Page 5452 – Christianity Today (2024)

Alice Fryling

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In our high-powered society, we have retreated from those around us who hurt.

Several years ago, as I was taking the limousine to Hopkins Airport in Cleveland, I chatted with the only other passenger. When I asked why he was traveling, he replied that his business partner had died suddenly and he had come to Ohio for the funeral. Misunderstanding what he said, I smiled politely and commented, “Oh, how nice!”

Immediately, I knew my response had been inappropriate. Embarrassed, I asked, “Pardon me?” When he repeated his answer, I realized how I had misunderstood him, and that my polite reply was a disaster. That brief conversation has haunted me as I have wondered how many “polite” answers I have given to people who were hurting deeply.

In our high-powered society, we have retreated from those around us who hurt. The hurts range from death to depression, from daily trials to serious illness. We have taught ourselves not to get too involved: it is too costly; it takes too much time; it is embarrassing; the risk of failure is too great. As a result, when we want to express care we no longer know how. We have not taken the risk and the time to develop the skills necessary to make our efforts effective. I suspect that almost daily God brings someone to us who needs help in facing a small hurt or a large crisis. We need three skills to be God’s instruments of care: (1) we need to listen; (2) we need to show we understand; and (3) we need to respond.

Listening

The key to good listening is first to stop talking. Eager to relieve another’s pain, we are often quick to pontificate. Consider Job: in despair he cried out to God, “I will give free rein to my complaint and speak out” (Job 10:1, NIV). But to his talkative, accusing friends he said, “If only you would be altogether silent! For you that would be wisdom” (13:5).

In How to Help a Friend, Paul Welter says that “a response no longer than 12 seconds is usually an effective length in a counseling or helping situation.” In 12 seconds, according to Welter, one can say two sentences, or a total of about 25 words. “A consistent response length of over 20–30 seconds presents a major problem.” What we communicate by more lengthy answers, Welter observes, is, “I want to talk to you rather than talk with you.” He also says, “If our responses are long, then the focus is taken off the person we are trying to help and the helping process is slowed down.”

One of the reasons we talk rather than listen is that we do not like to face negative feelings. I don’t feel comfortable when a friend is too depressed to pray. Or when that friend is sure God is irreconcilably angry with him. Or when he says “God doesn’t love me anymore.” Those feelings challenge my faith—and besides, I don’t have easy answers for them.

But if I intend to be biblical, honest, and loving I must listen. I have felt those feelings myself. I have read of them in Scripture. (In Psalm 77, for example, the psalmist admits to all the negative feelings just mentioned.) I must listen because, in his love, God listens. The Bible is bursting with the words of men and women who pour out their hearts before God. God was not embarrassed or put off by what his people said. Not only did he listen, but he allowed words of anguish and despair to be recorded in writing. The reality of God’s love is, in fact, clearer in Scripture because we are also allowed to read of the desperate need men and women have for that love. God forbid that we should try to protect his truth, or ourselves, by not listening to someone in need.

But listening involves more than not talking. We must want to understand what lies beneath the words we hear. Jesus listened for the heart needs of people. When he healed the woman with the flow of blood (Mark 5:25–34), he knew her need was greater than physical healing. Because of her 12 years of hemorrhaging, she had probably been ostracized by her people. Hers was a private problem. By drawing her out and telling her in front of the crowd, “Your faith has made you well,” he restored her not only physically, but socially and spiritually as well.

The heart need is not always the need stated in words. I may say, “I just feel out of sorts today.” “I’m lonely inside.” “I’m doing all that I can think of, yet God seems far away.” So I am greatly helped when someone reaches out and touches my spirit, as Jesus touched the leper, and says to me, “I’m interested in what you’re experiencing. I love you. I want to stand beside you and uphold you.”

Showing Understanding

Besides listening, you need to show that you have heard. Let’s reverse the roles and see what we look for when we seek help from someone else.

Suppose your father has just died, and you are pouring out your feelings to a Christian friend. You tell him that you get mad at your spouse when the slightest thing goes wrong, and at work bristle when anyone disagrees with you. After the initial burst of words and emotion, what response do you want from your friend? Probably you want to know that he is receiving the feelings you are sending. How can he show this? Perhaps by commenting, “I hear you saying you are all torn up inside by this.”

You might then say, “That’s right! Well, I’m sleeping pretty well, I’m not all torn up. But it does pretty well wreck my day and my relations with people.”

Now let’s translate that to the situation where you are listening to someone else’s problem. Having listened, the goal is to show that you have heard what your friend is saving. Often a one-sentence rephrasing is enough. When you do this, it gives him the chance to clarify, or to add more information.

It is the nature of pain, whether emotional or physical, to be ultimately private. This means that no one can fully understand the pain another person experiences. It also means that the person who hurts feels alone. So when we respond to a hurting person, we are communicating, “I want to understand your particular experience. I want to try to share it with you.”

Henri Nouwen, in Out of Solitude, says, “When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand.”

Responding

Besides listening and showing we have heard, we can respond in other ways. It may be appropriate, for instance, to ask some questions (taking care not to pummel your friend with them). Ask about the circ*mstances of the crisis. Or ask if this has ever occurred before. Or ask what he needs from other people. But give him the option not to answer. In fact, give him the option not to receive your help at all. The command of God to bear one another’s burdens is not our license to barrel into the privacy of his personal pain. If you ask about his feelings and he chooses not to tell you, step back, pray, and see if there is some other way to express your love.

He may want your help, however, and still not be able to answer questions. Let us therefore consider some suggestions for responding to a friend in crisis.

Jesus said that we should treat others the way we would like to be treated. While we can never assume that our response to crisis will be the same as our friend’s, we can ask ourselves, “What would I like someone to do for me if I were in the same situation?” For example, when I cry (which I hate to do!) I do not, at first, want someone to touch me or hug me. I want someone to pass the Kleenex. So, if I am with a friend who starts to cry, I tend to get the Kleenex before I offer a hug.

As another example, I know that when I am sick, I am fragile emotionally. Therefore, when I talk with someone who is sick, I try to remember that this person probably needs extra affirmation, even about little things. As we think about how we have been comforted, we echo Paul, who said, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Cor. 1:3–4).

It is sometimes helpful to describe your own feelings about the crisis your friend is facing. I remember telling a friend about an experience I had just had. Her response was, “Oh, it makes me so angry that you had to go through that!” It helped me to hear her say that she was angry, because I could not yet allow myself to be that angry.

If you really do not know how to help your friend, say so: “I’d really like to support you, but I don’t know how. What would be most helpful to you now?” Listen carefully, between the lines, to the answer. It may be, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m just too tired to do the simplest things each day.” Translated to heart-need language, that may be, “I need someone to tell me to go home from work—or to do my breakfast dishes—or to type a letter for me.” Or if the answer is, “It’s just hard to be so weak,” the translation might be, “I need to know if I am doing a good job handling this experience,” or “Please tell me that you like me even when I am going through this difficult time.” Ask if your translation is correct, and then do what you can to meet the need.

But while we need to be ready to act to meet a need, we need even more to be ready to share the sorrow even if we cannot change the situation. Henri Nouwen touches on this when he says, “The basic meaning of care is to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with … we feel uncomfortable with an invitation to enter into someone’s pain before doing something about it” (Out of Solitude). Listening to a friend describe his pain and hearing his heart needs may be the greatest help we can give to him at the time. Never be afraid to listen and to hear just because you cannot do anything to help.

Knowing What Not To Say

We need to consider two common responses—not because they are helpful, but because they almost never communicate the love intended. We have all probably given these responses in one form or another. Generally, we speak with the best intentions. But we see when we look at these responses that they can deflate someone who needs encouragement.

The first such response is, “I know just how you feel.” While this is probably an attempt to communicate understanding, it actually communicates a superficial view of the other person. John Powell observes in The Secret of Staying in Love that if you say this to him, you “anticipate that my reaction was what yours would be in a similar situation, and it never, never is.” Although we all want to know that our experiences are not weird and that they are to some extent shared by others, there are still corners of our heart that only God knows. And for all of us, there are subtleties of feelings that are so personal we would be uncomfortable sharing them. To lose a husband or wife is a common experience, but each person loses something unique, something no one else can fully appreciate. To face the slow death of cancer, or to lose a limb, or to be depressed day after day are all things that many have written about and discussed. But each person who goes through such an experience brings to it individual thoughts, feelings, and reactions.

It would be far better to say to the one who hurts, “I know I can’t really understand all you are going through, but I want you to know I love you, and I want to share your grief as much as I can.”

The second deflating response is: “Oh, but you shouldn’t feel that way! You shouldn’t be down on yourself. [You shouldn’t be angry, or, You shouldn’t be depressed.] God loves you, and you don’t need to feel that way.”

The person with such negative feelings probably knows that they are not God’s ultimate will for him. But to tell him he “shouldn’t feel that way” only adds to the reasons why he does. It becomes one more “bad” thing for him. We can gently remind him that his feelings may be inaccurate, though real, but as we do this we need to communicate that we will stand by him, no matter how negative his feelings.

Listening, showing we hear, and responding all take time and patience and practice. Though I have often failed, I am encouraged that God in his grace can take what is limited and faltering and transform it into a message of his love. Our skill may be fumbling, our questions may be awkward. But if we are willing to take the risk of involvement, and if we are willing to listen to others’ heart needs, then God will graciously allow us to share in the ministry of healing his people.

Alice Fryling is a former member of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s campus staff, and the author of two books published by IV Press. She and her husband live in Madison, Wisconsin, where he directs IVCF’s campus ministries.

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Which Magnet Draws Evangelicals Together?

The wrong one deflects, the right one aligns.

Evangelicalism today is decaying at the edges. There is nothing new about this—but neither is it necessarily bad.

The situation is not new because every human institution is imperfect and liable to decay. Even our Lord experienced an 8 percent loss among the original 12 apostles, and the New Testament warns repeatedly of those like Hymenaeus, Demas, Alexander the coppersmith, and a host of other antiheroes who deserted the faith. The first church had to reckon with its divisions in the body of Christ—each zealously protecting its own new converts (“I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas,” 1 Cor. 1:12).

In part, this corrosion in our own day is the product of a second generation of church people, children of fundamentalist fathers who fought valiantly against the overpowering sweep of liberalism in the early part of this century. But these people have not inherited their fathers’ faith.

Still, there is a positive way to view this decay at the edges, for in large measure it illustrates the Constantinian effect that plagued the ancient church. Then, new converts were being born into a growing movement who were converted emotionally, but only “half-converted” in terms of their apprehension of what it means to think biblically about Christian life and action. So although this decay is not new, and though it is often a direct result of the very success of evangelicalism, it is regrettable, and it ought to be a cause of deep concern to every true evangelical.

Unfortunately, the reasons for this decay are all too often viewed overly simplisticly, as when focus is directed to a single problem area, picking out issues on which evangelicals fine up left, right, and center. For example, the biblical scholar may see all issues in the light of inerrancy; the churchman sees them in terms of denominational loyalty; the liberation theologian in terms of social and political involvement in behalf of the poor. Too often it is assumed that evangelicals can be identified if they are located at the correct spot on a single band.

But the single issue model leads to inadequate understanding of evangelicalism and of the nature of the problems. Evangelicalism is just far too complex to yield to any simplistic analysis that seeks definition in terms of any single issue, or even two or three isolated and unrelated issues. And, of course, if we cannot define evangelicalism and its problems, we are in no position to offer effective remedies for those problems.

A better model to use in interpreting contemporary evangelicalism would be a confederation of independent nations that are bound together by a common purpose. Usually this is a common enemy. For evangelicalism, liberalism long served as that enemy, forcing together evangelicalism’s widely divergent elements. But today liberalism is in disarray and in full retreat. It can no longer function as the centripetal force that holds all of evangelicalism together. Some evangelicals are seeking to cast secular humanism as a new common enemy that will unite evangelicalism and halt the decay at its edges.

But neither the liberalism of a former day nor the secular humanism of the present day was ever intended to serve such a unifying role for biblical Christianity. For a full century, evangelicalism has suffered because its identity was based to too great an extent on its opposition to liberalism. In making this mistake, evangelicalism, quite unconsciously, contributed to the erosion of its structure. In fact, fundamentalism in much of its modern form could well be defined as evangelicalism shaped by its battle against liberalism.

Early liberalism tended to be rationalistic. Even today, evangelicalism is torn by those who accepted the challenge of rationalistic liberalism and sought to battle against it on its own turf. This led to a kind of evangelical rationalism, but also, on the other hand, it gave rise to those who reacted so sharply against rationalistic liberalism that they became virtual ‘fideists’ (faith must not be supported in any way by reason or evidences). If some liberals dissolved the holiness of God in emotional love, some evangelicals hardened his love into a rigorous holiness. When liberals turned to the social gospel, there were evangelicals who repudiated the social implications of the gospel. Thus, liberalism, while serving as a unifying factor to pull together the divergent strands of evangelicalism, at the same time also eroded evangelicalism to a degree that even now evangelicals are only beginning to discover, and to correct.

The true centripetal force to unite properly biblical evangelicalism is neither liberalism nor secular humanism—nor any other pressures from the world about it. The true unifying power is instead common commitment to Jesus Christ and the instructions he has given to his church in the written Word of inspired Scripture. It is extremely important that we discover this to be the true force that provides cohesiveness for evangelicalism, in spite of all its diversity.

Holy Scripture unequivocally sets forth the only legitimate bond for the people of God: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.… By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep his commandments” (1 John 4:10–11; 5:2). The same apostle John also records in his Gospel these words of our Lord: “Sanctify them in the truth; thy word is truth.… I sanctify myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth … that they may all be one, even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us; … that they may be perfected in unity,” (John 17:17–23).

It is the love of Jesus Christ the Savior that also calls forth from us a love for others, creating a longing to please him by obedience to the Holy Scripture. He has given us the truth for the guidance of our thought and life. Jesus Christ, the Lord of the church, draws the entire body together in a bond of love that enables us to see all issues in their proper relationship to the whole church. Only by subjecting every issue to the Lord of the church can we evaluate its true worth and thereby exclude false issues that may unnecessarily interfere with the desired unity of Christ’s body. At the same time, we can also find guidance for those not altogether rare instances—such as the time Paul withstood the apostle Peter to his face (Gal. 2:11)—when we must boldly take stands that at least temporarily destroy harmony in the church.

It is also important to recognize Christ himself as the true bonding force of evangelicalism. When we do, we can more effectively meet the complex and interrelated issues facing the church. We can observe a dangerous corrosion not only at the edges of the movement, but at each of the traditional fundamentals of the faith. Furthermore, today there are all sorts of new issues projecting themselves onto the evangelical scene: abortion, women’s rights, women’s ordination, divorce and remarriage, the integrity of the family—to name but a few. Each can be set in its rightful place by relating it to the Lord of the church.

Therefore, no position stands in isolated independence. It is always related to Christ and, accordingly, to every other position as well. It is only when we recognize this universal interrelatedness that we are prepared to apply remedies to the problems that trouble the body of Christ.

The situation is not unlike the one in which the United States found itself in the recent Falkland Islands debacle. To help Britain would seem to foster colonialism and antagonize Latin Americans; to side with Argentina would be to favor violent seizure of territory and weaken the Atlantic Alliance. All issues are interrelated, and one cannot be dealt with in isolation from another. For evangelicals to unite by focusing on individual issues or perceived enemies is to distort the church in the very act of trying to pull it together.

At the same time, we do not mean to imply that we cannot solve one problem until we have solved all problems. Every issue we face also serves to bring into focus numerous important aspects of the truth of Scripture. We must not gloss over any of these pieces of truth in the interest of a superficial harmony. Rather, we must extricate the truth and preserve it for the good of the body. The evangelical feminist, for example, will not, and should not, be satisfied until we have given full weight to equal justice for women and to the biblical teaching that women are created in the divine image every bit as much as men.

Those with whom the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy sits uneasily have every right to demand that we safeguard the full humanity of Scripture as the words of finite, sinful prophets and apostles whose writings were imbedded in a particular human culture that can be understood only in the light of what they meant in that historical context. The primacy of evangelistic preaching cannot annul the biblical command to care for the poor. The hom*ogeneous unit principle of evangelism (like witnessing to like) cannot negate the biblical concept of the unity of the body of Christ. Only the lordship of Christ can draw together all evangelicals without distorting the nature of the church as it is mirrored for us in Scripture.

We sometimes forget how effective Christ’s lordship is in holding evangelicalism together. The CHRISTIANITY TODAY-Gallup Poll revealed an amazing fact about the structure of this diffuse movement we call evangelicalism. Evangelicals have a very large core of common commitment that has grown out of their solid allegiance to Christ’s lordship. Divergences abound. But for each set of centrifugal forces tearing evangelicalism apart there is also a centripetal unifying power of much greater strength that provides a center of gravity and holds the body together. On issue after issue this proved true: abortion, divorce, inerrancy—and on through the gamut of issues troubling the body ecclesiastical. On the periphery are 5 to 10 percent who are creating the uproar, but in agreement at the center is the critical mass of those loyal to biblical truth. This critical mass, so decisive for the effective functioning of the church, mounts up to 60 to 80—sometimes as high as 90—percent of the total. On most issues there is a massive consensus at the center of evangelicalism.

Of course, the mere existence of this large body of agreement at the center does not mean that it always represents the truth. The majority is not always right. And because that is so, it is crucial to the well-being of evangelicalism that the lordship of Christ stand unequivocally as its unifying force. Of course the church has erred, and it will err again in serious, even devastating, fashion. But so long as evangelicals confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and adhere faithfully to Holy Scripture as he instructed, evangelicals have a built-in corrective to the warping and corroding to which they are constantly subject in this world.

If all of this is true, the role of those who lead the church becomes clear. We must seek by persuasive biblical argument and appealing presentation to strengthen and foster extension of Christ’s lordship over this critical mass and prevent the multiple erosion at the edges. The temptation to gloss over problems, or to confront them carelessly without regard for the complexity of the body, may lead to a quick fix and apparent victory. In the end, however, such measures will prove destructive.

The health and growth of the central mass is the decisive issue. If the centripetal force of Christ’s lordship over all and the full authority of his Word are not given their proper weight, then we shall lose the essence of the critical mass that constitutes the evangelical body. This must be preserved and defended at all cost.

But the desired results will not come automatically. We cannot sit on our hands. The unity that holds evangelicalism together is voluntary, and it will not hold unless this truth is continuously expounded and applied at every point. We must adhere faithfully and boldly to our faith in all its angularity. For biblical faith and its teaching are angular when measured by stretching them across the moral and spiritual pattern of twentieth-century man. The shape of a Christian pattern of things, however, is not ours to decide. That is the prerogative of our sovereign Lord through his Word. Our task is to uphold Jesus Christ as Lord and to apply his teaching faithfully to every aspect of human thought and life.

But to present a properly shaped Christian message is not enough. It must also be attractive if it is to move and carry the day for the advancement of the kingdom of God. We must so present the biblical message to our day that by all means we may win some—win many, we may pray. We can be right—a thousand times right—but unless our right is bathed in love, we shall accomplish nothing. The church of our day desperately needs effective, biblically guided, and spiritually appealing leadership for Christ and his kingdom.

A Heavyweight Bout That Hits Below The Belt

Christianity Today doesn’t ordinarily comment on sports events—least of all heavyweight boxing championships. But the recent Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney title bout dealt the world of sports a harder blow than any that champion Holmes landed on the chin of the defeated challenger. The tragedy warrants a sorrowful note from the editor.

In itself, boxing poses a moral dilemma for any evangelical. It is the one sport in which the aim is to batter the opponent into unconsciousness. The forward linemen in a professional football game may be equally brutal (and their tactics also highly questionable), but their aim, at least, is not to injure the body.

We have no quarrel with sports that demand vigorous bodily contact—even when there is inevitable danger of bodily injury. Rough physical contact teaches lessons that can be learned in no other way in our society. Physical injury is the price we sometimes have to pay to learn these lessons. Where such injuries occur with great frequency—as in professional hockey and in football (high school, college, and professional)—the evangelical Christian must raise hard questions about their moral justification. But in these sports, the aim at least is not to injure. Boxing, on the other hand, brutalizes the spirit because the goal of the sport is to destroy (even if momentarily) the humanity of a being made in the image of God.

But the real tragedy of the Holmes-Cooney bout had nothing to do with any of this. It had to do with the racist overtones conjured up, apparently, by boxing managers and trumpeted widely by the public media. We have no reason to believe that either boxer is personally racist, but their public statements added fuel to the flames and furthered the racial tension. Irrespective of who was ultimately responsible for it, this crass attempt to raise a few more dollars by an appeal to racism is a disgrace to all concerned—not least to the American people as a whole.

Over recent years the sports industry has succeeded better than most in weeding out traces of racial prejudice. Blacks themselves deserve most of the credit for this. By their outstanding performances they have won the right not only to equality but to the warm admiration of every fellow American. We are sorry to observe this blotch upon the world of sports that in other ways deserves the highest praise.

Eutychus

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Burned Out or Just Pooped Out?

I have a friend who proudly claims the distinction of having “burnout.” He describes his symptoms and the tests his doctors made before pronouncing the diagnosis. He proudly wears an “I’m Burned Out” button. Should I fail to ask about his condition whenever we meet, he begins to reminisce about his years of travail on the “front lines.” If I get irritated enough to ask him for specifics, he rolls his eyes and mumbles about being a candidate for a pacemaker.

I’ve tried, but I just can’t manage to lay claim to being a full-fledged burnout case. If I begin to tell my friend about the pressure on my job, he interrupts with, “Oh, that’s nothing. In my work the pressure is so tremendous that the staff are dropping like flies!” I nod sympathetically, all the while thinking about the unfortunate metaphor he has used for his colleagues.

But while I may not have the credentials for burnout, I think I can prove I qualify for being “pooped out.” Here are some data to support my case:

• I no longer relish the thought of a “breakfast meeting” at the Holiday Inn.

• I have lost enthusiasm for interoffice intramurals “for the whole family.”

• In spite of my long dedication to the cause, there are times I have to push myself to make just one more phone call.

• I’m easily depressed by articles in CHRISTIANITY TODAY by people who are conquering new territory, overcoming tremendous odds.

Why Christian Nose Counting Boggles The Mind

A new era in reporting and study of world evangelization was ushered in with the publication of the World Christian Encyclopedia.

Edited by David B. Barrett, and published by Oxford University Press, this massive single volume with more than a thousand 9¾×12¼-inch pages retails for $95 (an introductory price of $74.50 is in effect through July). The publisher’s instructions warn readers they will need a ruler to help them track information they are seeking from the 31 complex global tables and 440 religion and denomination tables (one of each for every country) that are at its heart.

Accolades are already piling up for what is the most systematic and comprehensive survey ever undertaken of all the versions of Christianity in the world. Patrick J. St. G. Johnstone, author of Operation World, says “I think it will be the standard.… Now at least we’ve got a base upon which to check [individual new findings].” Donald A. McGavran says, “There is nothing as complete and as accurate. Barrett, with the publication of this, is going to be the number one missiologist in all the world. Nobody knows as much about the world picture as Barrett does.”

Barrett has managed to develop a statistical grid that correlates the differing ways of numbering Christians and utilizes the computer for extrapolating where there are gaps and for projecting from the past into the future. The result is comparable totals at global, continental, and national levels, and at confessional and denominational levels.

The knot that up to now has foiled attempts to achieve a cohesive picture of world Christianity is the fact that one segment measures its entire community, including children and infants. In addition, secular enumerators have always shown more Christians than do church counts because their censuses have counted anyone who says he is a Christian, even though he is not on the rolls of any church.

Barrett has counted all three ways. He has measured practicing Christians and then added non-practicing Christians to arrive at a total of those affiliated with churches. He has then added to these affiliated Christians the nominal Christians who show up in the secular surveys (along with secret believers) to come up with an overall total.

This approach has corrected the serious undercounting of the world Christian community that led to a pessimistic outlook and to the development of a “remnant” theology. Christians have traditionally counted the committed, practicing portion of their community and then compared that number against, for example, all Hindus and Muslims. As McGavran notes, “There are more nominal Hindus than there are nominal Christians. There are simply enormous numbers of nominal Muslims.”

Evangelicals will likely be more interested in determining the number of “believers” in a given continent or country. Barrett accommodates by estimating the 1980 world population of committed Christians at 780 million, or 18 percent of the world’s population, with 420 million of those identifying themselves as born again.

In religious breakdowns, he includes an evangelical category under the broader Protestant category. Himself a conciliar evangelical, he includes fundamentalists, conservative (non-conciliar) evangelicals, and conciliar evangelicals. While this may constitute a broader definition of evangelical than some would prefer, many at least will find it provides a satisfactory working figure for Protestant Christendom as it is historically understood.

The encyclopedia also endeavors to measure the extent to which the world has been and is being evangelized. It is here that its findings become controversial—not so much in statistics as in the definitions used to arrive at them.

The encyclopedia is called a successor to the World Christian Handbook series, edited on a shoestring by Sir Kenneth Grubb, and published in Great Britain from 1949 to 1968. But not only is the encyclopedia a vastly more ambitious undertaking, it is also more inclusive in its suppositions. Grubb was anti-Roman Catholic. He reluctantly included Catholic figures in a single column at the back of his book, but only under pressure.

Barrett includes not only Catholics and Orthodox, but marginal Protestants (such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses) and nonwhite indigenous groups. No theological distinctions are made, thereby showing countries such as Argentina and Greece in the encyclopedia as evangelized.

Barrett, a British Anglican serving in Nairobi, Kenya, also opts for a European definition of evangelization rather than an American one. The European school of missiologists stresses exposure to the gospel in its most rudimentary form, regardless of response, as constituting evangelization. It clearly differentiates between evangelism and conversion. McGavran, on the other hand, states the American school view when he says evangelization has occured only “when you get a fairly steady flow of converts.” He regards Barrett’s projection of the world as 83.4 percent evangelized by the year 2000 as “hopelessly optimistic.” But he still terms Barrett’s figure valid so long as his definition is understood.

Barrett is a perfectionist who essentially put the encyclopedia together himself. Macmillan at first agreed to publish the work, but jettisoned plans in 1968 after a series of delays. The Nairobi branch of Oxford then picked it up.

The continuing delays were primarily because the immense size and complexity of the Christian world were seriously underestimated at the outset. Barrett’s 1968 estimate of some 5,000 distinct and separate Christian denominations turned out to exceed 20,800 by the time the survey was completed. Vast areas of Christian activity proved to be undocumented, necessitating trips by Barrett to nearly every country on earth.

His data was computerized on equipment at the University of Nairobi. Eventually the 100-megabyte data base required its own minicomputer. Incredibly, the entire volume was set in metal type—because that is what was available in Nairobi where Barrett did the proofing. Full-color maps were printed in England. The rest of the printing and binding were done in the United States (which is expected to provide a majority of sales).

So self-effacing is Barrett that even the publishers have been unable to obtain his photo.

The encyclopedia comes in 14 sections and includes a wealth of descriprive text and photos, plus a chronology, a dictionary of terms, and a directory of resources. It will take the reader some orientation rime to learn his way through its branching corridors and frequent references to its codebook to interpret its statistical tables. But what you are looking for is almost sure to be found there somewhere.

The World Christian Encyclopedia’s impact will be so marked that Johnstone says he advised groups such as World Vision’s MARC (Missions Advanced Research and Communication Center) to hold off new publications until pertinent segments of the encyclopedia were digested.

“Now mind you,” says McGavran, “on certain points I differ with some of his findings, but there is nothing that is as authoritative.”

Reviewed by Harry Genet, CT international news editor.

Briefly Noted

Numerous New Testament studies of high quality are appearing. Following is a sampling of what is currently available.

General. R. H. Gundry’s standard Survey of the New Testament (Zondervan) is now available in a revised edition. A helpful textbook on hermeneutics, The Literature and Meaning of Scripture (Baker), edited by Morris Inch and Hassell Bullock, covers the whole NT. A Guide to Biblical Resources (Morehouse-Barlow), by Iris V. and Kendig Cully, is a selective work covering history, methods, and resource books for Bible study. Barbara and Timothy Friberg have parsed the whole New Testament with an interlinear grammatical analysis of each word using the UBS text in the Analytical Greek New Testament (Baker). This will save a lot of people a lot of work (but not thought, let’s hope).

Commentaries. Bengel’s Gnomen is available again in a beautiful two-volume set from Kregel as Bengel’s New Testament Commentary. It still shows the end of the world taking place in 1836. Two monumental, though quite different, commentaries on Matthew are Matthew (Eerdmans), by R. H. Gundry, and The Gospel According to Matthew (Harper & Row), by F. W. Beare. Scholars will want them both. Terence J. Keegan’s Commentary on the Gospel of Mark (Paulist) is nicely written. Alfred Plummer’s Gospel According to John is available again from Baker and still quite useful. So are three other reprints: Romans (Klock & Klock), by H. C. G. Moule; Galatians (Klock & Klock), by John Brown; and Colossians and Philemon (Eerdmans), by R. P. Martin.

Special Studies. Four studies deal with Jesus as Savior: Crucifixion-Resurrection (SPCK), by E. C. Hoskyns and Noel Davey; The Atoning Death of Christ (Crossway), by Ronald Wallace; The Atoning Gospel (Mercer University), by J. E. Tull; and Jesus—A Savior or The Savior? (Mercer University), by R. F. Aldwinckle. All are valuable works, well worth reading. Rudolf Stier’s The Words of the Apostles (Klock & Klock) is a reprinted study of the speeches in Acts. A modern groundbreaking study, The Charismatic Leader and His Followers (Crossroad), by Martin Hengel, is now available in English. Is Christ Infallible and the Bible True? (Klock & Klock), by Hugh M’Intosh, will, though dated, still be useful to modern apologists. Wayne Grudem’s excellent The Gift of Prophecy in I Corinthians (University Press of America) goes a long way toward explaining what is really going on. Another excellent work is Angels and Principalities (Cambridge), by Wesley Carr, which looks at the background, meaning, and development of the Pauline phrase hai archai kai hai exousiai.

Suffering is examined in: Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Baker), by W. H. C. Frend, available again in a new form; Spirit and Martyrdom (University Press of America), by W. C. Weinrich, emphasizing the role of the Holy Spirit; and Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament (Cambridge), edited by William Horbury and Brian McNeil. These books are challenging and should be read carefully by all serious scholars.

Related Themes. W. H. C. Frend’s The Early Church (Fortress) is available again, to the delight of patristic students. A refreshing work is The Evangelization of the Roman Empire (Mercer University), by E. Glenn Hinson. He argues for the church as mission, and mission as chiefly winning converts.

Mystery Religions in the Ancient World (Harper & Row), by Joscelyn Godwin, looks at the pagan alternatives to Christianity, and Witchcraft (Southern Illinois University), by Charles A. Hoyt, looks at modern interpretations of similar phenomena. Both books are quite useful.

Alice Schrage

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Enable families to take a larger role in church.

Churches and pastoral staffs need to face the fact that two-thirds of all families today have two breadwinners, not one. These families face special problems as they juggle the demands of jobs, family life, and commitments to the church. They simply do not have the flexibility of other families.

Tight schedules allow them little time for dealing with their children’s school problems, sibling altercations, or even a child’s illness. In addition, although they want to serve the church, sometimes such people are too drained by their own concerns to do so. These two-paycheck families, who often feel isolated by the problems peculiar to their lifestyle, need the support and encouragement of the church. Here are some ways the church might help them.

• Promote awareness of the two-paycheck family’s time and energy stresses. We are all busy and must make constant choices about priorities, but time and energy for two-paycheck families are constantly at a greater premium. The relentless focus on two paying jobs contributes to this. So does the fact that most of the same work still has to be done at home. As a result, adults from two-paycheck families may consistently arrive at church or committee meetings feeling drained. They need to know that the church understands the level and quality of involvement they can contribute.

• Encourage flexibility of meeting times. The worship committee in one church used to meet at noon; new people on the committee have different schedules, so it now meets in the evening. Noon may be a good time for Bible studies and support or prayer groups to meet. A meeting over a sack lunch after church on Sunday or for breakfast on a weekday sometimes works well. Such flexibility means easier involvement for many people.

• Work out some short-term commitments. A small support group program in my home church asks those who wish to join a group to make an initial commitment of six meetings. Group members may then decide if they wish to continue and for how long. A Lenten Bible study series is another possibility. The idea of short-term commitments may be popular with other members as well.

• Provide good children’s programs and child care during meetings. Parents who must leave their children every day are reluctant to abandon them to a sitter on evenings and weekends. They can more easily become involved in church activities if the children enjoy their church programs.

Good programs usually require a time investment by volunteers, or else funds to provide proper nursery care for young children if capable volunteers are unavailable. Sometimes only a little effort and adaptability is needed. For instance, young children clad in pajamas and robes might attend a home Bible study with their parents. Following a half-hour of songs and a story with the families gathered in the living room, the children are put to bed all over the house while their parents concentrate on Bible study.

• Find ways to allow children to remain with parents in worship services or at committee meetings. Being able on rare occasions to take my young daughter along to committee meetings enabled me to be involved in the church at an otherwise impossible level. Working parents sometimes also need the freedom to take a child into the worship service—even though the church has a nursery. A child may be tired of being left, or the parents may especially need to have him nearby. The congregation can learn to accept the rustlings of a reasonably quiet child.

• Plan quality family activities. These people appreciate times they can enjoy as a family unit since so much of their lives pulls them apart. One good idea is a family night where the evening meal (perhaps from a fast-food chain) is shared along with a program of interest to everyone.

My family has enjoyed puppet and mime shows, skits, and musical programs at family nights. A picnic with games for all ages is another possibility. So are an intergenerational Sunday school class with time for families to work on crafts, or a summer family choir. These programs work best if they do not require major schedule changes or extensive preparation.

• Provide specific support programs dealing with the problems of their lifestyle. Two-paycheck families need a support group where they can air their problems with others who understand and talk about priorities from a Christian perspective. A sharing group might be formed of working couples, or a program planned presenting professional input on various aspects of the two-paycheck lifestyle.

In their book, Making It Together As a Career Couple, Marjorie and Morton Shaevitz say many couples in a two-paycheck marriage think there is something wrong with them or their marriage because they have so much difficulty working things out. While we would put it in a spiritual light, the Shaevitzes say most problems of this lifestyle are predictable, and do not of themselves indicate anything about the marriage or marriage partners.

A support group involving others who have similar problems could alleviate the stress. Couples could also gain ideas from one another on how to handle specific problems, and priorities could be discussed. Some couples might even be led to give up the second paycheck. Others could receive the practical support they need.

A ministry to two-paycheck families can help them face and assess their values and lifestyle from a Christian perspective. While the secular world focuses on individual growth and rights, often at the cost of relationships, the church can help couples achieve a more biblical balance. In return, the church with such a ministry will enable these families themselves to minister more effectively. Some who might otherwise leave the church will be drawn into its life as the Christian community provides needed support. Furthermore, a ministry to two-paycheck families can provide outreach to other such families in the community.

Formerly a missionary to Brazil, Mrs. Schrage is currently a free-lance writer living in Pasadena, California.

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Carol R. Thiessen

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Screenplay by R. L. Thomas and Anne Cameron; directed by R. L. Thomas.

How can a rational, clear-thinking person fall prey to a cult that other rational, clear-thinking people perceive as false—even bizarre?

There are no easy answers, but Ticket to Heaven, a United Artists Classics film, opens at least a window on how otherwise intelligent people can suddenly have all their intellectual fuses blown and their reasoning powers short-circuited. Ticket, based on the book Moonwebs by Josh Freed, is the story of a young Jewish teacher from Toronto. David, says his shocked father who could not even get him to attend synagogue, was an atheist. How could he be involved with a cult?

We’ve heard explanations, but never had them so graphically illustrated. David, superbly played by Nick Mancuso, arrives in San Francisco on an emotional low: his lover, Sarah, has just left him. In search of companionship with a boyhood friend, he finds himself thrust instead into first the friend’s communal (read cult) residence, then camp.

He is denied sleep, protein-rich food, and coerced into indoctrination sessions and determinedly enthusiastic chanting and singing that explode into mass fervor. He is also denied what he wants most: time to think for himself. Doubts, whether expressed or simply seen in his expression, are subjected to group pressure. Emotions take over and the thinking process is unhinged. His mentors have mind manipulation perfected. The campfire “testimony” service seems alarmingly familiar—a scene that should raise some honest questions for evangelicals.

David’s qualms about the integrity of hawking flowers to support a nonexistent drug rehabilitarion center are identified as the influence of “Satan,” along with anything or anyone else posing a threat—including family and friends.

Mancuso’s David, with his vacant eyes and robotlike behavior, is frightening. It is only with deprogramming that expression returns, that the circuitry is repaired and the thinking process restarted.

This is an important film. Evangelicals concerned about cult influence should make a point to see it.

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Steven Cory

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Like Nietzche, her faith cannot be easily dismissed.

Ayn rand is dead, at the age of 77. Author of novels such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she was for many years one of the leading voices of our time against Christianity. The temptation is for Christians to gloat (as in that popular bit of seminary graffiti: “‘God is dead”—Nietzsche. ‘Nietzche is dead’—God.”). But her ideas live on, and I have met many who, knowingly or not, embody them. For many, these ideas represent the most powerful and attractive attack upon our faith around today.

Like Nietzsche, Rand’s faith cannot be as easily dismissed as the naïve belief in the unaided progress of mankind we often refer to as “humanism.” She did not believe that humankind would become better simply as a result of an evolutionary process. For the most part, her world was populated with people who were, in her sense, totally depraved; only the few would ever rise to satisfy the rigorous demands of her moral vision.

She described this morality as “the virtue of selfishness.” For her, the ideal person was one who had a clear conception of where his own happiness lay, and who pursued this personal ideal with heroic effort. This world is filled with people who are afraid of their own desires, she felt, people who are too lazy and timid to chart clearly a course that will lead to productive achievement, which is the highest aim of man. It is only when an individual unashamedly sees his own fulfillment as the higest moral purpose of his life that he can make for himself—and for others—a life that is more worth living.

What Rand called “rational selfishness” cannot be passed off lightly as mindless self-interest. Her trust in man’s most genuine desires led her to posit that what is most beneficial to an individual will be of the greatest help to others.

She had, for instance, a strong ideal of friendship: she did not see it as based on any desire to “help” the other by bowing low to give of one’s self, but rather as a relationship between two people who can know and appreciate each other as individuals precisely because each has labored hard and long to find and to develop himself. Also, she pointed out, the greatest benefits to mankind have been achieved by people who single-mindedly pursued their own ambitions, thereby producing ideas, works of art, and products that enrich our lives, and stimulate and challenge the best parts of us all.

Where her writings hit us as Christians the hardest is in her critique of “altruism.” Altruism, she claimed, is basically a lie. We pretend to be selfless, while all the while we are reaping subtle, egoistic rewards. People who work for charitable causes usually do it in order to feel better about themselves, and often in order to win the adulation of others. What is most objectionable in this is that the true motives are so concealed. People become altruists, she felt, because they are weak, because they want to hide the fact that they have nothing positive to live for themselves.

Such a critique merits our attention, I feel: Are we being humble, self-abasing—and even kindly—only because it is the easiest path toward a falsely conceived self-respect?

Rand’s views led her naturally to an unflinching support of laissez-faire capitalism; she could be described as several miles to the right of Goldwater with respect to the free market. And this brings up a question for many of us who are both Christians and believers in free enterprise: Are we aware of this possible split in our moralities?

I have met a number of folk who share Ayn Rand’s views. Some of them are simply selfish people in a destructive way. But there are others who have my somewhat puzzled respect. They are kind and gentle, and even have a sort of natural humility about them (none of which is antithetical to Rand’s position). But their friendship is, in a sense, hardheaded. They do not stoop to aid so much as they display a desire for their friends to become more than they are now: they challenge their friends to better themselves. They are humble in recognition of their own shortcomings, yet they are unabashed in their efforts to deepen and expand themselves.

How are we to respond to such people? The answer is dialectical, involving both learning from them and giving them an answer they desperately need. As fallen people, we need to see that Rand’s critique of altruism hits home more often than we care to admit, and that we often misuse Christian notions of humility and reliance upon God in order to shirk responsibilities we ought to take on.

But it is also clear that there is much missing in Ayn Rand’s world view. The fact of the matter is, we are completely fallen people who Cannot go it alone. While much of our weakness is due to things we could profitably work on, in the final analysis we need the strong arms of a loving Savior in order to make our lives worth living, and in order to be of service.

Our notion of Christian love needs looking into. Because of the incarnation of Christ, love is a genuine presence, a true power in this world. It is not a matter of a strong person condescending to aid a weak person; we are all weak. Rather, it is the binding force, given us of God, that always infuses both parties with his presence. When we try to love in our insufficient ways, we should always look for what God has to give to us through the other person.

So it is that in dealing with Ayn Rand’s thought we come not to a compromise position, asserting that “we can be strong, too,” but rather to a deepening sense of humility. But humility and love are not weaklings. They are avenues for Christ’s redemptive strength.

Mr. Cory is self-employed, a free-lance writer living in Chicago.

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Rodney Clapp

Taking Christ’s social concern seriously.

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Some 10 or 11 years ago, an evangelical Chicago pastor and one of his parishioners, a lawyer, undertook a study to determine the Bible’s idea of justice. They found more than 80 passages conveying God’s concern for social justice—a concern especially directed toward the poor, whom society so easily casts underfoot. The pastor was William Leslie. The attorney was Charles Hogren. Their church, LaSalle Street Church, is on Chicago’s Near North Side. It is only blocks from Cabrini-Green, a neighborhood that is home to the poorest of Chicago’s poor.

Hogren helped out at his church’s youth center. It was there that Cabrini-Green children, hearing he was a lawyer, approached Hogren with pleas to help an older brother or neighbor who had been unfairly dumped in jail, according to the children. At first Hogren pleaded back: he was not a criminal lawyer, and had in fact avoided studying criminal law in law school.

Yet the children argued that he was the only lawyer they knew, and Hogren, in light of the biblical teaching, felt an increasing obligation. So he became the reluctant defender (the title of a book about Hogren’s work by David Claerbaut, published by Tyndale House, 1978).

The history of the Cabrini-Green Legal Aid Clinic is less a sugar-sweet American success story than a chronicle of committed endurance. Now into its ninth year of operation, the Legal Aid Clinic offers competent legal assistance to the 13,000 residents of Chicago’s most harrowing public housing project.

The cycle of poverty, illiteracy, and hopelessness that has trapped the largely black population of Cabrini-Green remains unbroken. Even residents helped by the clinic have said it is like an overwhelmed ambulance picking up bodies after an accident that should have been prevented.

But the accident keeps on happening. The Legal Aid Clinic, chronically lacking enough money, has stayed in Cabrini-Green since 1973 because it is a Christian endeavor. LaSalle Street Church still largely finances it.

Hogren learned early in his work with Cabrini-Green residents how disdained the rights of the poor actually are. Some youth were jailed merely as a harassment to scare them from loitering on the streets. Some were arrested on false warrants. Some were guilty; but Hogren believed they were as entitled to conscientious legal aid as someone who could afford it. (Though Hogren believes public defenders are competent and sincere, indigent people view them with suspicion as “part of the system.”)

Would Hogren, as a Christian lawyer, do his utmost to defend a client he thought guilty? Hogren thinks the American legal system requires sincere defense even of the guilty, so he will take such cases. But Hogren will not allow a defendant to mount the witness stand and lie. Neither will the law clinic defend hardened criminals—those with long conviction records.

The clinic now handles from 250 to 300 cases every year. The staff has expanded to include four lawyers and two law students, yet the clinic still has more work than it can handle.

Cabrini-Green is overcrowded: more than 80 buildings (3,600 apartments) are crammed into a five-by-eight-block area. The average family size is five persons, and 70 percent of the families have only one parent (usually the mother, who is often a woman younger than 25 who had her first child by age 14). Unemployment is rampant, with six of every 10 adults out of work. Violence is as commonplace as broken glass. The “three Ps” (prostitution, pimps, and pushers) are all most of the 10,000 children of Cabrini-Green know as role models for a livelihood.

Not all the cases handled by the clinic are criminal. A solid 100 this year, in fact, have involved landlord-tenant conflicts. The housing project is owned and managed by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), which decided to crack down on troublemaking tenants last year. Unfortunately, even victims of crimes that showed up on police reports were being evicted. Clinic lawyers believe the CHA knowingly abused the rights of tenants in its drive to clear out troublemakers. The CHA denies those allegations.

Since the average monthly rent at Cabrini-Green is only $50 to $100, most evictees could not afford to live elsewhere. The clinic was successful in reversing every eviction brought to its attention.

Work in Cabrini-Green is hardly filled with security for clinic lawyers. White (only one of the lawyers is black) and dressed in business clothes, they are conspicuous. “I am unnerved, on guard, when I go into one of the buildings,” admits James Brackin, one of the clinic lawyers. Hogren has been at the clinic long enough to be recognized by many residents, and that makes him feel safer. Still, he has wheathered an attempted robbery (someone wanted his briefcase) and interrupted several burglaries at clinic offices. Once he ducked into an apartment to talk with a Cabrini-Green woman minutes before a man fired several shots down the corridor.

There are, of course, rewards to offset the insecurities of working in Cabrini-Green. Sincere attention from one attorney who cares sometimes turns a youth from a career of crime. Yet for every youth truly changed, there are several more the legal clinic cannot even attempt to help.

“If a person was just here to practice law, he would get discouraged,” says Brackin, who is also a Catholic priest and on weekends, chaplain at Indiana State Prison. “That’s where the theological perspective comes into play. Whether you change the system or not, as Christians we are called to be with the poor, to be there even knowing we’re not going to reap the benefits of our work. The kingdom is not here tomorrow.”

Hogren says the clinic does have dreams that, if they became reality, would lend hope of change. One is a factory to get residents back to work and teach them marketable skills. A second dream is a farm for the rehabilitation of drug addicts—staying in the drug-ridden Cabrini-Green environment makes quitting especially hard. Finally, wide-ranging social work would, in Hogren’s words, “prevent the need for later legal aid.” Such social work would help Cabrini-Green residents get jobs, schooling, and get off welfare, which Hogren calls a “psychologically damaging status.”

They are all dreams in various stages of happening, dreams that keep the staff of the clinic working even when the notorious “urban burnout” threatens. The dreams keep them going—dreams, and some simple words of Jesus Christ: “I was in prison and you visited me.”

Antiabortion Movement Broadens

For years the antiabortion movement was considered the concern of only some Roman Catholics, but in the last two or three years, evangelicals and fundamentalists have become more visible in it. Now comes a statement—signed by 200 American religious leaders—which displays a breadth of antipathy to abortion not previously evident.

The 137-word statement objects to the “growing tendency of some to value human life only if they deem it ‘meaningful,’ ” and it affirms the “sanctity of each human life regardless of intelligence level, physical appearance, stage of development, or degree of dependency.”

It is signed not only by evangelicals and Roman Catholics, but also Jews, Eastern Orthodox believers, and scholars from Protestant denominations that are often considered “liberal.” The project was organized by Norman Bendroth, director of communications for the evangelical Protestant Christian Action Council. It notes that “all human life is sacred because each human being bears the image of God” and refers to the “Judeo-Christian ethic” which “specially responds to the need of the weak and unwanted.”

Worded positively as an affirmation, the statement concludes: “We encourage all efforts to help women facing unwanted pregnancies, to aid children and others suffering physical or mental handicaps, and to protect all human life under the law.”

Well-known signers of the statement include Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, and Malcolm Muggeridge, former editor of the British magazine, Punch. Several evangelicals who have already written at length against abortion were signers: John Warwick Montgomery, Francis Schaeffer, Harold O. J. Brown, and John Jefferson Davis.

The range of the list is evident from the educators whose names appear. Robert Cooley, president of the evangelical Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary signed. So did Paul Lazor, dean of students at the Eastern Orthodox Saint Vladimir’s Seminary, and Roman Catholic Michael Novak, a professor at Syracuse University.

Editors who signed cover a similarly broad spectrum. Eileen Egan, associate editor of the Catholic Worker signed, as did Moody Monthly’s Eric Fellman, and Francis X. Maier, editor of the National Catholic Register.

Jewish signers included Rabbi Seymour Siegal, a professor of ethics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and David Novak, rabbi of a congregation in Far Rockaway, New York. (Interestingly, several other ethicists besides Siegal also signed. They included Max Stackhouse, a professor at Andover Newton Theological School, and Paul Ramsey of Princeton University).

The statement was drafted by the Christian Action Council, then edited to its final form by evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry. Bendroth said it demonstrates that the opposition to abortion is “much wider than right or left, conservative or liberal.” For that reason, he said, it is a “significant statement.”

North American Scene

A Reformed seminary, considered a conservative alternative to Calvin Seminary (Grand Rapids, Mich.), will open September 1 in Orange City, Iowa. The new seminary, to be called Mid America Reformed Seminary (MARS), arises from last year’s controversy at Calvin about the historicity of Adam and Eve. Some of the Calvin faculty were said to support a ministerial candidate who expressed doubt about the actual existence of Adam and Eve. In February, the board of Calvin College and Seminary stated publicly that all members of the faculty believe Adam and Eve did exist in history. Calvin is a seminary of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). Four CRC ministers have been appointed to teach at MARS.

Chariots of Fire, Heartland, and Gallipoli were announced winners of the National Council of Churches Film Awards for 1981. The NCC film committee lauded Heartland for its evocation of “elemental human dignity” and the “heroic role of pioneer women.” Chariots of Fire, the Academy Award winner as “film of the year,” was praised for the “poetically uplifting way” it affirmed basic values and “integrity of conscience.” Gallipoli, the NCC commission said, was exceptional because of its “moving depiction, in terms almost biblical, of the cost of true friendship.”

A bevy of Hollywood films about hom*osexuality is losing at the box office. Making Love, the story of a supposedly happily married man who leaves his wife for a man, started well then plummeted. Personal Best, the story of two women athletes who develop a sexual relationship, died at the box office after two weeks. Neither is it expected to do well in Canada. The Toronto Star concludes that only films treating hom*osexuality as comedy succeed with viewers. Such movies as Victor Victoria and Deathtrap “are so polite and determinedly nonexploitative of hom*osexuality that one wonders why anyone would have ever objected to the practice,” writes film critic Ron Base.

Cult deprogrammer Ted Patrick, at age 52, says he is quitting. “We need at least 10,000 deprogrammers,” the granddaddy of deprogrammers insists, but he is giving up the practice because of legal tangles. “It’s just so much my family can take,” said Patrick, who has been jailed for alleged kidnapping. “Paying all this money for attorney fees, in jail all the time.…” But he promises to be writing and teaching about deprogramming and the cults, “educating a nation before it’s too late, if it’s not already.”

There are now more conservative than liberal religious political action groups, according to a new conservative journal, This World. Paul J. Weber, a social scientist at the University of Louisville, writes that in 1970 there were 19 religiously liberal and 8 religiously conservative interest groups trying to influence national politics. By 1980, 30 were liberal and 34 conservative. Most of the 26 conservative groups that began in the 1970s were Protestants lobbying for the New Christian Right.

The membership application of a largely hom*osexual denomination has been deferred one year by the National Council of Churches’ governing board. The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, begun in 1968, s about 80 percent hom*osexual. The denomination’s application for membership in the NCC will now be considered again in May 1983. “This is not a delaying action but a responsible attempt to approach a very significant and delicate subject,” said Bishop James Armstrong, president of the NCC. An NCC news release stated that “although many of the member communions support civil rights for hom*osexuals, none affirms hom*osexuality as a Christian lifestyle.” Eastern Orthodox members of the NCC’s governing board were said to be “prepared to vote against eligibility” of the denomination.

President Reagan has proposed a constitutional amendment to reinstate prayer in public schools. Speaking against the 1962 Supreme Court ruling that barred audible prayer, Reagan told a White House audience, “How can we hope to retain our freedom through the generations if we fail to teach our young that our liberty springs from an abiding faith in our Creator?” A New York Times/CBS news poll conducted in March showed 69 percent of Americans in favor of “organized prayer” in public schools. Reagan has emphasized that his amendment would sanction voluntary prayer. Many religious denominations—including the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest—are against the return of school prayer. Religious supporters include Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell, Ed McAteer of the Religious Roundtable, and evangelist Cecil Todd.

A government study has concluded that violence on television can lead to aggressive behavior by children and teen-aged viewers. “Television and Behavior,” a recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services, concludes that the “consensus” among scientists is that there is a “causal relationship” between televised violence and real-life aggression. The report cautions that not every child viewer becomes aggressive, emphasizing that various studies have compared large groups rather than individuals. The report also said television is most popular among the very young and the very old; that television does a “rather poor job” of helping viewers foster better health practices; and that television heavily influences the attitudes of viewers.

Campus Life, a nondenominational youth magazine, was chosen as the “periodical of the year” at last month’s Evangelical Press Association meeting. The judging committee praised Campus Life for its “strong editorial activism” and called the “overall product carefully designed and innovatively crafted.” The magazine also won an award of excellence in the youth category. An award of excellence in the general category went to Leadership, published by Christianity Today, Inc. The College of Communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign evaluated the magazines.

World Scene

American missionaries in Argentina have reported some tension but no anti-American incidents. They were continuing routinely with their duties last month, but attempting to keep a low profile. Britain’s South American Missionary Society, however, evacuated its 35 missionaries late in April, while the London-based Evangelical Union of South America advised its personnel to leave, but left the decision to them.

The British Council of Churches (BCC) has passed a resolution encouraging member churches to appoint more evangelicals to its boards and agencies. Interestingly, major support for the resolution, passed at the BCC assembly in Leeds in April, came from the archbishop of the Russian Orthodox church, Anthony Bloom. He said his church felt closeness to evangelicals with their concerns for theological themes, and was disturbed by the penchant in the BCC for exclusive concern with political and social themes.

A newly built mosque in southeastern France was destroyed by a bomb last month. Police estimated the damage to the mosque in Romans-sur Isère, one of the first in the country outside Paris, at $100,000. A series of bombings destroyed Protestant churches in and around Lyon last year.

The Pope’s latest trip was more controversial than most. John Paul’s trip last month to the Marian shrine at Fatima, Portugal, was seen as unnecessarily provocative, coming as it did just two weeks before his scheduled visit to England and talks with leaders of the Anglican church. It also followed a March pastoral letter by the Portuguese bishops condemning “politically motivated strikes”—in sharp contrast to the position of the church with regard to John Paul’s native Poland. The Pope stressed that “Catholic social doctrine does not think of unions as a reflection of a ‘class’ structure of society.” Ironically, the visit, a thanksgiving pilgrimage for surviving the attempt on his life a year earlier, was also marked by an assassination attempt by a reactionary priest who had been affiliated with the traditionalist group led by French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Greece’s socialist government is moving to separate church and state, and to expropriate the church’s unused land. The Greek constitution recognizes the Orthodox church as the state church, finances it, and provides for its involvement in many of its legal and administrative functions. Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, however, intends to end the church’s “improper” involvement in state affairs. It views expropriation as a means to aid underprivileged farmers. Other moves include the introduction of a bill to provide for automatic divorce after several years of separation, and pending legislation to allow abortion on demand. The government’s ultimate objective is to confine the church to a “spiritual” role.

Controversy over infant baptism has again emerged in West Germany. Comments in the press and radio over the recent dismissal of Gottfried Kirschner, 38, of Schonstadt, near Marburg, sparked off the debate. Kirschner was rebaptized in a Pentecostal church. He was dismissed by the regional Protestant church because the church still advocated infant baptism. It said his rebaptism separated him from the church and its ministry. Earlier this year, several young people were excommunicated by the Lutheran regional church in Saxony over their rebaptism. Ironically, they were rebaptized because they wanted to take the matter of being a Christian seriously.

Christian radio and TV broadcasting in France should benefit under laws enacted by the government of François Mitterand. Until recently, strict government control barred evangelistic broadcasting; no evangelistic TV broadcasting was permitted over the past 30 years. Now, nonprofit, nonpolitical groups may apply for a license to broadcast on FM radio frequencies. But commerical advertising is prohibited. Two independent TV stations have since started in the Paris region.

Plainclothes police seized a Russianfamily shortly after their departure from the British embassy in Moscow on April 27. Alexander and Raisa Balak, together with their three sons and her sister, were seeking help in emigrating from the Soviet Union. Two years ago the family of believers went to Moscow because of threats and actual assaults on their children in the town of Zhdanov. Unable to get a hearing or protection, they have since—following threats of imprisonment and assault—moved twice.

Some Surprising Words From A Catholic Historian

Single-issue voting is wrong. Morality cannot be legislated. The government’s secular rule of society is neutral. Moral Majority is the first religious group to be involved in politics, and the first to try to impose its absolute values on others.

All these beliefs are self-evidently true. Right? Not according to prominent historian James Hitchco*ck, a St. Louis University professor and practicing Roman Catholic.

Although Hitchco*ck is known as a religious and political conservative, he delivered a lecture at Wheaton College recently that was an iconoclastic machine-gun, firing at dogma after ill-considered dogma of contemporary American society. He finished by proclaiming the start of the “true” ecumenical movement. “The ecumenical movement,” Hitchco*ck said, “is only beginning because Catholic-evangelical dialogue is only beginning.”

Hitchco*ck, a past president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, said “pluralism” has become “one of the buzz words that has now taken the place of thinking in our society.” To appeal to “pluralism” ends all discussion, yet Hitchco*ck believes many Americans don’t understand what pluralism is.

American pluralism does not mean government can be religiously or philosophically neutral. That, said Hitchco*ck, is “the myth of neutrality.” “It is in the nature of the pluralistic experiment that no single group is going to get everything it wants,” he added. Instead, pluralism “requires that each group be aggressive. You must fight for something. Our whole political system is built on this.”

To Hitchco*ck, then, the activities of Moral Majority are neither new nor unconstitutional. “It is an illusion that no group imposes values on another,” he noted. All legislation that is not approved unanimously imposes the will of the majority on the minority. And court decisions settle a clash of values. “Every time a judgment is handed down, someone’s values are being imposed on someone else,” he said.

Hitchco*ck defended the activity of religious groups or individuals in politics: “The involvement of religious groups in politics is hardly a new thing.” The antislavery and civil rights movements were each “heavily supported by religious groups.”

He also disagreed with the frequently stated contention that Moral Majority is the first to introduce absolutes to politics. “To charge Moral Majority with having introduced absolutes into politics is to overlook a lot of history. Abolitionists considered slavery absolutely wrong,” he noted. Civil rights and the last decade’s antiwar movement were also motivated by the beliefs that discrimination and the Vietnam war were absolutely wrong.

Again, said the historian, “what is new are the kinds of absolutes being asserted and the people who are asserting them.” Even the “governing liberal mind of our time is not simply relativistic,” he claimed. Busing is defended on the grounds that racial integration is an absolute good, so that even a kind of “coercion” (forced busing) may be used.

The uproar about Moral Majority and similar groups stems from an anti-religious bias present in America since its birth, said Hitchco*ck “The men of the eighteenth century had a vivid recollection of religious wars and persecutions. They saw religion as dangerous. To insure peace and security in society, organized religion should be kept weak,” some founding fathers believed. But theirs were “very definitely minority positions,” he added.

The antireligious bias has perhaps been strongest in the judiciary, Hitchco*ck said. Generally, the courts have gone out of their way to protect religious liberty in cases involving some small and politically impotent religious groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Amish. The judiciary has leaned the other way—citing the separation of church and state—more often with large religious groups.

It is the “secularist agenda” that relegates religion purely to a personal and private realm. On that agenda, religion must “in no sense influence public and social conduct,” Hitchco*ck said. Thus, public schools will not allow 10 seconds of prayer each morning but require three hours of sex education each week.

A final area of concern to Hitchco*ck was the legislation of morality. “It’s clear we always do legislate morality and we can’t avoid doing it,” he said, again citing the example of the civil-rights movement and resulting laws.

Hitchco*ck concluded with an exhortation to recognize the broad body of Americans loyal to the Judeo-Christian tradition—Jews, Catholics, Protestants, even orthodox Muslims—and to politically involve those citizens. “Nobody’s values are taken care of in politics unless you fight for them,” he said. It is necessary to get religiously and morally committed people active.”

Specialized groups need to be formed, then linked together, though single-issue politics are not shameful, said Hitchco*ck. “Civil rights, antiwar, abortion—all these are single issues. What it comes down to is whether the [single] issue is important enough.”

It was in the context of molding this broad alliance that Hitchco*ck hailed the beginning of “true” ecumenism, the meeting of Catholics and evangelicals. “The real ecumenical test is what to do when people who take their beliefs very seriously get together,” the historian said.

Hitchco*ck has written several books and contributed to many magazines, including the New York Times magazine. He is a contributing editor of the New Oxford Review, an Anglo-Catholic periodical, which includes former CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor Carl F. H. Henry on its masthead.

- More fromRodney Clapp

Tom Minnery

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Two new books argue that it is time to stand up for the faith.

It is time for Christians to shed their piety and start protesting—legally when they can, illegally when they cannot—in order to rebuild the foundation of Christian morality upon which the country was based. That is the message of two strongly worded books set for publication this summer by two young authors, both protégés of philosopher Francis Schaeffer. They take up where Schaeffer left off in his successful Christian Manifesto (sales so far: nearly 200,000). If the new books catch on as Schaeffer’s has, there may come a time when atheists and religious liberals long for the good old days when they had only the Moral Majority to contend with.

The first book is by constitutional lawyer John Whitehead, 35, and is entitled The Second American Revolution. It was published this month by the David C. Cook Publishing Co. The second book is A Time for Anger by Schaeffer’s son Franky, 30, an artist and filmmaker. It is to be published in August by Crossway Books, which brought out Francis Schaeffer’s Christian Manifesto.

Whitehead, through diligent research and a bibliography of no fewer than 343 books, argues that the United States was founded on principles drawn from the Christian faith, and that without those principles, the governmental system makes no sense. He does not say that the government was ever intended to be a theocracy or that the founding fathers all were practicing Christians themselves.

Francis Schaeffer says in his Manifesto that Christians should resist the state rather than capitulate to laws contrary to God’s Word. Whitehead expands on Schaeffer to suggest an appropriate occasion to resist. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the state of Kentucky could no longer post the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Since the Bible at many points underscores the value of training in God’s commandments, the court ruling is immoral, according to Whitehead. “Local school officials, based on solid biblical grounds, could have simply refused to remove the Ten Commandments from the schoolhouse walls. Some local school districts in Kentucky did exactly that,” he writes.

Whitehead says that “the time may have come when a local community or a state may have to disobey the Supreme Court or other federal and state agencies that act contrary to the principles of the Bible.”

In his book, Franky Schaeffer also draws on the Christian Manifesto to argue that Christians should resist the immoral acts of their government. He notes that Peter and John, flogged for preaching the gospel, went right out and did it again, in violation of law. “We must develop this militant indifference to the edicts of mere men when they contradict God’s law,” writes the younger Schaeffer.

He argues that Christians have been too well behaved in the past, that first-century Christians were regarded as rebels, and that the time is right for more rebellion: “Atrocities unthinkable a few years ago (abortion, infanticide, euthanasia) go on today with the state’s sanction. More are in the offing. Why is there such roaring, massive silence on the part of those who should know better?” Elsewhere, Schaeffer writes that “Christians should be shamed by the zealous activity of the liberal elite, whose houses are built on sand, while we, with our houses supposedly built on the rock, sit silently and look on.”

Elsewhere in his book, Schaeffer exposes what he calls “the myth of neutrality” whereby news commentators, under the guise of “objectivity,” eradicate or emasculate the Christian message in public debate. In doing so, the public media, far from being “neutral,” promote values opposed to Christian values.

Schaeffer takes several chapters to make his case on this point, and he cites examples all the way. Other Christian polemicists have not taken the trouble to do this, and have simply branded the news media as “secular humanistic.” That term is not used outside of conservative Christian circles, and it only makes members of the news media scratch their heads. Because Schaeffer builds by example, his case is forceful, and because of it, people who don’t understand the jargon cannot ignore the argument.

Like Whitehead, Schaeffer deals in detail with the tragedy of abortion on demand. He reprints a lengthy article from the Philadelphia Inquirer on the situation in which well-developed fetuses are aborted but are born alive. (Contrary to what most people think, abortions in this country are legal right up until birth.) According to the article, this has placed many nurses in emotional turmoil, for they must decide whether to try and save life or obey the doctors who performed the abortions. Regardless of how one stands politically on the issue of abortion, it is hard to deny that situations like these constitute tragedy. Schaeffer compares the Upjohn Company, which manufactures the abortion drug prostaglandin, to I. E. Farban, the German company that manufactured the poison gas bought by the Nazis in great quantities to exterminate Jews. Schaeffer’s writing on the subject of abortion is provocative and pointed.

While Franky Schaeffer’s book is a polemic against the country’s drift from its Christian ethical moorings, Whitehead’s book is more dispassionate in building the historical case for the amount of Christian conviction in the founding of the country.

Whitehead shows, for example, that Christian principles were the basis for English common law, which is the foundation of our own legal system. An example is the Seventh Amendment’s guarantee of trial by jury. Jurors were never expected to be legal experts. Rather, drawing on the moral convictions of their faith, they were expected to render justice. Whitehead quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, from his inaugural address as a Harvard law professor in 1829. Storey said, “There has never been a period of history in which the common law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundation.”

There has been a cross-fertilization of ideas among Whitehead and Francis and Franky Schaeffer, and it is evident in the books by the three of them. Francis Schaeffer’s Christian Manifesto, published seven months before Whitehead’s book, contains several references to it, and Francis Schaeffer helped to refine Whitehead’s manuscript. Whitehead footnotes the Manifesto at several points in his book. Franky Schaeffer’s company financed Whitehead’s research, and the younger Schaeffer worked as Whitehead’s agent in securing the publisher. He has produced a film based on the book, which will be released in the fall. Franky Schaeffer, in turn, quotes Whitehead in his own book.

Evangelicalism has been pressed from the Right by the militancy of the fundamentalists, and from the Left by social activists. Francis Schaeffer’s influence, now being pumped through a second generation of writers, challenges the evangelical movement right from its heart (although Whitehead does not use the term evangelical to describe himself), and it may well prove a potent impact on evangelicalism in the 1980s.

Moon Held Guilty Of Tax Fraud

Sun Myung Moon, the leader of some 30,000 American Moonies, was convicted of income tax fraud in New York last month. Far from being crushed by the conviction, Moon’s followers expect their number to “multiply three times this year.”

Moon was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the federal government and filing false income tax returns. Convicted with him was Takeru Kamiyama, one of Moon’s top aides. Moon could face up to five years in prison for conspiracy and three years each for three tax counts. (The cult leader lives in the U.S. on a permanent visa, which could be revoked if the conviction stands.) Sentencing is scheduled for July 14, and Moon’s attorneys are already planning an appeal.

The main issue at the trial was whether the bank accounts and stock held in Moon’s name belonged to him personally or to the Unification Church, which he founded. Specifically, Moon was charged with failure to report $112,000 in interest earned for $1.6 million on deposit at the Chase Manhattan Bank, and for receiving $50,000 worth of corporate shares without declaring them as taxable.

The jury of ten men and two women was instructed to determine if the income belonged personally to Moon and, if so, whether or not Moon had “willfully” failed to report it on his tax returns. Key evidence included documents dealing with loans and finances in the Unification Church’s records. The prosecution contended some documents were created long after the transactions they were purported to record, and that the documents had been backdated.

The jury found Moon guilty on its fifth day of deliberation. Mose Durst, president of the Unification Church in the United States, immediately released a statement declaring Moon innocent. He announced the intention of Moon’s attorneys to appeal the case and said, “We have the utmost faith that through the court system in America, justice will be done and our spiritual leader fully vindicated.” Durst called Moon the “most abused and misunderstood religious leader of the twentieth century.”

Officials of the Unification Church were quick to insist the conviction will not cripple the controversial movement. “Membership will multiply three times this year,” said Joy Irvine, director of public affairs. Moonies will not give up because “Rev. Moon has taught us the highest standards of integrity and faith.” She added that the Moonie leader has been “unfairly treated many times” and the tax fraud conviction is “no big deal.”

Irvine denied that Moon had lied. The damaging documents were back-dated “out of ignorance,” she said. They were old documents from the cult’s early days in America, when the persons handling church records were not trained accountants. Any backdating was not intended to be fraudulent she contended, and Moon certainly had no knowledge of any of it. The church has grown since it was incorporated in America in 1961, she said, and it now has professional accountants to train its members in bookkeeping. (Ironically, one of the accounting seminars was being conducted at the church’s New York headquarters the very week Moon was convicted.)

- More fromTom Minnery