Page 5968 – Christianity Today (2024)

“I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and, though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming.”

This is a part of the thirteen principles of the Jewish creed recited at the end of the daily morning service. “Messiah” is the Hebrew Mashiach, meaning “the anointed one” (in Greek, “Christos”), a title of honor given to the kings of Israel to signify that they were consecrated by God by anointing and, therefore, holy. However, the designation the Messiah refers only to the long awaited Redeemer of the Jewish people.

Except for the belief in God, nothing has occupied the Jewish mind more during the last 2,000 years than the coming of the Messiah. The daily prayers in the synagogue and at home revolve around this hope. While it has not yet been fulfilled, the very hope has been a temporary substitute for the Messiah, a binding conviction that saved the Jews from extinction. All through their exile, the Messiah has been the remedy for all their troubles and ills.

This hope has found its noblest expression in their prayerbook—in the daily prayers, the prayers of the Sabbath and festivals, and others. All bear witness to the intensity of this longing. Some of these prayers do not expressly mention the Messiah; they speak only of “redemption.” But all Jews traditionally have known that the “redemption” will be accomplished by the Messiah.

The constant yearning for the Messiah is expressed not only in the liturgy of the daily services of Orthodox Jews but also on various other occasions. For example, at the after-meal benediction that follows the service of a circumcision there is a remarkable passage, suggestive of the mystery of the Messiah:

May the All-merciful, regardful of the merit of them that are akin by the blood of circumcision, send us His Mashiach, walking in His integrity, to give good tidings and consolation to the people that is scattered and dispersed among the peoples. May the All-merciful send us the righteous priest who remains withdrawn in concealment, until a throne bright as the sun and radiant as the diamond shall be prepared for him, the prophet who covered his face with his mantle, and wrapped himself therein, with whom is God’s covenant of life and of peace.

At the time of Christ, the Jews awaited the Messiah as the one who would deliver them from Roman oppression. The Temple, with its sacrificial service, was intact. The Romans did not interfere in the Jews’ religious affairs, and the messianic hope was basically for a national liberation. But even then, to many Jews, the Messiah was also to be a Redeemer of the souls of men, both Jew and Gentile.

Thus, when John the Baptist proclaimed that Jesus was the Lamb of God who bears the sins of the world (John 1:29, 36), he evidently expressed the hope and expectation of those around him. Great numbers of them came to be baptized.

After the destruction of the Temple and the cessation of the priestly rites, the messianic hope in general was for one who would bring the Jews back to the land of their fathers—the “Holy Land,” the “Promised Land”—and there restore the Davidic kingdom. But, as expressed in the liturgy, the hope was mainly to rebuild the Temple and restore the sacrifices and subsequently establish the Kingdom of “Shadai,” the Almighty. The need for reconciliation with God by full obedience (including restoration of the sacrifices) is evident in the liturgy more than the yearning for national physical redemption.

While all Orthodox Jews believe “with perfect faith” in the ultimate coming of the Messiah, few have a clear conception of the Messiah’s identity and task. Is he of divine nature, or mortal, or both? Is he to redeem the Jewish people only, or all “the families of the earth”? Is the purpose of his mission to bring the Jews back to their ancestral home, and that only in order to let them live in freedom and peace? Or is his purpose mainly to reconcile them with God through their keeping of the Law, based largely on prescribed sacrifices? When will he come? And where is he now?

According to some traditional authorities, the Messiah is similar in both identity and mission to the Christian Messiah: he is supernatural, and the purpose of his coming is the salvation of all mankind.

Some rabbis, among them the great Maimonides, thought that the Messiah would be a person of flesh and blood, but very wise and mighty, who would free the Jewish people from foreign yoke and provide them with a comfortable life. Thus they would be able to devote their time to the study of the Torah and the observance of its laws.

The Jewish people as a whole believe in the supernatural personality of the Messiah, a demigod who by some miracles will inaugurate a state of peace and happiness for the Jews, when God will provide them with all necessities and luxuries of life. This comfortable life in the “Age of the Messiah” is pictured in the Talmud as a wonder world of ease. For example, Rabban Gamaliel says that the soil in Israel will produce cakes and silk garments, the trees will bear fruit continuously, and the Jewish women would give birth to children every day (Talmud, Shabbath 30b).

Some see this era of the Messiah as paradise. Although the Jewish paradise is not as carnal as the Muslim paradise, which provides believers with beautiful maidens, it too offers an abundance of pleasures, such as sumptuous banquets where the meat of the wild ox and of the Leviathan will be served, accompanied by the marvelous, delicious wine preserved for the Jews since the six days of creation. All this bliss they consider will be only a just recompense for the suffering and martyrdom they had to endure during their long exile among their cruel enemies.

Pious and learned Jews have not shared this materialistic view of paradise. They have believed that the reward of righteous Jews will consist of sitting in company with all the righteous men, all crowned and feasting their eyes on the radiant glory of the Shekinah, the presence of God.

There is no consensus about the paradise. It is generally understood that it has been in existence since the creation of the world. It was Adam’s original home, from which he was expelled after his fall from grace. Every Jew is believed to have a share in this place of bliss after death and after some expiation in Gehenna, according to the number and gravity of sins committed in this life.

It is also generally understood that after the coming of the Messiah, the dead will be brought back to life and there will come the “Day of Judgment.” This doctrine is shrouded in vagueness. The rabbis have given no clear idea of this judgment day.

Vague also is the idea of a suffering Messiah. While Christianity has a clear idea of a Christ who had first to suffer and die for the atonement of the world and then return to earth as a triumphant King over all mankind, the Jewish sages who rejected the Messiahship of Jesus could not explain the apparent discrepancy between the Bible passages describing the Messiah as suffering (as in Isaiah 53) and those describing him as a victorious king, as was expected by the Jews. So they devised two different Messiahs: the Messiah, son of David, and the Messiah, son of Joseph. The son of Joseph would suffer, be defeated, and die, while the son of David would be the real Messiah as expected.

In the liturgy, the suffering Messiah is mentioned in a special Yom Kippur prayer. However, this idea of two Messiahs is now generally unknown.

In answer to the question of when the Messiah would come, a matter that has greatly occupied the Jews, the rabbis devised theories, various speculations, and calculations based on some passages of the Bible (such as Daniel 11). In time, some of the rabbis, fearing the despair likely when such calculations proved false, pronounced a curse upon those who speculated upon the date of the Messiah’s arrival (see Sanhedrin 97b). It says in Kethuboth 111a that two of the conditions that God made with Israel were that they should not be importunate about the end of time and should not reveal it.

It has been generally believed that God has set a date for the Messiah’s coming, and that this may even be today. But he may arrive before the appointed date, it is thought, if all the people repent of their sins, or if they are in utter despair, or when they keep two sabbaths. That he may come “today” they infer from Psalm 95:7, which is quoted also by Paul in Hebrews 3:7. And so he is expected every day, as they repeat daily at the end of the morning service.

The Jews generally deny that Jesus is the Messiah. But one may ask them, If he is not, who is?

Since the Roman conquest of the land of Israel various persons have claimed to be the Messiah and have been proved false, often after their disastrous effects. How will any new Messiah establish his identity? How will he be able to prove he is of the House of David and of the Tribe of Judah? No Jew today can trace his ancestry back beyond two or three hundred years.

The great Maimonides tells how to identify the Messiah, but what he says has inherent problems. According to him, the claimant to Messiahship will be able to prove the validity of his claim by bringing the Jewish people back to their ancestral home. He will rebuild the Temple, restore the sacrifices, force the Jews to keep all the laws of the Torah, fight God’s wars, subdue all enemies of the Jewish people, and so on. After he has achieved all that, he will be the true Messiah.

Now, all these achievements could be performed only during a period of many years. How will the Jews, with their various sects and parties, accept this person upon “credit” (that he will in due course perform these deeds), and how will he be able to persuade the various conflicting groups to go to Israel and keep the Torah, including its teachings on sacrifices and on full submission to rabbinic authority? One may doubt whether many Jews living comfortably in free countries will leave home and business, go to Israel, and wait till a certain person (who has suddenly appeared and claimed he is the Messiah) proves that his claim is legitimate.

If Jesus is not the Messiah, there is not and cannot be one, and the messianic hopes held through thousands of years have been founded on legend, superstition, and idolatry. However, those Jews who believe in their Torah may be comforted in the belief that their Redeemer liveth and that he is Jesus, the true Messiah of Israel.

SUNWARDS

Drift, wheel, then swim

hard against that torrent,

your river of air, and climb

cascades of wind, my salmon,

my creaky bird, and know

I ache, I creak with you.

I fly too—higher,

farther, faster than you.

But how? Like a louse on a sparrow,

a carried thing. So now

here by this tidal river

I stretch these twigs of arms

and reach for the muscled wings

that carry your white glint

sunwards. To soar on my own,

straining, wind-whipped, aching

toward … Not that sun.

Another.

FRANCIS MAGUIRE

The Essence Of Christian Action

This faith that we discuss is all action. Never make the mistake, however, of letting it take on the form of mere activism, that is, action simply for the purpose of promoting the name of Christianity. When I speak of the Gospel of Action, I mean redemptive action aimed at bringing the good news of salvation to all people everywhere. All activity in personal life and in church life must be judged by the relevance to the Gospel. It is not enough for the rummage sale, the bazaar, and the church suppers to be held in the name of a good cause. The fact that the end product of a church activity will bring more money to the treasury does not exempt it from the importance of being in itself an agency of love, joy, peace, and mutual helpfulness. In many churches such activities have come into disfavor because they have often been used as vehicles through which, in the name of a good cause, people could push each other around. This, then, is an even worse kind of activism—more dishonest than when the same thing happens for the sake of some worldly goal.

The Gospel of Action is the kind of activity that brings the good news of Christ to people right here and now. The real work of the Christian is to know Christ and to make Him known by those practical, constructive actions that show forth His love and His assurance of the abundant life He has promised. “Church work” activism is one thing and the real work of the church is something else.—C. W. FRANKE in Defrost Your Frozen Assets (copyright 1969 by Word, Inc.; used by permission).

On July 20, 1969, man landed on the moon, symbolizing the triumph of modern science. That exciting event added new and compelling evidence for the faith in science that prevails in our world. But the space adventure offers also an opportunity to reflect on another faith, one that nourished science in its infancy and helped it to its present maturity. One of the most magnificent expressions of this faith is found in Psalm 8, the text placed on the moon during man’s first landing:

O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who has set thy glory above the heavens.… When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.… O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!

This psalm suggests three essential contributions of biblical faith to the success of modern science: an affirmative attitude toward the material world, a conviction that the universe is ordered, and a recognition of man’s responsibility to exercise dominion over creation.

1. The first of these contributions to a scientific outlook involves a new evaluation of matter growing out of the faith that the material world is good and is worthy of detailed and devoted study. The psalmist declares, “How excellent is thy name in all the earth,” and elsewhere affirms that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Without this faith there is no basis for belief in the essential goodness of nature. It is a necessary ingredient of the experimental tradition in science.

The lack of experimentation was one of the weaknesses in Greek science, which often viewed the material level of reality with disdain and concentrated on the realm of ideas. A similar attitude exists in Hindu thought: matter is an illusion obscuring a deeper level of reality.

By contrast, the Christian doctrine of the incarnation is that God revealed himself in flesh in the person of Jesus, and thus affirmed the essential goodness of the material world. St. Paul acknowledges that God has given us all things richly to enjoy and that by Christ all things consist. Although medieval thinking was hindered by the Greek tendency to view matter as evil, it eventually began to recognize and even celebrate the goodness of the created world, as for example in the Franciscan tradition. This affirmative attitude toward nature is a necessary prerequisite for the spread of natural science.

2. In addition to this attitude, the scientific revolution was supported by a new emphasis on order. This conviction develops from the faith that the universe has a design in which patterns can be discovered. The psalmist recognizes this order in creation and compares it with the disorder so characteristic in the affairs of men. He confesses to God, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

The biblical doctrine of creation provides a foundation for theoretical science that was only partially understood by the Greeks. In Christian thought, regularity is immanent in the universe, while for the Greeks nature was a mere imitation of pure rational forms. Thomistic theology expanded on this idea with its emphasis on the intelligibility of nature and thus contributed to the growing faith in the possibility of science. This faith has become such an integral part of our Western culture that it is easily taken for granted. During three years of teaching in the Middle East I was surprised to observe the disordered patterns of behavior that often emerge in an Islamic culture. People there had little conception of waiting in line and would crowd together, everyone attempting to be first. Driving a car was always exciting and filled with the unexpected. In fact, a conscious effort is made in Islamic art to introduce flaws in artistic designs as a recognition that only Allah is perfect.

The fruit of this faith in an ordered universe is forcefully demonstrated by Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which is probably the single most important concept in the history of science. It immediately provided an explanation for phenomena as diverse as falling objects and orbiting planets. In fact, it is the basis for all the calculations required for the complex maneuvers of the Apollo moon mission. In the three hundred years since Newton’s original conception, only the development of adequate technology has stood between man and the moon. But technology itself is an expression of faith also.

3. Perhaps the most important factor in the growth of science and technology has been a new expectation of progress. The faith that progress is both possible and important is based on the first command given by God to man, to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” The psalmist expresses this mandate in the words, “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.”

The idea of progress inherent in applied science has its roots in the Augustinian teaching that history has a purpose culminating in the second coming of Christ. The result is a linear view of time instead of the cyclic view common to most other civilizations and cultures. If history is not just an endless process of repetition, then real progress is possible.

This idea is also supported by the Christian doctrine of vocation, which teaches that man has a responsibility to contribute toward the general welfare. The Protestant ethic explicitly endorsed the study of nature for the glory of God and the good of man. In marked contrast to this Christian emphasis on man’s responsibility is the fatalism of Islamic religion and culture. The Arabic expression “in’ shallah,” meaning “if Allah wills,” is the usual response to problem situations. Most of the hospitals, universities, and other charitable institutions in the Middle East are products of Christian missionary efforts over the last one hundred years. In fact, current technological progress in non-Western countries appears to be dependent on a process of secularization that also can be traced to biblical roots. Perhaps one of the most urgent questions of our day is whether this progress can continue unabated without the faith that initiated it.

The growth of science that has resulted from these new attitudes toward nature has given man an unprecedented control over his environment, with many salutary effects. However, his ability to control has often exceeded his wisdom, and the results have been exploitation, pollution, and destruction. Man’s dominion over nature must be exercised with a sense of Christian responsibility guided by the moral and ethical concerns of his biblical heritage.

Whether or not science continues to draw support and guidance from its Christian sources, it is at least clear that such resources are available from biblical faith. In this faith is light to see that the world is good and beautiful. Here too is the conviction that the Creator has ordered his creation as a revelation of himself. And here is motivation and energy to seek the good of man and the glory of God.

A distinguished visitor was speaking through an interpreter to a Korean audience. “What is patriotism?” he asked, and paused dramatically. “What is patriotism?” he asked again. Then, rising to his climax, he shouted, “Patriotism is love of country.” Even in English that is not too impressive a climax, but in Korean it was a disaster. For the word “patriotism” in Korean is literally “love of country,” and what he had asked the interpreter to do was to cry dramatically, “What is love of country? What is love of country? Love of country is love of country.”

“What is evangelism?” I ask. And I answer, quite correctly, “Evangelism is evangelizing. It is preaching the evangel—with a power, with a purpose, and with a strategy.” But this really does not mean very much until we face up to the more basic question: If evangelism is preaching the evangel, what is the evangel?

The first answer to that question is a six-letter Anglo-Saxon word. In their direct, no-nonsense way, the Anglo-Saxons gave the Greek word its exact equivalent in their own language: “good spiel” or “gospel.” How much more common sense they had than some of us. “Gospel” has a nice pious ring to it—how we love it, but we forget that it probably means as little to the average man today as the Greek “evangel” did to the Anglo-Saxons. Today’s word is not “evangel,” not even “gospel”; for modern man the word is “good news.” It is a good lesson in evangelism to note that when the American Bible Society called its latest edition of the New Testament just that—Good News for Modern Man—it had a runaway best-seller on its hands in less than a month. The “evangel” is not given to be hidden behind the religious jargon of ecclesiastical Greek or Latin or even Anglo-Saxon. The evangel is the good news.

It is what the angel said at Bethlehem: “Don’t be afraid; I have good news for you …” (Luke 2:10, NEB). It is what Jesus preached from village to village in Galilee: “the good news of the Kingdom of God” (Luke 8:1). It was what brought Paul to his feet unafraid before the kings and governors of Rome—an unprepossessing little man from a conquered race, but “not ashamed of the good news,” as he said.

There are three key biblical proclamations of the good news: the angelic, the messianic, and the apostolic. Any biblical definition of evangel must encompass all three.

1. The apostolic evangel. Paul said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel [the evangel, the good news].” But why wasn’t he? He was a Roman citizen, Writing to Rome. Was not the Gospel—full as it was of “nonsense about love and meekness and humility and turning the other cheek, and a god who died like a criminal!”—a ridiculous thing for a Roman to be preaching? Rubbish for slaves or for women, not for self-sufficient, world-conquering Romans. That was Rome’s attitude. Its standard was the eagle, its symbols the ax and the short sword. Not the cross. Rome wanted victory, not sacrifice; power, not meekness.

So Paul stood up and said to Rome, “The good news I have for you is power.” This is the first characteristic of the apostolic evangel. The evangel is power. “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation.” As a creedal Calvinist with propositional theological tendencies, I find that I often need this explosive reminder that there is a dynamic and a movement in the good news that will not suffer the compressions and containments of any creed, however true. It is precisely because the evangel is, first of all, power, that evangelism, which is the proclaiming of the evangel, can never be equated, as some would have it, with the cold, clear transmission of orthodoxy to the unbeliever.

This is not to minimize the indispensable nature of truth. But in the Bible, evangelism begins with power because the evangel is power. Not only with Paul in Romans. Consider also the significant sequence in the great commissioning scene that opens the Acts of the Apostles. How does Jesus make his first evangelists? First, says Luke, “he showed himself alive” to them “by many infallible proofs” (1:3). But that was not enough. The “infallible proofs” did not make them evangelists. They knew they were still not prepared, and asked for more information. But Jesus rebuked them. Knowledge does not make evangelists, either. “It is not for you to know …,” Jesus said (1:7). The evangel is not inside information about “times and seasons”; it is not “infallible proofs.” It is power. Jesus said, “You shall receive power … and be my witnesses” (1:8).

The power of the Spirit received, the power of a personal encounter with God—this is the good news of the evangel. So Paul, remembering a cataclysmic moment on the road to Damascus, says, “I am not ashamed of the good news, for it is the power of God unto salvation.” The good news, however, is not always cataclysmic, for experiences will differ. With Wesley at Aldersgate the experience was only a warming of the heart. The good news is not the experience but the power. It is “good news of salvation,” says Paul, and that, as Barclay remarks in his commentary on that phrase in Ephesians 1:13, “is news of that power which wins us forgiveness from past sin, strength for the future to conquer sin. It is good news of victory.”

This is heady stuff. It is as exciting as the taste of new wine. No old bottles will be able to contain it. I like and I preach the old words—ransom, justification, satisfaction, reconciliation. They are all true and biblical. But they are essentially theological, and it can be as much of a mistake to confuse theology with evangelism as to mistake social service for evangelism. The word for the evangel—the word for today—is power. Not black power, or student power, or flower power, but God power. “I am not ashamed of the good news, for it is the power of God.” The evangel is power.

But, secondly, the evangel is fact. Having said so emphatically that the evangel is power, we must add quickly, and just as emphatically, that the evangel is also fact, and that it is the business of theology to help us distinguish fact from fiction in the evangel. When the Reformation was being criticized for lack of saints’ bones and wonders and miracles, Calvin dryly remarked that Satan also has his miracles, “to delude the ignorant and inexperienced.” “Magicians and enchanters have always been famous for miracles,” he observed.

Evangelism may be power, and not theology, but the same apostle who was so excited about the power of the Gospel, as he began his letter to the Romans, goes on in that same epistle to write twelve of the most closely reasoned theological chapters in all of Scripture. Paul was the greatest evangelist in history not only because he had power but because he had learning. So many charismatic movements fail at this point. They speak with the power of the Spirit, so they say. How strange that through them the Spirit does not say anything theologically worth remembering.

I said before that “infallible proofs” do not make evangelists—power does. That is true. But if the evangelist’s evangel is not true to the facts, it is not good news at all. It is only wishful thinking, or false propaganda, which is even worse. A few months after we had been overrun by the Communists in Peking, I heard of a slogan they had posted in huge characters across the walls of a bookstore in Tientsin. It was a warning, I suppose, against what they called “dangerous thoughts.” The slogan was this: “Any fact which is not in accord with revolutionary theory is not a true fact.” Without tongue in cheek, the Christian can say: “Any preaching which is not in accord with the facts is not the true evangel.” “What the apostles preached,” says James Stewart, “was neither a philosophy of life nor a theory of redemption. They preached events. They anchored their Gospel to history” (Thine Is the Kingdom, p. 29).

The classic apostolic capsule of the facts of the evangel is in First Corinthians, chapter fifteen. There Paul writes: “Do you remember the terms in which I preached the gospel to you …? First and foremost, I handed on to you the facts …” (vv. 2, 3). The facts he chooses as his summary of the good news are the two most fundamental facts of all existence: death and life. In Christian symbolism they are portrayed by the cross and the crown. There is no evangel without both these facts.

a. The first fact of the good news is death. There is this much at least to be said for Paul: he tells it like it is. Someone has remarked that he was truly “called to be an ambassador,” but he was no diplomat. He breaks all the rules of modern preaching and begins with the last thing men want to hear about—death.

But where else can we honestly begin a world like ours? The one big brutal fact of modern life is death. Some, like the secular existentialists, say that death is the only really meaningful fact, for life has lost its meaning. That is not true, but death is at least an inescapable fact.

If the good news must begin with the facts, perhaps death is as good a fact as any with which to begin. It is a fact man had better learn to recognize and accept. But I must confess that there have been times when I thought Paul was a little too blunt about it. I have been tempted to play more lightly with the word evangel. I wanted to cry out that it means “good news,” not bad. I wanted to preach of the love of God, not of sin and death.

My intentions were good. And I was partly right. More right, I think, than those evangelists of doom who enjoy preaching about sin and death and all the fires of hell. It was D. L. Moody, a better evangelist than they, who said, “Don’t preach about hell if you can do it without tears.”

Yes, my heart was in the right place, but I was wrong if I thought I could leave death out of the Gospel, for death is the first fact of the good news, says Paul.

But where is the good news in death? Chesterton tells of standing on the Mount of Olives with Father Waggett, looking down at Calvary. “Well, anyhow,” said Father Waggett unexpectedly, “it must be obvious to anybody that the doctrine of the Fall is the only cheerful view of human life.” Chesterton was startled for a moment, until he reflected that it is the only cheerful view because it is the only profound view (quoted by H. C. Alleman in the Christian Century, Dec. 29, 1943, p. 1531).

But there is even more cheer than that in the evangel’s “fact of death.” The first fact of the Gospel, as Paul sums it up in First Corinthians 15, is Christ’s death, not the sinner’s. Or as that remarkably durable Puritan John Owen put it three hundred years ago: The good news is “the death of death in the death of Christ.”

The good news is that in the biblical evangel the hard facts of sin and death are not isolated from the love of God; the deepest proof of that love is “that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). The Bible does not dodge the fact that sin causes death, that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). But its spotlight is not on man’s death by sin but on Christ’s death for sin. That is the good news.

If this be so, the evangelist can never, never be vindictive. He must present the facts without apology, but also in love, without condemnation. In How to Give Away Your Faith, Paul Little tells how a drunk bumped into Charles Trumbull on the train. He was “spewing profanity and filth.” He lurched into the seat beside Trumbull and offered him a swallow from his flask. Trumbull started to shrink back. A lesser man might have blasted the man for his sins and condition, but instead Trumbull politely declined the drink and said, “No, thank you, but I can see you are a very generous man.” The man’s eyes lit up, and Trumbull’s remark was the beginning of a conversation that brought the man to the Saviour. That is evangelism. It communicates the good news, which is not condemnation but salvation. Over against the hard facts of sin and death, it places another fact: that “God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).

b. There is a second fact in the Gospel. The greatest fact is not death but life—that Christ, who died for our sins, “was raised to life.” The first fact is the cross. The second fact is the empty tomb and the crown of life. Let us make sure our evangel contains both these facts. “To preach only the atonement, the death apart from the life,” says P. T. Forsyth, “or only the person of Christ, the life apart from the death.… is all equally one-sided and extreme to [the point of] falsity” (The Cruciality of the Cross. p. 42).

There is more than a careful balance between these two facts in the Gospel. There is movement. The dynamic of the Gospel is its movement from death to life. The Bible calls this salvation.

It should be noted that this is a reversal of man’s normal understanding of history. The natural, mournful rhythm of existence as history records it is that man lives, and then he dies. Christian history turns this joyfully around: we were dead but now we have come alive. For “God who is rich in mercy, for the great love he bore us, brought us to life with Christ, even when we were dead in our sins—by his grace you are saved” (Eph. 2:4, NEB). We laugh at the “Brother, are you saved?” evangelistic cliché. But in a world where more and more people confess that they have somehow lost all sense of meaning in their lives, what more central question is there than, “Brother, are you really alive?” That is what “saved” means. The good news is life: we have moved from death to life.

But as always in the evangel, the accent is on Christ. As only Christ’s death makes of death good news, so only as Christ “was raised to life” do we have life. It took a miracle to wrench the course of history from its grim life-to-death inversion and bring it back again from death to life. It took a miracle, the hinge miracle of history—the resurrection. Death is the first fact, but not the great fact. Not even the cross stands at the hinge. “No cross, no crown,” said William Penn, for without the cross the Gospel is a frothy thing. But “no crown, no Gospel,” says Paul. “If Christ was not raised, then our gospel is null and void, and so is your faith” (1 Cor. 15:14, NEB).

The new breed of theologians has been right at one point, at least. Without the resurrection, God is quite dead. But what they have not been so willing to recognize is that without God, man is just as dead. Without him, life first loses its meaning. Then it loses itself. This is precisely how Malcolm Muggeridge, the acid-tongued social critic of our times, describes the world of the imminent future: “psychiatric wards bursting at the seams” and “the suicide rate up to Scandinavian proportions” as we rise “on the plastic wings of Playboy magazine” (quoted in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Feb. 2, 1968, p. 54). First the loss of meaning—bursting psychiatric wards; then the loss of life—soaring suicide rates. D. T. Niles puts it in more sober terms:

There are … attempts to make life meaningful apart from God. Existentialism is only the best known of these attempts. The Gospel answers that true meaning lies in the fact that we are the sons of God. There are attempts to direct man’s struggle for food away from man’s hunger for God. Communism is only the best known of these attempts. The Gospel answers, living is not Life, for Life is to live with God [That They May Have Life, p. 39].

The “good news of salvation” is life.

This, then, is the apostolic evangel: power, and death, and life. There is no evangelism without the fire, without the cross, and without the crown.

2. The Messianic evangel. But even earlier than the evangelism of the apostles was Jesus’ own evangelistic ministry. There is a direct relation between the two, of course. They proclaimed what he did: their good news was his power, his death, his resurrection life. But there is also a significant difference. Jesus’ own evangel as he preached it in the villages of Galilee was focused on a part of the Gospel that not all evangelists have recognized as evangelistic. What Jesus preached was “the evangel of the Kingdom.” And that is, in a sense, a social gospel. It is a prophetic gospel.

Perhaps we have not recognized it as the Gospel because we have not wanted to. We complain that it confuses the issue. It takes away the personal cutting edge from evangelism, the call for decision, we say. It dilutes the spirit with politics. But kings are inescapably political, and Jesus is King!

What are we to do with Jesus’ evangel of the Kingdom? What he preached was more than personal salvation. The gospel of his Kingdom is “peace, integrity, community, harmony and justice,” as Hoekendijk so rightly declares. For the Kingdom is what the King came to establish, and he is “Prince of peace” and “King of righteousness” (Isa. 9:6). All this may be social gospel, but it is no heresy. It is simply the affirmation of the lordship of Jesus Christ. It is as old as the oldest creed of the Church, and it was the first Gospel preached by the Church’s Lord, as recorded in chapter four of Luke’s Gospel: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18, 19, RSV).

The earliest creed of the Church, biblical theologians tell us, was “Jesus is Lord.” This was an even older test of orthodoxy, apparently, than the beloved evangelistic companion phrase, “Jesus is Saviour.” Paul uses it as just such a test. “No one can say Jesus is Lord,” he writes to the Corinthians, “except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3).

But once again let me run up the red flag of warning against separating the two statements. The Bible does not give us one creed for pious evangelists, “Jesus is Saviour,” and another creed for broad-minded activists, “Jesus is Lord.” The Creed of the Church and the teaching of Scripture is that “Jesus is Lord and Saviour,” and let not man put asunder what God has joined together. Bringing the two together reminds the evangelist that the broad ethics of the Kingdom are an essential part of the Gospel. Bringing the two together reminds the activist that the boundaries of the Kingdom are not the boundaries of this world, that the Kingdom comes not by social reform but by the will of God, and that men are called not to establish the Kingdom but to enter it. “[Christ’s] ethical teachings are the righteousness of that Kingdom,” writes Dr. John Bright. “As such, of course, they are incumbent upon all the servants of the Kingdom. But by the same token they lie beyond men who do not acknowledge its lordship.… To realize the ethics of the Kingdom it is first necessary that men submit to the rule of that Kingdom” (The Kingdom of God, p. 221). Calvin said the same thing, echoing the words of his Lord: “No one can enter the Kingdom of heaven except he who has been regenerated.”

In other words, no one can say “Jesus is Lord” who has not first said “Jesus is Saviour.” The Messianic evangel calls for commitment both to Christ’s person and to his program!

3. The angelic evangel. But earliest of all the evangels in the New Testament—earlier than the apostolic evangel, earlier than the Messianic—was the evangel of the angels. It is also the least complicated. The angel simply sang with joy: “Do not be afraid; I have good news for you: there is great joy coming to the whole people. Today in the city of David a deliverer has been born to you—the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:10, NEB).

The lost note in most of our evangelism is hilarity. The evangel is a theme for singing, and if we cannot sing it, it is not the Gospel. It can be power and fact and ethics and invitation and all the rest, but take the joy out of it, and it does not really grip the heart.

And we? We take this lovely, fragile, hilarious, singable thing, the Gospel—and argue it. Or we take this simple thing, the good news, and philosophize it. Some years ago a distinguished professor came to Korea. He wanted to preach. So Graham Lee, one of the early missionary evangelists, took him out to a little country church and prepared to interpret for him. The man’s first sentence was, “All thought is divided into two categories, the concrete and the abstract.” Graham Lee took one look at that little country congregation of toothless grandmothers and sturdy farmers and little children sitting on the bare, dirt floor, and instantly translated it, “I have come here all the way from America to tell you about the Lord Jesus Christ.” And from that point on the sermon was firmly in the hands of the angels!

It is as simple as that—the Gospel. If you cannot preach it, at least sing it. Proclaim it as truly and simply and as earnestly as you can. This world of ours is dying for the kind of happiness the “good news” of the love of God in Christ has the power to give.

Recently I spent three days in Boca Raton, Florida, at the Layman’s Leadership Institute. It was a thrilling experience to watch laymen who are at work for Christ as well as in business. Particularly gratifying to me was the participation of several members of the Board of Directors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Howard Butt, Jr., groceryman and lay evangelist, is the founder of the institute and its sparkplug. He and his fellow workers put together a challenging program for the hundreds of lay people who came from nearly every state east of the Mississippi and some west of it to attend the Leadership Institute.

J. Howard Pew, Presbyterian layman and chairman of the Sun Oil Company, delivered an address that was roundly applauded by his hearers as they rose to their feet at its conclusion. Speaking from the perspective of eighty-seven years, he showed how the churches have been infiltrated by humanism.

W. Maxey Jarman, retired chief executive of the Genesco Company, led two provocative seminars. Mr. Jarman has long been interested in the need for Christians in politics and is seeking his party’s nomination for governor of the State of Tennessee. If he wins the nomination and the election, Tennessee will have a fine Christian leader.

Who Can Tell the Difference between a conservative and a progressive? What does the antithesis between them really mean? Much depends on what the conservative wants to conserve and where the progressive wants to progress. The indefiniteness of the words makes them usable as slogans more than as specifically meaningful terms.

The way in which a person tends to think about things is influenced by psychological and character traits. It is influenced by experiences that have profoundly affected his response to what is going on in the world. There is certainly a difference in ways in which different people respond to life and history, and this difference is often what the words progressive and conservative are intended to imply. The difference plays an enormous role in the life of the Church.

Indeed, these words signal the experiences of many, many churches—their tensions, their fears, and even their schisms. In turning to the Scriptures, we do not get off easily with a quick endorsement or quick rejection of either mentality. Conservative-minded people have no trouble at all finding texts that summon us to conserve (e.g., 1 Tim. 6:20; Gal. 5:25; 2 Tim. 3:14; Heb. 13:8); one thinks perhaps most quickly of Jeremiah’s prophetic appeal to seek after the old paths (Jer. 6:16). But the progressives then call us to consider the constant biblical pointers toward the future, to the warnings against turning our eyes backward and away from the promised new things to which we are called to move forward. The new has come, and the new creation must define our whole lives; the old things are passed away.

These things play a significant role in theology, especially in eschatology. One need only think about Moltmann’s Theology of Hope and about the theologies of revolution. The notion of progress is not limited to the theologian’s study; it crops out in his attitudes toward the concrete life of our times. Theology has never been more “functional” than it is today. It refuses to abide by former abstractions and plows instead into the decisions of real life. And this is true of conservative as well as progressive types.

It is highly important that words like conservative and progressive not be used as slogans or derogatory labels. We must, if we are to be servants of one another, be sensitive to the motives, the backgrounds, and the concerns that lie within the manner of thought these words betoken.

Is there, one is sometimes tempted to ask, a split, a schism in the Church—not merely differences in specific dogmas or organization but wholly different ways of looking at and judging everything? Are there two mentalities, two orientations, two styles, two kinds of sensitivities prevailing in the Church?

Paul wrote that there could be no division in the body (1 Cor. 12:25). He also says that our lives must be defined by concern and love for the welfare of one another. It makes one ask whether the names we toss around at one another serve and can serve this end. Perhaps our use of words like conservative and progressive have, instead, hurt one another and brought the Church into division.

I am personally persuaded that the concern and love we owe each other as members of the same body is often tragically neglected. There is too frequently a tendency toward mutual irritation rather than consolation, and the result is only greater alienation. But it must be possible for us to rise above false dilemmas. The biblical teachings about the old and the new need not be taken as paradoxical. They both rise from the reality of the Gospel, and may not be abstracted or isolated from the Gospel. I should like to point to an example in which the opposition that exists in the world between progressives and conservatives is overcome. It is an example out of Paul’s own life.

In the third chapter of the Epistle to the Philippians we encounter words that, on first hearing, sound very conservative in tone: “Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing” (v. 16). This suggests that we ought, without deviation and without hesitation, to maintain the same ways that we have known in the past. Does not Paul want us to keep walking the familiar paths, and thus be conservatives? But let us take care. For the Apostle also sounds a rather progressive note in the same connection: “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I strive ahead if that I may apprehend that for which I am also apprehended of Christ Jesus” (v. 12). And he underscores the same thought in the next verse, where he speaks of “forgetting those things that are behind, and reaching forth to those things that are up ahead” (v. 13).

Clearly, to remain in the old paths does not mean that nothing new is going to happen along the way, and that we should not be prepared to seize the new things. The way that Paul wants to walk, in company with the Church, is the new way in Christ. (“The old is passed away; see, the new has come”—Second Corinthians 5:17.) The familiar path he speaks of is, in fact, the path that leads into the new reality of the new creation.

This accounts for the intensity and restlessness of Paul’s life. This accounts for the way he kept going, never standing still—for all the great journeys he made on behalf of the Gospel, and for his thoughts about the ones he wanted to make (Rom. 15:29). The past plays a most decisive role in all this, but not because it is old and familiar and comfortable. The past is crucial because it was into that past that God came in Jesus Christ to make all things new. The past, for Paul, means that past event in which God radically changed things, and thus set our minds on those things that are within the promises of God.

In all the tensions that are created by the dualities of conservatism and progressivism, it is important that we keep listening to Paul. For the thoughts he expresses are not empty formalities. They have content that is given to them by the Christ. They are historically filled with the things God has done and is going to do through Christ. They make it possible for life—and theology—to be poised and strong in the face of surprising new things.

Here we must pose urgent questions, in careful love of one another, about the bond between the past (when Christ arose) and the future (when Christ returns)—and about the way we live and think in the time we are still on the way.

In Paul’s words we find the rest (“I am apprehended”) and the restlessness (“I keep pursuing”) joined together. They are joined in the reality of Jesus Christ. Christ has opened up the future to us as a new and promising future. It is he who wants us all to walk into the future together. And it is he who will, in the end, save us from splintering ourselves over the question of whether we should be conservative or progressive. It is he, finally, who summons us all to look after one another, each having his own mentality and psychic orientation, in love and concern as members of the same body.

G. C. BERKOUWER

Churches are hurting. Indications of a downturn embracing a large part of the American religious establishment are becoming ever more obvious.

The latest report confirming the trend downward comes from the 1970 Yearbook of American Churches released this month. Though church membership shows a 1.6 per cent gain, it failed to keep up with the population increase in the United States for the second consecutive year.

The tally, which is for 1968, gives total church membership as 128,469,636. The previous year’s figure was 126,445,110, but the percentage of the American people belonging to churches dipped slightly from 63.2 per cent to 63.1 per cent.

Church building construction also was off a bit, from fiscal 1967’s $1.09 billion to 1968’s $1.04 billion. The decline was the second in a row, off from the record $1.17 billion of the 1966 fiscal year.

The Yearbook is published by the National Council of Churches, which collects the data it contains. The information is drawn from all possible sources, including most denominations that are not NCC members. Lauris B. Whitman is the editor.

One seemingly encouraging note, not immediately explained, was a rise in Sunday-school enrollment. It jumped from 37,370,435 in 1967 to 40,508,568 in 1968. Sunday-school enrollment had been falling off for a number of years; there was no indication whether this sudden increase came as a result of some change in reporting procedures or truly represents a contrasting trend.

Most of the signs point in the other direction. The United Methodist Church, the two biggest Presbyterian denominations, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the National Council of Churches all stated publicly that they had been forced to cut their budgets in 1969.

Catholics also are feeling the pinch, more so than Protestants because of the spiraling costs of their big parochial school system. The Archdiocese of New York showed a deficit of $1.2 million dollars last year. Baltimore was down $1.5 million. Detroit apparently had the biggest problem; sixty-nine parishes there had to borrow $3.9 million to meet expenses.

In membership, losses are being recorded by a number of leading denominations. The 1970 annual of the Episcopal Church shows a drop of 1.46 per cent, the first decrease in that denomination since it began recording figures.

Training and recruitment also are becoming more of a problem, probably as a result of membership and revenue losses. Eighty leaders from eight major Protestant denominations met in a special conference at Yale Divinity School this month to discuss why men are leaving the parish ministry. Typical is the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), whose latest yearbook shows that there were 7,306 ministers in the denomination last year, compared to 7,428 in 1968. The number of clergy serving local congregations dropped while the number in teaching assignments increased. As part of a belt-tightening process, an agency of the Episcopal Church is recommending that the denomination’s 1970 convention reduce its seminaries from eleven to five.

A number of theologically conservative bodies are successfully bucking the downturn—or at least have not yet begun to feel it. Congregations of the 372,000-member Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod contributed $5,351,000 to the synod in 1969, a 45.3 per cent increase over 1968. Officials attributed the boost to an intensive stewardship-education program begun in the fall of 1968. The Christian and Missionary Alliance, which had been lagging slightly behind on its 1969 budget, got record December giving to boost it over its $5,760,000 goal.

Relief-oriented organizations seem not appreciably affected by the current squeeze. The Mennonite Central Committee, for example (this year marks its fiftieth anniversary), has approved a 1970 budget of $2,794,700, a 12 per cent increase over 1969.

In most of the big denominations, however, cutbacks are the order of the day. Missionary enterprise seems to be the area most singled out for reduction in force. (There is reason to speculate that some church executives who are cool to overseas missions priorities are using the present situation to curtail some support.)

Why the decline? The reason invariably put forth is that laymen are reacting to social-action programs and pulling out of their congregations or withholding offerings. This has not been persuasively demonstrated, however, and may even be misleading. For one thing, the reaction to activism is not as acute today as it was in the early sixties.

It may be that laymen are finding what they regard as better ways of spending their religious dollars. Independent Christian organizations are having a great financial impact through direct-mail appeals, the mass media, and representatives traveling among local congregations.

Other possible reasons for the decline: Young people are not replacing old members at a sufficient rate, nor is their giving; a growing number of distractions—like the appeal of weekend travel—that keep people and their money out of the churches; people are moving more often and tend to lose interest in churches in the process.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Eyeing Dollar Power

A new agency to coordinate recruitment of Christian professional men for overseas missionary service is being created this month by International Students. It will absorb an 18-month-old organization known as Help for a Hungry World, which has sought to use missionary expertise in the investment of U. S. capital abroad.

The Reverend Paris W. Reidhead, founder and director of Help for a Hungry World, will head the newly-created division of ISI called Development Assistance Services. Both organizations have their offices in Washington, D. C. Reidhead is a former missionary to Africa and Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor.

Reidhead’s goal is to strengthen mission churches by enabling national Christians to capitalize on private enterprise. He now proposes to do this mainly by encouraging American professional men to invest their time, talent, and resources in the effort.

Meanwhile, the World Council of Churches decided to set up a World Development Fund to be financed mainly by its more than 200 member churches, probably at an annual figure of $50–$100 million.

The decision ended a five-day world consultation on ecumenical assistance to development projects sponsored by the WCC, attended by about one hundred delegates from fifty countries. All member churches will be asked to contribute at least 2 per cent of their regular church budgets to the new fund, beginning next year.

Religion In Transit

If the Consultation on Church Union becomes the Church of Christ Uniting (see February 13 issue, page 46), its first presiding officer, or bishop, must be black, a COCU committee head disclosed early this month. Also written into the plan of union, said United Methodist Bishop James K. Mathews of Boston, are places for women, youth, and minority groups on every level.

Billy Graham will return to New York City for a five-day crusade this June, one year after his ten-day campaign at 20,000-seat Madison Square Garden. This year’s crusade will be in 60,000-seat Shea Stadium, with the major emphasis on students. Graham said the 1969 New York effort led to 10,852 decisions for Christ.

At this month’s annual meeting of the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A., general secretary Dr. C. Thomas Spitz, Jr., indicated that forty-six area Lutheran councils have been formed in twenty-six states and forty more are in process in twenty-two states.

A new national preacher’s magazine, edited by Dr. Theodore Gill, dean of the Detroit Center for Christian Studies, has been sent to 5,000 subscribers. Dr. Carl F. H. Henry and Dr. Eugene Carson Blake are among those providing sermons in the first issue of MSS.

A.D. 1970 will replace the 105-year-old Ave Maria magazine next month. The new journal will be lay edited, news oriented, and ecumenical.… Big-name theologians and churchmen contribute free answers to a new weekly column wedding theology and journalism in the Asheville, North Carolina, Citizen-Times. Dr. James Blevins, religion professor at Mars Hill College, is adviser for “What Did the Bible Mean?”

The Reverend Theodore Epp conducted his first daily gospel broadcast in Lincoln, Nebraska, nearly thirty-one years ago; March 5 the “Back to the Bible Broadcast” will release its 10,000th program, heard on 555 stations world-wide.

Project America claims more than one million supporters in a drive for five million citizens who desire to: “retain ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto; return the right to pray to the classroom; and return the Bible to school curriculums.” Letters and petitions will be presented to the U. S. Congress, according to chairman William Mansdoerfer of San Francisco.

Insurance-company executive W. Clement Stone of Chicago pledged to give $500,000 to the National Presbyterian Church and Center in Washington, D. C., if the balance of a $3 million capital-funds drive there can be raised by the end of the year … $10,000 was given to California Baptist College of Riverside (Southern Baptist) because the school does not accept federal aid.

After twenty years of annual conferences, the 1970 Liturgical Week will not be held this August as scheduled. Attendance and finances for the controversial, leftist, National Liturgical Conference have fallen off in recent years.

The Florida Times-Union and the Jacksonville Journal no longer accept advertising for “X” rated motion pictures. “We do not want to be in a position of daily contributing to a nationwide trend we deplore,” editorialized the Times-Union in announcing the ban.

The United Church of Christ’s Board of Homeland Ministries has named the Reverend John Moyer of New York City to a new office in charge of ecology.

The United Church of Christ’s Council for Christian Social Action accepted custody of the draft card of resister Stephen Larson, 22, of Milwaukee and mailed it to the Department of Justice. United States attorney David J. Cannon said the action probably violated federal statutes.

An overhaul of the bylaws and statutes of Catholic University in Washington, D. C., has loosened the papally chartered school’s ties with the Vatican and the nation’s cardinals. Catholic U. trustees now control all its schools except theology, philosophy, and canon law.

Laymen without formal theological training will be ordained to a part-time ministry in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America in an attempt to ease the church’s priest shortage.

Deaths

DANIEL BURKE, 96, former president of the American Bible Society, lawyer; in Summit, New Jersey.

BISHOP ODD HAGEN, 64, President of the World Methodist Council; one-time president of the Methodist School of Theology in Gotenborg, Sweden; in Stockholm.

HELEN KIM, 71, noted Christian educator; in Seoul, Korea.

Personalia

Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, now in his fifteenth year as speaker on the “Lutheran Hour,” was named president of the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A. this month. The Missouri Synod Lutheran clergyman succeeds Dr. Malvin H. Lundeen, who headed the council in the first three years of its life.

The first Negro minister to conduct a White House worship service, the Reverend Manny Lee Wilson of the Convent Avenue Baptist Church in New York, preached there this month, followed the next Sunday by the Reverend Henry Edward Russell, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis and brother of Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia.

Two clergymen may run for congressional seats this fall. Lutheran activist Richard J. Neuhaus said he will challenge a fourteen-term incumbent, Democrat John F. Rooney, 66, on a peace ticket. Dean Robert F. Drinan of Boston College’s School of Law, a Roman Catholic priest, said he is considering running for the seat now held by Representative Philip J. Philbin, 71, who has served since 1942. Drinan is a liberal Democrat.

Dr. Gene E. Bartlett of Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall, Dr. Orville McKay of Garrett Theological Seminary, and Dr. Arland F. Christ-Janer of Boston University have resigned as presidents of their schools, effective this June. Bartlett is an American Baptist; McKay and Christ-Janer are United Methodists.

Catholic University chaplain Christopher Philip Grimley, 39, a Roman priest, left his post this month to become assistant pastor of a Lutheran church in nearby McLean, Virginia, after a year’s internship.

Mrs. Robert W. Webb, wife of a New York Protestant welfare agency executive, is the new chairman of Church World Service.

Atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair is now “bishop,” and her husband, Richard, a “prophet,” of Poor Richard’s Universal Life Church, chartered through a California mail-away scheme. The new “convert” said her church will be tax exempt and that alleged atheist Mark Twain would be its “patron saint of human laughter.”

At his installation as president of the United Church of Christ this month in Milwaukee, Dr. Robert V. Moss urged the church to ally itself with youth and take “an unequivocal stand against war as an instrument of national policy.…”

Mrs. Rita Warren, a 42-year-old mother leading a campaign for the return of prayer and Bible readings in public schools, was arrested in Brockton, Massachusetts, after she threatened a sit-in in the school superintendent’s office.

Warren W. Schwed, director of the Communications Department for the U. S. Catholic Conference, resigned after one year. Robert B. Beusse of RKO General radio and television took Schwed’s place this month.

Bennet Bolton, former Vatican correspondent and Associated Press national religious-affairs writer, has been named managing editor of the National Catholic News Service. Bolton will receive $18,000 a year in the newly created post.

World Scene

Nine projects in Africa, nine in Latin America, and five in Asia—expected to cost $3,575,000—were approved by the Community Development and Validation Service of the Lutheran World Federation.

An international Spanish-language radio program under the auspices of the “Back to the Bible Broadcast” began on a daily basis throughout Latin America this month … Albania radio has reported that Albanian Communists have stepped up a program against “old customs and religious prejudices” throughout the country, designed to “eliminate completely all religious beliefs among the citizens.” There are about equal numbers of Muslims, Catholics, and Greek Orthodox in the country.

Reforestation of a barren section of hills in Israel is being assisted by a Baptist forest project. A tract of land near Nazareth has been designated for the project; each tree will cost $2.50.… The first pine in the 10,000-tree forest dedicated to the late Bishop James A. Pike was planted last month by his widow near Yatir, in the northern Negev. The forest will become part of a woodland of 15 million trees stretching along the former border between Israel and Judea.

A spontaneous marathon revival among students and faculty at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, resulted in a week-long shut-down of classes and reached out to other colleges and communities from coast to coast this month.

Students, faculty, townspeople, and visitors wept, and smiled through their tears. They surrendered to the Holy Spirit, they said, and felt victorious. They confessed secret hates, frustrations, and weaknesses, and felt cleansed. They asked forgiveness, forgave, and embraced. They counseled together, quoted Scripture to one another, prayed singly and in groups, and sang.

During the first six days of the revival, delegations of students were invited to at least fifty-nine colleges and churches in sixteen states to tell the Asbury story.

A short-wave radio “college prayer net” linked Asbury daily with sixteen colleges from Wenham, Massachusetts, to Azusa, California. Asbury asked for prayer support and fulfilled hundreds of prayer requests received by mail and radio.

Although Asbury classes were resumed on the eighth day, the revival continued. It surpassed in length earlier spur-of-the-moment revivals that broke out at the college in 1950 and 1958. “It was a witnessing, not a preaching, revival,” Academic Dean Custer Reynolds said.

Even after classes resumed, the school’s Hughes Memorial Auditorium remained open around the clock with “unstructured” services for witnessing scheduled for six o’clock nightly.

Visitors from several states, including a Canadian family from Regina, Saskatchewan, were attracted to Wilmore by news of the revival. Wilmore is a hamlet nestled in the rolling Kentucky bluegrass fifteen miles south of Lexington. Asbury is an independent Wesleyan college of 1,000 students from thirty-eight states and twenty-four foreign countries. Slightly more than half of the students are Methodist. The remainder represent twenty other denominations. “This is not a fanatical school, but they are religious kids,” said Dean Reynolds.

The dean, a Methodist layman, explained the administration’s decision to resume classes by saying that the revival was “a mountain-top experience, but we cannot live at the mountain top.”

The revival began at one of three morning chapel periods held each week at the college. The program was one of singing and personal testimony. Dean Reynolds, who presided, said this type of service is held periodically at Asbury. He had no inkling it would continue past the scheduled fifty minutes.

Reynolds gave his own testimony and several students spoke. Then, Reynolds related, shortly before dismissal time, Dr. Clarence Hunter, professor of religion and philosophy, walked to the platform in front of the auditorium and said in a quiet voice: “I wonder if there are any here with hungry hearts who would like to come and accept Christ as your personal Saviour.”

The students started pouring to the altar rail. Two lines formed at either side of the auditorium,” the dean recounted. Regular classes were suspended then and there for an indefinite period. “There was no recruiting to sing or testify” at any time during the revival. Dean of Students Harold Spann said. “I feel it was a genuine movement of the Holy Spirit.”

Dean Reynolds didn’t leave the auditorium for the first two days of the revival except for food. His wife prayed and sang with the students for thirty-six hours before she succumbed to sleep. She described the revival “as a beautiful thing that you have to see to appreciate.”

Uncounted hundreds of Asbury students and unknown numbers of townspeople and visitors gave testimony or made some commitment to Christ during the week, a college official said. At times the 1,500-seat auditorium was jammed to capacity. At others, only a few persons were in the room—some seated, others kneeling in clusters.

On the fourth day, 20-year-old Gary Montgomery of Miami, Florida, walked slowly from the speakers’ platform, his eyes red from crying through a five-minute testimony before 200 schoolmates.

“I don’t know why I came to Asbury,” the long-haired, mod-dressed youth said after his testimony. “I don’t even know why I came to this revival, but I’m glad I did. I wish everyone could come.”

During his talk, Montgomery told the audience it had taken him forty hours of prayer to “get saved.” He said he now plans to spend much of his time talking to his friends about Christ.

“I had taken trips on everything before coming here,” Montgomery said later. “Drugs, sex, booze, gambling, everything. I was smoking joints [marijuana] like they were going out of style.… With drugs you get high and then come down hard. With Christ, I’m going to try to stay on an even keel and try to get all my friends to do the same.”

By the second day, the revival had spread to the Asbury Theological Seminary across the street from the college. The two schools enjoy a close relationship but are independent of each other.

The revival “gave me a new outlook,” reflected David Hill, 24, a seminary student from Los Angeles. “I was just drifting along. I feel now that God can really use me. I work in a factory in Wilmore. Now I can witness for the first time to the man who works next to me.”

By the sixth day, a Sunday, the revival had spread throughout Wilmore (population 2,800), with church groups by the busload coming to the college.

The Reverend David Seamonds, pastor of Wilmore United Methodist Church, publicly confessed his dislike for two Asbury college faculty members and asked their forgiveness and God’s. The pastor’s wife confessed her aversion—kept buried for years—to the town, its people, and her husband’s ministry there. But this feeling had been supplanted by love, she said.

“She’s shy, inarticulate, but you would have thought it was St. Peter on the day of Pentecost,” Seamonds said of his wife’s testimony. “The adults were hitting the altar like flies the minute she got through.”

Dr. Frank Stanger, president of the seminary, was away at the start of the revival (as was the college president, Dr. Dennis F. Kinlaw). “As soon as I got back on campus,” Stanger said, “I noticed a new sense of kinship, a new sense of unity, a new demonstration of love, a new consciousness that God is able to meet every personal need.”

“It was a baptism of love and power,” Seamonds said. “We were skeptical when it started, but by the first night, the Spirit of God was upon us … I have never seen such an awesome demonstration of the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit … My faith is just leaping out! Why not let God start it all over the country?” Seamonds asked.

Seminary president Stanger was a bit more guarded in his initial evaluation. “Don’t ask me about the revival now. Ask me thirty days from now. If it’s genuine, this will show in what happens in the weeks ahead.”

JOHN NELSON

Torn Over Racism

A rending demonstration cut into alumni-day celebrations at Moody Bible Institute’s Founder’s Week this month when two graduates tore up their Moody diplomas in a Chicago street-side protest over alleged racial discrimination.

Moody graduate Melvin Warren, a Reformed Church in America minister and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School student, charged that Moody’s emeritus dean of education, Dr. S. Maxwell Coder, in a statement made in May 1969, said “the Bible teaches that interracial marriage is inherently wrong.” Warren challenged Coder to defend that statement publicly on a radio program.

When Moody authorities didn’t respond, according to Warren, he and Leona Jenkins tore up their diplomas and one belonging to Miss Jenkins’s sister, Leola.

Said Warren, as his shredded sheepskin floated into a trash barrel: “We do this to inform the black Christian community and all Christendom of the institutional white racism at Moody.”

Russian Orthodox Union

Two of the three branches of Russian Orthodoxy in America are to be united on the basis of a recent agreement with Alexei, the patriarch of Moscow. The largest branch, the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church, headed by Metropolitan Ireney, has been reluctantly independent of Moscow since the Russian Revolution. There are about 340 U. S. parishes in the denomination, half of them divided between Alaska and Pennsylvania, and the rest spread around twenty-eight other states.

Far fewer Russian Orthodox parishes in America have acknowledged the jurisdiction of the patriarchal exarchate, Archbishop Jonathan, who will be recalled to Russia. His followers will be encouraged to join the larger body. Unaffected by the merger is the small Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which has a strongly anti-Moscow stance.

While the largest group has long professed its desire to have its independence canonically acknowledged by Moscow, prospects had not appeared good. In 1962, after lengthy court battles, Moscow was able legally to establish its rival exarchate. In 1969, the Ireney group’s yearbook decried the “Moscow Patriarchate’s current policies which cannot be called anything but imperialistic and dictatorial.”

Along with his official recognition of Archbishop Ireney, Patriarch Alexei is granting the church autocephalous (independent) status, making it equal with the older Eastern Orthodox bodies in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Moreover, the new name will be simply the Orthodox Church of America; it will appeal to all other Orthodox Christians to affiliate with it so as to establish a truly American branch of the worldwide Orthodox communion.

Since Russian Orthodoxy was the first branch to be established in the hemisphere, it does have canonical precedent to unite the Orthodox into an American branch of the movement. (Indeed, until the Russian Revolution, this was well on the way toward accomplishment.) However, the Greeks are much more numerous and are likely to be reluctant to respond to the Russian initiative.

Other Eastern Orthodox—Serbs, Arabs, Ukrainians, Albanians, Bulgarians—should be somewhat more receptive, especially the younger generations.

Uniting with the new Orthodox Church of America may be a way of healing divisions within almost all ethnic groups. There are, for example, a half-dozen different denominations of Ukrainian Orthodox.

In an unrelated Orthodox development, a movement is afoot to alter the existing relation between nine Orthodox bodies and the National Council of Churches because of discontent with the council’s social pronouncements. Anti-NCC sentiment appeared to center in a working document circulated within the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church last year.

An actual pull-out of the nine bodies from the council appears unlikely, especially in light of a proposal made by NCC general secretary Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy at its December triennium (see December 19, 1969, issue, page 30) that calls for a restructure of the NCC into a “General Ecumenical Council.” Such an umbrella structure would undoubtedly be more suitable to the Orthodox tastes for limited involvement in political and social affairs.

DONALD TINDER

Alcoholism: A New Theory Distilled

For nearly 200 religious and temperance leaders gathered for the first National School on Alcohol and Narcotics Studies at the Lake Yale (Florida) Baptist Assembly, there was exciting new encouragement for a cause that many have feared was being lost in the flood of social drinking engulfing America. Science, they were told, after years of painstaking research, now appears to be on the threshold of proving exactly how much damage alcohol does to the human body—and the mechanism by which it occurs.

The damage arises, scientists said, because in the presence of alcohol red blood cells become sticky and slow down circulation in the tiny, microscopic ends of arteries until the brain is anesthetized by lack of oxygen, and the individual becomes “high.” Brain cells die if deprived of oxygen more than a few minutes and can never be regenerated. Every drinking bout costs the imbiber thousands of brain cells, according to this theory. Through the same mechanism, alcohol also causes severe damage to vital cells in the liver, kidneys, and heart muscle, leaving irreparable scars.

The support science now offers for the temperance cause would make the crusaders who seventy-five years ago founded the Anti-Saloon League leap with joy. The modern-minded American Council on Alcohol Problems (ACAP), sponsor of the school, is a direct descendant of the league whose voice once thundered in American politics.

The word that alcoholic beverages are dangerous came from Dr. Melvin H. Knisely, bald, cherubic, widely respected chairman of the department of anatomy at the Medical College of South Carolina. After thirty years of careful research into the phenomenon of “agglutinated blood,” the condition in which red blood cells stick together and block blood vessels, Dr. Knisely is publishing his findings in such organs as Microvascular Research and Journal of Angiology. He is also lecturing to lay groups and cooperating in a documentary motion picture in the hope of cutting ten to fifteen years off the time it would normally take for his findings to become common knowledge in the medical profession and accepted by the public.

If alcohol can be proved to cause agglutinated blood, then Demon Rum is in serious trouble with medical men, for the condition of sticky blood and the devastating—often fatal—damage it can do in the human body are well established. Malaria and severe burns can produce agglutination, too. As Dr. Knisely vividly demonstrated, agglutination can be photographed in color motion pictures along with the tissue death it causes.

There is a precise relation between the number of ethanol (ethyl alcohol) molecules in the blood and the stickiness of the cells, he has discovered.¹Research now in progress has identified the sticky substance on the blood cells as a large protein molecule. Analysis of proteins is extremely difficult, and several years of painstaking work may be required before the relation is fully understood on a molecular level.

Meanwhile, other experts at the school emphasized the increasing toll alcohol is taking in our society every day. Dr. Andrew C. Ivy, retired vice-president of the University of Illinois, told the temperance leaders that 78 million Americans (two thirds of the adults over 21) now drink. Of these, 19 million are problem drinkers, and more than seven million have crossed the line into alcoholism. The average age at which people become alcoholics, Dr. Ivy warned, is getting much lower—it now is 35. The average age of alcoholics at death is now only 51. More than 500,000 Americans are becoming alcoholics each year, he added.

The executive board of the ACAP, meeting during the conference, expressed concern over the retreat of the United Methodist Church from its traditional teaching of abstinence, a policy underlined by the recent Methodist cut-off of all financial support of ACAP because of disagreement with its program. The ACAP expressed the opinion that many rank-and-file Methodists and former Evangelical United Brethren members will find it difficult to accept their denomination’s change at the very time science appears ready to support the historic Methodist position.

Summarizing the new position in the temperance movement, the Reverend Billy McCormack, executive director of ACAP, said: “We have seen soft drinks banned because cyclamates may possibly endanger human health. We are seeing strict controls placed over cigarette advertising. If the toll in health and lives being taken by alcoholic beverages can be proved beyond dispute, how long can the liquor industry escape strict measures of control?”

GLENN D. EVERETT

The Drumbeat Down Under

Wherever young people gather, it seems, demonstrations accompany their dissent. Even delegates to last month’s thirty-third Australian Christian Endeavour Convention marched—though to a different drummer. What made the Melbourne marchers unusual was their hair (short and shaven), their clothes (clean and conventional), and their posters (“Ban Oh! Calcutta,” “Ban Pot,” “We Support Law and Order,” “C. E. Seizes Jesus”).

Next day nearly half the 800 young people staged an “Evangelistic Invasion.” Two by two on street corners, passing out Scripture portions and witnessing Campus Crusade style, they asked 2,000 Australians about their religious convictions. Sixty-six per cent of those interviewed said they consider Jesus divine; 47 per cent felt no need for a more personal religious faith; 36 per cent said they never attend church.

Representatives from the United States and India spoke on “Christ and the Youth Revolution.” That revolution, said Indian Bishop Solomon Doraisawmy, “is a clear expression of lack of faith.” He challenged the young people to proclaim the Gospel: “No religion of the world knows of such a revolution.”

The interdenominational youth organization has societies in seventy-five countries, including East Germany and five countries where no foreign missionaries are permitted.

FRED J. NILE

Celibacy: Tightening The Ratchet

Speaking to the faithful in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Paul VI asked them to pray for the intention of priestly celibacy. “It is a very important law in our Latin Church,” he said. “It can neither be abandoned nor discussed.”

That was February 1. Earlier, in a sharply worded Christmas Eve letter to the Dutch hierarchy, the pontiff had acted to prevent the Fifth Dutch Pastoral Council from calling for abolition of mandatory celibacy. The directive fell on deaf ears, however, as the Netherlands bishops endorsed the council’s stand.

Next, Paul ordered the Dutch bishops to retract. Then, in a letter to the Vatican secretary of state, Jean Cardinal Vilot, the Pope refuted in detail the Dutch position, saying that only a few priests want to be relieved of their celibacy vows, and that provision for this (laicization) is already well established.

Tightening the ratchet on the celibacy issue still further a week later, the Pope took the unprecedented step of appealing to all priests under Vatican authority to renew annually—on Holy Thursday—their promises to remain unmarried and to obey their bishops. His letter to the heads of the National Conferences of bishops was presented to the press February 9.

The Reverend Patrick O’Malley, president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils in the United States and the first priest ever to address the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on priestly matters (see December 5 issue, page 44), rapped the papal announcement as “an apparent challenge to the integrity of priests.” He said he was sure it would create problems among priests “because it sounds very much like the loyalty oaths that were forced on people in the McCarthy scare days.”

The Vatican appeal also warned against appointing seminary teachers “who are accustomed to attacking tradition, institutions, and the authority of the Church.”

Whether the issue would produce the first schismatic split within Roman Catholicism in this century remained to be seen. A Vatican official who has been a troubleshooter for the Netherlands predicted that as long as Bernard Cardinal Alfrink of Utrecht (the man in the middle) is head of the Dutch church, there will be no split.

And Then There Were Nun

Even though their long-time opponent, James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, had just retired, the reform-minded Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles thought too much water had gone over the dam. More than 300 of the 400-member order decided early this month to go secular and form a lay community open to married as well as single persons, including women who have never been nuns.

Such a move by so many is said to be unprecedented in Roman Catholic history. IHM president Sister Anita Caspary said the new group will continue the order’s customary tasks: teaching, health services, social concerns, and the fine arts. But it will have no official ties with the church and will take on new styles of life and work.

A running dispute between the sisters and McIntyre came to a head over two years ago when the cardinal took exception to their experimental program.²This included abandoning their habits for secular dress, and dropping communal prayers and mandatory schedules. Some sisters sought jobs outside the parochial school system. A Vatican committee was appointed to investigate; last spring it ordered the experimentation stopped.

Timothy Manning, the new archbishop of Los Angeles, met earlier with Sister Anita in what was called a “cordial” session. He said he had Vatican permission to grant the nuns dispensations from canonical vows. About 350 requests are expected.

A Prototype Of Heaven?

They skipped the sermon at the eighteenth annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast in Washington this month. A succession of brief homilies by top government officials made up for it, and most of the audience of nearly 3,000 in the spacious International Ballroom of the Washington Hilton Hotel seemed inspired enough.

President Nixon came the closest to being the preacher. At the end of the program he gave an eight-minute plea for higher values. “We have a destiny to give to the world,” he said, “in an example of spiritual leadership and idealism.”

The crowd at the interfaith affair included many distinguished persons from North America and abroad, ranging from political leaders to denominational heads.

Congressman Burt Talcott, representing the House of Representatives’ prayer group, said: “We are ecumenical, and we were long before ecumenicity became popular.”

The prayer-breakfast idea, now observed around the world, began with Dr. Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian-born preacher who died last May. The Presidential Prayer Breakfasts are officially sponsored by the House and Senate prayer groups but are actually arranged by the organization Vereide founded, International Christian Leadership. Anonymous donors always pick up the tab.

The movement has been primarily implemented by laymen. The emcee of this year’s event, Congressman Albert H. Quie, noted that the head tables did not include a single clergyman. Congressman Morris Udall, a Mormon who two days before had announced he would attempt to unseat House Majority Leader John McCormack, read the invocation. Others on the program were Senators Herman Talmadge and James B. Allen, Commissioner of Education James E. Allen, Jr., Navy Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. A typically loud folk-rock group from John Brown University provided foreground music.

Among the dignitaries at the head tables were Mrs. Nixon, Mrs. Spiro Agnew, a half-dozen cabinet members, and Governors Linwood Holton, Lester Maddox, Russell Peterson, and Claude Kirk.

Guests in the audience who went unannounced included Ilia Orlov, a Baptist pastor from Moscow. Orlov said afterward that the event, which brought together people from many varying religious and political persuasions, was “a prototype of heaven.”

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Last month more than sixty religion editors and writers went on a ten-day fact-finding tour of Israel sponsored by the Associated Church Press, the Catholic Press Association, the Religious Newswriters Association, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. News Editor Russell Chandler reports here and on pages 14 and 15.

The young little nation of Israel—devoting the major share of its political attention and its tax revenue to security and defense problems—was embroiled in a semi-war this month. But a domestic issue threatened to steal the thunder from the Syrian jet that roared over Haifa, shattering dozens of windowpanes.

It was the stormy debate over “who’s a Jew,” exciting Israelis as few issues in recent times have done.

About 3,000 demonstrators carrying placards with messages like “Golda, you are not Joan of Arc” protested outside the Knesset (parliament) over Premier Golda Meir’s handling of the issue. In another volatile episode inside the Knesset a few days before, an opposition member was hustled out of his seat by ushers. He refused to quiet down in a debate of a controversial government bill that would give the force of law to the traditional religious criteria of deciding Jewishness.

Another representative of the opposition faction was suspended for five sessions of the Knesset for tearing up his government identity card on the rostrum to demonstrate his defiance of the bill.

It was the filling out of the identity card, in fact, that touched off the present controversy—a question far from settled.

Benny and Anne Shalit, self-declared atheists, had been fighting since 1967 to have their children registered as of “no religion” but of “Jewish peoplehood” (Le’om). To them, there is a clear distinction between belonging to a people and one’s personal religion. The concept is vehemently opposed by Orthodox rabbis.

In an unprecendented 5–4 ruling last month, the Israel Supreme Court held that a man can be of Jewish nationality without being of Jewish faith. In effect, it said that the Ministry of Interior must register any applicant according to his own definition of what it means to be a Jew.

Reaction was swift and strong. Some Israeli officials said the decision would split the nation; religious leaders almost unanimously condemned the ruling, holding that only the rabbinate—through the Halachic law—may decide, for religious purposes, who is a Jew.

During the Sabbath reading at Heichal Shlomo, Jerusalem’s leading synagogue, Dr. Moshe Yafe rapped on the altar and invoked a rare religious custom that allows a worshiper to interrupt reading of the weekly chapter of the Talmud on grounds that a wrong has been done to him. Yafe, president of the Union of Synagogues of Israel, declared that he was making a complaint not on his own behalf but for a large majority of Jews in Israel opposing the Shalit ruling.

Explaining the thorny issue to a group of American newsmen, Dr. Yehuda Bloom, a Hebrew University law professor, said the criterion was not biological but “a question of national and spiritual identity.” Bloom said he feared repercussions in other Jewish communities, particularly the United States.

“There are very grave dangers in the long-range view,” he said. “It invites the severance of nationality from religion, thereby encouraging mixed marriages.” Such marriages, in his view, usually result in the loss of the Jewish partner’s religious and ethnic identity.

Prompted by mounting public opposition to the Supreme Court decision, the Israeli cabinet decided to change the law to conform with the Halachic definition of Jewishness the Interior Ministry had been using through decree. A compromise formula was devised for approval by the coalition government at mid-month.

Basically, it would re-enforce the traditional definition of a Jew as anyone born of a Jewish mother or a convert to the faith (Mrs. Shalit isn’t Jewish). But the burden of proof of any applicants’s Jewish identity would be on the registration clerk—not the applicant.

The government bill does not upset the court’s ruling on the Shalit case: Oren, 5, and Galya, 2, have been officially notified of their unique status as the only people in Israel to be known as Jews by nationality—but not by religion.

The Jewish Law of Return provides that any Jew may immigrate to Israel and, upon entrance, acquire Israeli citizenship. According to the compromise package, the Law of Return would be modified to a more liberal interpretation. Both partners in a mixed marriage, as well as their children, would be permitted to return to Israel and obtain citizenship and other benefits.

A cabinet amendment extended these privileges to an extra generation: the children’s spouses and children would also be covered.¹In order to marry, however, immigrants will still have to prove accredited Orthodox parentage, or convert to Orthodox Judaism according to Halachic standards. There is no civil marriage under Israeli law, and all non-Orthodox Jews must be married outside the country.

As the wave of strong feeling on the “who’s a Jew” question showed no signs of quickly subsiding, two points seemed to be emerging:

• If the government bill and its amendments are accepted, it will ultimately mean a slight shrinkage in the dimensions of civil liberty for Israelis. Responsibility for meeting the problems of Jewish identity will be placed less in the hands of the government and more in the hands of the rabbis.

• At the same time, it will bring a degree of Halachic flexibility. Rabbinic authorities will be faced with the need to liberalize conversion procedures if they are to prevent the erosion of Jewish identity they deplore.

Eschatological Stirrings: Madman At The Mosque?

Most people in Israel think Denis Michael Rohan, 28, the Australian sheep-herder who set fire to Jerusalem’s Al Aksa Mosque last August 21, is a tormented religious bigot. The medical director of the mental hospital where Rohan is indefinitely confined told CHRISTIANITY TODAY: “Certainly he is insane and psychotic.”

But an Orthodox Jew, a successful lawyer who holds a doctorate in jurisprudence from Harvard University, thinks Rohan may be of sound mind “and the rest of us insane.” Reuben Gross, who with his family immigrated to Jerusalem from the United States in 1967, set forth his views in the Jerusalem Post recently. It was weeks before the paper decided to print the story, Gross said in an interview.

Finally, when it did, most reaction was critical. “I thought they were going to send the men in little white coats after me,” Gross confided. Privately, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and a noted Jerusalem rabbi indicated agreement with Gross.

According to Gross, the fate of the Temple Mount, where the gleaming silver-domed Al Aksa Mosque (second only to Mecca and Medina in sacredness to the Muslim) stands, still not fully repaired, “is one of the most under-discussed topics in this overarticulate age.”

Rohan, apparently fired by reading material from the Pasadena, California, Herbert W. Armstrong Church of God (see November 7, 1969, issue, page 54), testified at his two-week trial that he had been chosen by God to build a temple to Jesus on the site of the Hebrew Temple. That temple was destroyed by the Roman invasion in A.D. 70; Al Aksa was built in the eighth century. It is steps away from the Western, or Wailing, Wall.

Before building a temple of his own, of course, Rohan had to destroy the mosque. The action set off a wave of anti-Israel feeling throughout the Muslim world and led to the pan-Islamic conference in Rabat, Morocco. The meeting was called to capitalize on anti-Israel feeling generated in Muslim countries not directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“Even the Six Day War [in 19671 did not give rise to an assemblage of Muslims from all over the world,” Gross noted. The amount of damage to the mosque (less than $100,000) didn’t warrant such a stir. “It is the eschatological implication of Israel and a unified Jerusalem that has shaken them,” Gross says.

“But because theological terms are not the currency of discourse in the modern world, thinking on this level has been forced into subterranean channels. As long as the Old City was in Jordanian hands, the ancient dream of a rebuilt temple could conveniently be left in the category of dreams. But with the union of all Jerusalem under Jewish control, the dream assumed realistic outlines, and the challenge to rebuild the temple, with its host of difficult political and religious questions, loomed large.”

Religious Jews have made no attempt to rebuild the temple in recent times. For one thing, the Temple Mount’s state of ritual uncleanness to Orthodox Jews has made it off limits to them. Many rabbis say the time is not yet: there will be a “sign from heaven,” the coming of the messiah, before the rebuilding can commence.

But Gross, a thoughtful man who fought in the Jewish war of independence and until recently was chairman of the American Veterans of Israel, believes that the biggest factor in the Rohan uproar is Israel’s psychological unpreparedness to rebuild the temple: “Jewry is embarrassed by a rendezvous with a destiny for which it is ill prepared.”

“Regardless of how we rationalize our perplexity,” continued Gross, “a Zionist State without Zion is a schizoid thing.… By contrast Michael Rohan is a model of sanity.”

Gross does not excuse Rohan’s act of arson, but he contends it was not based on an insane intention. Rather, it followed logically from Rohan’s bona fide—albeit mistaken—belief that God had commissioned him to be king over Jerusalem and Judea.²The court said Rohan was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was not punishable for his deed because he had acted under an uncontrollable pathological impulse.

To Reuben Gross, the point is not Rohan’s guilt. “That an Israeli court might degrade his intentions in the sight of the walls of Jerusalem will never be forgotten,” he wrote in the Post. “The Jerusalem which our forefathers swore not to forget was not a city sans temple.”

Musing as to why a member of a Christian sect (and a tourist to Jerusalem at that) should have taken the first step toward a new temple, Gross conjectured: “Eschatological stirrings are touching Christians more than we Jews.… The Gentile thinks simple and straight. You need childlike simplicity to grasp it.… We Jews have absorbed so much of the poisons of exile, we have refused to take our own history seriously.”

Bible Misuse

“Where have the churches been on the issue of peace in the Middle East?” asked a disgruntled Israeli official at a press conference in Jerusalem last month. Speaking to about sixty U. S. religion editors and writers, he went on to issue a pointed attack on the World Council of Churches’ “attitude toward Israel” and added that Israelis have “great misgivings” about recent WCC statements.

The government panelist was referring to an eight-point statement adopted by the WCC in Canterbury, England, last August. In the eyes of most Israelis, it takes a decided pro-Arab and pro-Russian stand. Particularly objectionable is a statement concerning a call for restudying biblical interpretation in order to “avoid the misuse of the Bible in support of partisan views and to clarify the bearing of faith upon critical political questions.”

After an extended visit to Israel, Dr. Arnold T. Olson of Minneapolis, president of the Evangelical Free Church of America and the National Association of Evangelicals, concluded: “The Israelis have taken this to mean that the World Council of Churches will now study the Bible to find out what right Israel has to use the scriptures in defending the rebirth of the state.”

The official reply to the WCC draft came from Professor I. J. Werblowsky, professor of comparative religion at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “The World Council statement is a retrograde step, putting the block back in a manner that may well undermine any possibility of a continuing Jewish-Christian dialogue,” he said. “To my knowledge the WCC has so far not officially recommended the study of biblical interpretation in order to avoid the Catholic misuse of Scripture.… To come out with a bland statement about the possibilities of the Bible in support of partisan political views is to my mind the most decisive and incontrovertible testimony to a basically un-ecumenical frame of mind.”

Kenneth R. Zebell, the WCC’s man on refugee work in Jerusalem, told reporters that the WCC statement was “no embarrassment” to him, and that it had not hindered his relations with the Israel State Department.

Meanwhile, two American religious journals issued a joint editorial last month—thought to be the first action of its kind—excoriating abuse of Scripture for partisan purposes by both religious and political leaders in the Middle East.

“We are convinced that [all parties] … could help defuse the present crisis by categorically rejecting the use of the Bible for propaganda means,” wrote the Reverend J. Martin Bailey in the United Church Herald, the United Church of Christ national magazine, and the Reverend Charles Angell, editor of the Lamp, a Roman Catholic unity journal. Such use of Scripture “ignores the circumstances in which the Bible was written and the purposes of its original writers,” the editors said.

Lebanon’S Shattered Peace

During the past few weeks, Lebanon’s uneasy peace has repeatedly been shattered by dynamite blasts in the capital city of Beirut. Now a new element seems to have been added: for the first time some blasts apparently were directed at Lebanon’s Jewish population.

Almost all Lebanese Jews (about 3,000) live in Wadi Abu Jmil, Beirut’s Jewish sector, an area under police surveillance since the June, 1967, war with Israel. On January 18 a dynamite blast caused minor damage to the Jewish Religious Council’s Alliance school in the Wadi Abu Jmil quarter. Shortly over a week later, an explosion in an empty lot rocked the area but caused no damage.

Lebanese government officials said the explosion was “aimed at creating an atmosphere of anxiety” and probably was “the work of a hired treacherous hand to distort the reputation of Lebanon.” The Palestinian commando organization Fatah denounced the incident, warning Arab and Palestinian peoples to guard against “imperialist and Zionist plots which aim at terrorizing Arab Jews to emigrate to Palestine and become, against their will, soldiers in the army of the enemy and help for its sectarian aggressive state.”

Workers among the Jews in Lebanon tend to think the recent blasts were not aimed exclusively at the Jewish community, but were designed to create disturbances among all groups. A Christian worker said the Jews in Lebanon are very close to the Christian community and during the 1967 war were advised to seek protection in Christian villages.

LILLIAN HARRIS DEAN

At a Ministers’ Meeting the other day, the new district superintendent gave a speech. “Men,” he said, “I’m going to give it to you straight. You’re a commodity. And at appointment time you’re a commodity for sale. Whether you’re ‘bought’ or not depends on your image and your reputation.”

What he said was true, and the terms were familiar. Erich Fromm recognized this development in sociopersonal relations in 1947, when he wrote Man for Himself (Holt, Rinehart and Winston). The question he raised is this: What does it do to a man’s personality to be a commodity for sale? Fromm speculates that a new personality factor arises: the “marketing orientation.”

The marketing orientation is based upon a concept of value that arose with the advent of capitalism. The value of a product came to depend less and less on its inherent usefulness (as a pair of shoes is useful), and more and more on its exchangeability (does the market demand it?). This placement of value in the market has led to acceptance of a similar method of evaluating persons, including oneself. For instance, instead of asking himself, “Am I a person useful to God and man, playing a useful role in society?,” the minister may ask, “Am I in demand?”

What does the modern minister, businessman, psychologist, or physician have to sell on such a market? Principally his personality, because his skills (or use value) have diminished in market importance. As the district superintendent noted, selling a personality package is the minister’s chief means of achieving success.” (Like detergent, a salable package of clerical traits might come striped in liturgical colors, proclaiming itself Hard-Working, Long-Lasting, A Bargain for the Price.) Furthermore, one must display whatever sort of personality is in demand at the moment. (One can imagine a Clerical Traits Stock Exchange: Fundamentalism, off ⅜; Situational Ethics, up ¼; Experimentalism, up ½; Traditionalism, steady.)

How does one discover what type of personality is most in demand, what type one should develop or pretend to develop? Partly through TV, magazines, and advertising of all sorts, but largely, I believe, through simple observation of the successful—that is, those bought for a good price. In clerical circles, one discovers the salable type of personality by observing ministers who get the good appointments, the higher salaries, the preaching invitations, the important committee appointments. In a recent church publication, an article announced the appointment of a young minister to a prominent conference position. Not only was each accomplishment, award, and activity of the minister held up for others to note, but his wife’s activities were listed as well (president of the garden club, Red Cross volunteer, and so on). How many wives feel pressured to seek such positions in order to enhance their husband’s salability?

For the minister, as for others, there are at least three dangers to psychological health and to what Fromm calls “authentic selfhood” inherent in the marketing orientation.

First, self-esteem may suffer. One may find that, as his worth is determined by his market value rather than his use value (capacities, skills, and abilities), so his self-esteem is determined by salability. Naturally, self-esteem that depends on market conditions beyond a person’s control is very shaky self-esteem indeed.

Secondly, one’s feeling of identity is threatened. To be salable, to respond quickly to changing market demands, he must be able to acquire and abandon qualities readily. Superficiality, of course, accompanies such quick-change acts. The minister need only appear “righteous” and “pious” until the market swings to “worldly” and “bold.” Core, central, bedrock qualities are not necessary. Relationships with others become superficial—one temporary self responding to another.

The most serious threat to authentic selfhood that accompanies the marketing orientation is the fear of peculiarity. Persons may avoid appearing unusual, different, strange—and may thereby stunt the development of individuality. Independence and autonomy are thus seriously damaged. Ministers may find themselves glancing furtively at denominational leaders for hints of new market trends before they dare act. Yet the thesis of Fromm’s book, as well as of the body of his work, is that a man lives fully only when he lives as himself, as the expression of his inherited self and his freely chosen values.

What can be done if we recognize traces of the marketing orientation and its accompanying evils in ourselves?

1. Fromm’s own solution is confidence in one’s inner self, which leads to a glad recognition of one’s potential qualities of love, understanding, and creativity. One insists on the freedom to be himself, firmly rejects the authority of the market, and is aware of social forces that may mold personality on an unconscious level.

But the Christian minister will want to go beyond this.

2. The minister must maintain confidence in his skills—as proclaimer (in whatever form) of the message of supreme worth: that of God’s redeeming love. Self-esteem, then, can depend upon the applaudings of conscience when one has successfully performed God’s work, and not upon what sort of price one fetches on the market.

3. Ministers must muster the courage to risk being peculiar, perhaps unsalable, if integrity calls for such a stand. This may mean gentleness when toughness is in fashion, time-consuming devotion to sermon preparation when moonlighting for OEO is popular, firmness in moral standards when a Salem above a clerical collar appears chic. Yet they must remember that no single stand is right for all men. For each personality there is a unique expression that can be developed from continual honest introspection, and action based on a response to the Holy Spirit.

4. Ministers must choose principles upon which to base integrity and then hold fast to them, balancing this with flexibility in non-essentials. Personalities built on solid, permanent values and traits can withstand market fluctuations.

5. Ministers must practice searing honesty with themselves. They must always be alert to role-playing and mask-wearing that is replacing honest response, little games for enhancing salability at the expense of integrity. (Shall I be Humble, Aggressive, Flattering, Jolly, Severe? Shall I play Pal or Wise Leader? Spiritual Saint or Social Activist?)

6. Ministers must practice being responsible primarily to the Holy Spirit, however they receive his guidance. God takes the place of the market in Christian lives. In him, we find our value; in him, direction for change; in him, strength to hold fast.—KAY POSEY, Hurtsboro, Alabama. (Mrs. Posey, the wife of a Methodist minister, is a school librarian and English teacher. She holds an M.A. in religion and society from Emory University.)

A letter from a chinese christian—a one-time ardent Buddhist who is now professor at a graduate school here in America—expresses concern over whether the Church will remain Christian or settle for Confucian ethics and a non-Christian form of religion. I share deeply in this concern.

The danger that now threatens the Church is compounded of a number of things, such as the present emphasis on “involvement,” the mirage of trying to make the Gospel “relevant” to the world, the confusion in the minds of many about the biblical meaning of “reconciliation,” and the shift from God’s message for the spiritually impoverished to one that seems so often concerned about man’s body alone. All these have caused untold confusion in both the Church and the unbelieving world, with tragic results.

The first result is the loss of the very heart of the Gospel: “… that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4).

Let this be clear: If these truths are not believed and preached, the “Christian minister” has no Gospel to preach and what he preaches is “another gospel.” Harsh words? True words, and in this truth lies one of the grave dangers facing the Church.

Another danger is the urge toward entanglement in many secular movements unconnected with the spiritual work of the Church. Many programs that the Church is promoting rise no higher than those of socially oriented and motivated secular organizations that are honestly trying to do good in their communities.

The word relevant has become sacrosanct today. We are told we must make Christianity relevant to the world in which we live. But what we often see are attempts to make the world relevant to the Church so that the Church refrains from convicting the world of sin.

As for “reconciliation” (a popular theme of the day), only too often we find this used to mean the reconciliation of sinners with sinners, rather than the vitally necessary reconciliation of man with God through the death and resurrection of his Son.

Another grave danger is the misplaced emphasis on “poverty.” While it is the Christian’s duty and privilege to help care for the needy, the Church alone has the message to relieve spiritual poverty. We must not forget that the world’s basic problem is poverty of the soul. All around us we see materially prosperous persons who are desperately poor in things of the spirit. They know neither God nor his Christ and are ensnared in the sins of the flesh without knowing that Christ came to deliver them from their desperate plight and to make them rich in him.

In the second of Paul’s letters to his spiritual child, Timothy, it is obvious that Timothy had become fearful because of the opposition he was finding to his message there in Ephesus. In his letter the Apostle Paul makes it plain that to witness faithfully for Jesus Christ will mean suffering for that witness. Paul emphasizes the necessity of sticking with the message: “Guard the truth that has been entrusted to you by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us” (1:14); “what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2:2).

The Apostle Paul was deeply concerned about the content of the Christian faith. The Gospel he preached was a direct revelation from Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:11, 12), and he urged Timothy to stick to that Gospel, regardless of the consequences.

From the emphases of many in the Church today the unbelieving world would never guess that the Church’s central mesage has to do with sin—the fact of sin, its nature, and its effect—and with God’s plan of redemption through the atoning death of his Son. In fact (and I say this in love), much that is being offered the world in the name of “Christianity” is little more than a system of ethics. At its heart is humanism, with its emphasis on the welfare of the body and all its secularistic and materialistic concepts that ignore sin, the soul, and eternity.

The Apostle Paul warned Timothy not to change his message in the face of rejection but to “preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (2 Tim. 4:2–4).

The Church is in grave danger because its message is increasingly world-centered and man-centered. Many in the Church are willing to stress the compassion of our Lord for the material woes of mankind but unwilling to teach that his life, death, and resurrection had primarily to do with redemption from sin and with the result of that redemption—eternal life.

The Apostle Paul found himself in the midst of great wickedness in Corinth. Knowledge and art prospered, but there, as in America today, people were wallowing in the sins of the flesh. Paul knew there was but one answer, one message: “When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:1, 2).

“Jesus Christ and him crucified” is not at the center of the Church’s message today. There has emerged “another Gospel,” and it is playing havoc with the God-given task of leading sinners to repentance and to faith in Jesus Christ.

To the Church has been committed the preaching of the Gospel of redemption from sin and the building up of the saints in spiritual knowledge and in practical Christian living. Christians must be shining lights, reflecting the glory of their Saviour in compassion and love for those about them. The hungry must be fed and the thirsty given drink as opportunity arises. There must be response to the needs of the stranger, the naked, and the sick. Visiting those in prison is a part of the Christian’s obligation. Yet all this is geared to a higher end than the immediate needs of mankind. We must above all witness to him who is the Bread of life, the One who quenches spiritual thirst—the One who ministered and suffered and died and who arose triumphantly from the grave.

Unless everything we do is to glorify Christ, then we too are preaching and living “another gospel”—and the end thereof is death.

L. NELSON BELL