Page 5539 – Christianity Today (2024)

The unprecedented unity of 237 Protestant churches that participated in the Singapore Billy Graham Crusade in December 1978 has now resulted in the formation of the Evangelical Fellowship of Singapore (EFOS). EFOS shows an apparent decline of the strong liberal influence of the 1950s and 1960s in this island republic, as well as significant progress made by evangelicals since the mid-1970s.

“Things were still pretty bad even in the early 1970s,” said Benjamin Chew, honorary chairman of both the Graham Crusade and EFOS. “Then we had a steady evangelical shift.”

Chew attributed the shift to sound evangelical teaching and the work of parachurch organizations, especially in the University of Singapore. More than 10 young evangelicals who became pastors during the last decade were converted at the university level. Another factor was the renewal movement of the 1970s. “We had men like Bishop Doraisamy,” said Chew, “who shifted from a semiliberal to a dedicated evangelical position.”

Two congresses on evangelism in 1978 gave additional impetus to evangelical fevor. “The Graham Crusade was really the peak,” Chew said. “I definitely see a greater evangelical influence in Singapore in the ’80s.”

Earlier this year, a front-page report in the secular newspaper highlighted the appointment of two laymen active in evangelical churches to cabinet positions in the government. They were Minister of Foreign Affairs S. Dhanabalan, a Brethren church elder, and Minister of Education Tony Tan, an Anglican.

EFOS drew its 29 Central Council members from 14 denominations. Of these, 13 also participated on the executive committee of the Graham crusade. This is natural since EFOS was first discussed at length by the crusade committee. Especially significant is the inclusion of a Bible Presbyterian church leader, since this fundamentalist group (with 20 churches in Singapore) actively opposed the Graham Crusade.

A month after EFOS launched its recruitment drive, 15 churches and seven parachurch organizations joined the fellowship. Administrator Liew Kee Kok (who was crusade manager) said it is still too early to accurately gauge response. “Most churches say they need to discuss membership implications before giving an answer.”

Thus far, the only objections to the formation of EFOS have come from representatives of the National Council of Churches of Singapore. They said EFOS is redundant since the NCCS already functions as a national church body. NCCS, which has its roots in the defunct Malayan Christian Council formed in 1948, now draws its membership from six denominations. Two of them, the Mar Thoma Church and Syrian Orthodox Church, have only one congregation each.

Most evangelical churches, however, declined joining the NCCS because of its ties with the World Council of Churches. In a recent interview, NCCS general secretary James Wong objected to the liberal tag. “Singapore has changed so much in its religious scene over the last 20 years,” Wong said. “For people to harp over what happened in the ’40s and ’50s, they must believe that history is linear and not progressive. This to me shows the small-mindedness of Christian leaders. But the NCCS leadership has changed radically.” He said the NCCS debated the issue of WCC ties in early 1970 and had decided not to be a WCC member. Since then, Wong said, “we send them no donations and receive no funds from them, and do not support any of their projects.”

This assurance, however, ran contrary to the minutes of an NCCS general committee meeting held on August 16, 1979, which stated: “The honorary treasurer reported that the NCCS received a check for $1,112 from the WCC in aid of Program of Projects. The money was given for administrative purposes.”

Wong, one of four EFOS vice-chairmen, nonetheless hopes that NCCS and EFOS will complement each other. So far, there has been no tangible evidence of such relationship.

Commenting on the radical change in NCCS leadership, a member of the EFOS Central Council, Alfred Yeo, said “The evangelical witness in the NCCS is not always guaranteed.” This is because representatives appointed to the NCCS council serve a four-year-term, and office holders are elected annually.

Yeo then charged that the NCCS is supposed to represent the Chinese and English churches, “but in practice, all the activities so far are in English.” Anticipating such a weakness, EFOS appointed Kao Keng Tai as its associate general secretary. Kao is expected to act as liaison between English-speaking and Chinese-speaking churches. He has for the last seven years served as secretary of the executive council of the Union of the Chinese-speaking Christian Churches of Singapore. Its current membership stands at 53 Chinese-speaking churches and parachurch organizations out of about 120 Chinese churches and organizations in Singapore.

EFOS intends, moreover, to avoid a structural weakness of NCCS. While NCCS is meant only for denominations, EFOS membership is open to all local churches, parachurch organizations, and individuals who subscribe to its statement of faith and constitution. The NCCS does not have a statement of faith, Chew said.

Beyond this tension between liberals and evangelicals lies the more crucial matter of the EFOS mandate. Lawyer William Wan, general secretary of EFOS, said EFOS “ought to be a representative voice, not only nationally but internationally.” While saying EFOS should stay out of politics, he stressed, members must be “bold and courageous enough to address ourselves to the government if it infringes upon Christian principles.” He stated the need to study social issues and present the government with a united, credible Christian platform. Late last year, the government invited views on its proposed amendments to the divorce law contained in the women’s charter bill, including divorce by consent. It appears that the government decided not to proceed with legalizing divorce by consent because of several written statements against it by evangelical bodies such as the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship.

On the international level, Wan said EFOS should be an information resource center for more accurate dissemination of news on Singapore to other countries. In addition, he said, “Our movement should be in fellowship with the World Evangelical Fellowship and have more direct links with other national fellowships in our region.” Such links will help Singaporeans “understand problems affecting Asian churches because we are part of Asia, and keep us informed of developments in the West.”

A graduate of Regent College, Vancouver, Wan said he would explore the possibility of setting up a theological commission. “Our concern,” he said, “is to have national theologians coming together from different denominations, different types of schools, to study pressing theological problems.” For starters, he wanted to examine the charismatic movement.

Finally, Wan stressed that EFOS is a coordinating body that will work toward evangelical cooperation among churches and parachurch organizations. “We can play the mediating role, defusing hard feelings and misunderstanding,” he said.

Wan confessed that such objectives are “ambitious.” “But since we represent a national group of evangelicals,” he said, “we have the resources and, we hope, the finances to carry them out.”

Israel

West Bank Relief: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Israel’s West Bank military authorities are blocking some of the welfare and development projects of religious and charitable organizations working with Palestinians there. Reporter David K. Shipler observes that the authorities tend to approve projects for towns that are submissive to occupation and to disapprove them for towns with pro-PLO leanings. Also, he notes, social welfare programs get the nod, while those aimed at raising the level of economic productivity or producing highly skilled workers are vetoed.

Aid agencies are caught in a bind: they must cooperate with the authorities to operate on the West Bank, but if they appear to be adjuncts of Israeli authority they lose credibility with the Palestinians they seek to help. Protestant agencies involved include the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the American Friends Service Committee, the Lutheran World Federation, and the Middle East Council of Churches.

The latest casualty of the tension is MCC worker Paul K. Quiring and his family. They left Israel in September after being denied permission to work there; they earlier had served a four-year term on the West Bank. Quiring evidently displeased the authorities by making a carefully researched statement before a U.S. congressional committee describing the encroachment of Jewish settlements on Palestinian farmland and water supplies.

Ghana

What Next? White Bibles on the Black Market

Bibles for promised brides are a hot item in Ghana, whose economy has long been a shambles. Many distributors are making illegal profits by selling the popular engagement gift for the exorbitant price of $90 (at the official exchange rate for the grossly overvalued Ghanaian cedi).

The public has turned bitter over the soaring cost of Bibles and has started pointing an accusing finger—probably unfairly—at the Bible Society of Ghana.

Maxwell Dzunu, general secretary of the Bible society, acknowledged in an interview that Scripture supplies are scarce. Dzunu explained that for the last four years the society has been prohibited from transferring funds to overseas printing facilities and therefore has not received fresh stocks of Scriptures.

(During his first year in office, Ghanaian President Hilla Limann is widely credited for imposing austere economic measures that conserved enough foreign exchange to pay the nation’s short-term debts. His management teams shaped up major enterprises that grew inefficient and corrupt during years of military rule. Still, his efforts have been undercut by the decline in world prices for cocoa—the main prop of Ghana’s economy. Ghanians thus have yet to experience relief from bare store shelves and an inflation rate exceeding 50 percent a year.)

Dzunu deplored the attitudes of distributors who exploit the Ghanaians’ desire for Bibles. To counteract overpricing, he announced that the price for all standard binding Bibles had been set at $5.50. He also asked that churches urge their members to use local language Bibles for their marriages in place of the traditional English-language Bibles that are in short supply. “After all,” he said, “most of the so-called engagement Bibles are not read by their recipients. They are treasured so much that, instead of reading them, they are neatly tucked in the bottom of trunks.”

Understandably, given the state of the economy, Ghana’s churches have failed to meet their assigned 12 percent share of the society’s $910,000 budget. Local church contributions last year amounted to only $35,500—less than 4 percent of the society’s budget.

In spite of these fiscal constraints, the society is proceeding with translation of the Old Testament into the Dangme language, and of the New Testament into the Nzewo and Fante tongues. The government also has approved the society’s proposed unified orthography for the Akan language.

G. B. K. OWUSU

The American Lutheran Church

Complementary Counsel and Contrary Conviction

Convention delegates of the American Lutheran Church (ALC) tackled some hot issues in the cool northlands of Minneapolis last month. The abortion issue was so complex that it warranted not one, but two position statements. A question remained whether the statements are contradictory.

Delegates first approved a strong statement, prepared by the ALC Church Council, deploring “the absence of any legal protection for human life from the time of conception to birth” and the “alarming increase of induced abortions since the 1973 Supreme Court decision.”

But a second, much longer statement, drafted by a 14-member task force appointed two years ago, illustrated the complexities of the abortion issue. It placed the responsibility on individuals “to make the best possible decision they are capable of making in light of the information available to them and their sense of accountability to God, neighbor, and self.”

Some ALC officials criticized the task force report as lacking in biblical foundations, and in effect supporting elective abortion. Task force supporters disagreed. David W. Preus, who was reelected at the biennial meeting to a six-year term as president of the 2.3-million-member denomination, denied that the statements contradicted each other. He noted that the first was approved as a statement of “judgment and conviction” (or a public stand), while the second statement was approved for the “comment and counsel” of ALC congregations.

Convention delegates disregarded Preus’s advice when they asked for the sale of all the denomination’s stock in firms doing business in South Africa as the best strategy to oppose government-imposed segregation, or apartheid. Preus had argued that divestiture takes away church representation at company stockholder meetings, and thereby removes a stronger witness than the protest withdrawal provides.

A black South African bishop also opposed a stock sale. L. E. Dlamini, bishop of the Southeastern Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in South Africa, told delegates that while his church opposes apartheid, divestiture would hurt “the very people you intend to help and liberate.”

About half of the ALC’s 18 districts supported divestiture in resolutions. The ALC has already sold holdings in three firms doing business in South Africa, and reportedly still holds $24.8 million in stock in 18 corporations doing business there. The approved resolution calls divestiture “the most legitimate strategy in opposing apartheid,” and requests that ALC trustees divest in “a prudent manner” that does not place “undue risk” on ALC investments.

The convention turned down a recommendation that the church support the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. It also voted to authorize a study on whether the ALC should join the National Council of Churches.

By a nearly unanimous vote, the delegates approved a process possibly leading in two years to a vote on merger options between the ALC and two other Lutheran bodies. Four proposals, ranging from close cooperation with no merger to a full merger, are being considered by the ALC, the Lutheran Church in America, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches. A new single church would have more than 5 million members.

Outgoing president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Jacob A. O. Preus, showed the improbability of any future merger between his LCMS and the ALC. In an address to the ALC convention, Preus said the LCMS basically feels uncomfortable with the diversity of doctrine and practice allowed in the ALC. He said the LCMS believes it necessary that “a confessional church … be in agreement in doctrine and practice.” In 1977, the LCMS declared its fellowship with the ALC “in protest” because of disagreements with the more liberal ALC on scriptural interpretation, women’s ordination, and other issues.

Elementary Religious Education

Judge’s Gavel Dismisses Chattanooga Bible Classes

For the first time in 58 years, grade school students in Chattanooga, Tennessee, aren’t studying the Bible—at least, not in the public school classroom.

A September 5 U.S. District Court ruling severely curtailed the program, begun in 1922 by the Public School Bible Study Committee. It operates at present in both the Chattanooga and Hamilton County school systems. Specifically, Judge Frank Wilson, a respected United Methodist Sunday school teacher, ruled that Bible classes taught in the Hamilton County elementary school system violated constitutional provisions against state establishment of religion.

Judge Wilson had listened to several tape-recorded lessons, and concluded the intent and purpose was to convey a religious message rather than a literary or historic message. Because of that, the lessons violated guidelines he established a year ago for maintaining the constitutionality of the program. He established these after parents of several students filed suit against the program, and he declared it unconstitutional. The Bible study committee then revamped the program, and felt it satisfied the judge’s guidelines. The committee gave jurisdiction of the program to the two school systems, but still provided financing.

However, the parents again filed suit with the active support of the American Civil Liberties Union. They had vocal backing from Thor Hall, religion professor at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. They specifically challenged Bible classes in the elementary schools, but not in the junior and senior high schools.

Ironically, the judge upheld the constitutionality of the Bible classes taught in the Chattanooga elementary schools. However, the Bible study commmittee dropped its funding of the Chattanooga elementary program, so classes stopped there as well.

Committee vice-chairman John Stophel, a Chattanooga lawyer, explained that since each school system used the same curriculum, “It was foolish to think that we could permanently sustain the program in the city schools.” The committee could explain the judge’s mixed ruling only in that he had studied separate groups of lessons from each school system before making his decision.

The committee, composed of 45 of the area’s most prominent business, political, and religious leaders, continued its funding of the junior and senior high school programs in both school systems. The committee decided not to appeal the judge’s ruling or make further attempts to revise the elementary program. Insurance executive and committee chairman Hugh O. Maclellan told a reporter that a continuing program apparently would “require distortion or omission of events recorded in the Bible,” so that funding for it would “constitute betrayal of the generous donors who have supported the program.”

Critics said recent events show the tyranny of the minority. Elementary students needed a signed slip from their parents to participate in the voluntary program; even then, participation was 95 to 100 percent, said Stophel. To prevent embarrassing those not taking part, elementary schools conducted the semester-long classes for no more than half the class at one time. This way, nonparticipants would join at least half the class in some other activity and not be isolated.

California

Churches Find State Less Prying but Mere Taxing

Religious organizations in California are now less likely to be investigated but more likely to lose their tax-exempt status. That is the result of two recent legislative measures: one that passed, another that didn’t.

The first one, signed into law by Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., severely trimmed the power of the state attorney general to investigate alleged financial abuses by religious organizations. A California law that came into effect early in 1980 had given the attorney general broad powers to investigate and correct any “wrongful activity” discovered for such controversial groups as the Worldwide Church of God and its founder, Herbert W. Armstrong, Synanon, and Eugene Scott’s Faith Center (Apr. 18 issue, p. 48).

The bill, authored by State Senator Nicholas Petris (D-Oakland), received backing from a coalition of civil-rights and religious groups that said state intrusion into the affairs of even one unorthodox religious group threatened First and Fourth Amendment rights and freedom of worship of all religious groups. The measure was opposed mostly by groups of parents of children in religious cults and by some psychologists.

The new law bars the attorney general from looking into the affairs of religious organizations, except for criminal matters and a few narrowly defined civil complaints. Amendments added during the bill’s passage through senate and assembly committees allow the attorney general to: “make inquiry” concerning funds solicited from the general public for specific purposes, make destruction or unauthorized altering of financial records a criminal offense, and instruct the courts to consider requiring financial restitution in the criminal conviction of any individual.

Attorney General George Deukmejian said the new law “puts in serious jeopardy” the state’s suits against the Worldwide Church of God and Synanon, both accused of widescale diversion of funds. He did not say whether these suits would now be dropped, but acknowledged that all such pending cases “must … now be reexamined.”

Governor Brown vetoed a second measure, which would have prohibited state tax officials from denying a church its tax-exempt status for making political statements in keeping with its religious faith. This bill also had passed overwhelmingly in the legislature; it was sponsored by Republican State Senator H. L. Richardson. It could still be enacted over Brown’s veto by a two-thirds majority of both houses of the legislature, but that was considered unlikely.

Richardson branded the veto “a pagan assault against the churches of California.” But increasing public concern about politically outspoken churches and ministers appeared to buttress the governor’s veto.

The Richardson bill also would have simplified tax filing by churches. It was backed, therefore, by two interest groups: those who sought the liberty to preach and mail information about their positions on moral issues having political ramifications—such as abortion and hom*osexual rights; and churches with connected Christian schools that would have been relieved of detailed tax reporting. These churches considered release of such information a government encroachment on religious freedom; they have resisted court efforts to define what is and what is not an integral part of a church.

Churches in California still can lose their tax exempt status if they engage in “substantial” propaganda campaigns, attempt to influence legislation, or campaign for political candidates. And as many as 70 churches that stopped filing the appropriate IRS forms in the last year or two, expecting the bill to pass, now find themselves in a bind. At least one—Calvary Baptist Church in Fairfield—has had a lien placed against its property because of delinquent property taxes.

They use California curriculum hearings to curb publishers’ evolutionary dogmatism.

Skirmishes between creationists and evolutionists in schools and legislatures around the country are being reported widely, but the evolution of some new science textbooks themselves sometimes passes unnoticed.

Less than 10 years ago, elementary science texts by and large presented evolution as hard fact, with no room for doubt. But partially because of a tiny yet tenacious organization of Christians in San Diego, things have begun to change—ever so slightly—in the last few years.

For example, a new science book for seventh and eighth graders, published by Laidlaw Brothers, winds up its introduction to a chapter on the origins of life this way: “This unit, in general, is about what many scientists have thought about the beginnings. Their ideas are interesting and exciting. But since evidence is lacking, people are still left to wonder just how it all began.”

Another seventh- and eighth-grade text, this one by Allyn and Bacon, introduces a similar chapter thus: “Our present knowledge of the history of the earth is based chiefly on a study of the rocks that are found at the earth’s surface. Unfortunately, many of these rocks are so twisted and crumpled that their histories are not clear. Other rocks have eroded away and their histories are lost forever. In addition, there were long periods when no rocks were formed. Therefore, present ideas about the earth’s history include many speculations about the meanings of the relatively few facts that have been discovered …” A new eighth-grade science text by the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishing company introduces a section on evolution with this less-than-doctrinaire title: “The Long and Magnificent Journey—An Evolutionary Viewpoint.”

Two Southern Californians, Nell Segraves and Jean Sumrall, have been fighting for the last 18 years to get changes like that. They began informally in 1962, and in 1970 formed the Creation Science Research Center (CSRC) in San Diego with other evangelical Christians. Its purpose is to defend creationist beliefs and publish elementary teaching material that explains creationism from a scientific viewpoint. (Creationists believe that the origins of the universe and of life on this planet are better explained by a model of intelligent, purposeful design and special creation—creation of all species separately—than by an evolutionary model.)

Nell’s son Kelly, trained in theology, is director, and writes much of their book material. Robert Kofahl, who has a doctorate in chemistry from Cal Tech, serves as science coordinator, and works to keep their publishing efforts on a sound scientific track. (CSRC is not to be confused with the Institute for Creation Research, also in San Diego. The two are separate but cooperative.)

California is the nation’s most populous state, and is a market no large textbook publisher can ignore. Elementary texts must be approved by the state board of education before local districts can buy them, and that is where the creationists press their views. Nell Segraves has become an effective lobbyist and book critic at textbook adoption hearings held by the state school board’s Curriculum Commission. “People say we’re trying to censor science,” she said in an interview at her San Diego office. “We say we’re trying to protest the censor of science,” by getting publishers to acknowledge that evolution is theory, not fact. In the face of the creationist lobbying, some publishers have been loosening their evolutionary dogmatism rather than be refused permission to sell their books in California. Publishers readily acknowledge they cannot present evolution as they used to. Eugene Frank, director of publications for Laidlaw, said, “We don’t think it’s a publisher’s responsibility to give a position and say, ‘This is it.’ No one knows. The answers are still not available.”

Even with the changes, grade school readers would still find it difficult to believe in anything but evolution, judging from presentations in most of the books now in use, and Segraves acknowledges that there’s a long way to go. Although evolution may be identified as theory, it’s still usually the only theory seriously explained. Most grade school science text writers, for example, are still fond of describing the evolution of the horse, from the tiny, four-toed eohippus of 58 million years ago to the fully-grown, hooved equus of modern times. Scientists who believe in creationism energetically dispute that.

Nonetheless, Sumrall says the change in emphasis in new editions is evident, compared with editions of the same books 10 years ago. “Before, I’d find sometimes one-third of a book devoted to various aspects of evolution. We don’t find the dogmatism now. We don’t find the whole book brainwashing the kid.” She and Segraves don’t object to evolution as the dominant teaching, only when it is presented as fact.

The women acknowledge that although there may be light at the end of the tunnel, it is still an awfully long tunnel. The board of education routinely adopts many texts over their objection, and even when one they like is approved, it is still up to budget-wary school districts to buy it. “A publisher told me that getting his book on the adoption list is really only a license to peddle books in California,” Segraves said. No publishers as yet deal seriously with creationism. (CSRC has been unable to get any of its own books on the adoption list.)

Besides all that, the state doesn’t control the sales of high school science texts. That puts them beyond the practical range of CSRC lobbying, and in them evolution remains just about as dogmatic as ever. “I do see movement [in high school texts], but it’s not significant,” said Richard Bliss, a curriculum expert at the Institute for Creation Research. “We still see much, much indoctrination, although we may not see the word evolution.” Both organizations maintain that creation stands up scientifically as a theory for the origin of life. They want these scientific facts, not the biblical doctrine of Genesis, taught in the schools alongside evolution. “We have nothing to fear from good science,” Bliss said.

Over the years, Segraves has made slow but steady strides with the state board of education members appointed by former Governor Ronald Reagan, as well as with its textbook adoption arm, the Curriculum Commission. In 1973 the board required that evolution be clearly labeled as speculative and theoretical in elementary science books. In 1978, because of the more liberal influence of Governor Edmund (Jerry) Brown’s school board appointees, science regulations were revamped. Evolution, in effect, was to be taught in science textbooks and creationism was relegated to the realm of philosophy and religion. “We didn’t buy it,” Segraves said, and CSRC creationists went to court. They lost because they missed a filing date. They appealed, and were asked by the judge to try and settle out of court with the school board’s lawyers. This they did, but the board rejected the settlement. CSRC will be back in court in December for a new trial date, but Segraves worries about the $10,000 in legal fees she believes she will need, and is now trying to raise.

CSRC chose to register as a public trust to enhance its credibility and to avoid being identified with, or dependent upon, religious groups. That is both its strength and its weakness. Unlike private religious organizations, public trusts are permitted to lobby and retain their tax-exempt status, but they are limited in the dollar amounts of donations they may receive, effectively excluding large foundation grants.

“We’re a public trust,” said Segraves, “and if the public doesn’t support us [with small, individual contributions], we have no right [in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service] to exist.” Many publishers and scientists in California, who have run up against the dogged creationists, probably hope that support never materializes for the hard-pressed CSRC.

Dialogue

Is a New Alliance Needed to Repel Secular Inroads?

How can the church maintain its unique Christian identity in a rapidly changing society that seeks to manipulate and absorb it?

That question drew a small group of evangelical and Roman Catholic leaders together in Ann Arbor, Michigan, last month. The participants came by invitation of Pastoral Renewal, a journal published there by The Word of God, the interdenominational Christian community born out of the Catholic charismatic renewal. Also sponsoring the meeting was the Center for Christian Studies of South Bend, Indiana.

Pastoral Renewal publisher Peter S. Williamson explained further that the goal of the meeting was “not to focus on Christian unity per se, but to investigate ways in which we can work together toward goals of common concern to us.” Word of God coordinator Mark Kinzer named some of those goals, which were aimed at “adapting and applying Christianity to a drastically new social environment.”

He proposed that Christian leaders make it their top priority to restore natural groupings and strengthen family life. He asked them to equip Christians to deal with powerful influences of technological society, such as the communications media and mass education; to provide teaching on practical Christian living; and to restore patterns of Christian initiation and church discipline that again make clear the boundaries between church and secular society.

Kinzer said modern technological society obscures “the boundaries separating the church from the surrounding society, contributing greatly to a vast infusion of non-Christian currents of thought and life.”

Speakers included well-known author and Regent College professor James I. Packer, editors Kenneth Kantzer of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and Stephen Board of Eternity, and church renewal author Howard Snyder. Others were James Hitchco*ck, president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars; Paul Vitz, New York University psychology professor and author of Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self Worship; and church historian Richard Lovelace.

Some participants felt that Dubuque Theological Seminary professor Donald G. Bloesch captured the theme of the meeting in his prepared paper. Bloesch stated, “I believe the time is ripe for a new evangelical alliance, embracing Bible-believing Christians from all branches of Christendom.”

Bloesch said the church today is challenged by the advancing secularization of contemporary society. He indicated that biblical authority is being eroded in many segments of the church, and certain key Christian doctrines are being reinterpreted according to secular modes of thought. Bloesch cited indications that Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants may soon be able to oppose jointly these dangerous trends, as well as cooperate in evangelistic mission. Evangelicals, he said, are “rediscovering their roots”: appreciation of the fathers of the church and of the place of religious orders, sacraments, and church authority. At the same time, he said, many Roman Catholics are moving toward a view of Christian truth and life consonant with some of the major concerns of evangelicals.

JOHN BLATTNER

University Chapel Policy

Critics Charge Princeton Strays from Founders’ Path

A Jewish rabbi participated in opening exercises at Princeton University this fall. As usual, the event took place in the university chapel, but this year the administration removed the cross from the altar. Music, readings, and prayers referred to God, but avoided mention of Christ by name.

The interfaith approach reflects the school’s new policy on the role of the chapel and its dean. A year ago, the university trustees emphasized religious pluralism on campus, and said it should be respected. In their report, the trustees said university functions in the chapel must be clearly distinguished from the chapel’s Sunday services, when worship is explicitly Christian.

Princeton’s founding patriarchs, Jonathan Edwards and John Witherspoon, wouldn’t like this turn of events, say critics. Founded in 1746 on bedrock Calvinist principles, the school’s stance should remain avowedly Christian, they argue. One trustee who is an evangelical Christian refused to sign the chapel report. Journalist Philip Lawler, in a National Review article entitled “Getting God Out of Princeton,” blamed the policy change on president William Bowen’s pursuit of secular humanism.

A faculty committee report on the chapel failed to mention Christ, and referred to God’s existence only once. The trustees’ chapel committee, chaired by Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts John Coburn, smacked of relativism and universalism, said critics.

The trustees’ report seemed to contradict and misinterpret the school’s founding fathers. Ministers such as Edwards and Witherspoon founded Princeton as a Christian college, but the trustees affirmed religious pluralism and implied the founders would have approved it. In one section, the report reads: “We hope to affirm the religious spirit which helped to give birth to Princeton by recommending further expressions in a variety of forms—but motivated by the same spirit.”

Recent events notwithstanding, Princeton has retained its Christian identity longer than other Ivy League universities, such as Harvard and Yale, which also were founded to train Christian ministers. The school places its dean of the chapel in the administrative hierarchy, and gives him the powers of any other dean.

All university presidents were clergymen up to the turn of the century. Until 1964 the school retained its requirements of mandatory attendance at religious services (although by then, these requirements were considerably watered down). President Robert F. Goheen told incoming freshmen at the time that “the maturing and shaping of the moral and spiritual structure of your lives must be largely your own affair.”

Observers cite a further crumbling in recent years of the school’s visible stance as a Christian college. Increasingly, schools want to avoid having policies that provoke questions of church and state relationships and allegations of discrimination on religious grounds, which may explain the trends at Princeton.

However, journalist Lawler, a member of the conservative group, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, wrote that president Bowen, since his arrival in 1972, has consistently downplayed the role of the university chapel and its dean, Ernest Gordon. Lawler described the strong-willed Gordon as an outspoken supporter of Princeton’s religious heritage, who could not help but irritate Bowen, a “leading exponent” of secular humanism.

When Gordon announced his retirement after 25 years, Bowen began a complete reevaluation of the deanship. He appointed a broadly based committee to study the proper role of the chapel dean—a crucial question being whether the new dean should be an ordained Christian minister. (Bowen was on a temporary sabbatical, and could not be reached for comment.)

The matter finally landed with the trustees, who decided that the new dean would indeed be a Christian minister: Frederick H. Borsch, an Episcopal priest and president of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. The school appointed an acting dean until Borsch arrives on campus in January.

But the trustees also made provisions to accommodate the school’s religious pluralism. Trustee Bob Connor, an evangelical Christian active in campus outreach before his Princeton graduation in 1978, served on the trustees’ subcommittee on the chapel. He refused to sign the report when it was introduced a year ago.

In a telephone interview, Connor criticized the report’s “universalistic perspective” as “theologically untenable.” The report distorted the “original Christ-centeredness” of Princeton’s founders, he charged. The 24-year-old hospital administrator called “ominous” the “omission of the covenant relationship between the university and the Lord as embodied in Dei sub numine viget (the school’s motto, meaning “Under God’s power she flourishes”).

However, new dean Borsch sees the university’s change of stance as appropriate and necessary, considering “the campus is more pluralistic.” In an interview, he said, “It seems to me the essence of Christianity is wanting to share faith with other people. Christianity’s strength is in sharing its faith and vision with all kinds of other people.”

Because he is a Christian minister, Borsch promises to continue Christian services in the chapel. Sunday morning interfaith services would be a mistake, he said. However, the 45-year-old New Testament professor hopes for cooperation between campus religious groups that transcends theological differences: “The message about what God has done in Christ does not mean we cannot cooperate … and share with those who have been given a different form of revelation.”

About 500 persons regularly attend Sunday worship in the university chapel, but only about one-third are students. Another 300 students participate in the chapel’s social ministries, such as prison visitation.

All told, a relatively small percentage of the 4,400 undergraduate students actively participate in organized religion. Surveys indicate that about 30 percent of the students are Roman Catholic. About 20 percent are Jewish, while Presbyterians and Episcopalians outnumber those from other Protestant groups.

Whether the campus experiences an awakening like that in Edward’s day remains another matter.

What would Edwards think of the pluralistic awareness at the chapel? New dean Borsch suggested: “I would like to think that Edwards would be very quick to understand that the challenges and ministry today are very different, and he would be on the side of those who are probing to find the most faithful ways in the spirit of the times to present the gospel.”

Trustee Connor gave a different exegesis when he explained to fellow trustees why he could not support its report on the chapel. He distributed copies of Edwards quotes to all the trustees. Then, with a portrait of the fiery preacher facing him from the opposite wall, Connor said he felt led to give “an Old Testament-style talk” in support of the school’s historic Christian stance.

JOHN MAUST

New Call to Peacemaking

Peace Church Coalition Wins and Loses Friends

Just as world militarism has increased, so has the interest in peacemaking, said a leader of the second national conference of the New Call to Peacemaking. Convener Norval Hadley, a World Vision staff member and Evangelical Friends Alliance leader, added, “Now is the time for the church to boldly proclaim the biblical message of peacemaking.”

About 300 members of historic peace churches—Quakers, Church of the Brethren, and Mennonites—discussed tangible ways to engage in peacemaking: tax resistance, conscientious objection to service, and nonregistration for the military draft, among others. Delegates at last month’s meeting put their proposals into a 3,500-word document, which compiled the work of 27 study groups that met during the four-day session at Green Lake, Wisconsin.

Some members of the peace churches in the past voiced reservations about the group, fearing they were too radical and biblically weak. At the recent convention of the U.S. Conference of the Mennonite Brethren Church, delegates voted to withdraw the church’s cooperation with the New Call to Peacemaking—a four-year-old peace church coalition, which had its first national meeting two years ago (issue of Nov. 3, 1978, p.58).

At its first meeting, the New Call to Peacemaking asked the 400,000 members of its several participating denominations to “seriously consider refusal to pay the military portion of their federal taxes, as a response to Christ’s call to radical discipleship.”

Those who came to Green Lake this year included greater numbers of local church leaders and young people as well as some tax resisters, such as Bruce Chrisman, of Ava, Illinois. The General Conference Mennonite Church has appealed Chrisman’s conviction as a tax resister, and in a friend-of-the-court brief to the Springfield (Ill.) district court, supported Chrisman’s claim that “paying for war is the same as bearing arms.”

Peacemaking advocates believe their cause will grow because of increasing support from evangelical groups not always recognized for their peace efforts. The Southern Baptists, the National Association of Evangelicals, and evangelist Billy Graham in recent months have publicly attacked the arms race.

Among its recommendations, the delegation called for a moratorium on the production, testing, and deployment of nuclear and other weapons. They encouraged “open, nonviolent noncooperation with the conscription system” as a way to oppose militarism. They again asked that members consider refusing to pay the military portion of their federal taxes, and that congregations and church agencies honor employees’ requests not to withhold war taxes.

William Carey University

Trying Graduate Cultural Studies Where Students Are

If geography is a tall barrier to postgraduate study, officials at William Carey International University (WCIU) suggest a solution: earning graduate degrees by extension.

“The school [WCIU] will provide an option for people who can’t establish traditional residency on campus,” said new dean of graduate studies James O. Buswell III. WCIU rests on a 17-acre campus in Pasadena, California, and is associated with the U.S. Center for World Mission. (Missiologist Ralph Winter founded both institutions, and is WCIU president.)

The school focuses upon international development issues, and more than 20 mostly graduate-level courses were offered on campus this fall. However, its distinctive is courses by extension.

Buswell has corresponded with at least 40 prospective doctoral students. According to plans still being developed, each applicant secures an advisory committee composed of three persons skilled in his or her area of study. The school pays the committee from the student’s tuition fees, and lists them as WCIU adjunct faculty members. The student more or less designs his three-year program, but progress is regularly monitored by Buswell and the committee.

The school hopes to avoid criticisms that it is a mail-order degree factory. Buswell explains: “We have to be academically hard-nosed.” The long-time anthropology professor (most recently at Wheaton College) gladly accepted his new administrative post because WCIU offers “the cross-cultural emphasis I’ve been teaching for 30 years.”

The school has applied for state approval of its program of teaching English as a second language; that approval is necessary before the school may apply for accreditation through the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), which it intends to do. WASC has specific guidelines for approving nontraditional, off-campus graduate programs, such as those offered by WCIU, Buswell said.

School officials patterned their extension program after the University Without Walls (undergraduate) and Union Graduate School in Cincinnati, Ohio. Registered as a secular university, WCIU is open to all students. However, Buswell noted the advantages to overseas missionaries unable to return to the U.S. for doctoral study.

At the undergraduate level, WCIU has a concentrated, semester-long Institute of International Studies. This program aims for students pursuing careers in a cross-cultural setting. Last year, IIS organizers offered the program for the first time off-campus at Pennsylvania State University. Their goal is to locate their extramural program at 90 state colleges and universities by 1985.

Currently, graduate programs include applied linguistics, community health, teaching English as a second language, and Chinese, Hindu, Muslim, and tribal studies.

Is God In Process?

Faith and Process: The Significance of Process Thought for Christian Faith, by Paul R. Sponheim (Augsburg, 1979, 351 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by Colin Brown, professor of systematic theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

All philosophy, it has been remarked, is really a series of footnotes to Plato. With somewhat more justice it could be said that “process thought” is a series of footnotes to A. N. Whitehead.

Paul R. Sponheim, professor of systematic theology at Luther-Northwestern Seminaries in Saint Paul, sets out in Faith and Process to explore the significance of process thought—the view of reality deriving from the writings of Whitehead—for Christian faith, thought, and service. It opens with a plea for metaphysics; the Christian cannot avoid the ongoing quest for meaning. Christian faith raises philosophical questions—not least is the problem of how our faith relates to the scientific view of the world. Whitehead’s process thought is seen as providing a framework and appropriate categories for expressing the Christian faith today.

God himself is in process of becoming. Process thinkers speak of God’s primordial nature and of God’s consequent nature. But even as creator, God is not “creativity-itself.” Rather, creativity is the more encompassing concept, with God as an extraordinary instance. Whitehead claimed that, “It is as true to say that God creates the world, as that the world creates God” (Process and Reality, corrected edition, p. 348).

Faith and Process performs a real service in providing a clear, sober, and judicious exposition of Whiteheadian thought. It is meticulously illustrated by quotations from Whitehead’s books and numerous other recent writers, complete with diagrams exhibiting their differences. Dr. Sponheim is at pains to relate process thought to Christian faith, stressing that metaphysics is the servant of faith, and suggesting ways in which process thought may contribute to the dialogue with atheism.

For all that, I find that my doubts about process theology are greater than ever. There is much in Whitehead that is provocative—not least his challenge to Christians to think out how they view the relationship of God to the world. But this is precisely the problem: far from providing a solution to the problem of evil and a theological foundation for ecology, process thought gives us a God who is finite and amoral. As the ground of novelty, God is in all things luring them indiscriminately to achieve their subjective aims and thus maximize themselves. On this basis it is difficult to see how one could blame the rapist or murderer, for could it not be said that what they are doing is realizing their subjective aims? When Dr. Sponheim speaks of God choosing to receive the world “in Christ” and of the divine will to love becoming concrete in Christ, he appears to revert to the language of theism in order to give some Christian content to a scheme of thought that is basically pagan. Could it be that, after all, process thought is a twentieth-century, updated version of the religion of Canaan proclaiming an immanent deity and a gospel of creaturely self-fulfillment?

There is no little irony in the fact that Dr. Sponheim has moved from the study of Kierkegaard to the study of Whitehead. The shift is as dramatic as a move from Kierkegaard to his archenemy, Hegel. Hegel taught an all-embracing, philosophical, and religious system based on an evolving, immanent deity. Kierkegaard pointed out the system was indemonstrable and the church needed to return to the God of the Bible. The same is true for process thought.

Gifts Of The Spirit

Grace Gifts, by Michael Griffiths (Eerdmans, 1978, 80 pp., $2.65), The Spirit in the Church, by Karl Rahner (Seabury Press, 1979, 104 pp., $3.95), and Scripture and the Charismatic Renewal, edited by George Martin (Servant Books, 1979, 127 pp., $4.00), are reviewed by J. Kenneth Grider, professor of theology, Nazarene Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri.

These three small books, all related to gifts of the Spirit, and not especially to tongues speaking, are helpful in varying ways.

Grace Gifts, by Michael Griffiths, is a brief study, but it compresses many helpful insights. Griffiths understands a gift as consisting of God’s heightening the “natural aptitudes” he bestows upon us as Creator (pp. 70–71). The author further considers that spiritual gifts are at least 14 in number (pp. 25–66), and that they have “not ceased; but are “applicable today” (p. 8). They really are gifts (p. 68), and are not to be sought. Instead of “earnestly desire,” he translates 1 Corinthians 12:31 as an indicative instead of as an imperative—“You earnestly desire”—and says the Corinthians were being reprimanded for their desire for gifts (pp. 9, 68ff.).

Of these three books, the other two are written by and for Roman Catholics. Both (one by Karl Rahner, and the other a symposium by Catholic writers) take up issues not especially of interest to Protestants—except that it is of interest to us that they are dealing with these issues. Rahner, for example, says that “office holders” in the church should realize that “their subjects,” “ordinary Christians,” are sometimes given “commands and promptings” by “the Lord” (pp. 60–66). In this connection, he says, “They are actions that God wills even before the starting signal has been given by the hierarchy …” (p. 61). He is interested in “prophecies” (p. 89ff.). But unlike the way in which they are understood by the typical Protestant Pentecostal, they “almost always” are messages “delivered by persons seen in visions” (p. 89).

The Catholic symposium, Scripture and the Charismatic Renewal, would be of interest to Protestants who would like to know about the strictures under which Catholics read Scripture and think about its meaning. Not just certain dogmas are official for Catholics, but specific interpretations of given Bible texts are official (e.g., p. 25). The book treats Vatican II statements that encourage Scripture reading by Catholics, and it reveals a renewal of lay Catholic interest in and use of the Bible.

A New Life Of Calvin

God’s Man: A Novel on the Life of John Calvin, by Duncan Norton-Taylor (Baker Book House, 1979, 298 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Larry M. Lake, chairman, English department, Delaware County Christian School, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania.

Biographies are difficult to write. The biography of a man who died over 400 years ago presents even more difficulties. Yet God’s Man is a triumph over typical obstacles. The author’s untypical approach to biography, writing it as a novel, is a wise choice. In his words, “few biographies can be wholly true, while novels may wholly bear their own truth.”

Perhaps the book’s most striking feature is its first-person narrative. Instead of the expected “John Calvin was born in Noyon, France, in 1509 …” the beginning is told from Calvin’s perspective as, lying on his deathbed, he is visited by the Reformer Farel. Calvin reviews his life, recalling being shown relics in the cathedral at age three, the death of his mother, his first days at school. These events are described in present tense, helping to convey a sense of closeness and authenticity. By the end of the first section, Calvin has become a leader in the Reformation, and has published the first edition of his Institutes.

The novel’s second part is from the viewpoint of one of Calvin’s critics who travels and works with him, but eventually leaves him. Here the author shows some of the criticism leveled against Calvin, without having to belabor his defense. The reader considers the source and moves on.

In the third section Calvin is established as a pastor in Geneva and tells his story about that city’s political turmoil and his own infirmities. Maigret, a loyal friend and supporter, next continues the narrative. As a member of the aristocracy, he has insights into Genevan life that Calvin never could have had.

In the last two parts Calvin again tells his own story, as the church is threatened by heresy and political maneuverings, as he establishes a school, and as he completes his fifth edition of the Institutes, prefacing it with the statement, “A thing is done soon enough if it is done well enough.”

In many places the writing has a poetic clarity, and scenes are set simply and imaginatively.

God’s Man is a successful biography and an entertaining novel. It will be interesting to Christians who enjoy people, theology, history, and fine writing.

True Faith For Today

From the Pinnacle of the Temple: Faith or Presumption? by Charles Farah, Jr. (Logos International, 1979, 243 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Paul Elbert, postgraduate in New Testament, University of London, King’s College.

Does the believer exercise faith or presumption? This question will be of interest to every practicing Christian who tries to serve God. Farah, professor of historical theology at Oral Roberts University, sees within the body of Christ two extremist elements. One denies the existence of the miraculous in Jesus’ ministry to believers today and treats the Book of Acts with antiquarian disinterest. The other, overzealous to be used of God, detaches the biblical teaching about faith from its contextual relation to total truth, pushing it to illogical extremes. The result in this case can be heresy.

There exists today between these two extremes a significant portion that includes the classical Pentecostal denominations and the charismatic movements in the Protestant and Catholic sectors. There Christians generally take the Epistles as normative for doctrine of the church and the principles of the Book of Acts as normative for life and experience of the church. But herein is a problem, providing good reasons for Farah’s pastoral concern. He believes care needs to be taken in the nascent and burgeoning renewal in order to preserve balanced doctrine in the area of faith.

This is so because there is on the periphery of this growing edge of the church an extremist fringe of “faith” teachers who routinely attack balanced and sound doctrine in the realm of faith. The oversimplified “faith” formulas (e.g., “confess it and it’s yours”) and associated false doctrines have so victimized and plagued mainstream Christianity that Farah’s book should be received with a sigh of relief by all who wish to live a balanced Christian life of faith.

Farah addresses himself to finding a remedy with all due tolerance and courtesy. He pleads for a return to contextual scientific exegesis to determine meaning for Scripture passages.

The book concludes with a 20-page set of practical guidelines for Christian leaders entitled “A Methodology for Ecumenical Theology,” which may be the highlight of the book. This bold and courageous book reasserts the sovereignty of God and helps define real biblical faith. Every pastor and lay person who has encountered the effects of presumptuous false doctrine needs to have this book in hand.

Putting It All Together

The Integration of Psychology and Theology, by John D. Carter and Bruce Narramore (Zondervan, 1979, 139 pp., $3.95 pb), is reviewed by Willard Harley, Sr., practicing psychologist, and professor emeritus, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

This volume is number one in a projected series on the integration of psychology and Christianity. The book begins with an excellent treatment of the ambivalence among Christians toward applying psychology to human behavior. The authors’ openness to psychological data is based on the assumption that all truth is God’s truth.

Chapter three follows two of introduction, and delineates the scope of both systematic theology and psychology in order to illustrate their communality and major differences. This effort, I feel, unfortunately illustrates how tempting it is to force dissimilar categories into a single mold. For example, the doctrine of sin is supposed to be the theological pairing of psychopathology. I have the impression that the authors, like Freud, developed their theories out of their counseling cases. If Christ’s most frequent examples of fallen man were the clean-living, religious Pharisees, would not the most essential effects of the Fall be seen by observing our best specimens of unregenerated man—rather than the emotionally disturbed? Do not some of our devoutly committed Christians share the same psychopathologies as the unbelievers?

In chapters four to seven the current attitudes toward integration are divided into four approaches or models. The first two are briefly but well described. The latter two would bear further clarification. For instance, while the authors see themselves in model four, the Integrates, they seem to sound more like number three, the Parallel Model. The book closes on the point that practical integration is an ongoing process already at work in the Christian psychologist.

I only wish that such a beginning treatment of this almost virgin area had clear definitions. What psychology? Whose psychology? What constitutes a Christian psychology? Whose theology? Whose data? What happens when data need theory for interpretation? What was lost in the Fall? What constituted the image of God? What therapy does the Christian psychologist offer the unregenerated client?

Obviously, a fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer, but beginning books ought to start at the beginning.

Luke-Acts Today

Studies in Luke-Acts, edited by Leander E. Keck and J. Louis Martyn (Fortress Press, 1980, 316 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Peter H. Davids, assistant professor of biblical studies, Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, Ambridge, Pennsylvania.

L. E. Keck and J. L. Martyn first issued this volume in 1966 as a tribute to their teacher, Paul Schubert. Professor Schubert and some of the contributors have died since then, but in many cases the essays were seminal, so a paperback reprint of the volume is now in our hands. The work is a collection of essays from the early 1960s by such scholars as van Unnik, Cadbury, Dahl, Käsemann, and Haenchen; it is grouped into three parts: (1) general overviews of the interpretation, perspective, and theology of Luke-Acts, (2) specific issues in Luke-Acts, and (3) studies of the relationship between Acts and its literary setting.

While one can hardly evaluate a volume of first-quality essays in a few words, three comments should be made about this work. First, some of the essays are now dated—the editors themselves suggest C. H. Talbert’s Perspectives on Luke-Acts as a source of more recent material. Second, many of the essays are classics, which must be read in any thorough study of Luke-Acts; even the dated ones are useful for a history of interpretation (e.g., Conzelmann, “The Address of Paul on the Areopagus,” P. Vielhauer, “On the ‘Paulinism’ of Acts,” and H. J. Cadbury, “Four Features of Lucan Style”). Finally, only one essay is by an evangelical (C. F. D. Moule, “The Christology of Acts”), showing a continuing need for more evangelical involvement in such scholarship (despite I. H. Marshall’s recent contributions).

The Church In South Africa

The Church Struggle in South Africa, by John W. de Gruchy (Eerdmans, 1979, 267 pp., $7.95); Perceptions of Apartheid: The Churches and Political Change in South Africa, by Ernie Regehr (Herald Press, 1979, 309 pp., $7.95), are reviewed by Richard V. Pierard, professor of history, Indiana State University, Terre Haute.

South Africa today is of deep concern to Christians everywhere. The republic’s 1961 constitution states unequivocally that South Africa is a Christian country. But the odious racial policies that are summed up under the rubric of apartheid or “separate development” are hardly those that bring honor to the Christ who died that all people might be equal and free through faith in him.

The officially sanctioned racism and the fascist-like police state atmosphere have led some critics to equate South Africa with Nazi Germany, but this is not really accurate. The rule of law has not completely disappeared. Courageous journalists, lawyers, businessmen, and above all, churchmen, have been challenging the apartheid system; already some lessening of its rigors are seen.

There is an extensive body of literature on Christianity in South Africa and the two books reviewed here are welcome additions, as they deal frankly and sensitively with the issues. Both contain concise, informative historical surveys, analyses of the various theological positions, and discussions of how Christians are combating apartheid. Dr. John de Gruchy of Cape Town, an able scholar and devoted churchman, has a remarkably clear grasp of events and movements in his country as well as in Europe and the Americas. His treatment of the tensions within the deeply divided Christian community and between church and state is perceptive. Particularly meritorious is his clear-headed, positive assessment of South African black theology and his biblically grounded presentation of the kingdom of God as the vehicle for white liberation. In terms of its clarity of writing and theological depth this book deserves to be ranked among the best of the year. Christians who are seeking to apply their faith to the problems of contemporary society will profit much from de Gruchy’s insights.

Ernie Regehr, a Canadian Mennonite, was sent to South Africa by his church to study apartheid and its ramifications for Christianity. His account covers much of the same ground as de Gruchy’s in tracing the role of the churches in racial-political conflict, but he emphasizes more how various groups in the country perceive the system. He presents the factual side of apartheid in considerably more detail and alerts the reader to the unmistakable enormity of this evil. Its wealth of data and its character as an outsider’s view make this book a good complement to de Gruchy’s.

Briefly Noted

Eschatology: A good general survey of current debate among theologians is Christian Hope and the Future (InterVarsity) by Stephen H. Travis. A revised edition of On the Way to the Future (Augsburg) by Hans Schwarz surveys Christian eschatology in the light of current trends in theology, philosophy, and science. Jurgen Moltmann’s The Future of Creation (Fortress) is a collection of thought-provoking essays about eschatology, hope, the Cross, and more.

Affirming the historic premillennial position, David Ewert in And Then Comes the End (Herald) offers a spiritually minded, topical survey of the biblical material related to the Second Coming of Christ. A rather polemical, antimillennial overview is What the Bible Says About the End Time (College Press, Joplin, Mo.) by Russell Boatman. Jim McKeever affirms Christians Will Go Through the Tribulation (Alpha Omega, Box 4130, Medford, Oreg.) and tells how to prepare for it. The Incredible Cover-Up by Dave MacPherson is now being distributed by Alpha Omega and presents what is called the true story of the pretrib Rapture. Fear, Faith and the Future (Augsburg) by Ted Peters affirms Christian hope in the face of doomsdayers. Lehman Strauss’s Prophetic Mysteries Explained (Loizeaux Brothers) looks at the prophetic significance of the parables in Matthew 13 and the letters of Revelation 2–3 in traditional dispensationalist terms. Life in the Afterlife (Tyndale) by Tim LaHaye is also traditional dispensationalism, with a cautionary word about “out-of-the-body” experiences.

Paulist Press offers What Are They Saying About the Resurrection? by Gerald O’Collins and What Are They Saying About Death and Christian Hope? by Monika Hellwig. Is There Life After Death? (Harvest House, Irvine, Calif.) by John Weldon and Zola Levitt says “yes” in easy-to-understand terms. Life, Death and Beyond (Zondervan) by J. Kerby Anderson is a fine study of the experiences of death and what they prove.

Universalism is making another appearance. Something to Believe In (Harper & Row) by Robert Short is a plea for Christian universalism, complete with cartoons from Peanuts, Doonesbury, and others. Arguing the same theme more academically is Eternal Life: Why We Believe (Westminster) by L. Harold DeWolf. Unconditional Good News (Eerdmans) by Neal Punt pushes “toward an understanding of biblical universalism” within the Reformed tradition.

Encounter With Terminal Illness (Zondervan) by Ruth Kopp deals sympathetically and helpfully with the problems surrounding death, and suggests how to draw upon spiritual resources.

Doctrine of God:The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe (Here’s Life) by William Lane Craig is a readable presentation of what is essentially the cosmological argument, and is especially good for thoughtful college students. James M. Houston’s I Believe in the Creator (Eerdmans) is powerful and profound, a highly recommended study of God as a loving Creator. One God in Trinity (Cornerstone), edited by Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, is an excellent collection of 10 essays analyzing a central doctrine in Christianity. The God of Jesus Christ (Franciscan Herald) by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is a moving set of meditations on God as Trinity. Emil Brunner’s classic The Christian Doctrine of God (Westminster) is now available in paperback for a new generation of students.

Three books look at God’s relation to us. The Back of God (Tyndale) by Bill Austin avoids easy answers, but finds signs of God’s presence in our lives. The Optional God (Morehouse-Barlow) by Stephen F. Bayne shows that God is not optional. God With Us (Westminster, paperback) by Joseph Haroutunian relates God to our personal lives, finding communion with God as we commune with each other.

Faith Incarnate In Life

The Physical Side of Being Spiritual, by Peter E. Gillquist (Zondervan, 1979, 174 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Dan E. Nicholas, public information officer, Mendocino County Schools, Ukiah, California.

Peter Gillquist would like you to take your shoes off and feel the earth beneath your feet—and know God intended it that way. God purposefully constructed his universe and his gospel to be as much physical as it is spiritual.

In this recent book, Gillquist takes a long look at the tendency of evangelicals to devalue their bodies and otherwise to escape the tangible, touchable side of the Christian faith in their desire to be spiritual.

Mental religion gets a bad review from this author. He follows up his earlier work, Love Is Now (Zondervan), a treatise on grace, with this new work which stresses an earthwise holiness. In easy-to-read style, the author advocates a faith lived out in visible fashion before fellow flesh-and-blood pilgrims with whom we are to rub elbows in the church.

An unsatisfying faith, in Gillquist’s view, is one that traffics in pop religion and private piety, shunning the church in trade for parachurch, doctrinal fads, and a me-and-Jesus religious solitaire.

Gillquist leans heavily on the early church fathers as models worth following. During a period of concern for intense spirituality, these leaders did not let go of the physical aspects of the faith. Evidence of this is their high view of the sacraments of holy baptism and the Lord’s Supper, events that speak to a healthy marriage of the physical and the spiritual.

In a day when all manner of Christians stroll through a cafeteria line of religious choices, often dangerously overspiritual, Gillquist focuses on a diet that has satisfied the saints for centuries. He addresses areas where the church is hurting today: worship, community life, and accountability. These are areas in which evangelicals could stand to get a lot more physical with their faith.

Must specialized ministry drive wedges between evangelism and social action?

Six months have passed since the World Council of Churches Commission on World Missions and Evangelism Melbourne Conference, “Your Kingdom Come,” and the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization Pattaya Consultation, “How Shall They Hear?” Both were concerned with the church’s mission in the world. Melbourne listened attentively to the cries of the poor and the oppressed. The LCWE Consultation on World Evangelization (COWE), on the other hand, concentrated on how to evangelize the world’s unreached peoples.

The distinction between the two conferences, between concern for the poor and concern for the lost, should not be over-pressed, however. At neither conference was there a total disjunction between these two Christian responsibilities. At COWE one miniconsultant focused on refugees, and another on the urban poor. Similarly, Melbourne did not altogether disregard the necessity of evangelism, as some have unjustly said. Its Section II declared that “the proclamation of the gospel to the whole world remains an urgent obligation for all Christians,” and its Section III that we have a “special obligation to those who have never heard the good news of the kingdom.”

Nevertheless, the difference in emphasis remains. The Melbourne documents pulsate with indignation over human injustice and with longings to liberate the oppressed, whereas their call for world evangelization lacks a comparable passion. As for COWE, its almost exclusive preoccupation with evangelism led to the issue of “A Statement of Concerns,” which originated with Third World evangelical leaders but was quickly signed by a widely representative group of more than 200 others. Although it recognized the useful work done since Lausanne by the committee’s Strategy and Theology groups, it went on to criticize it for seeming to have gone back on the Lausanne Covenant’s commitment to both evangelism and sociopolitical involvement, and for not being “seriously concerned with the social, political and economic issues … that are a great stumbling block to the proclamation of the Gospel.”

The LCWE’s executive, to whom the “Statement of Concerns” was addressed, invited three of its leading signatories to meet them and elaborate their criticisms, and was able to assure them that it had no intention of going back on the Lausanne Covenant. Indeed, the Thailand Statement (overwhelmingly endorsed by the participants on the last day, with only one dissenter) includes these sentences: “Although evangelism and social action are not identical, we gladly reaffirm our commitment to both, and we endorse the Lausanne Covenant in its entirety. It remains the basis of our common activity, and nothing it contains is beyond our concern, so long as it is clearly related to world evangelization.” It then goes on to reaffirm the covenant’s declaration that “in the church’s mission of sacrificial service evangelism is primary,” and explains the reason for this primacy in the following terms: “This is not to deny that evangelism and social action are integrally related, but rather to acknowledge that of all the tragic needs of human beings none is greater than their alienation from their Creator and the reality of eternal death for those who refuse to repent and believe.”

Meanwhile, can anything be done to dissipate the current confusion? My friend David Hesselgrave (see “Tomorrow’s Missionaries,” July 18 issue), while saying that he thinks it permissible to opt for my wide definition of “mission” as “everything the church is sent into the world to do,” asks whether I mean to involve “missionaries” in this “everything,” and invites me to be explicit on this point. I am happy to oblige.

It seems to me important to distinguish between polarization and specialization. That is, although we should not polarize on this issue—some Christians defining mission in terms of evangelism and others in terms of social action—we must accept the reality that God calls some to specialize in the former, and others in the latter. The early church first recognized this when the apostles affirmed that their special calling was pastoral (the ministry of the Word and prayer), while the seven were appointed to the social work of caring for the widows (Acts 6). Paul’s doctrine of the body of Christ, with all members gifted for different ministries, confirms and universalizes this truth.

Nevertheless, how can legitimate specialization be prevented from driving wedges yet more deeply between evangelism and social action? I have three suggestions to make.

First, in general terms, in spite of our specialist callings, every Christian is sent into the world as both a witness and a servant. Whenever we see someone in need, whether that need is spiritual or physical or social, if we have the wherewithal to meet it, we must do so; otherwise we cannot claim to have God’s love dwelling in us (1 John 3:16). Often people have more than one need, and if we love them with God’s love we shall do our utmost to relieve their needs. It is then, too, that they are most likely to believe. Verbal witness is not enough. As Jesus said, it is when people “see our good works” that our light shines most brightly and will give glory to our heavenly Father (Matt. 5:16).

Second, each local church should be involved in both evangelism and social action. Since God calls and gifts different people for different ministries, it seems a logical deduction that those with similar gifts and callings should coalesce into specialist study and action groups and be encouraged to concentrate on their particular God-given ministries. At the same time, they should be given regular opportunities to report back to the whole congregation, so that the body of Christ may know what its different members are up to and may support them with encouragement and prayer.

Third, what about missionaries? It is agreed that they neither can do everything (for lack of time and energy), nor should give themselves to any ministry for which they have not been gifted and called, nor should they meddle in the politics of their host country (unless specifically requested by national Christians), since they are guests and aliens in it. Nevertheless, because missionaries have come to identify with another country, all its people’s needs and aspirations should arouse their sympathetic concern. They cannot close their eyes to local poverty or hunger, disease or drought, bad farming or exploitation. What, then, should they do if these needs remain unmet, and if they remain convinced of their own continuing calling to evangelism? Should they not do, in principle, what the apostles did in Acts 6, namely take steps to ensure that others are appointed to do the social work to which they have not been called?

My personal belief is that we should develop many more mission teams, so that evangelists, teachers, doctors, agriculturalists, social workers, and relief and development experts can work together in the name of Jesus Christ, offering a humble, holistic service to the whole neighborhood to which they have been called.

John R. W. Stott is rector emeritus of All Souls Church, London, England.

Since the Reformation, some Christians have had a tentative, even suspicious, regard for the arts.

From the very beginning God’s people practiced the arts. Adam composed the first poem in the world, about Eve (Gen. 2:23).

Bone of my bone,

Flesh of my flesh,

She shall be called wo-man,

For she was won-from man.

Aaron’s sister Miriam choreographed a dance to celebrate Israel’s deliverance from the pursuing Egyptians (Ex. 15:20). God gave Moses blueprints for the tabernacle’s architecture and the ark with its sculptured angels made of gold and decorated candlesticks (Ex. 25:9–40). The Lord poured out specially the Holy Spirit upon silversmiths Bezalel and Oholiab so they could practice their arts with special skill (Ex. 31:1–11).

David wrote many songs and hymns for use in worship (Psalms). Solomon’s artisans carved, with God’s specific, handwritten approval (1 Chron. 28:11–19), bas-reliefs of flower blossoms, palm trees, and angels in the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 6:23–25); and the artists carved hundreds of pomegranates on the free-standing columns arranged like sentinels in front of the temple (1 Kings 7:13–22). Musicians and a Levite band of instruments frequently accompanied worship (2 Chron. 5:11–14 and Psalm 88 subtitle).

The Bible also tells us that from earliest history men who did not fear the true God practiced art as well. Lamech’s son Jubal played the harp and flute (Gen. 4:21), and Lamech’s own oratory was boastful bombast (Gen. 4:23–24). The ziggurat tower at Babel was an architectural monument to human pride (Gen. 11:1–9).

The Bible uses without prejudice all kinds of literary art, from Jotham’s fable (Judges 9:7–20) and Samson’s riddles (Judges 14:8–18) to the majestic poetry of many psalms and passages like Isaiah 40. God has even revealed his will in Scripture through a dramatic chorus of voices like the book of Job and the artful parables of Jesus (e.g., Luke 10:30–37; 16:19–31).

The point is not whether followers of Jesus Christ should be busy in art or not. Since the very creation of the world the problem has been whether these arts have been fashioned and used by men and women as vehicles of praise to the Lord, or whether they have been conceived and executed as expressions of human vanity.

For centuries, Christian craftsmen practiced their art as a service to the church. Nobody thought of art as “fine art,” as if art were something utterly special for and by itself. Guilds of painters, sculptors, and architects were on a par with guilds of weavers, silversmiths, and carpenters. Music and literature were the skills of tradesmen called musicians and minstrels. And the medieval church put all such artistry into its service.

Art was conceived by Christians as (1) a liturgical means for worshiping God. Plainsong became Gregorian chant used in the Mass. Rhetoric was converted into pulpit homilies. Sculpture ranged from baldachin to gargoyle; artists in lead, colored glass, and precious stones taught catechism lessons in brilliant, stained glass windows; architects preached Gothic cathedral sermons in stone. Artistry was understood to be a worthy natural means by which talented men could lift their neighbor into a church experience of God’s grace.

As the church lost its monopoly control over cultural life during the Renaissance, and as art came into existence as “fine art,” patronized by rich nobles at their courts even more than by archbishops and popes, a new position firmed up on the relationship of Christians to the arts. Art was given its independence from being an audio-visual aid for ecclesiastical worship, but Christians still wanted art not to contradict biblical truth. Art was to be (2) autonomous but bound to the general norms of beauty, truth, and goodness of humanity and God’s natural world.

The idea that art had its own inviolate realm separate from explicit Christian indoctrination meant art became somewhat secularized. Fifteenth-century frescoes of Bible stories on inner church walls gave way to sixteenth-century portraits of wealthy people for their homes. The change from devotional poetry, which one could use like prayer beads, to medieval romances, like Roman de la Rose and Dante’s Divine Comedy, continued. The tale remained devout, like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, especially in its allegorical dimension, but the story was one of human love and ordinary experience that had no Bible story prototype. Morality plays in the churchyard gradually turned into the enormously rich dramas of Shakespeare in the playhouse. Many Christians felt comfortable with the theater, painting, and poetry as they were developing, and let it be whatever it was so long as it did not undercut their Christian beliefs.

Another position taken by Christians on the arts is the one that art is normally (3) a sensuous temptation that is dangerous to faith. This view has inhibited followers of Christ from participation in the arts. If one believes that composing, performing, or viewing art is playing with fire, then one withdraws from that kind of activity. Sometimes only certain arts have been prohibited—like theater, painting, and dance—while others—like song, music, and poetry—are permitted. The first are considered earthbound and physical while the others are more spiritual in nature.

Christian iconoclasts of the eighth century A.D. destroyed thousands and thousands of sculptures, paintings, frescoes, mosaics, and illustrated manuscripts because the pictured images had occasioned a cult of icon worshipers and misled the populace into trusting such images as if they were akin to miracle-working relics. English Puritans destroyed art in churches during the seventeenth century in the fervor of ecclesiastical politics, but also because they did not believe sensible art could lead one to spiritual realities. Eighteenth-century European pietism tended to be restrictive toward art for similar reasons. Pietistic Christians are hesitant about imagination and are fundamentally distrustful of artistic illusion because it seems to be deceptive rather than straightforwardly true.

One final, important way Christians have viewed art in history is the way of accepting it as (4) a God-given mouthpiece for human witness of the Lord’s great works, or for cursing our existence. This position, which the historic Protestant Reformation set in motion, believes that for art to be Christian, art does not need to be narrowly liturgical. Art is also not intrinsically normative nor is it intrinsically more seductive than any other human activity. Art is simply a certain kind of cultural calling that has its own legitimacy as a sensible, crafted, allusively symbolic artifact. And art can be a vehicle of insight thanking God for his mercies in our sin-torn world or a vehicle of hate and blasphemy, no matter how expertly done, depending upon the spirit it embodies.

John Donne’s amorous sonnets or poem on “The Will” (1633) treat human passion with large, redemptive horizons. Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox (1655) depicts the stunning glory of ordinary meat hanging in a butcher shop. The Well-tempered Clavier by J. S. Bach (1723) presents keyboard music that resounds with toccata-like joy and intricate contrapuntal rhythms that celebrate a creaturely rich world. Such poetry, painting, and music exemplify the way Christians can witness of our redeeming Creator’s handiwork within the very artistic idiom, irrespective of the “topic.”

These four basic positions in history, on how Christians should best conceive, practice, and relate to the arts, represent roughly the major groupings within the worldwide Christian communion today. Each position shows certain strengths and weaknesses as we all try to face the overriding issue of our age with respect to the arts: How do Christians most responsibly come to terms with the utter secularization of the arts, without trying to set back history? If Christians stay away from the arts (position 3), godless people have undisputed control of the arts media and can expand their hard-core secularization. If Christians adopt the best artistic forms current (position 2) or try to utilize professional, secular artistry without much conversion, in the church’s missionary outreach (position 1), Christians may be co-opted and adulterated in their cultural expression. If the Christian community tries to develop its own particular style of art (position 4), it runs the risk of being permanently odd, amateurish, and obscurantic.

But the deep secularization of modern art is a fact. Surrealistic painting, by and large, calls into question the sanity of ordinary life and most traditional values. Salvador Dali (born 1904) posited a Freudian universe and painted everything he treated into an erotic, hallucinatory vortex—even when he took biblical themes. The canvases of René Magritte (1898–1967) are fascinating artistic achievements which juxtapose objects in a way as disturbing as the unanswerable koans of Zen Buddhism. Martha Graham’s choreography is also rigorously erotic, reaching for a new dance idiom of mythic power that repudiates the aristocratic niceties and elegant pirouettes of classical ballet. Many great innovators in modern art have been intensely self-conscious of their rejection of a bourgeois, Victorian world view and their commitment to a non-Christian primitivism.

Much contemporary architecture, painting, and instrumental music rightly give Christians pause today, too, because of their hard-bitten secularity. It became possible around 1900 to use concrete and reinforced cement to construct buildings. Under the influence of the Bauhaus and architect LeCorbusier (1887–1965), large buildings of all sorts became standardized into functional shells with unobstructed interior spaces (e.g., movable partitions for walls); practical metals like aluminum, nickel, and chrome intensified the feel of cold brightness inside such structures already occasioned by the profusion of physical and electric light. In effect, office buildings, classrooms, and homes took on the aspect of being factories, which quite naturally provide little personal and private space. Painters like Malevich (1878–1935), late Mondrian (c. 1917–1944), and Josef Albers (1888–1976) use a very restricted alphabet of forms to construct what look like geometric blueprints in paint, and they do it with repetitive ingenuity and tenacity. Serious music, too, builds sounds around a flexible grid of 12 tones that forces imaginative rhythms and resonances back to a kind of mathematical universality. Such rigorous, purist art has a tendency to sterilize life.

An additional complication to the problem of how Christians are to confront both sexually aggressive art and the dehumanizing technocratic style around us is the fact that so much art today is mass produced and mass consumed. A futuristic novel like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) sells hundreds of thousands of copies. A brilliant portrayal of aimless violence as a way of life and death, like Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972), is seen by millions of people. Self-righteous p*rnography like Oh! Calcutta runs for years onstage in London and New York. Mindless entertainment, pop star culture, and films interrupted by paid advertisem*nts train children from youth up on TV. Superb means of mass communication rain secular art upon the earth with an almost brain-washing effect.

Christian families are called upon to face the secularized arts today in the strength of the Holy Spirit (John 16:13) and to show themselves approved of God (2 Tim. 2:15–16). But how can we do that with respect to the arts? The answer is that Christians must first of all become deeply rooted biblically, so that their faith life flowers as a rich plant unafraid in God’s world, rather than as a poor, undernourished stick in the mud. Second, they must study both the nature and the history of art, so they will not be fooled into approving or judging the wrong things.

Let me mention a few examples. The “subject matter” or “topic” of a novel or film provides little clue as to its worth or insight. Seduction can be graphically portrayed by Proverbs 7:6–23, to our edification, or twisted into a scene that dirties and bores our sensibility, as in Last Tango in Paris. It is also a mistake to demand “beauty” and “harmony” from painting and music as if distortion and dissonance violated artistic norms. Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece of Christ’s crucifixion (c. 1510–1515) is grotesque and unpleasant, but an impressive presentation of our Lord’s agony. Schönberg’s atonal Variations for Orchestra (1928) is important music that wakes a listener up musically to the important tensions we really know in our day. “Creativity,” too, is more often a slogan than a sound idea for helping us to judge whether a given painting is truly art or bogus: “creative” can mean gifted men are like God (Gen. 3:4–5!) or the idolization of frenzied experimentation (as certain paint-dripping canvases by disciples of abstract expressionism). If one thinks of art as “creative,” and if “creativity” is colored by the romantic adoration of “artistic genius,” so that the necessary element of craftsmanship in art is neglected, one goes wrong in approaching art.

The most important thing for Christians to understand is that the arts are skillful and thoughtful man-made objects characterized by allusiveness. All the arts—music and sculpture as well as drama and poetry—present an artist’s religious perspective in ambiguity. Art is not by nature a confused matter, but art is by nature a fused presentation of knowledge necessarily rich in suggestion. It is both normal and normative for the arts to be oblique and symbolical in the way they bring things to our attention as spectators, readers, or audience.

If poetry tries to be as straightforward as a roadway sign, it will be poor poetry. If poetry or painting is overly complicated, like a crossword puzzle, it will also be defective. But poetic, painterly, and musical knowledge is not at core “verbal” or “propositional.” Poetry, painting, music, and all the arts present knowledge which can certainly be talked about and analyzed, but the final character of artistic knowledge is that it is nuanceful knowledge.

Calvin Seerveld is senior member in aesthetics at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His book, Rainbows for the Fallen World, was just published by Tuppence Press.

Does evangelical thought have any chance of dominating the great universities as long as it stays on the periphery of intellectual responsibility?

I speak to you as a Christian. Jesus Christ is my Lord and God and Savior and Song, day and night. I can live without food, without drink, without sleep, without air. But I cannot live without him. Without Jesus I would have perished long ago. Without him and his church reconciling man to God, the world would have perished long ago. I live in and on the Bible for long hours every day.The Bible is the source of every good thought and impulse I have. Not a day passes without my crying from the bottom of my heart, “Come, Lord Jesus!” I know he is coming with glory to judge the living and the dead, but in my impatience I sometimes cannot wait, and I find myself in my infirmity crying with David, “How long, Lord?” And I know his kingdom shall have no end.

Nothing is more important or as important in the world today than for the Christians of America to grasp and realize their historic opportunities.

Perhaps never since the Twelve Apostles and Saint Paul has any group of Christians been burdened by Providence with the responsibilities now devolving upon American Christians. Materially, politically, and morally, the Protestants of America especially command resources that are absolutely unprecedented. Spiritually they are in a state of creative ferment.

The Protestants of America today can do more together—not separately, but in sincere cooperation with other Christians—than any other group of Christians to promote the highest interests of man and the spirit. They can effect this in the mass media, in the schools and universities, in the churches themselves, in the seminaries, in individual personal character, in popular literature, in the conduct of business, in the councils of state, in international relations, and in the general quality of life of a whole epoch. The burden of their infinite accountability before God and history can only be carried with at once the deepest joy and the most authentic humility.

Protestantism emphasizes four fundamental truths: (1) the supreme importance of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, as the Word of God; (2) Jesus Christ of Nazareth as the living Lord of Lords and King of Kings, with whom we must, and indeed we can, have a direct personal relationship; (3) justification by faith and not by works, best expressed by Romans 4:5: “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness”; and (4) individual, personal, responsible freedom as the very essence of the dignity of man.

Jesus Christ will not be revealed as the Light of the World, his wonderful light will not shine in the awful darkness of our world, until the American evangelicals—on whom so much depends today—integrate into themselves, and get themselves integrated into, the unity and continuity of the cumulative Christian tradition. For Christ has so shone on many souls and many cultures throughout history—not on today’s evangelicals only.

This is the spiritual side; there is also an intellectual side. In the nature of the case, evangelization is always mortal man’s most important task. For proud and rebellious and self-sufficient man (and pride and rebellion and self-sufficiency are the same thing) to be brought to his knees and to tears before the actual majesty and grace and power of Jesus Christ—this is the greatest event that can happen to any man. Those who are engaged in mediating this event, the evangelists, are God’s supreme heralds.

But we are endowed not only with a soul and a will to be saved; we are also endowed with a reason to be sharpened and satisfied. This reason wonders about everything, including God. We are to seek and love and worship the Lord our God with all our strength and all our mind. We argue and reason with one another all the time. Indeed, every sentence and discourse is a product of reason. It is therefore neither a shame nor a sin to discipline and cultivate our reason to the utmost; it is a necessity, it is a duty, it is an honor to do so.

If, therefore, evangelization is the most important task, what follows immediately is to find out exactly what is happening to the mind and the spirit in the schools and universities. That—not politics, not economics, not the quest of comfort and security and ease—is in second place. A Christian will be profoundly disturbed once he discovers there is a total divorce between mind and spirit in the schools and universities, which divides between the perfection of thought and the perfection of soul and character; between intellectual sophistication and the spiritual worth of the individual human person; between reason and faith; between the pride of knowledge and the contrition of heart consequent upon being a mere creature. When he realizes that Jesus Christ is less at home on the campuses of the great universities in Europe and America today than almost anywhere else, he must ask what can be done to recapture them. The universities would not have come into being in the first place without Christ.

What can the poor church, even at its best, do? What can evangelization, even at its most inspired, do? What can the poor family, even at its purest and noblest, do? Children spend between 15 and 20 years of their lives, indeed the most formative period of their lives, in schools and colleges in an atmosphere of formal denial of any relevance of God and spirit and soul and faith to the formation of their minds. The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.

The church and the family are already encumbered with their own strains and ordeals. They are fighting a losing battle in terms of the university’s bearing upon the spiritual health and wholeness of youth. All the preaching in the world, and all the loving care of even the best parents, will amount to little or nothing so long as what children are exposed to day in and day out virtually cancels out what they hear and see and learn at home and in the church. The problem of the school and university, therefore, is the most critical problem afflicting Western civilization.

So far as the university is concerned, I have no patience with piety alone. I want the most rigorous intellectual training; I want the perfection of the mind. Equally, I have no patience with reason alone. I want the salvation of the soul; I want the fear of the Lord. I want at least neutrality with respect to the knowledge of Jesus Christ. I crave to see an institution that will produce as many saints as Nobel Prize winners, one in which, while producing in every field the finest works of thought and learning in the world, Jesus Christ will be at home—in every dormitory and lecture hall and library and laboratory. But this is impossible today, and why it is impossible is the most important question.

The sciences are flourishing as never before. May they keep on flourishing and exploding and discovering! The diversity and quality of the intellectual fare available to university students is absolutely unprecedented in history. There is nothing Western civilization can be more proud of than its great universities.

But I am worried about the humanities—about philosophy, psychology, art, history, literature, sociology, the interpretation of man as to his nature and his destiny. It is in these realms that the spirit, the fundamental attitude, and the whole outlook on life—even for the scientist himself—are formed and set. But in terms of content and substance, what are the dominant philosophies in the humanities today in Europe and America?

For the most part they are materialism and hedonism, naturalism and rationalism, relativism and Freudianism. There is a great deal of cynicism and nihilism, indifference and atheism, linguistic analysis and radical obfuscation. We find immanentism and the absence of a sense of mystery or of wonder or of a sense of tragedy. There is humanism and self-sufficiency, the worship of the future rather than something above and outside and judging past, present, and future. We see the relative decay of the classics, the uncritical worship of everything new and modern and different. There prevails a false conception of progress, and an uncritical and almost childish optimism, an uncritical and morbid pessimism, and the will to power and domination. All of these are just so many modes of self-worship. Is it any wonder there is so much disorder in the world?

The state of the mind and the spirit in the universities lies at the heart of all the problems facing Western civilization. We see these as general nervousness and restlessness, the dearth of grace and beauty and quiet and peace of soul, the manifold blemishes and perversions of personal character. And we see problems of the family and of social relations in general, problems of economics and politics, problems of the media, problems affecting the school and the church, problems in the international order. These are all at the heart of the crisis in Western civilization.

It is totally vain, indeed it is childish, to tackle these problems as though all were well in morals and in the fundamental orientation of the will and mind, as well as in the great halls of learning. The leaders in all these realms come from the universities. The decisive question is: What are they fed—intellectually, morally, spiritually, personally—during the 15 or 20 years they spend in school and university? It is there that the foundations of character and mind and outlook and conviction and attitude and spirit are laid. To paraphrase a biblical precept, if the wrong foundations are laid, or if the right foundations are vitiated or undermined, “what can the righteous do?” (Ps. 11:3).

At this point, of course, a charge of self-righteousness will be leveled. But the question is so momentous that it must be vigorously raised even at the risk of this charge and a dozen other charges and misunderstandings.

As Christ is the Light of the World, his light must shine and be brought to bear upon the problem of the formation of the mind. That investigation will have to be accomplished with the utmost discretion and humility; it can only be carried out by men of prayer and faith. But once the light of Christ is shed on this study, the light the study itself will shed on all problems facing the Western world will be incalculable.

This is not a mechanical thing, nor is it a question of reforming the university; the university only reflects the mind of contemporary culture. We are dealing here with a thoroughgoing critique—from the point of view of Jesus Christ—of Western civilization’s highest contemporary values. This is what lends the task its grandeur and its supreme responsibility.

Believe me, the mind today is in profound trouble—perhaps more than ever before. How to order the mind on sound Christian principles at the very heart of where it is formed and informed, in the universities, is one of the two greatest themes that can be considered. This theme must engage us with the utmost urgency as we live between the First and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and while human society continues to be under the sway of sin and corruption.

Is it necessary to sacrifice or neglect Jesus in order to create and excel intellectually? Must learning and research be sacrificed and neglected in order to give all of life to Jesus? Is self-giving to scholarship and learning incompatible with self-giving to Jesus Christ? These are the ultimate questions—but beware of thinking they admit of glib answers. I warn you: the right answers could be most disturbing.

But if Christians do not care for the intellectual health of their children and for the fate of their own civilization—a health and a fate so inextricably bound up with the state of the mind and spirit in the universities—who is going to care? The task is gigantic. For it to be accomplished as I believe Christ himself would want it to be accomplished, people must be set on fire for it. It is not enough to be set on fire for evangelization alone.

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas?

It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of anti-intellectualism. For example, I say this different spirit, so far as philosophy alone—the most important domain for thought and intellect—is concerned, must see the tremendous value of spending an entire year doing nothing but poring intensely over the Republic or the Sophist of Plato, or two years over the Metaphysics or the Ethics of Aristotle, or three years over the City of God of Augustine. But if a start is made now on a crash program in this and other domains, it will take at least a century to catch up with the Harvards and Tübingens and the Sorbonnes—and by then where will these universities be? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

Responsible Christians face two tasks—saving the soul and saving the mind. I use “soul” and “mind” here without definition, but I can define them in precise, philosophical-theological terms. The mind is desperately disordered today. I plead for a tiny fraction of Christian care to be extended to the mind, too. If it is the will of the Holy Ghost that we attend to the soul, it is certainly not his will that we neglect the mind. No civilization can endure with its mind as confused and disordered as ours is today. All our ills stem proximately from the false philosophies that have been let loose in the world and that are now being taught in the universities. Save the university and Western civilization is saved, and therewith the world.

What could be more wonderful than for evangelicals to aim at achieving under God and according to God’s own pace the two-fold miracle of evangelizing the great universities and intellectualizing the great evangelical movement? These two things are absolutely impossible; and yet because they are at the same time absolutely needed, God can make them absolutely possible. Every self-defeating attitude stems originally from the Devil. It cannot be willed by the Holy Ghost.

So anti-intellectualism is an absolutely self-defeating attitude. The great universities control the mind of the world. Therefore, how can evangelism consider its task accomplished if it leaves the universities unevangelized? And how can evangelism evangelize the university if it cannot speak to the university? And how can it speak to the university if it is not itself already intellectualized?

Evangelism thus must first intellectualize itself to be able to speak to the university and, therefore, to be able to evangelize the university and, therefore, to save the world. This is the greatest task, the historic task, the most needed task, the task—required loud and clear by the Holy Ghost himself—to which evangelicals must humbly address themselves.

If this should happen, think of the infinite joy that would overflow our hearts. Who, then, would not join with David in singing: “Bless the Lord O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul; and forget not all his benefits … I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.” (Psalms 103:1–2; 104:33).

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

It has established itself in American higher education by virtue of its unique contributions to the church.

When a certain kind of college has produced 75 percent of all evangelical missionaries on the field today, we are compelled to take notice.

And when we learn that that college movement is now facing major decisions about programs and majors, about its relation to advanced education and to public education, and about its commitment to “whole man” education through Christocentric general education courses, we become all the more intrigued.

These facts about today’s Bible colleges call us to consider why this movement arose, what claim it can lay to contributing significantly, and where it plans to go.

But first, a couple of definitions. The Bible colleges of North America differ from secular schools in taking evangelical doctrine seriously. As a result they offer three things: classes in Bible and Christian ministry, a Christian philosophy and life, and a concern for deep spiritual life on campus. In this they are like the Christian liberal arts colleges.

They differ from these sister colleges, however, in having a more focused interest in training their students for vocational Christian ministry. The extent to which they do this depends on the Bible college. Perhaps these distinctions will become clearer as we glance at how the movement came into being.

In 1882, reconstruction after the Civil War was well under way. Chester Arthur had just become president when James Garfield was assassinated. Dwight L. Moody looked back on his first decade of evangelistic work, and Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute was in its first year.

The federal government had been giving public higher education substantial financial grants since the Morrill Act in 1862, and, with the second Morrill Act in 1890, would do even more. These two acts may be the nineteenth century’s most important federal legislation involving schools. The public state university was now an established fact.

Meanwhile, a weakening of theology in established seminaries and the concerns of practical and biblical Christianity emerging from recent revivals gave birth to the early stages of the Bible college movement. In 1880, Dr. A. B. Simpson of the Christian and Missionary Alliance wrote an editorial arguing for a college to train missionaries. In 1882 Nyack Missionary College opened its doors in New York City with 12 students and two teachers. One year later, Emma Dryer inaugurated what were known as the “May Institutes” as a part of D. L. Moody’s Chicago Bible Work. And in 1886 the Moody Bible Institute was formed (though that name was not assumed until 14 years later).

Today there are well over 200 Bible colleges and Bible institutes in North America. They are represented in the arena of American higher education by the American Association of Bible Colleges with a membership of 68 accredited, 15 candidate, and several applicant schools. Dr. S. A. Witmer defines the Bible college as “an educational institution whose principal purpose is to prepare students for church vocation or Christian ministries through a program of biblical and practical education.” All the schools in the AABC adhere to this commitment, though with varying levels of tenacity.

Accomplishments

Before examining the two alternatives on educational policy presently facing these schools, it is important to take a frank look at what they have accomplished in the first century of their existence.

First, they have maintained their distinctives. Some think a Bible college is merely a Bible institute on its way to becoming a liberal arts college, and that is accurate for a few. But important differences separate Bible colleges from Christian liberal arts colleges. They center in curriculum, size, and objectives. (1) While the Bible college focuses primarily on majors leading to various kinds of Christian ministry, the Christian liberal arts college offers majors in a variety of vocations. (2) The average Bible college is probably only half the size of the Christian liberal arts college. (3) But primarily, the difference lies in objectives, since the primary goal of the Bible college is preparation for Christian service vocations, while the Christian liberal arts college offers general education for all vocations with heavy emphasis on arts and sciences.

Second, we need to consider the academic standing of Bible colleges. Since the founding of the American Association of Bible Colleges in 1947, the quality of their faculties has steadily increased. Statistics for 1979 show that faculty in member schools have studied an average of almost eight years beyond the secondary level. Further, library holdings in accredited schools reflect an average of about thirty-six thousand volumes per institution with even the small schools (250 students and under) showing holdings of over twenty-five thousand volumes.

In addition, an increasing number of Bible college graduates are going on to graduate school, especially seminary. In recent research by Richard Patterson at Winnipeg Theological Seminary, 70 percent of the AABC schools answered yes to the question “Do you have a preseminary major?” Sixty percent of the respondents invited seminary representatives to recruit on campus, and over 50 percent felt positive about the openness of seminaries to Bible college graduates.

These graduates do well in seminary. In the early 1970s I analyzed the graduates of 10 evangelical seminaries, comparing type of undergraduate education with graduate grade point averages. Bible college graduates did better than the graduates of secular universities and as well as the graduates of Christian liberal arts colleges.

Third, and most important, the Bible college movement has an astonishing record in producing men and women who are now serving as pastors, Christian teachers, and leaders in other forms of ministry. To see the significance of this, we must recall that although there are 11.4 million college and university students in the United States, there are only 30,308 enrolled in all institutions accredited by the AABC. Neither the size of this movement nor its public recognition prepares one for the evidence of its effect, especially concerning world evangelization.

Wesley A. Olsen is quoted in the fall 1967 Evangelical Missions Quarterly as noting that statistically “even today the majority of missionaries on the field had some of their training at Bible institutes and Bible colleges.” He adds that these men and women fought and won their battles not in the technical scholastic arena, but “in the fields of pulpit and pen, and in the primitive mission wilderness.”

The same holds true today. Missiologist Herbert Kane has written that “the lion’s share” of evangelical missionaries now on the field has been produced by the Bible college movement. He estimates that the figure may be over 75 percent.

As early as 1951 Frank Gaebelein stated that Bible colleges have been exercising a vital, and in fact, in foreign missions, a “crucial significance.” In 1974 present CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor Kenneth Kantzer concluded of Bible colleges, “In the twentieth century they have taken the place, for many evangelicals, of the state university system of higher education. I think it is right that anyone who is evangelical and who believes in higher education, should look with a clear, hard, careful eye at the schools which have assumed this role.…”

Clearly Bible colleges have become a substantial, effective movement.

Growing Edge

What issues are in ferment in today’s Bible colleges as they gear up for the future? To examine the most crucial discussion we can start with a comment by Karen D’Arezzo in her article last fall in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (Nov. 2, 1979). She noted that “the primary distinctive of the Christian college is its integration of faith and learning. It is based on the principle that the God of the Bible is a God of truth; therefore, ‘all truth is dependent on God’s truth.’” I agree. In any school the strength of biblical studies and the theological sophistication of the entire faculty are foundational to achieving that “primary distinctive.” Without doubt Bible colleges, in contrast to Christian liberal arts colleges, tend to be weakest in the area of general education. Discussions not only with Christian colleges, but also between Bible colleges, are dealing with this weakness extensively today.

Can Bible colleges therefore provide the integrative process necessary to whole-man education? S. A. Witmer, writing chapter 7 in Gaebelein’s book, Christian Education in a Democracy, thought so in 1951; the holistic thrust of Bible colleges has strengthened considerably since then. He says, “Bound neither by the graveclothes of classicism nor the chains of empirical science, Bible-college education makes use of the abiding elements of both while providing an integrated education for the whole man.”

The reverse problem exists in many Christian liberal arts colleges, where faculty brilliantly schooled in some specialization such as psychology or chemistry may have little understanding of the theistic implications of their subjects. As for the student making the integration on his own, six or eight hours of Bible survey courses scattered across four years will probably not equip him sufficiently to serve the church or function theologically in contemporary culture.

It is most difficult, of course, to generalize on quality. Practice among Christian liberal arts colleges varies widely concerning required Bible content in the curriculum. The same is true of Bible college commitment to the liberating necessity of general education and an openness to change. Accreditation of colleges (whichever category) by a regional association tells us little since the standards of the associations still vary greatly.

One can detect, however, a less than subtle difference among AABC member schools between what I wish to call “progressive Bible colleges” and “traditional Bible colleges.” I spelled out this difference in detail in an article in Communicare, Fall 1976, but here is a brief description: The traditional Bible college is marked by an exclusive commitment to vocational Christian ministry; a single and simple curriculum; an emphasis on terminal training; and complete separation from secular education.

The progressive Bible college, by contrast, retains a primary commitment to vocational Christian ministry without exclusively restricting itself to professional ministerial programs. It defines “ministry” more broadly, offering a wider range of majors under that umbrella. The progressive school emphasizes preparatory training (an approach that is gaining growing support, but one still affirmed by fewer than 50 percent of the AABC institutions). Progressive Bible colleges offer a serious commitment to “whole man” education, attempting to reflect a Christocentric and bibliocentric world view in all aspects of institutional life. Finally, progressive institutions pursue relationships with public education. Many Bible college educators are actively involved in interinstitutional cooperation, state and regional projects, and local joint ventures such as lecture series or fine arts festivals.

Progressive Bible college leaders push their institutions to join consortia; seek licensing where applicable; move on to the highest possible levels of accreditation; join state and national professional organizations at professorial and administrative levels; and through it all affirm that the fear of the Lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom.

Future of Bible Colleges

We all know the statistics are gloomy for small private colleges: half of the 113 colleges that closed between spring 1970 and fall 1976 were church related. Since the smaller the size of the student body and endowment the greater the likelihood of the institution’s closing, the Bible college must recognize its vulnerability. An AABC report on student recruitment offers mixed data: “Fortunately, the Bible college is not linked to national trends as strongly as the conventional liberal arts college or university. Their enrollments depend less on the decline of the World War II baby boom than on the growth of the evangelical church. Even so, the current situation does not allow for complacency.”

Furthermore, an AABC survey in 1974–75 showed that entering students are not so settled on distinctives traditional in Bible colleges. They are less likely to be committed in the early stages of their education to full-time Christian ministry, less excited over the specialized ministry programs, less certain that when they graduate they will find opportunities for appropriate ministry available, and less certain about God’s specific call and the gifts he has given them.

Perhaps the most determinative answer to the question about the future of the Bible college movement has to do with the future of the AABC’s leadership. The present executive director will be retiring and the board of the association must make some decisions about its direction over the next two decades. The association has grown significantly in membership recently, and has been recognized by the Council on Postsecondary Accreditation. Yet the division in philosophy is apparent. Will the movement continue to expand on the gains of the last 33 years?

In 1957 Enoch Dyrness said, “The Bible school movement has really come of age and achieved its rightful place in American higher education.” I’m not so sure. The battle goes on and as society changes, educational institutions change. In the Bible college the history is glorious. But the decade of the eighties presents its own pressures; the image of an updated progressive Bible college must be communicated much more clearly than in the past. Ten years ago in this magazine Everett Cattell spelled out the options: “We must face the facts. If we evangelicals are to have youth prepared to live in a society in which Christians are increasingly a minority and are surrounded with increasing paganism, they must, in addition to a personal experience of Christ, which is basic, have an intellectual understanding of their faith and its relation to the arts and sciences.… Keeping the evangelical colleges alive and relevant is a life-and-death matter.”

He is even more right today than he was then—about both the Christian liberal arts college and the Bible college. Neither should be sacrificed on the altar of the other, for the church needs the leaders both provide.

Who Forgot The Oil?

Tailor made, perfectly manicured,

He was beamed into a thousand homes

At the flick of a switch.

A polished presentation

And flawless eloquence;

But the glistening on his brow

Was only sweat.

Tell me:

Is the reflection of studio lights

Any substitute for the shekinah?

Has charisma replaced the charismata?

STEVE BROWN

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Its future must entail more than mere survival—it will require excellence.

Can a college really die? The answer is an emphatic “yes.”

A few years ago I was on the campus at Parsons College in Iowa, a school enjoying unprecedented success. Buildings were under construction, enrollment was booming, faculty salaries were among the highest in the nation as the school known as “Last Chance U” capitalized on a unique and highly publicized educational program for academic underachievers.

But then the college encountered mounting problems, and it finally had to close. When I visited the campus several years later, I found a barricade blocking the main entrance. An ugly snow fence circled the grounds and signs were posted warning trespassers. Weeds had taken over and I noticed broken windows in many of the empty buildings. It was a dismal scene. The college was dead.

I thought of the many students whose plans had been shattered, of faculty members whose careers had been interrupted, of families whose lives had been disrupted. To one who has spent his entire adult life in higher education it was heartbreaking.

Yet today many private colleges, including some well-known Christian schools, face impending and lamentable death. By 1990 some long-established Christian schools will be but a memory while others will be dramatically altered. Some alumni will no longer have an alma mater and other graduates will bemoan the fact that their school is no longer distinctively Christian.

Finances

Projections just released by the National Center for Educational Statistics predict that there will be 500,000 fewer college students nationwide in 1988 than in 1979. The center also projects that the average enrollment in private colleges will be down by 7.4 percent by 1988. In addition, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects a dramatic decline in high school seniors between 1979 and 1995.

On a state-by-state basis, the commission figures also cause concern. A band of states from New York westward to Illinois will all show a striking decline in high school graduates in the next 15 years (New York, 42 percent; Pennsylvania, 37 percent; Ohio, 31 percent; Michigan, 31 percent; Illinois, 31 percent). Recognizing that many of the established Christian colleges are located in these states, the prospects for stable enrollment become discouraging since obviously we cannot add to the numbers by creating instant teen-agers.

Economic recession, double-digit inflation, an energy crisis, and increasing demands by state and federal governments have alerted, but hardly prepared schools for the grim days ahead. The National Institute for Education has recently estimated that goods and services which cost the typical college approximately $1,800 in 1979 will cost $3,450 by 1989.

The Christian college must face these realities. Most, if not all, Christian schools depend on tuition and fee income to meet the major part of their annual operating expenses. Fewer students mean less income—and at a time when costs are spiraling. Reductions in program or personnel are difficult because most small colleges have little “excess” in their operation. A significant budget reduction at a small college can cut into the heart of a program and seriously erode the quality of education. Thus it is possible for a fragile institution to try harder but become progressively weaker.

A number of Christian schools have recently announced that they are “holding their own” or that they finished the year “in the black.” This should not lead to false optimism. A school can adopt survival methods to get through one year that guarantee a future worse than the present. Temporary expedients lead to potential disaster: the withholding of salary increases, the transfer of endowment funds to operating expenses, or the curtailment of significant programs or services may create momentary euphoria but also may create a time bomb waiting to explode.

Few Christian colleges have monetary reserves to face a serious financial emergency. Contingency accounts are almost unknown in a day when just about everyone is living hand-to-mouth. But emergencies do occur.

Not many Christian colleges have contemplated the most serious contingency of all—the loss of public funds designated for student scholarships. What college could survive the loss of state scholarship funds, Veterans Administration, and social security benefits? Or the elimination of National Direct Student Loans and Work-Study programs, or withdrawal of Basic Opportunity and other government financial grants designated for students? Yet this may well happen.

But although the government might curtail financial aid programs, it is more likely that a Christian school would find the controls accompanying government funds so intolerable that it would voluntarily withdraw from the programs. There is no assurance that this action would bring freedom from government interference, but it certainly would create financial disaster on the local campus. Thus, Christian colleges may one day find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

Possible Solutions

Schools could respond in a variety of ways. Some could develop innovative programs designed to attract a new clientele. But there is not much new in higher education and seldom do such programs prove to be educationally sound and financially feasible. Some Christian colleges may decide to become “community” schools and serve the local geographical area. While it may be exciting to think about achieving fiscal stability and at the same time extending the evangelical outreach, it just does not work that way. The wholesale influx of students who are either neutral or hostile to spiritual things is not designed to enhance the spiritual ministry of any Christian college.

A college might launch a sophisticated public relations campaign where Madison Avenue techniques are used to “tell the story.” Unfortunately, very few stories are unique enough to make a difference. The similarity of Christian college advertisem*nts is distressing. Names of schools could be interchanged and the readers would scarcely notice. Advertising is important, but the more important thing is to have something to say.

Christian students and their parents have every right to ask if a Christian college education is really worth the extra investment and family sacrifice. Increasingly they will probe behind the public relations to determine if claims for excellence can be substantiated. They will want to know the hard facts about academic excellence and spiritual commitment. They will seek to explore the “heart” of an institution and will not be content with the façade.

The Key

There are no short cuts to success. I believe the key not only to survival but to excellence in the 1980s and beyond is a satisfied student. When a Christian student understands the special mission of the college, when he experiences a first-rate educational program, when he has sound opportunities for spiritual growth and development, and when he is in contact with people on campus who consistently demonstrate Christian love and concern, it is then that a student can expect a satisfying experience.

Student satisfaction has a “snowballing” effect. Satisfied students mean happy families who appreciate the college and spread the good word. Satisfied students mean loyal alumni who care. Satisfied students mean constituents who believe because of what they hear and see. And student satisfaction depends largely on the integrity of the institution: its programs and its people.

Institutional integrity demands a clear sense of identity and purpose. The Christian college must define and articulate what it is and what it does. It matters little if the school specializes in work-study, biblical concentration, technological education, or the liberal arts; it must determine its own unique role in the educational spectrum, and concentrate efforts there. And as a Christian school there must be an uncompromising institutional commitment to biblical truth and the lordship of Jesus Christ.

But a statement of mission alone is not enough. There must also be a total program, both in and out of the classroom, which validates claims the institution makes for itself. Integrity demands that a Christian college do only what it can do well. “Selective excellence” becomes essential. Realistically, students are the first to know when deeds do not correspond with lofty phrases. A disillusioned student is rarely satisfied.

Some years ago the dean of a denominational college that had been generously supported through the years by a politically conservative philanthropist said to me, “I hope our philanthropist friend never comes on campus and sees for himself what is really going on here.” It was unfortunate for the college that the donor did visit, did see for himself, and did abruptly terminate his financial support. But the greater tragedy was that the historic mission of the college had become merely hollow words.

Institutional integrity can rise no higher than the personal integrity of the key people involved. College trustees must be more than mere figureheads or rubber stamps. They must strive to understand the uniqueness of Christian higher education and to know their own institution intimately. They must establish sound policies and yet keep “hands off” the ongoing day-to-day administration. They must be willing to work, to give, and to pray for the success of the college they serve.

Administrators must not only be skillful in institutional management, but they must also be people of personal conviction and integrity. They must have a dedication of purpose and a consistency of life that all can see. Ability alone is not enough. There must be evidence of spiritual maturity and a willingness to commit every aspect of life, on the job and off, to the pervasive care of God’s Spirit.

Faculty and staff members represent the most significant influence in the life of the developing college student. People are far more important than facilities, and a good faculty is essential to a good college. Christian faculty members have two basic responsibilities—to teach well and to serve as spiritual exemplars to maturing young people. That is, they must be consistent role models both in and out of the classroom.

The future of the Christian college must entail more than mere survival. The goal should be survival with excellence. This demands the utmost in stewardship and commitment. It means that colleges must stand firm, refusing to compromise their distinctive spiritual mission. It means the development of solid educational programs that command respect in academic circles. It requires attention to the development of people that results in knowledgeable and dedicated trustees along with competent and committed administrators, faculty, and staff. And it means a basic institutional integrity that will be reflected in satisfied students, loyal alumni, and enthusiastic and generous constituents.

Some schools, limited in number, seem to have responded to the challenge and are ready to tackle the future with confidence. Unfortunately, others do not appear to be good prospects for survival. Some undoubtedly will die while others may linger on, but without distinction. Any Christian college that is just “hanging on” by virtue of educational fads, novel programs, or compromises over spiritual principle seems a prime prospect for eventual failure.

As this new era dawns, Christian colleges across the land face their most challenging struggle, one that involves not only the colleges themselves, but the entire Christian community. The stakes are very high. Evangelicals cannot just stand on the sideline and watch. The Christian college that refuses to compromise its historic purpose, exhibits integrity in its program, and demonstrates stewardship in its use of resources deserves the full support of the evangelical community. The call to action is now.

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Their aim was to measure all human knowledge by the standard of biblical truth and values.

T. s. eliot once observed that “we must derive our theory of education from our philosophy of life. The problem turns out to be a religious problem.” There has never been a better example of education growing out of a philosophy of life than the one provided by the Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Though not always credited with an enthusiasm for learning, the Puritans were among history’s staunchest champions of education. No other English-speaking colonizers established higher education as soon as did the Puritans after their arrival in Massachusetts Bay. Already in 1636 the General Court voted four hundred pounds “towards a school or college.” Thus established, Harvard College was kept alive during its early years partly through the sacrifice of farmers, who contributed wheat to support teachers and students.

This concern for education was carried to America from the European Reformation. Calvin established a flourishing university in Geneva, and Luther appealed to the magistrates of Germany to insure universal public education. In England the number of grammar schools doubled while the Puritans were in their ascendancy.

Such actions merely demonstrate that the Puritans practiced what they preached, and were rooted in the thinking of the Reformers on the Continent. Luther’s opinion, for example, was that “you parents cannot prepare a more dependable treasure for your children than an education in the liberal arts” (Table Talk).

In America, the document New England’s First Fruits (1643) begins, “After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the Civil government: one of the next things we longed for, and looked after, was to advance learning and perpetuate it to Posterity.” Cotton Mather called that act “the best thing that ever New-England thought upon,” adding that the Puritans “were willing to let the richer colonies, which retained the ways of the Church of England, see ‘how much true religion was a friend unto good literature’” (Magnalia Christi Americana).

Puritan views on education are among the greatest of all their legacies. Only to our own detriment can we ignore what they said on the topic.

The ideal of an educated Christian mind has always needed defense against anti-intellectual forces within the Christian church. In the seventeenth century, radical Protestants known in England as sectaries and in America as antinomians kept up a running attack against Puritans and others who extolled the value of education and the importance of human reason. “I had rather hear such a one that speaks from the mere motion of the spirit, without any study at all, than any of your learned scholars, although he may be fuller of Scripture,” declared an antinomian in the hearing of Captain Johnson.

The Puritans consistently defended the cause of learning against such attacks upon the mind. The English Puritan Richard Baxter believed that “education is God’s ordinary way for the conveyance of his grace, and ought no more to be set in opposition to the Spirit than the preaching of the Word.” John Cotton claimed that although “knowledge is no knowledge without zeal,” yet “zeal is but a wild-fire without knowledge.” “Faith is grounded upon knowledge,” said Samuel Willard, and “for this reason it is said that without knowledge the mind of man cannot be good, and that a people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”

Neither did the Puritans’ faith in the Bible’s authority lead them to believe human reason was unimportant. Harvard’s first college laws required not only that students be able to read the Scriptures, but also “to Resolve them Logically.” A hint of what this entailed is suggested by Baxter’s description of instances when a Christian must use reason: “We must use our best Reason … to know which are the true Canonical Scriptures …, to expound the text, to Translate truly …, to gather just and certain inferences from Scripture assertions; to apply general rules to particular Cases, in matters of Doctrine, Worship, Discipline, and Ordinary Practice.”

To say the Puritans treasured an educated mind is not to imply they found that ideal easy to attain. The obstacles to it were the same then as now: mental laziness, the complacency of ignorance, the pressures of time, and the temptation to amass money instead of paying for an education. Puritan leaders, at least, valued an educated mind over material riches. Cotton Mather admonished his congregation with the comment, “If your main concern be to get the Riches of this World unto them, it looks very suspiciously, as if you were yourselves the People of this World, whose Portion is only in this life” (“What the Pious Parent Wishes”).

John Milton paid this moving tribute to his father as he neared the completion of his education: “For, father, you did not enjoin me to go where the broad way lies open, where money slides more easily into the hand, and the golden hope of piling up wealth shines bright and sure …, desiring rather that my mind should be cultivated and enriched.… What greater wealth could a father have given …, though he had given all things except heaven?” (“To My Father”).

Setting the right priority of values has been the hidden agenda for every generation of Christians. In a day of relatively modest material means, many Puritans showed by their actions that they valued learning above possessions. Christians in our affluent Western culture today have not always risen as high.

The Christian Goal of Education

Albert Einstein once remarked that we live in a day of perfect means and confused goals. Such a charge cannot be laid at the door of the Puritans. The strength of their educational theory was that they knew what education was for: their primary goal was Christian growth.

The statutes of Emmanuel College, perhaps most Puritan of Cambridge University colleges, stated, “There are three things which above all we desire all the Fellows of this College to attend to, to wit the worship of God, the increase of the faith, and probity of morals.”

American Puritans voiced the same goals. The immediate occasion of the founding of Harvard was the Puritan determination not “to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust” (New England’s First Fruits). One rule observed in the college was: “Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, John 17:3, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.” One of the most famous education acts ever passed in America, in establishing free public education in Massachusetts (1647), gave as the reason for wanting a literate public the wish to foil a “chief project of ye old deluder Satan to keep men from the knowledge of ye Scriptures.”

It is obvious the Puritans would be shocked by secular education devoid of religious purpose. In their view, such an education would lack the most essential ingredient. “For we certainly want to provide not only for our children’s bellies,” wrote Luther, “but for their souls as well. At least this is what truly Christian parents would say about it” (letter to the Councilmen of Germany). Calvin wrote that “a knowledge of all the sciences is mere smoke, where the heavenly science of Christ is wanting” (commentary on 1 Cor. 1:20).

Given this religious conception of education, the Puritans naturally made the study of the Bible and Christian doctrine central in their curriculum. The practice can be traced right back to Luther, who wrote, “Above, all, the foremost reading for everybody, both in the universities and in the schools, should be Holy Scripture.… I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not supreme.” At Harvard the rule was that “every one shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day, that he shall be ready to give such an account of his proficiency therein … as his Tutor shall require, … seeing the entrance of the word giveth light.”

The Puritans’ aim in the classroom was to measure all human knowledge by the standard of biblical truth. Although Milton’s proposed curriculum contains both classical and Christian readings, the works of writers like Plato and Plutarch are subjected finally to “the determinate sentence of David or Solomon, or the evangels and apostolic scriptures” (Of Education). Thomas Hall wrote that “we must … bring humane learning home to Divinity, to be pruned and pared with spiritual wisdom.” The integration of faith and learning one hears so much about in Christian education today is not new. It is an ideal with a distinguished ancestry, partly Puritan, and one can only regret that it has so rarely been strongly practiced in the intervening centuries.

The classic statement of the Christian goal of education appears in Milton’s famous definition of education: “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him” (Of Education). Milton defines education in terms of what it accomplishes. There may be many ways to achieve a Christian education—but in the meantime we had better not lose sight of what it is. In Milton’s view, education is not what people so often reduce it to: completing a certain number of courses, writing the requisite number of papers, “getting a requirement out of the way,” or acquiring a degree (though perhaps not an education). Milton the educator is less interested in how much a person knows than in the kind of person he or she is in the process of becoming.

In Milton’s definition, the goal of education focuses on a person’s relationship to God. Properly conducted, a person’s education makes him or her a better Christian. Milton even describes education as a process of sanctification when he writes that the aim is “to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.” We customarily limit sanctification to moral and spiritual progress, but surely becoming like God means coming to share God’s love of truth and beauty as well as his holiness.

The Puritans kept the religious goal of education clearly in view. Our modern tendency is to wonder how they dared to think so optimistically about the ability of education to mold a Christian character. I suspect the Puritans would wonder how our century has dared to expect so much less than that from education.

A Complete and Generous Education

The Puritan emphasis on the Christian element in education will surprise no one. But that emphasis is only half the picture; the other half is not so well known. While the aim of Puritan education was religious, its content was established to provide an educated clergy; the resulting institution was neither a Bible school nor a seminary but a college.

This concern for a broad education in all subjects can be traced back to the early Reformers. “If I had children and could manage it,” Luther wrote to the Councilmen of Germany, “I would have them study not only languages and history, but also singing and music together with the whole of mathematics.” Luther observed that, “The ancient Greeks trained their children in these disciplines,” and “they grew up to be people of wondrous ability, subsequently fit for everything.” “Fit for everything” has always been the goal of liberal arts education, as distinct from vocational training.

For Protestants such as Luther, no education was complete if it included only religious knowledge. Philip Melanchthon put the case succinctly: “For some teach absolutely nothing out of the Sacred Scriptures; some teach the children absolutely nothing but the Sacred Scriptures; both of which are not to be tolerated.”

Although the aim of education in Calvin’s university was religious, the content of the curriculum was broad. Of 27 weekly lectures, 3 were in theology, 8 in Hebrew and the Old Testament, 3 in ethics, 5 in Greek orators and poets, 3 in physics and mathematics, and 5 in dialectic and rhetoric. Twenty years before the founding of the university, Calvin expressed the view that “the Word of God indeed is the foundation of all learning, but the liberal arts are aids to the full knowledge of the Word and are not to be despised.”

We might expect that as the early American settlers struggled with the wilderness for their survival they would have been totally indifferent to the liberal arts, but the reverse is true. Cotton Mather praised president Charles Chauncy of Harvard for “how constantly he expounded the Scriptures to them in the College Hall” and “how learnedly he … conveyed all the liberal arts unto those that sat at his feet.” The ministerial students at Harvard not only learned to read the Bible in its original languages and to expound its theology, they also studied mathematics, astronomy, physics, botany, chemistry, philosophy, history, and medicine.

The Puritan ideal was a comprehensive study of human knowledge in all its branches within a context of biblical revelation. Such an integration of human knowledge with the Bible is captured in a Harvard thesis of 1670 that describes the seven liberal arts as “a circle of seven sections of which the center is God.”

Since all truth is God’s truth, it is ultimately one. The Puritans thus had a foundation for seeing the interrelatedness of all academic subjects that makes modern versions of interdisciplinary courses look superficial. Samuel Mather commented that “all the arts are nothing else but the beams and rays of the Wisdom of the first Being in the Creatures, shining, and reflecting thence, upon the glass of man’s understanding; and as from Him they come, so to Him they tend. Hence there is an affinity and kindred of Arts. One makes use of another, one serves to another, till they all reach and return to Him.”

In sum, the Puritan ideal in learning was liberal arts education; its goal was a capable and qualified person. No statement of that ideal can rival Milton’s: “I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war” (Of Education).

The heart of Milton’s definition is that a complete education is one that frees a person to perform “all the offices, both private and public.” A liberal education is comprehensive. It prepares a person to do well all that he or she may be called to do in life. Learning a certain amount of information will not by itself constitute a liberal education; such knowledge becomes worthwhile only as it is instrumental in forming a qualified person. The effects of a good education, according to Milton, are twofold: they influence people in their personal lives and make them productive members of society.

Education in our day has been obsessed with a single public role, that of job or vocation, which it has tended to define in economic terms. Milton’s phrase “public offices” covers more than that, however; it includes being a good church member and a positive contributor to the community.

And what are the “private offices” that Milton mentions? They include being a good friend, roommate, spouse, or parent, and they include the most personal world of all—the inner world of the mind and imagination. One of the best tests of whether a person is truly educated is what he or she does with leisure time. The extent to which education in our century has failed is obvious in the cultural malaise (especially evident in leisure pursuits) that Paul Elmen analyzes in The Restoration of Meaning to Contemporary Life: boredom, the search for distraction, the fear of spending time by oneself, sensuality, escape into comedy, violence, and the appeal of horror (“the fun of being frightened”).

If Milton and the Puritan tradition within which he wrote were right, we should not ask first of all, “What can I do with a Christian liberal arts education?” but rather, “What can a Christian liberal arts education do with and for me as a person?”

Education Today

It would be a mistake to think that Puritan ideals of education are important only to people who support Christian education as opposed to public education. Surely Christians should not disagree on the goals of education. No Christian parent or student or educator should want anything less than the development of the soul, as well as the mind, of every student.

When compared to the Puritan perspective, public education in our century is a scandal of low expectations. Whereas Milton and his age were thinking in terms of becoming like God and preparing to do all tasks well, modern secular education has waived the spiritual and (in large part) moral goals and settled for imparting mental data. Christians who for philosophic or financial reasons have not supported Christian education have been entirely too ready to assess secular education on its own terms, not realizing that the premises themselves are faulty. Many Christians act as though there is no cause for alarm in public education.

According to the Puritans, there is much to be alarmed about. Instead of an education in which the school reinforces the family and church and every discipline is integrated with a Christian viewpoint, secular education is producing intellectually split personalities in which school and intellect rarely intersect with Christian values in home and church. The two sets of data often sit side by side without ever merging.

The Puritan theory of education also stands as a corrective to many practices in Christian education today. It has never been easier for parents to support Christian education for the wrong reasons. Christian parents look at declining academic standards, lack of discipline, drug abuse, promiscuity, unchristian influence of teachers and peers, and the sociologists’ practice of using schools to conduct social experiments, and it is understandable that they want an alternative. Yet truly Christian education (as distinct from merely private education) has never flourished when it has been no more than an opposition to public education. The only adequate foundation for Christian education is what the Puritans stood for: an aggressive pursuit of the goals of producing a well-rounded Christian character and of relating biblical truth to every area of life.

Puritan education also opposes the narrowness of much Christian education today. A graduate of a prestigious Bible college recently maintained under cross-examination that he had never heard of John Milton. There are Christian schools where readings in English courses consist solely of missionary biographies.

For the Puritans, an adequate education was more than a knowledge of the Bible and Christian doctrine. A complete education was one that related all of life to the Christian faith. The Puritans were right. I have sat in church services in which everything that was said was true and biblical, but in which there were no “windows” beyond the walls of the church to the issues of everyday life. The “real world” is here to stay until Christ returns; no education, no matter how religious, is an adequate preparation if it fails to teach a person how to live Christianly in society.

The goal of Puritan education was the formation of a complete and capable person, grounded in the Bible, and able to operate in all areas of life in the light of the Christian faith. The educational aim was not a withdrawal from society but a penetration of it with Christian principles. Both Christian and public education in our own day have much to learn from their example.

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

War is to search and destroy, instead of to seek and save.

My college roommate, just after World War II, was a dedicated German of my own denomination who had served in Hitler’s army. In our late-night discussions he described how the Nazi cause had caught him and other German Christians in its fervor and fury. During those war years he had never doubted he was doing his God-given duty. He believed the German cause was just.

Along the frontier of Germany and France today one can see tombstones bearing the same inscription: “For God and the Fatherland.” Some are in French, marking the graves of those who died fighting for France; some are in German, over those who died for Germany. Troops from both countries believed God was on their side. And both believed their nation was just in waging war.

Such experiences caused me to study seriously what Scripture says on the Christian’s relation to war. In sharing my personal conviction as a conscientious objector, I recognize the subject is one that divides great scholars and leads many people to differ. Further, I know that no short statement can be final. We all face complex situations in our sinful society. But the following is my witness to what Scripture and the Spirit say to me; I believe it also corresponds closely with the viewpoint of persons and churches who have adhered to the evangelical peace position down through the centuries.

My Position

Biblical pacifism is rooted in divine revelation and the necessity of the new birth by the Holy Spirit. Its growth takes Scripture, Christ, and the church for sustenance; while other kinds of pacifism contain important truths, biblical pacifism is different in its orientation.

Humanistic pacifism places primary emphasis on what man can do, and applies a peace ethic to all society. Gandhian pacifism exerts pressure by peaceful means to accomplish deserved ends. Moralistic pacifism makes much of the immorality of war and the dignity and goodness of man. Political pacifism proposes political action, law, and pressure upon governments to avoid war. Anarchistic pacifism repudiates or rejects government. Apocalyptic pacifism perceives the possibility for peace and the practice of love only in some future age when there will be no enemies, and refuses to practice peace now.

Biblical pacifism results from Christian discipleship. Refusal to fight is based on my calling as Christ’s disciple. Jesus is Lord! To be his disciple also means he is my teacher. To accept Christ is to accept his person and teaching, and to follow in his steps regardless of consequences. My way of life and ethics must be in harmony with his. As the way of salvation is determined by him, not by me, so the way I am called to live is determined by his standard, not mine. Christ commands me, “Love your enemies.”

Biblical pacifism’s objective is to lead others to know Christ and follow him, thus experiencing reconciliation with God and others and becoming ministers of the gospel of reconciliation to everyone. To do this it is impossible to participate in any program of ill will, retaliation, or war that conflicts with Christ.

Having thus stated my position, let me enlarge on several areas basic to my conviction as a conscientious objector against participation in warfare of any kind.

Christology

Fundamental to my peace position is my understanding of who Christ is, what he says, and what he did. Who Christ is lies at the beginning. He is the “Word become flesh.” He is the one through whom God has spoken in these last days. Christ is the full and final message to us of God’s will. All the records of Christ’s works indicate that he spent his life in matters related to the will of God and his redemptive work. If there is one thing upon which we all agree, it is that Jesus personified in his person and relationships—in his love for even his enemies—by dying on the cross, the way of love and nonviolence. No one has ever dared to picture Christ with a gun in his hand.

Jesus Christ is also called the Savior of the world. A clear concern of Scripture is to present him as the cosmic Christ; he died for all and he cares equally for each person. Here is a chief difficulty: we love to localize Christ. We regard him as a respecter of persons, and demand he become a national, denominational, or personal God only. Especially during wartime, in spite of our confession of faith, we limit his love. It seems difficult to believe that he came to save our enemies as well as us. We try to confine Christ in the small container of one country or one denomination.

But Christ cannot be thus confined. He has called disciples from every tribe, tongue, and nation: he is the Christ of all cultures. He is not necessarily on the side of the biggest bomb. He will never sanction belief in racial superiority, the sin of cultural pride, or the destruction of his other children. As the Savior of the world, he cannot.

My Christology must further take into account not only who Christ is but what he says. Jesus declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” To believe this is to accept him not only as the way to God for salvation, but to accept his teachings as the way of daily discipleship. So I live under his lordship. He is the authority for both belief and behavior—even though the temptation remains to live a life and to use methods he never allowed and even spoke against.

Christ demonstrated the way of peace in contrast to war and retaliation, and he commands his followers to do the same. We are to be as he is in this present world. We are to have his Spirit in relating to our enemies. The Sermon on the Mount is the essence of Jesus’ teaching and it is picked up phrase by phrase throughout the New Testament, calling for obedience here and now. As a peacemaker, Christ calls me to invade and penetrate all of life and society with not death, but life, and to preach the practical possibility of reconciliation among men. I witness, by what I say and do, that the war is over, that hostility is an outright denial of the message of Christ, and both are contrary to the Spirit of his teaching. He said, “If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight … but my kingdom is not of this world.”

I cannot go to the Old Testament to prove it is right for the Christian to engage in warfare any more than I can go there to prove that polygamy or slavery or the doctrine of grace are right. Christ came to fulfill the law. Reports of Joshua’s battles do not become the basis of belief and behavior for the New Testament believer. Nor does the Christian derive his doctrine of war and peace from David’s destruction of Goliath and his killing of ten thousands. I take seriously the truth that Jesus is God’s final message. This means that I cannot add “except” to Christ’s commands. I cannot say, “Love your enemies [except in wartime]”; “Resist not him that is evil [except in wartime]”; “Put up the sword in its place, for all that take the sword shall perish with the sword [except when the government tells me to fight]”; “If a man say, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar [except when he fights in war]”; “Bless those who persecute you, bless and curse not [except when my country is at war].”

Jesus is my example, and my Christology must take into account what he did. He demonstrated throughout his earthly existence the way of suffering love in contrast to retaliation: all Christ’s words were brought to living expression in himself.

He says, “As my Father has sent me, so send I you.” According to the apostles, the way Christ dealt with evil and how he bore his cross instead of retaliating against his enemies are to be imitated. All the New Testament writers, with the possible exception of Jude, call us to do this. Paul says, “Follow me as I follow Christ.” Peter points to it clearly, “For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow in his steps: Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously” (1 Peter 2:21–23).

Without doubt, the great betrayal of the church through the centuries is that it reaches out to claim the benefits of the Cross for salvation but refuses to take the way of the Cross as the means to live the Christ life. I would thus agree with Reo M. Christenson, who has written in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (Jan. 5, 1973): “It still seems reasonable to me that the church should condemn such public evils as racial discrimination, cruelty, oppression, hypocrisy, deceit, corruption, and war—especially war, which I find wholly incompatible with the Sermon on the Mount and all Jesus stood for. And I think the church should encourage its members to oppose these things by every peaceful and ethical means. All of these are evils that Jesus opposed by word, example, implicitly and explicitly.” I agree also with Robert McAfee Brown in his book The Bible Speaks to You when he writes: “Nothing in Jesus’ life or teachings can be ‘twisted’ in support of killing or warfare.”

Gospel

Fundamental to my peace position is my understanding of the gospel. The entire New Testament teaches that the gospel is global. One distinguished advocate of world missions wrote: “Nothing is more deeply embedded in Christianity than its universality.” The gospel is to be preached to every creature. The reconciling work of Christ cannot be restricted to one community, church, country, or continent. The gospel is the good news of one who, rather than following the world’s way of righting wrongs, gave himself for the wrongdoers.

J. B. Phillips paraphrases Paul’s statement in Ephesians: “For he reconciled both [Jew and Greek, insider and outsider] to God by the sacrifice of one body on the cross, and by his act killed the enmity between them. Then he came and brought the good news of peace to you who were far from God [the outsiders, the Gentiles] and to us who were near [the insiders, the Jews]” (Eph. 2:16–17). That is the gospel: war is not only sin, but war for the believer is over.

That is the good news. It means that for me as a Christian all persons loved by God are my beloved also—even though they may consider me their enemy. Redeeming love is at the heart of the gospel; love and peace are God’s plan for people regardless of who they are. For me to participate in warfare means that I go contrary to all I understand the gospel to mean.

War gives death instead of life, hate instead of love, judgment instead of forgiveness, retaliation rather than reconciliation; it is to search and destroy instead of to seek and save—to use weapons against the very persons to whom I’m told to give the gospel. In fact, to me, engaging in warfare is the supreme denial of the Great Commission and all Christ said and did. I agree with Charles Clayton Morrison who said, “Nothing more antithetical to Christianity can be imagined than war. It is the denial in the boldest possible form of the very life principle of the religion of Jesus. It is anti-Christian in the rawest, nakedest form.”

Engaging in warfare strikes at the heart of discipleship and evangelism. Each person I face in combat is either a Christian or non-Christian. If I destroy a Christian, I kill the brother for whom Scripture says I should lay down my life. If my enemy is a non-Christian, I destroy him for whom Christ died and take away any further opportunity to be a reconciler or to let him find salvation. In the interest of the gospel and salvation, I cannot participate in war.

I sense kinship with Christopher Butler who wrote in The Catholic Worker: “Let us take the opportunity of saying clearly that the church, the people of God, does not seek protection from its enemies—whoever they may be—in war, and especially not in war of modern type. We are the mystical body, and Christ is our Head. He refused to defend himself and his mission by the swords of his disciples or even by legions of angels, the ministers of God’s justice and love. The weapons of the gospel are not nuclear but spiritual; it wins its victories not by war but by suffering.…”

Church

Fundamental to my peace position is my understanding of the church. Scripture recognizes the existence of nations. Most of the time, however, when we read of “the nation” the text says that out of every tribe and tongue, people and nation, God gathers and redeems men and women as his people, his family, Christ’s body on earth, the church. “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Peter 2:9). The nation to which the Christian belongs first is the nation over which Christ is king: it is the church of Jesus Christ. That nation exists under every form of government. Members belong first to each other regardless of race, country, or political system. This unity in Christ bridges all that separates and it breaks down all barriers.

The entire New Testament teaches that the church is an interracial, supranational, transcultural body composed of all who put their faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and follow him as Lord. When one group including Christians takes up arms against another group including Christians, both are saying that Caesar, not Jesus, is Lord. Christians of one land battle and kill Christians of another land because these are requirements of nations at war; Caesar commands it. Persons in one church family put to death persons of that same church family.

It is striking to me that in the great cry for church unity and oneness, not much is made of the great division and death that war brings to the body of Christ. Christians are yielding to the state’s demand for closer solidarity in the secular struggle rather than responding to the inward and genuine call to unity in Christ across cultures and curtains. The church thus becomes representative of some select form of Christianity (American, British, etc.), bearing more the marks of a culture or country than of the Cross of Christ and of a universal fellowship where there is neither black nor white, Easterner nor Westerner, American nor Russian. The church sings, “We are not divided, all one body we”—until wartime, when each church backs whatever territory it happens to be in.

On an existential level, this means the body of the nation dare not be rent, but the body of Christ may be. And nation, not church, is the “destiny” man cannot escape.

I would agree, therefore, with Frenchman Jean Lasserie in War and the Gospel: “It would seem impossible for a French believer, on the grounds that his government was in conflict with the German government, to resign himself to taking part in the slaughter of Germans, when there are believers among them who, like him, form part of Christ’s body.” E. A. Lawrence wrote: “The church is a gold coin of divine minting. One side shows the likeness of its Lord, the other the map of the world. Both sides are so indelibly stamped into the coin that to mar either means loss, to efface either destroys the coin.”

Government

Fundamental to my peace position is my understanding of what the Scripture says about government and human authority.

In the context of Romans 13—nonconformity, peace, love for the enemy, and leaving vengeance to God—we have the statement that the “powers” are “ordained” by God. God planned order, not anarchy. Further, God is over the powers Certainly Paul does not mean, as is sometimes suggested, that God is morally responsible for every ruler in power. He ordained all rulers in the same way, since this is written to Christians regardless of the government under which they live. He ordained all in the same way he ordained marriage; it cannot mean he puts his stamp of approval on each.

Paul goes on to say that government “officials” are ministers of God to the extent that they reward good and evil according to their merits. Therefore I should do good. Here in Romans, as elsewhere in Scripture, I am told to be in submission to the authorities. Notice, however, that obedience is reserved for God. And if obedience to God conflicts with human authority and results in punishment or persecution, then I, along with Christ, the apostles, and disciples through the centuries, must submit to the consequences of that obedience. It can never mean that I must do whatever any king, president, dictator, or magistrate orders. If so, why try war criminals who obeyed leaders without question? I render to Caesar what is his, but I give all of life and first loyalty and obedience to God. The problem of the church has always been that of rendering to Caesar more than his due, and giving God less than belongs to him. To “render them their due” can never mean to “render to the state all it asks.”

Romans 13 also tells us not to resist the powers. Does this mean that one should neither question nor seek to change existing programs or policies of government? Hardly! It is a call away from revolution and violence. It means the Christian is not to engage in the overthrow of governments.

Thus Romans 13 (and other passages usually used to sanction the Christian engaging in warfare) really calls Christians to refuse to be squeezed into the conformist and pagan values of the world’s systems so that we may be free to pledge full allegiance to God and to live under the lordship of Christ. According to New Testament teaching the loyalty and relation of the Christian to government is a limited one: to pray and honor always, to overthrow never, and to obey when not in conflict with God’s will.

Finally, a biblical pacifist is a realist. He knows the power of sin. He knows the way of reconciliation many times means death. He does not ask, “What will happen to me if I am faithful to Christ?” He knows what it cost Christ. Like his Lord, he may be faced with the accusation that he is socially irresponsible and a traitor to his nation.

A true pacifist is not passive. He believes in the power of love and the power of God. He gives priority to resolving conflict at his own risk rather than at the risk of another. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” not just the “peace keepers.”

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.