Page 5702 – Christianity Today (2024)

An “enormous amount of mail” has reached New York Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, Jr., since he ordained an avowed lesbian earlier this year. Most of the response, he concedes, has been negative.

But the bishop says he is amazed at all the reaction because he does not think his ordination of Ellen Marie Barrett was “some sort of gesture condoning hom*osexuality or licentiousness.” He still believes the new priest is highly qualified by training and temperament to be an Episcopal minister.

Why, then, is he hearing from protesters around the nation as well as from Anglicans in other countries? Episcopalians, says Moore, are “upset about lots of things,” and his unprecedented act could have been a “catalyst for the release of this upsetment.”

Much of the reaction came from within his own diocese, and Moore acknowledged that he had “never had so much flak” on any subject before. Some of that flak was in the form of pledges by parish vestries to withhold annual assessments to the diocese.

With a straight face, Moore told a reporter, “The money is not spent for ordinations. Much of it goes for the mission work of the church.”

The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, John M. Allin, has also been on the receiving end of many of the protests, but he too has tried to minimize the importance of the New York ordination. He went to Memphis to address the convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee and declared, “One ordination does not make and does not break a church at any place, point, or diocese. The church has not gone down the drain; it really hasn’t. Pass the word along.”

The presiding bishop then tried to cool the Tennesseans: “Think of what a great thing it would be if we didn’t speak the first time we got the urge.… And we need not to pass any asinine resolutions that won’t change anybody. Harsh reaction can condemn a lot of people who have no defense.”

The diocesan convention then went on to pass a resolution calling “active hom*osexuality” contrary to Scripture and Christian tradition and expressing the “hope that other professed, active hom*osexual persons will not be ordained.”

The Diocese of (North) Florida proposed amendments to the national Episcopal constitution and canons that would “explicitly insure that such persons shall not be admitted to Holy Orders.” Southeast Florida Episcopalians, in their diocesan convention, officially asked that Bishop Moore and Ms. Barrett be disciplined.

In the Diocese of Washington, where Moore served before he went to New York, the question of hom*osexual marriage has claimed some attention. Two men active in an avant-garde parish were planning to be married by its rector last year until the parish was threatened with the loss of the diocesan subsidy. One of the pair, holder of a master’s degree from Wesley Theological Seminary, went to the Episcopal General Convention in Minneapolis last September, and after that they decided to “celebrate” a “holy union” in the presence of friends in “our church community.”

After an Episcopal church ceremony was refused, they exchanged vows in a hom*osexual congregation. They told a Washington Post reporter that the next bishop of the Washington diocese, John Walker, had declined his blessing by saying he “felt that if he did anything to bless the union this early in his episcopacy, he’d be ineffective for the rest of it.” They still hope to have Episcopal recognition of their marriage, however.

One Episcopal priest who went to the convention last year did not go home alive. He died in his hotel room, stabbed to death by a seventeen-year-old who was described by authorities as a “male hustler.” The youth recently pleaded guilty to the stabbing and was sentenced to one to twenty-five years in a state reformatory. He did not say and was not asked in court how he met the priest or what caused a quarrel that led to their struggle.

The Metropolitan Community Church, in which the Washington couple exchanged vows, continues to claim that it is growing nationwide. Troy Perry, founder and moderator of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, told a reporter in Minneapolis at the end of last year that there are now 103 congregations in seven countries with a total membership of 20,731.

Introduction of a “national gay civil rights bill” by ten members of Congress was announced by the MCC’s Washington office soon after the new Congress convened. In effect, the bill (H.R. 451) is an amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, adding “affectional or sexual preference” to the list of conditions for which it would be illegal to discriminate.

The MCC had a setback in Massachusetts when its Boston branch lost a bid to become a member of the Massachusetts Council of Churches. The council’s board unanimously voted to turn down the gay application without giving reasons. A similar application from the national body has been before the National Council of Churches, but an NCC official said it had been withdrawn.

The National Association of Evangelicals has meanwhile disavowed any connection with a hom*osexual group that describes itself as “Evangelicals Concerned,” headed by Ralph Blair of New York City. The group’s literature says it was formed at the time of the 1976 NAE convention in Washington.

The NAE’s executive director, Billy Melvin, declared, “An organization has no right to ride on the NAE’s reputation simply because it was formed in a hotel across the street from where the NAE meetings were taking place. NAE wants to disavow any connection with Evangelicals Concerned. The basic error in the teachings of such a group has been well documented.”

The gay activists have another group to contend with in the independent Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns. The group’s denomination, the United Presbyterian Church, is currently studying the ordination question, and the PUBC board last month issued a statement calling the ordination of avowed hom*osexuals “a clear violation of biblical teaching and a grievous offense against God, who requires a holy and blameless life of those who seek ordination to the offices of pastor, ruling elder and deacon.”

In Canada, Anglicans have been choosing up sides in a debate over whether their church newspaper, The Churchman, went too far in an issue dealing with hom*osexuality. In the paper’s features on the subject were details of hom*osexual relationships between two men and two women and the account of a priest who admitted hanging around bus stations to pick up sex partners. After the issue was published, one priest wrote that he is “no longer ashamed of myself” and that he knows “that hom*osexuality is the normal and natural part of my personality.”

Christian leaders in England have expressed concern over the new emphasis on hom*osexuality in society. The Nationwide Festival of Light organization urged Prime Minister James Callaghan to halt the “growing exploitation” of children by militant hom*osexuals in schools and elsewhere. The church is a part of that “elsewhere,” according to one recently published commentary. The authoritative Crockford’s Clerical Directory in its latest edition warns hom*osexual clergymen not to give physical expression to their tendencies. The list of Anglican clergymen and parishes is always preceded by a long, outspoken preface written by a leading churchman who is never identified. The anonymous British writer says in the new preface, “Christians should never be so charitable to deviants as to cease to oppose the flaunting of hom*osexual behaviour.”

More For Missions

The number of Protestant North Americans serving as missionaries outside their own countries is continuing to rise despite a decrease in the number sent by the mainline denominations. The eleventh edition of the Mission Handbook, published last month by the MARC division of World Vision, shows a record total of 36,950 from the United States and Canada.

Worldwide, the number of Protestant overseas workers is estimated at 55,000. The North American contribution to the total rose by about 2,000 during the three-year period ending December 31, 1975. The totals in the previous edition were dated January 1, 1973.

Mission giving in the United States and Canada is reported to have outstripped inflation by 29 per cent in the three-year period, from $383 million in 1972 to $656 million in 1975. The funds went to 620 agencies with workers in 182 lands.

Brazil was listed again as having the largest number of North American missionaries: 2,068. Japan was in second place with 1,545. The agency with the most overseas workers was Wycliffe Bible Translators (2,693), with the Southern Baptists close behind (2,667).

Also recently released, but with a much bleaker outlook, was the Handbook of British Missions. Since the last edition was published four years ago, the number of British overseas personnel has dropped from 5,507 to 4,592. The totals omit some societies, but the reported decrease is thought to be representative of the overall situation. Giving in Britain for missions was up over the four-year period, however. The pound sterling total increased from 17 million in 1972 to 26 million in 1976.

Among the North American sending agencies that experienced declines during the MARC handbook’s latest reporting period was the United Church of Christ Board of World Ministries. It has just announced plans to “stabilize” its overseas force at 165, down from the 244 reported in the tenth MARC handbook (1973) and 70 per cent below its 1960 strength.

The High Cost Of Caring

Many church-related retirement and convalescent facilities across the country are in trouble. Part of the reason is that life-care contracts written in the 1960s and early 1970s often were not flexible enough to keep income ahead of costs during a period of soaring inflation. Some institutions have been forced into bankruptcy as a result. There have been closures, revisions of contracts, dispossessions, and much distress for those affected. Some elderly people have lost everything.

Last month Pacific Homes Corporation (PHC), a United Methodist-related retirement and convalescent complex, filed bankruptcy proceedings after California’s department of health refused to allow it to renegotiate contracts with its 2,100 residents.

PHC’s deficit toward the end of last year was $27.6 million, and it was reportedly losing $500,000 a month. Included in the deficit are loans totaling about $12 million from insurance companies and a lien by the state to safeguard the interests of residents. The loans have been guaranteed over the past eight years by the 435-congregation Pacific and Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church, which may have to make good on the promises to repay if reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy fails. The conference has already cut its own annual budget by $540,000 (this included the release of a number of staffers) in order to subsidize residents who cannot pay higher rates.

Some 85 per cent of PHC’s 1,200 residents were said to have agreed to go along with the plan to renegotiate. Five of the corporation’s seven retirement units are in California. The other two are in Hawaii and Arizona. Additionally, six of seven convalescent facilities are operated in conjunction with the retirement centers.

A conference spokesman described PHC’s centers as “the best in California.” He said that “everything is being done” to ensure that residents continue to receive “the finest in care” and to prevent their being turned out.

There are about 175 United Methodist-related homes for the aging in the United States, and they have about 31,000 residents. About 20 per cent of the homes may be having problems of “crisis proportions,” according to Lynn Bergman of the denomination’s health and welfare ministries.

The typical life-care contract written ten years ago, he says, promised that for an entrance fee of $3,000 and $180 per month, the agency guaranteed full care, even during physical and mental breakdowns. Some contracts had no clause protecting the home against inflation, he points out, and even those with 5 per cent increase clauses are in trouble because inflation has run as high as 20 per cent in recent years. It might cost a home $20,000 or more a year to service a contract that calls for the resident to pay much less, he explains. The improved medical and social care results in a mixed blessing: people in the homes live longer, adding to ledger woes.

Expansion has halted in most cases because of the crunch. The number of persons who can be given free or part-paid care is lower, in part because of reduced denominational subsidies. Where possible, homes are renegotiating contracts.

Profit organizations have an out that churches avoid, says Bergman: “Private corporations can simply sell the home to someone else, which immediately cancels all contracts. Then they can go back the next week and rewrite monthly cost-of-care contracts for persons who can afford them.”

The for-profit sector of the $8-billion-a-year nursing-home industry has been ridden with scandal in recent years, and there have been a variety of crackdowns.

Church-related homes generally get higher marks than their secular counterparts in matters of care and ethics. Increasingly, however, their survival may be in jeopardy.

Last Will And Testament

The late evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman left a personal estate of $732,543, including her $130,000 suburban Pittsburgh home and jewelry valued at $94,000, according to a final court inventory of her wealth. The largest amount, $187,350, consisted of savings certificates and interest on them at Pittsburgh banks. More than $70,000 was found in checking and savings accounts. Household goods were valued at $88,000, including furnishings in an apartment in California.

The inventory also listed vacation property in Alberta, Canada, two fur coats, a $4,500 interest in Texas gas wells, $60,000 worth of shares in a corporation Miss Kuhlman formed to market her books and records, and $200 in coins—all 50-cent pieces she had culled from offerings at her services.

An attorney said state and federal estate taxes consumed $167,500, debts and expenses (mostly medical) of the evangelist amounted to $150,000, and legal and other fees for closing the estate totaled about $100,000. This leaves approximately $314,500 to be shared by two of Miss Kuhlman’s sisters, a sister-in-law, twenty employees, and D. B. “Tink” Wilkerson, 44, a Tulsa auto dealer who befriended Miss Kuhlman in the last years of her life. The amount was to be distributed according to a formula prescribed by the evangelist, who died February 20, 1976.

Uproar Over ‘Folklore’

A row has flared up in England over the firing of a religious education teacher who believes in Adam and Eve. David Watson, 56, told his pupils so, was subsequently dismissed, and had his appeal rejected by Hertfordshire County Council. Watson, said the verdict, “had refused the reasonable request of the headmaster and governors to conform to the requirements of the agreed syllabus.”

The syllabus, which dates back to 1954, says: “The Genesis stories of creation, read as their writers intended them to be and not as literalist interpreters have read them, do not conflict with evolutionary theories. They are, of course, only part of the collection of the myths and legends—Hebrew religious folklore—which make up the first 11 chapters of Genesis and they should be seen in that setting.”

A former missionary in India, Watson rejected this as the only view permissible, and he refused to give written assurances of conformity with it because of what he regarded as its dogmatic assertions. He had been head of religious education at Rickmansworth Comprehensive School since September, 1975, and is the author of two anti-evolutionary books, Myths and Miracles and The Great Brain Robbery.

He plans to appeal to an industrial tribunal on the grounds of unfair dismissal. A thirty-year-old British Education Act says: “No teacher may be deprived of any advantage by reason of his religious opinions.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Peril in Uganda

President Idi Amin of Uganda has survived approximately ten coup attempts since January, 1971, when he seized power in a bloodless takeover. Another apparent coup attempt came to light last month, and news sources indicate that many Ugandans were killed and hundreds arrested in connection with it. Among those arrested were Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum, spiritual leader of the 1.5-million-member Church of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Boga-Zaire. Luwum, a British-trained theological educator in his forties, was elevated to the archbishopric in May, 1974. Another Anglican, Bishop Yona Okot, was also accused of complicity in the alleged plot. Certain Catholic and Protestant leaders were reportedly targeted for arrest, too.

In a bizarre demonstration that Luwum and other church leaders were forced to attend, several alleged ringleaders of the attempted coup “confessed” their role, and 3,000 army troops chanted, “Kill them! Kill them!” Amin released Luwum with the admonition to “preach the Word of God … not bloodshed,” and announced that a military court would conduct a trial.

On February 17, Uganda Radio reported that Luwum and two cabinet ministers arrested with him had been killed in an automobile accident.

Religion in Transit

A sixteenth negative presbytery vote has now been cast against the proposed Book of Confessions in the Presbyterian Church U.S. (Southern), thus killing a doctrinal proposal that would have given the denomination a theological stance similar to that of the United Presbyterian Church (see issue of February 18, page 52, and related editorial this issue, page 31).

The Church of Scientology purchased the Cedars of Lebanon hospital complex in Hollywood, California, recently. Church officials, noting they had paid more than $5 million in cash to avoid interest payments, said the complex will become a major training facility for Scientology.

General secretary Philip Potter of the World Council of Churches apologized to the Church of Scientology for anti-Scientology remarks attributed to him last fall at an “informal meeting and luncheon.” He said he hadn’t known the press was there.

Rebecca Nash, 37, daughter of evangelist Oral Roberts, and her husband Marshall, 39, a Tulsa banker and real estate developer, were among the six persons killed in the crash of a private plane during bad weather at Anthony, Kansas. They were returning to Tulsa from a skiing holiday in Aspen, Colorado. The Nashes are survived by three children ages, 5, 8, and 13.

A federal judge ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to file with the National Archives all of its tapes and documents related to buggings and wiretaps of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. The materials cannot be made public for at least fifty years, except by court order. FBI officials in the sixties reportedly played tape excerpts for some church leaders in an attempt to discredit King and keep him off important platforms.

A pastoral letter issued by the majority of the eighty-two Catholic bishops in the Philippines was read from pulpits throughout the country last month. It attacked the government for allegedly interfering with the church’s work of evangelization (the bishops say this includes the teaching of salvation, liberation, and social development). The letter complained that priests and other religious workers had been arrested and foreign missionaries deported. A military list, was released in December charging 155 clergy and laypersons with “rebellion and inciting to sedition.”

Some 5,000 Roman Catholic and Protestant charismatics came together for prayer, sermons, and singing in Hordern Pavilion in Sydney recently. It was described as the largest indoor religious gathering ever held in Australia. “Your one desire,” noted Cardinal James Freeman of Sydney, “is to open your hearts to the power of the Holy Spirit, to awaken and bring to greater power his gifts within you, and by so doing come to a closer, more intimate union with our Savior.”

About 800 of Italy’s 4,000 Seventh-day Adventists rallied in Rome last month and urged Parliament to approve a proposed law recognizing Saturday as a day of rest.

Controversial Anglican theologian John A. T. Robinson (Honest to God) shook up his fellow liberals last month with the release of Redating the New Testament in which he says all of the New Testament books were written before A.D. 70 rather than between A.D. 50 and 150, as most liberal scholars contend.

Alan Geyer, former editor of Christian Century, was named executive director of a new interdenominational Center for Theology and Public Policy, to be located at Wesley Seminary in Washington, D.C. Research, not lobbying, will be the emphasis, he says.

Deaths

JAMES OLIVER BUSWELL, JR., 82, Presbyterian theologian, former president of Wheaton and Shelton colleges, and professor at Covenant Seminary; in Quarryville, Pennsylvania.

GILBERT L. (GIL) DODDS, 58, former world indoor record-holder in the one-mile run (1948), track coach at Wheaton College, and evangelist of the Brethren Church (Ashland, Ohio); in St. Charles, Illinois, of a brain tumor.

HERMAN DOOYEWEERD, 82, renowned Calvinist philosopher and professor at the Free University of Amsterdam in Holland; in Amsterdam.

JAMES G. KELLER, 76, Roman Catholic priest who founded the Christophers, an ecumenical movement dedicated to the spread of the Judeo-Christian ethic; in New York City, from complications arising from Parkinson’s Disease.

ALFRED A. KUNZ, 84, former executive secretary and international director of the Pocket Testament League; in Fort Myers, Florida.

In a sense, Olafs Bruvers may be more representative of today’s Eastern European situation than those whose names are often in the headlines. Unlike Andrei Sakharov, Georgi Vins, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he is unknown to all but a few people outside his country.

Until he was expelled from his native Latvia late last year, Bruvers had never thought of leaving. He is thirty and has always lived under Communist domination.

He finds it hard to understand why some people might consider him a celebrity. He was in Washington last month to speak to a congressional committee studying the Eastern European scene. In an interview with Christianity Today, he made no claims to being anything other than an ordinary Christian, and his manner was somewhat shy and self-effacing.

Bruvers underscored his conviction that he is representative of many Latvians (and other Eastern Europeans) in his response to a question about the youth group he left behind. The Christian students in Riga will have no difficulty finding leadership, he told a reporter, since many have been willing to step forward as Christians in recent months. Before being deported in September, the slim, bearded young man led a group in Latvia’s capital city.

“I miss them,” he acknowledged, “but they don’t miss me.” Asked to explain the second part of that statement, Bruvers said his friends closed ranks when he left, added to their number, and developed new leaders. They have gotten along well without him. A general spiritual resurgence now sweeping the little Baltic state is “almost like a miracle,” he declared. More than at any previous time in his experience, young people are searching for spiritual freedom. Having long been surfeited with lies, he said, they are now looking for truth, he suggested.

Asked about life in the U.S.S.R. (of which Latvia is now one of the “socialist republics”), the exile said people are speaking out more than ever before. Students respond critically to professors, and anti-Soviet literature is distributed. Young people openly wear buttons (some handmade) that proclaim “I Love Jesus” or “Jesus Loves Me.”

Baptist churches are now crowded, according to Bruvers, and young people are well represented. Throughout Latvia the number of Baptist church members had dropped to about half the pre-war total, but that erosion has now been checked. Roman Catholicism too is attracting open identification among many Latvians, he reported. Other denominations are experiencing some new interest also but not as much as the Baptists and Catholics, he said.

While there is a steadily increasing amount of religious expression in the Soviet Union, it is not without its hazards. Bruvers cited the case of his friend Gunars Lagzdins as an example. Lagzdins is a Baptist minister who makes his living as a chemical engineer. Bruvers described him as a beloved pastor, a very attractive personality, and a man who has influenced many young people. He lives and works in Riga, but his parish is in the interior city of Jaunjelgava, southeast of Riga.

Despite harassment of various kinds from Soviet authorities, Lagzdins has continued his ministry, according to Bruvers. The state department of religious cults took away his official permission to preach late in 1973. He was accused of spreading anti-Soviet lies in his sermons. He has also had to face charges of black-marketeering and inciting to revolt. The one thing that has not been taken away from him is his engineering job. Bruvers explained his friend’s continued employment by saying that he is such an expert in his field at the Academy of Sciences that they could not afford to do without him. While studying architecture, Bruvers worked as a laboratory assistant in one of the institutes were Lagzdins is employed. The young exile believes that publicity for such spiritual leaders in the Soviet Union is helpful in the current state of affairs.

Communist authorities are now keenly sensitive to news in the Western media about dissidents within their borders. World attention is focused on their compliance with provisions of the Helsinki accords on European security and cooperation. A performance review is scheduled to be held in Belgrade in June.

“This may be the beginning of the end,” Bruvers declared. He doesn’t see how the Soviets can stop what appears to him to be a rolling tide of freedom. People all over Eastern Europe are pressing for Western recognition of their plight in light of the Helsinki guarantees.

Bruvers still is not sure why he, along with most of his immediate family, was expelled. The provocation used by the authorities was linked to the possibility that he was preparing to inform Western sources of internal problems. He was arrested for giving out a questionnaire to fellow students. He and his younger brother, a medical student, had drawn up the single-page form, asking mostly about leisure-time activities but also one question about “the situation in our country.” This question, the prosecutor at Bruvers’s ten day trial said, was framed in an “anti-Soviet way.”

The brothers had collected about 175 forms and had done nothing to announce the results when police confiscated the papers, he said. The fact that the prosecutor claimed Bruvers planned to send the poll out of the country was enough to convict him, he explained. But instead of carrying out his jail sentence, the authorities deported him.

While disclaiming that he had any important leadership role among Christian youth, Bruvers thinks his work among young people was the primary reason he was deported. The group that met at the University of Riga and around the city had frequent contact with groups in other parts of the country as well as in other Soviet states. There were virtually no contacts with Christian or student groups outside the Soviet Union, however, he maintained.

He did have one sister in the West, and this could have been a factor in the authorities’ decision to oust other members of the Bruvers family. His sister is the wife of a Latvian pastor, Janis Smits, who left the country last May. While Smits wanted to leave, his brother-in-law and other members of the Bruvers family were not seeking to emigrate. The decision to let Smits go was tied to a plan to get rid of the other members of the family, according to Bruvers. The parents are considered undesirables, it was brought out at the trial, since they “polluted” their children with religion. They are now looking for a place to settle. They were granted temporary asylum in West Germany and are living in Bonn.

Even though Bruvers is still puzzled about why he received so much attention from the authorities, he is not unaccustomed to being singled out. Because of his Christian family background, he was the target of verbal abuse in school before he was twelve years old. Teachers spoke of his “backwardness of belief” and of his failure to enroll in the Young Pioneers organization. In high school, because he was not a member of the Communist youth organization for that age group, his class was prevented from taking a long-anticipated trip to Leningrad. Teachers were under pressure to report 100 per cent enrollment, but he said fellow students defended his right not to join. Only classes with 100 per cent enrollments took the trip.

At seventeen he wanted to be baptized. Because the law did not permit public baptisms of believers under eighteen, he was baptized in secret. At eighteen he was drafted into the Soviet army and sent to a base on the Black Sea. Fellow soldiers there, impressed with his spirit and work attitudes, nominated him for secretary of the Communist party organization within their unit. Not being a member of the party, he declined the “honor.” He said his commander found out that he was a Christian because of the incident but did not send him to “re-education” camp because he wanted to keep him there as his chauffeur.

Official harassment, as much of a problem as it is, is not the chief obstacle to Christian work in Latvia, Bruvers said; what is worse is the shortage of Bibles and Christian literature. Most of the young people he knows do have smuggled Bibles, he acknowledged. He also noted that many people are hearing Western religious and cultural programs on radio.

Along with the well-known dissident leaders of Eastern Europe, the young Latvian exile believes that free-world attention to the human-rights situation there can do more for them than anything else now. While the American signing of the Helsinki accords was criticized by some exiles and anti-Communist groups, the dissidents are now using it as a tool for pointing out their plight. A report in the February 14 issue of U.S. News and World Report said: “The Helsinki accords have become a Pandora’s box of trouble for Russia and its Eastern European allies. In country after country, citizens are taking provisions of the agreement literally and pressing for more liberties.”

Campaign pledges on the human-rights issue made by candidate Jimmy Carter last year are being taken literally now that he is in office. Groups throughout Eastern Europe have been quick to pick up the statements and to inform him of their problems. Within a week of the inauguration, the Carter administration issued two statements aimed at the Eastern-bloc human-rights situation. The Kremlin promptly protested interference in internal affairs and retaliated against Western journalists and some dissidents.

A significant move in the Kremlin’s crackdown was the arrest of physicist Yuri Orlov, chairman of the unofficial committee to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki accords. His panel had been the first to bring together concerns of many Soviet dissidents—political, artistic, intellectual, and religious.

There were also new attempts at repression of dissent in the satellite states. Party pressure has been felt particularly in Czechoslovakia, where a manifesto called “Charter 77” was issued by some 500 prominent persons from all walks of life. Several clergymen are among the signers. Czech religious freedom, says the document, “is continually curtailed by official action.”

Official church bodies found after the charter was published that they were expected to denounce it. The Communist daily Rude Pravo promptly reported that the Roman Catholic bishops dissociated themselves from the manifesto, identifying it as a disturbance in “the life in our homeland.” The bishops’ lay employees came on stronger, according to the report in the daily, condemning the document as the product of a “group of shipwrecked individuals.” Seventh-day Adventist leaders were quoted in the Prague ecumenical weekly Kostnicke Jiskry as saying they “do not agree with the signatories of Charter 77 because their objectives and methods are not acceptable to us believers.”

According to Kostnicke Jiskry, the Synod Council of the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren learned of the existence of Charter 77 by reading the daily papers. “None of its members or officials was asked to sign that proclamation, and none of them has signed it,” said the council. Blahoslav Hruby, a Czech exile who edits Religion in Communist Dominated Areas from New York, said it was significant that among the signers of Charter 77 were some former leaders of the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren who had been disciples of the late J. L. Hromadka. Hromadka had promoted Christian-Marxist dialogue and led the Christian Peace Conference until he spoke out against the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

But whether for a prominent Czech, or a Russian, or for a relative unknown like Bruvers, dissent causes problems. The problems extend to the person’s family and friends as well.

In the February 21 issue of Time, the wife of exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “A sentence for a political offense is always a sentence against the offender’s family. Persecution against them starts immediately. Not only has the family lost its main provider but often the wife also loses her job. She has to feed her children, but she cannot find another job because there is but one employer—the state.”

Whatever the risks, the dissenters are gambling on getting attention for their cause before the Belgrade conference in June.

Americans United: Advocacy Role

Tax-exemption privileges and abuses in the religious community, deprogramming from the cults and freedom of belief, the teaching of Transcendental Meditation in public schools or with government money, the Roman Catholic “lobby” pressing for constitutional change that would prohibit abortions, rights of Sabbatarians who are employed to worship on Saturdays, taxes or utility rates to support religious beliefs or institutions not of the choosing of the tax payer or utility user, foreign aid put in the hands of sectarian groups that sometimes use it to proselytize, the Internal Revenue Service declaring what is or is not an integral part of a church or what its mission is.

These topics were seen as the most crucial for the preservation of religious freedom and the separation of church and state by delegates attending the twenty-ninth National Conference on Church and State last month in San Diego. The two-day convention marked the thirtieth anniversary of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the widely influential organization whose sole objective is to maintain the First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom.

Pronouncements and court cases initiated by Americans United (AU has won 90 per cent of its cases in court during the past decade) have sometimes endeared the organization to segments of the evangelical community; at other times conservatives have been infuriated or alienated by AU’s “liberal” position on such issues as abortion and prayer in the public schools.

But throughout, the organization, whose headquarters is in Silver Spring, Maryland, has attempted to keep its focus on church-state entanglements rather than on the theological aspects of the groups or practices under its scrutiny.

“Americans United is the advocate and not the adversary of the religious community,” Andrew Leigh Gunn, AU’s executive director, told about 100 persons attending the convention’s closing banquet. “Because of church-state separation, the church is stronger here than anywhere else in the world.”

Deprogramming was the hottest issue on the conference agenda—and one of the few on which opposing views were freely heard. A panel discussion generated such angry exchanges and accusations that moderator Edd Doerr, editor of AU’s magazine, Church & State, was at times barely able to keep order.

Deprogramming is generally acknowledged to have begun in San Diego in 1971, when Ted Patrick seized and held a member of a sect group in the same hotel where last month’s AU convention was held.

In an opening talk on the subject, Sharon Worthing, a law student at Fordham who was unsuccessfully “deprogrammed,” told of joining the New Testament Missionary Fellowship when she was a freshman at Yale. “To the extent that deprogramming requires the law to make value judgments as to the merit of particular religious beliefs and affiliations, it is treading on constitutionally impermissible ground,” the short, plainly dressed girl said. She added that the danger is that “when government acquires jurisdiction over the area of belief, it will use this … to suppress dissent and to deprive its citizens of true freedom. Ideas are to be tested by the mechanism of the marketplace, not by state officials who decide which beliefs and affiliations are healthy and right for citizens and which are not.”

In rebuttal, William Rambur, a retired U.S. Navy lieutenant commander who heads the Citizens Freedom Foundation in Chula Vista, declared: “We believe we are rescuing, not kidnapping” persons involved in the so-called new religions. Rambur said his group alone receives twenty-five to thirty phone calls and letters daily from distraught parents seeking to get sons or daughters out of cults (his daughter is in the Children of God).

In another presentation, speakers assailed the Roman Catholic hierarchy for allegedly waging an all-out campaign for pro-life, anti-abortion legislation that is contrary to the doctrine of church-state separation. But California congressman James Corman, a United Methodist who was a stalwart in the 1971 drive to defeat the reinstitution of prayer in the public schools, predicted that a threatened campaign to call a constitutional convention to revise the Constitution to outlaw abortion “will never come off.”

At the convention’s close, Calvin W. Didier, pastor of House of Hope Presbyterian Church, St. Paul, was named president of AU, succeeding Jimmy R. Allen, pastor of the First Baptist Church of San Antonio.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Amy’s Immersion

“I think it is terrible,” said a woman at Washington’s First Baptist Church, “how Amy’s baptism has been played up by the press.”

Terrible or not, the baptism of President and Mrs. Carter’s nine-year-old daughter provided Baptists an unprecedented opportunity to explain to the world what the ordinance means to them. The ceremony last month was dutifully reported by the White House press corps just as any other public event of the First Family would be reported. Journalists had some trouble handling details, however, since some of them had never before seen a believer immersed.

W. Barry Garrett, Washington bureau chief for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service, observed the work of the press pool assigned to report to White House correspondents. “It is enough to make us Baptists cringe to know that we have failed so miserably to communicate some of our most precious beliefs,” he lamented. “When you combine the baptism of a President’s daughter with baptism by immersion, you have a scenario that sends the non-initiated into a quandary.”

The pool reporters apparently got their questions answered, however, since the articles carried by news services and major papers were generally straightforward accounts of the ceremony.

Baptized at the same service was a sixteen-year-old girl from Cameroon. A member of the congregation was moved to send a note to reporters. It said, “Surely, this is a beautiful and loving witness of the love of God which transcends class, color, culture.”

The baptism took place the third Sunday after the Carters moved to Washington. That afternoon, the President took his family to see an opera.

Religion in the Cabinet

The only Roman Catholic in the Carter cabinet says the administration plans to stress alternatives to abortion such as family-planning services, sex education, and better programs for unwed mothers. Joseph Califano, testifying before a Senate committee considering his qualifications to be Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, expressed his opposition to federal aid for abortion. He added, however, that he does not favor a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion.

“I personally believe abortion is wrong,” said Califano, who was subsequently confirmed and sworn in as head of HEW. “I believe that federal funds should not be used for providing abortions.” Congress last year passed a law barring Medicaid payments for abortions, but it could be nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although Califano is the only Catholic actually in the Cabinet, two other top Carter appointees are Roman Catholics: Charles L. Schultze, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor.

Four of President Carter’s ranking appointees are Episcopalians, and three are Lutherans. Three are of Jewish extraction, but two of these are converts to Christianity.

The Lutherans are Robert S. Bergland, secretary of agriculture, Cecil D. Andrus, secretary of interior, and James R. Schlesinger, energy chief.

Schlesinger was reared in a conservative Jewish home but embraced Christian beliefs at the age of twenty-one while on a trip to Europe. W. Michael Blumenthal, treasury secretary, also had Jewish parents but has been affiliated with a Presbyterian church. Labor Secretary Ray Marshall is also a Presbyterian, a ruling elder.

Defense Secretary Harold Brown is Jewish, but currently has no religious membership.

The Episcopalians are Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Secretary of Commerce Juanita Kreps, Secretary of Transportation Brock Adams, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia Roberts Harris.

Attorney General Griffin Bell is the only Baptist in the Cabinet. The closest United Methodist to the president is Thomas B. Lance, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Andrew Young, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was the first clergyman to be given a high-level appointment by Carter. He is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ.

Top White House staff personnel have been urged in a handwritten memorandum from the President to spend “an adequate amount of time” with their families to assure a stable family life. Written on White House stationery and signed “J. Carter,” the memorandum says:

“I am concerned about the family lives of all of you. I want you to spend an adequate amount of time with your husbands, wives, and children, and also to involve them as much as possible in our White House life. We are going to be here a long time, and all of you will be more valuable to me and the country with rest and a stable home life. In emergencies we’ll all work full time. Let me have your comments.”

Rethinking Abortion?

The U.S. Supreme Court is taking a harder look at the abortion question, according to a noted Washington newsman who is an astute analyst of the judicial review process.

Signs of movement, said Lyle Denniston of the Washington Star, were evident last summer when the court upheld a requirement that a woman give “written and informed consent” to an abortion.

Denniston told the annual conference of the National Abortion Rights Action League that he believes there is “a fairly strong degree of impermanence” in the court’s abortion decision of 1973 “because it is based, so fundamentally (for the majority, at least), on present medical knowledge and ethics.” “The constitutional source of the decision, a woman’s ‘right of privacy,’ seems to me, after repeated re-reading of Roe, to be quite secondary in the mind of the court majority,” he said.

Denniston emphasized that he did not mean to imply that the justices would probably make abortion law depend upon whether they themselves, or other judges, think abortion is right or wrong. “It is to suggest,” he said, “that some aspects of the abortion question will be allowed to be controlled by whether legislators and other policymakers think it is right or wrong.”

A change in the court’s thinking from the so-called Roe case of 1973, he added, could be caused by “compelling advances in the medicine of fetal life—let us say earlier viability.

“But even if there should be at some future point a re-examination of the fundamentals of Roe, we should recognize that, for the time being, at least, the Supreme Court has indeed moved on to questions of when and how regarding the abortion decision and procedure. We have already seen signs of that in the decisions last summer upholding a requirement of written and informed consent by the woman seeking an abortion.

… We now await other signs of the court’s attitude on the when and how of abortions: Must there be public financing; the scope of Congress’ power regarding that, and the constitutionality of denying it for the indigent woman; and, must there be an availability of abortions at public hospitals, publicly aided private hospitals and clinics and Public Health Service hospitals?”

Denniston said that when those decisions are reached, “we perhaps will see the first indication of judicial decision-making in this field according to a ‘moral equation.’

“Then the court will begin to answer the question: Will legislators and executive officials be allowed discretion regarding public financing and public availability of abortions, to follow the moral sense of a community majority, or at least of a vocal, politically active and potent minority?”

Lifeletter, published by a strong antiabortion lobby in Washington, took note of Denniston’s speech by suggesting that perhaps the court is wavering “and just waiting to see if Congress will fight back. Certainly there is no reason to suppose that Denniston has any sympathy for the anti-abortion position. He repeatedly fills Star columns with ‘scare’ stories on the many dangers to the ‘right’ of abortion.” Lifeletter cited page-one headlines to bolster the “scare” charge.

Big Bible Year

Publishers’ reports reveal that sales of Bible translations continued at a high level throughout 1976. The Good News Bible (American Bible Society) was published on the first day of December, and a million copies of it were sold in that month alone. (An additional 313,000 were sold in January.)

The 1976 sales figure for The Living Bible (Tyndale), in its various editions including The Way, was 2.25 million; for The Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday), about 380,000; and for the New American Standard Bible (several publishers), 130,000.

Figures for the King James, Revised Standard, New American, and New English (all with multiple publishers) were not readily available, but all and especially the first two had continuing large sales.

Prominent annotated editions also did well: The New Scofield Reference Edition (Oxford), based on the King James, 100,000; the Harper Study Bible (Zondervan), based on the Revised Standard, 55,000.

In the category of non-Bible nonfiction (excluding cookbooks, dictionaries, and books issued more than two years ago), the hard-cover best sellers for 1976 included four Watergate-related titles among the top ten. The Final Days (Simon and Schuster) by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the list with 630,000 copies sold. Fifth ranked was Charles Colson’s testimony, Born Again (Revell), at 340,000 copies. (A mass-market paperback edition has just been released.)

Seventh place was won by Billy Graham’s Angels (Doubleday), of which 275,000 copies were sold. It led the list with 810,000 in 1975.

DONALD TINDER

India: Strategy For the Jet Age

Christians in India boast that their church was planted by the apostle Thomas. What he planted in his first-century missionary effort has not grown much, however. Only about 2 per cent of the more than 600 million Indians profess to be Christians.

For the first time in the nearly two-thousand-year history of the Indian church, a representative group of evangelical leaders got together early this year for serious talks on reaching the non-Christian 98 per cent of their fellow countrymen. They met for a week as the All-India Congress on Mission and Evangelization under the auspices of the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI).

The 400 Christian leaders assembled at a rural boarding school near Devlali, about ninety-five miles from Bombay. Their gathering was an outgrowth of the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, and participants were invited on the same basis as those who went to Lausanne (a cross section of denominations, types of work, men, women, youth, and so on). The congress replaced the EFI’s annual prayer conference. A spokesman explained that for the twenty-five years of the EFI’s existence, the promotion of revival in the churches has had priority, but this year attention was turned outward in the emphasis on mission and evangelization.

The effect on the participants, said the spokesman, was “chastening.” He said they went home “rebuked … for their failure to be His faithful and consistent witnesses to the 98 per cent” but “renewed in faith, in vision for evangelization, and in love for one another.”

According to “the Devlali Letter,” the congress’s principal document, participants also went home with a conviction that all Christians, particularly the leaders of churches and para-church groups, must cooperate in evangelistic strategy. The letter was drafted by a committee that received reports from each of the small groups that met throughout the congress. While the letter was generally thought to represent a consensus of those attending, it was not presented for a formal vote. Instead, all the participants were asked to sign it. The number who did so was not announced immediately.

“We are convinced that we live in such a time of open doors and great opportunities that the evangelization of India in the power of God’s spirit is an achievable goal,” the document declared. “We praise and thank God for his church in India and for placing us in a country where religious freedom is guaranteed to all by law.”

While little was said from the platform about the current political situation, the congress met amid rising tension in the nation over the “emergency” proclaimed in June, 1975. A newsman at the meeting said Christian leaders generally saw the sweeping political and economic changes in the land lending urgency to their task. The general secretary of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in India, P. T. Chandapilla, told a reporter, “The emergency has taught Christians to mind their own business—which is evangelization.”

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent a short written greeting to the congress. It was dated two months earlier. While the congress was meeting, though, she startled the nation with her announcement that parliamentary elections would be held in March. Calling for the vote, she said, was a part of a major relaxation of her emergency rule.

The evangelical leaders met in a retreat setting, but they were not isolated from the pressure of events. At the same time, millions of members of the country’s majority religion, Hinduism, were at a major gathering on the Ganges River. Some of the Christians found it difficult to make travel arrangements because space was already booked by those going to the Hindu festival.

Many of the participants who finally did arrive on trains at the Devlali station found they still had several miles to go before they arrived at the meeting site, the Barnes School. For some, the only available rides were in ox-cart taxis. The centuries-old mode of transportation was a reminder of their heritage, even as jet planes flying overhead were a reminder of current challenges.

Autonomy Ahead

Ecclesiastical wheels sometimes turn very slowly, but there seems to be little doubt now that Methodists in India are heading toward autonomy. Their church, officially known as the Methodist Church in Southern Asia, has been involved in an extended controversy over merger questions. Until it gains autonomy, the Indian denomination is an overseas branch of the United Methodist Church (U.S.A.). A decision by the United Methodist Judicial Council last year finally paved the way for it to go its own way.

Following the judicial decision, the Central Conference of the church in India unanimously voted to become an “affiliated autonomous church” by 1980. A doctrinal statement and other constitutional documents will be prepared next and then submitted to regional annual conferences. If two-thirds of them approve, the matter will come back for Central Conference ratification in, it is hoped, 1979.

The central body voted in 1968 to become one of the bodies that would found the Church of North India, but as union plans developed, the vote was rescinded. The reversal was challenged in the church courts, and it was this question that was settled last year. The church, one of the United Methodists’ largest overseas sections, has some 168,000 members.

Keeping in Touch

While mainline Western denominations cut back on their missionary efforts, Third World churches are stepping up their outreach at home and abroad. The growing number of missionaries and the societies to support them have brought Indian Christian leaders to the conclusion that they need a vehicle to foster cooperation. A consultation on forming an association of missionary societies in India is scheduled this month as a direct outgrowth of the recent All India Congress on Mission and Evangelization.

If that association is formed, it will be one of at least seven national groups of evangelical missions. All the existing ones were represented at a consultation in Bombay in January, the first ever held by executive officers of these groups. The convenor was Wade Coggins of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (U.S.A.), who is the retiring steering committee chairman of the World Evangelical Fellowship’s missions commission. The steering committee met during the consultation and named Ernest Oliver as the new chairman. He is the secretary of the Evangelical Missionary Alliance of Great Britain. The full missions commission is scheduled to meet next in January, 1979, and until then the top priority will be given to establishing contacts with emerging missionary movements.

Introducing A ‘Strange Lady’

Such a Strange Lady: A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, by Janet Hitchman (Harper & Row, 1975, 177 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, assistant editor, Christianity Today.

Never leave the middle initial out of Dorothy L. Sayers’s name. That oversight enraged the well-known creator of the rich fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey. And now, thanks to Janet Hitchman, readers in Great Britain (where the book was first published) and this country know it.

Among the other interesting details one learns in this biography—the first—of Sayers are that her father was a minister, they were poor, and she hated the countryside where her family lived and chafed at the absence of privacy in her home. Also, that the son she supposedly adopted in her early thirties was really her own illegitimate child.

Despite the resistance of Sayers’s family, close friends, and executors, Hitchman managed to piece together the events of her life in a somewhat respectable manner. I wish, though, that she had resisted the urge to stray into psychological speculation, rumor, and biographical literary criticism.

For example, she claims that Sayers gave her son the bare necessities but denied him love. Where is the proof? Without corroboration by family or friends, we cannot accept Hitchman’s word for this. Nor can we accept a rumor that Sayers’s husband fathered an illegitimate child. Since Hitchman admits she could not verify it, why include it at all? She also tells us that “the only way Dorothy could get herself through a crisis was to write it out as fiction, to see it laid down as though it had happened to someone else.” There is little in Sayers’s fiction that compares to her life. This approach denigrates Sayers’s imaginative and creative powers.

Hitchman continues this autobiographical approach to Sayers’s fiction in her analysis of Lord Peter Wimsey, “who,” she says, “may have represented a long-lost lover or have stood for those moral and ethical values which she considered were vanishing from a civilized world.” Wimsey was pure fiction. And, as I point out in my article on Sayers in this issue (see page 16), the characters who surround him more nearly reflect the author’s own Christian world view than does her protagonist.

Once Hitchman gets past the Wimsey years she leaves herself behind. (That’s the real weakness of the first half of the book—too much Hitchman.) Her discussion of Sayers as religious playwright, theologian, broadcaster, and scholar is both informative and entertaining because we hear Sayers first. Hitchman finally allows the curious Sayers personality to dominate. If she had done that from the outset (as all good biographers do), Such a Strange Lady would not have been such a strained book.

Evangelical Roots

Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, by Donald W. Dayton (Harper & Row, 1976, 147 pp., $8.95, $3.95 pb), is reviewed by Erling Jorstad, professor of history and American studies, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.

This volume makes available for a much larger audience a notable series of ten articles from the 1975 issues of the Post-American (now Sojourners) entitled “Recovering a Heritage.” Using both issue-oriented and biographical studies from the nineteenth century as his evidence, Dayton argues that evangelicals today should reclaim their proud heritage of being committed to transforming society, rather than settle for the current evangelicalism that “has become bourgeois and establishment oriented.”

Dayton’s study is a bold, partisan plea for evangelicals to recapture the vision and dedication of such giants as Wheaton College founder Jonathan Blanchard, evangelist Charles G. Finney, and the abolitionist Grimke sisters. They had no doubts that, as Finney worded it, “the great business of the church is to reform the world—to put away every kind of sin.… The great sin and utter shame of the church and of so many of the ministry [is] in neglecting or refusing to speak out and act promptly and efficiently on these great questions of reform.”

The great questions that thrust the nineteenth-century reformers into the most controversial areas of American life were total and immediate emancipation of slaves, full equality for women, temperance, and care for the poor. These evangelicals understood the new life in Christ to mean an uncompromising resistance to evils and the use of all Christian means of eliminating them. They understood the Gospel as rejecting partial measures, objectivity, or “gradual” reform because, to them, such attitudes would be compromising with evil. Said one, “The gospel is so radically reformatory, that to preach it fully and clearly is to attack and condemn all wrong, and to assert and defend all righteousness.”

Dayton also presents a well reasoned chapter—based largely on the research of Lucille Sider Dayton, his wife—on the evangelical roots of feminism, arguing that the revivalist understanding of the equality of all persons in Christ “gave birth to the women’s rights movement.” Using the leadership of the Grimke sisters and later feminists as his evidence, he shows how the abolitionist-feminist tradition established the foundations on which later egalitarian claims would be built. Dayton cites the words of Free Methodist bishop W. A. Sellow: “Women the world over have been patiently waiting … for the glorious gospel of love, as taught by Jesus Christ and its attendant civilization, to restore to her those rights which have been taken from her by force.” Regarding the biblical defense of keeping women in submission, the Grimkes, we learn, realized (beyond citing Galatians 3:28) that they must “protest against the false translations of some passages by the MEN who did that work.…”

Dayton suggests that, given certain personality differences, these leaders shared several principles and commitments: total emancipation of slaves, full equality for women, an anti-bourgeois life-style, trans-denominationalism, the power of the Gospel not only to save but to redeem and make righteous sinful persons and sinful institutions, and a willingness to give up their lives if necessary “For Christ and His Kingdom”—the motto of Wheaton College.

The final chapter is a brilliant though brief development of the theological, historical, and sociological forces that altered the reformist heritage of the evangelicals and produced in its place the contentious fundamentalism of the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter cries out for fuller development, especially of Dayton’s comparison of Finney’s redemptionism to Hodges’s resignation to the immutability of sin. Both men are in the evangelical tradition; Dayton obviously thinks that tradition would be better served if we reformulated Finney’s position for our day.

This book is deliberately a manifesto for our times more than a dispassionate analysis of a historical movement. That in itself gives it excitement and importance; it also brings some impatience over sweeping generalizations and unbalanced descriptions of the adversaries of these leaders. Yet Dayton’s zest and commitment, and the implications of his conclusion—namely, that evangelicalism can renew itself best today by sympathizing with the contemporary communitarian movement—make this book compelling reading.

Science: Relevant To Religion?

The Relevance of Natural Science to Theology, by William H. Austin (Barnes & Noble, 1976, 132 pp., $22.50), is reviewed by Christopher B. Kaiser, visiting professor of theology, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.

This volume is a welcome contribution to the vast and often repetitive literature on the subject of science and religion. It is not an exposition of what the author takes to be the relevance of science to theology but rather a critical examination of various arguments, put forth by philosophers and theologians, intended to rule out any such relevance. It is well organized, closely reasoned, and very concise. The examination proceeds on two fronts: (a) are the arguments against relevance sound?, and (b) if so, how much do they prove? For instance, do they rule out any relevance at all, or do they allow indirect relevance via metaphysics or methodology or general psychological impact?

Arguments for the irrelevance thesis are divided into two groups: instrumentalist arguments and “two-realm” arguments. Instrumentalist arguments include those based on an instrumentalist understanding of science (Duhem) and those based on an instrumentalist interpretation of religion (Braithwaite, W. T. Stace). “Two-realm” arguments include Karl Heim’s treatment of God and the world in terms of multiple spaces or dimensions, D. M. MacKay’s version of the “complementarity” between descriptions of a single referent as seen from different standpoints, the post-Wittgensteinian idea of autonomous language games (D. Z. Phillips, W. D. Hudson, Peter Winch), and finally the argument that religion is utterly different from, hence independent of, science, because it involves personal commitment whereas science requires strict objectivity (Donald Evans, Alasdair MacIntyre).

Austin’s conclusion is that all these arguments fail because they lack either cogency or generality. The great value of his work, however, is not the conclusion he reaches so much as the range of ideas he surveys and the example he sets for tackling complex philosophical issues with thoroughness and simplicity.

Light Look At Families

Parables For Parents and Other Original Sinners, by Tom Mullen (Word, 1976, 135 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Elaine Mathiasen, Boise, Idaho.

Do you want a delightful change from serious articles on discipline? Had enough of books describing the perfect family, the one where even the dog knows its place? Tom Mullen tells us about families that harvest weeds and get blisters from their gardens; families whose children drop marbles in church during prayer; families who buy twice as much car as planned because the salesman spotted their weaknesses. He even gives us an inspiring account of “night people” when morning comes.

Mullen offers the reader thirty personal commentaries on family life in our society. Humorous and light, they nevertheless end with serious and provocative thoughts and a prayer that keeps us in touch with God’s practical nature. These prayers express briefly and simply a biblical truth that many of us never learn: that God cares about every small detail in our lives.

The scriptural theme of the book is that since we are all saved by grace, no family member should be expected to be perfect. In a lighthearted way Mullen promotes love, forgiveness, and acceptance within the family; these qualities can be seen by others and attributed to the grace of God. He also probes into such things as our value system, our fear of growing old, and our national love of bumper stickers. (On this last point, he wonders whether we may be passing up opportunities to express friendship and love.)

Mullen’s book is a fresh approach to living in a real family. He encourages humor and perspective in personal relations and practices them in his views of our world.

Religion And Philosophy

Wittgenstein and Religious Belief, by W. Donald Hudson (St. Martin’s, 1975, 206 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by James D. Spiceland, assistant professor of philosophy, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.

To all who are acquainted with his life and work, it is clear that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was not a religious believer. He was an interesting and eccentric Cambridge philosopher who spent his time pursuing problems that would appear, at least initially, to have little bearing on religious belief. But initial impressions are often mistaken, and Donald Hudson has written an articulate and thorough account of the bearing of Wittgenstein’s thought on the philosophical problems generated by religion.

Hudson states at the outset that Wittgenstein was not a believer. But in an interesting section on Wittgenstein’s life, he builds a solid case for the claim that Wittgenstein’s mature attitude toward religion was “anything but that of the hostile positivistic critic.” He points out that while an Austrian soldier in World War I, Wittgenstein read Tolstoy on the Gospels and was, according to his own word, profoundly influenced by it. Wittgenstein was an intense and sometimes abrasive man who was very selective about friends. It is interesting that some of his most meaningful friendships were with Christians. Unlike some intellectuals of his day, he did not deride Christianity, and when other philosophers did so, he occasionally rebuked them. Among his preferred authors were Augustine and Kierkegaard, thinkers who are not usually thought of as after-dinner reading for analytic philosophers.

His unwillingness to criticize religious belief is probably made more significant by the fact that he was not the least bit reticent to express his distaste for many of his academic peers. Hudson relates that when Wittgenstein was told about an important meeting of philosophers to be held in Cambridge in July of 1920, he replied, “To me it is just as if you had told me that there will be a bubonic plague in Cambridge next summer. I am very glad to know and I shall make sure to be in London!”

It should be clear, then, that while he saw himself quite unambiguously as an unbeliever, Wittgenstein was more open to the possibility of religion than many of his colleagues. So much for Wittgenstein the man.

In a clear, brief chapter, Hudson presents a very readable overview of Wittgenstein’s philosophical stance. He was a philosopher of language whose work was characterized by an effort to develop a theory of meaning. In his early book called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning was scientifically oriented and appeared to be agreeable to the positivists of his day. That theory has been called “the picture theory.” In its most elementary form it states that propositions picture reality, that the meaning of every word is the object it refers to. If a word or proposition does not picture an actual state of affairs in this direct way, it is meaningless. When Wittgenstein finished the Tractatus, he felt he had provided philosophy with a method of distinguishing at one stroke everything that it makes sense to say from everything that it does not. Having accomplished this he returned to his native Austria, where he worked at various jobs, including schoolteaching, from 1920 to 1926.

Philosophy had gotten hold of him, however, and it appears that he never ceased to wrestle with its problems. Observing the language habits of peasants and rural schoolchildren caused him to rethink his earlier theory of meaning. He slowly moved toward a more pragmatic position. In spite of his professed distaste for academics, he was back in Cambridge in 1929, beginning what is generally called his later period.

His later thought is seen most clearly in his Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1958. The theory put forward in this book has been called “meaning as use.” It holds that meaning in language is related to the various contexts in which men speak. Meaning does not come about in, say, empirical science in exactly the same way as it does in morality or in religion. This is not to say that each one of these is completely divorced from the others. There is much interplay and overlap of meaning. However, if the philosopher is to understand how meaning occurs in a particular context, he must familiarize himself with that context. To do otherwise is to confuse universes of discourse, to misunderstand the great variety of uses to which language is put. This is the “language game” notion of meaning. Wittgenstein said that “the term ‘language game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life.”

Now all this has a bearing on the language of religion. The picture theory left religious language pretty much a no-man’s-land. Since the referent of talk about God cannot be found, it appears to be meaningless. His later position, however, is more open. It implies that if a philosopher is to unpack the logic of religious language, he must do his homework, so to speak. He must familiarize himself with its native habitat, i.e., the religious life. Of course this does not mean that he must be a believer. It simply means that he must make an effort to gain some understanding of the religious life, its purposes, goals, and the like. Nor does it mean that religion is a kind of linguistic ghetto. It is one of the many interrelated contexts in which people express themselves. Its boundaries are sometimes vague, and part of the philosopher’s task is to chart where they are vague and where they are sharp. He must uncover the relation that religious language has to all language.

In 1938 Wittgenstein gave a series of lectures on religious belief, and here we find his most direct comments on religious language. Hudson’s excellent discussion of these lectures concludes the book.

One of the important issues dealt with in the lectures is the logical distinctiveness of religious belief. Take, for instance, belief in God. To the believer, the word “God” is used something like a word representing an object or a person. Yet, if a question arises concerning the existence of God, it will not be handled in the same way that a question about, say, Jimmy Carter’s existence would be. God is not found in Washington. D.C., in Vatican City, or at Harvard Divinity School (at least not in the way Jimmy Carter might be found in one of those places). It is true that some believers seek empirical evidence to support their beliefs, but it is generally conceded that lack of such evidence does not bring about abandonment of belief. The role of belief in God is regulative, i.e., it determines how we interpret evidence, indeed, how we view all of life. Questioning the believer about God’s existence, then, is something like questioning the foundations of his worldview. It is not the same as asking if Jimmy Carter or John Doe exists. In a similar vein Wittgenstein examines the religious belief in a coming Last Judgment. Is such a belief held to on the basis of historical and/or sociological evidence as belief in a coming war might be? Wittgenstein thinks it is not. This belief has a regulative function, and is logically distinct from other beliefs. If a man said that he believed in a Last Judgment but went on to say that it makes absolutely no difference to him, we would probably say that his belief is not a truly religious belief. A religious belief is more (logically) than simply the belief that a being exists or that an event will take place.

The logical status of the question of God’s existence is dealt with directly in the book. Hudson’s position is that it is logically impossible to handle this question within the context of religious belief, because that context presupposes God’s existence. On the other hand, if God is, by definition, not a physical object, or a moral obligation, or whatever, then it is logically impossible to deal adequately with the question of God’s existence in non-religious contexts (e.g., science). The presuppositions and methodology of these contexts will not lead to God, or at least not the believer’s God. In the end, Hudson says, our answer to the question of God’s existence will rest on an ontological choice. Religion confronts people with a decision.

This book is an excellent contribution to frontier studies in the philosophy of religion. It is clearly written and carefully documented by an author who has immersed himself deeply in both Wittgensteinian studies and the philosophy of religion.

Briefly Noted

PSYCHOLOGICAL DENOMINATIONS seem to be almost as numerous as Christian ones. Joel Kovel claims to offer A Complete Guide to Therapy (Pantheon, 284 pp., $10). He doesn’t, but nevertheless it is helpful to see a book that compares T-A, Rogerianism, Gestalt, and many other types, instead of propagandizing for one of them. One of Kovel’s options is the subject of a large survey. The Reality Therapy Reader edited by Alexander Bassin, Thomas Brattner, and Richard Rachin (Harper & Row, 691 pp.,$15). Reality therapy, promoted by William Glasser, has been adopted by many Christians because of its stress on personal responsibility. One of the best-known Christian counselors has no use for the therapies described by Kovel. Jay Adams in What About Nouthetic Counseling? (Baker or Presbyterian and Reformed, 91 pp., $2.50 pb) briefly answers questions raised by critics and others. He thinks that psychologists, even if Christian, should stop counseling and stick to behavioral research and that psychiatrists should stick to treating patients with brain injuries.

The Poetry of Civic Virtue by Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (Fortress, 164 pp., $8.50) discusses Eliot, Malraux, and Auden, who take “the world of men to be a world of coexistence, of Coinherence, or a world of … the City.” Those familiar with Charles Williams will see where Scott is going. Contrary to many novelists and poets, says Scott, these three consider the City to be a beneficent image. Thought-provoking, both critically and theologically.

NEW-STYLE SUNDAY SCHOOLS are proposed in Open Education Goes to Church by Mary Duckert (Westminster, 140 pp., $3.45 pb), Will Our Children Have Faith? by John Westerhoff III (Seabury, 126 pp., $6.95), and The Family Together: Inter-Generational Education in the Church School by Sharee and Jack Rogers (Acton House [1888 Century Park East, Los Angeles, Calif. 90067], 138 pp., $4.95 pb). The last book tells how several families actually started a class for all ages and outlines a year’s curriculum. The husband teaches at Fuller Seminary.

BLACK CHRISTIANS are the target audience of an increasing number of books, but whites associated with blacks as teachers, co-workers, and the like can benefit from them also. Church Administration in the Black Perspective by Floyd Massey, Jr., and Samuel Berry McKinney (Judson, 172 pp., $5.95 pb) is aimed at Baptists. Biblical Faith and the Black American by Latta Thomas (Judson, 160 pp., $4.95 pb) and The Identity Crisis in Black Theology by Cecil Wayne Cone (AMEC [414 8th Ave., S., Nashville, Tenn. 37203], 172 pp., $7.95) are by professors at Benedict College and Interdenominational Theological Center, respectively. In Negro Spirituals From Bible to Folksong, Christa Dixon (Fortress, 117 pp., $3.25 pb) comments on twenty-three well-known spirituals (such as “Let Us Break Bread Together” and “Joshua Fit de Battle”); the book has helpful Bible and subject indexes and should be of wide interest. Collections of black sermons (which lose even more than other types of sermons by confinement to the printed page) are Preaching the Gospel edited by Henry Young (Fortress, 89 pp., $2.95 pb) and Outstanding Black Sermons edited by J. Alfred Smith, Jr. (Judson, 96 pp., $2.95 pb).

ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS from other planets visited earth and according to many accounts are still visiting in unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods? and its sequels (of which tens of millions of copies have been sold) is the best-known promoter of this view. Although some versions profess to accept the biblical data, considerably reinterpreted, UFOlogy is essentially a religious viewpoint that rivals Christianity and other religions. Ronald Story demolishes von Däniken’s “evidence” by taking a second (sometimes it’s the first) close look at it in The Space-Gods Revealed (Harper & Row. 139 pp., $7.95). Three other books add an evangelistic thrust in their refutations of von Däniken and the like: Crash Go the Chariots by Clifford Wilson (161 pp., Master Books [Box 15666, San Diego, Calif. 92115], $1.95 pb), revised and enlarged from a previous million-copy edition; The Gospel According to Science Fiction by John Allan (Quill/Mott Media, 111 pp., $3.75 pb), who criticizes several of the competing views including those of Presbyterian minister-author Barry Downing (The Bible and Flying Saucers); and The Great Flying Saucer Myth by Kelly Segraves (Beta Books [10857 Valiente Ct., San Diego, Calif. 92124], 93 pp., $1.25 pb), who believes in UFOs but thinks they are piloted by fallen angels.

CHURCH-CENTERED EVANGELISM is not the most talked about kind, though over the long run it is probably the most productive. Leading Your Church in Evangelism by Lewis Drummond (Broadman, 165 pp., $2.95 pb), Every Member Evangelism For Today by Roy Fish and J. E. Conant (Harper & Row, 111 pp., $2.95 pb), and Conserve the Converts by Charles Shaver (Beacon Hill, 104 pp., $1.50 pb) are very practical guides for local congregations. How to Take the Worry Out of Witnessing by George Worrell (Broadman, 92 pp., $1.75 pb) is aimed at teens to help them lead their peers to Christ.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATORS who are in the field full-time, and libraries serving them, should know the following books. Foundations For Christian Education in an Era of Change edited by Marvin Taylor (Abingdon, 288 pp., $5.95) updates the same editor’s An Introduction to Christian Education.The D.R.E. Book by Maria Harris (Paulist, 190 pp., $4.95 pb) is about the role of the director of religious education in today’s congregation. Catholic or Protestant. Catechesis and Religious Education in a Pluralist Society by R. M. Rummery (Our Sunday Visitor, 225 pp., $8.95) is a scholarly study of the past and possible future of Catholic educators. Emerging Issues in Religious Education edited by Gloria Durka and Joanmarie Smith (Paulist, 211 pp., $7.95) is also Catholic-oriented but is of value to Protestants as well.

PSYCHICS, the best known of whom is currently Jeane Dixon, are found wanting by a biblically informed journalist, René Noorbergen, in The Soul Hustlers (Zondervan, 190 pp., $5.95). The book would be helpful for the many Christians who do not properly distinguish spirituality from spiritism.

Unlike Africa, Asia seems to hold little prospect of a dramatic evangelistic breakthrough that by the end of this century might turn half the continent Christian. Having yielded only 3 per cent of its overall population to Christianity, Asia is the least Christian of all the continents. It need not remain that way, however. Once upon a time both Old and New Testament religion had deep roots in the Middle East. Today a remarkable acceleration of evangelical witness and work is under way, and signs of advance are increasingly evident.

Evangelistic and missionary engagement has notably increased since the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism (Berlin) and the 1968 Asian Congress on Evangelism (Singapore). Dr. Marlin Nelson’s Hows and Whys of Third World Missions—An Asian Case Study (William Carey Library, 1976) cites evidences of this. In 1973 the Asian missions meeting (Seoul) was followed by the Asian students’ conference (Baguio). Somewhat along Inter-Varsity Urbana lines, the latter saw scores of Asian students volunteer for missionary service.

The 1974 Congress on World Evangelization (Lausanne) regathered Asian leadership for a cooperative vision of the global evangelistic task. The previous year in Korea, a vast Billy Graham crusade had been held. And there was an unprecedented outreach to university students and other young people during Campus Crusade’s Explo ’74. Christian campus witness in Korea is still in its first phases, however, and some staff retrenchment has recently occurred.

Those congregations that had prepared themselves to mine the evangelistic opportunities of city-wide gospel crusades benefited most from the endeavors. Young Nak Presbyterian Church, for example, added a fourth service and provided new-member training. In compact Hong Kong, the Graham crusade contributed even more notably to deeper intra-evangelical cooperation in evangelism and education by the isolated mission schools and seminaries. Yet one church unprepared to cope with more than a hundred crusade referrals voted to ignore them after deciding that such an influx might unpredictably alter the character of its congregation.

In 1975 came the establishment of the Asia Mission Association, adoption of the Seoul Declaration of Mission, sponsorship of the “Love China” effort, and the conference on Third World missions. Heartened by reports of the faithfulness of Christians surviving in underground house groups in mainland China and despite adverse government pressures, the first Chinese Congress on World Evangelization was held in Hong Kong in August, 1976.

The Asian Association for Theological Accreditation has for several years prompted the academic strengthening of evangelical institutions. Operating in Seoul since 1974, the Asian Center for Theological Studies and Mission now attracts students from as far as India. In Hong Kong, China Graduate School of Theology began classes in 1976 with a gratifying enrollment. Reinforcing the efforts of longer established seminaries, such Asian enterprises will help curtail the erosion of ministerial strength caused by students and pastors who study abroad and then do not return.

Already 3,000 Asian missionaries labor in other than their native cultural situations, though most of them do minister to their own nationalities. Burgeoning new churches are appearing in Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere. In Bangladesh (where in the 150 years since William Carey, Christians have had very little evangelistic success), Hindus, long treated as second-class citizens in a Muslim land, remember with new religious openness the recent nondiscriminatory Christian relief ministrations. In Japan, many students now religiously adrift have indicated that Christianity would be their preferred religion if they had one. Thailand’s deputy education minister has called for a halt to temple construction because almost a fourth of the 20,000 Buddhist temples are virtually deserted except for a few priests.

While still growing, Korea’s 16,000-member Young Nak Presbyterian Church is no longer that country’s largest congregation. With 26,000 members who throng the 8,000-seat auditorium in four Sunday services, the somewhat atypical Assembly of God (First) Church just outside Seoul is thriving. Its charismatic emphasis—including exorcism, which connects with the animistic background of many Koreans—has won a wide hearing. The large number of converts to Christianity in the Korean army continues; last year almost 20,000 servicemen were baptized. After nine years’ work by scholars, the Korean Bible Society is issuing its first new translation in forty years.

Korea’s 2.7 million Christians are adding to their ranks at four times the population growth. Mostly evangelical Protestant, they now make up 16 per cent of the total population. While divided into four major and four minor camps, Presbyterians alone number more than 1.6 million; Methodists more than 350,000; the Korean Evangelical Church (O.M.S.) 240,000; Assemblies of God 100,000; and Baptists 70,000. Over three years the Korean Evangelical Church has established 200 new congregations (a new church every week); its special days of witness and active crusade teams have added 40,000 more church members to a constituency of 200,000. Awaiting availability of their own seminary trainees, some Korean churches have begun interim support of non-Korean missionaries even in lands as distant as Brazil.

The concentration of churches in big urban centers like Seoul and Pusan is being supplemented by extension churches in unevangelized suburban and rural areas. In five years Presbyterians established, for example, a satellite area church of 500 members, and Baptists in four years established one of 400 members and a Sunday school of 600. (Some of this is transfer growth, however.) Korean Christians gather in neighborhood house meetings on Friday, in addition to midweek and Sunday services.

Despite its growth, Korean Christianity is not without problems. Long-established evangelical colleges and universities tend under secular pressures to become Christian in heritage and mood more than in perspective and intellectual commitment. Theologically the seminaries remain predominantly conservative; pockets of neo-orthodoxy and liberalism are the exception. But evangelicals there as everywhere often exploit their differences for promotional and financial advantage, thus sacrificing large areas of potential cooperation and economy at a time when a unified impact would count for much on both intellectual and evangelistic frontiers.

Exuberant Christians sometimes tell exaggerated tales to convince non-believers of God’s greatness. Inflating the truth isn’t necessary, and it often backfires. “Augustine says that lies when exposed always injure the truth,” said J. A. Froude in his Life and Letters of Erasmus. “One might fancy they were invented by knaves or unbelievers to destroy the credibility of Christianity itself.”

Today’s evangelical church has a credibility problem, and it isn’t getting smaller. Billy Graham recently warned that with increased visibility comes increased vulnerability. Many claims are being made today in the name of evangelical Christianity, and some of them are not true. Most likely to damage credibility are the unproved reports of miraculous physical healings.

Some zealous Christians seem to believe that the best way to get the world’s attention for the Gospel is to publicize stories of marvelous cures. More and more of these have been appearing in the media in recent months. Radio preachers talk about cures; telecasters introduce people who testify that they experienced healing at the hand of God; and periodicals regularly report physical “miracles.” Sometimes only the skimpiest of verification is offered.

In a commendable show of integrity, the weekly National Courier recently informed readers that one of the stories in its “Miracles” series had turned out to be false. The story had been discredited in the locality where the healing supposedly occurred long before it was circulated nationally. We hope that readers who were turned off by the first article will see the retraction.

There is no way to guarantee that shabby operators in this area will ever be silenced. The knaves and unbelievers will always be with us to try to make personal gain or to discredit the Christian faith, and the desperate and the gullible will always be willing to finance them. We can only pray that they will be restrained.

More concrete steps can be taken, however, by the many responsible Christian leaders who are seeking to glorify God (and not themselves) by circulating the testimonies of those who have no human explanation for their cures. They hold, as a matter of cherished doctrine, that supernatural healings occur in these days, and we will assume this for the sake of discussion. We challenge these persons (specifically the editors and broadcasters among them) to unite in an effort to lend credence to their reports.

They could consider, for instance, setting up an agency to evaluate the medical marvels. Roman Catholics have registered cures at Lourdes for over a century. More than two million pilgrims go to Lourdes every year, and many claim to be healed. The number admitted to the registry is only in the hundreds, however. A comparable agency under evangelical auspices would have the advantages of not being tied to the promoters of a certain shrine or geographical area and of not being under the control of one ecclesiastical authority.

A certification agency should not be dependent (for finances or any other kind of support) on any one group. No single denomination, missionary society, broadcaster, or publisher should control it. It should be absolutely free to make all necessary investigations and then to certify only those cures that are warranted by the evidence.

The time is ripe for such a move. So many stories of healing are being circulated that many people are inclined to disbelieve all of them. They are understandably skeptical if they see a new “miracle” on television every day. Responsible leaders of the groups that circulate these reports could now show their good faith to the rest of the evangelical community by establishing a certification agency.

Plenty of help should be available. The Christian Medical Society, for instance, might be willing to help to formulate criteria. Its members are all professionals in the medical field, but they are also professing Christians who believe that God is at work in today’s world. Advice might also come from such organizations as National Religious Broadcasters and the Evangelical Press Association.

Meanwhile, until there is a verification procedure, would it be too much to ask for a moratorium on the exploitation of alleged miracles? The genuine wonders would be appreciated more if they were publicized after a period of silence on the subject.

The News Is Good And Getting Better

Statistics tell a story but never the whole story. This is especially true in the Christian missionary enterprise, where the influence of dedicated lives cannot be measured by a mere body count. Some recent statistics are encouraging for the very reason that they do reveal only the tip of the missions iceberg. The new (eleventh) edition of the Mission Handbook from the MARC division of World Vision (see page 52) reports an all-time high North American Protestant missionary force at work abroad. The number is 36,950, about 2,000 more than were listed three years ago in the tenth edition. A healthy 28 per cent are considered to be primarily evangelists or church planters. The contribution made by agricultural and development personnel, literacy and linguistic specialists, and other such workers must not be minimized. But it is heartening to know that more than a quarter of the overseas force has evangelism as its primary assignment.

For all its value, though, the MARC publication can report only what has already happened. Future possibilities are suggested by statistics from the recent Inter-Varsity Missionary Convention (see January 21 issue, page 38). That meeting’s record attendance was encouraging, and there is further reason for hope in the information recorded on student registration forms. Far and away the first choice of type of service was “church evangelism” (ahead of education, medicine, and all other areas). Another bright spot was the enthusiastic participation by thousands of students from mainline denominations that have been lagging in missionary support. This could be the generation in which the world is finally evangelized!

Getting Philosophers Together

Evangelical scholar H. D. McDonald wisely observes that philosophy is a necessary activity of the human mind. Anyone who questions that probably does not understand the true nature of philosophy. “However much it may be emphasized with Bonaventura that the heart makes the theologians,” says McDonald, “sooner or later head and heart must seek accord” (The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church).

Given the pervasiveness of philosophy, we welcome a newly formed association of evangelicals in the field. The Evangelical Philosophical Society was organized in Philadelphia on December 28, 1976. As befits the public image of philosophers as plodders, a month passed before any of the twenty original members got around to telling CHRISTIANITY TODAY about it. Never mind; we rejoice no less. The aim of the EPS is to “encourage and advance scholarly production in any of the areas of philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, apologetics, ethics, and other related areas.” It is a healthful trend that evangelicals are working out their beliefs in the context of their vocations and disciplines.

The society has adopted for itself the very simple and broad statement of faith of the Evangelical Theological Society, with which it will hold joint annual conventions. (The next will take place in San Francisco, December 26–28.) Its first president is Norman L. Geisler, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School who is the author of a definitive work on ethics. Gordon Lewis of the Conservative Baptist Seminary in Denver is the vice-president and program chairman for the 1977 convention.

Membership in the EPS is open to teachers and other professional people who are involved in the areas to which the society is dedicated and who have at least an accredited master’s degree in one of the areas or the equivalent in scholarly production. Associate and student memberships are available for those not meeting the regular qualifications. Applications may be obtained from secretary-treasurer Jay Grimstead (2011 Fallen Leaf Lane, Los Altos, California 94022).

“Some of our hopes,” says President Geisler, “include a scholarly journal, monographs, and books, and an employment clearing house for teachers.” And we hope their hopes are realized—with all deliberate speed.

Eli Lilly

The world lost one of the greatest philanthropists of all time when Eli Lilly died last month. He was ninety-one.

By developing and producing medicines, the drug company founded by Mr. Lilly’s grandfather has done much to ease the suffering of humanity. A number of the most widely used of today’s therapeutic drugs originated with the company. Eli Lilly headed the firm for many years and was regarded by those closest to him as a devout Christian.

He did a great deal more, however, by helping to found in 1937 the Lilly Endowment, which over the years has given more than $250 million to a wide assortment of charitable causes. Few foundations distribute more money than this one.

Religious causes have been a specialty with Lilly. Indeed, no other foundation contributes as much to religious causes. Lilly seeks to support a great variety of such efforts, and hundreds of evangelical institutions of one kind or another have benefited. Recently, the Lilly board of directors has noted the need for a strong religious press and not only has given money to sustain it but has brought editors and publishers together to help them deal with economic problems.

Complications In Courtship

It’s official now: presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church U.S. (Southern) have defeated a proposed new doctrinal basis for the denomination. Approval requires affirmative votes from three-fourths of the district bodies, and more than a fourth have already said no. The final tally is not in, since some of the presbyteries will not vote until late spring, but the contest has been close.

Proponents are not giving up. Albert C. Winn, the former Louisville Seminary president who was chairman of the drafting committee, said the defeat “does not mean the end of the movement for confessional change in our church.” He is one of many in the denomination who are against the three-fourths rule that has effectively blocked major doctrinal and union proposals during the past fifty years. He has made it clear that efforts will be made to change this constitutional provision.

Not all who voted against the confessional package were opposed to change. J. McDowell Richards, retired president of Columbia Seminary and a former moderator of the denomination’s General Assembly, called for another draft. “There is in our church a tremendous sense of need for a contemporary statement of faith,” he said, “even among those who voted not to approve the new declaration of faith.” He suggested that the current proposal failed because it was not “clear and forceful in dealing with doctrinal and moral issues.”

The close vote, even in the presbyteries that counted a majority for the package, indicates that Southern Presbyterians are, at best, uneasy about adopting the same kind of confessional position embraced in 1967 by the United Presbyterian Church. The statistical decline of the United Presbyterians in the last decade has done nothing to suggest that its theological base is better.

Still ahead is the vote on a plan of union for the nation’s two largest Presbyterian denominations. If the Southern church keeps its three-fourths rule, and if United Presbyterians keep their doctrinal position, the chances for a legal marriage appear to be slim.

Without Benefit Of Clergy—Or Commitment

The figure is out: 1.3 million Americans are living together as couples without being married, according to a new Census Bureau report. That’s double the number reported in 1970 and triple the number reported in 1960. While the proportion of unmarried couples is small, just 1 per cent of all households, the rapid increase is distressing. Earlier non-Christian cultures faded rapidly and disappeared from the earth when they violated one of the basic laws of nature (not to mention the revealed law and will of God).

Couples who live together without the commitment of marriage are compromising their humanity and reducing themselves to a level of pleasure-seeking (or perhaps convenience-seeking) animals. In a book entitled Crisis and Faith (Sanhedrin Press), Eliezer Berkovits put it well:

“The highest form of the personalization of the relationship between a man and a woman finds its expression in their complete dedication to each other. It includes unquestioning trust in each other, the full acceptance of one’s partner in his or her comprehensive humanity. A love that does not have the courage to commit itself ‘forever’ is lacking in trust, in acceptance, in faith. Love fully personalized desires to be final, ultimate. But how can one commit oneself forever? Only by accepting the bondage of the responsibility of the commitment. In the ups and downs, in the struggle of daily existence, the truth and the faith are tested, often as if by fire.”

Rabbi Berkovits said this in a discussion of “Jewish sexual ethics,” but his comments express the Christian view on this subject as well. And they should be heeded by married as well as unmarried couples. The breakdown of marital commitment shown by the current statistics on divorce and unmarried couples bodes ill for the future of our society as well as for the personal well-being of its members.

Attention Please!

There comes a time in the lives of believers and unbelievers alike when God seems expendable. Noting that things are going along quite well, man, including Christian man, feels quite willing to go it alone.

A case in point is Israel at the time when Moses was receiving the Ten Commandments on the mountain top. God had led this people in a marvelous way. He had drowned their opposition in the Red Sea. He had provided food in the wilderness and had made sure they had water. He had given them shade against the sun and fire against the cold of night. But Moses had been away for only a few days when the Israelites turned away from Jehovah and had Aaron collect gold from which they fashioned themselves a visible god. It was a smashing success.

Their bacchanalian feast was interrupted by the return of Moses. In anger he smashed the tables that had been written by the finger of the Almighty. And God forcefully drew the Israelites’ attention to what they had forgotten—that when man tries to live without God, the result is always disastrous.

The prolonged cold spell in parts of North America can be looked upon as an accident of nature or as a divine reminder that God still calls the signals. Man, no matter how powerful, can be humbled by the weather—by the falling snow, as Napoleon discovered when he invaded Russia, or by the lack of rain or excess of it, or by an unusually bitter winter.

Whenever natural catastrophe struck, the spiritual leaders of our Pilgrim forebears used the pulpits of New England to remind the people that God was at work behind every catastrophe, and that he still spoke not only by the still, small voice but also by the thunder, the snow, the hail, the absence of rain, and if necessary even by death.

The Pharoah was given sign after sign by God, and one after the other the signs were ignored. It was not until the tenth sign came that the Pharoah let God’s people go. Have we too hardened our hearts against God’s message?

Mother, I am afraid I have bad news. Mus and Verena have had a terrible accident and are in a hospital in Germany. We’ve put in a call to the hospital and we’ll soon have more details.” Details included the facts that the car had skidded on an icy spot in a lonely area, and that Verena, finding that Mus was scarcely breathing, had amazingly extricated herself from the wreck and had run through the woods to find help. After telling what had happened and giving directions, she collapsed with her injury—a broken back. In the hospital it was discovered that Mus had broken six ribs and had punctured a lung so badly that the blood needed to be drained from that lung, which collapsed. Both of them had concussions, too.

Perfectly whole one minute, horribly broken the next. What an intensity of longing on the part of loved ones to put the broken parts back together again and take away the pain. Broken bodies, broken dreams.

When our Susan was twelve, she stayed for some weeks with dear friends of ours whose home was filled with very lovely art objects. One morning as Sue sat on a couch in the living room waiting for breakfast, she exuberantly stretched out her arms with pure joie de vivre. The joy was short-lived. One hand hit a priceless Ming vase, and the vase was knocked over and shattered. One moment in perfect condition, perfectly preserved for centuries; a second later, smashed.

As I am waiting for more news of Mus and Verena, my mind is filled with many thoughts of brokenness and wholeness. Broken relationships are more painful and serious than broken possessions or bodies. Our child’s breaking something as irreplaceable as a Ming vase could have broken the close relationship we had with its owners, but that didn’t happen. These people understood the real values in life. The awareness of the high cost of a broken relationship is an important thing to have. Lack of understanding in this area leads to brokenness, an internal injury to our very beings.

The very first broken relationship was the break that came between human beings and God, as Adam and Eve made a choice that showed, among other things, an insensitivity to the importance of that relationship. The expected “gain” that filled their thoughts as they believed Satan’s promise about their eating the fruit was one they suddenly valued above their relationship with God. The shattering of this relationship led to further brokenness, in their relations with each other, and then inside themselves as they became the first of the long, long line of “broken people.” Broken personalities, broken relationships, broken understanding, broken purposes, broken incentives, broken courage.

The Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you; this do in remembrance of me.… Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup.… If we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged” (1 Cor. 11:23–31).

Human attempts to mend a variety of kinds of brokenness fall far short even in the area of individual wholeness, let alone perfect oneness between two people, or among a group, or with God. God himself has made it clear that he had no way of mending the broken relationship between him and us except to be broken for us. Jesus the Son of God was willing to have his body broken on the cross—a terrible price to pay for our wholeness. However, he also went through a broken relationship with his Father as he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” All this he endured so that we could come into an eternal relationship as children of his Father and joint heirs with him—so that we could be mended.

The fact is earth-shaking, universe-shaking, and as we eat the broken bread in remembrance of all this, we are meant to be aware of the wonder of what he has suffered for us, and to consider seriously what sins or hindrances need to be confessed. The broken relationship is mended when we accept Christ’s brokenness for us, and we can communicate with the Father continually, even to the point of confessing our fresh sins.

There is mending taking place in our other areas of brokenness—emotional, intellectual, spiritual, physical—but we will not be perfect until Jesus comes back again. “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.… If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.… For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:17–22). The hope of perfect mending and complete wholeness is the resurrection.

How painful it was for Christ to be broken for us. But it is even more painful that his sacrifice is often disregarded by many of us who have accepted what he did. Our breaking, even temporarily, the relationship that cost Christ so much to repair should make us say “I’m sorry” even more fervently than we express sorrow over allowing things to break our human relationships. He is perfect; it is always we who are at fault when something comes between us and him.

On the horizontal level we have been given strong directions about how not to have broken relationships: “Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And above all these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfectness. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful” (Col. 3:12–15). This leaves little room for misunderstanding how we are meant to feel and act toward one another as fellow children of the heavenly Father.

Brokenness in the body, the Church, must hurt Him who was broken that we might become the body put together in oneness. “And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence” (Col. 1:18). This is the One in whom we are “complete” (Col. 2:10). Pray that there may be more evidence of that completeness in us as individuals, and as “the body of Christ,” but also thank God that perfect victory will be evident throughout all eternity. His brokenness will fulfill its purpose; he really did nail to his cross the things that would be against us. Our brokenness will change to wholeness on that glorious day when he comes again.

In ordinary living, death comes as a shock, a nauseous insult and confusion. We confront it gradually, if at all, and often with silence or cliché, as a normal tone of voice seems offensive.

Art too may respond to death with silence and cliché. After Lear dies, the play closes with four couplets in which Albany offers the throne, Kent refuses it, and Edgar remarks, not profoundly, that the “oldest hath borne most” and that he himself will never live to see the like. This is, in effect, silence.

Containing death by means of cliché is the specialty of detective fiction. Of all its standard items, death is the least mysterious and intense. The corpse constrains the detective to do his work; but the work and the detective interest us, not the death and the deceased. Death is no more personal than a starting gun.

I have been thinking about detective stories for some time (see “Corpses, Clues, and the Truth,” August 30, 1974, and “The p*rnography of Moral Indignation,” December 19, 1975), and the more I think the more complicated the form seems, until I fear I am running beyond my evidence.

Detective fiction offers an image of morality; the detective seeks to establish justice, to assign guilt and its proper remedies. But to see the form’s moral imagery chiefly in terms of its resolution—the moment when the evidence comes clear and explains the mystery—is to rationalize its morality into a kind of financial simplicity: debt and payment, liability and reward. But what of felt morality, the process of deciding, choosing, dreading, confronting, and escaping?

Few detective stories are complex enough to deal with this. Their characters are psychologically and thus morally simple. But the stories are needed and valued by real people, and the psychology of this is necessarily complex. Sometimes the primary motive in this psychology is social anxiety—a certain embattled class’s need to see its enemies, or a representative of them, insulted, degraded, and destroyed. This motive exaggerates and simplifies the villain; indeed, it dehumanizes him, so that he may be killed off without compunction.

That’s what the TV cop show does. It sees crime from the restricted viewpoint of a single class: suburban America, the imperiled middle. Evil comes from above or below, endangers essential securities, and is to be dealt with in extreme ways. The classic mystery, on the other hand, sees crime as growing up within the social complex; the criminal cannot be recognized by class markings or accent, and is dealt with firmly but with honor. Often, in fact, he has so thoroughly internalized the standards by which he is judged that he executes himself. Neither crime nor criminal seriously questions the common moral assumptions.

As a result the classic detective can remain a social figure. He has moral symbolism; but he needs no special moral sanction, for the community’s approved morality approves and supports him. He defends, not a class, but a whole society.

The TV cop, in contrast, is driven by his audience’s fear, though on the surface he seems to have infinite Bogart cool. The fear is generated by threats to a security that may well be social or even financial in essence, but one that we see as moral because it reaches so deeply into our lives, and also because overt social prejudice offends our self-conscious egalitarianism. In the fictional detective, therefore, this fear issues in moral passion.

An interesting recent example of this is Serpico. (There is a real Serpico, and my comments on his fictional incarnation are not intended to reflect on him.) That he has become a symbol of outraged honesty as well as of embattled law enforcement makes the TV Serpico a complex and instructive image of the peculiar detective morality.

Serpico concerns himself with what fighting crime does to the integrity and emotional health of the crime fighter. His position is one of sympathy; appropriately, he is a sentimentalist. His moral authority is established by his feelings—by his taste for the sensitive arts, dance and music, by his compassion and vulnerability.

Of these, the aesthetic sense is window-dressing, the vulnerability essential. Serpico’s moral passion is a function of his basic passivity, and both are functions of his capacity to suffer. He embodies our odd modern belief that power is inherently bad, that to be itself virtue must be impotent. In this he differs from other TV cops who sneer and swagger and rough-house their suspects. They are the heirs of Bulldog Drummond. Serpico’s precedents go far deeper in our minds. In his justification by weakness he is a saint, a secular Francis, a debased Christ.

If his vulnerability is a moral credential, however, he does not prevail by suffering. His humility, unlike Christ’s, does not extend that far. Serpico “cares,” storms, weeps, and then beats the criminal senseless. His strength, we understand, is as the strength of ten, because his heart is pure.

The violence does not shock us because Serpico does not have to bear responsibility for it. If he is violent, it is only because he has been pushed beyond tolerance, beyond the point at which suffering patience can be a virtue. The criminal bears the guilt for Serpico’s violence as well as for his own.

For his role in supporting the detective’s moral heroism, the criminal is simplified and brutalized. He is usually an extreme case; no confused kid, no business-like or elegant thief, but a sad*st and pervert, a vendor of filth and cruelty—a Fu Manchu with all that Sax Rohmer only implied made nauseously explicit.

His use is clear. His evil raises the story’s temperature high enough to justify the violence of Serpico’s emotions and behavior. Without this the hero would sound exaggerated, over-blown, false, a vaunting knight with no pagan to kill. That he is a parody-saint would become too obvious without the pressure of a parody-villain.

I have argued before that this kind of moral passion—the kind that takes away the humanity of its object, as a way of freeing itself of responsibility for its own results—is sub-Christian, essentially unjust. In some cop shows, dehumanizing the villain licenses the detective to indulge himself in anger and violence. The same happens in Serpico; it is a common tactic. But here we meet a further development. Serpico’s anger is “moral,” not only in a symbolic sense but as it is permeated by his sentimental morality; and the story utilizes this special quality. His morality is his ultimate excuse for violence; he is going to war, and only moral passion can justify it.

This takes us back to the psychology of the audience. On the crudest level, the standard popular detective story uses moral corruption, and violence both “good” and “bad” (the cop’s and the crook’s, ours and theirs), as sensation; it is p*rnographic, bypassing our minds and consciences, appealing to our nerves.

In a somewhat deeper sense, it feeds our social anxiety through a rough comanchero justice; it offers us the vision of anti-social elements brutalized (as we believe them to be in actual experience) and destroyed (as we wish they were).

But have Serpico’s tender moral feelings any place in this pattern? How does the addition of self-conscious moralizing intensify the effect of this sensationalism? Why is there no conflict?

The reason, it seems to me, must be found in religious psychology—specifically, in whatever faint Christian pulse remains alive in our post-Christian culture. All the TV detectives—in particular, however, Serpico, the moral hero—offers us an image of moral warfare. The hero’s rightness is not only an excuse for sensational violence, though it is that; it is not only a rationalization of his social utility. We enjoy it because we have an ingrown response to the warfare of light against darkness, and, distorted as it is, the detective’s image is of this warfare.

According to Christian belief, human beings are made for war—the universal war of good against evil. Historically, Christian writers have drawn on the Scriptures’ military metaphors to express our duty in this war, as in “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

This spiritual militarism can be distorted, like any image, and the Prince of Peace made into General Jesus. But then, as Dorothy L. Sayers said, we normally “trim the claws of the Lion of Judah” and come up with “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” This is comforting. But if the truth is partly otherwise, and we are made in some sense to fight, then it follows that we have been given a penchant for battle. Every minor moral struggle braces and prepares us for a greater. Every skirmish has in it something of the Last Battle, and to that our spirits respond.

It is doubtful that many TV viewers—church members or not—actually take a conscious part in the war with principalities and powers, with social and moral corruption. We are nonetheless made for it, though in fear and sloth we avoid it. This tension our TV fantasies help to resolve. What we see in Serpico is a debased version of our own vocation.

One often hears TV praised for its immediacy. Marshall McLuhan’s thesis, that the medium is a direct extension of eye and ear, is familiar. But TV also creates distances. Like the radio scanner with which we listen in on police calls, like the news program that shows us war footage scarcely hours old—the dead are not buried before we watch them eviscerated in our living rooms—TV cop shows let us confront evil and death played out in explicit terms before us, but veiled by the blue screen. We examine them in the approach-avoidance techniques of flirtation. We are meant to oppose evil and prevail. Instead we watch, silently, as our fictional surrogate opposes fictional horrors and wins fictitious victory. We are voyeurs of the moral war.

Our pleasure in Serpico’s tirade, therefore, is deeper than the pleasure of seeing the good guy win, the bad guy lose. It is more subtle than social reassurance. Lacking moral passion ourselves, we enjoy its Active expression. Our “participation”—the little thrills of assent we feel as he preaches, our approval of his exaggerated vulnerability and his automatic violence—makes us feel that, for a moment, we are involved, though at no cost and without real effect.

Or has it no effect? There is a danger, at least, that we will come to believe that moral warfare is indistinguishable from social conflict—a kind of inverted bourgeois Marxism—and that it can be won by “legitimate” violence. We enjoy violence, of course, but then everyone always has. But will we come to believe also that violence is itself a morality, that intensity of feeling justifies its own fruits, provided it is on the side of superficial order?

There have been, and are, modern societies that have believed that violence is a morality. The obvious example is Nazism. Yet the Nazi’s opponents—from Allied firebombers to the purveyors of “holocaust chic”—have managed to believe almost the same thing regarding the Nazi himself: anything to exterminate the horror. We merely carry this one step further, putting the same attitude on TV for family consumption. But this is a malign step. For we are not serious about it; the wildly askew moral universe in which Serpico hunts his enemy is what we call fun. Like the Walrus, he weeps and sympathizes, and sorts out his prey; like the Carpenter, we applaud and join in.

Beneath the rational simplification of life into good guys and bad; beneath the rationalization of social fear; beneath the use we make of detective fantasy, the fictional trick of reducing death to cliché—beneath this, I think, there may be a moral impulse. It is to save ourselves the cost of actual moral life, with its complexity and confusion. Some escape may be necessary, for we cannot always be agonizing. Art gives us breathing space—especially the popular arts, the ones that do not replace life with occasions of even greater complexity. The problem is that we misuse our privileges.

The comprehensive social matters lying behind my thesis are too broad for this column. Detective stories are only a shred of evidence, a scrap of our consciousness. But any leaf responds to any wind, and will tell its direction. We are no longer a Christian culture, even in superficial ways. One evidence of this is that we take archetypal moral experiences for games, and are satisfied to substitute the game for the experience. To do this with social fact was the genius of the classic detective story. To do it with moral fact gives us a bigger kick: it is also more dangerous.

Lionel Basney is associate professor of English at Houghton College, Houghton, New York.

Last winter, while recuperating from a car accident, I gathered around my bed a stack of books, not only to while away the time but also as a means of amplifying the experience of coming so suddenly and unpredictably close to death and surviving. The fact that I was lying there, breathing in and out, eating, drinking, and reading books seemed to me miraculous as I lived over and over again in my mind that scene, already fading as fast as dreams do when we wake. I knew this experience had enormous significance, perhaps accessible to me in sleep when I would groan and cry out and feel myself falling. But to abstract the meaning from those dream times eluded my conscious mind.

At times of crisis, I have discovered, the world begins to take on symbolic significance. The weather becomes a portent; mundane objects glow with messages. The books I had gathered would, I felt, contain clues to the meaning of my experience. Whether by accident, design, or unconscious selection on my part, they tended towards what can be called “confessional” literature, stories of true-life adventures from Christian veterans. Miraculous escapes from various life-threatening situations; hopeless, dead-end existences transformed into lives of unspeakable richness; stories of trust and daring, of contact with another dimension of life that ordinarily we only guess at. To someone suddenly snatched from the mainstream of life and flopped on the shore gasping for air, these books had the heady effect of undiluted oxygen. Almost-life became not quite good enough for me. Anything less than a marvel was meaningless.

When I finally got on my feet again, both literally and figuratively, I began to think a little more analytically about this genre of Christian writing. To a Christian, “confession” is a many-sided word. It can mean confession of sin, proclamation of God’s mighty works, or praise, as in “the heavens declare the glory of God.” All these meanings are usually present in Christian confessional literature, whereas in its secular counterpart the reader is simply the recipient of the intimate and sometimes compulsive confidences of the writer. Nevertheless, it now seemed necessary for me to identify the particular benefits and dangers of this kind of writing for Christians. Was it indeed a valid form of faithful witness? What sort of history did it have in the Christian tradition?

To begin in the middle, there is a long flat stretch of Christian history that is almost totally devoid of confessional writing of the sort so dear to the heart of browsers in Christian bookstores, though there was a good amount of devotional writing by mystics such as Thomas à Kempis. (The History of the Calamities of Abelard, ostensibly a letter to this meretricious monk’s friend but with at least one eye on its broader publication, can at best be labeled autobiography and not confessional in the many-faceted Christian sense.) Scholasticism, which extended its empire unquestioned from the eleventh century to the first rumblings of the Reformation, hardly allowed of such a messy variety. Theologians saw their task as categorizing the data of faith, much as their regrettably pagan mentor, Aristotle, had set about categorizing the biological world. After all, there is so much of it. How else is one to get a grasp of the subject unless it can be indexed?

Whereas Plato had meandered about in dialogues, Aristotle and the churchmen intended to tidy things up. Even in Dante, who, though he never laid claim to the title of theologian, nevertheless gave us perhaps the most read of medieval theological tracts, we find the categorizing influence of the Scholastics on a burgeoning imagination: carefully delineated circles marked off for circ*mscribed varieties of both sinners and saints. But as his characters spin out their stories, confessing under the stern eye of Virgil or the luminous eye of Beatrice how they got where they are, it is as though the floodgate holding back seven centuries of stories had broken. Out they spill, eager to fill in with particulars the broad, blank surface of universal categories.

From that point on, Scholastics fell on hard times. They were defamed as mere hairsplitting debaters devoid of feeling. Actually, they were quite fiery in their debates. Their fervor shines through in their hymns, such as St. John of Damascus’ still familiar “Day of Resurrection.”

Yet one can scarcely imagine an underling of the Avignon entourage writing the story of his conversion experience in the manner of Chuck Colson. It is not that these Christians lacked the material with which to chill one’s blood and thrill one’s soul. The history of St. John of the Cross, that playboy knight-errant turned mystical monk, would alone provide enough copy to saturate Guideposts. Instead, he chose to write an incredibly complex how-to-do-it book on attaining union with God.

The quintessence of Scholastic writings was contained in Peter Lombard’s “Sentences,” short, reasoned, doctrinal propositions, revered among churchmen because they were impersonal and therefore could not be confined to individual instances. At first, it would seem that the Reformation made precious little impression on how Christians wrote about their faith. True, Luther’s tracts were a little snappier, especially those directed against the pope, and his transcribed Tabletalk gives us vivid scenes of the tempestuous Luther household. But it took another century for the subjectivism inherent in the new theology to flower into confessional literature.

In fact, it was Jonathan Edwards who not only championed experiential religion in such works as A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections but also with his Personal Narrative brought into prominence the literary form that had been accumulating in the diaries of countless unpublished Puritans. When he writes that after a particular spiritual revelation “the appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm sweet cast or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything,” his meaning is immediately accessible to the contemporary Christian in a way that systematic theology is not.

Indeed, the first literary production of the new world, William Bradford’s History of Plimouth Plantation, was a forerunner to Edwards’s Personal Narrative. This official diary of the Elect Nation took up the old medieval notion of the chronicle which, even when it described ecclesiastical events, never proposed to be more than history. Bradford’s History, however, became a continuation of the Hebrew’s confessional salvation history.

As we observe the fresh flowering of this mode of expression on the new continent, we can also trace its roots back to its greatest practitioner. The American historian Perry Miller links the Puritans to Augustine “simply because Augustine is the arch-exemplar of a religious frame of mind of which Puritanism is only one instance out of many in fifteen hundred years of religious history.… There survive hundreds of Puritan diaries and thousands of Puritan sermons, but we can read the inward meaning of them all in the Confessions” (The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Beacon, 1961, p. 3)

The African Augustine, writing his Confessions in a monastic community half a world away while the Roman civilization was crumbling under the barbarians’ onslaught—what could be more alien to American Protestants? Yet the ordinary person in the pew can read St. Augustine’s Confessions, at least the first ten books, with much more ease and understanding than he can read a recently published theological tome. Why is it that, though most of the faithful, Protestants and Catholics alike, would feel totally at sea with Augustine’s treatise on the Trinity, they nevertheless would feel the firm foundation of faith beneath their feet as they read his recollections of the journey towards belief?

Possibly for the same reason that, says G. K. Chesterton, an ancient pagan “worships the peak of a particular mountain, not the abstract idea of altitude.” Few people are philosophers but everyone understands a good story. And that is why our faith is in a story, not in a philosophy abstracted from it, useful as that might be in more mundane matters. “Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct,” Chesterton continues, “is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another” (The Everlasting Man).

Certainly this is true not only of The Story but, by God’s grace, of our story as well. The change, the transformation, the metamorphosis, is the subject of all Christian confessionals; they can all be summarized by “I once was lost but now am found.” No analytical feats are necessary to understand that experience. We have all been supplied with the necessary raw lump of life.

While we are exulting over this fact, however, it may be well to remember that whatever stories we can tell are only derivative, not primary. Augustine himself must have been guarding against the pride incipient in his great work by casting the entire story in the form of a prayer. While dredging up the unsavory motivations that led him to excel in his studies, he adds: “I need not tell all this to you, my God, but in your presence I tell it to my own kind, to those other men, however few, who may perhaps pick up this book. And I tell it so that I and all who read my words may realize the depths from which we cry to you.” This extensive prayer, undoubtedly the longest in any language, is no mere literary device but a protection against pomposity.

For there is no parallel for such work in the Gospels. Even Paul, in his asides about his former life and conversion, is brief and unelaborative. One might have expected so spectacular a conversion to occupy more than the meager, almost impatient mention in Galatians and the thirty-one verses that Luke gives it in Acts. One cringes at the thought of a twentieth-century gospel modeled on the pseudo-personalism of our mass media—“How Jesus Turned My Life Around: The Miracle Story of a Simple Fisherman Now a World Renowned Evangelist, as Told to Our Roving Reporter, John Mark.”

Part of what a literary critic would call the internal evidence that authenticates the Gospels is this very constraint on the part of the narrator. That four separate accounts of the same events should focus so exclusively on the person of Jesus rather than on the observer’s reactions to him indicates the inexorable power of that person. It was not for nothing that Jesus chose his closest followers from among the illiterate. Luther once wrote that if the Gospel could be promoted or maintained by worldly means, God would never have entrusted it to fishermen. Perhaps they were the only ones who could be trusted not to be incessantly scribbling away at their diaries. Paul, that great and gifted writer, bemoans that the Lord appeared to him as to “one born out of due time.” But if Paul, the intellectual who, by his own admission, was obsessively introspective, had been one of that scruffy, itinerant band, into what temptation might not his talent have led him?

Still, we need not despair of finding a biblical prototype for our beloved confessional thrillers. For one, there is Jeremiah, who records his reactions in Lamentations. He, of course, was only amplifying the tradition of the confessional psalms. The psalmists seem to have been inveterate penitents, documenting their spiritual highs and lows in scrupulous detail. The movement that begins with “Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul” and culminates in “Let the heaven and earth praise him, the seas and everything that moveth therein” is a familiar one to us. This is why the psalms serve so well liturgically. Whereas people may shuffle their feet uneasily over certain sections of creeds, feeling inadequate to comprehend the meaning of “very God of very God,” everyone feels in his bones the full weight of the declaration “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.”

It is not difficult to understand the appeal of confessional literature. We all like to have someone else affirm our experience. “I know what you mean” is one of the most comforting phrases in the language. It is a part of the glue that holds humanity together. But we also read these books for inspiration. They open a tiny crack in the blank grey wall of the cul-de-sac we find ourselves in from time to time, and through the crack gleams the promise of undiscovered possibilities in life, a more expansive dimension into which others have been transported and from which they beckon us.

“You too can live through prison camps and unspeakable nightmares” we hear Corrie ten Boom and Solzhenitsyn and Jeremiah saying. “Your life can make a difference in other lives” declare Brother Andrew, the Bible smuggler, and Nicky Cruz, the delinquent tamer. I can even remember staring at myself in the bathroom mirror after finishing Keith Miller’s The Taste of New Wine, stunned by the realization that this was the face of one engaged in terrible spiritual warfare, that every act of mine was of everlasting importance, that vast invisible powers preserved and protected me. That knowledge was like an immense secret I bore into the world.

But though it is easy enough to identify these aspects of the appeal of confessional literature to readers, there remains a deeper motivation that links the reader and the writer in a common search. Corrie ten Boom says this in her book In My Father’s House: “So many times we wonder why God has certain things happen to us. We try to understand the circ*mstances of our lives, and we are left wondering.” I think this is a large part of what drives people to read others’ experiences or to write down their own. They must teach themselves the meaning of their own lives by seeing those lives not as a succession of disconnected episodes but laid out as a path, full of switchbacks and stones, but leading somewhere. The writer is left, not wandering in a trackless maze, but wondering at the delicate and intricate meetings and passages he has made. Without a perspective, a pattern is impossible to perceive.

Thomas Merton, whose own confessional Seven Storey Mountain became a best seller, explains the necessity of seeing his life as a story whose author is God: “Too often the conventional conception of ‘God’s will’ as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love. Such a view of divine will drives human weakness to despair.… We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good.” And Augustine, the arch-confessionalist, goes perhaps deeper than all the others when, stripped of every other concern, he cries out as to a lover, “Why do you mean so much to me? Help me to find words to explain.”

Nothing less than such a primal need can justify, however, the covering of pages with a welter of words about one’s private world. The dangers of a public, printed confession are manifold, both to the writer and to the reader. Too many times as I read the books beside my bed during that convalescence, I was driven almost to despair by well-intentioned writers more bent on an uplifting moral than on a painstakingly accurate description of their lives. Despite their frequent disclaimers of perfection, I was often depressed. When I came across Solzhenitsyn’s account of his dastardly behavior towards his fellow prisoners upon being arrested at the front in World War II, I was ambivalently thankful that someone else was as weak as I.

Also, there can creep into the documentary a subtle contempt for early experience that belies the notion of preparation. We too easily convince ourselves that we have risen above or outgrown what we once were. But I have had this illusion shattered for me when passing houses I once inhabited in childhood or as a student or young mother. Then the eerie feeling comes over me that my own ghost, a shadow of the person I was then, is looking out the window at me. A great pity, for that prisoner of the past weighs me down, and I know it is that ghost, as well as my current, transitory self, who must be redeemed, who will be with me when I give back my own story to its true author.

Edmund Spenser and the Angels

“How oft do they their silver bowers leave …

And their bright squadrons round about us plant.”

—The Fairie Queene

He saw their glowing pinions cleave the skies

As angel-squadrons left high heaven and came

To fight for man, to watch and daily ward

Against base fiends ranged round his sin-blind side.

So, twice-born, and within the Spirit’s flame,

Spenser beheld our world through light-filled eyes;

And rapt with awe the poet-mystic cried

(Seeing his own unworth before the Throne):

“Oh, why should heavenly God to men have such regard?”

And all the angels echoed: “Love, alone!”

M. Whitcomb Hess

I met Lord Peter Wimsey in high school. He wasn’t handsome but was witty, urbane, often nonsensical. Listening to him chatter and patter I learned a great deal about logic—how to assemble facts and draw reasonable conclusions. It wasn’t until years later that I learned of his creator, Dorothy L. Sayers. Although Wimsey isn’t a male recreation of Sayers, she did give her famous detective the same mental powers she possessed.

Peter Wimsey stories are quite out of the ordinary—longer, more complex, and intellectual, without the stock characters useful to most detective novelists. As Peter Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager duch*ess, says of Harriet Vane’s mysteries in Strong Poison, they are “really quite good and so well-written, and I didn’t guess the murder till page 200, rather clever, because I usually do it about page 15.” But more than just the cleverness and writing style place Wimsey above Asey Mayo or Albert Campion. Sayers provides us with clues in her mysteries to other facets of her personality and beliefs. As with C. S. Lewis, each of her writings forms a part of a unified whole. Whose Body, the first of the eleven Wimsey novels, may not appear to have much in common with The Mind of the Maker. But each of her books further develops the central or controlling theme of her creative life: we know man is made in God’s image by his desire to make things.

What are some of the clues Sayers’s novels give to her personality and beliefs? Police Inspector Charles Parker studied theology while in school and reads Bible commentaries to keep his wits sharpened. Lord Peter’s assistant, the spinster Miss Climpson, is an outspoken Christian who struggles with her conscience to determine right and wrong in the gray areas of investigations. She has a strong spiritual sensitivity that Wimsey relies on to discover the good from the bad, the guilty from the innocent. That spirituality saves Harriet Vane from being hanged for a murder she did not commit. (Lord Peter eventually marries Harriet in the final Wimsey novel, Busman’s Honeymoon.) Although Lord Peter is not a Christian, he is thoroughly versed in Scripture and theology, and in the early novels he and Parker have some low-key discussions about, for example, the merits of Bible scholars. In Whose Body? Lord Peter discovers the murderer not through a logical collecting and cataloguing of facts but by reading a book, Physiological Bases of the Conscience, written by the murderer: “The knowledge of good and evil is an observed phenomenon, attendant upon a certain condition of the brain-cells, which is removable.” The author went on to speculate that as man progressed the conscience would disappear, since when it functioned it caused death. Sayers juxtaposes this blatantly criminal philosophy with that of Christianity.

Some of Sayers’s Christian readers have wondered why she didn’t make Lord Peter convert to Christianity, since she herself was a Christian. Sayers replied in The Mind of the Maker: “Peter is not the Ideal Man; he is an eighteenth-century Whig gentleman, born a little out of his time, and doubtful whether any claim to possess a soul is not a rather vulgar piece of presumption.” Although her refusal to make Lord Peter something he wasn’t continues to disappoint readers—and to cause some to think she couldn’t really have been a Christian—her reason for not doing so is intrinsic to her view of the duty she owed to God the Creator, who gave her certain human, creative gifts. She could not violate her creation by imposing her will on him any more than God imposes his will on us. He wants us to surrender to him freely. (It may sound strange to talk of Lord Peter as though he were real. But anyone who has tried to invent characters, compose a song, or paint a picture knows that a work of art takes on a life of its own. No amount of molding or plumping or rewriting by the artist can change it. To try would be to violate the truth of art.)

Harriet Vane runs into this problem in Gaudy Night, one of Sayers’s best and most philosophical novels. She falsified one of her characters to smooth the plot, but the book was wooden. Lord Peter makes a few suggestions, to which Harriet says, “But if I give Wilfrid all those violent and lifelike feelings, he’ll throw the whole book out of balance.” She rewrites the book. Sayers avoided that kind of problem, except in Have His Carcase, where she invented a locality to hang her story on a murdered hemophiliac. Nothing about the book works; even the usually good dialogue between Harriet and Lord Peter strikes consistently false notes.

Sayers raised the level of detective writing to an art form, and her stories deserve to be called novels. Recognition of this and of her growing popularity is seen in the British productions of her novels—most recently Five Red Herrings—for public television’s exciting “Masterpiece Theatre” series. Regrettably, many of the Christian distinctives have been excised in the television adaptations. Those unfamiliar with Sayers would never sense from these films that she was a Christian. In his introduction Alistair Cooke tried to compensate for this by saying that late in life Sayers became a dedicated “church-woman,” a description that suggests a church bazaar mogul more than a serious Christian artist.

And that is finally what distinguishes her from other writers of the same genre—her attitude toward her work, of which those clues I outlined are only a small part. Her detective novels were just one expression of a theme—or to use her word from The Mind of the Maker, the Idea—that motivated her throughout her life: work as a sacrament. Through work God continually recreates us in his image, and in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, we offer back to him “our selves, our souls, and our bodies.” By our good labor we can express to God thoughts and feelings not possible with words alone. Our work becomes prayer made concrete. That is why a character in Gaudy Night can say, “A good painter mustn’t paint bad pictures—that would be immoral.”

God worked, we work. God created, we create. We can readily recognize God’s work as an act of primary creation, but we seldom think of our own as creation at all. We reserve that idea for artists. Sayers insisted that each of us should work as though it were a sacrament, an act of creation. In that way we reflect God’s image in us, and give back to him what he has given us, the opportunity to work creatively.

We think of work as an evil result of the fall. Yet before the fall Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful and multiply, to nurture the garden and care for the animals. Milton in Paradise Lost captures this prelapsarian attitude toward work:

On to thir morning’s rural work they haste

Among sweet dews and flow’rs; where any row

Of Fruit-trees overwoody reach’d too far

Thir pamper’d boughs, and needed hands to check

Fruitless imbraces: or they led the Vine

To wed her Elm; she spous’d about him twines

Her marriageable arms, and with her brings

Her dow’r th’ adopted Clusters, to adorn

His barren leaves [V, 211–19].

Here Adam and Eve eagerly attend to their tasks of keeping order and nurturing trees and plants. The attitude toward work perhaps more than the work itself changed when Adam and Eve sinned. Before the fall, man worked blissfully; after, grudgingly. In The Zeal of Thy House Sayers says, “The hatred of work must be one of the most depressing consequences of the fall.” As part of our Christian commitment, then, we need to change our attitude toward work.

Again and again in her novels, plays, and essays she talks about what work means, how we should respond to whatever it is God has given us to do, and what our attitude toward work should be. Before we can change our attitude, though, we need to discover what it is that God wants us to do. Once we’ve found that out, we can begin not only to enjoy our jobs but to do them well. In Creed or Chaos Sayers explains that the Church “has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred … that work must be good work before it can call itself God’s work.… The official Church wastes time and energy, and, moreover, commits sacrilege, in demanding that secular workers should neglect their proper vocation in order to do Christian work—by which she means ecclesiastical work. The only Christian work is good work well done” (Harcourt, 1949, pp. 56–58). That harsh condemnation hits the evangelical church, which has often said that only missionaries or ministers, to use the most obvious examples, are doing God’s work. How many bad preachers were talked into the ministry by well-meaning people when they would have served God far better by being good grocers or conscientious craftsmen?

With her concern for work well done, it seems strange at first to think that Sayers’s most famous character is independently wealthy and only dabbles in detection as a hobby. Yet even in the first Wimsey story, which began what Sayers called her lifelong “hymn to the Master Maker,” the question of work comes up between Parker and Wimsey. Wimsey asks Parker if he likes his job. “The detective considered the question, and replied: ‘Yes—yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it quite well—not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take a pride in it.’ ” To Lord Peter, criminal investigation is just an exciting hobby that keeps his life from boredom—at first. By the time we get to Busman’s Honeymoon, he and we discover that it’s his job just as much as Parker’s, and that no matter how much he’d like to disregard his duty, it would be immoral not to do it with all his energy. Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night defends her profession to the dean of her old school: “I know what you’re thinking—that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don’t see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.”

Sayers understood the frustrations of not knowing what job she was called to do, as well as the emptiness of unemployment. After attending Oxford, where she was in the first class of women ever to receive a master of arts degree from the university, she taught in a girls’ school for a while, wrote some slim volumes of poetry, and finally returned to the Fen country to the home of her father, who was an Anglican clergyman. In her late twenties she took a temporary job writing jingles for a London advertising agency. She stayed ten years. Out of desperation she began writing mysteries, discovered she was good at it, and kept on until she’d made enough money to write and sometimes produce religious plays, such as The Zeal of Thy House and The Man Born to Be King, a cycle of twelve plays for radio written during World War II.

It is simple to say, “Enjoy your work; do it well as an offering to God.” But what of those whose work is degrading or boring or in fact harmful? Sayers understood those problems, too, with her ten years in a job she considered worthless, a job she exposed in Murder Must Advertise. She also discusses the problem in a chapter-length postscript to The Mind of the Maker, “The Worth of the Work.” In order to lift work from drudgery into a sacrament, we need to consider it apart from economic necessity. An artist or any creative person lives to see his work completed. He does not just work to live. “Whether it is possible for a machine-worker to feel creatively about his routine job,” she says, “I do not know; but I suspect that it is, provided and so long as the worker eagerly desires that before all things else the work shall be done.” Or, as the author of Ecclesiasticus says, the craftsman “watches to finish the work.” Each of us can have that attitude. The typist looking (almost lovingly) on clean, error-free letters, reports, or manuscripts, neatly stacked and assembled. A secretary who efficiently schedules and guides her supervisor’s day for the greatest productivity. The grocery clerk who rapidly and accurately checks out foodstuffs. Or the waiter who enhances the pleasure of a well-prepared meal by cheerful, courteous service. A housewife who knows that cleaning is a never-ending job and proudly views shining floors and polished tables. All these are jobs considered by our society as menial, yet they can be done creatively and can produce satisfaction. Any task that brings order out of chaos is of the nature of the first creative act of God and becomes a sacrament.

To this Sayers adds one strong note of warning in her moving play The Zeal of Thy House. We cannot continue with a task that God has taken from us and given to another. We must guard against making the work more than a sacrament, which is after all only a physical image of spiritual communion between us and God. Even as she explains the importance of work Sayers also warns us not to take the image literally, not to make work the thing it represents and worship it rather than him from whom work comes. William the master architect learns this at the end of The Zeal of Thy House: “What, in my work? The sin was in my work? Thou liest.… In my work? That cannot be.… O now, now I begin to see. This was well said, He is a jealous God. The work was not ill done—’twas done too well.”

Yet if we keep our perspective, always seeing the image as image, we can faithfully serve God by faithfully doing the work he gives us. Dorothy L. Sayers lived out this conviction, and her work shows that integrity. She was an honest craftsman who knew whom she served. Two verses from her poem “The Makers” sum up her message to us:

Let each do well what each knows best,

Nothing refuse and nothing shirk,

Since none is master of the rest,

But all are servants of the work—

The work no master may subject

Save He to whom the whole is known,

Being Himself the Architect,

The Craftsman and the Corner stone.

“Scholar as preacher leaps into my mind,” said Helmut Thielicke’s translator in trying to describe him. John Doberstein, who translated Bonhoeffer also, notes that Thielicke combines “deep, scholarly, biblical and theological mastery with strong, vividly colorful, pictorial utterance, eschewing the worn cliché.…” Thielicke’s sermons have been heard in bombed-out churches during Hitler’s regime, on contemporary radio and TV, and by overflowing crowds at his large Lutheran church in Germany. His sermons are considered by many to be among the finest ever preached. This selection is abridged from chapters nine and ten of the sermon collection entitled “How the World Began,” published by Fortress in 1961, and is used by permission.

I still have a vivid memory of one night during the war. On a height near Stuttgart there were some twenty boys from a Latin school manning an antiaircraft battery. They were anxious to have me come and give them religious instruction. But since this was prohibited and their request was not granted, they went on to a higher commanding officer and finally, by their spirit and persistence, secured his permission. So I walked out to visit them regularly and we sat down among the guns and talked about the “last things.”

But on this occasion they had called me for another reason. Their position had been hit by a low-level attack and the father of one of the boys, who happened to be visiting, was killed while his boy was manning the gun.

The boy carried his dead father away in a wheeled stretcher. The youngsters—for that’s all they were—crowded around me deeply shocked, almost like chicks around a hen. They were completely broken up and they looked to someone older for protection from a world whose dark enigma had suddenly leaped upon them for the first time. I spoke some words of comfort to them, though I myself felt utterly helpless.

But then the thing happened that accounts for my relating this incident at all. On my way home the moonlight lay upon the quiet valley, the white flowers of the trees shimmered in this soft light, and an unspeakable peace and stillness rested upon the landscape. The world was “like some quiet room, where wrapt in still soft gloom, we sleep away the daylight’s sorrow.”

I mention this, not to be romantic or to gain a sentimental effect, but rather because for me this hour was a parable of the dark threshold which, the account of the Fall says, man has crossed. Before me lay the seemingly whole and healthy world of a springtime night. But in that moment its very peace was like a stab of pain. For I knew that the peace of nature is delusive, and that I had just spoken, encompassed by a sea of blossoms, with boys whose eyes were filled with dread even though they bravely swallowed their tears.

No, this world was not sound and whole, because man had invaded it with his murderous instruments and despoiled it of its peace. And will it not grow even worse? How long will men be able to refresh themselves by looking at the starry heavens and their majestic calm? Will man disturb even this peace with his space ships and cosmic spies?

The story we shall discuss shows us how from this one point in the world—where man stands—evil streams out like an icy breath into the world, into a world that once was sound and whole, a world over which there rang the joy of the Creator: “Behold, it was very good; behold, it is very good.”

That wonderful serenity of the first man under God that rings out in Joseph Haydn’s radiant duets between Adam and Eve is suddenly ended. Their frank and open candor is shattered. Now they have something to hide, and they hastily make themselves aprons. And when they hear the voice of God as he walks through the garden, they go into hiding like culprits caught by surprise and with palpitating hearts watch to see what will happen.

We can only stand in amazement at this age-old story, for it summarizes in exemplary fashion what we see happening all around us and especially within ourselves. Surely all of us feel as I must confess I do when I hear these words. At first, as an intellectual living in the atomic age, one is inclined to take offense at many of the mythical features of this story—for example, the idea of a serpent that can speak. But scarcely has this skepticism begun to stir than we are so compelled to listen to what the serpent says that the feeble protest of our intellect is simply thrust aside.

Do not all of us know certain scenes in our lives that recur in this story of a temptation? Is it not something like a concentrate of the whole art of temptation? How can one capture in a few pages the great profusion of shapes conveyed in this story?

So I can do nothing else but deal with it several times, in order that in this way we may slowly work our way to the arch-question of all mankind—the question that even fourteen-year-olds ask and that still pursues people in their old age: the question of how evil came into the world.

And the first thing that strikes us is this. The drama of temptation, which now begins and puts a sudden end to the vision of a sound and healthy world, begins not with the crash of the kettle drum but rather with the sound of oboes. One might even say that it has in it hymn-like motifs.

The overture of this dialogue is thoroughly pious, and the serpent introduces himself as a completely serious and religious beast. He does not say: “I am an atheistic monster and now I am going to take your paradise, your innocence and loyalty, and turn it all upside down.” Instead he says: “Children, today we’re going to talk about religion, we’re going to discuss the ultimate things.”

Well, something like that immediately inspires confidence. After all, blackguards and rascals do not dabble in such topics. When you talk about pious things you immediately secure for yourself the alibi of serious-mindedness and sincerity.

So he begins by asking, “Did God—this God whom we all revere; even I, the serpent, honor him dearly—did our revered God say that you should not eat of any tree of the garden?”

In other words, the serpent is trying to start a discussion, something like a theological discussion about the “Word of God.” So there is not a trace of doubt—oh, no! The devil himself believes in God. He takes his stand on the fact of “God.” …

So this is the first point that we must note here: the Tempter always operates in disguise. He hides behind a mask of harmless, indeed pious benevolence. All temptations in life begin in sugared form.…

So this is the first idea that the serpent insinuates into our hearts with all the arts of suggestion. God is different from what you think. He is not at all a narrow-minded, moralistic God who is always getting in your way. Rather he is the God of life, the God of abundance. Take everything you can get, for God is handing it out to you. Act according to the laws of life, even when they are cruel, for God made life. Take advantage of the rights of the stronger, for God is always on the side that has the heaviest artillery. Keep shoving down and climbing up; that’s the way to get ahead. After all, that’s what this life God created looks like! Take away the hidden irony of that famous song of Bert Brecht’s and make it the principle of your life: “If anybody does the trampling, it’s me; and if anybody gets trampled, it’s going to be you.” C’est la vie—life is like that—and that’s probably what he who made it is like, too.

It is quite apparent that the serpent has well-reasoned arguments. He is far too subtle to appeal only to the baser instincts. His ambition is not to persuade but to convince.

And yet we have not even touched upon the shrewdest point in this temptation. The serpent not only does not suggest to Eve that she rebel against God; he actually gives her the chance to champion God and break a lance for him, as it were, to become religiously active. The serpent actually fires Eve’s piety; he activates her belief in God.

“Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of the trees of the garden’?” So runs the question with which the serpent introduces this pious exercise.

“No,” says Eve, thus becoming God’s defender, “he did not forbid that at all. He even permitted a great deal and gave us a lot of choice. We are allowed—most generously!—to eat of all the trees in the garden. God excepted only the one tree in the midst of the garden; we’re not even supposed to touch that one.” …

Now the woman in her conversation with the serpent has mentioned the critical point on which her destiny with God will be decided. It is really only “one point,” namely, a single tree, and on that tree, only one apple. God put at man’s disposal the whole breadth of his creation: the multitude of plants and animals are at his service, the laws of nature are there to be explored and technologically utilized, and the whole cosmos is offered as his dominion. Only one single spot in all this infinite expanse must remain tabu, inviolable, and reserved to God himself, namely, this one tree. And at this one point the serpent now begins to fire away.

Thus he is actually very careful not to try to tempt Eve with an atheistic suggestion. He does not say: God is an illusion; the only things that are true are what you can see and taste and touch. He makes only one modest, almost hesitant objection to Eve: after all, this one paltry point cannot matter that much! What is this one apple compared with the peaches and melons and strawberries and apricots, to which God has no objections! If you conform to God in 999 points in a thousand and more in the area he has assigned to you, surely, Eve, this one point in a thousand isn’t going to upset your peace with God!

But that’s the way it is; that’s the way it really is—in your life and mine. The fact is that all of us have sectors in the territory of our life which we are quite content to leave to God. But each of us also has a point which we will by no means let God approach. This point may be my ambition whereby I am determined to beat my way to success in my career at any price. It may be my sexuality to which I am determined to give rein no matter what happens and no matter what it costs. It may be a bottomless hatred toward one of my fellow men which I literally nurse and which gives me a kind of sensual pleasure which then comes between me and God and robs me of my peace. God can have everything, but not this one thing!…

Now the curious thing is that God lets me find him only when I offer to him this one, hardest thing in my life. In other words, God never comes through the door that I hold open for him, but always knocks at the one place which I have walled up with concrete, because I want it for myself alone. But if I do not let him in there, he turns away altogether.…

The first explosive charge lies in the Tempter’s effort to bring Eve to the point where she will not take God seriously. Up to this time she had taken him seriously. She knew that when we are dealing with God we are dealing with life and death, that one can die if one crosses him; then our destiny in time and eternity is at stake.

But now the serpent says to her: “Surely it is sheer nonsense to think that God would let you die and perish utterly just because you don’t take him so terribly in earnest, but rather just partly seriously. You will not die. The question of God is not that serious, my dear lady! All honor to your respect for him. I take my hat off to your display of piety, but really now, he’s not that serious about it!” …

But there is still a second explosive charge in this remark of the serpent. He says, “God has forbidden you to eat this fruit only because he knows very well that your eating it will endow you with a secret knowledge. But knowledge is power. And God is afraid of it. He wants to keep you on a short leash so you men will not get beyond his control. He is afraid that you will compete with him and that his little divine throne may totter if you discover the tremendous potential that lies in your human reason and the enormous leverage you could bring to bear if you call a general strike like Prometheus.”

In other words, here the Tempter is engaging in a little well-poisoning. His action can be reduced to this simple formula: he is sowing doubt of God’s goodness in Eve’s heart. He is saying: God doesn’t mean well by you when he forbids you to eat of this tree. His motives are rather jealousy and malevolence.

The serpent knows very well that, if this seed of distrust falls on receptive soil, it is only a short step from doubt of God’s goodness to doubt of his existence.…

So the Tempter sowed two poisonous seeds in Eve’s heart. First, he persuaded her that one must not take God too seriously, because what he says is by no means a matter of life and death; and second, he made her distrustful of the goodness of God.

It may surprise us—but it is typical of the course of every temptation—that at this point the conversation breaks off. We do not hear that Eve immediately reacted to these insinuations by saying, “Yes, you are right, I have been taking God too seriously. I have been relying all too naïvely and simple-mindedly upon his goodness.” No, the conversation breaks off; the poison must be given time to take effect. Besides, the Tempter is never fond of a static war of position; he prefers elastic tactics and a war of movement. So now like a fencer he suddenly changes his position.

Up to this time he has been playing with ideas, entangling Eve in a religious, philosophical discussion of the severity and goodness of God. Now he turns to a completely different area of the self, namely, to the senses and sensuality. But he knows that he has made a considerable dent in Eve’s intellectual resistance by the preceding arguments and that in this state she can be completely upset by a small sensual titillation.

So he simply proceeds—as we have said, before the discussion about God is finished—to dangle the forbidden fruit before her. There it hangs in all its luscious fulness and Eve’s eyes are sucked fast to it. Her mouth begins to water. “The woman saw,” the text says, which is to say: she meditated on the fruit, she turned it over in her thoughts.

But it was not only the sensual tickling of her palate that enchanted her. It was also the secret with which this fruit was laden: the eating of it would make one wise. So the fruit exerted a sensual and an intellectual fascination.…

Under the pressure of this twofold curiosity, the fascination of the senses and the mind, Eve reached out for the fruit. And only as she did this, as she performed this practical act of disobedience, did she actually answer the serpent’s question whether she was really going to take God so dreadfully seriously and whether she was really going to trust his goodness so utterly—answering it almost without being conscious of answering it. Now she is going to do neither of these things any more. And therefore she is quitting—not officially, not formally, and not by flinging an emotionally charged and defiant No toward heaven—like Prometheus—but through one very small gesture, through one very harmless snatch of a tidbit.