Page 5888 – Christianity Today (2024)

Four years ago in the May, 1968, issue, Church Growth Bulletin asked: “Will Uppsala Betray the Two Billion?” The circumstances were as follows. The World Council of Churches was about to convene its Fourth Assembly at Uppsala, Sweden. Early that year the WCC’s Commission on World Mission and Evangelism had published a document on mission, titled Renewal in Mission, which, at the Uppsala meeting was to be discussed, possibly revised, and issued as the council’s plan for mission and evangelism in the seventies. The faculty at Fuller Seminary’s School of Mission studied Renewal in Mission with care and were alarmed to see that it contained no plans for evangelism and interpreted “mission” solely as horizontal reconciliation of man with man.

The document called for a radical diversion of mission away from the Great Commission, away from the proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, and particularly away from church-planting evangelism. Renewal in Mission was not calling Christians to renewed zeal in making the Saviour known and persuading men to believe in him, repent of their sins, be baptized and incorporated in his church, and then venture forth in the power of the Holy Spirit as salt and light in the world, full of righteousness, justice, and brotherhood, thus bringing about substantial changes for good in the social order. Renewal in Mission, while freely using the great words of mission, was using them in radically new ways. For example, changing the social order through revolution (apparently regardless of what the revolutionaries believed about Jesus Christ) was called reconciling men to God. Instead of affirming that mission takes place at points of unbelief, the document says that “mission takes place at the points of tension.” Mission’s “places of opportunity” are “the unresolved religious, social and political problems, the situations which deprive men of the hope of renewal and cry out for the good news of the new humanity.”

At the very time that great movements toward Christ were developing in scores of countries the basic mission concept of inviting men to become Christ’s followers in his church was notable by its absence. Instead of calling on men to believe on Jesus Christ and persuading them to become responsible members of his church, the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches was, it seemed, about to place its sole emphasis on exhorting Christians to act justly toward their fellow men.

Since at least two billion have not heard of Christ, the proposed action would condemn these multitudes to live without the power of Christ in their lives and die without even hearing of the way of salvation. This, the Fuller mission faculty believed, would leave the two billion without hope. It would deprive them of that radical renewal which comes through justification by faith and being “in Christ.” It would withhold from nations that Power they need above all powers, that Wisdom they need above all wisdoms, if they are to develop as God wishes them to develop. It would focus their hopes on man instead of on God. It would leave them without the Bible, without the Church, and without the means of grace. It would, in short, betray the two billion.

The School of Mission faculty devoted the May, 1968, issue of Church Growth Bulletin to an extended plea to the Fourth Assembly to see the fatal error of the preparatory document and revise it radically.

That issue created a storm (recounted in The Eye of the Storm, Word, 1972). World Council leaders wrongly considered it an attack on them. Actually it was a plea for them to turn from excessive concern with humanization and to lay at least equal stress on proclaiming Christ as divine and only Saviour and persuading men to become his disciples and responsible members of his church.

At the Fourth Assembly of the World Council, the two-page theological section of Renewal in Mission was, through the efforts of John Stott, David Hubbard, Paul Rees, and a few other evangelical leaders, considerably revised. Unfortunately the outcome was a patchwork in which opposite opinions were written side by side. In the practical section, Douglas Webster, an Anglican, on the third attempt, backed up by Norwegian churchmen and by a resolution passed in the plenary session of the World Council, got inserted mention of the hundreds of millions who have not heard the Gospel and of the duty of the Church to take it to them.

Some took great comfort in these small concessions. But the great question remained: Would the World Council of Churches regard the document as revised and passed at Uppsala its marching orders in mission, or would it disregard the few words on Great Commission mission and divert mission to horizontal reconciliation?

Four years have passed, and that question has been answered. The articles, pamphlets, and books pouring forth from Geneva and the conciliar mission boards are directed very largely (and in many cases exclusively) to carrying on mission conceived as humanization. Some denominations abroad have ceased evangelizing—and growing. Some boards recall missionaries who are active in evangelism. Funds are readily available to establish agricultural centers for distributing new strains of rice or wheat; but for carrying on nation-wide campaigns of evangelism there is nothing. The result of the convenient doctrine that evangelism is the task of the younger church has often been that little evangelism occurs. Publicity, personnel, and cash are given to development, not discipling. The focus remains unswervingly on man.

One scans WCC publications in vain for an expression of concern that men know Jesus Christ, be baptized as he has commanded, and be added to the Lord in the Church of Christ. Conciliar leaders plead constantly that mission must be to “the whole man.” What they mean is that mission must be to bodies, minds, and social organizations. Concern for the immortal souls of men is not only neglected: it is scorned.

The immensity of the change frequently escapes Christians. Two factors camouflage this huge revolution in mission.

First, while the theory, theology, and methodology of missions emanating from the World Council and its subsidiaries are remarkably consistent in their hostility to evangelism, conciliar denominations and missionary societies have many evangelicals in their ranks. These evangelicals go on preaching Christ, actively seeking members, baptizing converts, starting new churches, and obeying all those commands of Christ that the Official Line seldom if ever mentions. The younger churches on the whole are conservative. Although some of their leaders have been taken to Europe and America and “educated” in the new fashion in missions, most of their ministers, bishops, and elders are biblical Christians. The new line does not affect them much—yet. They may even use the “in” words while continuing vigorously to evangelize. If they really understood the heresy they would refuse to go along with it; but in a permissive age, when heresy is no longer recognized, they are inclined to say, “Let them do their thing. The fringe is always doing something peculiar. We shall simply do the right as God gives us to see the right.”

Thus the seriousness of the deviation is masked. It appears as if the conciliar denominations were doing considerable evangelism and church planting. What is being done should not conceal the fact that their evangelistic effort is commensurate neither with their strength nor with the amazing opportunities of the day.

The second aspect of the camouflage is deliberate concealment of the magnitude of the change in theory and theology of mission. The present leaders have learned from the experience in 1933 of William Hocking, who was head of the Laymen’s Commission on Mission. Hocking proposed that the age of church-planting missions was over, and that the age of coexistence with the great religions, each reconceiving itself in the light of the others, had begun. Hocking was an honest man and made his recommendation quite openly. It was rejected unanimously by churches, mission boards, missionary leaders, and churchmen all around the world.

In contrast, the present change has been most carefully camouflaged. Nowhere, for example, do the Uppsala documents say that there should be no more conversion evangelism and church multiplication. Indeed, some escape hatches have been built in. But J. C. Hoekendijk, who is the source from which much of the Geneva Line on missions has sprung, writes openly: “It is impossible to think of the plantatio ecclesiae as the end of evangelism. It is too poor a conception and betrays too clearly a lack of expectant hope” (quoted in Eye of the Storm, p. 49).

The writings on mission that emanate from conciliar sources are full of the old sacred, emotion-laden words—God, salvation, conversion, evangelism, mission, priorities for mission, mobilizing the people of God for mission, proclaiming the Gospel by word and deed, and the like. But these words have been systematically humanized. The biblical meanings held by generations of scholars of all the various branches of the Church have been jettisoned in favor of new meanings, suddenly discovered after 1955 to be the real ones! Thus “conversion” is no longer the turning of individuals and groups from idols to serve the true and living God, but is rather turning to new and better forms of social structure, to new and more just forms of labor-capital relationships, and to forms of land owning that give the masses a fair deal. Thus in a WCC book called Salvation Today, one article is entitled “Saved by Mao.” “Mission” has become, not proclaiming Christ and persuading men to become his disciples and responsible members of his church, but rather “everything God wants done.” For instance, cooperating with a revolution in Brazil or Chile is called mission. There is no end to the reinterpretation.

The plane of missions winging its way to Jerusalem has been hijacked. Most of the passengers are unaware of the event. It is the same plane, the same stewardesses, the same flight crew, but the destination is different. The multi-million dollar income, the headquarters buildings, the property around the world amounting to hundreds of millions, the good will that keeps the dollars and pounds, marks and yen rolling in—all this, given for and dedicated to propagating the Gospel, is now being devoted to mission considered solely as social action.

The plane is heading to Havana, not Jerusalem. The “gospel” being advocated is that of a fair deal in this world—not eternal salvation, good both in this world and the next. Mission is working toward the “new humanity,” not by reconciling sinners to God through Jesus Christ his Son, but by bringing about just and humane structures of society.

All this continues in the face of earnest pleas by evangelicals that Christians emphasize both vertical and horizontal reconciliation. The Frankfurt Declaration says:

We affirm the determined advocacy of justice and peace by all churches, and we affirm that “assistance in development” is a timely realization of the divine demand for mercy and justice as well as of the command of Jesus: “Love thy neighbor.”

We see therein an important accompaniment and verification of mission. We also affirm the humanizing results of conversion as signs of the coming Messianic peace.

We stress, however, that unlike the eternally valid reconciliation with God through faith in the Gospel, all of our social achievements and partial successes in politics are bound by the eschatological “not yet” of the coming kingdom and the not yet annihilated power of sin, death, and the devil, who still is “prince of this world” (quoted in Eye of the Storm, p. 292).

While many conciliar leaders have—as individuals—commended and even taken part in Evangelism in Depth, New Life For All, Billy Graham’s crusades, and the like, the councils as councils have stayed aloof. The only comment on Evangelism in Depth was an attack on it in the WCC’s International Review of Mission. And to combat the concept of church growth, the International Review assembled eight writers from all over the world—Orthodox Syrian, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and others—who on many counts found unacceptable the idea that the growth and multiplication of Christian churches should be a chief determinant of the policies of missionary societies.

The conciliar forces seem unable to diminish polarization by declaring that, of course, salvation of men through belief in Jesus Christ, reconciliation with God in the Church of Jesus Christ, always has been, is now, and ever will be a major end of Christian mission in which all Christians should engage, while at the same time they work steadily forward “doing good to all men” and changing the structures of society as they are able so that the structures themselves add to humanization. The net result is that the powerful direction from Geneva and offices of the great “missionary” societies veers farther and farther away from the propagation of the Gospel.

Yes, Uppsala has betrayed the two billion at their point of greatest need. We can only pray that leaders of the conciliar churches will reverse Uppsala, and return the hijacked plane of missions to its proper course. In the meantime, may God raise up men and women from every nation who as missionaries of the Good News, in true missionary societies, will liberate these hundreds of millions into the glorious liberty of Christ.

Donald McGavran is dean emeritus of Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission and Institute of Church Growth. He served as a missionary of the Disciples of Christ for thirty-five years. He holds the B.D. from Yale Divinity School and the Ph.D. from Columbia University.

On a recent furlough journey from Tanzania to the United States I revisited Japan for the first time since 1935, which was two years before Japan invaded China and thereby helped set the stage for the Second World War. How conspicuously it has changed! In earlier days the nation moved on wooden clogs, whose deafening clatter in such places of concentrated hurry as the Tokyo Railway Station formed a kind of national salute to the rising sun. Now all of at least urban Japan moves quietly and resolutely forward in thoroughly modern footgear. For me this was an introductory symbol of the nation’s change.

I was already partly aware of Japan’s progress. In recent years its radios, cameras, cars, and trucks have invaded East Africa, town and bush. Two years ago in Lubumbashi I had come across the preliminary work of the Japanese in exploiting the fabulously rich Central African mineral area on the farther side of the great continent. And in magazines I had read of their unexampled capacity for building ships, notably supertankers, of their being now the third nation of the world in gross national product, and of their surpassing both the United States and Russia in the rate of production increase (Japan’s rate being 10–15 per cent per annum in recent years).

And this is the nation that Hiroshima put flat on its back. It has picked itself up and in a quarter of a century has thrust itself forward to the very first rank of nations. The purposeful, disciplined Japanese do enormous things in much less space than the rest of us. Poor in their own resources, they have become great by using the resources of others.

I am full of admiration for them. And I am led to ask two questions, the one as an American, the other as a missionary.

Looking upon Japan’s phenomenal rise, particularly as one of several impressive power changes on the international scene, I ask myself as an American, Is there rising fast about us the scaffold for taking us down from preeminence among the nations (if indeed we now hold that rank)? Is some nation, or combination of nations, with the eminently Japanese qualities of resolution, drive, and discipline about to remove us from supremacy?

I make no predictions. I merely urge that we soberly consider what it would be like to have someone else at the top. Losing preeminence among the nations means loss of the chief opportunity to give world service as a nation. In view of the role of nations in the purposes of God, this is serious. Nations, no less than individual people, are servants of the Master. His assignment of stewardship, in accordance with the teaching of his own parable, is with an eye to returns, and tenure as steward is based solely on performance; when the Master summons his nation servants for a redistribution of the talents, only a fool will think it a time of merriment.

Is there no honorable retirement from the chief rank among the nations? Conceivably a nation might want to relinquish leadership in mundane matters in order to concentrate on things of the spirit. But this is hardly our case, not with the clamor for higher wages and higher profits so strident that we have been driven to the first peacetime abandonment of a free market in an effort to save the value of the dollar. The overwhelming presumption is that our displacement at the top would be a judgment, a deprivation of opportunity in view of our performance. This is especially so in the light of the Scriptures, with their great attention to the rise and fall of nations and with their emphasis on the justice of God’s reorderings of national power and eminence.

Consider our record. Much in American history is noble, not least in our international relations. Early we required a reputation for justice and for sympathy with the oppressed. When I was growing up in China I was often called yang kwei tzu, “foreign devil.” But when I was asked my nationality and answered “American,” the reaction was, I think, consistently favorable. The rapid recovery of defeated Japan after World War II is in great part due to the victor’s magnanimous help to the vanquished.

But a measure of economic generosity is not enough, particularly from a nation where prosperity is so great that it has almost become a national liability. If, as my denominational headquarters recently reported, for every dollar Americans spend on world missions, they spend $35 on personal care, $42 on tobacco, $58 on alcoholic drinks, $124 on recreation, $208 on clothing, accessories, and jewelry, and $269 on cars and transportation, then we are radically selfish and devoid of the desire to fulfill God’s will in bringing the knowledge of the truth in Jesus Christ to all men.

Now it is probably true that most of our people are unconverted and unregenerate, and lack even the beginning of true fear and love of God. Therefore they cannot be expected to be concerned about fulfilling his will in world missions. On the other hand, God judges a nation to which he has entrusted much by his own expectations, and will not excuse it because most of its members remain ignorant of the source of their blessings and indifferent to the will of the one who gave them. Thus we are provoking judgment on ourselves as a nation. (I am not suggesting that only national sins provoke national judgment, any more than I would suggest that only sins against the body are punished in the body.)

Another somber implication of displacement as top nation is liability—for the first time—to foreign oppression. Between nations, affliction (as well as comfort and help) is reciprocal. But oppression is always from above downward, and therefore only the top is safe from it. The superior is of course not bound to act oppressively, but whether he so acts or not depends solely, under God, on himself.

America’s freedom from foreign oppression is perhaps unique in world history. The explanation is that from the time of our emergence from virtual isolation, in the First World War, we have been the most powerful nation on earth. We can scarcely conceive of being denied the right to dissent (if denied, we would just dissent!)—the right, for example, to caricature our political leaders in openly published cartoons. But many countries as civilized and as liberty-loving as ours have in our own time awakened to the placarding of Verboten! or some similar order straight across their political life. Foreign oppression is standard equipment in God’s work of bringing the nations to their senses; it was his chief instrument in bringing his chosen people to reason and to obedience.

Again, I am making no predictions. I merely urge a sober look at the alternative to our staying at the top—and responsible behavior in accordance with such a look.

What should our course of action be? While we retain the leadership of nations, we are certainly not to flaunt our position in an orgy of self-indulgence. We are rather to exercise and cherish it in humble dependence on God and scrupulous observance of his revealed principles of national and personal conduct.

And what should we do if we lose that position, if the United States at long last is the victim of foreign oppression and finds its style of life dictated from a foreign capital? That would depend on the finality of the judgment. There are biblical examples of rebellion that have had God’s approval and blessing. There are also biblical examples of divine injunction to smart submissively under an alien yoke. There is God’s amazing requirement of Jeremiah—consider the infamy to which the prophet would be exposed!—that he direct his king and people to capitulate to the enemy and later that he counsel his exiled compatriots to seek to salvage what they could of national fortunes by avowed collaboration with the conqueror and solicitude for his welfare.

The second question I ask myself when I consider the phenomenal progress of contemporary Japan is, What does this say to us about Christian missions, particularly to Japan?

To my mind the most significant feature of contemporary Japan from the missionary point of view is its unprecedented combination of superior well-being with non-Christianity. Of all the great nations of the world, Japan has had the most rapid development, and of all the great nations of the world (excepting perhaps China, about whose Christian community we have little conclusive information), Japan appears to be the least Christianized. I don’t mean to belittle either the work of of the Christian missionaries or the social impact of the Christian Church in Japan; I merely put together the two facts that confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour is essential to Christian discipleship and that more than 99 per cent of the Japanese people make no avowal of Christianity.

Japan’s well-being does not consist only of material and technological advancement. It has also attained a kind of moral eminence. Ages ago the Japanese chose as their cultural mentors the Chinese, whose exposition of the proprieties made their own social order the most long-lived in history. Japan’s astonishing recovery is a prize exhibition of a whole cluster of virtues, notably resilience, quickness to see and seize opportunities, a remarkable loyalty to group enterprises and readiness to subject quick, private advantage to long-term community gain, and a wide-range dependability that is highly honored in the markets of the world. The visitor to Japan comes across surprising evidences of honesty among the people of the land. Then, too, there is the ethical concomitant of a liberal political system. Japan is one of the few non-western countries that can sustain multiparty politics. There is therefore in Japan at least some political group, that in free intercourse with like-minded elements in other lands, continuously presses in the highest governmental quarters for recognition of such enlightened principles as the dignity of the individual.

In attaining this superior ethical status Japan has certainly been moved in part—perhaps even profoundly—by Christian influences—but the significant point is that in it all the nation has rejected the Christian religion.

The Japanese have appropriated all that appealed to them in Western civilization while rejecting Christianity. In so doing they have sharply differentiated between civilization and Christianity, have virtually eliminated from their country the humanitarian work of the missionary, and have given great pertinence to the question, Is the Christianization of any country at all necessary?

In making this distinction between civilization and essential Christianization, the Japanese have shown a perspicacity and religious honesty not always found even in missionary circles, which have often confounded the two. The Japanese have appropriated only what they wanted and have made plain their belief that they did not need Christ.

Their extraordinary advance obviously puts them beyond the need of the humanitarian service of the Christian missionary. Nevertheless, to deplore the passing in Japan—and many other parts of the non-Christian world—of the need for this service is as unjustifiable as for the Good Samaritan to have wished for further muggings on the road to Jericho so that he could again show his Good Samaritanism. Being the Good Samaritan, he would inevitably have shown it in any new situation as well.

The situation in contemporary Japan is a striking throwback to the original missionary situation of the Christian Church.

The economic disparity that today makes it possible for fifty or more orphans in one country to be supported by the per-capita income of another country did not exist throughout most of church history. It dates from the Industrial Revolution, which in general made the West a “have” area and left the rest of the world largely an expanse of “have-nots.” Such a disparity certainly did not exist between Antioch, the first missionary-sending community, and Ephesus, Philippi, and Corinth, representative of the first missionary-receiving communities. The only relief organized by the Apostle Paul of which the Scriptures make any mention was in the opposite direction of the general flow of modern international Christian relief: it was from ex-pagan Christians to the mother church of them all, Jerusalem.

Economic comparability between sending and receiving countries prevailed during the whole course of missionary expansion down to the times approximately of Schwarz and Carey. When St. Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima in 1549, he found Japan roughly comparable economically to Portugal, from which he had come.

When missionaries come to contemporary Japan, they are back in the situation of the Apostle Paul entering Ephesus and St. Francis entering Kagoshima, but with a difference. Paul met the Ephesians and St. Francis met the Kagoshimans on a level of economy and related factors that was virtually universal. Today the missionary finds the Japanese on a level similar to his own, but only because, though the missionary’s own (Western) level of well-being has soared in the last two centuries, by prodigious effort and in only decades the Japanese have risen to the same level and are, in fact, pushing that level still farther upward. Meanwhile the belated parts of the world are aching to join the club, and many of them are getting there fast.

This means in a very general way that in economics, education, politics, culture, and in a sense even ethics the contemporary Japanese are our peers in the same way that Ephesians, Philippians, and Corinthians were the peers of the Apostle Paul and his missionary colleagues; that, as a group, the hardhat Kobe shipwright and the marketwise matron in the Osaka department store, the girl in the white dress with matching hat and bag who is waiting for the commuter train and surprises us by speaking no English, only Japanese, and the bowing protagonist of the yen at the international monetary conference—all these persons are our peers in the same way that the Philippian jailor, and Lydia, the Thyatiran seller of purple, and the pitiable maid with a spirit of divination were all peers of Paul and Silas. Shorn of all preeminence in education, economic attainments, and educational, medical, and industrial skills, the missionary in contemporary Japan is reduced to the lowly place of Paul among the first-century Greeks! But—and this is the point—Paul engaged his world gloriously with stripped-down sheer evangelism. The great question contemporary Japan poses to the Christian Church is this: Have we the capacity to engage contemporary Japan and the rest of the fast homogenizing world with stripped-down sheer evangelism, or any evangelism?

What is to be our motive for evangelizing the Japanese? It certainly cannot come from any invitation on their part. Having arrived culturally and technologically, the Japanese make it very clear that they feel no need for the missionary. On the basis of a purely naturalistic assessment, we can hardly claim to offer them anything they cannot provide as well or better themselves. Japan’s increasing material prosperity meets most needs; if one’s view of man holds that he has religious and spiritual needs that also must be met, Japan has its own resources there as well. Soka Gakkai, for example, an indigenous Japanese religious movement only forty-two years old, has already gained more adherents in Japan than have all the varieties of Christianity combined in the 400 years since the inception of the missionary movement there. Soka Gakkai—along with many other non-Christian religious groups present in Japan—has both an ethical and religious dimension, demanding morality in daily living and inculcating a measure of religious awe and reverence for the supernatural. From a naturalistic perspective, we might conceivably argue that there is something to be gained by presenting Jesus Christ as a symbol of an untrammeled and authentic humanity that would be valid beyond the borders of Japan and thus hold a promise of bringing all the peoples of the world into some kind of unity. But all such considerations fall far short of supplying an adequate motive for real evangelization in the biblical sense.

The stripped-down sheer evangelism with which Paul engaged his Jewish and Gentile contemporaries was derived from divine commission:

I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee; delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee, to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me [Acts 26:15–18].

Without this commission, how could Paul have dared to confront his peers in civilization and culture with the charge that they were blind and caught in the power of Satan, alienated from the living God?

Without the same commission extended to us through the infallible Scriptures, how could we possibly dare to confront our contemporaries the Kobe hardhat, the Osaka matron, the white-dressed girl commuter, the bowing economist, with even the faintest suggestion that outside Christ they too are spiritually blind, dead in trespasses and sins, caught in the coils of Satan, and subject to the judgment of God, and that by believing in Christ they will be forgiven, resurrected, and handed a card to the glories of the ages to come? Without such a commission, how dare a missionary proceed to Japan? And with it, how can he keep away?

The contemporary missionary situation in Japan preserves intact the essence of the missionary situation gloriously exploited by the Apostle Paul and his companions, and the population of Japan alone is several times that of the whole classical world known to the first missionaries. Therefore the vista of evangelization possibilities that in Japan are spread before Bible-believing and Spirit-trusting missionaries is stupendous.

There are also in contemporary Japan, because of its advancement and strength, certain immunities for the Christian missionary. He cannot be charged with deculturization. Nor can he be accused of buying converts with the offer of hospital, schools, and orphanages. Nor, certainly, can he be said to be riding into contemporary Japan on the tails of imperialism. You don’t ride into wide-awake, up-and-coming Japan on the tails of anything.

In the evangelization of Japan, the astute Japanese have themselves set us an example by their virtuoso propagation of trade (Jesus himself commended to the children of light the superior wisdom of the children of this world in matters of their own generation). More than any other people, the Japanese seem unanimously committed to capturing every world market. Can Christians be less unanimous? The evangelization of Japan should be a matter of believing, obedient, prayerful, and means-providing concern for every Christian on earth. All of us must get behind the missionaries now in the field, and that unitedly, through the central office of the Holy Ghost.

Not only is Japan the least Christianized (or nearly so) of the great powers of the world; Japan is also in that condition of well-being to which all underdeveloped countries aspire, and which many of them will, unless the Lord hastens his coming, reach in time. Consider what an extraordinary entrée Japanese trade commissioners and tourists and exchange students serving as Christian missionaries would have to the other peoples of Asia and those of Africa—and perhaps to those of Europe and America as well!

H. Daniel Friberg is an ordained missionary of the Lutheran Church in America on furlough from Tanzania. He holds the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Not long ago a package of books for review arrived from my denominational publishing house. One was by an Anglican, one by a Presbyterian, and one by a Baptist. Though different in several ways, all had one thing in common: they all mentioned John Wesley.

These references lend support to my observation that there has been, particularly in recent evangelical books and magazines, a rediscovery of John Wesley. We are discovering, I think, that his remarkable ministry in eighteenth-century England has much to say to us in the churches of twentieth-century America.

The Wesleyan revival brought perhaps the most thoroughgoing transformation of a society by the Gospel in history. This fact is particularly important for the Church in our chaotic era, for the Wesleyan Revival occurred during the period of upheaval that accompanied the Industrial Revolution in England.

The socio-political effects of the Wesleyan Revival have often been overdrawn. The thesis that Wesley saved England from a French-style political revolution is, at best, highly speculative and ignores important differences between French and English cultures of the day. Yet it is true that England improved considerably during the eighteenth century, and that the Wesleyan Revival was a major agent of this change.

The rediscovery of John Wesley can hardly be cause for pride by any present-day denomination. The Anglicans, by and large, turned their backs on Wesley. Methodists have to remember that Wesley died an Anglican and never officially became a “Methodist,” nor wanted Methodism to become a separate church. And most contemporary groups that consider themselves Methodist or Wesleyan have fallen into a rigidity and narrowness that is distinctly non-Wesleyan.

John Wesley is bigger than any one denomination. He belongs to the whole Christian Church, along with Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and others. All of us, “Wesleyans” and “non-Wesleyans” alike, can learn from his example.

Six elements of Wesley’s success impress me as especially pertinent to our day. Three of these have to do with Wesley’s message and three with his method.

John Wesley’s Message

John Wesley had a message to communicate, and its principal elements were these:

1. Personal salvation through Jesus Christ. Wesley emphasized the basic biblical teachings of man’s sin and lostness, Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, and the transformation of the new birth. People listened and responded, by the thousands.

Wesley’s proclamation was clear. Though an Oxford scholar, he had no patience with high-sounding phrases that failed to communicate. It is said that Wesley would often preach a newly prepared sermon to his maid, a simple, uneducated girl, and have her stop him whenever she didn’t understand his words. His passion was to communicate with the masses. Preaching at Oxford, however, he might quote from Latin authors or from the Greek New Testament.

2. The Spirit-filled life. Wesley continually spoke of the need for the filling and continuing ministry of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, and thousands of early Methodists found the experience a reality. In nearly every city he visited, Wesley carefully examined the members of the Methodist societies as to their Christian experience. Although he frequently found spiritual counterfeits, he also found much spiritual reality and power. The Holy Spirit was at work.

Wesley advocated much more than merely a crisis experience of the infilling of the Spirit; he stressed the need for ongoing Christian growth, the edification of the Church, the forming of the stature of Christ in each believer.

3. An active and involved social consciousness. Wesley was supremely an evangelist. And yet a list of his sermon titles, or of the pamphlets he published, reveals that his topics included such things as wealth, national sins, war, education, medical ethics, the Stamp Act, trade with North America, responsibility to the king, the liquor industry.

There was no question where Wesley stood on poverty and riches, sea piracy, smuggling, the slave trade, or other crucial issues of his day. And he did not think he was compromising his call as an evangelist when he preached on these issues on Sunday morning. Like the Old Testament prophets, he saw that the biblical faith touches every area of life and makes everyone morally responsible, from king to coal miner.

Wesley’s social concern got results. Why? First, because he awakened a new moral consciousness in the nation. Second, because others followed his example. Third, because his faithful evangelism resulted in thousands of transformed lives. He instilled in many converts this same social concern, thus producing a popular basis for social reform. He proved what church history from other times and places shows: there is no combination more potent than biblical evangelism plus biblical social concern, than Old Testament prophet plus New Testament evangelist.

Wesley did more than just talk about social reform. Among other things, he agitated for prison, liquor, and labor reform; set up loan funds for the poor; campaigned against the slave trade and smuggling; opened a dispensary and gave medicines to the poor; worked to solve unemployment; and personally gave away considerable sums of money to persons in need.

John Wesley’s Method

But his message is only part of the story, Wesley saw—or rather, learned—that the clearest, most biblical proclamation of the Gospel often had little effect if it was locked within the walls (literal or figurative) of the institutional church. Others before and since have preached as clearly and sincerely, but without half the results. Why? In part, because their message was encrusted in rigid, unbiblical ideas about the nature of the Church.

Wesley started out strictly high-church in his ecclesiology, but God didn’t let him stay there. Although to a considerable degree he was still a high-churchman at his death, in many ways he had learned to be remarkably flexible and unconventional.

This is shown by three aspects of Wesley’s ministry.

1. He did not restrict himself to the institutional church. John Wesley’s effectiveness dates from the time he began carrying the Gospel outside the four walls of the church.

It happened like this: Wesley’s friend the evangelist George Whitefield preached regularly to a large congregation of colliers (coal miners) at Kingswood, near Bristol. Whitefield’s method was “field preaching”—assembling a large crowd in an open field and there opening the Word. Wesley frowned on this at first, for he had been, in his words, “so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls a sin if it had not been done in church” (Journal, Epworth, II, 167).

Whitefield requested—practically insisted—that Wesley take over his congregation so he could return to America. Wesley did not want to accept, but after seeing Whitefield’s ministry he felt the call was from God. Says Wesley, “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from an eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people” (ibid., p. 172).

The crowds grew. Soon there were congregations in other places, and within a few years throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. Wesley had discovered that when people do not come to the church, it’s time for the church to go to the people.

Wesley, his brother Charles, and Whitefield did not win ecclesiastical praise for their efforts. As Bishop Leslie R. Marston notes, “These three men were called mad enthusiasts because they would free the gospel from the confining gothic arches of established religion and release it to the masses in street and field, to the sick and unclean in hovel and gutter, to the wretched and condemned in Bedlam and prison” (From Age to Age a Living Witness, p. 66).

Wesley was a devout churchman. He had no intention of founding a new dissenting group; he urged his hearers and new converts to attend the regular Anglican services. He never preached in field or marketplace during times of stated worship services. But he was also a realist. He saw that many simply would not attend the traditional church services, and that those who did failed to receive all the spiritual help they needed. And this leads to the second aspect of Wesley’s method.

2. He created new and workable structures for “koinonia.” One of the first things Wesley did with his converts was to divide them into groups of a dozen, each group with its own leader. These were the famous Wesleyan “class meetings.” Wesley soon discovered the spiritual dynamic of this small group structure. He said in 1742:

I appointed several earnest and sensible men to meet me, to whom I showed the great difficulty I had long found of knowing the people who desired to be under my care. After much discourse, they all agreed there could be no better way to come to a sure, thorough knowledge of each person than to divide them into classes, like those at Bristol, under the inspection of those in whom I could most confide. This was the origin of our classes in London, for which I can never sufficiently praise God, the unspeakable usefulness of the institution having ever since been more and more manifest [quoted by John Stott in One People, p. 72].

What was the result? Wesley later wrote,

Many now happily experienced that Christian fellowship of which they had not so much as an idea before. They began to “bear one another’s burdens” and naturally to “care for each other” [“Plain Account of the People Called Methodists,” Works, Zondervan Edition, VIII, 254].

Wesley introduced other new ideas of church practice also, such as lay ministers and simple, unpretentious “preaching houses.” He felt free to make such innovations because he conceived of Methodism, not as a new denomination, but merely as a “society” within the Anglican church.

Wesley’s efforts along this line say much to the churches of today, many of which are trapped in rigid institutional patterns. Few of today’s traditional churches really experience that “fellowship of the Holy Spirit” of which the New Testament speaks. The same was true of eighteenth-century Anglicanism, and Wesley did something about it.

3. He preached the Gospel to the poor. One of the crucial signs of the Kingdom is to whom the Gospel is being ministered. John Wesley, like Jesus, preached to the poor. He sought out those whom no one else was seeking.

Reading his Journal, one is impressed with how many times Wesley preached early in the morning, at five o’clock, or in the marketplace at ten. Why was he so often preaching at five A.M.? Certainly not for his convenience, but for the convenience of the men and women who went to work in mine or factory at daybreak. Wesley assembled the colliers in the fields before they started work, or the crowds in the marketplace at midday. His passion was to preach the Gospel to the poor, and among them he had his greatest response.

John Wesley had a message, and he didn’t muffle it behind stained glass. He went outside the church, preaching the Gospel to the poor. He refused to allow newborn babes to die of spiritual malnutrition, but provided spiritual homes and foster parents for them. He created new church forms—new wineskins—for those who responded. He matched a biblical message with methods in harmony with a biblical ecclesiology.

John Wesley’s Secret

How did Wesley “happen” to find this happy marriage of message and method? We face here, of course, the mystery of the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit. But we can see at least some of the ways the Spirit worked in Wesley’s life.

Wesley was not primarily a theologian, though he was theologically competent. He “theologized” sufficiently to find biblical answers to the basic questions of Christian experience and to confront social issues with biblical revelation. But he never worked out a consistent theological system. His theology was a mixture of high-church traditionalism, believer’s church pietism, and evangelistic pragmatism. On some questions, such as infant baptism, he never developed a firm position but held seemingly contradictory opinions.

There is not even unanimous agreement about whether Wesley was at heart an Arminian or a Calvinist! While he has generally been considered an Arminian, he was careful not to fall into antinomianism, and some have argued that his theology was basically Calvinistic.

So John Wesley’s secret was not essentially theological. But it was essentially biblical. Wesley, the scholar, the author and editor of many books, was a man of one book—the Bible. He accepted it implicitly and practiced it resolutely. This was his secret: the Word of God.

Wesley held the common-sense view that if the Bible was true, it would show itself true in human experience. So his points of reference were first the Bible and secondly experience—not church tradition, contemporary philosophy, or the opinions of others. What was said in the Bible and proved true in human experience was true, regardless of what others thought.

Wesley had his faults. He was something of an anti-Catholic bigot (although his personal relations with individual Catholics were above reproach). Some will choke on the fact that he was a pro-monarchy political conservative with little patience for upstart American revolutionary radicals.

He also had other things going for him than what we have mentioned here. He was a gifted administrator and chooser of men (even though some of the leaders he chose later betrayed him). His editing, condensing, and publishing of books—a complete library from history to medicine—was a ministry in itself. And he received immeasurable help from his brother Charles, who wrote hundreds of hymns that were sung to popular tunes of the day. (The early Methodists held an intelligible faith partly because they memorized much of it in the hymns of Charles Wesley.)

John Wesley was born June 17, 1703; was converted in Aldersgate Street on May 24, 1738; and died on March 2, 1791. Because he was biblical, because he walked where Christ walked, John Wesley was a man for our times.

the new propriety

There is a spirit growing among young Americans, the spirit of the new propriety. Theological radicals tend to fawn over it, trying to nurse it into its “full stature,” that of a new morality or situation ethic. Evangelicals try to crush it among their youth, before contributions to their schools wither or the name of Christ comes into disrepute.

Both the gleeful and the fearful miss the point. Myopically self-centered, they dwell on appearances and interpret them as fundamental changes, either good or bad.

Young Christians have accepted cultural manifestations ranging from dress to dance. The cinema has come into its own as an art form, and young believers, no longer suspecting celluloid to be demon-possessed, freely choose which films to attend. Bad cinema can be more boring or nauseating than pernicious.

In an age of coed dorms and off-campus apartments, young Christians at secular schools watch television, study, play games, and talk together in the once forbidden privacy of their rooms. Most committed Christian students have a sense of spiritual responsibility both to Christ and to others. They know that their lives are constantly on display before the non-Christians who are their roommates and neighbors. Segregated-by-sex dorms do not stymie students bent on immorality, even on Christian campuses (fraudulent sign-out destinations and other subterfuges provide alternatives).

Coed dorms and long hair are manifestations of a new propriety, not a new morality. This change has come about slowly and naturally, by circumstance rather than by design. Away at school and free of the usual restrictions, the younger generation has formed a new culture, and young Christians are a part of it. It is not that they have departed from the faith. Rather, they are living it out amid new social patterns.

As C. S. Lewis pointed out in Christian Behavior, “a girl in the Pacific Islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might be equally ‘modest,’ proper, or decent, according to the standards of their own societies.…” Young Christians may accept the cultural phenomena of shortened skirts, lengthened hair, and twenty-four-hour visitation privileges without changing their moral standards. Few Christian girls venture out in public conspicuously braless. But while Christians do not succumb to the prevailing morality, neither do they recoil in horror and set up a monastic counter-counter-culture.

No one should impose a guilt complex on the young. As long as they use their discretion and do not act to excite passion or give occasion to sin, they are guiltless. Those who are older need not lose sleep or agonize in prayer over long hair and coed dorms. The young need (and grudgingly appreciate) the prayers of mature Christians for their real problems, but accusation, innuendo, and morbidly probing curiosity serve only to aid the devil. Each generation should ignore trivial differences and pray for the real spiritual needs of the other, for both sides of the “propriety gap” face basically the same temptations, albeit in different surroundings.

Young and old, we are brothers and sisters in Christ. Let us make a testimony to a world beset by schism and close the generation gap in the ranks of the redeemed. The first step together is gaining an understanding of differences in propriety and a mutual tolerance bred of the Holy Spirit.—ROGER WILLIAM BENNETT, student, Bradley University, and orderly, Methodist Hospital of Central Illinois, Peoria.

Howard A. Snyder is dean of the Free Methodist Theological Seminary in São Paulo, Brazil. He has the B.A. (Greenville College) and the B.D. (Asbury Seminary).

The revelation of God in history, as Christians understand it, was originally recorded in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek by Jewish writers who represent a variety of cultures quite different from our own. We nonetheless understand God’s message of redemption in Christ through an English translation of the Bible, often the archaic King James translation, though we may not fully appreciate the nuances of the original documents. Problems of communication are compounded when Western missionaries bring the biblical message to primitive tribes.

In his book entitled Customs and Culture, Eugene Nida of the American Bible Society relates how a literal translation of biblical passages can convey misleading connotations to certain African tribes. The Kpelle of Liberia view the placing of palm branches in Jesus’ path (Matt. 21:8) as an insult, since their culture requires that all leaves be cleared from the path of any dignitary. The Zanaki of Tanganyika would regard Jesus’ knocking at a door (Rev. 3:20) as strange, since in their culture honest men call aloud at the door and the only ones who knock are thieves.

Cultures as well as languages differ, and these differences pose problems for understanding, communicating, and applying the Christian message.

What Is Culture?

Modern anthropologists use the term “culture” to designate the distinctive way of life of a given society, including such things as their values, manners, morals, and artifacts. According to Kluckhohn:

Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior, acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning influences upon further action [C. Kluckhohn, Culture and Behavior, ed. R. Kluckhohn, 1962, p. 73].

Margaret Mead defines culture as:

An abstraction from the body of learned behaviour which a group of people who share the same tradition transmit entire to their children, and, in part, to adult immigrants who become members of the society. It covers not only the arts and sciences, religions and philosophies … but also the system of technology, the political practices, the small intimate habits of daily life, such as the way of preparing or eating food, or of hushing a child to sleep … [Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, 1955, p. 12].

Hershkovits has succinctly defined “culture” as “the man-made part of the environment.”

We seldom think consciously about our own culture. Our own ways of thinking, feeling, and acting seem so natural that we assume they must be correct. Only when we have been exposed to or plunged into a non-Western culture do we realize how different the ways of other people can be. Loss of familiar cues may even produce the uneasy feeling known as “culture shock.”

How Cultures Vary

Anthropologists have been struck by the fact that though there are certain basic needs common to all men, the responses in meeting these needs are almost infinitely diverse. Within the community, murder, incest, lying, and stealing are universally condemned. But how people regard property, family relations, time, and work, how they eat, drink, clothe themselves—such attitudes and activities vary from society to society. For example, Eskimos eat rotten walrus meat. The Chinese eat fermented duck eggs but cannot comprehend how Westerners can eat fermented milk (cheese).

Almost all people clothe themselves, however scantily; complete nudity is quite exceptional. But the ways in which people clothe their bodies are quite diverse. What is sexually provocative in one society may not be so in another. The Yapese in Micronesia consider uncovered breasts of women quite proper while bare legs are a sign of immodesty. When missionaries urged that women in the Ngbaka church in northern Congo wear blouses, an elder protested that in their area only prostitutes dressed in such a manner—only they could afford such garments.

How people relate to others is another matter that differs considerably from culture to culture. North Americans pride themselves on their frankness. Latin Americans may be quite reserved about telling someone else what they are thinking. An Oriental is more prone to tell someone what he thinks the other wishes to hear; missionaries in post-war Japan were thus misled by the seemingly positive responses their audiences gave to invitations to accept Christ.

In many societies it is important that gifts be given and received with both hands. A missionary in India insulted his congregation by passing the communion plate with his left hand. In Korea under the influence of Buddhism a person who receives a gift does not express thanks for the gift, on the principle that the giver, who obtains merit through giving, should be the one who should be thankful. Many societies seem callous to the needs of others outside their group. Yet these same people will impoverish themselves to provide for relatives. Americans’ impersonal giving to strangers may arouse suspicion rather than gratitude.

Among the Indians of North and South America, attitudes are often quite different from those of white men. A Hopi Indian child is taught that she should never strive to get ahead of others. If an Indian becomes exceptionally rich, he is expected to share his wealth with his kinsmen. Indians of Mexico are primarily interested in the present. If they have a surplus from their crops, they prefer to spend it all in a fiesta rather than save it for the future.

Many societies resist change except in peripheral items that make life easier without drastically changing the old patterns. Americans, on the other hand, welcome change and novelty. We are oriented toward the future. “Time with us is handled much like a material; we earn it, spend it, save it, waste it,” commented Edward T. Hall in The Silent Language. We value promptness. A North American kept waiting forty-five minutes for an appointment in a Latin American office would be furiously impatient. In our society a last-minute invitation may be considered insulting. In the Middle East and elsewhere, however, it is pointless to send out an invitation far in advance.

Western missionaries are accustomed to a systematic universe that rules out “logical” contradictions. They too often facilely assume that their converts will draw the same “logical” conclusions from the Scriptures, unaware that many peoples live with the conception of an unsystematic universe.

Biblical Cultures

To better appreciate the import of the biblical revelation we need to know something of the cultures of those who received that revelation—the Hebrews of the Old Testament period in the midst of pagan Near Eastern neighbors and the Jews of the New Testament period in their Greco-Roman world.

Looking back, we can understand to some degree why God chose these people to be the vessels of his revelation. Eugene Nida points out that many of the non-Western societies find it easier than Westerners to understand the Scriptures with their original connotations. He comments:

The selection of the Jewish people can be understood in some measure on the basis that God chose to reveal Himself through a people who, there at the crossroads of so many cultural influences at that point in world history, possessed a culture with greater similarities to a greater number of other cultures than has existed at any other time in the history of mankind [Message and Missions, 1954, p. 49].

God’s revelation in the New Testament shows continuity and also development. More than half the citations from the Old Testament are made from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. The spread of Greek as a common language after the conquests of Alexander the Great aided the dissemination of the Gospel. The first great historian of the Hellenistic Age, Johann Droysen, firmly believed that the rise of Christianity as a world religion would not have been possible without this cultural development.

Even within the confines of the New Testament one can detect cultural factors and differences. Jesus makes no reference to the Greek athletic games that provided the Apostle Paul with so many sermon illustrations. Even Pentecost did not obliterate the cultural differences between the Hebraist and Hellenist Christians (Acts 6:1).

Paul was able to distinguish between the unchanging supra-cultural message of the Gospel and its adaptability to various cultures. In his desire to reach all groups with the Gospel, he said he was ready to be “made all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9:22). Paul gave us the principle of respect for various cultural practices in his exposition of what Christians should do about meat that had been offered in sacrifices to idols (1 Cor. 10:23–33; Rom. 14; Col. 2:16; 1 Tim. 4:3, 4; cf. Acts 15:29).

The Bible and Cultural Relativity

Our culture is so different from that of biblical times that some critics (such as Bultmann) have dismissed much of the Bible as irrelevant, and others (such as Tillich) have rephrased the kerygma in such a way that it is no longer recognizable. At the other pole are some conservative Christians like Carl McIntire who claim biblical justification for capitalism and other facets of the American way of life. Hendrik Kraemer, the great missionary statesman, deplored the unconscious identification of Western culture with Christianity by missionaries who were not aware that Western Christianity was but a relative and imperfect adaptation of the biblical revelation:

It is a truly remarkable and pathetic fact that those who are the champions of the eternal and absolute validity of the Gospel perpetrate so easily the fatal mistake of raising the relative, historical expression, the earthen vessel, to the status of the absolute divine act and gift. It is one of the most subtle forms of idolatry [The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, 1938, p. 316].

I believe it is possible, though not always simple, to steer a middle course by seeking to extract from the Bible supracultural principles that can be applied to various cultural situations. We need to avoid the temptation of identifying any given cultural expression as the only Christian mode possible, and we must recognize the relative values in various cultural patterns. Just as it has been possible for missionaries to translate the Gospel into a multitude of languages, it is certainly possible for the Holy Spirit to work in a variety of cultures.

It is an error simply to take a biblical injunction out of its cultural context and attempt to reproduce it in our society without reflection upon its significance. Orthodox Jews believe it is unlawful to eat meat and milk dishes together on the basis of the biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not seethe [boil] a kid in its mother’s milk” (Exod. 23:19; Deut. 14:21). But the original intent of the injunction is made clear by a Ugaritic text of the fourteenth century B.C. that reveals that the prohibition was directed against a Canaanite ritual.

Among Roman Catholics (until recently) and certain Protestant groups, women are expected to wear a hat or at least some minimal covering on their heads on the basis of Paul’s directive to the Corinthian church (1 Cor. 11:5, 6). When Paul writes that a man should not cover his head in prayer (1 Cor. 11:7), he is referring only to Greek practice, for Jewish and Roman men did cover their heads while praying.

The observation that an unveiled woman would be an object of shame is based upon the very ancient and widespread custom that decent women were to be veiled in public. The Middle Assyrian laws of the twelfth century B.C. had strict rules for the veiling of married women. On the other hand, “A harlot must not veil herself; her head must be uncovered”; in fact, one who saw a veiled harlot had to arrest her or be flogged himself! Jewish women in Jesus’ day went out in public with their faces hidden. Qimhit, the mother of several high priests, would not even uncover her hair before the men of her own family.

Although styles have changed, there still remains the principle that one should not dress in a way that would offend public sensibilities (1 Cor. 11:16). It would be simply impossible, even in our day, for either the congregation or the preacher to concentrate on the message at hand if an attractive girl walked down the church aisle in a bikini.

A more controversial example is the question of the role of women in the Christian community. Are all Paul’s statements normative? Or do some apply specifically to the culture of his day? If so, which ones?

What was the position of women in Jewish society? Among the rabbis it was considered unwise to talk too much with women, including one’s own wife. It was also considered scandalous to talk with a woman alone. The education of women was limited to the domestic arts; they were not expected to study the Scriptures. Women attending the synagogues were separated from the men by a lattice or sat in a special gallery. During the service women were to listen in silence (see J. Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, 1969, pp. 359 ff., esp. p. 373). The Mishnah (Kiddushin iv:13) stipulates that women may not be teachers of children. (The same text also bars unmarried men from this occupation.)

Christianity proclaimed the ideal equality of male and female, bond and free (Gal. 3:28). To the surprise of his disciples, Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:27). Christ had a number of devoted women among his disciples. Mary (Luke 1:46 ff.) and Timothy’s mother and grandmother (2 Tim. 3:14) were women who knew the Scriptures. Women played a prominent role in the early churches, as at Philippi; Priscilla even seems to have taken precedence over her husband Aquilla. Nonetheless in First Timothy 2:11–15Paul stresses woman’s pre-eminent role as a mother and denies her a public teaching role, not suffering her “to usurp authority over the man” (v. 12).

Scriptures from the beginning regard marriage and the family as God-given institutions. The Communists tried to abolish all sexual ethics after the revolution of 1917 and advocated the “glass of water” policy whereby one satisfied his sexual urge as freely as he satisfied his thirst. In the 1920s the disastrous consequences of this libertine policy forced them to reverse their stand and officially urge chastity before marriage and fidelity in marriage.

I believe that what Paul taught about a woman’s role as a mother and her subordination to her husband is still quite valid. On the other hand, in our own culture and in other cultures where women have a more equal public role with men than did the women of the first century, permitting a woman to teach in a church situation does not seem to be an usurpation of man’s authority. According to Eugene Nida:

Some missionaries have made the mistake of excluding women from all church responsibilities, thinking that in so doing they were adhering strictly to the rules (though not the principles) laid down by the Apostle Paul. Other missionaries have thrust entirely too much authority upon women, assuming that the role of women in the indigenous culture was roughly equivalent to that which they possess in our own culture. Both extremes are ill-advised, for it is the genius of the Good News of God that by the action of the Holy Spirit it may enter in and sanctify all forms of human institutions [Customs and Culture, p. 286].

The Universal Appeal of Christianity

Given the almost infinite variety of human cultures it is a most remarkable fact that the Christian Good News of God’s redemption in Christ has been preached successfully to so many societies. Here is a message that has burst the bonds of its parochial Palestinian origins and has touched the hearts of sophisticated philosophers and savage Auca Indians. Paul affirmed that in Christ there can be neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all (Col. 3:11). Scythians were nomads from Russia who were the epitome of savagery in the ancient world: they tatooed themselves, took scalps from their captives, and smoked hemp!

In the early second century the Roman governor of northwestern Anatolia, the Younger Pliny, in a letter to the Emperor Trajan complained about the appeal of Christianity to all classes, urban and rural alike. He was alarmed, “… for a great many individuals of every age and class, both men and women, are being brought to trial, and this is likely to continue. It is not only the towns, but villages and rural districts too which are infected through contact with this wretched cult.”

Rightly understood and rightly preached, Christ is the hope of glory for every man (Col. 1:27, 28), whatever his culture, his kindred, people, tongue, or nation (Rev. 5:9).

Edwin M. Yamauchi is an associate professor of history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. His most recent book is “Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins,” which was published in the “Harvard Theological Studies” series.

When President Nixon went to the summit at the Kremlin, we sent along our managing editor, David E. Kucharsky. His extended report appears in this issue. We think our readers will find in it some information and interpretation not made available by the other newsmen who accompanied the President.

During Billy Graham’s week-long visit to Ireland recently, we had our British representative, J. D. Douglas, cover the scene. We expect to publish his report shortly. The purpose of the trip was to promote healing in that troubled land through the Gospel.

By the time this issue arrives in readers’ homes I will have attended Explo ’72, the vision of Bill Bright, one of my former students. My own daughter Nancy and her husband Dan Sharp have joined the Campus Crusade staff as missionaries. Dan and Nancy are Wheaton College graduates, and Dan has a master’s degree in music from Drake. He hopes to use his musical talents in evangelism, looking forward perhaps to seminary training and the ministry later on.

We rejoice in the reports of large numbers of people who are finding Christ as Saviour; there are evidences of a special moving of the Spirit of God. We may yet see another great awakening in the Americas and around the world before Jesus comes again.

tentative proposals for a new united church in Scotland are outlined in a 30,000-word report just published (Multilateral Church Conversation in Scotland, Saint Andrew Press). Suggestions are made for new enlarged parishes and the pooling of resources in buildings and manpower, as well as for small groups to be formed within these parishes. Ministers and congregations would be in the care of “superintendents” or bishops, since it is felt that some personal pastoral oversight is desirable. The superintendent would deal with an enlarged parish rather than a diocese, and he would be regarded as a pastor of the people, the congregations, and the ministerial team.

The proposals have been drawn up by representatives of six denominations: the Church of Scotland, the United Free Church, the Episcopal Church, the Methodist Synod, the Congregational Union, and the Churches of Christ. Round-table talks have been held over five years. Two years ago the ruling bodies of all six agreed to a list of principles and authorized the hammering out of a plan of union.

On the question of relations with the State, the report notes the United Free Church’s opposition to establishment and says, “A united church would need to stand at a measured distance from State institutions, free to exercise a prophetic criticism of them while falling heir to the responsibilities in both mission and service accruing from establishment.”

If there is to be any possibility of recovering the “lost unity” of the churches in Scotland, declares the report, it must be on the basis of agreement on the fundamental Christian beliefs. The panels have found that such consensus already exists, and the report includes a brief statement of these fundamental convictions.

So much for summary, presented very largely from official sources lest my own selectivity be faulted. This, it is stressed, is an interim report only and goes now for discussion and comment to the ruling bodies of the six. It should be added that non-participants in the conversations were three smaller Scots Presbyterian bodies (including the historic Free Kirk) and the Baptist Union.

It is in the nature of inter-church reports to emphasize points held in common, while insisting that there have been frank exchanges on strongly held differences. Just as predictable, however, is the discovery that such differences are seldom mentioned in anything but the vaguest terms.

For example, I have before me now a Scottish Episcopal Church booklet entitled “The Apostolic Succession,” written by one of its bishops who is currently the executive officer of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Its claims on this single issue would serve to focus inter-church conversations largely on the terms on which the 97 per cent non-episcopal church membership (i.e., membership of the five other churches in the talks) would accept bishops. I have always been appalled in ecumenical discussions that Anglicans should so easily assume they are negotiating from a position of strength when their stance is rejected both by Rome and by Reformed churches. It makes me think of the exasperated parliamentarian who said he did not mind Gladstone’s acting as if he had the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but he did object to his assumption that God had put it there.

But confronted by the present report I would not make the above a major issue. Whatever the merits of the case, to the overwhelming majority of Scots the bishop is an alien concept in which a sense of history is for once utterly unhelpful. Not untypical is the reported protest by one university teacher against the 1956 “Bishops’ Report”: “I may be an atheist, but I’m a Presbyterian atheist.”

What made me groan continually as I read this report was its failure (though we are told it tried) to speak to the intellectual capacity of the people for whose benefit presumably the words were put together. There is something pathetic about high-level talkers of several denominations ascending amid jovial good fellowship into the profounder reaches of church order, polity, and doctrine, fondly imagining that the average church member is following them.

Even if we overlook the tendency to linger lovingly over questions that the man in the pew is not asking, there is a problem of sheer communication when the compilers’ niceties of speech are as incomprehensible as the mumbled Latin Mass, which even traditionalist Rome is superseding. I took this report to my octogenarian farmer friend, a man of generous heart and shining witness. His radio has told him of new church talks; he wants to know what is being said. I open the report: “The Gospel has to be indigenized … Jesus is aut deus aut non bonus … extra ecclesiam nulla salus … The Church will readily consume all the presbyteral man-hours it can get, and is unlikely to spawn unattached practitioners of the Presbyterate” (which would have the makings of humor in any other context). My farmer friend, who left school at twelve, listened with that patient courtesy still found in TV-less households, then told me I’d had a long ride and that I’d better sample some of those scones before a couple of big-eating Methodists arrived for the weekly home Bible study.

I persevered, this time with a Presbyterian landlady who saw me through some tricky student years. I chose an easy sentence: “The witness of the Church as a whole is weakened by the fact of disunity.” She understands. She agrees. But her mind is not on the vision splendid. It turns out that she is thinking of the ancient parish church where the two ministers are not on speaking terms and communicate through a church officer. Happily neither of the ministers is a signatory to the present report. And unhappily (Women’s Lib please recall this remark when the battle is won) the Church of Scotland’s fifteen representatives included not a single woman to obtrude that unity-but-begin-in-me note into the conversations.

I mention the above for no mischievous purpose, and not simply to highlight an extreme example of disunity within my own church. The Church of Scotland (which comprises some 85 per cent of the church membership represented in the six bodies) has in the last decade conducted individual talks with four of the others. All of them began with high hopes; all have quietly foundered. Are we then to evolve a new Parkinson’s Law for ecumenical man—that unity prospects are enhanced as dissident elements increase? That after four discordant duets a sextet of the same fumbling trumpeters will blend in harmony? Moreover, will they choose the right music to play?

It is a pity that ecumenical discussion in Scotland was not put into cold storage for a generation after the bishops-in-presbytery scheme was rejected, for we still have something to learn from an Arab proverb: “Keep your tents separate and bring your hearts together.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

“Dear God,

“Please don’t think me to be smart by putting grass in your offering plate. It means I am giving it up for your son, Jesus Christ.”

The letter—signed “Your daughter, Debbie”—and an ounce of marijuana came out of a collection bucket on the final night of the Leighton Ford crusade in Rochester last month.

Ford, 38, heir apparent to the Billy Graham role (he is Graham’s brother-in-law, vice-president of the Graham organization, and frequent speaker on Graham’s “Hour of Decision” broadcast), maintained his strong appeal among young people. More than half of the 3,293 “inquirers” were teen-agers. (Total attendance for the ten-day crusade: 65,400, a record.)

There were other notable aspects. Crusade planners—representing 250 churches—launched a unique social-action ministry to inmates in Attica prison, and Ford promoted a fledgling work among young people on probation. Jesus people were enlisted to work with street youths. And evangelical Catholics participated in significant numbers—even as counselors.

“I believe the ‘sweet bye and bye’ and the nasty here and now belong together,” declared Ford in forging the link between evangelism and social action. (That piety is essential but must be combined with involvement is a point he makes in his book One Way to Change the World.) Presbyterian pastor William Showalter, crusade chairman, noted approvingly that Ford had “developed social consciousness as an evangelist. Those who are socially concerned see in him someone they can trust.” Until Rochester, Ford had merely recommended certain service agencies on “Christian Action Night” in his crusades.

To set up the prison project Ford relied on his friend Richard J. Simmons of Seattle, who has established well-known help programs at a number of West Coast prisons. The project, known as “The Bridge,” will be beamed to prisoners at the nearby Attica State Correctional Facility, where forty-three died in a riot last September. Initially, thirty volunteers from Buffalo and Rochester will visit inmates regularly, then help them make a new start after they are released, staying with them throughout the parole period.

New York authorities expressed uneasiness about having outsiders run the program (more than 100 organizations asked to work at Attica after the riot), so it will be sponsored instead by the Genesee Ecumenical Ministries of Rochester and the Buffalo Council of Churches.

Ford also publicly endorsed the new Volunteers in Probation unit working with a county family court and the local FISH (Friends in Service Here) organization that volunteers help to the needy. The 5,300 at the crusade session where the three ministries were highlighted gave an offering of $3,500 to help stake them. An anti-war group tried to disrupt the meeting, but Ford welcomed the protesters and discussed issues with them later; they did not return.

Showalter, fellow Presbyterian minister James Rice, who served as Christian-action chairman, and others on the crusade planning committee suggested the Attica idea to Ford months ago. (Local Presbyterian involvement in evangelism goes back nearly 150 years, when evangelist Charles G. Finney drew thousands to his Rochester campaign and sent 635 new members into three Presbyterian churches. The area was so saturated with hellfire-and-brimstone preaching that it was dubbed “the burnt-over district.”)

The planning committee also recruited a dozen members of the Love Inn Christian community near Ithaca to counsel street people—some of them zonked on drugs—who made decisions. The young Christians helped reunite runaways with their parents and spent days rapping with other youths in parks and shopping plazas.

Another committee idea: a “Help” table next to the platform where nearly 100 in need signed up for aid in lining up job interviews, pregnancy and marriage counseling, and the like. (Two psychiatrists were on call.)

Catholic bishop Joseph L. Hogan of the twelve-county Rochester area gave the Ford crusade his official approval and urged his faithful to attend. (In an interview Hogan revealed that he often listens to Billy Graham and appreciates Graham’s style and message, “which you don’t hear much in the pulpit these days.”) Indeed, one-third of the decisions recorded were made by Catholics, and some Catholics—including at least one nun—served as counselors. It marked the first time a Ford crusade had gotten so much Catholic support and participation. (Catholics and Protestants alike from non-participating churches are provided special follow-up and referred to a Bible-study course, according to Ford’s advance man, Lawrence Selig. If Catholic churches ever participate officially, he replied to a question, new believers with Catholic backgrounds will probably be steered to those churches for follow-up.)

The crusade featured a Jesus witness march through downtown Rochester, where hundreds handed out evangelistic newspapers and tracts. A large 15- by 20-foot TV screen behind Ford on stage enabled the audience to maintain eye contact with him, another evangelistic first.

Among the firsts there was also a last: “crusade”—a word that has some bad connotations, especially among Jews. Ford’s next campaign will be billed a “Reachout.”

Billy Graham: From Birmingham To Belfast

Blacks and whites in Birmingham, Alabama, sat side by side through eight crusade sessions listening to evangelist Billy Graham expound the Gospel as God’s answer to man’s most pressing social and spiritual needs. Attendance averaged about 40,000 per service; of these, an estimated total of 10,000 streamed forward during the invitation periods indicating they wanted to try the answer in their own lives.

On the day before Governor George Wallace was shot, the presidential hopeful telephoned Graham and told him, “I will be with you from Thursday on.” The assassination attempt moved the 53-year-old evangelist to scrap a Youth Night sermon and preach instead on “the pornography of violence,” citing especially “the influence of the devil.”

In a different vein on another night, guest James Johnson, assistant secretary of the Navy, in a testimony related how upon his arrival in Washington he had committed himself to “make a friend each day for Christ.”

Scholars Agree …

What’s the “best” Bible? Austin Chapman of Minneapolis, Minnesota, conducted a survey among forty-six well-known Bible scholars, clergymen, and theologians to find out. Among those who responded to the questionnaire: Harold Lindsell, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Harold J. Ockenga, Gordon-Conwell Seminary president, and Francis A. Schaeffer, of L’Abri Fellowship.

Chapman’s survey covered the American Standard Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New English Bible, and the King James Version. Out of ten categories the RSV snagged seven first places and three seconds. The ASV took first in “most accurate,” but the RSV got first in “scholarship” and “best whole Bible.” The KJV came in last in nine out of the ten categories, including accuracy and scholarship.

A daytime school of evangelism attracted 1,000 participants, including many pastors. The executive committee of the crusade was racially mixed and represented every major branch of Protestantism. The racial mix was evident nightly on platform and program.

Back in 1964, when racial tensions were still running high, Graham conducted an Easter service at Legion Field attended by nearly 50,000. “That’s when blacks and whites learned they could sit side by side,” observed a reporter. “This year they learned they could work side by side.”

Having gotten blacks and whites together in Birmingham, Graham at the close of the crusade announced he would make a six-day visit to Belfast and Dublin in early June, presumably in hopes of getting Irish Catholics and Protestants together. He said he would have a few speaking engagements, including a television appearance, but would not fill a political role. Instead, said he, he would seek only to carry a message of love to “integrated” audiences (Catholics and Protestants), emphasizing the biblical message of reconciliation, while trying to learn from the Irish. As long as the United States is in Viet Nam, he pointed out, Americans have no right to tell others how to solve their problems.

Before leaving Birmingham he told reporters that a rehearing of the school prayer issue before the U. S. Supreme Court would be preferable to legislative attempts to pass a “Prayer Amendment” to the Constitution. But if no court relief is forthcoming, he said, he would assume his original stance and might even lead a march on Washington—“the largest of such marches”—to restore prayer in public schools.

Skinner Gets Them Together

Black evangelist Tom Skinner preached to about 30,000—many of them high schoolers—in an eight-day Flint, Michigan, crusade sponsored by more than 300 churches in the area. Associate evangelist Bill Pannell reported 1,167 decisions. More than 500 youths staged a Saturday ten-mile Trek-for-Tom walkathon to raise funds for the crusade; their efforts netted over $2,000. Crusade co-chairman Avery Aldridge of the Foss Avenue Missionary Baptist Church reflected: “A new day has come to Flint, a day when black and white Christians realize that we are together, truly serving the same personal Saviour, Jesus Christ.”

Earlier, Skinner and evangelist Leighton Ford had teamed up in an unusual outreach at the University of Virginia sponsored by the local Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship chapter, whose membership numbers in the hundreds. IVCFers from other campuses and a dozen Gordon-Conwell seminary professors and students were also recruited to aid in the low-key effort. There were meetings in the main auditorium, scholarly seminars, classroom lectures, an appearance before the debating society (seminary professor William Lane was accorded a standing ovation), and personal encounters throughout the campus, with a number of decisions for Christ.

Participant Richard Lovelace, church history professor at Gordon-Conwell, sees such involvement as a breakthrough that would “make the seminary a reaching as well as a teaching institution, helping to focus everything the seminary does on the practical demands of mission.”

Charisma In Pittsburgh

Overflow crowds—4,000 from twenty-four states and four foreign countries—packed into the stately Hicks Memorial

Chapel of staid Pittsburgh Seminary in mid-May for the annual six-day Greater Pittsburgh Charismatic Conference. They represented what charismatics like to call the “true ecumenical movement,” for among them were members of all the major denominations plus some old-line Pentecostals, “completed” Jews, and a large number of Roman Catholics. (The burgeoning Catholic Pentecostal movement began in Pittsburgh in 1967 at Duquesne University, site of next year’s conference.)

Intended to be primarily a “ministry of teaching,” the conference featured speakers from Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish backgrounds. They included well-known author Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch victim of a Nazi concentration camp, Derek Prince of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who specializes in exorcism. J. Rodman Williams of Austin Presbyterian Seminary conducted a clergy workshop on the theology of the Holy Spirit, laymen listened to popular Roman Catholic psychologist-lecturer John Klem, and converted Jewish rabbi Michael Esses of Anaheim’s Melodyland Christian Center led participants in a study of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament.

Speaking to overflow evening sessions (many were turned away) were Indonesian revival evangelist Mel Tari and Dr. Harold Ockenga, president of Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Seminary. Tari, author of the best-selling Like a Mighty Wind, reported that the seven-year-old Indonesian revival is still spreading through that country’s islands and into New Guinea. He affirmed that the New Testament-like miracles are still occurring and answered his detractors with, “This is just the fulfillment of the Bible your missionaries brought us. Thank you for bringing us this word of God!” Tari told of Muslim priests on his island of Timor who had torn up the Koran and accepted Christ. He claimed that now 850,000 of Timor’s one million residents are Christians. (Some missionaries have disputed the authenticity of parts of his book, but Tari insists the accounts are true.)

Ockenga brought the house down at the closing session with a repeat of his prophecy address at last year’s Jerusalem Conference on Prophecy and a triumphant “Even so come, Lord Jesus!” Ockenga himself is not a charismatic.

Conference chairman Russell Bixler, a Church of the Brethren pastor, said hundreds had been “baptized in the Holy Spirit” and many had been physically healed. (Numerous conferees reported they no longer needed their eyeglasses.) He cautioned zealous charismatics not to come on too strong in their home churches, but to talk about Jesus and be a uniting force.

ROBERT E. FRIEDRICH, JR.

Amish Schooling: Unenforceable

The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously 7 to 0 that the state of Wisconsin does not have the constitutional power to punish Amish parents who refuse because of religious convictions to send their children to public high schools.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, speaking for the court, said a state’s interest in universal education is not entirely free from a balancing process when it impinges on other fundamental First Amendment rights. He held that Wisconsin would “greatly endanger if not destroy the free exercise of their religious beliefs” if Amish children were forced to attend high school and that the state did not show a compelling need for thus interfering with the traditional Amish religious way of life.

The court asserted that an Amish child would not be deprived of the ability to earn a living should he leave that faith in later years since he would have received excellent vocational training and learned habits of hard work and honesty in his Amish education.

Other justices, while agreeing with the basic decision, questioned whether the court was really taking adequate heed of the children’s freedom of choice, an issue that, they noted, was not directly raised in the Wisconsin cases.

GLENN EVERETT

Holding Academic Hands

An evangelical university system may evolve out of the Christian College Consortium. Dr. David L. McKenna, president of Seattle Pacific College, says the ten member schools in the consortium are already cooperating in a number of ways and are planning more joint efforts. One key project is a summer institute on faith and learning that will bring together faculty representatives to discuss the integration of faith and learning. McKenna is chairman of the executive committee of the consortium.

Scotland: Specter Of The Bishop

For five years clerical and lay representatives from six Scottish churches have quietly been talking about unity. They have now produced a 30,000-word interim report that is sure to cause a storm in a land where religion still regularly makes the front page.

Proposing a merger into one body that will draw on the traditions of all six, the document stresses that true unity will come only when “the road back” is closed for good. It sees one vital principle: “The authenticity and credibility of the Church depends not on any given form of order, worship or service, but on God’s own action of calling, sustaining and forgiving. The shaping of the Church has always been vitally affected by involvement and concern within a given historical situation.”

While the report goes into great detail on the organizational grouping of the unified church in congregations, parishes, and regions, many Scots will see in its recommendations only the “unexorcised specter of the bishop” come again to haunt them, unconvincingly disguised under the flexible appellation of “superintendent.” Said one Kirk minister, quoting an early Presbyterian, “Busk [dress] him, busk him as bonnilie as ye can, we [still] see … the horns of his mitre.” And the Beaver-brook press, which does not wish bishops well, resumed its traditional cries of outrage at yet another secret plot.

The six involved are the Church of Scotland (accounting for all but 300,000 of the potential 1.5 million membership), Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, United Free, and Churches of Christ. The report goes now for consideration to the governing body of each church.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Constantinidis, ‘Heretic’

Greek journalist George Constantinidis, an evangelical, has been sentenced to five months’ imprisonment and six months of deportation (confinement to a particular part of the country) on charges of proselytizing, but he is free pending appeal. In the same courtroom in Pyrgos, Greece, in November, 1970, Spiros Zodhiates, president of the New Jersey-based American Mission to Greeks (AMG), was acquitted of similar charges (see December 18, 1970, issue, page 43, and January 1, 1971, issue, page 29).

The charges against Constantinidis—sending New Testaments and evangelistic booklets to school children and sending literature to adults—were lodged by Orthodox bishop Athanasios of Elias. Orthodox officials claim the materials are “heretical” because they are published by the AMG’s O Logos publishing house, a non-Orthodox publisher. According to news sources, an Orthodox spokesman said the literature failed to mention the Orthodox teaching that salvation is effected by Jesus Christ only through the Greek Orthodox Church.

Defense attorneys tried to show that their client had been the victim of an Orthodox plot and that prosecution witnesses had lied, but they based their case mostly on the alleged invalidity of the anti-proselytism law, arguing that the Greek constitution allows the freedom to propagate religious beliefs.

Constantinidis explained that he had never tried to “convert” Orthodox members into the Evangelical Church but was intent only on “evangelizing” them, defined as “bringing someone to Christ.”

If a higher court rules in the journalist’s favor, it will be a landmark decision perhaps abetting the evangelical cause in Greece.

Religion In Transit

More than 265,000 homes in the San Diego area have received the Living Bible version of the Gospel of John, delivered by 700 members of the city’s Scott Memorial Baptist Church. Of 600 responses so far, 200 have resulted in professions of faith, says pastor Timothy LaHaye.

Park Street Church in Boston has pledged a record $335,000 for missionary work in the year ahead.

Stony Brook School, a leading evangelical prep school, held its fiftieth commencement. Speaker: Senator Mark Hatfield.

A federal study shows that 46 per cent of the nation’s unmarried women have engaged in premarital sex by age 19, and that “while proportionately more blacks than whites have had intercourse, it is the white non-virgins who have sex more frequently and are the more promiscuous.”

Roman Catholics in the United States increased by 176,261 to a total of 48.4 million during 1971, but decreases were reported in the number of priests, nuns, students, schools, baptisms, and converts.

Activist students on college campuses are becoming more “person-oriented” than “cause-oriented,” Lutheran Student Movement executives reported after a tour of campuses, confirming observations of John Charles Cooper in The New Mentality and Charles Reich in The Greening of America.

World Wide Pictures, producers of Billy Graham films, will produce a film version of The Hiding Place, World War II hero Corrie Ten Boom’s best-selling book co-authored with John and Elizabeth Sherrill.

A tornado roared through part of Heather Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis, but 500 praying parishioners huddled inside the sanctuary escaped unhurt. Among them: fifty teen-agers who left a makeshift Sunday-school building moments before it was destroyed.

The National Catholic Register again editorially urged Catholics to participate in the Key 73 evangelistic campaign.

Wheaton College students have raised $50,000 to support fifty-two students in Christian service abroad this summer.

The American Board of Missions to the Jews has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to deny WOR-TV (Channel 9 in New York) renewal of its broadcasting license because it canceled a film on the Passover last year, after which nine other major stations also canceled.

“DIMENSION For Better Living,” a twelve-page evangelistic tabloid newspaper supplement in color published by Moody Monthly magazine, is being inserted in a number of major dailies and distributed in other ways by interested Christian groups.

Inteen magazine, edited by Henry Soles, Jr., and published by Urban Ministries, Inc. (UMI), of Chicago, was named “Christian Education Magazine of the Year” during the recent Evangelical Press Association convention. The one-year-old UMI, founded by Melvin E. Banks and chaired by evangelist Tom Skinner, is the first black-owned independent publisher to produce interracial Sunday-school literature.

The executive board of the National Coalition of American Nuns, representing 1,800 of the nation’s 175,000 Catholic nuns, has called upon Catholic women to withhold church offerings until the Catholic Church gives women equal status with men.

Personalia

Pastor John Huffman of the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church has carried a Miami radio station from sixth to first in number of listeners on Sunday nights with a three-hour open-phone talk show that begins at 10 P.M.

Minneapolis insurance broker Vernon Blikstad, a Lutheran believed by many to be the nation’s largest single distributor of Scripture portions, has been ousted from membership in the Christian Business Men’s Committee for promoting the charismatic movement during CBMC luncheons. “The leaders of yesterday’s revival are the enemies of this one,” he countered.

American financier-philanthropist John M. Templeton, a United Presbyterian elder, announced creation of a “Nobel prize” for religion worth $88,400 annually to a person of any faith who is deemed significantly “instrumental in widening man’s knowledge of love of God.” The nine judges include World Council of Churches executive Eugene Carson Blake and Princeton seminary president James McCord.

For reasons of health, pastor Edward L. R. Elson, 65, of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington gave up his church duties last month rather than waiting until January to bow out as earlier announced. He will continue to serve as chaplain to the U. S. Senate.

World Scene

New York Times correspondent Anthony Lewis reports that early Sunday-morning masses at the Catholic cathedral in Hanoi are packed, and crowds worship in another Catholic church in the city. Authorities, however, allow no seminary, hence no new priests have been ordained in the past ten years. Meanwhile, Catholic officials denied that two French missionaries had been crucified by invading North Vietnamese troops north of Kontum, South Viet Nam.

Resorts are springing up on the site of Sodom on the shores of the Dead Sea, a development seen by some as a fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy of redemption for the infamous sin city.

The World Council of Churches’ anti-racism commission says it will press for the withdrawal of all foreign investments from South Africa as part of a stepped-up drive against apartheid.

Suburban Johannesburg authorities have arrested twenty-seven young people for “disturbing the peace” by street witnessing.

The Nationalist Chinese government refused to permit a recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan to discuss a controversial statement issued by the church last year. The statement reflected concerns of native Taiwanese displeased at domination by Chinese exiles from the mainland, and called for government reforms.

Indonesian Baptists have set a goal of one million converts by 1981; they have grown from 850 in 1960 to more than 20,000 today.

In evangelist John Haggai’s Lisbon, Portugal, campaign attended by 63,000, more than 2,500—mostly young men—professed Christ.

It may have been the altitude—one mile above sea level—or perhaps only remembrances of the old pioneer experience suggested by the “unsinkable” millionairess Molly Brown, who lived there. But whatever the cause, this year’s 184th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., meeting in Denver, Colorado, proved particularly unpredictable.

Foremost on the list of surprises was the firm decision on the part of commissioners (voting delegates) to withdraw from the ten-year-old Consultation on Church Union (COCU), which had been launched by former stated clerk of the UPUSA church Dr. Eugene Carson Blake. Withdrawal of the three-million-member denomination was expected by many observers to have the effect of ultimately defeating the COCU plan to merge the nine participating churches. The action was unexpected, since COCU’s Plan of Union was currently only under study and was not to be presented for definitive action until next year’s assembly.

Withdrawal from COCU came early in response to an overture from the Presbytery of Philadelphia. The overture had originated in Philadelphia with a group of conservative ministers and laymen known as the Geneva Forum. In its original form it had merely asked for rejection of the proposed union plan while nevertheless “continuing ecumenical conversations through the Consultation on Church Union.” In Denver this original motion was strengthened by the assembly’s Committee on Bills and Overtures so that the recommendation that reached the floor called for total withdrawal. According to spokesmen on the committee, the decision was reached despite pressure by denominational officials to reverse it. Final action passed by a vote of 411 to 310.

Several days later, a maneuver to delay the disengagement until January 1, 1973, and to permit the United Presbyterian Church to send observers to COCU even after that date was defeated. COCU committee members were given until October 31 to terminate their participation. Also defeated (365 to 333) was an earlier substitute motion to keep the denomination in COCU while nevertheless rejecting the current plan.

Reaction was predictable. Dr. James I. McCord, chairman of the UPUSA Committee on COCU and president of Princeton Seminary, called the assembly’s decision “an aberration that will have to be corrected.” He tended to blame the results on the Presbyterian Lay Committee, a conservative group within the denomination that had been laboring for a year to defeat the COCU proposal. McCord argued that the COCU committee had erred “in letting the process of study and criticism go on too long.”

Dr. Robert V. Moss, president of the United Church of Christ, which was also involved in the Consultation, expressed “deep regret” at the action. The Reverend William A. Benfield, chairman of the delegation to COCU from the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), argued that the “precipitous action” of the northern church would be interpreted as “breaking the faith” by the other denominations.

Those who supported the assembly’s action reiterated their belief that the COCU plan was obsolete and unworkable and that its defeat actually freed the church to pursue more valid and more promising ecumenical ventures.

One such venture seemed to be found in efforts to unite the northern and southern churches. The General Assembly voted to continue such efforts, which could lead to the reunion of the two major Presbyterian denominations “within five years,” according to the Reverend Robert C. Lamer, co-chairman of the joint reunion committee.

For a time it looked as if the same script would be played out on the issue of United Presbyterian participation in the Key 73 nationwide evangelistic campaign. UPUSA’s Council on Evangelism had opposed participation, but this was reversed by the assembly’s own committee. However, after extended debate, at which youth delegates spoke heartily in favor of the Key 73 proposal, a vote of 387 to 237 barred Presbyterian involvement at the denomination level. Instead the action recommended that the proposal be called to the attention of the lower judicatories of the church and to local congregations.

In an important denominational matter, the assembly also approved costly and extensive plans to restructure all the boards and agencies of the church along more modern lines and to relocate headquarters from Philadelphia to New York. This restructuring is intended to produce substantial savings in overhead and staff salaries, though no one would estimate how many of the 1,028 staff jobs would be eliminated. The move is expected to result in a voluntary loss of 20 per cent of the executive and 60 per cent of the secretarial and clerical personnel. Technically, all the current jobs are up for grabs, and there is no guarantee that any one now employed by the church will be rehired.

In further actions the assembly also:

• Adopted a statement urging that women should have “full freedom of personal choice concerning the completion or termination of their pregnancies” and that abortions should not be restricted by law.

• Called for the immediate and total withdrawal of all United States forces from Southeast Asia and asked Congress to withhold spending for support of the war effort.

• Rejected efforts to alter or eliminate the controversial Emergency Fund for Legal Aid (which came under fire last year because of a grant of $10,000 to the Angela Davis Defense Fund), while at the same time establishing a further set of guidelines and criteria for the administration of the fund.

• Adopted a report of the Standing Committee on Baptism that acknowledges the validity of both infant and believers’ baptism and permits the practice of both within the church.

• Called for extended changes in America’s criminal-justice system, substantive tax reform at all levels of government, and congressional action to prohibit “the manufacture, sale, ownership, and possession” of concealable weapons.

• Approved plans for a new monthly magazine to be known as A.D., combining and replacing the present magazines Presbyterian Life and the UCC’s United Church Herald.

On the first day of the assembly, the position of moderator—highest leadership post in the denomination—passed from Lois H. Stair to C. Willard Heckel, a professor of constitutional law at Rutgers University. In a postelection interview, Heckel justified the Angela Davis grant, expressed reservations about Key 73, and opposed the Indochina war, terming U. S. involvement “lawless … immoral … and stupid.” He won a first-ballot victory over three other candidates.

Estranged Presbyterians Aye Reunion Basis

Two small groups of Presbyterians, divided since 1939, took a significant step toward reunion last month in separate but related actions. The Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church both approved a new “Basis for Union” and instructed subcommittees to report back next year with detailed plans for a church merger. Negotiations between the two churches—which have a combined membership just over 25,000—have been under way for more than five years. The actions came at a time when many union-movement advocates in both churches had given up hope of getting together.

Reformed Presbyterians in their 150th general synod, held at Harvey Cedars, New Jersey, listened to Covenant Seminary president Robert G. Rayburn present the proposed “Basis,” then approved it overwhelmingly after moderate debate. Opponents argued chiefly that Orthodox Presbyterians had not yet shown sufficient willingness to recognize the right of a church body to speak on moral issues not explicitly forbidden by Scripture.

Approval of the same “Basis” by Orthodox Presbyterians meeting in Oostburg, Wisconsin, came from a majority of at least two-thirds.

Joint committees of the two churches will work during the coming year on such matters as merging presbyteries, control of educational institutions, publications, and realignment of missionary agencies.

At Harvey Cedars, about 200 commissioners heard reports of unprecedented evangelistic growth in local churches of the Reformed Presbyterian denomination. Elder Marion D. Barnes, president of the recently accredited Covenant College at Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, was elected moderator.

JOEL BELZ

Flunking A Religious Test

Can a Christian organization (radio station, magazine, or college, for example) hire personnel—or deny employment—on the basis of religious creed? This is the latest question that the federal government is asking, and in the first case tested the answer is no.

The Federal Communications Commission notified radio stations KGDNAM and KHIQ-FM in Edmonds, Washington, that they violated the law by requiring prospective employees to answer such questions as “Are you a Christian?” and “Is your spouse a Christian?” Trygve J. Anderson, an applicant for radio announcer, complained to the FCC that such questions “have no bearing on a person’s ability to handle a job in broadcasting.” King’s Garden, Incorporated, owner of the stations, replied that most of its programming is inspirational.

The FCC cited statutes already on the books (1964 Civil Rights Act and the rules of the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity) that prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of creed. To avoid asking questions for employment such as those King’s Garden uses, some federal personnel suggest that the employer advertise with the religious press or recruit from religious colleges.

In handing down the ruling, the FCC said that persons employed to present a particular religious philosophy over the air may be exempt from the religious discrimination code, but that this is “a very narrow exemption” and not applicable to general employees.

The Department of Labor has issued proposed new guidelines to define further the statutes the Edmonds stations violated. The new order emphasizes that it’s the employer’s obligation “to provide equal employment opportunity without regard to religion.”

GLENN D. EVERETT

Passing The Missions Buck

Unlike many of the major denominations, the 120,000-member Christian and Missionary Alliance reports its revenues have increased consistently since World War II, reaching a total of $7.6 million for worldwide missionary work last year. CMA treasurer B. S. King said that 95 per cent of the money comes through free-will offerings. The funds are used to support 191 missionary personnel and their work in forty countries.

The report was given at the annual CMA meeting, held in suburban Oakland, California, last month. The Omaha Gospel Tabernacle in Nebraska led giving with $106,500.

American Baptists: Some Dreams Come True

To conclude his speech at the sixty-fifth annual meeting of the 1.5-million-member American Baptist Convention in Denver last month, District of Columbia congressman Walter E. Fauntroy—a black Baptist clergyman who sings tenor fairly well—burst into strains of “The Impossible Dream.”

While the song was intended to underline his call for blacks and whites to work together, it was also a fitting finale to much that had transpired at the business sessions.

For years various groups in the ABC have been pursuing their own versions of the impossible dream. This year the dream came true for some. Leaders who have lobbied for denominational restructure and streamlining won their case by a wide margin. Evangelicals, feeling the ABC has been long on social action and short on evangelism, were warmed by the virtually unanimous endorsement of ABC participation in the nationwide Key 73 evangelism campaign next year—and by the election of a theologically conservative general secretary. Racial-justice forces won a resounding okay for a joint $7.5 million fund-raising venture with the predominantly black Progressive National Baptist Convention (the money will be used mostly for minority educational purposes). And mission leaders glowingly reported receipts of more than $16 million and deferred gifts of $7 million in a campaign launched in 1963 to raise $10 million for capital needs of ABC home- and foreign-mission agencies.

But for Women’s Lib advocates the dream ended in never-never land, and for anti-war enthusiasts and the resolutions committee the dream lapsed into a nightmare.

Under the terms of restructure, overwhelmingly approved (though only 1,900 of the 3,200 delegates voted in the late-night session) and due to take effect January 1, 1973, the ABC’s name will be changed to “American Baptist Churches in the U. S. A.”

The name change was only one of a number of important measures. Four major denominational program boards, until now autonomous agencies that have elected their own officers and staffers, will be brought under the direct control of a new 200-member policy-making “General Board.” Selection of the latter is designed to give the grass roots more say in denominational doings. Three of the boards will have their names, not functions, changed to reflect their status as boards of national, international, and educational ministries.

The new general secretary, dean and New Testament professor Robert C. Campbell of the American Baptist Seminary of the West at Covina, California, will have greater authority than any of his predecessors. (In perhaps the briefest acknowledgment speech in Baptist history, Campbell responded, “Thank you, I think.”)

The ABC’s presidency, a figurehead position, will be rotated among clergy and laity with equal consideration given all candidates “regardless of race or sex.” (This year’s president is pastor Gene E. Bartlett of Newton Centre, Massachusetts, formerly president of Colgate Rochester Divinity School.) An amendment intended to guarantee women 50 per cent of the General Board’s seats was defeated 2,221 to 296. A section calling for the ABC’s annual conventions to be replaced by biennial meetings survived 1,385 to 1,101, but many delegates said they wanted more—not less—fellowship, and they vowed to raise the issue again.

As predicted, the resolutions session again this year ended in a shambles for want of a quorum. And again the issue up for grabs was a lengthy controversial statement on the Indochina war. It called for “immediate” unilateral ceasefire and withdrawal by U. S. troops and congressional cut-off of war funds. Indiana pastor A. E. Lacy, with backing of the resolutions committee, introduced a shortened version of the original, but it was rejected 846 to 818. A New Jersey layman then introduced an amendment supporting President Nixon’s policies. In light of the earlier action it could conceivably have squeaked by, but the convention fell apart amid haggling and a quorum call. (It was the first major church parley following mining of North Viet Nam’s harbors and the step-up in bombing.) The opposing groups ended up sending their statements as telegrams to Nixon.

An endorsement of Key 73 and part of a statement on racism were voted upon before the fiasco took place. The Key 73 paper called for “person-to-person communication of our faith.” witness through social action, experiments in worship forms, and togetherness with other Key 73 participants. The racism measure supported quality education for all children, even if busing is necessary to achieve it.

All was quiet on the black, Spanish American, and Indian caucus fronts. (“It’s because we’ve made progress in these areas,” explained an ABC press spokesman.) Even the evangelically oriented American Baptist Fellowship took pains to avoid rocking the boat.

But also missing were last year’s throngs of young people caught up in revival, the crowded evangelism and spiritual-life seminars, the sense of spiritual jubilance and expectancy. The dream of a revived, revitalized ABC seemed a bit more possible then.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

“As the head of a large, international movement I am involved with thousands of others in a ‘conspiracy to overthrow the world.’ Each year we train tens of thousands of high school and college students from more than half of the major countries of the world in the art of revolution, and daily these ‘revolutionists’ are at work around the globe, spreading our philosophy and strengthening and broadening our influence.”

These words come not from a Communist party chairman but from Bill Bright, founder and president of the growing Campus Crusade for Christ organization. The revolution he mentions is a spiritual one, for Bright and his workers are out to evangelize the world by 1980. It is no empty vow. Crusade’s full-time staff now numbers more than 3,000, up from 250 ten years ago. And already hundreds of thousands of persons worldwide can trace their spiritual ancestry to Crusade. (Crusade grew out of a ministry Bright and his wife beamed to University of Los Angeles students in 1951 when he was a businessman-turned-seminarian. See April 12, 1968, issue, page 40.)

Crusade is no longer confined to campus. More than 100,000 laymen are trained each year in lay institutes, says Bright. These range from small interchurch groups to large denominational gatherings. Special divisions work with pastors, missionaries, blacks. American Indians, Spanish-speaking people, and military personnel.

Nor is crusade confined any longer to America. Its international staffers work in more than fifty countries. Fewer than 100 of these workers are Americans; over 400 are nationals. (Most of the national leaders were converted and recruited while they were college students here. Some are former Communists.) Many will be on hand for Crusade’s Explo 72 evangelism congress this month in Dallas.

In addition to its main multi-million-dollar headquarters at Arrowhead Springs on the slopes above San Bernardino, California, Crusade operates centers in Manila, London, Switzerland, and Mexico.

Bright and his administrators are tuned to goals, and they devise strategy accordingly, country by country. But whether it’s America or another nation and students or church members under consideration the entire operation boils down to a simple concept: train Christians to share their faith with their peers—then press for a decision, lead them into the filling of the Spirit, enroll them in follow-up, and turn then into reproducers. This, Bright believes, is the fastest way to fulfill the so-called Great Commission of Christ. It is also, he is convinced, the best hope for changing the world for the better.

Although the international aspect of Crusade’s ministry is only a few years old, impressive results are being reported. Here is a recent sampling:

South Korea. According to many South Korean leaders, their nation is in the midst of a revival greater than the famed outpouring of 1907. And Crusade is in the thick of it, led by national director Joon Gon Kim. Last August Crusade drew 10,000 persons (6,000 were high school and college-age young people) to leadership training sessions at Taejon. They witnessed personally to 42,000, and 16,000 prayed to receive Christ. The newly trained leaders went back home and passed on their training to thousands of others. In less than two months, leaders say, 180,000 were taught how to give their faith away. At Kongju Teachers College nine professors and 150 students accepted Christ. The principal at Samchuk high school led fifty of his pupils to Christ—and into the church he attends. More than 3,000 primary school teachers evangelized in homes. Kim preached to 1,600 army commanders and on another occasion to 14,000 troops, with many decisions reported. Three collegians led half their classmates in the engineering department to Christ. The accounts of conversions, changed lives, transformed homes, and revived churches are endless.

Mexico. Fifty Crusade “action groups” of college students are functioning weekly on campuses. At least 2,000 reportedly received Christ during a “campus invasion” at the 110,000-student National University in Mexico City, and nearly that many registered decisions in a similar outreach at the 65,000-student National Polytechnic University where Christian students were allowed to speak in 220 classroom meetings.

France. The Forerunners, a traveling Crusade music group, opened the way at a university in Orleans. Half of the large audience asked for follow-up interviews, and “discovery groups” were formed in all six residence halls.

Colombia. Crusade’s activists are under attack by Communists, but leaders expect to have 2,000 students in weekly meetings in Cali soon.

Brazil. During a leadership institute workers practiced their new methodology on campuses and beaches and from door-to-door, and reported that half of those they spoke with made decisions.

Indonesia. In a high school class on religion in Djakarta, a Crusade-trained student wielded his “Four Spiritual Laws” booklet (it’s in dozens of languages) and all 112 of his classmates said they wanted to accept Christ.

Pakistan. Leader Kundan Massey says there is “tremendous fruit” just now among Moslems and Hindus (workers make them renounce other gods), and that many educated persons are turning to Christ. The liberal-oriented West Pakistan Christian Council representing more than 500 churches has asked him to conduct schools of evangelism for all its pastors, and these are under way. An Anglican priest led his congregation through the Four Laws at a Sunday worship service and dozens of members walked forward to pray to receive Christ. Similar happenings—and accounts of personal renewal—were reported by other clergymen.

Our Man In Moscow

Although protocol kept Soviet Baptist leaders from inviting President Nixon directly to visit their church in Moscow sometime during his week-long stay in the capital, they did ask press personnel to relay their hopes that he would. They also got ready—just in case.

Workmen were making repairs on the outside of the church when this reporter saw it the day after Nixon’s arrival in the Soviet Union. The inside also was being spruced up with paint, and a woman was polishing the ornate wooden pulpit.

The church, which is in the same building as the offices of the Soviet Evangelical Baptist Union, is located more than a mile from the Kremlin, where Nixon and his wife stayed while in Moscow. It schedules three services each Sunday (most are packed) plus evening services on Tuesday and Saturday.

The distinguished-looking white-haired president of Soviet Protestantism, the Reverend Ilia Ivanov, uttered an eloquently expressed hope for God’s blessing upon the summit conference to the end that it might foster world peace. He said he and his colleagues were praying that the talks would be fruitful.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Finland. New staffer Lassi Kontula, a divinity student, says there are more young Christians in his land than ever—“and they are more active than ever before.” There has been opposition from Communists, but 150 Crusade action groups continue to hold forth on every campus in Helsinki.

To complement the ministry abroad, Crusade three years ago launched a ministry to reach the 150,000 international students in this country. “These are the cream of the crop, the future leaders of their countries,” explained Massey. “Yet 80 per cent return to their lands without hearing the Gospel here.” Indeed, until now more of them have probably returned as Communists than as Christians, say many observers.

About fifty Crusade staffers have enlisted so far to work with international students. Meanwhile, Crusade’s lay contacts are being urged to open their homes to touring internationals. Bright and other leaders are convinced that nationals must bear the prime responsibility for reaching their respective nations with the Gospel.

Amid the blessings are some headaches too. Crusade’s current budget is about $2 million. An administrative aide says that must be hiked next year to $5 million in order to keep abreast of goals—and to $200 million by 1980. So far staffers have had to raise their own support (ranging from $285 monthly for a single rookie to about $950 for a veteran with four children, with housing and auto allowances extra), but the Arrowhead Springs property still carries a hefty mortgage, there is plenty of overhead, and the foreign work must be staked until it is self-supporting (Australia and Canada have reached that status; Korea is nearing it). Yet Bright believes God will continue to supply all needs.

Some staffers grouse about the tight regimen imposed by headquarters, but Bright insists it will take discipline to do the job right.

There are detractors too. Liberal critics complain that Crusade’s message is too narrow and its methods too rash. Some cite a lack of social consciousness. And several theologians say more theological content is needed. But, backers defend, who else is doing as effective a job? They say the average Crusade staffer is a sharp, socially-aware student of Scripture who believes that evangelism must precede any lasting social impact. And as for aggressively sharing the faith, he is only carrying out a task given him by Christ—a task that will last at least until 1980.

British Seek A Total Strategy

A week-long strategy-for-evangelism conference held in the English coastal town of Morecambe acknowledged that Britain is no longer a “Christian country” but a mission field.

Conference chairman John Stott, Anglican rector and a chaplain to the queen, entoned to the 2,000 delegates: “We want to begin the conference on a note of penitence for our share of responsibility in the country’s spiritual and moral decline, and of humility that the problem of evangelizing Britain is far beyond our meager resources.” Speaking on “the irreducible minimum of the Gospel,” seminary head Michael Green, a well-known author, charged that evangelicals had introduced a new religious language not demanded by the Bible in the realm of salvation.

Bishop David Sheppard, who succeeded the radical John Robinson at Woolwich, warned that, while caring for the casualties of our society, evangelicals must not neglect the society that produced those casualties.

Conspicuous for plain speaking, the conference—sponsored by the Evangelical Alliance and the Church of England Evangelical Council—considered drugs, work among immigrants, the industrial scene, and offered training courses for witness in specialized areas.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Reconsidering Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard’s Thought, by Gregor Malantschuk (Princeton, 1971, 388 pp., $12.50), Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, by Louis Mackey (University of Pennsylvania, 1971, 327 pp., $12.50), Kierkegaard and Consciousness, by Adi Shmuëli (Princeton, 1971, 202 pp., $8.50), and The Problematic Self in Kierkegaard and Freud, by J. Preston Cole (Yale, 1971, 244 pp., $7.50), are reviewed by Donald W. Dayton, assistant professor of bibliography and research, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

Sören Kierkegaard has suffered much at the hands of evangelicals. The usual evangelical caricature, as found for example in the writings of Francis Schaeffer, views him as the “father of existentialism” and thereby to be blamed for much that is wrong-headed today in both theology and philosophy. Fortunately within the last decade cracks have begun to appear in the solid wall of evangelical repudiation of Denmark’s greatest son. And irony of ironies, one may now well argue that Kierkegaard shares the basic commitments of evangelicals.

The major charge against Kierkegaard among evangelicals is that he advocated an irrational “leap of faith” that leaves no objective content to be believed. Those making such a charge reveal only that they have not read Kierkegaard, especially the now readily available paperback On Authority and Revelation, the most important part of which has also been published as “Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle.” Fortunately for Kierkegaard’s reputation among evangelicals, E. J. Carnell of Fuller Seminary lived long enough to declare in his last book (The Burden of Sören Kierkegaard): Let it be asserted for all to hear that Kierkegaard did not separate himself from the traditional orthodox claim that the data of Christianity are objective in the sense of existing “out there.” And Canadian evangelical Kenneth Hamilton attacks head-on the usual interpretation of Kierkegaard’s place in the history of Western thought by claiming (perhaps a little too brashly) that “any paternity suit brought against him now for fathering existentialism would be likely to be promptly dismissed” (The Promise of Kierkegaard).

Indeed, as we have already suggested, Kierkegaard seems to share the concerns of evangelicals. Consider, for example, his attitude toward the Bible. In common with most evangelicals, Kierkegaard was passionately committed to devotional reading of the Bible and very leery of the critics. That he moreover held a high view of Scripture was ably argued at the 1965 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society by Vernon Grounds, president of Conservative Baptist Seminary—though he was admittedly not able to wring the word “inerrancy” out of the Kierkegaard corpus. In a neglected “Princeton Pamphlet,” Paul S. Minear and Paul S. Morimoto predict that “coming generations will increasingly reckon with him not so much as a philosopher, as a poet, as a theologian, or as a rebel against Christendom, but as an expositor of Scripture” (Kierkegaard and the Bible). Sure, he was sometimes wrong; but so are evangelicals. More often he was right and profoundly illuminating. Evangelicals should be delighted to do half as well.

Other common concerns can be adduced. In Kierkegaard’s own words, “The whole of my work as an author is related to Christianity, to the problem of ‘becoming a Christian’” (The Point of View For My Work as an Author). E. J. Carnell and Vernon Grounds have both endorsed the verdict of Denzil Patrick: “He was an evangelist rather than a theologian. There can be no question about his own adherence to the orthodox Christian Faith of the ecumenical creeds. But he sought to speak to the needs of his time rather than to give a timeless exposition of the faith” (Pascal and Kierkegaard). My own experience confirms this. I have known several persons converted through reading Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard’s attack on the church of his day was aimed at shaking it loose from its self-satisfied smugness, and was no more vitriolic than some of the attacks launched by evangelicals against the established church of our day. And recently Vernard Eller has argued (in Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship) that Kierkegaard’s view of Christianity was much like that of the more radical or “anabaptist” church traditions that have had such an important role in shaping evangelicalism.

One may even argue that evangelicals share the excesses of Kierkegaard, such as his individualism and his tendency toward “fideism.” To a great extent Kierkegaard was merely a highly sophisticated pietist. This is recognized by George Price (The Narrow Pass): “His abnormal religious experiences … are common in protestantism—and in many of its sects are actually demanded as the signs of a genuine religious experience. This was especially true of the pietistic movements of his time.” Nearly every one of Kierkegaard’s strictures against historical and rational arguments for faith is paralleled in John Wesley, who was also profoundly influenced by the same forms of Continental pietism.

The appearance of four “Ivy league” university press books about Kierkegaard in a single season testifies to the continuing impact on the American scene of Denmark’s profoundest thinker. Evangelicals would do well to ride this wave and not deprive themselves of a most powerful ally. Unfortunately, these four works—two general introductions and two specialized studies—will be of only mixed value for the evangelical task. But they will contribute to a better understanding of Kierkegaard in general and at the same time show the need for evangelicals to take the initiative in unfolding the Christian character of Kierkegaard’s works.

The most valuable is that by Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard Research Fellow at the University of Copenhagen. The translators, Howard and Edna Hong, earlier won the National Book Award in translation for Sören Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. When Malantschuk’s volume first appeared in Danish in 1968, reviewers insisted that it be immediately translated into a world language. The translators go so far as to call it “the best work currently available on Kierkegaard in any language.”

One can only concur in that judgment. Malantschuk’s work is obviously the product of a lifetime spent with Kierkegaard. Its greatest strength is the way in which Kierkegaard is allowed to interpret Kierkegaard. However, the emphasis on discovering the coherence in Kierkegaard’s thought results in a rather “philosophical” reading of an essentially “religious” (to be carefully distinguished from “theological”) writer.

Louis Mackey, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, provides some clues to why Kierkegaard has been consistently misunderstood. Mackey argues that he is primarily a poet: “whatever philosophy or theology there is in Kierkegaard is sacramentally transmitted ‘in, with, and under’ the poetry.” Mackey therefore applies techniques of literary criticism, rather than theological or philosophical criticism, to key works in the corpus of Kierkegaard. The resulting interpretation is better than most. The method is helpful if kept under control, though it borders on the same error as viewing the Bible primarily as literature.

Adi Shmuëli’s book presents an interesting anomaly: an Israeli professor of philosophy who has a firmer grasp of the Christian character of Kierkegaard’s writings than most Christians. According to Shmuëli, Kierkegaard’s aim is to create “Christian awareness” in his readers, or better, to unfold to them a Christianity that “reveals to man what is truly in him—that he is fallen, a sinner; and it bids him to be born again in faith.” But these concerns are peripheral to Shmuëli’s main intention: to describe Kierkegaard’s understanding of “consciousness,” and this very much from the milieu of French existentialism and phenomenology (the book was originally a French University dissertation). The editor himself, Yale Kierkegaardian scholar Paul Holmer, finds the argument unconvincing but provocative. At the very least it does serve to remind us that Kierkegaard’s primary interest was in the analysis and development of Christian experience.

J. Preston Cole’s book is the least valuable of the four. Cole, dean of Kendall College, compares Freud and Kierkegaard on the “self” and suggests that a viable conception might emerge from the dialectical tension of their essentially complementary conceptions. His argument depends upon such claims as, “For both, the essence of man is Spirit,” and that Kierkegaard can correct Freud by providing a historical rather than naturalistic ontology for the analysis of human existence. Cole is actually more interested in the “remnants of philosophical idealism” to be found in Kierkegaard than in any of the distinctively Christian elements.

For Devout Novices

Biblical Theology, Volume One: Old Testament, by Chester K. Lehman (Herald, 1971, 480 pp., $15.95), is reviewed by Ronald Youngblood, professor of Old Testament, Bethel Theological Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Lehman’s synthesis of Old Testament theology, the fruit of a teaching career at Eastern Mennonite Seminary that spanned almost half a century, has much to commend it. The author cheerfully and gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to Geerhardus Vos, a recognized evangelical giant in the field. The arrangement of the volume is attractive, though its attempt at interweaving logical and chronological treatment of biblical themes makes for somewhat disjointed reading in the chapters on the prophets. Lehman’s recognition of the principle of double/multiple fulfillment of prophecy as a working hypothesis in prophetic interpretation is to be a welcome feature. And his admission of pictorial and symbolic elements in the Genesis creation account and of dramatic touches in the story of Job, without denying the historical reality of either narrative, is refreshing.

Other aspects of the book, however, do not so readily attract compliments. For example, how can anyone write an Old Testament theology in our day without using recent insights of ancient Near Eastern studies (languages, texts, archaeology, covenant formularies, form-critical approaches, and the like)? Also, Lehman tends to be inconsistent in certain areas. On the one hand he assumes without further ado that David was the author of numerous psalms, Solomon of Proverbs, and Jeremiah of Lamentations, while on the other hand he affirms, with a minimum of explanation, the existence of the J and P writers in the Pentateuch as well as a late date for Isaiah 40–66. The purist will shudder at the inconsistency of Lehman’s transcription of Hebrew (e.g., qodesh, p. 139; kodhesh, p. 149). Lapses of this kind make it evident that he is less at home in technical Old Testament disciplines than in the broad range of theological studies. And even his discussions of theological themes are far too often little more than a rephrasing of the biblical text.

Yet this “fault” may also encompass the chief strength of the book. Lehman’s staunch Christian faith and warmhearted love for Scripture are everywhere apparent in his writing, and what he says will be most useful to the devout novice who wants to know what the Old Testament has to say about a particular theological theme. The footnotes arc full of biblical references for further study. Regrettably, the publisher has placed the footnotes at the end of each chapter, giving the diligent reader the feeling that he is watching a tennis match.

The Four Visions

A Commentary on the Revelation, by George E. Ladd (Eerdmans, 1972, 308 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Robert Guelich, associate professor of New Testament, Bethel Theological Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Professor George Ladd of Fuller Theological Seminary is known to the evangelical community through his previous writings in eschatology. He has behind him years of study in the prophetic and apocalyptic backgrounds of the New Testament message of fulfillment in Jesus, and it is most appropriate for him to write a commentary on Revelation, which involves both prophetic and apocalyptic elements.

Ladd’s exposition of Revelation does not fall into any of the traditional categories. On the one hand he rejects the historically and apocalyptically oriented preterist position for ignoring the prophetic element. On the other hand he also rejects the futurist position for failing to take history seriously, as did both the prophets and apocalyptists who saw “imminent historical judgment” as a “type of, or prelude to, the eschatological judgment.” The solution lies in a blending of the two positions. Ladd does take a premillennial stance. Yet he sees the millennium and the whole book of Revelation referring chiefly to the “destiny of the Church” rather than to God’s “theocratic promises to Israel.” Consequently, this commentary offers a fresh and distinctive approach to the Apocalypse.

Ladd’s basic structure is the four visions at the heart of the Apocalypse. The first vision (1:9–3:22) involves the message to the seven churches. Comments on topography, conditions, and local color suggest their historical character, but the context shows that their message was intended for a wider audience than a particular local church. The second and longest vision is composed of three sets of sevens with various interludes. According to Ladd, the sevens are telescoped so that the seven bowls (chs. 15 and 16), which relate the outpouring of God’s wrath in the great tribulation, are included in the seventh trumpet. The seven trumpets (8:2–14:2), which related the beginning of the end events, are themselves the content of the seventh seal. The seven seals (6:1–8:1) in turn have related the forces leading up to the end, namely, the content of the scroll (5:1 ff). The interludes (ch. 7; 10:1–11:13, chs. 12–14) are but close-ups of elements in the panoramic vision. The third vision pertains to the mystery and judgment of Babylon (17–19:5) and to the triumphant consummation that begins with the resurrection of the saints at the parousia and concludes with the new creation following the millennial reign of Christ on earth (19:6–21:8). The final vision is that of the heavenly Jerusalem come to earth (21:9–22:5).

The variegated and often moot symbols of Revelation leave their interpreters, Ladd included, especially vulnerable to those of a differing persuasion. No doubt some will take issue with Ladd’s interpretation of the first seal as the proclamation of the Gospel, of the 144,000 as spiritual Israel, i.e., the Church, and of the measuring of the Temple and the two witnesses as the salvation of the Jewish remnant and the two eschatological prophets who witness to them. Yet, as usual. Ladd has carefully and exegetically laid the bases for his views. Some will be disappointed by his refusal to identify such familiar symbols as Armageddon, 666, Babylon, and Gog and Magog. Yet fanciful speculation would be incongruent with his exposition. Ladd has gone as far as the text in its context will allow.

Ladd has an amazing ability to explain simply and clearly something that is complex and opaque. He writes on the mysterious and complex Apocalypse lucidly, thoroughly, and very readably. He transliterates the rarely occurring Greek words. He interacts with other viewpoints sensitively and fairly, he avoids the very technical debates. This commentary comes as a very valuable interpretative aid to layman, pastor, and scholar alike.

Newly Published

A Coward’s Guide to Witnessing, by Ken Anderson (Creation House, 157 pp., $3.95). An outstanding book. The well-known evangelical writer and film-maker shares his frustration, fears, and modest achievements over the years in personal evangelism. Too many books on witnessing lead to dejection because what the author triumphantly reports seems regrettably alien to the average Christian’s personality and accomplishments. Anderson’s book is as different as the title suggests.

Jesus Confronts Life’s Issues, by Joseph D. Ban (Judson, 128 pp., $1.95 pb). Useful and discussion-provoking thoughts about a dozen incidents in Jesus’ life (e.g., temptation, breaking with tradition, payment of taxes) and their relation to similar issues we all face today.

Jesus and the Old Testament, by R. T. France (Inter-Varsity, 286 pp., $9.95). A revised Ph.D. thesis studying Jesus’ application of Old Testament passages to himself and his mission. A major contribution.

America’s Fastest Growing Churches, by Elmer L. Towns (Impact [1625 Broadway, Nashville, Tenn. 37202], 223 pp., $4.95). An admittedly uncritical report on ten congregations (eight of them with the Baptist Bible Fellowship) with average Sunday-school attendance (except for one that is smaller and younger) of 830 in 1967 and 2,080 in 1971. Also includes some good reflections distinguishing these self-designated fundamentalist congregations with their authoritarian pastors from other evangelicals.

An Evangelical Faith for Today, by John Lawson (Abingdon, 95 pp., $1.75 pb). A discussion guide that brings central Christian doctrines back into focus—e.g., the doctrine of God, Christ, the Atonement, the Second Coming—and attempts to make them intelligible rather than to demythologize them; not altogether sharp on all points (e.g., the doctrine of Scripture).

Labor Problems in Christian Perspective, edited by John H. Redekop (Eerdmans, 364 pp., $6.95). A useful if uneven collection of articles giving widely differing views ranging from the Christian legitimacy of laissez-faire capitalism to a kind of Christian socialism.

Suicide and Grief, by Howard W. Stone (Fortress, 134 pp., $3.50 pb). If understanding fails to prevent suicide, the minister may find this book helpful in dealing with the survivors.

Marquee Ministry, by Robert G. Konzelman (Harper & Row, 123 pp., $4.95). Advice to pastors: encourage your congregation to attend films, and use them as sermon texts. The author also explains how to use movies for discussions; his examples: Cromwell, The Learning Tree, and I Never Sang For My Father. Films are an important aspect of our culture and shouldn’t be ignored. But the emphasis here is a bit too strong.

The Eternal Feminine, by Henri de Lubac (Harper & Row, 272 pp., $6.95). Examines an obscure element in Teilhard’s early writing and seeks to show that his cosmic, mystic vision involves a unique understanding of the feminine.

The Freedom of Man, by T. Paul Verghese (Westminster, 157 pp., $6.95). A stimulating and provocative essay on the nature of man and of freedom by a former WCC staffer, an Eastern Orthodox priest. Verghese combines many valuable insights, many of them gleaned from the early church fathers, with occasional simplistic platitudes derived from liberalism.

Not A Silent People: Controversies That Have Shaped Southern Baptists, by Walter B. Shurden (Broadman, 128 pp., $1.95). A breezy, fairly accurate glance at six of the many controversies in Southern Baptist history. Perhaps does not distinguish clearly enough between controversies over method and those over the message. Definitely errs by implying that Baptists have more controversies than other denominational families.

God’s Will For Your Life, edited by Gary Meader (First Presbyterian Church [1760 N. Gower St., Hollywood, Cal. 90028], 81 pp., $1.50 [$1 each in lots of 25], pb). Study guide for new Christians; excellent, as far as it goes. No Presbyterian bias. Sticks to certain practical topics, such as guidance, prayer, baptism of the Spirit, the state, and drugs. Avoids others, such as water baptism.

The Wilderness Revolt, by Diane Kennedy Pike and R. Scott Kennedy (Doubleday, 385 pp., $7.95). Building on the fanciful speculations of the late and eccentric Bishop James A. Pike, his widow and her brother resurrect the Reimarus-Brandon thesis that Jesus was a frustrated political revolutionary, without, however, entirely discounting a possible supernatural element in his ministry. The resurrection is explained away, then brought in again by a back door. Detailed but unreliable.

Jesus and the Politics of Violence, by George R. Edwards (Harper & Row, 186 pp., $5.95). A scholarly reopening of the Brandon thesis (that Jesus was a political revolutionary) that comes to contrary conclusions and goes on to reject Christian support for the state in favor of non-violent social change. Relies heavily on liberal New Testament scholarship.

The Roman Siege of Jerusalem, by Rupert Furneaux (McKay, 274 pp., $6.95). Another in the rash of books asserting that Jesus was a political rebel and that the gospel writers and Paul misrepresented his intentions. The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 provides the focus.

The Message of Liberation in Our Age, by J. Verkuyl (Eerdmans, 110 pp., $2.45 pb). A study written by a missions professor at the Free University of Amsterdam for the upcoming assembly of the World Council’s Commission on Mission and Evangelism seeks to interpret the mission of Christ in terms of the key words liberation and emancipation. Evasive.

The Pseudonyms of God, by Robert McAfee Brown (Westminster, 234 pp., $3.25 pb). Slightly dated occasional essays demonstrating the author’s passionate involvement with some current ethical problems, such as the draft, civil rights, and civil disobedience. Lacking in biblical perspective. The “Open Letter to Spiro T. Agnew” is of questionable taste.

Christian Prisoners in Russia, by Rosemary Harris and Xenia Howard-Johnston (Tyndale House, 166 pp., $1.25 pb). Open letters, similar to that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from Russian Christians to their leaders.

Campus Aflame, by J. Edwin Orr (Regal, 277 pp., $2.95 pb). A documented chronicle of student evangelical awakenings and movements, mostly American, since about 1800. The more recent ones are chiefly in evangelical colleges. Shows that the current “Jesus movement” is hardly unprecedented; one hopes it proves to be less short-lived than some earlier youth stirrings.

Where Do I Go From Here, God?, by Zac Poonen (Tyndale, 86 pp., $.95 pb). A fairly good contemporary treatment of the principles of discerning God’s will for one’s life, using the customary guidelines. More realistic than some counterparts, yet not quite adequate for explaining the great failures of even well-meaning Christians.

Renew My Church, by David Haney (Zondervan, 95 pp., $1.50 pb). A brief study guide emphasizing a reexamination of one’s own beliefs, attitudes, and behavior patterns with a view toward legitimate and genuine church renewal.

From Luther to Chemnitz, by E. F. Klug (Eerdmans, 261 pp., $4.95 pb). A thoroughly documented attempt to set straight many misconceptions of Luther’s doctrine of inspiration and to introduce the views of one of Luther’s most influential successors.

Half-Truths or Whole Gospel?, by Chester A. Pennington (Abingdon, 127 pp., $2.25). A thoughtful attempt to bridge the gap between salvationists and social activists, without surrendering either the unique spiritual claims or the socially transforming ethics of Jesus Christ.

Death, Heaven and the Victorians, by John Morley (University of Pittsburgh, 208 pp., $12.95). A well-illustrated and well-documented study of an aspect of nineteenth-century English behavior that is usually, but regrettably, left to anthropologists studying “primitives.” Useful for reflecting on how present funeral practices exemplify Christian doctrine.

The God Who Understands Me, by Gladys M. Hunt (Harold Shaw, 87 pp., $1.25 pb). Fifteen group Bible studies on the Sermon on the Mount.

Ethics and the Urban Ethos: An Essay in Social Theory and Theological Reconstruction, by Max L. Stackhouse (Beacon, 220 pp., $7.95). In a kind of in-depth follow-up to Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, Stackhouse does not give us a clearly more biblical approach to its problems, but, as a pupil of James Luther Adams, he is thorough, imaginative, and fair.

Your Marriage—Duel or Duet?, by Louis H. Evans (Revell, 125 pp., $.95 pb). Since it was originally published a decade ago, this inexpensive reprint does not interact with women’s lib. But Evans does make good points for maintaining the institution of marriage, and even for making it an “enjoyable partnership.” Helpful biblical and practical advice.

Americans Speak Out on This Nation’s Top Ten Problems, by Charles E. Blair (Moody, 119 pp., $2.95). The pastor of the huge Calvary Temple, Denver, reflects on the issues he found to be troubling his fellow citizens most.

When Love Is Lost, by Donald J. Tyrell (Word, 155 pp., $4.95). For amateur counselors, pastors, or those just interested in personality development, this volume can serve as a basic, simple-to-read introduction.

Christianity and Its Cultural Bondage, by M. B. Martin (Herder of St. Louis [314 N. Jefferson, St. Louis, Mo. 63103], 232 pp., about $4.50). A Catholic author attacks the cultural bondage of Christian theology to Hellenistic views of the natural immortality of the soul and calls for a greater emphasis on the resurrection of the body. Overstates the extent of the bondage but contains many valuable insights.

Psychology For Successful Evangelism, by James H. Jauncey (Moody, 126 pp., $3.95). Not on evangelistic techniques and not a comprehensive text. A pastor simply shares his attempts to apply some modern psychology to the practice of historic, Spirit-empowered evangelism.

Understanding People: Children, Youth, Adults, by Omar Brubaker and Robert Clark (Evangelical Teacher Training Association [Box 327, Wheaton, Ill. 60187], 95 pp., $1.75 pb). Intended as the text for a new required course for an ETTA diploma, but can be used for private study.

Noah’s Ark: Fact or Fable?, by Violet M. Cummings (Creation-Science Research Center [2716 Madison Ave., San Diego, Cal. 92116], 352 pp., $5.95, $3.95 pb). Those who are passionately engaged in a quest are hardly the most impartial witnesses, so don’t suspend your critical faculties if you are tempted to read this account. When, if ever, an ancient ship or barge is undeniably found, we will let you know.

The Opposite Sex, by Irene and Allen Harrell (Word, 135 pp., $3.50). Down-to-earth prayers of a husband and wife; they raise some practical questions on everyday problems that even the best marriages encounter.

Speak Through the Earthquake, by Elihu S. Howland (Pilgrim, 125 pp., $4.95). A psychiatrist who is also on a congregation’s counseling staff attempts a theology of emotional crisis that has not yet reached the “breakdown” stage and discusses various ways to help. Of value to pastors, especially since he dissents from the notion common to his profession that ministers are to be very junior partners in therapy.

To Turn The Tide

The Anchor Bible: Matthew, by W. F. Albright and C. S. Mann (Doubleday, 1971, 564 pp., $8), is reviewed by Robert H. Gundry, professor of New Testament and Greek, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

By appeal to recent studies of Samaritanism and of the literature from Qumran and Chenoboskion, Albright and Mann attempt to turn back the tide of Germanically dominated studies of the Gospels, particularly Matthew. Agreement with the milieu in Palestine before A.D. 70 becomes the main criterion of and (in view of the breakup of Palestinian Jewish Christianity around A.D. 70) argument for authenticity. Oral tradition replaces any sort of documentary solution to the synoptic problem (though A & M rarely mention, much less dispose of, specific evidence favoring Marcan priority). Matthew the Levite captures nomination to authorship. Historicity gains high marks in their estimation.

Yet the supernatural causes embarrassment. Some of the miracles originally were parables, others symbolic dramatizations, still others psychosomatic healings. Exorcisms pass for shock therapy. Predictions stemmed from natural foresight. The transfiguration is a dramatically theologized description of the disciples’ thinking about Jesus’ Messiahship. The Parousia becomes Jesus’ coming to the Father via crucifixion and resurrection. Therefore the warnings to watch for the Parousia mean, “Don’t miss the significance of My crucifixion-resurrection.”

Naturally, elimination of a documentary solution to the synoptic problem drastically reduces the viability of redactional criticism: for A & M, theological variety derives, not from redaction by an evangelist, but from independent developments of an oral tradition largely unavailable to our scrutiny.

As to individual points of interpretation, the kingdom of the (Son of) Man/heaven, which is the Church, is distinguished sharply from the kingdom of God, which is the final state. The distinction depends on tortuous explanations of particular sayings and on quiet omission and stated excision from Matthew’s original text of sayings awkward to the distinction. In other matters, too, A & M display a penchant for conjectural emendation of the text. Historical conjecture appears in the rather confident opinion that not only John the Baptist but also Jesus himself belonged to the community of Essenes at Qumran—why else did the townspeople of Nazareth ask, “Is not this the carpenter …?,” as though they failed to recognize him immediately because he had not lived there for some time?

It is well argued that “hypocrite” means “casuist” rather than “pretender.” And an insightful suggestion is made that parables were prophetic case laws. The continuity of Jesus’ community with Israel appears to be overstressed and underqualified. All in all, this welcome commentary nearly always stimulates and, on distinctive points, occasionally convinces.