Page 5681 – Christianity Today (2024)

Judaism And Earliest Christianity

Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum: The Jewish People in the First Century, section one, volume two, edited by S. Safrai, M. Stern, D. Flusser, and W. C. van Unnik (Fortress, 1977, 722 pp., $32.50), is reviewed by David E. Aune, professor of religion, Saint Xavier College, Chicago, Illinois.

Two generations ago, several magisterial syntheses of the state of knowledge of Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman era were available to students. Two of the most important and valuable of such works were Emil Schürer’s monumental Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im ZeitalterJesu Christi [“History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ”] and H. Strack and P. Billerbeck’s Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch [“Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Midrash”], with honorable mention for J. F. Moore’s Judaism. Serious students of early Christianity are fortunate that several new or revised summaries of the last fifty years of scholarship are now in the process of publication. The “old” Schürer is now being completely revised under the competent editorship of Matthew Black, and the first volume of The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, rev. and ed. by G. Vermes and F. Millar (T. & T. Clark, 1973), has already appeared and has become an indispensable tool for the study of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman period. With the concurrent publication of the first volume of the first section of the Compendia in 1974, students of early Christianity now suffer from that most pleasant of all disadvantages, the poverty of riches. (See the review of these two works in the December 20, 1974, issue, page 21.)

Books that superficially treat the political, social, and religious background of the New Testament are a dime-a-dozen (and generally worth every penny). Good books on the subject (like E. Lohse’s The New Testament Environment [Abingdon, 1976]) are rare and when found should cause rejoicing. (See review February 4, issue, page 48.) Great books on the subject, like the one presently being reviewed, are as rare as sightings of Halley’s comet. If you should see this book in a bookstore (doubtless heavily guarded), go at once and sell what you have to sell to buy it.

In the present volume, seven Jewish scholars (all Israelis and all but one professors at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) and one Christian scholar comprehensively treat a number of important aspects of first century Jewish society, economics, religion, and culture. Volume two handles subjects not treated in volume one, which dealt extensively with geography and political history. Each essay is well-written, carefully documented, and accompanied by a selected bibliography. One point that becomes increasingly clear as one reads this book is that archaeology, reportedly the Israeli national pastime, has made great strides in the last generation. Many of the essays rely heavily on recent archaeological explorations carried out in Israel, reports and interpretations of which are more often than not published in modern Hebrew in various Israeli publications.

Filmstrips

There are a number of noteworthy filmstrips on biblical subjects aimed at children, some of which are appropriate for young teens. The Ten Commandments for Children (Catechetical Guild, Our Sunday Visitor, Noll Plaza, Huntington, IN 46750), closely integrates both the Old and New Testaments. The love of God in Jesus is stressed as the means of fulfilling the essential law. That is why the series of eleven filmstrips (one introductory) is subtitled “God’s Laws of Love for All His Children.” It handles the commandment on adultery sensitively. With traditional drawings and music, this series belongs in evangelical church libraries.

The Sadlier Scripture Series (Wm. H. Sadlier, 11 Park Place, New York, NY 10007) includes ten nicely animated, well told stories from creation to the prophets (Jonah, Amos, Isaiah). The Thomas S. Klise Company (Box 3418, Peoria, IL 61614) also draws from the deuterocanonical works for its delightful litany, Praise the Lord. A fast moving and fun to watch filmstrip, it is a children’s praise service for nature’s beauties. The animation is based on Daniel 3:47–88 (sic), but no one will know unless told. In any case it fits Psalm 148 equally well.

For the New Testament, the Sadlier Company offers two about our Lord, Jesus: Friend of the Lowly and Jesus: Bread of Life. They are based broadly on Luke and John respectively. Alba House (Canfield, OH 44406) offers Follow Me, two read-alongs on one filmstrip that tell what Jesus did with reference to the rich young man and to blind Bartimaeus.

What Jesus taught is the emphasis of the parables offered by two producers, Marshfilm (Box 8082, Mission, KS 66208) and Family Films (14622 Lanark St., Panorama City, CA 91406). Although there is a little overlapping, there is little stylistic similarity. Besides being animated, Marshfilm’s innovation is to relate how Jesus’ childhood observations became adult parables. Each parable is pointed. Family Film’s version is neither live photography nor animation. Rather it features “Church Mice,” stuffed creatures who pose the parables as cute stories. This series is called Four Parables for Boys and Girls.

A beautiful retelling of the Lord’s Prayer is The “Our Father” from Twenty-Third Publications (Box 180, West Mystic, CT 06388). It emphasizes how the teaching of the Lord’s Prayer would have sounded to the ears of first-century Semitic children. By means of animated flashbacks the hearers relate segments of the prayer to stories of Noah’s Ark, Lot, Joseph, and Daniel. The guide, unfortunately, overuses terms like “myth” and “legend.” Ignore the guide, but get this truly imaginative production.

Check with your audio-visual retailer or write the producer for further information such as price and availability of teaching aids.

DALE SANDERS

Portland, Oregon

The social context of the ministry of Jesus and of the earliest Christians is illuminated by a number of essays on social and economic subjects such as M. Stern’s “Aspects of Jewish Society: the Priesthood and Other Classes,” S. Applebaum’s “The Social and Economic Status of the Jews in the Diaspora,” and “Economic Life in Palestine,” and S. Safrai’s “Home and Family.” The authors of these essays show themselves exceptionally well-versed in New Testament studies by frequently demonstrating how aspects of their subjects are relevant to a more adequate understanding of early Christianity. A clearer picture of first century Palestinian religious life emerges in four essays by S. Safrai, “Religion in Everyday Life,” “The Temple” (which summarizes the results of recent archaeological investigations near the site of the Temple), “The Synagogue,” and “Education and the Study of Torah.” M. D. Herr’s article on “The Calendar,” though more esoteric than most of the articles in the volume, is nevertheless an important contribution to the subject. In the area of philology (here one of the pressing questions for students of the New Testament relates to the original language of Jesus), C. Rabin discusses “Hebrew and Aramaic in the First Century” (unaccountably his bibliography omits the fine article by J. Fitzmyer, “The Languages of Palestine in the First Century, A.D.,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 32 [1970], 501–31), and G. Mussies treats “Greek in Palestine and the Diaspora.” G. Foerster’s excellent discussion of “Art and Architecture in Palestine” suffers from a lack of pictorial illustrations necessary for an adequate treatment of such a subject. “Paganism in Palestine” is expertly treated by Israeli New Testament scholar D. Flusser, who demonstrates that on the whole Palestinian Judaism was essentially immune to paganism. Finally, M. Stern’s “The Jews in Greek and Latin Literature,” though erudite in its own right, should be read in the context provided by A. Momigliano’s chapter on “The Hellenistic Discovery of Judaism” in his Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge, 1975).

When completed the entire Compendia project will consist of five sections, presumably with two or more volumes per section, dealing basically with Judaism and Christianity and their mutual relationships during the first two Christian centuries. The project is a massive undertaking, the size of which is more than matched by the quality of scholarship evident in the two volumes that have so far appeared. No theological library can do without them.

American Indian Religion

Seeing With A Native Eye: Essays on Native American Religion, edited by Walter Holden Capps (Harper & Row, 1976, $3.95 pb), is reviewed by Arthur Roberts, professor of philosophy and religion, George Fox College, Newberg, Oregon.

These essays provide a helpful introduction to the study of the various native American religions. The value of such study to persons within the despiritualized West may be illustrated by the response of an old Navajo herder to pictures of a bomber, “How many sheep will it hold?” Christians have often applied reductionist interpretation to the religions of “inferior” cultures but resent the application of such interpretations to their own culture. This book serves as a reminder of the judgment and fulfillment of all cultures in Christ.

The most reflective non-Indian essay is Richard Comstock’s. He shows how eschatological expectations of a harmonious union of Europeans, native Americans, animals, and nature, depicted so eloquently in Hick’s “Peaceable Kingdom” give way to the myth of a “no-good savage.” “It is as if the societies with the complex technologies have felt some kind of threat from these people so easy to defeat in an uneven battle, but so difficult to exorcise from the secret imaginings of their hearts.”

Quietly, like the slaves of ancient Egypt, the native peoples are gathering world-wide. Will Christ become their liberator, their second Moses? This book could well be read in conjunction with Hannah’s song, Isaiah, the Magnificat, and Jesus’ words about the future of the meek.

Churches Behind Bars

A Christian’s Guide to Effective Jail and Prison Ministries, by Dale K. Pace (Revell, 1976, 318 pp., $11.95), is reviewed by John de Vries, Protestant chaplain, Centre Federal de Formation, Laval, Quebec.

This book will fill a conspicuously empty spot in the library of every minister and church worker. As a supervisor chaplain and regional coordinator for Good News Mission, which has chaplains in jails in several states, Dale Pace is well qualified to write a comprehensive and well documented introductory textbook. This easy-to-read book focuses on the chaplain and related ministries in correctional institutions.

The author honestly and candidly describes the problems and issues that the chaplain and Christian workers must manage to have an effective ministry to the “Church Behind Bars.” Pace describes the biblical imperatives for such a ministry, and he rightly laments the lack of religious or spiritual ministry in more than 1,600 of the 4,000 American correctional institutions. The “house of penitence,” first established by the Quaker Christians as an alternative to ruthless corporal punishment, is today a “foreign mission field” within driving distance of every North American city (and church?). The author is encouraged by the growing evangelical awareness and response to the needs of our incarcerated population.

Pace wants results. His book is pragmatic. The basic underlying issues of injustice in the correctional institutions, the unchristian forms of punishment, and the questionable methods of many correctional institutions should not be ignored by the Christian and the chaplain. But Pace does not discuss these issues. Perhaps his book will serve as an introductory text to be followed by more writing and study in this much neglected area of ministry. He says that a biblical and theological approach to penology and criminology must be developed.

Pace gets needlessly bogged down in a diatribe over the pros and cons of clinical pastoral education, which he finds wanting, and the chaplain’s source of income, which he feels strongly should come from the church rather than the government.

Some of the author’s minor views regarding chaplaincy training, income, and the establishment of a “Church Behind Bars” are debatable, but his overall pastoral thrust is deeply rooted in both the Word and personal professional experience. The book is challenging and is a vital source of information for ministering to prisoners, a class of persons often neglected even by those who believe that Christ came to minister to all men.

The Pilgrimage Of Karl Barth

Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, by Eberhard Busch (Fortress, 1976, 369 pp., $19.95), is reviewed by Donald G. Bloesch, professor of theology, Dubuque Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.

The author of this perceptive study was Karl Barth’s last assistant and is now curator of the Barth archives in Basel. The book presents an illuminating summary of Barth’s thought, as well as an informative and scintillating account of his life. Some of Busch’s material is based on unpublished letters in the Barth archives and on records of addresses and conversations not generally available.

Of particular interest to students of theology is Barth’s spiritual pilgrimage, as the author describes it. In his early years as a theological student Barth was exposed to the liberal theology that dominated German and Swiss universities. At one stage in his career his philosophy was that the only divine element in the world is good will (à la Kant). After his studies in Berlin he came to regard Schleiermacher as the leading light in his thought. Among his professors Harnack and Hermann exerted considerable influence on him. His commitment to liberal theology was irrevocably shaken when his German teachers identified with the Kaiser’s war effort. As a pastor in Safenwil, Switzerland, he veered toward the right theologically and toward the left politically. In his teaching years at German universities he moved steadily toward a theocentric as over against an anthropocentric theology. In his book on Anselm (1931) he finally arrived at a theological method (“faith seeking understanding”) that broke with philosophical theology. These years also saw his conflict with National Socialism and his role in the Barmen Confession, which was drawn up by German theologians and pastors against the German Christians who sought to accommodate the faith to Nazi ideology. For Barth the battle against National Socialism was a battle against natural theology and a defense of the first commandment.

Barth’s relation to the Confessing Church in Germany was not always amicable. When Hitler assumed absolute power, Barth was compelled to return to his native country where he took a teaching post at Basel, but he continued to maintain close contact with the Confessing Church. As the Confessing Church became evermore concerned with right doctrine over against a public witness in the face of growing paganism, Barth began to express reservations. He criticized the Confessing Church for fighting only for itself and for the freedom and purity of its proclamation while keeping silent over the persecution of the Jews, the harsh treatment of political opponents, and the suppression of the press in the new Germany.

In his later years Barth became increasingly disenchanted with existentialism, and his earlier break with Gogarten, Bultmann, Tillich, et al. now became an open rupture. He regarded existentialist theology as the latest development in Neo-Protestantism, where the point of departure is religious experience rather than divine revelation. He argued against Bultmann that philosophy is not the handmaid of theology but that both theology and philosophy can only be the handmaid of the church and of Christ.

Of special interest today in light of Marquardt’s book Theology and Socialism: The Example of Karl Barth (1972) is Barth’s complex relation to socialism. Marquardt maintains that Barth’s theology was an attempt to give conceptual undergirding to his commitment to socialism, already evident in his pastorate in Safenwil. Barth was outspoken in his defense of the rights of workers and at Safenwil was even known as “the Red pastor.” Yet Busch makes it clear that Barth always maintained a certain distance from socialist ideology though he was active in socialist politics. Barth was careful never to identify a political program with the kingdom of God and felt that Christians should enter the political arena anonymously. He declared: “I regard the ‘political pastor’ in any form as a mistake, even if he is a socialist. But as a man and a citizen … I take the side of the Social Democrats.” For Barth theology must not become political nor politics become theological. At the same time he saw that the object of Christian faith and responsibility is not only divine justification but also human justice. The church’s message should be addressed to concrete life situations and therefore should have political implications and consequences. He contended that a genuine confession of faith should have something definite to say in terms of both dogmatics and ethics. This is why he refused to support the confessional statement of the No Other Gospel movement, since he believed that it did not effectively challenge the principalities and powers of our time.

Barth was passionately concerned with both doctrine and life. “The question of right doctrine,” he lamented, “introduces us to the vacuum at the heart of our church and inside Christianity.” At the same time he saw that doctrine must be integrally related to life, for otherwise it becomes irrelevant and saltless. Barth sought to call the church back to a confessional basis without succumbing to the temptation of a confessionalism that blocks the free movement of the Spirit and that exempts the confession from judgment and reformation in the light of the Word of God. A confession must never be a straitjacket that leaves no room for free inquiry, but an invitation to obedience to the Word of God in the concrete situation in which people find themselves. One does not have to agree with everything Barth says on confessions and theology to appreciate Busch’s fine contribution to theological understanding in our time.

Gnosticism Popularized

The Laughing Savior, by John Dart (Harper & Row, 1976, 154 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Malcolm L. Peel, chairperson, department of philosophy and religion, Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

A perennial challenge to scholars of the ancient past is to make their studies readable to a non-professional audience. Here the task has been performed for them by a journalist, John Dart, religion news writer for the Los Angeles Times. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dart did his work at Stamford University. However, the scholar upon whose files and information he depended most, James M. Robinson, is based at the Claremont Graduate School.

Dart has produced a highly-readable, non-technical introduction to one of the truly great manuscript discoveries of the 20th century, the Gnostic documents of Nag Hammadi. The book is divided into four parts. Part One contains a dramatic account of “The Discovery,” from 1947 when Jean Doresse first saw a codex in the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo to 1976 when Robinson revisited the scene of the find. It is a tale of how scholarly jealousies and international politics combined to delay full publication of the find for more than thirty years. Also included is an admission by Robinson that his primary motivation in tackling Nag Hammadi was the prospect it afforded of vindicating Rudolph Bultmann’s contention that New Testament Christology was formatively shaped by a pre-Christian Gnostic redeemer myth.

Part Two, “The Jewish Connection,” sets forth the widely-held theory that Gnosticism, the most virulent heresy combated by the early church, originated in heterodox Jewish circles. Evidence for this is offered from selected Nag Hammadi texts held to contain rabbinic-style interpretations of the Old Testament (notably, Gen. 1–3), interpretations that reveal a radical transvaluation of Jewish values (such as, the Serpent in Genesis is declared good, the Creator evil).

Part Three, “Will the Real Savior Please Stand Up?,” raises two crucial questions about the new texts: first, whether they yield any new, non-canonical but reliable information about the historical Jesus; second, whether they contain evidence of a pre-Christian Gnostic redeemer myth. Dart, accepting the conclusions of Robinson and his close associates, affirms that the Gospel of Thomas contains sayings of Jesus older in form than their canonical New Testament counterparts, and that the Paraphrase of Shem and the Apocalypse of Adam do contain non-Christian and probably pre-Christian versions of a Gnostic redeemer myth.

Part Four, “The Gnostic Phenomenon,” examines less heterodox writings in the library, notably, the Valentinian Gospel of Truth. Also, it reports that there is no evidence in the manuscripts library for the orgiastic excesses and anti-feminism attributed to Gnostics by the early Church Fathers. Finally, there is an attempt to present a schematic development of Gnosticism on the basis of types of laughter found on the lips of the Saviour and certain female beings found in the texts. The volume concludes with a helpful appendix, prepared by James Brashler of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont, containing summaries of all fifty-two writings of the library.

The volume includes a valuable up-to-date, accurate account of the discovery and publication of the documents; the identification of key scholarly theories emerging about the texts; and the appendix. However, there are some shortcomings: a complete lack of documentation; the omission of any extended discussion of more than half of the texts; a failure to mention the names of all those members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Translation Team who provided the Institute for Antiquity with its transcriptions and translations; and silence regarding the dissenting opinions of other scholars on the question of the presence of a pre-Christian Gnostic redeemer myth in Nag Hammadi texts. In spite of these things, however, this is currently the best popular account of Nag Hammadi available in English, a fitting prelude to the publication by Harper & Row of all the library in English translation within a few months.

Briefly Noted

A wide range of tension-creating issues is treated by Russell A. Cervin in Mission in Ferment (Covenant Press [3200 W. Foster Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60625], 120 pp., $3.50 pb). Among the topics are: calls for moratorium, cultural resistance, church/mission tension, and the struggle of liberation theologians.

We’ve always said we care about our children and believe in ministering to them. But do we really? Have we demonstrated our concern? Of course, we have Sunday school. We give an occasional party and perhaps set up a few activities for them. But are children really significant in the life of the church?

At our church we’ve been putting more and more emphasis on the children. It’s true that they are the leaders of tomorrow. But they are also people of today, and they qualify for our attention and concern just as much as those of any other age do.

Every Sunday during our worship service we have a children’s sermon. After the opening hymn and prayers I invite the youngsters to the front. They sit on the floor around me for a five-minute sermon, nearly always illustrated, and on a level that they can understand. That means using concepts and a vocabulary within the grasp of children under twelve.

In the beginning, not everyone was sure that the children’s sermon was a good idea. “Some of the people are complaining,” an elder reported after the third Sunday. “They say you’re spending too much time in the service with those kids.”

“I’m sorry they feel that way,” I replied. “I certainly don’t want to upset anyone. But what we’ve been saying by our attitude, if not by our words, is that children don’t really count; God isn’t interested in you until you become a teenager—except in Sunday school, of course. Don’t you think we ought to let the children know that they do count?” He nodded. Not enthusiastically, but at least he nodded.

Three Sundays later at the door he said, “You know, I enjoyed the children’s sermon this morning. It was a lesson for me as well.” And six months later he said, “I hope this won’t hurt your feelings, but sometimes I get more out of your children’s sermons than I do the regular ones.”

I told him that I was glad he was getting something out of the worship experience and that I didn’t care whether it was the hymns, the prayers, the organ music, or some other part of the service that ministered to him.

Before beginning, I discussed the idea of a children’s sermon with some parents. Although they didn’t oppose it, they felt it would not be effective to have young children attend the whole service. “We want our children to learn something,” one said. “It’s awfully boring for my five-year-old to sit through an hour of regular worship.”

We developed a compromise. The children’s sermon takes place at about 11:10, after the opening prayers and a hymn. When it is over the four- and five-year-olds go to another part of the church for a forty-five minute program. From time to time the teachers talk to them about what went on during the quarter hour when they were in the worship service. They’re also told, “Just think, when you’re six, you can sit in there with the others.”

We considered the junior-church idea, and one day we may try that. But I feel that it’s good for families to have the experience of worshiping together. And the children seem to like the arrangement. Every Sunday morning children greet me warmly at the door. I receive effusive hugs from both girls and boys. I love those children, and their expressions tell me that they know it.

Amuse-You-Tuesday, another program for children, developed out of a comment by Vicki Turner. “Cec, we need to do something more for our kids. The teen-agers get a lot of attention, but what about the ten-year-olds?”

Others agreed. And so one Tuesday morning eight of us got together to talk about it. We decided that what was needed in a program for children was an enthusiastic presentation, solid biblical content, and a certain amount of physical activity—drama, crafts, or simple recreation.

On Tuesdays we start at four P.M. Children who come early can have juice and cookies. Occasionally we start the hour with crafts, and the children begin working on their projects as soon as they arrive.

Normally we spend ten or fifteen minutes on singing. I’m not a great singer—the pianist once asked me, “How can I find your key when you sing somewhere between two of them?”—but I am enthusiastic. And I can make the children sing. We do action songs and we learn Bible verses set to music. In six weeks we learned to sing all the books of the Old Testament.

Next there is a Bible story, done by one of the volunteers or by me. We use the flannelgraph board, or flashcard pictures, or puppets, or chalk drawings.

Then two creative women lead the children in crafts and physical activity. They may have the children dramatize the story they’ve heard, as we did the three Hebrew children in the fiery furnace. Or they have a related craft project, such as making three-dimensional ravens out of construction paper, each with a piece of bread in its mouth, to illustrate the story of God’s sending the birds to feed Elijah.

On Sunday evenings we have the Good News Club. Learning centers are set up around the room. On a typical evening, one child might be listening to a cassette telling the story of Abraham leaving his country. Another is looking at slides that show what ancient Palestine looked like. Three others are in a corner building a tent. Another group is doing simple research to find out what kind of food the patriarchs ate.

We’re also trying out other programs. For instance, at our monthly church family service, we’re having a separate program for children when the adult speakers don’t interest them. And we’re planning to have the children themselves handle the service at least once a year.

Jim, a gifted musician, is developing an unusual type of choir. Children from kindergarten through sixth grade sing a psalm of praise while the teen-agers flow in with a more contemporary piece, such as “Day by Day” from Godspell. Sometimes the musical instruments that the children are learning to play, such as the French horn, clarinet, and guitar, are written into the musical number.

It doesn’t take a church with two thousand members to do programs like these; our membership is only three hundred. What’s needed most is the determination to show children that we care about them.—CECIL B. MURPHEY, pastor, Riverdale Presbyterian Church. Riverdale, Georgia.

Thus saith the LORD God; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her. And she hath changed my judgments into wickedness more than the nations, and my statutes more than the countries that are round about her: for they have refused my judgments and my statutes, they have not walked in them.… Moreover I will make thee waste, and a reproach among the nations that are round about thee, in the sight of all that pass by. So it shall be a reproach and a taunt, an instruction and an astonishment unto the nations that are round about thee, when I shall execute judgments in thee in anger and in fury and in furious rebukes. I the LORD have spoken it” (Ezek. 5:5, 6, 14, 15).

There will be nothing fuzzy about the instruction or the witness that God is God indeed, nothing left to discuss under the shadow of doubts as to who God is, when his judgment is meted out. Too often the warnings are insufficient, and too often a soft pedal and dim lights blot out the strength of what God means his people to make clear with searchlights.

What were people doing in Ezekiel’s time that brought about such strong warning? Is it similar to people today who use God’s name as a banner? The Israelites who had known the living God had turned so far from him as to get into human sacrifice and to involve their children in the ultimate degradation of idolatry and worship of the false gods of other nations. The terrible “end” had started out as a mixture of true and false that rapidly degenerated into the sacrifice of children.

One day while standing near the entrance of Migros in Aigle (the supermarket), our minds on groceries, we met an American girl in a bedraggled long dress, a baby tied in a cloth dangling from her hip, and a packet of papers in her hand. With a big smile on her face she approached the Swiss housewives or couples hurrying in to do their week’s shopping. One of the girls from L’Abri approached her and discovered that her conversation was about “following God,” and her money bag was collecting money for the Children of God. One of the papers showed a picture of a girl hanging on a cross, with a nail through her sexual organ. It explained that the way that a woman could sacrifice herself to God was by giving herself sexually to male members of the Children of God.

“He said also unto me, Turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations that they do. Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD’s house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping to Tammuz. Then he said unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations than these. And he brought me into the inner court of the LORD’s house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the LORD, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the LORD, and their faces toward the east; and they worshiped the sun toward the east. Then he said unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of Man? Is it a light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the abominations which they commit here?” (Ezek. 8:13, 14, 15, 16, 17a).

Mixing true and false worship, mixing portions of the Word of God and the hideous lies of false gods is something Jude speaks to in verse 11: “Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam.” 2 Peter 2:14, 15 describes the same thing: “Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children: which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness.”

Over and over again in the Bible God makes himself known. He speaks of two ways. Over and over again the gentleness of God is made known, and his compassion is stressed. We have in Ezekiel 33:11 the assurance that this is so: “Say unto them, As I live, saith the LORD God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” However, the thundering passages concerning the witness of the wrath of God must not be deleted. God has made it very clear that the witness to his existence is to be known in two ways. He turned back the Red Sea; he has brought forth water from a rock, he multiplied bread and fish; and he caused Peter to walk upon the water. Positive proof had been given, even as it was given when fire consumed Elijah’s sacrifice and proved Baal a false god. Christ himself came and lived and gave proof over and over again that he was the Son of God, that he had always existed, and that he would die and rise from the dead in three days. Communication with God was given in a new way when Jesus said that after his death his people could pray in his name.

However, the second way is also sharp and strong. Ezekiel was speaking to Israel and Jerusalem. But he also speaks to us. The warning cannot be shrugged off. Nations that have known the truth and then have in one sense or another “stood with their backs toward the temple of the LORD … and worshiped the sun toward the east” are included in this loud blast of the trumpet as God speaks forth a warning. Other “nations that are round about,” and based on false religions or false gods are going to have an “instruction” or a “witness” or a “demonstration” of the reality of the existence of the one true God. “Other nations” are going to be shown something that the sailors in the ship with Jonah were shown. They are going to be shown that God is the Lord indeed. How?

God will pour out judgment upon nations that have based themselves on his existence and then turned away. Ezekiel’s declaration of this one purpose of judgment will be fulfilled. When people today speak of changing the principles in which their government’s founding papers have recognized God, the subsequent change will have its results. Christians need to be concerned about this.

Also, we can’t turn away from the papers being handed out in airports, or burn the scrap of blasphemy we’ve been handed. We can’t simply turn away from the sad sight of a young American girl who has come from some small American town to a small Swiss town to hand out her propaganda with the next generation on her hip ready to be put through a particular form of “sacrifice” and just shrug our shoulders. We must do something.

What? We have been given a call in Lamentations 2:18, 19: “Their heart cried unto the LORD, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night; give thyself no rest; let not the apple of thine eye cease. Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the LORD: lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger in the top of every street.”

The Church of Jesus Christ is in trouble. Evidence of decay can be found by those who bother to look. It is true that we must heartily appreciate the numerous evidences of Christian vitality. But much of this vitality has not penetrated the traditional structures of congregational or parish life.

We are living in a post-Christian age in the West. The situation in Europe is appalling. In traditionally Protestant lands church attendance does not exceed five per cent of the population. In Sweden a recent survey reveals that 83 per cent of its people do not believe in a life after death.

In the United States church attendance reportedly hovers around forty per cent, but beneath the surface decline is detectable. Several denominations have been undergoing division because of alterations in their respective doctrinal and ecclesiastical stances. The Episcopal Church is lately in the news as the result of parishes withdrawing. The (Southern) Presbyterian Church has seen the Presbyterian Church in America emerge largely from its ranks. Northern Presbyterians and Baptists and the Disciples of Christ divided earlier. The recent disruption of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is a marked exception to the trend. It represents one of the few cases in which the advocates of change departed from the older institutions rather than the contenders for traditional views.

Other denominations that have not divided have seen the emergence of strong pressure groups protesting what they believe to be significant departures from their founding principles. The Southern Baptist Convention has witnessed the rise of the Baptist Faith and Mission Fellowship within its ranks to protest increasing toleration of beliefs outside the historic latitude permitted in its constituency. New graduate seminaries in Memphis (Mid-America) and in Jacksonville (Luther Rice) by and for Southern Baptists, which are independent of the denominational control that characterizes the older seminaries, are a significant indication of declining trust. Counterparts among the United Presbyterians are Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns and the Presbyterian Lay Committee, publishers of a large circulation magazine.

Such divisions, and such protest groups that are often the forerunners of divisions, would not occur if Protestant denominations were still contending fervently for that faith that the Reformers sought to promote. Division in the sixteenth century resulted in a new burst of evangelical proclamation and enthusiasm. Division in our century is too often a testimony to the dimming of a once bright light.

The decline of missionary outreach in the face of continuing needs by so many of the older denominations is another indication of decay. The United Presbyterians have reduced their overseas task force by approximately two thirds from its peak. The United Methodists have reduced theirs by approximately one half. Both churches have been steadily losing members at home over the last decade. While many groups that once were staunch heralds of the Gospel are forfeiting their leadership, the number of missionaries for non-Christian eastern religions in the Western world is rising. Likewise Christian deviations such as Jehovah’s Witness, Mormonism, or the Unification Church seem to have little trouble in making headway with the zealous proclamation of their erroneous messages.

Times were also bleak for the Christian Church as it entered the sixteenth century after Christ. It could have seemed hopeless that it would ever again be an effective and fruitful agency for the ongoing mission committed to it by its Lord. Over the centuries there had been efforts at renewal, but by 1517, as events were later to prove, reformation—and the accompanying heart-wrenching separations and costly struggles—was the course to be taken.

Those who were then holding power in the historic institutions could not be persuaded to reinstate the biblical proclamation at the center of their churchmanship. Now in our time those holding power in the large churches of Europe and America descended from the Reformers have to face a similar question. Will the power of the Gospel once again surge through as in former days? Or is a new reformation aborning?

A New Post For David E. Kucharsky

Senior Editor David Eugene Kucharsky is leaving our staff to become editor of Christian Herald. It is with regret that he is leaving and best wishes for his future that we make this announcement.

Kucharsky has served the readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY far longer than any other staff member. He first appeared on our masthead as news editor with the January 6, 1958, issue when CHRISTIANITY TODAY was just over a year old. He served in that capacity until the issue of April 14, 1967, when he was promoted to associate editor. Subsequently his title was changed to managing editor and then to senior editor with essentially the same duties. He has been an effective right-hand man of the editor, with responsibilities for day-by-day oversight of the magazine. He has written many editorials, some of which have been quoted widely in the secular press. He has contributed special reports to the News section even when he was no longer its editor and has been the principal screener of articles submitted to us. But his role as a steadying, calming influence amid all the hurly-burly of a magazine’s routine has been just as important. Editor Harold Lindsell says of him:

“Gene is a splendid Christian gentleman whose integrity is unquestioned, whose personal life is immaculate, and who has been a comrade, friend, and confidant for many years. His new post will enable him to use his gifts advantageously. He brings with him a wealth of experience, a wide circle of friends and acquaintances upon whom he can call for assistance, and a spirit of good will and of Christian compassion and concern that will endear him to readers and co-laborers alike.”

Christian Herald is an interdenominational monthly based in a suburb north of New York City. It has a circulation of 270,000 and a distinguished ninety-nine year history of service to a general reading audience. Although we regret losing him, we know that he is going to a post where he can serve even more people through quality Christian journalism.

‘The Jesus Mania’

Some people are annoyed by all the fuss attending the evangelical resurgence. The Saturday Review cover story for September 17 painted a less than laudatory picture of what it calls “The Jesus Mania—Bigotry in the Name of the Lord.” Author Dwayne Walls pans “fundamentalist, evangelical Christians” as “anti-intellectual.” He groups charismatics, Messianic Jews, and admirers of pastor-television personalities such as Robert Schuller and Rex Humbard as potentially “intolerant, presumptuous, and pushy.”

“The Jesus movement’s excesses,” says Walls, “rur directly against the American precepts of respect for one’s fellowman and tolerance … of a multinational, multifaith society.” Yet to strive for converts is by no means equivalent to denying freedom for other religions to do the same. It is one of the distinctives of America that we have such a freedom.

Although identified as the son of a Baptist preacher, Walls shows little discernment between the Gospel as it is faithfully proclaimed and practiced and the inconsistencies of those who claim to believe it. His background might suggest a familiarity with Christianity. Yet he laments its turning “away from the theology of good works and toward a theology of salvation by faith alone.” At least Walls has learned something about the true Gospel from what he calls the “Jesus mania.” Even more significant is that his pejorative description is a fairly accurate presentation of our calling: “The entire movement, it seems, has one common denominator: an unyielding determination to exalt Jesus Christ and make every living soul his follower.” If we must be criticized, at least it’s for what we are trying to do.

Nevertheless, many of the excesses Walls laments are indeed valid. There are zealots, many of whom are orthodox Christians, who “take the conversion of their fellowman as the supreme act of faith.” We need to remember that true conversion lies with God. Christians are to bear witness to the light, but badgering, browbeating, and arm-twisting offends the illuminating ministry of the Holy Spirit. If our lives and the manner of our testimonies contradict God’s love as seen through Christ, our words may not be heard.

A Christian Chronicle Of the Capital

How do all those Christian politicians in the United States get along when their views toward social issues differ so widely?

Wallace Henley’s most recent book, Rebirth in Washington: The Christian Impact in the Nation’s Capital (Good News Publishers), tackles that question along with a number of others people have about spiritual life in the nation’s capital. Henley brings to his analysis his insights as a preacher and newsman as well as his experience as a White House aide under President Nixon. The result is a readable work that deserves the attention of all evangelicals who are concerned about the lack of or extent of the influence of their faith upon national life. Henley has served as a pastor in various Southern Baptist churches and before going to Washington he was religion editor of the Birmingham News.

There is a certain spiritual vitality in Washington no matter who is President. In the midst of much-publicized political turmoil, dedicated Christians are quietly at work, not changing social structures as much as rescuing gifted individuals from the grip of evil by pointing them to Jesus Christ. Only in heaven will we know all the victories that are being won, but Henley’s account will encourage many people who despair about our country’s future.

That is not to say that Henley overlooks the seamy side of the city. He shows that he is only too aware of the way selfish, power-hungry individuals maneuver and manipulate people. He also understands what the pressures of political life can lead to. He notes, for example, that “if Americans really understood the scope of the alcohol problem in Washington, they would be terrified.”

This book is a sequel to his earlier work, The White House Mystique (Revell, 1976; Charles Colson wrote the foreword). Earlier he wrote Enter at Your Own Risk (Revell, 1974). All three books contain narrative and autobiographical elements that bring the material to life and that help establish Henley as an important reporter on Christian influence in contemporary American politics.

On Billy Graham And the WECEF

Billy Graham is a member of the Board of Directors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He has made headlines recently not only because of his trip to Hungary but also because of a story that appeared in the Charlotte, N.C. Observer, which was widely quoted around America. The story implied that he had a hidden fund of twenty-three million dollars. That is untrue. The fund was not hidden and there was plenty of evidence to the contrary. Associated Press columnist George Cornell wrote a column to that effect and other people in the media, including Barbara Walters, came to Graham’s aid.

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the World Evangelism and Christian Education Fund (WECEF) are legally separate organizations. Formation of the latter was announced to the press in December of 1971. The WECEF started because Graham wanted to raise money for a missionary center to continue the work of world evangelization, to open a lay persons’ Bible training center, and to financially assist Christian organizations working in such areas as education, relief, and communications. This magazine is one of the organizations to receive financial help. Beginning this year audited reports of the BGEA will also be made public.

Many wealthy Christians want to help Christian causes, but they don’t want to start foundations. The WECEF answers this need. People can designate that donations be used for certain purposes, and the WECEF will see that it’s done.

Good will come from all of this. The Christian public is well aware of the extent of Graham’s ministry and his desire that the Gospel be preached to all the world. I hope the foundation will quickly reach a hundred or two hundred million dollars—a small amount in view of the world’s spiritual needs. And I intend to help.

The Editor

Those who were born during or after World War II have grown up under conditions unknown in previous generations. The threat of nuclear annihilation has made the world an increasingly fearful place in which to live. The horrors of war have shattered any hope that mankind is progressing toward a world utopia. Leading theologians have proclaimed the death of God. The inner feelings and anxieties of American youth living in this environment erupted into overt forms of expression during the 1960’s. What exactly took place in that decade is still being analyzed. Paul Simon began his career in that era. He expressed in song some of the turmoil of modern living. Throughout his music there is a constant underlying tone of pessimism whether one is talking about his years with Art Garfunkel (1963–1970) or his subsequent solo career.

Paul Simon’s poetic songs with their intellectual attitude and sophisticated message have found a large audience among young people. They find in them a depth of meaning with which to identify. Starting with the basic folk style, which enjoyed a revival in the early ’60’s, Simon’s music moved into folk-rock, a hybrid that coupled rich lyrics with electric and beat backgrounds. Not all of his songs are pessimistic or somber. Each album has a frivolous song or two that lightens his otherwise bleak outlook. He began his career with high school buddy Art Garfunkel in 1957 when as “Tom and Jerry” they had a rock’n’roll hit song “Hey, School Girl.” The frivolous side of his music seems to have surfaced more in his solo career, however.

Simon lives and records in New York City, his hometown. Perhaps this has colored his outlook on life, and influenced the imagery and settings of many of his songs. He is a man attempting to cope with life and to somehow come out on top.

“Patterns” examines the feeling that the world is out of control and that we have no control over our personal lives. Simon tells of lying on his bed with a streetlight throwing random shadows on the wall. He concludes that his life is like those shadows. Like a rat in a maze he is trapped in situations beyond his control.

Although stripped of all beliefs in an orderly and stable future, man continues to exist. “Kathy’s Song” finds Simon alone: “So you see I have come to doubt/All that I once held as true/I stand alone without beliefs/The only truth I know is you.” Each person fights to maintain his sanity in an uncaring society. Just as the “Sparrow” seeks help from others but finds none and dies, so each person faces life alone. The hit song “I Am A Rock” put into words what many people were feeling: I must keep to myself; I must avoid the pain of emotional attachments; safety comes in seclusion

The lack of communicatin between people is starkly portrayed in “The Sounds of Silence.” Simon tells of a dream in which a man views a crowd that hears but does not listen and talks but does not speak. Society is sick, for “silence like a cancer grows.” The singer cries out to be heard but his words fall on deaf ears as people turn to worship “the neon god they made.” The layers of meaning warn of the dangers of such silence. Relationships between people become unreal. On the fog-covered “Bleecker Street” Simon sees a “shadow touch a shadow’s hand” and in “The Dangling Conversation” a couple sharing the same room live worlds apart until, “I only kiss your shadow/I cannot feel your hand/You’re a stranger now unto me.” In “Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall” Simon admits the dark loss of identity: “I don’t know what is real/I can’t touch what I feel.” A person can only continue to pretend, to go on each day seeking a way to cope with the bewilderment of living. Or perhaps you can find relief in that “Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine” that will “neutralize the brain.”

Many young people uprooted themselves to search for themselves. Simon reflects the loneliness of the road and the longing to return home in “Homeward Bound.” “Each town looks the same” and identity becomes blurred. “America” describes the search of someone who is forced to admit to himself that even on the road he has not found himself: “I’m lost” and “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why,” he cries out. But solace is not found back in “My Little Town”; we cannot reconcile ourselves to living the life of our parents. The past also offers nothing. The success, style, and social status of “Richard Cory” ends in suicide. Nor does it seem that peace is found in isolation as “A Most Peculiar Man” points out. He, too, commits suicide.

Simon’s only solution to this loss of meaning and identity peculiar to modern civilization is to seek some level of comfort in companionship. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” pictures a life of mutual support where some ray of hope can be found when a couple walks over the rough waves of life. Like “The Boxer” Simon remains to face the foe and carry on. Yet relationships disintegrate, for “Everything Put Together Falls Apart.” So Simon finds himself asking in “Congratulations” if a man and a woman can really live in peace together.

Old age, a supposed time of satisfaction and reward, is unsettling. “Old Friends” tells of sharing a park bench, of the fear of death, and of the feeling that life has passed by the two old men.

Paul Simon toys with religion but seldom seriously considers it. Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (Simon and Garfunkel’s first album) contains “Go Tell It On The Mountain” and “You Can Tell The World,” two folk songs with the message that Christ has come to bring peace. Yet Simon doesn’t believe the lyrics he sings. The church is alive with the struggle for freedom in Simon’s “A Church Is Burning,” but the freedom is not freedom from personal sin. Rather it is civil rights and freedom for a suppressed minority. “Mrs. Robinson,” from the movie The Graduate, is consoled with the words, “Jesus loves you more than you will know” and “Heaven holds a place for those who pray,” but these seem little more than patronizing words. The young traveler “Duncan” finds temporary salvation in a young girl evangelist who preaches from the Bible and tells of the Pentecostal experience. But the real salvation comes late at night when he creeps into her tent to be awakened sexually. Many people felt that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was a religious song, and some Christian groups include altered versions of it in their concerts. The sound of the song is religious, but the message is not. The same can be said of “Gone At Last,” a rousing gospel-styled number. “Love Me Like A Rock” plays with the idea of consecration warding off satanic attacks. The early song “Blessed” uses the Beatitudes as a jumping off point to “bless” the ugly side of society while crying out, “O Lord, why have you forsaken me?” In Simon’s latest album (Still Crazy After All These Years) he comes to grips with the God who in “My Little Town” had his eye on us. “Some Folks’ Lives Roll Easy” sees Simon brought to his knees for a brief moment:

And here I am, Lord

I’m knocking at your place of business

I know I ain’t got no business here

But you said if I ever got so low

I was busted,

You could be trusted.

Unfortunately, the next song finds him calling on God to bless the good things of life, so that we can all just “Have A Good Time.” Even though he seemed to be saying throughout his earlier work that the American dream was empty, and he admits in “American Tune” that “You can’t be forever blessed,” he reverts to the pattern of preceding generations and finds solace in things. His haunting “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” admits that something profound has perverted modern society. Human relationships fall apart, love fades, people are not communicating, anxiety grows, time is flashing by, and society is self-destructing. Yet Simon cannot put his hand on a solution. Perhaps he will find religion, for his song “Silent Eyes,” which tells of God’s care for Jerusalem, may be an indication that he is still considering Judaism.

The songs of Paul Simon have spoken to people on many levels. His insights and poetic style have enabled him to find success. Yet he remains haunted by the realization that the good times of life cannot go on forever.

Daniel J. Evearitt is a graduate student at Drew University.

Dean Inge, an English churchman of another generation, cautioned that the theologian who weds himself to contemporary thought will find himself a widower tomorrow. Recent liberal and radical theologians have failed to take Inge’s marriage counsel too seriously. Lusting after modernity, they have united their Christian faith to some fashionable view, only to discover that the partners are incompatible. The result has been that many recent theological hopefuls have divorced themselves from Christian views, retaining only the name and surviving influence of their previous Christian association.

The theologian and preacher who intends to remain faithful to the essential biblical word must be alert to alien ideas that pass themselves off as Christian by retaining the name from their broken union. My purpose in this article is to look into some basic aspects of modern thought that have been united in a marriage of convenience with Christian faith.

Foremost among those characteristics is the abandonment of essentialism.

Until recently it was the generally accepted view, both in philosophy and in theology, that each person has a genuine selfhood, a distinctive human nature. Each begins his existence with a real “essence,” or a “substantive self,” as it is called, that then develops through life’s experiences. There is an “I” beyond, behind, and within all the psychic activities of individual life. The reality of this continuing substance, or essence, was considered a fundamental postulate of all truth and faith, and as such it had not only the backing of the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition but also the blessing of the church.

Now this is supposedly obsolete. We are now assured that there is no such “static self’ behind man’s actions and functions. The self is only an observable unity of these actions and functions; just that, and no more.

This of course has serious implications for the doctrines of God and Christ. Following the lead of Paul Tillich, several modern theologians have denied outright the biblical view of God as divine personality. For if there is no distinctive selfhood in the individual man, made in the image of God, such a personal selfhood cannot be credited to God either. The term God is no more than a code word for a mere succession of ideas or activities or whatever that religious people pronounce divine. However God is conceived, we are told, he is not to be thought of as a personal being.

Such a conception is quite at odds with the biblical picture of God, and with what Christians know and believe him to be. In the Scriptures, God is revealed as the living God, as the possessor of a distinct selfhood. It does not make Christian faith easier to accept if God is presented as the ground of being or a stream of activity or some other such notion.

It is in Christology that the attempted wedding of this modern denial of the substantival self with biblical truth has been the most reckless. Since man’s nature is understood in terms of activity and function, so, too, it is argued, must Christ’s. He, like the rest of us, is the sum total of his actions and functions. True, in his case, these came to be esteemed as having a distinctiveness sufficient to designate him divine.

So there has arisen a crop of Christologies that deny that Christ is a unity of two distinct natures in one person. The right question to be asked concerning the person of Christ, it is asserted, is not “What is his nature?,” the question with which Chalcedon was preoccupied, but “What is his function?”

Although the answers given to the question of Christ’s function differ considerably in terminology, there is general agreement that when Jesus spoke of himself as the Son of God, and of God as “my Father,” he did not mean “of one substance with the Father.” Instead Christ is to be designated divine because he acted in a unique way. So, for example, John Knox, in The Humanity and Divinity of Christ (1967) contends that Jesus was credited with the terms of divinity solely because the church came to believe that God acted in him in a marked fashion. And Nels Ferré in his Jesus: Christ and Lord considers our Lord’s deity to consist in his possessing the agapé content of God’s matchless love.

Allied to the current view of human selfhood is the so-called dynamic view of the universe. Historical theology was framed in the belief of what we may call the “created-givenness” of the world. But this view, under the tutelage of Lloyd Morgan, A. N. Whitehead, and Charles Hartshome, is written off as static. Instead we are bidden to conceive of reality as essentially creative, as a process of becoming. There is no fixed order; there is movement, activity, development. This creative activity gives birth to mutations that bring forth new existences. There is thus both continuity of process and the emergence of novelty.

The union of this idea with theology has not been all bad. In some respects it has enriched our conception of God. On the other hand, it has had baneful consequences for Christology. It yields at best a Nestorian view of the person of Christ. For when Christology is approached from the perspective of process thought, Christ is seen merely as a signal mutation within the creative process.

One of the most thorough attempts to unite process thought with Christology is that of Norman Pittenger. In both The Word Incarnate (1959) and Christology Reconsidered (1974) he conceives of God as continually acting creatively in the world and somehow finding fulfillment in the process. Within this continuity of process, according to Pittenger, there has emerged in Christ a genuine novelty. But, then, every person is also a mutation in the development process; each is, in a real sense, a new product. God is at work in every man, but in the man Jesus of Nazareth he found full existential response, so that, in Christ, the union of God and man was “clinched” and “established.” The difference between Christ and other men is, therefore, only a matter of degree; in Christ the divine indwelling was raised to the highest pitch. Pittenger readily admits that this view can hardly be distinguished from Nestorianism.

A second major characteristic of present-day thinking is the repudiation of “verticalism.”

Early theology climaxing in Augustine strongly asserted God’s otherness from the world, and his action in it as sovereignly direct and immediate. During the Middle Ages, despite the counter horizontal emphasis made by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, this relation of God to the world was conceived virtually in a deistic fashion. God had brought the world into existence as a finished article, and it was to be accepted as it was. To interfere with it was considered irreligious and impious. This reasoning was advanced at the time against every scientific attempt to improve man’s lot. It was the church’s task to relieve what misery it could by acts of charity without seeking to alter God’s unalterable cosmos.

One prominent illustration of this attitude comes from the reign of Philip II of Spain. A suggestion was submitted to the authorities for improving navigation of the rivers Tajo and Manzanares so that easier communication might be had with isolated groups of the population. But the request was refused, on the grounds, according to the official report, that “if God had so willed that these rivers should be navigable then he would have made them so with a single word, as he formerly did when he said ‘fait lux.’” The report goes on to declare, “It would be a bold infringement of the right of Providence if human hands were to venture to try to improve what God for unfathomable reasons has left unfinished.”

The sixteenth-century Reformers did not greatly change this situation. For by portraying God’s relation to the world almost exclusively in terms of the divine omnipotence, they virtually excluded God from his world. The Reformation witnessed the abandonment of natural theology and introduced a fideism in which knowledge of God was restricted to faith alone. Thus was God left outside the rational sphere, the sphere that meanwhile was to dominate the life of Western man.

If the Reformers, for the very best of reasons, seemed to exclude God from the world, Kant in his turn certainly put the reality of God outside the realm of pure reason. But he did allow him a place within the areas of practical reason and morality. Schleiermacher, consequently, sought to relocate God in the emotions and feelings, an area where the rational understanding had not yet penetrated. But soon Freud was to appear and subject this region to scientific analysis, with the result that here, too, no place was allowed for God.

And so, with God edged out of the world both outside and inside man’s experience, where else could religion have scope but in action? It was concluded therefore that “the true interpretation of the meaning revealed by theology is achieved only in historical praxis [practical use]” (Gustavo Gutierrez, The Theology of Liberation, 1974 [English translation]). So general has this emphasis on praxis become that much contemporary theology is almost exclusively horizontal, and its validity is judged according to the measure allowed to man’s active participation in building for himself a better world. Man is consequently conceived as a one-dimensional being whose destiny is planned toward a more human future. Commitment to the world is then equated with the experience of faith, and the church’s sole reason for existence is to be in “the vanguard in humanizing the world” (Edward Schillebeeckx, God and the Future of Man).

This thesis, which has come to full flower in the theology of liberation, began with the publication of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theologie der Hoffnung in 1964 (English translation, Theology of Hope, 1967). Moltmann emphasized the cosmic range of Christian hope and regarded eschatology as the dominating motif of the whole New Testament message. In contast to the Reformers, he discounted the desire for individual salvation and stressed the universal and social application of God’s reconciling work in Christ. The New Testament salvation (sõtria), he insists, must be understood as shalõm (peace) in the Old Testament sense. “This does not mean,” he then declares, “merely salvation of the soul, individual rescue from the evil world, comfort from the troubled conscience, but also the realization of the eschatological hope of justice, the humanizing of man, the socializing of humanity, peace for all creation.” Yet Moltmann did allow for an ultimate fulfillment of the eschatological promise by an act of God from beyond history, at an end-time, with the parousia of Christ.

But it was precisely on this score, that he had dispatched God to the future, that he was criticized. The critics asserted that he did “not keep sufficiently in mind the participation of man in his own liberation” (Gutierrez) and so, according to Hugo Assmann, “ran the risk of relegating man to the role of an inactive spectator.”

Moltmann yielded to the criticism. In subsequent works he took a more radical view of how the kingdom of God is to be brought about in human society, giving man a more active share in establishing its universal sway. This stronger stress on the fulfillment of “the eschatological hope of justice, the humanizing of man, the socializing of humanity, peace for all creation” comes out in such declarations as this: “The humanity of man comes to its reality in the human kingdom of the Son of Man. In the kingdom of the Son of Man man’s likeness to God is fulfilled. Through this human man God finally asserts his rights over his creation” (Man: Christian Anthropology in the Conflicts of the Present, 1974 [English translation]). The Christian consciousness must consequently be a consciousness of mission. Such a consciousness, however, “does not ask about God’s universal plan for the coming ages, but asks rather about Christ’s universal mission to all men” (Planning and Hope, 1971 [English translation]). In his Religion, Revolution and the Future, the second word in the title struck a welcoming note with those who had come to believe that a more hostile posture was required of those who, in the interest of the kingdom of God, sought the liberation of man from all injustice and the equalization of all in a humanized society.

Yet Moltmann’s allowances were not enough for those who thought that the increasing radicalization of social praxis, the building of a just society based on a new relationship of the means of production, is the only way of establishing the kingdom of God.

The theologies of liberation and revolution drew upon several sources, including the naturalism of Feuerbach; Blondel’s “philosophy of action”; Bloch’s idea of history as open-ended, so that there is always the possibility of the novem, the new; and Marx’s thesis that social conditions are but the reflex and echo of the economic conditions, so that change for the better can be brought about only by the revolutionary redistribution of the economic forces of society. According to one advocate of the theology of revolution, Carl E. Braaten, “the vision of the radically new is what links revolutionary action with eschatological hope.” But basic to such theologizing is the obliteration of the natural-supernatural dualism that has always been a presupposition of biblical faith. Thus Gutierrez declares, “The temporal-spiritual and profane-sacred antitheses are based on the natural-supernatural distinctions. But the theological evolution of the last term has tended to stress the unity which eliminates all dualism” (The Theology of Liberation).

There is, therefore, only one world, the secular. We are to look to this world and not to one beyond for “true life.” In this connection the story of the Exodus from Egypt is regarded as “paradymatic.” Israel was promised a land in which it could establish itself as a society free from misery and alienation. In the whole episode the active participation of Israel is emphasized. “By working,” therefore, at “transforming the world, breaking out of his servitude, building a just society, and assuming his destiny in history, man forgets himself. In Egypt, work is alienation and, far from building a just society, contributes rather to increasing injustice and to widening the gap between exploiters and the exploited” (Gutierrez, The Theology of Liberation). So “man’s freedom is to become a praxis that makes the world different”; for “God needs man for the creation of his future” and “awaits for what man can give to the new tomorrow” (Rubem A. Alves, A Theology of Human Hope).

The result of all this is the rejection of a climactic return of Christ to bring an end to human history and to set up God’s eternal kingdom of righteousness beyond history. For the hope of the kingdom is to be realized within the historic process, almost totally by human endeavor. When salvation is viewed from the perspective of alienation, at once political, economic, and racial, the only right Christian response, it is maintained, is what Johannes Metz calls “a political theology,” which he equates with an “eschatological theology,” and which Braaten calls “the politics of eschatological hope for a society.” The ethical outworking of this thesis, as Rubem Alves sees it, is “the creation of a new world” by the liberation of man from the ills—such as poverty, exploitation, and disease—that result from alienation. In Moltmann’s theology of hope, God and man work together to bring about man’s salvation. In the theologies of liberation and revolution, man does it alone, with perhaps a helping hand from God now and then to steady him on the course.

Can what purports to be a Christian theology remain essentially biblical if it is squeezed into the framework of an alien metaphysic? It must surely be evident that Christian faith cannot remain biblical if it loses contact with its biblical foundations. To proclaim it truly one must maintain its own presuppositions. For faith has, as Augustine says, its own “secret metaphysic.” That is to say, there is a biblical world view in which alone Christian doctrines find their reality and their rationale. One pillar of this biblical world view is that there is a spiritual realm that cannot be totally equated with the material and the physical. If the spiritual sphere is denied and the doctrines of the Gospel are confined within a one-dimensional framework, the result must be an unbiblical faith, a Christianity cut off from historical revelation.

To have a biblical Word we must take with it the biblical world view. To maintain the Christian message we must retain the Christian metaphysic. The justification of this metaphysic is the task of the apologist. It falls to him to give cogency and certainty to Christian theism, in which context alone the biblical revelation of God comes with saving significance.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

I have a private war with Halloween, and I want to share it with you. Perhaps I’m only tilting against windmills in Don Quixote fashion. But I don’t think so. Some people might wonder why I want to “deprive little children of all the fun and excitement of a holiday that is a special time to them.” Well, there are lots of reasons.

For one thing Halloween has become a questionable and increasingly dangerous night. And it’s not due to ghouls and goblins. Each year more vandalism occurs, more property damaged. Older children beat up younger children. In fact, that happened to me one Halloween when I was a small child. Much worse is what some adults are doing—putting hallucinogenic drugs in candy, or razor blades in apples. You’ve heard the horror stories.

But that’s not the only reason I question this particular holiday. It’s such an extraordinary time. We do some bizarre things on Halloween, don’t we? Dressing up as spooks, goblins, and witches. Calling on people and demanding goodies. I wonder if we know why we do these things. Why do we go along with it? Because it’s tradition? That isn’t enough of a reason.

Let me put it this way. The Passover celebration in a Jewish home begins when the youngest son asks his father, “Daddy, why is this night different from all other nights?” Then the father tells him of the mighty works of God surrounding the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. But what would you say if your son or daughter were to ask about Halloween, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” How would you explain the shenanigans of Halloween?

Most people know that the word itself comes from All Hallows Eve, the evening before All Hallows. Therefore it has something to do with All Saints and the Christian Church. But what?

It comes as quite a surprise to discover that this celebration predates the Christian Church by several centuries. In fact, it goes back to a practice of the ancient Druids in Britain, France, Germany, and the Celtic countries, who lived hundreds of years before Christ was born. This celebration honored one of their deities, Samhain. Lord of the Dead. Samhain called together all the wicked souls who had died within the past twelve months and had been condemned to inhabit the bodies of animals. The date for this celebration was the last day of October, the eve of the Celtic new year. It was a time of falling leaves and general seasonal decay, and it seemed appropriate to celebrate death. That’s what it was—a celebration of death. It honored the god of the dead and the wicked spirits of the dead. The Druids believed that on this particular night the souls of the dead returned to their former homes to be entertained by the living. If acceptable food and shelter were not provided these evil spirits would cast spells, cause havoc and terror, and haunt and torment the living. They demanded to be placated. Look closely. Here is the beginning of “trick-or-treat.” Evil spirits demanding a “treat.” If they didn’t get it, you got a “trick.”

James Napier writing in Folklore says that these beliefs and practices were not confined to northern Britain, but were widespread and—with some variations—practiced the world over by pagan peoples. In Cambodia, for instance, people used to chant, “Oh, all you our ancestors who are departed deign to come and eat what we have prepared for you, and bless your posterity to make it happy.” In Mexico jars of food and drink were set on a table in a central room; the family went out with torches to greet the evil spirits and bid them in. Then they would kneel around the table and pray to these spirits to accept their offerings.

But how did all this become associated with Christianity? There’s another part of the story that goes back to Rome. The Roman Pantheon was built by the Emperor Hadrian in about A.D. 100 as a temple to the goddess Cybelé and various other Roman deities. It became a principal place of worship where Roman pagans prayed for their dead. Then, Rome was sacked, the barbarians came in, and they took over the Pantheon, along with everything else. After several centuries it fell into disrepair. In A.D. 607 it was recaptured by the Emperor Phocas and he turned it over as a gift to Pope Boniface IV.

Boniface reconsecrated it to the Virgin Mary. This was part of a general policy that wherever pagan celebrations were well established, they would be continued and incorporated into Christian worship. (Only the names were changed to protect the innocent.) So, if you worshiped a certain god, and you were conquered and “Christianized,” you could continue that same celebration. Only now you would offer it to one or another of the saints. (Rather a questionable way of evangelizing, but it was effective if you were interested in numbers.) No longer were Roman pagans gathering to pray to the goddess Cybelé for their dead. Now the Roman Catholics were gathering to pray to the goddess Mary for their dead. And they did so in the same temples.

For two centuries the major celebration in the Pantheon took place in May and was called “All Saints Day.” Then in A.D. 834 it was deliberately moved to the first of November. Why? To coincide with those ancient Druidic and pagan practices that had been going on for centuries. The Church wanted to accomodate the recently conquered German Saxons and the Norsem*n of Scandinavia; it baptized yet another celebration.

That’s the wedding of All Saints Day to Halloween. Thoroughly, utterly, totally pagan: the worship of the dead, the placating of evil spirits, the honoring of the Lord of the Dead, the transferring to Mary of pagan esteem that was previously given to Cybelé. Where does this leave us?

First, there is an appropriate way of honoring the “saints” who have gone before us. But it is not to pray to them. We are nowhere in Scripture invited to pray to the saints. We are to honor them, surely, and to praise God for their good examples that encourage us. The book of Hebrews says, “we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses.” Not witnessing us, but witnessing to us, saying, “Hang in there, keep going, it’s worth it.” Mary had confessed herself a sinner. Just like you. Just like me.

She called Jesus her Saviour—only a sinner needs a Saviour—and she worshiped her Son. It would horrify Mary to have us pray to her. The Scripture says “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.” It is idolatry and blasphemy to pray to human beings, no matter how good they might be.

Second, we are nowhere given any warrant to pray for the saints. The whole notion of praying for the saints comes from the doctrine of purgatory. But Scripture doesn’t teach purgatory. It teaches that “to be absent from the body” if you are a Christian is “to be present with the Lord.” One of our articles of faith says that “the Romanish Doctrine concerning Purgatory Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.” So we are not to pray to the saints and we are not to pray for the saints. The Collect for All Saints Day says, “Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living.” That’s the appropriate prayer—a prayer for ourselves.

So what about Halloween? I would like to propose an alternative to the way we have come to observe it. I don’t think you can simply take it away from children without putting something in its place. How about an All Saints Party? Why not a party on the night of Halloween that still provides an evening of fun and celebration for the children as well as adults but transforms that fun into something distinctly Christian? My parishioners responded so enthusiastically to the challenge last year that United Press International ran a story about our activities and newspapers all over the country picked it up. We want to make our “All Saints Party” an annual event.

If there must be costumes for the party, how about trying to dress as we imagine the saints of old did. Joan of Arc or Francis of Assissi. Or your favorite Bible characters—Joseph or Luke or John. What about sponsoring a contest to determine which person comes closest to our understanding of the saints? Or maybe make costumes designed around a Bible text or theme, with a prize for the best interpretation. Or why not plan a party around Pilgrim’s Progress, the way Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women did. Act out a scene from Paradise Lost or “Samson Agonistes.”

Whatever we do, let’s not have any ghosts, witches, or monsters. Let’s leave that to the Prince of Darkness. We must focus on light. And personally I want nothing whatsoever to do with the whole business of trick-or-treat; I would love to see Christians refuse to participate in it altogether.

The early Israelites were warned that “When you come into the land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who has anything whatsoever to do with the occult or with the contacting of the spirits of the dead. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord” (Deut. 18:9–12). Surely this applies to us as well.

John W. Howe is rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia. He has the M.Div. from Yale University.

The idea of recompense makes many people uneasy these days. Both Christians and morally sensitive non-Christians have trouble uttering the word “deserve.” This is why the grading system in America’s colleges and universities is in a shambles. There is a growing reluctance to recompense good work with good grades and bad work with bad grades; people feel uncomfortable saying, “Johnny deserved to fail.”

In discussing the matter of salaries with students and colleagues, I have found an aversion to the idea of paying people differently according to the merit of their work. They simply can’t say, “Employee A deserves more money than employee B because his work is better.”

We no longer have penal institutions. We have instead correctional institutions. This means, at least for those who create the vocabulary of the debate, that we no longer punish our criminals; we re-educate them. No one wants to ask, “What does a thief deserve?” We would rather ask, “How can we retool him so that he doesn’t make a nuisance of himself again?”

How shall we view this aversion to the law of recompense? Is it the tender sprout of a genuinely Christian ethic ready to burst into full bloom and fill the world with the fragrance of equality and dignity? Or is it rather the hauling up of another moral anchor?

I will leave that for the reader to decide as I try to answer this quesion: When is it right and when is it wrong to transcend the law of recompense? By the “law of recompense” I mean that principle according to which a person receives no more and no less than what he deserves; what determines the size of his reward or punishment is the goodness or evil of his action.

I call it a “law” because I believe it is the binding, universal substructure of all moral existence. In other words, it is the foundation upon which any system of ethics must be built to accord with reality. And as a Christian I believe that it has its origin in the nature of God and that he, insofar as he must be himself, is bound to act in accordance with the law of recompense. I hope it will become clear that this is not an arbitrary presupposition but is grounded in reason and in Scripture.

It is easy to agree that to transgress against the law of recompense by treating a person worse than he deserves is almost always wrong. (There may be some rare exception in which one might harm an innocent person in order to prevent him from hurting many others unawares.) Ask yourself how you would appeal a judge’s decision that you were to spend five years in jail for jay-walking (assuming that the law permitted such a sentence). Your basic argument would probably be that the crime of jay-walking does not injure the state or its citizens so severely as to merit this severe punishment. Your argument would be based on the law of recompense: it is unjust to treat a person worse than he deserves.

The other way of setting aside the law of recompense is to treat a person better than he deserves. That is, one may decide not to punish a guilty person or to punish him less than his evil action deserves. This is what I mean by transcending the law of recompense. And here is where the uneasiness with the idea of recompense sets in—understandably so, for the issue involved here is extremely complex, whether one approaches it from a theory of natural law or from New Testament exegesis.

Again and again the New Testament commends to us examples of transcending the law of recompense. If someone strikes you on the cheek, turn to him the other also; bless those who curse you; do good to those who hate you; pray for those who persecute you; forgive those who wrong you seventy times seven; repay no one evil for evil; do not avenge yourselves (Matt. 5:39; Luke 6:28; Matt. 5:44; 18:22; Rom. 12:14, 17; 1 Thess. 5:15; 1 Pet. 3:9). No wonder Christians feel uneasy with the idea of recompense, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Does not even God himself cause the sun to rise and the rain to fall on the unjust as well as the just (Matt. 5:45)? And, to get to the heart of the matter, is not the most important thing in life the pardon for sins that we enjoy in Christ? In the death of Christ, God, because of his great love for us, transcended the law of recompense.

Or did he? If the law of recompense had been completely abandoned, then why the cross? Why did the Son of God “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” have to die (Acts 2:23)? Why didn’t God on one clear day in eternity simply say, “In spite of the fact that the human race in its pride and self-sufficiency has sinned against me and deserves eternal destruction, I will overlook what it deserves and bless it forever and that’s that”? He did not do that because the law of recompense is not a legal statute outside God that he consults for guidance, a principle that can be set aside under extenuating circ*mstances. It is not an impersonal code established by our reason to which God must conform. Rather, the law of recompense is an expression of who God is.

If we were to be spared from the punishment we deserve and to enjoy the smile of God’s countenance forever, then Christ had to die; the Lord had to lay on him the iniquity of us all (Isa. 53:6). God had to send his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin in order to condemn or recompense sin in the flesh (Rom. 8:3). Christ had to become a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). For the curse and the condemnation under which sin stands are irrevocable. God never sweeps any evil under the rug.

Because of what happened on the cross, Paul says that all of us ungodly people will be treated as innocent if we believe in Jesus (Rom. 4:5; 3:24). So if we focus on ourselves, it is true that the law of recompense has been transcended: we are not requited according to our iniquities. But if we focus on God we see that he has not been untrue to himself. There has been due recompense for sin; the glory that we failed to render to our Creator has been duly repaid in the obedient death of his son. So the law of recompense is not nullified by the mercy of God that we as believers cherish so much.

What of those who do not believe? How does the God of righteousness relate to them? He is patient and longsuffering, bestowing upon them sun and rain, seed time and harvest, and the witness of his servants. But they presume upon the riches of his kindness, and by their hard and unrepentant hearts they store up wrath to fall upon them on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed (Rom. 2:4, 5). As Paul says to the Thessalonians, the Lord Jesus will be “revealed from heaven … inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus; they shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction …” (2 Thess. 1:7–9). “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Rom. 12:19). For those who do not take refuge in the cross of Christ there will be only wrath and fury in the end. For them the last word of the law of recompense is Hell. And it is not correctional or remedial; it is punitive and eternal (2 Thess. 1:9; Matt. 25:46; Rev. 20:10, 15).

Our own practice of transcending the law of recompense derives its proper meaning from the death of Christ. When the New Testament calls us to turn the other cheek and not to render evil for evil but to forgive, it is calling for a behavior that mirrors the work of God in Christ. Accordingly, the twofold source from which our transcending the law of recompense should spring is, first, the mercy of God that we have experienced in Christ and naturally want to extend to others, and second, the inner peace or contentment that we derive from this mercy. We thus show that Christ has freed us from the craving to exalt our own ego by squashing others down (even if they deserve it).

From the work of God in Christ we derive also the twofold goal at which our merciful behavior should aim. The first part is the glorification of God. If we endure wrong without a spirit of retaliation for Christ’s sake, we are saying in effect that God is gloriously trustworthy, for he has promised that this momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Cor. 4:17f.), so that we don’t need to secure our own glory by showing up the offender. Secondly, our transcending the law of recompense should aim at the conversion of the unbelieving opponent. Our hope is that he will see our good deeds and give glory to our Father in heaven (Matt. 5:16; 1 Pet. 2:12; 3:16).

Ultimately the law of recompense is still fulfilled. If our offender repents and believes on Jesus, all his sins, including his slap on our cheek, will be laid upon Jesus and there duly condemned and punished. If he dies in his sin, then he will reap in wrath and fury all that he has sown, including the slap on our cheek.

Is it always right for the believer to transcend the law of recompense? In my opinion, no. I see at least three spheres of life in which it is both socially devastating and contrary to the will of God to transcend the law of recompense consistently. The first is the parent-child relationship. The parent who makes it his rule to transcend the law of recompense, always turning the other cheek, always answering his child’s insolence with sweet talk, and never punishing disobedience, is destroying his child. Where is that child going to learn that each person is held accountable for his deeds? How is he ever going to conceive of the holiness and the wrath of God? And if the parent should defend his approach by saying, “I want my child to know that God is a God of mercy,” my response would be that he is making it impossible for that child to appreciate mercy. One cannot appreciate mercy unless one knows that according to the law of recompense he deserves condemnation. This child will not learn this if his arrogance and disobedience are continually rewarded instead of punished.

The Old Testament wise man said, “Discipline your son while there is hope; do not set your heart on his destruction.… If you beat him with the rod you will save his life from Sheol.… He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him” (Prov. 23:13 f.; 13:24). And nowhere in the New Testament is this deep insight called into question. Paul writes, “Bring up your children in the discipline of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). In other words, take heed, parents, for you hold an awesome post as God’s deputies and are to administer his discipline, punishing evil, rewarding the good, and training your children properly.

The second sphere of life where it is destructive and contrary to the will of God consistently to transcend the law of recompense is the economic order of society. The economic counterpart to the law of recompense is that the value of goods and services should be truly reflected in the remuneration received for them. Where there is no direct correspondence between the value of goods and services on the one hand and prices and wages on the other, the economy will deteriorate and collapse.

To illustrate: if we have to pay as much for a loaf of bread as we do for a car—that is, if we are forced to transcend the law of recompense and reward the bakers far more than they deserve—then the people will starve, and before they starve they will revolt, and that will mean the destruction of the economic order. Or if the garbage collectors demand $50,000 a year and we grant it, the tax burden will become unbearable. No economic order can last if the law of recompense is abused in this way.

The Apostle Paul had to deal with an abuse of this kind. Soon after he had founded the church at Thessalonica and had gone away, somebody began spreading the idea that the day of the Lord was at hand. The result was that some people stopped working and began living a life of idleness. But apparently they expected to be fed by those who were still producing. That is, they expected their Christian brothers to overlook the law of recompense and to reward them with food that they were doing nothing to deserve. Paul wrote to remind them of an established principle: “For even when we were among you, we gave you this command: If any one will not work, let him not eat. We hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to … earn their own living” (2 Thess. 3:10–12). In other words: do not transcend the law of recompense.

The third sphere of life in which it is destructive and against the will of God consistently to transcend the law of recompense is governmental authority, specifically the responsibility of governments to make and enforce laws. If, all of a sudden, robbery and murder, rape and fraud were consistently pardoned rather than punished, if the police and the courts always turned the other cheek and returned good for evil, only a dreamer could think that civilized society would last a year.

According to the New Testament, it is God’s will that governments maintain order in a fallen society by administering justice in accordance with the law of recompense. Romans 13 describes the secular ruler as God’s servant, one whose proper function is to commend good behavior and to manifest the wrath of God by punishing evil behavior. “He does not wield the sword in vain” (Rom. 13:4). The punitive function of government is not seen as a necessary evil that God simply permits. It is viewed rather as an expression of God’s righteous opposition to evil and his loving concern that fallen societies not plummet into chaos.

If this line of thinking is correct and there are at least these three spheres of life in which it is God’s will that men requite others according to their deeds, how shall we reconcile this with the repeated commands in Scripture not to avenge ourselves?

The answer some give is that the Christian must not be involved in an institution in which he would have to participate in the outworking of punishment or recompense, such as a police force. But I do not think it is possible to carry this answer through consistently as one reads and tries to live by the New Testament. What is the difference in principle between a parent’s spanking his child for disobedience and a policeman’s knocking a thief over the head with a billy club because he disobeyed the law and tried to run off with a woman’s purse? To carry this suggestion through consistently would, for me, mean the abandonment of very important biblical teachings, and would result in very unloving behavior.

My own suggestion is that it is possible for behavior that accords with the law of recompense to spring from the same source and aim at the same goal as behavior that transcends the law of recompense. And when human recompense does spring from that source and aim at that goal, it is not sin.

There are at least three ways of expressing the source from which proper recompense might come. First, it must spring out of an experience of God’s mercy. The Christian who recompenses rightly knows that he is utterly unworthy of the grace in which he stands and yet feels totally secure and fulfilled in the love of his heavenly Father; his act of recompense does not spring from a sense of fear or of personal frustration or from a desire to exalt himself by putting another down.

Secondly, the believer’s decision to punish another person will spring from a humble submission to the sovereign Creator, whose prerogative it is to render to a man according to his deeds but who has ordained that in some spheres of life his human creatures be involved in administering his retributive justice on his behalf. It is too simple to say recompensing evil is not man’s business but God’s, for apparently God has chosen to employ parents and policemen, for example, in his business and has thus made it their business as well.

Why do people today avoid using the word deserve? Is it the tender sprout of a genuinely Christian ethic? I leave it to the reader to decide.

I do not mean to say that employers who recompense employees according to their merit are God’s agents in precisely the same way that secular rulers are. I want only to stress that in some circ*mstances economic conformity to the law of recompense is God’s will and that when Christian employers conform to the law of recompense they need not think they are usurping a prerogative of God. They are doing his will on earth and in that sense are his agents.

Thirdly, recompense must spring from a dependence upon God’s willingness to give wisdom to his servants so that they know in specific situations what is right and wrong and what punishments accord with what offenses.

And finally, the goal at which both the transcendence and the execution of recompense aim is the glorification of God: not this time by witnessing directly to his mercy but by witnessing to his justice, which is an essential ray of the glory that streams out from his person. Even here mercy is not neglected, however, for an expression of the justice of God furnishes the context a sinner needs to understand God’s mercy.

I believe that if an act of recompense springs from this threefold source—(1) a humble dependence upon the mercy of God in which one does not act out of frustration or fear, (2) a submission to God’s prerogative to recompense evil, which in some cases he does through human agents, and (3) a faith that God will give wisdom to his servants—and if its aim is the glory of God rather than self-exaltation, it is good.

I have not attempted to provide any absolute criterion for deciding whether an act of recompense or an act transcending the law of recompense is right in a particular situation. Ought one to weave a whip and drive the robbers out of the temple (John 2:15) or to put down the stones and say to the harlot, “Neither do I condemn you” (John 8:11)? The New Testament does not offer absolute rules for making that kind of decision. Instead it offers the power of God to transform us by renewing our minds, so that with our new mind, the mind of Christ, we can in every situation “prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2).

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Somewhere along the road between Democratic presidential nominees William Jennings Bryan and James Earl Carter the thesis that evangelicalism is doomed should have been abandoned. But many scholars and journalists, a bulldog group, have clung tenaciously to this view. Until recently, that is. Now their jaws are slackening and we read and hear that evangelicalism is on the upswing. Why is conservative Protestantism (often disparaged as fundamentalism by those who do not identify with the evangelical movement) suddenly making news?

Some people would simply give a theological answer, that is, that for all its weaknesses, inconsistencies, and factions, God is behind it. But then, a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon would offer the same explanation for the continued growth of his movement. So, without discounting a divine role, I would suggest three other reasons for the resurgence of evangelicalism.

First, the more conservative brand of Protestantism is just recovering from the loss of much of its organizational apparatus—denominational headquarters, colleges, seminaries, publishing houses, and periodicals—to the control of liberal Protestants who had changed (if not discarded) most of the historic teachings of the church. It generally takes time, energy, and money, even if the Lord is with you, to build up organizations that win converts, produce disciples, foster scholarship, and prepare and distribute academic and popular writings.

With a few notable exceptions, evangelical Bible colleges, liberal arts colleges, youth organizations, foreign and domestic missionary agencies, theological seminaries, Sunday School curriculum producers, book publishers, and periodicals are just now reaching their third, fourth, or fifth decade of existence. Many prominent evangelical organizations are still led by their founders. Evangelicalism was there all along, but outsiders had to look for it. Its institutions were poor and small; the more substantial works of its publishers were reprints of nineteenth century books; its publicity apparatus was weak at best.

In many ways the condition of Protestant orthodoxy in the first half of this century had parallels with the century-long condition of the immigrant Roman Catholic communities. Most orthodox Protestants, especially if they were traditionally English-speaking, have had to make a fresh start institutionally. In some cases this meant forming new denominations. It also meant forming and supporting new, specialized institutions (schools, publishers, missions, camps), independent of denominational control, that served evangelicals who remained in the older denominations as well as those who left.

I do not think that having to begin again was on the whole an unfortunate circ*mstance. There may in fact be something in the sociology and psychology of long established institutions that is usually incompatible with fervent evangelicalism. Indeed in earlier centuries new evangelical organizations were formed not so much to protest departure from orthodoxy as to rebuke diminishing vitality.

Second, conservative evangelicals would not appear to have gained so much if liberal evangelicals, now generally known as ecumenical Protestants, had not declined. One needs to recall that liberal Protestantism was once quite fervent. A large number of liberals once went forth as foreign missionaries. Liberal church-related colleges once were clearly distinguishable from secular private colleges. Liberal theologians were academically respected on their university campuses and were, once upon a time, a frequent source for college presidents. The ordained ministry was an honorable profession for the sons of elite families and the graduates of the finest colleges. Today, there is no shortage of ministerial candidates in liberal Protestantism, but does anyone care to argue that leading families and colleges are supplying their share? (Probably a parallel phenomenon could be found for Catholic priests and nuns and for Jewish rabbis.)

I am far from predicting the demise of ecumenical Protestantism. I certainly don’t wish to fall into the same trap as those who saw no future for evangelicalism. But it is noteworthy that the nineteenth century founders of liberal Protestantism thought it necessary to make adjustments in the historic doctrines lest the world first ridicule and then ignore Christianity altogether. “Unless we change, the people will stop coming,” went the reasoning. So they changed, but the people stopped coming anyway. Well, not exactly.

Large numbers of people still attend liberal Protestant churches in the United States. But parallels in other movements do not augur well for the future. Decline in attendance among Catholics has been notable since the liberalizing winds began blowing through that church; and in Britain and most of continental Europe, church attendance is pitifully small. I don’t contend that if the European theological faculties had been reserved for orthodox Protestants church attendance would not have plummeted. But non-orthodox Protestantism must ask why, despite its best efforts to appeal to “modern man,” it has converted so few of them.

Liberal Protestantism will endure at least as a halfway house for those who can no longer embrace Protestant orthodoxy but who do not wish to repudiate religion altogether. Whether it will have a long-lasting vitality apart from that significant factor—much as Mormonism indisputably has—only time will tell.

Third, conservative Protestantism is not as “conservative” as it may appear at first. To be sure, certain crucial historic Christian doctrines are still sincerely affirmed, such as the deity of Christ, his sin-atoning death and bodily resurrection, and the certainty of his returning to earth in glory. And there are a few publishers that chiefly reprint works from the nineteenth century or earlier, issuing only such twentieth century writings that read as if they could have appeared earlier. But that is a minor section of the evangelical scene. Far more significant are the modifications of traditional styles and approaches.

Consider, for example, the very successful Living Bible, Paraphrased. Whatever one thinks of the scholarly and stylistic virtues of this rendering of the Bible, it is surely a major departure from the King James cadences that traditionally characterized evangelical proclamation.

In another area, the success of The Total Woman—the author made the cover of Time magazine—represents countless lesser-known books that take a positive rather than a shameful attitude toward sexuality. Many people wrongly classify the book as conservative because it limits sexual relations to those who are married, as the Bible clearly does, and because it emphasizes sexual role distinctions, as Christendom has traditionally done. (The biblical basis for such distinctions is now being shown to be not necessarily as sweeping as was long thought.) The Total Woman has drawn opposition from many evangelicals just because it is so positive about sex. At the same time a small but vocal group of evangelicals has opposed the book because it is “sexist.”

Another recent best seller is The Late Great Planet Earth. The author based his scenario for the future on a system of biblical interpretation called dispensationalism. As a system it is not quite 150 years old, less than one third as old as Protestantism. Of course relative antiquity is no basis for deciding the correctness of biblical interpretation. The very existence of dispensationalism, which is represented in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible, shows that conservatives are willing to be innovative when they think that they have scriptural backing for a change. Even as Luther and Calvin were willing to break with the traditional ecclesiastical institutions, so dispensationalism was willing to break with more traditional Protestant understandings of the details of the return of Christ to earth.

Yet another example of evangelical innovation is the Pentecostal-charismatic movement, which is essentially a twentieth century phenomenon. Short-lived and geographically restricted precursors of this kind of religious expression have often occurred; our century is seeing the first sustained and widespread dissemination of it. Even as many evangelicals fault the freedom of the Living Bible, the attitudes toward sex of The Total Woman, and the detailed descriptions of the future in The Late Great Planet Earth, so many of them fault the exegetical under-pinnings and the experiential emphasis of the charismatic movement. But such willingness to be innovative has contributed greatly to the flourishing state of “conservative” Protestantism.

Apart from the Living Bible each of these examples has secular counterparts. But it would be wrong to assume that evangelicals are simply exploiting cultural trends to gain converts. The doctrines of The Late Great Planet Earth were taught and published long before the interest in ancient astronauts, astrology, or doomsday became popular. It would also be wrong to assume that the climate of the age does not have anything to do with renewed evangelical appreciation for sex within marriage, which is reflected by The Total Woman.

What to an outside critic is opportunism is seen by an insider as an appropriate channel through which the message of historic Christian doctrine can flow. Are the masses, for whatever reason, showing a renewed interest in demons? Then evangelist Billy Graham will write a bestseller on Angels, both to give a balanced view and also to present the Gospel. Does deemphasis on the literary classics mean that fewer common people groove with the King James? Then make available a Living Bible in every day language. Because of this widespread unwillingness to be tenaciously conservative in method and message, evangelicals are having the impact that they are on the nation.

Evangelicalism, therefore, has blossomed not because it is new but because it was ignored for so long by outsiders. It flourishes because the institutions that give it visibility have only lately reached maturity. It appears to prosper more than it otherwise would because other expressions of Protestantism have lost some of the preeminence that they enjoyed for two or three generations. And it flourishes because, though conserving the doctrines at the heart of Christianity, it is innovative in a variety of other ways.

What of the future of Protestant orthodoxy? It is unlikely that it will ever regain the prominent position it enjoyed before the Civil War. But it is also unlikely that it will face any sterner challenges, unless it be total political persecution, than have already been confronted over the past century. Completely new factors comparable to the emergence of urban, technological society or to academic-led scepticism about the supernatural are unlikely to emerge. Other people may not like evangelicalism but for now they will have to live with it.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Let’s All Think Negative Thoughts

A few months before Donald Grey Barnhouse died he met with Norman Vincent Peale. In the course of their time together Barnhouse suggested that Peale write a new book, The Power of Negative Thinking.

That book was never written, but a variant has just been produced by Donald G. Smith. It is How to Cure Yourself of Positive Thinking (E. A. Seeman Publishing, $7.95; the price establishes a mood for the book).

It’s about time that such a book was written. There’s been entirely too much positive thinking around for years, too much optimism. It’s unreal. Reality is found in a theory I happen to subscribe to: a pessimist is an optimist with experience. So, evidently, does Mr. Smith.

The author takes on positive thinking (aren’t those words a contradiction in terms?) from Peale to the loud-mouthed community leader who jumps to the platform and demands, “Everybody sing!”

“As in the case of Saint George,” Smith suggests, “it was enough to be anti-dragon. There were plenty of proprincess hand-wringers back at the castle.”

Now I don’t want to be a hand-wringer. My mother was one, until we got our first washer, and she developed strong hands. Too strong, I thought as a child.

But after she got the washer, her hand was wrung. I mean that it went through the wringer, which was even worse than hand-wringing.

That’s where I think we are today: between the hand-wringers and the wringer. And it’s hard to be positive in such a situation.

EUTYCHUS VIII

Paul Seen Clearly

I want to express to you my profound appreciation for printing Leon Morris’s “Paul, Apostle of Love” (Current Religious Thought, Sept. 9). Morris is especially accurate in his depiction of the great apostle’s attitude toward women—his teaching of mutual subjection of Christian husbands and wives, his encouragement of theological education for women, his tributes to female leaders and workers in the early church, and so forth. My son was named after the apostle Paul, and Morris’s column is a glad reminder of why I’ve always been pleased with that choice.

VIRGINIA R. MOLLENKOTT

Hewitt, N.J.

Sounding The Alarm

After reading “Is Self-Love Biblical?” (Aug. 12), I found that I was not only disappointed but even alarmed. I was disappointed in that there was nothing given that would help a Christian counselor help others out of the dilemma of selfdepreciation. I was also disappointed in that Piper obviously is attacking a “straw man”.… A Christian counselor using the Good Samaritan parable as the basis of his philosophy of self-love is not seeking to develop a new redemptive system with man at the center. Rather, he is in hopes of leading the counselee to a greater appreciation of the redemption which is already his in Jesus Christ. My disappointment was also increased by the realization that Piper’s concern was evidently intuitively attained rather than thorough careful research.…

However, if disappointment was all I received from the article, I could have closed the cover and forgotten it. That wasn’t possible because of my alarm at the implications of the article and its effect on Christian counselors coming to it with a hope similar to my own. There is the implication that narcissism and self-esteem are equivalent as well as the suggestion that Jesus assumed that self-love is a given. Will these implications lead some who counsel in whatever capacity to assume that to encourage a fellow believer to a greater appreciation of his glorified condition is to promote narcissism?

JOE D. LIVINGSTON

Director of Counseling

California Center for Biblical Studies

Culver City, Calif.

Piper reveals a fundamental misconception. He makes the common error of equating positive self-esteem with narcissistic egocentricity and sinful pride.… It is not falsely striving to find goodness and worth in myself where none exist. Rather, it is a realistic appraisal and acceptance of both my strengths and weaknesses, accompanied by a generally good feeling about who God has made me to be.

The Good News of Christ teaches me to see myself, as well as other people, as God sees us—not only as sinners, but also as essentially valuable persons, created in God’s image and redeemed by Christ’s precious blood. In Christ I can begin to love and accept myself and others because in Christ God loves and accepts us unconditionally. Only then am I truly freed to forget my selfish preoccupation with false feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness and then I can begin to love God unreservedly and to selflessly minister to the needs of others. “All human beings” do not “love themselves” in this way, because they have not known the love of God for them. The prideful, sinful self-love of the priest and Levite is not to be equated with healthy self-esteem, nor is the loving selflessness of the Samaritan to be equated with its opposite. Piper has either never experienced the debilitating pain of low self-esteem, or else he has not yet known the joyous experience of deliverance from it.

ROD MARTIN

Willowdale, Ont., Canada

The Christian And Culture

The Christian’s relationship to secular culture is a serious problem for our generation, as it has been for all those before us. CHRISTIANITY TODAY, more than any evangelical publication I know, provides articles which enable the reader to form enlightened attitudes.

One stunning example is the cover story on Robert Hale, “When You Care Enough to Sing the Very Best” (Aug. 26). As a longtime opera lover and a fan of Wilder and Hale, I am most appreciative for Hale’s dealing with the issues of operatic morality, character assumption, and Christian commitment. And I commend Cheryl Forbes for her finese in interviewing.

The editors who months ago formulated the policy to run cultural-aesthetic material in CHRISTIANITY TODAY deserve credit and thanks.

CAROLYN KEEFE

West Chester State College

West Chester, Pa.

As Concert Co-ordinator for Robert Hale and Dean Wilder, it is my privilege to write and express my deepest appreciation for the review of Robert Hale.

I wanted to … let you know of the many phone calls and letters that we have continued to receive from the time this particular issue reached the news stands and, also, [from] all those who are regular subscribers to CHRISTIANITY TODAY. We have had nothing but praise and continued registrations of approval for the fine article and extremely good taste in which the magazine presented Hale, both as an opera star, and, also, as a gospel singer.

HAROLD J. STEPHANZ

Hale-Wilder Concerts

Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

Since Cheryl Forbes demonstrates an otherwise commendable concern about the negative attitude evangelicals too often show toward the arts (her first question for Clyde Kilby is, “Do evangelicals still fear the arts?”, Sept. 9), it is lamentable that [in her introduction to the Hale interview] she calls the music for the Black Mass scene of Boïto’s Mefistofele “sickeningly seductive.” This unfortunate phrase suggests that Boïto appealed to prurient interests, whereas anyone familiar with this powerful opera and with the New York City Opera’s production knows that Boïto suggests both the terror and fascination of Hell.

C. S. Lewis reminds us that “it is a very old critical discovery that the imitation in art of unpleasing objects may be a pleasing imitation.” Boïto’s Mefistofele is a revolting character who sings beautifully, and she should not appear to warn evangelicals away from a superb opera. While her interviews with Kilby and Robert Hale are for the most part commendable efforts to exonerate evangelicals from Martin Marty’s charge in A Nation of Behavers that they are generally anti-intellectual and suspicious of the arts, Forbes ought not to appear to condemn a great work of art.

BYRON NELSON

Assistant Professor of English

West Virginia University

Morgantown, Pa.

Bravo! CHRISTIANITY TODAY gets better with each issue! It’s good to see a journal meet some issues. Three articles in particular were outstanding in the August 26 issue. The interview with Robert Hale … the report on Harrington and O’Hair … and the article by Klaus Bockmühl on the Ten Commandments. Keep up the good work.

KEN WILSON

Decatur Seventh-day Adventist Church Decatur, Tenn.