciful. He forgives. But only if we repent. And biblical repentance involves more than a hasty tear and a weekly liturgical confession. Biblical repentance involves conversion, a change of behavior. The One who stands ready to forgive us of our sinful involvement in economic injustice offers us his grace to begin living a new, transformed life of identification with the poor and oppressed.
Institutionalized sin is not just an inconvenience or a tragedy for our neighbors. It is an outrage against the Almighty Lord of the Universe. We who live in affluent nations have profited from systemic injustice—sometimes only half knowing, sometimes only half caring, and always half hoping not to know. We are guilty of an offense against God and neighbor.
But that is not God’s last word to us. The one who points a finger is the one who died for us sinners.
John Newton was the captain of a slave ship in the eighteenth century. A brutal, callous man, he played a central role in a horrendous system that fed tens of thousands to the sharks and delivered millions to a living death. But one day he saw his sin and repented. His well-known hymn overflows with joy and gratitude for God’s acceptance and forgiveness.
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
We are participants in a system that dooms even more people to agony and death than the slave system did. But God’s grace will also teach our hearts to fear—and then to rest and trust. And it will not stop there. God’s grace will flood our lives with a new dynamic to work for less unjust social structures.
Ronald J. Sider is associate professor of history and religion at Messiah College (Temple University campus), Philadelphia. He is a fellow for 1976 of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. This article is from a chapter in Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study, to be published by InterVarsity Press.
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