Page 5458 – Christianity Today (2024)

NEWS

Graham’s springtime blitz draws a strong response.

Even for a itinerant evangelist, it has been a lot of travel. During April and May, Billy Graham has been crisscrossing New England, holding one-day rallies in seven cities and delivering “evangelistic lectures” at seven college campuses, including three Ivy League schools. Three associate evangelists—Ralph Bell, John Wesley White, and Leighton Ford—have also been working the territory. The climax comes the first week in June with an eight-day Graham crusade in Boston.

In the middle of it all, Graham made trips to Washington, D.C., to address a U.S. Chamber of Commerce prayer breakfast, to Moscow for an unprecedented preaching engagement (CT, April 9, p. 44), and from there to London to pick up his $200,000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

College crowds, particularly in the Ivy League, are not apt to be pushovers for a Bible preacher. But as Graham’s schedule got under way, it was evident he was getting a good reception. He drew 1,600 at Northeastern and 1,900 at the University of Massachusetts. At Yale, the crowd stretched down the street and around the corner by the time the doors of the campus chapel were opened. When Graham spoke, about a thousand people had packed out the place.

He spoke twice at Harvard—the first night at the John F. Kennedy School of Government before a near-capacity crowd of some 800, which Graham’s Harvard hosts admitted by advance ticket only. When he concluded, Graham was accorded a sustained ovation by an audience not known for its effusion toward outside speakers. The next day the campus daily newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, called the crowd “enthusiastic.” The following night Graham spoke in spacious Memorial Church in the middle of fabled Harvard Yard. The church was packed—the audience again limited to Harvard students, faculty, and staff.

The one-day rallies were also drawing good crowds as the schedule got under way: 19,000 in Providence, Rhode Island; 4,400 in Burlington, Vermont; and 9,000 in Portland, Maine. The number coming forward for counseling afterwards was running 10 percent—double what Graham usually sees in North America.

“Our team senses something unusual happening here,” said Sterling Huston, Graham’s director of crusades for North America. “There is just a very confirming sense in the numbers and the spirit of those who have been coming that this is God’s time for New England.”

Some of Graham’s campus lectures coincided with “Ground-Zero Week” at a number of colleges, a time dedicated to halting the arms spiral, and Graham’s lectures were billed as focusing on the peace issue. No doubt some students were disappointed because Graham did not dwell on nuclear arms, and he said nothing critical of the Reagan administration. He mentioned only briefly what he dubbed “SALT 10,” the destruction of all nuclear arms. He emphasized, however, that he is not a pacifist, he does not concur with unilateral disarmament, and he does not have magic solutions to the arms race.

In fact, if there was a reason for Graham’s success with the Harvard students, it was his forthright admission that he does not have all the answers, and for his gentle approach to the gospel, minus fire and damnation.

He said he is still on a personal pilgrimage and “the more I learn, the less dogmatic I become on some topics … the answers are constantly being oversimplified in our society. It’s especially true in religion and politics. The temptation to simplify must be resisted.”

He declared his commitment to the social aspects of the gospel, and he described his alma mater, Wheaton College, as an antislave institution founded before the Civil War. He described his first “act of conscience” as a time at one of his earliest crusades when he ripped down a rope barrier separating whites from blacks.

There were some tough questions from the audience, such as, Was Graham manipulated by former President Nixon for Nixon’s political gain? Graham replied that Nixon used him less than some other presidents, and he revealed that in 1960, Nixon heard a rumor that Graham was about to endorse him for president. According to Graham, Nixon phoned to tell him not to do it because Graham’s ministry was more important than Nixon’s candidacy.

Graham was asked if he would condemn apartheid in South Africa, and in the Dutch Reformed church there, which supports it. Graham replied that it would be too easy to speak out from the safe distance of a Harvard lectern and that he has done it instead in Durban and Johannesburg. Pressed about including the Reformed church in his condemnation, Graham demurred, saying not all Reformed ministers favor apartheid.

As at his other campus lectures, Graham presented the gospel, calling it the only way out of the human dilemma, and declaring that Christ was “either a madman, a liar, and the biggest liar in the history of the world, or he was who he claimed to be.”

Graham’s warm reception at Harvard is consistent with a slow but noticeable trend of openness to evangelical Christianity on college campuses in New England, particularly where evangelicals have been willing to be counted on social issues as they boil up on campus.

When David Fountain, a young Conservative Baptist minister, arrived at Harvard in 1976 to work as a chaplain with graduate students, he found no organized outreach among the graduate population of 7,000. He started one and was joined in 1978 by another Conservative Baptist chaplain, Michael Knosp. Today, the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship includes about 100 graduate students. It is encouraging growth, given the rarified air of the Harvard graduate schools.

At another level, the Harvard Divinity School has been talking with the Graham people for some time about finding donors to endow a chair of evangelical studies (total amount needed: $1 million). Part of the reason, said George Rupp, dean of the divinity school, is that “there’s a seasoning of evangelical scholarship. An institution [such as Harvard] always recognizes scholarship wherever it finds it, and we now find more of it in evangelical circles.” He also said that because of the growing visibility of evangelicals in the culture, mainline scholars are more interested in discussions with them.

Those discussions have already begun. Last fall two professors from nearby Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, David Wells and Richard Lovelace, came to Harvard to discuss pertinent issues with two of their counterparts from the divinity school. The meeting was scheduled for the student lounge, but there were so many interested students and faculty wanting in that it was moved to the school’s largest lecture room, where it was still jammed.

It is certainly too early to declare that another “Great Awakening” has come upon New England, but as Graham’s work in the region this spring has shown, there do seem to be signs of life that may be signaling the end of a long, hard freeze in the area that once preserved for the nation its Judeo-Christian heritage.

TOM MINNERY in Boston

When I was getting started in my profession, I used to wonder what happened to preachers when they got old. (In those days, “old” meant somewhere in the 40s. I have since recalculated.) I supposed that old preachers, like old soldiers, did not die; they just faded away. Now that I have reached middle age, I am getting my answers.

Not that I am old. (As I mentioned before, I have recalculated.) True, I can no longer sign John 8:57 after my name (“Thou art not yet fifty years old”), but there are plenty of other verses to choose from. My friends who own pocket calculators tell me that nobody can know when he is at middle age until he knows how long he will live. But even if the Lord graciously grants me fourscore years, I am still past that midpoint, and that makes me a middle-aged minister.

Dante found himself “in a dark wood” when he arrived at “the middle of the road of life,” but it was his own fault. He admitted that he “strayed from the straight path.” Byron had nothing good to say about the middle years: “That horrid equinox, that hateful section / Of human years, that half-way house, that rude / Hut …” His experienced estimate was that our middle years are the time “when we hover between fool and sage.” I think Byron must have followed Dante off the straight path.

Not that middle age doesn’t have its special problems. Bob Hope once defined middle age as that time of life “when your age starts to show around your middle.” My wife told me that swimming was good for my figure, and I asked her if she had ever looked at a duck’s figure. Many golfers I know are tediously overweight, and I don’t golf anyway. I still get my exercise by carrying books up and down the stairs and occasionally strolling about the neighborhood.

But I sometimes have a problem understanding what is going on in the high councils of Christendom. A whole new vocabulary has developed while I was out of the room parsing a Greek verb. The church renewal movement has occasionally given me slight headaches, and I have to pray extra hard before reviewing books by some authors. The new “tell-it-like-it-is” school of biography and autobiography upsets me. I sometimes feel like taking a shower after reading such stuff, and I suppose that dates me.

All sorts of new winds are blowing. Fences are coming down that used to seem sturdy. The fellow who used to draw the boundary lines was ran over by a gang of protest marchers and we don’t see him any more. Perhaps that’s the biggest problem of the middle-aged minister: he is not always sure where he belongs. He is too wise to follow every flag that marches by, and yet he has no desire merely to be a spectator.

Some ministers solve this problem by jumping on a noisy bandwagon and hitching their future to an evangelical superstar, a “man with a cause.” Their own light is dim, so they live on a borrowed glow. “There is safety in numbers.” they argue; but, as a witty British minister once remarked, “There is more safety in exodus.”

I have never felt happy on a bandwagon. Like Thoreau, I tend to listen to a different drummer. I have never asked my friends to follow my flag; all I have asked is that they give me the privilege of following it myself, and I will do the same for them. Jehovah is a God of infinite variety and there is no need for us to be carbon copies or clones. Too many middle-aged ministers huddle together for warmth and safety when they ought to be out cutting new trails for the gospel.

All the books tell me that my middle years are a time for evaluation. I am embarrassed to confess that I never had an identity crisis. My parents always reminded me who I was, and when they forgot, my two brothers and sister took up the quarrel with the foe. I don’t recall that any of my professors ever lectured on the subject, although more than once I did have a crisis trying to identity what they were lecturing about.

The books also tell me that the middle years bring threats of fear of failure. Perhaps they do. My own feeling is that God and his people have treated me far better than I deserve, and that God has balanced the blessings and burdens in a beautiful way. My early optimism has become realism; I trust there is no pessimism. I am not as critical as I used to be, not because my standards are lower, but because my sight is clearer. What I thought were blemishes in others have turned out to be scars. In my earlier years, I was one of the six blind men describing the elephant. Today I can see the elephant clearer and also the other five men.

A friend once said to me, “I want to get mellow, but not rotten.” A good point. I recall that one of the great saints prayed, “Lord, don’t let me become a mean old man.” I suppose this has special relevance when we see others achieving goals that, to us today, are either dreams or memories. When I read the news columns of religious periodicals, I am amazed at the number of “immature young men” who are filling important places of leadership. Why, I knew some of those fellows way back in Youth for Christ days! They were just kids!

It is easy to look at the future in a rearview mirror, but that kind of driving always leads to a collision. God is building his temple, and I would rather stand shouting with the youths than sit weeping with the aged. True, some things are changing; but they have always been changing. I am reminded of the reader who complained to William Randolph Hearst that his newspaper was not as good as it used to be. He replied: “It never has been.” I believe that God still saves the best wine until the last, and that the path of the just still gets brighter and brighter, even if we sometimes find ourselves looking at the glory through our tears.

Yes, there are many compensations to the minister who reaches middle age. I have lived long enough to be thankful for unanswered prayer. Here and there, I meet people who were helped along the way by something I said or wrote. I admit that it makes me feel old when I dedicate the children of parents who were little imps in churches I have pastored, but it makes me feel happy to know I helped to give them a good start. I have fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters in the Lord all over the world, and that gives me a good feeling—especially when I travel and need someplace to hang my hat.

I like to think I have matured a little. I don’t know as much about prophecy as I used to, and I have stopped hunting for obscure texts that will stun congregations. I have learned the hard way that there is a difference between an outline and a message, and I wince when I remember some of the sermons I have preached. How patient were those congregations that listened and loved and encouraged! They came for bread, but too often I gave them a stone—but they were kind enough not to throw it at me.

God has taught me that he blesses people I disagree with and does not ask my permission. No, I have not abandoned my theology. The foundation is still the same, but I must confess that I have rearranged the furniture and even tossed out a few pieces that don’t seem so important anymore. I have learned to love my neighbor, even if he wears a different label from mine. And I have learned not to be afraid of truth, because all truth is God’s truth, no matter what the channel. When I meet a new Christian friend, I major on what we agree on and let the disagreements take care of themselves.

Regrets? Just a few, but nothing major. God has ruled and overruled, and I have no room for complaint. I am not running around quite as much—not because there are no opportunities, but because I have rearranged my priorities. William Culbertson, the late president of Moody Bible Institute, once said to me, “We do more by doing less.” He was right. I am no longer infatuated with the latest church-growth scheme or intimidated when I fail to attend the latest seminar. Instead of reading the books of the hour, I am concentrating on the books of the ages and learning a lot more.

Above all, I am trying to encourage and help those who are coming along. After all, people encouraged me in those early difficult years, and real Christian encouragement is a rare commodity these days. God changes his workmen, but his work goes right on. I want to be like David and serve my generation in the will of God.

I want to keep growing, even though the older I get, the more difficult it becomes. Why? Because there is no growth without challenge, and there is no challenge without change. When I was younger, change was a treat; now it tends to become a threat. But I need change—not novelty, but change—the kind of experiences that force me to dig deeper and lay hold of that kingdom which cannot be shaken. There is no time to waste on scaffolding; I must build on essentials, not accidentals.

The same Lord who started me on this path will see me through to the end. I have no desire for a road map of the future; one day at a time is sufficient. I am doing my best to act my age and not trying to imitate a teen-ager. At the same time, I don’t want to drift into what a friend of mine calls “sanctified senility.” Balance is the key word, isn’t it?

The mind grows by what it takes in; the heart grows by what it gives out. “Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face,” wrote Montaigne. I would rather have a wrinkled face than a wrinkled mind. The Indian summer of life has its own glory and beauty because God made it that way, and I hope to enjoy it with him as long as he allows. Ministry thrives on maturity, and time cannot destroy what we do in the will of God. There is no time to wallow in evangelical nostalgia, not as long as there is a world to reach with the gospel.

Middle age? It is just another stage in a grand and glorious life that has been planned for us by a loving Father.

Could we want anything better?

A former pastor, Warren W. Wiersbe is currently engaged in radio and conference ministry, and serves as associate teacher on the “Back to the Bible” broadcast. Author of some 50 books, he and his pastor son are currently collaborating on a volume on the subject of pastoral ministry. He wrote CT’s Eutychus X column for nearly three years.

The ascension of Jesus is just not important for Christians—it isn’t, that is, if the importance of an event is determined by how many commemorate it. Even among Roman Catholics, Christ’s ascension does not seem to attract the same attention as the assumption of Mary. The latter commemoration, in fact, has acquired many of the characteristics of Jesus’ own ascension.

Coming as it does 40 days after Easter, Ascension Day never had the good fortune to fall on a Sunday. It is forever doomed to Thursday.

The Ascension also suffers at the hands of those who see the Resurrection as a myth. Without a meaningful doctrine of a physical resurrection of Jesus, the Ascension is the first domino to fall. No Resurrection easily translates into no Ascension. If the Resurrection only means that the early church glorified Jesus as the Christ in its preaching, then the accounts of the Ascension and Jesus sitting down at God’s right hand can only be further descriptive embellishments of the basic kerygma. Both Resurrection and Ascension would be myths contrived by the church to show that these earliest Christians began to think of the earthly Jesus in exalted, almost divine, terms. They would be parables teaching in unison that Jesus had become something special in God’s sight. Already 150 years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of neo-Protestantism, saw both the Resurrection and the Ascension as unnecessary to demonstrate that God was present in Jesus.

The Ascension is, however, embedded into the church’s worship life as all the major Protestant and Roman Catholic confessions follow the statement in the Apostles’ Creed that Jesus “ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” It is not a later addition to the church’s faith; writing from Rome—probably before A.D. 70—Peter states: “For Christ also died for sins once for all … through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him” (1 Peter 3:18, 21–22). The outline of our Apostles’ Creed is clearly detectable.

In this century, conservative Protestant theology has been so concerned with defending the historical character of Jesus’ virgin birth and resurrection that his ascension has received relatively little theological attention. It is handled in only a few pages—sometimes a few paragraphs—in most traditional dogmatical textbooks. Frequently it seems that the Ascension is handled in such a way that it does little more than provide the best explanation of why Jesus is not with us today as he was with his disciples after his resurrection. Others emphasize it as a doctrine offering bereaved Christians comfort in knowing that the faithful departed are with Jesus.

But there must be more to the Ascension. Without denying the value and truth of viewing it as providing a haven for Christian saints, the church must see a wider dimension for this doctrine.

The early church never understood the ascension of Jesus as a departure ceremony for a beloved teacher traveling to a distant and unknown land. Rather, it was seen as a further step in his glorification, from which the church could only benefit. Luke, the only New Testament writer to give us a graphic account of the Ascension, also points out that after the event Christ was working with his apostles (Acts 14:3). For Luke, the Ascension did not mean that Jesus was no longer with them. Describing it, he gives no indication that the disciples were in any way saddened or disappointed. On the contrary, they were elated and glorified God. The Ascension did not only mean that Jesus had entered a new dimension. It also meant that through it they were going to participate in Christ’s universal reign through their preaching of the gospel. What God had been doing through Jesus in calling men to repentance he was now going to do through them.

The full significance of the Ascension is lost if it is simply viewed as a spatial event with Jesus going from one place to another. Such an understanding would mean that it would be merely a deathlike departure for Jesus—though of course under the more pleasant circ*mstances of being carried into heaven bodily. But, like those who die, Jesus would actually be removed from us. Such a view would mean that we could remember him, and that in his place in heaven he could be aware of us. But he would not really be present with us.

Along with his ascension, the New Testament writers just as emphatically teach that Jesus is still present with his church. Remember, only? Luke provides the historical details of the Ascension. The longer Marcan ending (16:9–20) is generally recognized as a later addition, even though it can be considered an adequate theological reflection of the primitive apostolic doctrine. The absence of ascension details in Matthew, Mark, and John can hardly mean that they saw no use in the doctrine. They all teach Christ’s return on the Last Day, and such a return is not plausible without something resembling the Ascension.

That the Ascension lacks attention only means the early church saw the Lord’s presence in their midst as a Christian truth as vital as the fact that through the Ascension he was no longer visibly present with them. Just as Luke could conclude his Gospel and begin the Acts of the Apostles with the ascension of Jesus, so Matthew could conclude his Gospel with Jesus’ words, “Lo, I am with you to the close of the age.” This is not a contradiction between conflicting Gospel traditions. Since ascension means removal from sight and not departure from the earth, just the opposite of departure is meant. The One who preached only in Palestine among the Jews is now preaching everywhere in his church.

The writer of the longer Marcan ending saw the harmony between ascension and Christ’s presence in his church: “So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that attended it. Amen” (Mark 16:19–20).

The Soviet cosmonauts probably intended to strike a blow for official Marxist atheism when they proclaimed from their first earth-circling trip that they had not seen Jesus or the apostles in heaven. But any search to the most distant part of the created universe will result in a similar disappointment at not finding the ascended Lord. The Honest to God bishop, John Robinson, made theological hay by proclaiming the demise of the alleged biblical view of the three-storied universe. Without a hell down there and a heaven up there, ascension as a spatial event becomes meaningless.

In referring to Christ’s descent to earth in the Incarnation and his ascension into heaven, the Bible is not speaking of change of a spatial nature, but of one of condition. Common expressions in our own speech include such phrases as “he is going up in the world,” or “he feels down.” Christ’s ascending into heaven and sitting down at God’s right hand mean he assumed control of the world for the benefit of his church. The apostle Paul describes Christ’s glorification as the subjection of all things in the universe to him (Phil. 2:9–11).

Ascension means not only personal glorification for the Messiah, but also for the church. The Resurrection is not only an event in history, but also it means that the Christian has already been raised with Christ. The Ascension follows the Resurrection, and it means that Jesus has taken his church with him into heaven to share in the glories he has received for his work of atonement. Christians have already died and been raised with Christ (Eph. 2:5–6), though from our vantage point in time our death and resurrection lie in the future. God, however, sees these events as having already been accomplished in Jesus. The divine and not the human perspective must be recognized as the superior and overarching reality. This gives Christian faith its confidence.

Ascension and Jesus seated at God’s right hand give tangible definition to the reconciliation that God, wrathful over sin, has accomplished in the Atonement. Our human nature, once alienated from God by sin, has been raised by Christ’s ascension to God’s right hand (Eph. 1:3).

In his ascension hymn, “See, the Conqueror Mounts in Triumph,” Christopher Wordsworth gave poetic expression to the dogmatic truth that God and man have been united in Christ:

Thou hast raised our human nature
On the clouds to God’s right hand:
There we sit in heavenly places.
There with Thee in glory stand.
Jesus reigns, adored by angels:
Man with God is on the throne.
Mighty Lord, in Thine Ascension.
We by faith behold our own.

Even though the ascension means the reality of Christ’s presence in the church rather than his absence, it also means that he is no longer visible to his church on earth. He simply is not present as he was before his crucifixion. But the different type of presence began with his resurrection, not with his ascension. For Jesus, resurrection not only means his body had overcome death, but that it was immediately assumed into glory. The risen Lord was no longer living in Jerusalem or anyplace else after his resurrection, but he had passed in one moment into the glory of his Father.

During the 40-day period between resurrection and ascension, Jesus came out of his glory to appear to his disciples and to eat, talk, and walk with them. In no way was he subject to the ordinary processes of human existence; however, for the benefit of his disciples he wanted to show that he had risen from the dead. His ascension was essentially no different from his disappearances during that 40-day period when he removed himself from their sight. This did not mean that he had gone somewhere. He appeared out of glory, and he returned to glory. But his final removal from their sight had to be so convincing that they would no longer expect him to return until his final appearing. Being lifted up from the earth and covered with the cloud, along with the message of the angels, was to convince the disciples that Jesus would no longer be visibly present among them.

There is, perhaps, some benefit in paying little attention to the Ascension, for it is just as important to believe that Jesus is still working with his church as it is to believe that he was removed from our sight. But even more important, Christians have already begun to share in his glory by being raised to God’s right hand in him.

David P. Scaer is professor of systematic theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

When a marriage fails, the church has failed and needs to breathe new life where there has been death.

“It’s all over now. One final session in court and a life together is over. If the marriage had ended in death (you muse), there would have been a funeral. Your friends would have been with your mate or you for the final service. Word and sacrament would have been a comfort. Next Sunday there would have been prayers for the survivors. The grief could have been open, and even proud. One need not apologize for death.

“But this is a divorce … and divorce is completely and utterly without honor. The church has no prayers for the divorced. No congregational voice will rise up to heaven on behalf of your loss.”

So begins Alice Stopler Peppier in her introduction to Divorced and Christian (Concordia, 1974). She is right. More often than not, the church offers no support for the person caught in the painful grief of a living death: divorce. Divorce is a statement of failure not only for the persons divorcing, but also for the Christian church.

Some churches go to extremes. On the one hand, there are those that do not recognize divorce as legitimate on any grounds. Others, on the other hand, accept divorce as preferable to an ongoing unhappy marriage. The CHRISTIANITY TODAY-Gallup Poll (1979) showed that about two-thirds of the nation’s pastors fell somewhere between these extremes, believing divorce should be permitted only in an “extreme situation” (CT editorial, May 25, 1979).

My plea, regardless of the foregoing, is for pastors and lay Christians not to get so hung up on which biblical grounds divorce may be permissible that they overlook the duty of the church to minister to those who have sustained, or who are experiencing, divorce. In many cases, not only have these people not gone through divorce for the right reasons (if one accepts such a possibility), but for reasons that do not meet the biblical criteria some pastors and churches understand to be legitimate.

Much has already been said and written about how to prepare for marriage, but very little is available on what to do for those who have failed. Some seminars have been conducted for pastors who are seeking creative ways to uphold the biblical view of marriage and at the same time to respond to the suffering of divorced persons (see “Divorce and Remarriage in Christian Perspective,” by William Oglesby, Pastoral Psychology, Summer 1977).

The church desperately needs to face and develop a Christian policy and attitude toward both divorced persons and those who have remarried, so that it will be able to respond immediately and with openness when confronted with questions. We only compound the problem if we pretend it is not there, or when we force someone to suffer while the church makes up its mind about such things as membership, teaching, or holding office. By the time the dust has settled, the person in question usually will have given up and gone elsewhere, or simply dropped out of church worship and nurture.

Each church, of course, must decide what the Bible teaches about divorce and the remarriage of divorced persons. Certainly the Bible upholds the high view of marriage as a God-ordained relationship that no one should destroy.

At the same time, because I believe Christians must care about divorced persons, we are also required by that same Bible to come alongside people who hurt, and offer them the redemptive, healing grace of God. Such an approach is described in “A Christian Understanding of Divorce,” by Thomas Olshewsky (Journal of Religious Ethics, Spring 1979); in Christian Alternatives Within Marriage, by Gary Demarest (Word, 1977); and in Divorce and the Faithful Church, by G. Edwin Bontrager (Herald Press, 1978).

I look at marriage as both a spiritual covenant before God and the church and a civil contract before society. It is a covenant in the sense that both parries vow to commit themselves by God’s grace to each other. These vows, spoken before God and his people, rest on the belief that Christ reinstated the supremacy of marital fidelity in the face of the Pharisees’ question about loopholes. Marriage thus pictures God’s covenant with the church.

As far as society is concerned, marriage is a civil contract in which the couple declare their intention to live by the laws of the state. These laws are for the good of society as a whole in that they provide stability for parents and children.

Such an approach to marriage carries us far beyond the immediate questions so often discussed: Was sexual adultery committed? By whom? Who is the innocent party? When we consider marriage as primarily a spiritual covenant, the important issue is personal fidelity to the vow to work toward becoming one in relationship. Wrongdoing is thus not limited to the overt sexual act with someone other than one’s spouse. Rather, it may well be the infidelity of neglect and alienation because of one’s preoccupation with a job or children or oneself. More often than not, these are the things that lie behind overt extramarital behavior, things that tempt a husband or wife to begin to look elsewhere for the understanding he or she perceives as missing in the marriage.

If marriage involves such a spiritual covenant, the failure of that covenant is a matter for repentance. Sometimes surprising things happen when husbands and wives confess such failure and seek the support of the church in the person of a friend, a pastor, or a counselor. In this way they should be enabled to find God’s healing grace to change and return to the marriage with a renewed covenant. But for partners who cannot or will not take this step, divorce may become necessary as a last resort.

I agree with Olshewsky when he says, “If divorce from past failures does lead the Christian to a civil divorce, s/he has the continuing task of setting the break in repentance and mending it in forgiveness.… This requires not only that we adopt a Christian understanding of divorce but an understanding of Christian divorce, a divorce that leads into reconciliation rather than alienation.”

Gary Demarest comments: “This is not to say that divorce for any reason or every reason is acceptable. It does affirm the fact, however, that God makes a gracious provision for us to deal with the irremediable, destructive situations in every human relationship. This principle is reiterated in the context of Matthew 18:15–17, where a process is offered as a means of dealing with broken relationships in the Christian community.”

There are some who may say that this is letting down the barrier and inviting divorce. Not at all. Without condoning sin, the church must still love a divorced or divorcing couple and seek to minister to them. We must remember that the justice and love of God are to be wedded in that experience also. In Romans 6, the apostle Paul tried to explain the forgiveness of God in the face of the law of God. We do not invite sin that grace may abound. But neither must we hold that divorce is the unpardonable sin for which there is no healing and forgiveness from God.

Responsibilities for the marital relationship are spread among the couple and the community of faith before whom, and with whom, they have taken their vows. If marriage is so serious a task, and we humans so sinful, then the church has a great responsibility to support that task by every possible means. It can do this through helping a couple prepare adequately for marriage, and by supporting them through the ups and downs of their becoming “one flesh.”

Here is the background for the church to respond more effectively to divorced persons. The place to begin is by taking church membership more seriously. If confessing Christ as Lord and Savior means not only that we are related to God through his Spirit but also that we are now related to other Christians in the church, then we need to reevaluate the covenant relationship of church membership. Do people simply come and go in spectator fashion? Or does church membership involve responsibility for one another in Christ? Growth and education in the Christian life cannot be experienced without meaningful relationships in the church.

But please note: I am not speaking of authoritarian relationships where one merely stands in judgment of another’s behavior. Rather, I am remembering that I, too, am a sinner who has been forgiven much by the Savior. I am speaking of relationships where we call one another to commitment, and where we encourage and support one another and bear one another’s burdens when we fail (Gal. 6:1–5).

As Henri Nouwen says, we need to be committed to membership in a community of “wounded healers.” This can be experienced only where there are growth groups within the church. Small cells provide the kinds of relationships necessary for leveling with one another in love for the purpose of Christian growth (Eph. 4:15).

The church also needs to help Christians learn how to live in a fragmenting, secular society. For example, probably one of the greatest causes of divorce is that it is too easy to get married. Contrast how much time a couple spends in romance with the amount it spends in preparation for a married lifetime. According to Wayne Oates, “The divorced Christian is a symptom of the irresponsibility of the church as a teaching community and its failure of nerve as a fellowship of human suffering” (Pastoral Counseling in Social Problems, Westminster, 1966).

Bontrager writes: “It is imperative that counseling services be provided to persons considering marriage to help them understand the seriousness and responsibilities of marriage.” While this is, of course, true, it may be too little, too late. We need to revamp our educational programs so as to provide realistic and effective education for living in our stressful society—that is, we need to provide support/study groups in the church at every age level. We need to apply Christian truth and grace to living in an alienating society, and we need to do it to prevent problems and to reeducate people who have fallen into patterns that have produced problems.

An important function of the church is to provide the supportive, accepting relationships that are so much needed by those suffering the painful grief of divorce. Divorced persons often find that it takes one to three years to work through grief and readjustment. That this period is so long may be due in part to the loneliness and alienation such individuals have experienced in the Christian community.

I remember one active member of an evangelical church who was suffering a divorce and the loss of his job at the same time. He told me he could count on the fingers of one hand the people in the church from whom he felt real support. Others, he said, would turn down another aisle to avoid him as he entered the church. Some would admonish him to pray more, or to get his life in order so that God could bless his marriage and restore him to a job.

A Christian singles recovery group can be of tremendous value during this period of grief. Most churches already have enough people for such a group when they take into account the widowed and divorced persons who are already there. Christian organizations that minister to singles are glad to provide help to get a group started.

It is important to recognize that group ministries like these should only be for recovery. Their goal is to reintegrate hurting people into the life of the church. An important part of that process is educating the rest of the church body to help their understanding.

We need to get in touch with our own unbiblical prejudices and fears about divorced persons. Particularly we need to look at how we subtly—and not so subtly—communicate our attitudes to formerly married persons. I remember one church that had an adult group called “Pairs and Spares.” It wasn’t until I began to listen to widowed and divorced people that I realized how brutally that title described how they are often made to feel.

Darlene Petri quotes Katie Wiebe’s experience of attending a large, church banquet with a woman friend. “As we entered the banquet half, the ushers asked us if we would mind splitting up and taking single seats, which they found difficult to fill with couples. I wondered later how many married couples had been asked to do the same” (The Hurt and Healing of Divorce, David C. Cook, 1976).

The church that takes seriously God’s high call to Christlikeness will be able to support and teach the high view of marriage as a covenant between two partners to become one flesh in Christ for life. At the same time, such a church will join those who fail in confession and healing, and in renewal through God’s forgiving grace. The congregation that has a theology of divorce, and a Christian response, is prepared not to deny, ignore, tolerate, or condemn divorced people. Rather, it will face divorce with a failing couple, and with them, own it as a sinful failure of the covenant. That church will provide counsel for healing and renewal. And, if necessary, it will walk with that couple through the pain of civil divorce, mutual forgiveness, and restoration, to the end that together they may go on for God in the Christian life.

George Ensworth, Jr., is professor of pastoral theology and chairman of the Department of the Ministry of the Church at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts. He also conducts a private counseling psychology practice.

Gospel music needs to be saved—from its detractors, its advocates, and its own “success.” The once clear perception of gospel music as proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ is no longer generally evident. The public image of gospel music is so confused that even the integrity of the term itself is in great danger. What a church means when it advertises gospel music, and what the secular mind—or even other Christians—thinks it means may have absolutely no relationship. The trend to retain the name while emptying it of its meaning may force us to relinquish its use altogether.

Gospel music has become very successful in secular terms (“Moneychangers in the Church,” CT, June 26, 1981), and promises to become even more so. According to syndicated columnist Dick Kleiner, “Knowledgeable people predict that gospel music will become the most important thing in music within four or five years, and they see gospel music series on television and gospel music coming in movies” (Dec. 16, 1981). Lack of historical perspective and unwisely worded statements have created much of the current confusion. The communications media give the impression that gospel music began about 60 years ago, and that it is primarily in one of three categories: black, southern-country/western, or “contemporary” in style. They ignore the mainstream of gospel hymnody and the gospel song of the past 150 years.

Historically, as Donald Hustad points out in his book, Jubilate! (Hope, 1981), gospel music has been “usually concerned with the basic gospel, the message of sin and grace and redemption, and man’s experience of them.” It is not just that “gospel” means “good news,” but that it expressly means the good news of salvation through Christ.

The origin of the gospel song can be traced to the camp and revival meetings, the singing schools—which had a profound impact on public music education—and the Sunday school of the first half of the nineteenth century. Some gospel music traditions continue, such as the “all-day singin’ and dinner on the grounds” in many southern churches. Many of the gospel songs of this period are still loved and used today—for example, William Bradbury’s “Just As I Am.” Like Bradbury, many of the gospel songwriters of the nineteenth century were highly trained, sometimes in European conservatories. They were also culturally sophisticated. Fanny Crosby knew no fewer than six U.S. Presidents, and scores of other prominent leaders. Much of our gospel music is the product of a distinctly cultured people.

The term “gospel music,” according to Hustad, was first used by Philip Phillips, “the Singing Pilgrim” of the nineteenth century. In 1874, P. P. Bliss published Gospel Songs, and the following year combined it with Ira Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos. The result, Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs, eventually numbered 1,200 selections and is still sold in Great Britain. Sankey and D. L. Moody, as well as other evangelist-musician teams, made the gospel song familiar throughout the world.

Recent articles in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, however, and a special documentary series on ABC-TV, are examples of a different, limited view of gospel music. It is consistently defined within a strict context of the black church as “music of joy,” and as having been “invented” in the 1920s by Thomas A. Dorsey. Now 83, Dorsey is the black Chicago musician who wrote “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Peace in the Valley.” He defines gospel music as “the expoundation of that which you have inside you that is good, so help the other fella who is not feeling so good.”

There is an increasing tendency to define gospel music as merely expressions of positive feelings. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times (March 5, 1982), Don McLeese says, “In the American musical mainstream, gospel has become almost synonymous with spirit.”

Reba Rambo (McGuire) recently said, “Any song that is positive and upbeat can be considered to be gospel music.” A joyful mood, a sense of excitement, seems to be more important than content.

Gospel hymnody historically has been message oriented. Important as the music was to Luther, Wesley, and countless others, the text was even more important. Today, however, a lack of clear content is distinctly one of the problems with much—though by no means all—gospel music. The desire to achieve “crossover” has created a too-frequent dilution of the gospel message, so that, as Kleiner says, “Sometimes it is hard to pin a gospel label on a song that is contemporary gospel, because it often seems to be just another love song.” This apparently does not bother some. Gary Chapman, voted Songwriter of the Year by the Gospel Music Association, commented on his reaction to writing one of his songs as, “Wow, they can look at this any way they want to.”

Such activities and organizations as International Gospel Song Festivals, the Gospel Radio Network, and the Gospel Music Association with its own Dove awards all developed out of post-World War I trends. Southern gospel quartets began to attract attention in the 1920s as they appeared in school assemblies and churches. Simultaneously, Thomas Dorsey turned his talents in the direction of black gospel, adding elements of blues, jazz, and ragtime to more traditional hymns and spirituals. Elements of his style included syncopation, strong jazz rhythms, blues chords and melodic devices, and improvisation. 1945 to the early 1960s is generally considered to be the “golden era” of this branch of gospel music. Black gospel developed basically along two lines: an emphasis on the singer’s vocal quality and beauty of style—Mahalia Jackson, for example—and a concentration on the interaction between soloists and ensemble, with the voices often deliberately coarsened in quality to convey an atmosphere of emotional conviction. In performance, the notes and words are only suggestions; in fact, performers in church may not even finish, but give way to “shouting.” Performing four or five numbers can take up to two hours.

During the past 30 years, “gospel” increasingly has become identified as a secular style, devoid of any religious meaning. In 1950, the Dominoes recorded a rhythm and blues number, “Sixty Minute Man,” overtly erotic and admittedly based on the style of black gospel music. One of the common practices in secular gospel at this time was to break down in tears during a song.

The identification with commercial pop styles is all too complete. Allen Wheeler, general manager of an all-gospel music station in Chicago Heights, says, “If you will compare a contemporary gospel record with any of the current hits on the rhythm and blues charts, the only difference will be the lyrics. The beat is basic.” Chicago gospel music historian Clayton Hannah states, “What makes [gospel music] different than anything else is the beat. That’s all it is: Christian music put to a beat.” Many top secular artists started out singing gospel music, whether southern or black. (Elvis Presley, for example, claimed it was a major influence on his style.)

All this has made gospel music increasingly vulnerable to marketing manipulation. Last December, the Second Annual International Gospel Music Conference attempted to bring gospel musicians and their secular counterparts closer together. Contemporary Christian Music magazine (Jan. 1982) reported that Dick Asher, the deputy vice-president of CBS Records, said, “I’ll not pretend that we’re here because of some new burst of religious faith. We’re here because of the potential to sell records in the gospel market.” Former Chicago music critic Thomas Willis observes, “The secular, competitive professionals are more concerned with the market than the message.” Plainly, “the key word is ‘saleability.’ ”

Increased visibility of gospel music intensifies our need to demand consistent spiritual reality and content. Many artists are genuinely concerned that the Christian message and role modeling be clear. Even though they know it may hurt their commercial television potential, some continue to insist on a “message” orientation in their presentations. Black gospel artist Jessy Dixon says, “My songs are testimonies,” and Ben Speer expressed to me his deep concern that southern gospel artists not only maintain integrity in their music, but in their personal lives as well.

Gospel music is worth saving. It fulfills a vital, necessary role in a healthy, well-balanced hymnody. From the days of the early church, doctrine was taught and the gospel spread through music as well as through preaching. There has been a historic relation between genuine revival and an outpouring of new congregational song. Some of this new witness music penetrates the continuing heritage of evangelical hymnody: Andraé Crouch’s “My Tribute,” Ralph Carmichael’s “The Savior Is Waiting,” John W. Peterson’s “It Took a Miracle,” and Bill and Gloria Gaither’s “Jesus Is Lord of All” are examples. Most does not survive, but then, neither do most new worship hymns.

If gospel music is to be saved, we must face some issues squarely. We must admit that too often we have lacked openness to new music, even when it has had genuine substance. We have frequently failed to get past the vehicle of a text to see how, with some adaptation, some of the new music could be assimilated profitably into our hymnody.

On the other hand, sometimes we have been so open that we have failed to exercise responsible discernment, so that “anything goes.” Our heritage is disdained in a desperate quest for increased popularity. Overzealous proponents of gospel music often have hurt the cause. An arrogant attitude toward traditional, classical hymnody only polarizes people and diminishes the prospect for a full-orbed ministry of music.

Music lovers, too, also are often intolerant. They fail to balance attacks against the admitted excesses of gospel music by honest support of its virtues, and they fail to distinguish between true emotion and mere sentiment. Thus, they undermine the credibility of criticism that otherwise would be valid. This has often led church leaders and their congregations to take a counterproductive anticlassical stance.

The salvation of gospel music requires informed and committed support from many sources; no single approach will suffice.

1. Christian colleges, Bible institutes, and seminaries should require courses in hymnology of all students, and church history, systematic theology, and pastoral ministries of church musicians. Hymnology courses will be counterproductive, however, if teachers view gospel music as “inferior” and “unworthy” of use in Christian worship, and if they have failed to demonstrate biblical concepts successfully in their own ministries. The mature professor may discover that the thoughtful support of good gospel hymnody in no way compromises his stature as a Christian musical leader—in fact it may even enhance it.

However, one honestly wonders whether or not the Christian school has not already forfeited its leadership role. Pastors nationwide are too frequently disillusioned with the products of its programs, and view them with cautious suspicion. The successful church musician has often painfully learned the practical fallacies of much that he heard from authoritarian, sometimes youthful, idealists. The wounded music ministries in countless churches and their legacy of anticlassical and nonworship music is often the reaction to an insensitive and inexperienced advocate of good music.

2. Pastors need to keep themselves informed in hymnody. Public guidance from the pastor can do much to help direct and support a balanced congregational music ministry. Pastor and musicians working together, making decisions primarily on the basis of ministry, and with respect for the content of a song, can be role models to their people. They can help them to develop their own sense of selectivity, understand the kind of gospel music that has genuine significance, and sing it with the biblical balance of emotion and understanding (1 Cor. 14:15).

3. If music is to be a valid ministry of the Word, then the musician must also be a student of the Word and consistently apply its standards. Further, the church musician must recognize that the song of his people just may be legitimate in the house of God. As a pastor through music, he may need to exhibit all his love and patience if he is to help them effectively make their song appropriate in content and treatment.

4. Christian broadcasters perhaps presume too much of a leadership role in music. Although they claim they merely reflect the public’s taste, the Christian broadcasting medium is perhaps the single most powerful and effective educational force in gospel music today. Announcers and programmers have a shaping role in gospel music often out of all proportion to their musical and ministerial qualifications. Christian stations should require those who choose what is played or promoted to have some background of hymnology and church music. This is especially true of people coming out of Christian communications courses.

5. In fairness, broadcasters often are frustrated in their attempt to program quality gospel music because of the increasing difficulty in obtaining such material. The record companies must realize their responsibility both to make available and to promote aggressively a certain amount of quality gospel music, perhaps subsidizing it with profits generated from more popularly oriented releases. A public and real commitment to spiritual values, with an avoidance of hucksterism and phony “greatest” slogans, with less concern for Grammy nominations and Dove awards, and more concern for the cause of Christ, would greatly enhance their credibility in the public eye and be a real service to the ministry of music.

6. Artists with genuine talent and a proven capacity to minister the Word of God through music should be encouraged and supported. They must do their homework to see where they fit in the historical continuum, not just in relation to the current “top 40” scene. Pastors are increasingly wary of gospel artists, and some major churches now refuse to invite any at all. Where this is a reflection of genuine concern, it is admirable. However, some large churches have developed well-earned national reputations for underpaying musicians, and use the current situation as a convenient justification.

7. Bookstores should exercise more discretion and provide wider variety in what they play and promote. Working in cooperation with Christian radio stations, they could help foster a desire for quality gospel music. Many Christians want to purchase better gospel music—especially when they hear it on the radio—but they cannot find it in their stores. Too often the stores exhibit little inclination to obtain it for them.

8. Publishers must encourage more quality gospel music, and books that present it and its use in a reasoned and balanced way. Snide remarks about other Christians should be discouraged. There is no place for arrogance or self-righteousness at any level of ministry. However, it does no good to print—or record—excellent material if it is not promoted. Christian magazines should profile musicians who have something of genuine spiritual value to say, and who would be excellent role models for our youth.

9. We need more congregational and perhaps less “spectatorist” music. We must explore more of our congregational heritage and make better use of the resources in our hymnals. We may need more new tunes for old texts—like Pete Butler’s excellent 1966 setting of Fanny Crosby’s “Redeemed.” Our new texts may exhibit simplicity without being simplistic. God’s most original work, redemption, does not need to be expressed in trivialities.

10. Christians should check their facts, then graciously make their views known. Letters, phone calls, personal comments—repeated and to the right people—all help. It does no good to complain to someone who cannot do anything about the situation.

11. Finally, the term “gospel music” should be reserved for music that is related to the gospel of Christ and man’s response, and the clearer, the better. Rather than see how diffuse we can make it, so that people aren’t sure if it is there or not, we should give a “certain sound” that is relevant to our time and culture. We must refuse to surrender the term to its commercial exploiters, or permit it to be applied to a style that may accompany lyrics that are antithetical to Christian standards. Nor should we allow a part of gospel music to presume to speak for the whole of it.

Above all, with Ira Sankey we should pray that God “wouldst bless especially the singing of these gospel hymns.… May we sing, not to be heard of men, but may we sing to praise Thy name.”

Richard D. Dinwiddie, music director and conductor of The Chicago Master Chorale, is visiting professor of church music at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Bad health—that is, bodily malfunctioning and pain, until lowered efficiency, tending towards death—has been a fact of life since the Fall. Had there been no sin, there would have been no sickness. As it is, however, both are universal, the latter being a penal result of the former. So, at least, implies Scripture. So, too, did yesterday’s Christians view the matter, and therefore they did not find bad health and chronic discomforts an obstacle to faith in God’s goodness. Rather, they expected illness, and they endured it as they looked forward to the health of heaven.

But today, dazzled by the marvels of modern medicine, the Western world dreams of abolishing ill health entirely, here and now. We have grown health conscious in a way that is itself rather sick, and certainly has no precedent—not even in ancient Sparta.

Why do we diet and jog and do all the other health-raising and health-sustaining things so passionately? Why are we so absorbed in pursuing bodily health? We are chasing a dream, the dream of never having to be ill. We are coming to regard a pain-free, disability-free existence as one of man’s natural rights.

It is no wonder, then, that Christians nowadays are so interested in divine healing. As Christians, they long for the touch of God, as direct and powerful as possible, on their lives (and so they should). As modern men, they are preoccupied with physical health, to which they feel they have a right. (How much there is of worldliness in this preoccupation is a question worth asking, but it is not one with which we will deal here.) With these two concerns meeting in Christian minds, it was predictable that today many would arise to claim that all sick believers may find bodily healing through faith, whether through doctors or apart from them. And exactly that has happened. A cynic would say the wish has been father to the thought.

But is that fair? That it was natural for this teaching to emerge in our times does not make it either true or false. It presents itself as a rediscovery of what the church once knew, and never should have forgotten, about the power of faith to channel the power of Christ. It claims to be biblical, and we must take that claim seriously.

To support itself from Scripture, this teaching uses three main arguments.

First, Jesus Christ, who healed so abundantly in the days of his flesh, has not changed. He has not lost his power; whatever he did then he can do now.

Second, salvation in Scripture is a wholistic reality, embracing both soul and body. Thoughts of salvation for the soul only without, or apart from, the body are unbiblical.

Third, blessing is missed where faith is lacking, and where God’s gifts are not sought and expected. “You do not have, because you do not ask,” says James. “Ask and it will be given you,” says Jesus. But, Matthew tells us, in Nazareth, where Jesus was brought up, he could not do many mighty works because of their unbelief.

All of this is true. So, then, does Jesus still heal miraculously? Yes, I think that on occasion he does. I hold no brief for blanket denials of healing miracles today. I believe I have known one such case—not more than one, but equally, not less. There is much contemporary evidence of healing events in faith contexts that have baffled the doctors. B. B. Warfield, whose wife was an invalid throughout their marriage, testily denied that supernatural healing ever occurs today. But I think he was wrong.

What is being claimed, however, is that healing through prayer, plus perhaps the ministrations of someone with a healing gift, is always available for all sick believers, and that if Christian invalids fail to find it, something is thereby shown to be lacking in their faith.

It is here that I gently but firmly demur. This reasoning is wrong—cruelly and destructively wrong—as anyone who has sought miraculous healing on this basis and failed to find it, or who has been called on to pick up the pieces in the lives of others who have had such an experience, knows all too well. To be told that longed-for healing was denied you because of some defect in your faith when you had labored and strained every way you knew to devote yourself to God and to “believe for blessing,” is to be pitchforked into distress, despair, and a sense of abandonment by God. That is as bitter a feeling as any this side of hell—particularly if, like most invalids, your sensitivity is already up and your spirits down. Nor does Scripture ever require or permit us to break anyone in pieces with words (Job’s phrase: it fits) in this way.

What, then, of those three arguments? Look at them again; there is more to be said about each one.

It is true: Christ’s power is still what it was. However, we must remember that the healings he performed when he was on earth had a special significance. Besides being works of mercy, they were signs of his messianic identity. This comes out in the message he sent to John the Baptist: “Go and tell John what you hear and see … blessed is he who takes no offense at me.” In other words, let John match up my miracles with what God promised for the day of salvation (see Isa. 35:5ff.). He should be left in no doubt that I am the Messiah, whatever there is about me that he does not yet understand.

Anyone today who asks for miracles as an aid to faith should be referred to this passage (Matt. 11:2–6) and told that if he will not believe in face of the miracles recorded in the Gospels, then he would not believe if he saw a miracle in his own back yard. Jesus’ miracles are decisive evidence for all time of who he is and what power he has.

But in that case, supernatural healings in equal abundance to those worked in the days of Jesus’ flesh may not be his will today. The question concerns not his power but his purpose. We cannot guarantee that, because he was pleased to heal all the sick brought to him then, he will act in the same way now.

Again it is true: salvation embraces both body and soul. And there is indeed, as some put it, healing for the body in the Atonement. But, we must observe that perfect physical health is promised, not for this life, but for heaven, as part of the resurrection glory that awaits us in the day when Christ “will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself.” Full bodily well-being is set forth as a future blessing of salvation rather than a present one. What God has promised, and when he will give it, are separate questions.

Further, it is true that blessing is missed where faith is lacking. But, even in New Testament times, among leaders who cannot be accused of lacking faith, healing was never universal. We know from Acts that the apostle Paul was sometimes Christ’s agent in miraculous healing, and he was himself once miraculously healed of snakebite. Yet he advises Timothy to “use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments,” and informs him that he left Trophimus “ill at Miletus.” He also tells the Philippians how their messanger Epaphroditus was so sick that he “nearly died for the work of Christ,” and how grieved Paul himself had been at the prospect of losing him. Plainly, had Paul, or anyone else, sought power to heal these cases miraculously, he would have been disappointed.

Moreover, Paul himself lived with “a thorn in the flesh” that went unhealed. In 2 Corinthians 12:7–9, he tells us that in three solemn seasons of prayer he had asked Christ, the Lord and the Healer, to make it go away. But the hoped-for healing did not occur. The passage merits close attention.

“Thorn” pictures a source of pain, and “flesh” locates it in Paul’s physical or psychological system, thus ruling out the idea that he might be referring to an awkward colleague. But beyond this, Paul is unspecific, and probably deliberately. Guesses about his thorn range from recurring painful illnesses, such as inflamed eyes (see Gal. 4:13–15), migraine, or malaria, to chronic shameful temptation. The former view seems more natural, but nobody can be sure. All we can say is that it was a distressing disability from which, had Christ so willed, he could have delivered Paul on the spot.

So Paul lived with pain. And the thorn, given him under God’s providence, operated as “a messenger of Satan, to harass me,” because it tempted him to think hard thoughts about the God who let him suffer, and in resentment to cut back his ministry. How could he be expected to go on traveling, preaching, working day and night, praying, caring, weeping over folk with this pain constantly dragging him down? He had to contend with such “flaming darts of the evil one” all the time, for the thorn remained unhealed.

Some Christians today live with epilepsy, hom*osexual cravings, ulcers, and cyclical depressions that plunge them into no less deep waters. Indeed, Philip Hughes is surely correct when he writes: “Is there a single servant of Christ who cannot point to some ‘thorn in the flesh,’ visible or private, physical or psychological, from which he has prayed to be released, but which has been given him by God to keep him humble, and therefore fruitful?… Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh’ is, by its very lack of definition, a type of every Christian’s ‘thorn in the flesh.’ ”

Paul perceived, however, that the thorn was given him, not for punishment, but for protection. Physical weakness guarded him against spiritual sickness. The worst diseases are those of the spirit; pride, conceit, arrogance, bitterness, self-confidence are far worse, and they damage us far more than any malfunctioning of our bodies. The thorn was a prophylactic against pride, says Paul, “to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations.” Seeing that was so, he could accept it as a wise provision on the part of his Lord.

It was not for want of prayer, then, that the thorn went unhealed. Paul tells the Corinthians what came through from Christ as he prayed about it. “He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ ” It was as if to say, I can use my power better than by making your trouble go. It is better for you, Paul, and for my glory in your life, that I do something else instead: that I show my strength by keeping you going though the thorn remains.

So Paul embraced his continuing disability as a kind of privilege. “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” The Corinthians, in typical Greek fashion, already despised him as a weakling. They did not consider him an elegant speaker or an impressive personality. I am weaker than you thought, says Paul, for I live with my thorn in the flesh. But I have learned to glory in my weakness, “for when I am weak, then I am strong.” Now you Corinthians learn to praise God for my weakness, too!

One virtuous commentary doubts whether the thorn can have been illness in view of Paul’s “extraordinary stamina” throughout his ministry. How obtuse! Extraordinary stamina was precisely what Paul was promised. Similarly obtuse was the reviewer who described Joni Eareckson’s books as a testimony to “human courage.” The age of miraculous blessing is not past, thank God, though such blessing does not always take the form of healing. But then, neither did it in Paul’s day.

Three conclusions issue from what we have seen.

The first concerns miraculous healing. Christ and the apostles only healed miraculously when they were specifically prompted to do so, so that they knew that to attempt to heal was the Father’s will. That is why all the attempted healings recorded in the New Testament succeeded. As we noted, miraculous healing for Christians was not universal even then, so there is no warrant for maintaining that it should be so now.

The second conclusion concerns sanctifying providence. God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other sorts of affliction, as his chisel for sculpting our souls. Felt weakness deepens dependence on Christ for strength each day. The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away. To live with your complaint uncomplainingly, being kept sweet, patient, and free in heart to love and help others, even though every day you feel less than good, is true sanctification. It is true healing for the spirit. It is a supreme victory of grace in your life.

The third conclusion concerns behavior when ill. We should certainly go to the doctor, and use medication, and thank God for both. But equally certainly we should go to the Lord (Doctor Jesus, as some call him) and ask what message of challenge, rebuke, or encouragement he might have for us regarding our sickness. Maybe we shall receive healing in the form in which Paul asked for it. Maybe, however, we shall receive it in the form in which Paul was given it. We have to be open to either.

I thank God that I have known almost 40 years of excellent health, and I feel well as I write this. But it will not always be that way. My body is wearing out; Ecclesiastes 12, if nothing worse, awaits me. May I be given grace to recall, and apply to myself, the things I have written here when my own day of felt weakness comes, whether in the form of pain, paralysis, prostration, or whatever. And may the same blessing be yours in your hour of need, too—“under the Protection,” as Charles Williams used to say.

British theologian and author J. I. Packer is professor of systematic and historical theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Among his many writings is the well-known Knowing God (IVP, 1973).

Counterpoint

Stinger,you can jab,and point,and thrust your sword at me,(you do it so expertly!)but I do not fear.

Stinger,you can prick and pierceand lunge your sword through me,(you know you can make me bleed)but I do not fear.

And then, Stinger,you can dance and gloat and lift your sword in glee when I succumb to your weaponry, but I still do not fear.

Because Stinger,I am the living and the living don’t feel the sting of your sword,the living go free.Only the dead know your devilry.

Stinger, you are stung by our victory.

LESLIE FIELDS

If God Held A Press Conference

Does the liberal bias of reporters allow them any degree of fairness and objectivity?

“Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you read,” warns the cynic! That is ridiculous if taken literally; sound, practical wisdom if taken seriously. Every Christian needs to heed this time-honored advice as he watches TV, listens to the radio, or reads his daily newspaper.

At Columbia University, Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman recently prepared a major study of the “media elite.” They profiled a group “out of step with the public and raised serious questions about journalism’s qualifications as an ‘objective’ profession.” The article describes them as “a new leadership group” with immense influence upon society. Business leaders rule them most influential. They rate themselves second.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S readership polls show that our articles on topics discussed in the public news media are better read. The news media unquestionably rank at or near the top in influence on modern society and certainly determine what issues we discuss, if they do not determine our conclusions.

Who are these movers and shakers of American society? They are the people who write our newspapers and magazines, and whose voices we hear over radio and television. They are white (95 percent), male (79 percent), well-heeled, college graduates, and from highly privileged homes. We have every reason to believe that they are also dedicated to their profession, hard-working and at least as honest as the average. But they are not religious.

When asked to state their religion, exactly half responded: “None.” Nearly a quarter were reared in a Jewish household, but not many are still practicing Jews. Only 8 percent said they attended church or synagogue on a regular basis; 86 percent declared they seldom or never darken the door of a house of worship. Over half characterized themselves as ideologically liberal or Left-leaning. And most thought their fellow journalists really stood still farther to the Left than did they.

In politics, they are consistently and overwhelmingly liberal. Most are opposed to Marxism and state ownership of industry and business and are firmly committed to capitalism. However, they are equally committed to the welfare state and generally discontented with the social system. A large segment (28 percent) are convinced that America “needs a complete restructuring of its basic institutions.” With many others they consider the most important goal of our nation is to attain economic stability. But their second most important goal is to move the nation toward a less impersonal and more humane society—clearly interpreted to include greater moral and social permissiveness.

The importance of the stance of these journalists for American evangelicalism, for our nation, and for the world’s impression of America (and therefore also for American missionaries) can scarcely be overestimated. Note, first of all, how wide is the divergence between the world view of this group and that of the rest of the country—and particularly how widely it varies from the religious world view of evangelicals. For example, half the “media elite” possess no religion; for the rest of the nation, 60 percent are church members, 90 percent regard their religion as important, and 80 percent profess to believe in the deity of Christ. Fifty percent of the “media elite” see nothing wrong with adultery, while 95 percent of the public and 100 percent of the evangelicals disapprove of it.

But how does this world view affect a journalist’s reporting and in turn shape the views of the rest of us? We cannot assume that his world view will necessarily cause him either to twist the facts or to reveal his own convictions, let alone that his world view will necessarily determine the conclusions we draw from his reporting. We believe the newsmen and -women in most cases sincerely desire to reflect to us a fair picture of what happens. Moreover, there is a built-in system of checks in their profession. Too slanted a report will be discovered by others, with the result that the reporter loses his credibility.

Yet no one can ever free himself from his own world view. An evangelical newsman, Wes Pippert, has said: “A large segment of good journalists simply turn off moral information. It’s as if they were tone deaf in this area. They don’t understand Christian doctrine and they don’t really understand the Judeo-Christian ethic. Since they don’t understand it, they find great difficulty in reporting it accurately or interpreting it fairly. They lack a cultivated religious and moral sense.”

Examples of this are not hard to find. Sam Hart, the black Christian nominated for an important role in the present administration, was blasted by journalists from every side. They attacked him because of his very conservative political and social stance and also because of what they thought were irregular financial arrangements. But nowhere did it appear that they made any attempt to check the very plausible explanation Hart gave of these arrangements. The public was all too willing to accept any suggestion of shady dealings by a conservative black preacher. And Sam Hart withdrew his name.

C. Everett Koop’s long-delayed appointment to be U.S. surgeon general is an even clearer case. When his name was proposed, one would have thought his only accomplishment in life was his opposition to abortion. He was derided as a “fundamentalist” and “a clinician with tunnel vision.” His extraordinary contribution to his field and brilliant medical pedigree never showed up in newsprint, radio, or TV.

The fact is, the world view of reporters does influence their reporting. How could it be otherwise? Their world view determines what they see, what they understand, what they think is important (or unimportant), how hard they work to check their sources, to what they choose to give prominence, the code words employed (like fundamentalist, or extreme Right), comparisons made, interpretations suggested even when not stated, and value judgments of approval or disapproval.

We appeal to the journalists themselves. We would remind them of their responsibility to report the news fairly, to seek to understand the American culture of our day, and especially to recognize the role of religion in our society. If they would be faithful journalists—faithful to their professional task—it is their duty to understand the role of religion, to understand the spiritual and moral commitments of the people whose actions and thinking they are endeavoring to interpret for our society. They cannot divest themselves of their world view, but they can recognize that they have one, and lean over backwards to represent fairly those whose views are alien to their own.

Finally, the awesome power and influence of the public media coupled with its strong antimoral, antireligious, and antievangelical bent ought to challenge evangelicals to greater participation in this influential instrument in our society. If evangelicals are to penetrate our culture and, indeed, become the salt and seasoning of the society in which they live, then it is necessary that they prepare themselves to function effectively at this neural point in our modern social structure.

We Have Met The Enemy, And He Is Us

What will happen when, as many scientists hold, the sun turns red and roasts the earth alive? One physicist answers, “Probably we will have escaped to [a friendly planet near] another star in the Galaxy before then.”

We may take comfort, he would say, in knowing either that the sun will not fail us for six billion years, or that we can escape our problems by fleeing in spaceships.

Such optimism gives the Christian a case of theological indigestion. Granting that the “old earth” people are right and that we are to measure the life of our solar system in billions of years, still there is that business of escaping in spaceships.

Jonathan Schell, writing in the New Yorker of February 8, cannot stomach it either. Such a view “assumes that if only we could escape the earth we would find safety—as though it were the earth and its plants and animals [and sun, or something out there] that threatened us, rather than the other way around.”

Why is the spaceship view wrongheaded? Because, for one thing, “wherever human beings went, there also would go the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons, and, with it, the peril of extinction.” Schell concludes that “science cannot deliver us from its own findings.” True enough. But even more basically he points out that it cannot deliver us from our own “destructive and self-destructive bent.”

The fact is, all those people escaping in six billion years will (if we provisionally accept that time system) carry the same defects that corrupted their ancestors long ago. William Golding has illustrated in Lord of the Flies that hom*o sapiens is selfish, and more than selfish, downright vicious.

How many brinks must humankind teeter on, how many world wars must it fight, how many Jews must it kill or classes exterminate before it realizes that the problem is not mainly “out there” but “in here”?

Our hearts betray us, for “out of the heart come evil thoughts.” We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Old optimisms die hard. Perhaps biblical realism, which calls for repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ, poses radical surgery for an evil too radical to bear the thought of. Perhaps many today, glimpsing in a preternatural moment the wickedness of their own hearts, are driven by a momentary horror to look on fantasies more pleasant than reality.

The thick and dreadful darkness, the setting sun, the smoking pot, and the blazing torch pose a covenant-in-blood too real and too certain for us to accept. Escaping in spaceships seems easier by far.

And after all, in the spirit of ancient Belshazzar’s handwriting on the wall, does not E=mC2 portend a time when one atomic blast will reduce us all to sunbeams?

What? Sue the Preacher?

Who says ministers don’t need malpractice insurance? Do they never make mistakes? Is it thought that no one would ever want to sue a minister? Do people think clergymen and -women are so poor that a plaintiff wouldn’t get much money even if he won?

Could a minister be sued for quoting the Bible—if “Go and do thou likewise” is the wrong message for the wrong person? Now, sending a minister to jail for incorrect exegesis may not be a bad idea, but we would soon have to build a new network of jails just to house blatantly poor exegetes.

While most people realize it rather quickly if the prescription a medical doctor gives them is making them worse, they don’t always perceive it when they are getting sicker using a prescription from the preacher. Doctors read the literature put out by pharmaceutical companies about indications, side effects, antidotes, and so on. Even the right medicine in the wrong proportions can result in something worse than the original disease. Ministers should ask themselves, “What will happen if someone overdoses on this verse?” Maybe seminaries should have a course in Biblical Pharmacology.

Working out the scale for ministerial malpractice insurance will be an actuarial nightmare. Why, suits might include an entire church! Someone placed in a church group with boring people, for instance, might sue. And what if the pastor’s wife is in charge of the church supper and everyone gets ptomaine poisoning? Who will be sued then? Could the minister be sued only for what he says? What about things he doesn’t say? Or doesn’t do? Consider a suit brought against a pastor who fails to attend the piano recital of an elder’s 11-year-old daughter.

A number of good things are bound to happen once people get into suing their ministers. The ministers will be much more frugal with words. Parishioners will see the possibilities of getting rich by coming to church and listening carefully to the sermon. And insurance companies will have a new lease on life!

EUTYCHUS XI

Inerrancy—Where Does It Rest?

I apppreciated the article “Jesus Takes the Stand: An Argument to Support the Gospel Accounts” [April 9]. It is a buttress to apologetic argument to show that biblical accounts of historical events are trustworthy. However, the conclusion leaves something to be desired.

My knowledge that the Bible is accurate and true cannot rest on the intellectual honesty of the writers. It must rest on the inspiration of the writers by the Holy Spirit.

WALTON M. PADELFORD

Jackson, Tenn.

Simple Faith Needed

“The Battle for the Bible, 1982: A Report from the Front” [April 9] expressed the opinion that the acceptance of a 1982 Trinity Evangelical Divinity School graduate by Princeton Theological Seminary is “a sign that such schools are beginning to value conservative scholarship more highly.”

If some “liberal” schools today do value more highly “conservative” scholarship, it is because of its excellence, not its conservative character. If “conservative scholarship” is indeed receiving more respect these days, it is because recent generations of scholars have achieved a level of excellence that many of their predecessors, more involved in defensive apologetic and reactionary rejection, failed to attain.

MICHAEL HOLMES

St. Paul, Minn.

Recently you have repeatedly reported on discussions of inerrancy. We have witnessed little consensus at these congresses and conferences. When will a united effort bring forth a definition of inerrancy that is mutually agreed upon by those who insist the Bible is inerrant?

Please refrain from labeling mainline churches “liberal.” We fear that among your readers, “demon-possessed” or “Communist,” not “Christian,” are synonyns for “liberal.” Why don’t you accept the challenge to define the labels—“liberal,” “conservative,” “evangelical”—they seem so intent on placing on churches?

REV. DUWAYNE DALEN

REV. LLOYD SAND

REV. DENNIS HANSON

Salem Lutheran Church

Lake Mills, Iowa

Literary and Spiritual

As a Jew I have obviously had limited exposure to your periodical. But I happened upon “The Ragman, the Ragman, the Christ” [April 9].

I found it not only rich in the literary sense, but the impact of the spiritual message was not lost. I find it heart-warming that literary excellence and a spiritual message can be combined to touch the intellect as well as the heart.

ARLEEN R. GOLDSMITH

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Improper Perspective

It is unfortunate that your report on one of the resolutions adopted at the fortieth annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals was not presented in proper perspective [News, April 9].

The full text of our resolution clearly refers to other resolutions adopted in 1952, 1977, and 1979. There are those within our membership who are committed to peace through strength as well as those who renounce the use of force as a matter of conscience. But we have all consistently joined together through the years to urge our government to exercise reasonable restraint in the production and use of its military capabilities and to encourage other nations to do the same.

RAYMOND CARLSON

Chairman, Resolutions Committee

National Association of Evangelicals

Wheaton, Ill.

Your readers would have been interested to know that our theme was “Save the Family”; that plenary sessions were addressed by Pat Robertson, Elisabeth Elliot, Charles Swindoll, and William Brownson; that 40 workshops were led by leading marriage and family experts; that significant resource material for local churches emerged; that a national Task Force on the Family was named to provide a continuing ministry to families; and that James Dobson received our Layman of the Year award.

Individuals representing 47 denominations and more than 50 Christian organizations from 36 states and Canada were in attendance.

BILLY A. MELVIN

Executive Director

National Association of Evangelicals

Wheaton, Ill.

Priorities!

Hooray for the United Methodist bishops for placing ecumenism at the bottom of a list of 15 priorities for the church in coming years [“COCU Still Struggles for Mainline Church Union,” April 9].

REV. ROBERT DICKERSON

First United Methodist Church

Pensacola, Fla.

Material to Ponder

Your beautiful coverage of a delicate subject [“A Proposal to Tilt the Balance of Terror,” April 9] prompts me to communicate in total agreement. My experience as an infantry soldier in New Guinea and the Philippine Islands in World War II placed me in the “kill or be killed” position for two-and-a-half years.

You have thoughtfully and courageously expressed the futility of pacifism in a realistic world and given Christians excellent material to ponder.

REV. HANFORD RANTS

First Baptist Church

Bellflower, Calif.

In today’s confused world, no one knows exactly who will fight for what. We do know that anyone and everyone will fight. What we need to know is that there is someone who will stop making others pay for his freedom, even if he has to die to make that statement. The Christian is not called to fulfill Romans 13:1–7 but Luke 9:23.

REV. RICK H. MCPEAK

Free Methodist Church

Greenville, Ill.

As a member of a historic peace church, I have often felt and stated that across the board pacifism does not address Christian responsibility, nor face realistically the issue of the depravity of man.

I pray passionately that we will find a therapy for our national, and international, nuclear neurosis. Publicly renouncing the prerogative of a first or preemptive strike could be at least a bud on an olive branch.

W. WINGER

Niagara Christian College

Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

Wrong Impression Left

Your article [North American Scene, Mar. 19] leaves the impression that I delivered a blanket condemnation of fundamentalists, creationists, and biblical inerrantists. Such is not the case. I was discussing the current attempt by some who hold one or more of these positions to discredit those who do not agree with their interpretations or espouse their particular causes. My concern was that an absolutist position concerning God’s Word can be and sometimes is used in ways that in fact deny God.

G. DANIEL LITTLE

Executive Director

General Assembly Mission Council

United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.

On Ascension Day, 40 days after he rose from the dead, Jesus ascended bodily into heaven. The Bible speaks of these events as the first fruits of the resurrection of all believers. We await that day (spoken of in 1 Cor. 15 and 1 Thess. 4) when we, too, shall rise from the grave—or be transformed without ever dying should we be alive at his second coming. Lutheran scholar David Scaer writes of the significance of Christ’s ascension for Christian doctrine: we do not worship an absent Lord, yet in his resurrection and ascension he paved the way for all of us.

Meanwhile, we live daily in these mortal bodies here on planet earth. That is not always easy. When the going gets tough, we long for the immortal body that one day will be ours. Then we shall be delivered from the nagging pain and cruel suffering that few of us ever wholly avoid down here. Yet we believe in a miracle-working God, who is fully able to heal us instantaneously. Many of us believe that in his grace God chooses to heal us right now—sometimes. But most of us have never experienced that miraculous healing touch. Why must we wait so long for the full benefits of our promised redemption? Anglican scholar James I. Packer wrestles with this problem and sets forth a convincing and satisfying summary of biblical teaching about human sickness, faith healing, and the grace of divine providence.

More and more, the world seems to penetrate the church with its antibiblical values. The church always runs that risk when it is obedient to our Lord’s command to evangelize the lost and to penetrate the godless society around us with salt and light. As sinners find Christ and enter the church, they necessarily come in as spiritual babies, uninstructed in Christian doctrine and ethical living. Moreover, as Christians rub shoulders daily with the world, the filth of its practices and lifestyle splashes on them. By its very obedience to the Great Commandment, the church becomes specially liable to counter influence from the world.

Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated today than in the rapidly increasing divorce rate within our evangelical churches. To meet this growing problem, every church stresses the biblical commandments on marital faithfulness and warns against the evils of divorce. Yet psychologist George Ensworth would remind us that divorce is not the unpardonable sin. Divorced people need to know God’s forgiveness and healing. The church is not primarily engaged in a ministry of condemnation but of preaching the gospel and proclaiming the wonder and joy of God’s forgiving love to all who will turn to him—to the divorced, too.

Inside, Looking Out; Outside, Looking In

The united states is witnessing the phenomenon of Christian television celebrities who have mass appeal. They preach that people are fed up with the nation’s moral climate, and that our society is doomed unless we return to godly principles.

This phenomenon has in turn produced a number of books that attempt to explain what is happening in the country that has caused such messages to become popular. These explanations run mostly along psychological or sociological lines: the people who believe these preachers and send them money cannot cope with today’s complex society; they need a simplistic message of assurance; they can only endure economic deprivation in this life by focusing on heavenly mansions to come.

No one, as far as I know, has yet written a book suggesting that the fundamentalist resurgence results from the fact that people really are fed up with the country’s morals and really do believe that without a return to godly principles our society is doomed. I suppose the reason for this is that such an explanation would not fill up a book.

The most recent of the books that try to explain the state of American religion in the 1980s is By What Authority (Harper & Row), written by Richard Quebedeaux, author of earlier books on charismatics and evangelicals. His theme is that today’s Christian leaders hold their authority by virtue of their celebrity status, not by authority of their doctrine or the institutional churches to which they belong. This would be a good theme for a book if it were time, but Quebedeaux so tangles the strands of Christendom in fleshing out his argument that he fails to make the many crucial distinctions that are demanded. As a result, the book is a maze of rabbit trails.

Besides that, the book seems to lack first-rate research. The author calls Jerry Falwell “a man of charm, talent, drive and ambition.” But by what authority does he say this? Why, the Wall Street Journal, from which he quoted that description. The author reviews Falwell’s beliefs about fundamentalism, but he has taken a Falwell quote from Penthouse magazine as the basis for what he says. Each of these publications is a leader in its respective field, but neither is known for its perception of Christianity. (At one point in the Penthouse article, Falwell spoke of the Bible as God’s inerrant Word. The writers, apparently knowing no better, thought he was saving “inherent” Word of God, and they recorded that instead.)

This business of reporting on fast-developing trends from once-removed sources is getting to be troublesome. Last year Robert Webber of Wheaton College wrote a book entitled The Moral Majority: Right or Wrong? He based most of his research on one of Falwell’s books, Listen, America—a book written before Moral Majority was organized.

The point wouldn’t be worth laboring except that by researching the wrong book, Webber failed to distinguish Falwell the Moral Majority leader from Falwell the fundamentalist preacher. Now Quebedeaux has failed to make the same distinction. He points out that Falwell associates with Jews and Catholics, which is unbecoming to a fundamentalist, and adds this slamming indictment: “The leaders of the religion of mass culture know that success and influence among the public is determined by large numbers of fans and big budgets more than by theological agreement.”

Theological agreement indeed! Falwell does not even claim that Moral Majority is a Christian organization, merely a political one, and it is on that latter ground that he associates with Catholics and Jews. Falwell has dug a chasm between the Moral Majority office and his Thomas Road Baptist Church. Commentators who don’t look closely enough keep falling into it.

Much of Quebedeaux’s book is taken up with an explanation of something that does not actually exist, which he calls “popular religion.” He defines it thus: “That dominant brand of religion, carried and shaped by the mass media, which confirms and strengthens the values the viewing and listening and reading public already holds dear. It is packaged and sold in a technological how-to-do-it form and is communicated to bored and anxiety-ridden individuals by appealing celebrities.”

Now that might explain the electronic church. Except for that how-to-do-it angle, it might also describe the National Football League broadcasts (“… stay tuned for Phyllis George at halftime …”). This common-denominator definition of religion is offensive to those who hold doctrinal truths dear, and who make sharp distinctions about what is authentic and what is not. Quebedeaux does not make those distinctions because he does not look at religion theologically but sociologically. He writes: “The rational methodology inherent in modernity requires that social phenomena of all kinds, including religion, be interpreted less and less in moral and theological terms and more and more by reference to empirical evidence about society itself.” It is hard to imagine anyone trying to interpret the American religious scene without reference to moral and theological issues. Yet that, as Quebedeaux clearly says, is the basis of this book.

Throughout the book, the author fails to make theological distinctions about what is historical Christianity and what is not, thus leaving the strands of Christendom in a tangle. He makes the broad statement that seminaries these days are not as concerned with the truth of doctrine as with whether a particular doctrine “works” in a parish (whatever that means). This is exquisitely untrue in those seminaries that have a high view of doctrine—those that are thriving.

Quebedeaux quotes Gallup, who says 6 in 10 teen-agers cannot name any of the four Gospels. While this may be true overall, it is obviously untrue in certain healthy strands of Christian churches. One cannot jumble matters like these and come up with any kind of worthwhile commentary. That is why the author’s term “popular religion,” which permeates the book, is invalid.

There are contradictions in the book. On page 143 Quebedeaux indicts mass-media churchmen for building monuments to themselves. He includes the Billy Graham Center, which houses the Wheaton College Graduate School, the universities built by Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, and Oral Roberts, and Bill Bright’s graduate school of theology. (He did not, for whatever reason, include Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College.) Six pages later Quebedeaux argues that American Christianity, especially the brand practiced by radio and television preachers, is anti-intellectual. He cannot have it both ways.

This competition among authors to explain what is happening in American religion is being matched lately by commentators inside conservative Christianity who are explaining what is happening outside that framework. This trend started with Francis Schaeffer’s incisive examinations of modern culture and the humanistic weeds that have taken root in it.

Tim LaHaye, a lecturer and former California pastor, leans heavily on Schaeffer in developing his recent book, The Battle for the Mind (Revell). Much of LaHaye’s book is devoted to a useful analysis of the strong grasp atheism holds on modern society and what is happening because of it. He is much more successful in explaining what is going on outside the walls of Christianity than Quebedeaux is in explaining what is going on inside those walls.

LaHaye runs into trouble, however, when he tries to argue that humanism is a conspiracy and not merely the inevitable outgrowth of a culture that has slipped its Christian moorings. LaHaye writes, for example, that all U.S. newspapers must rely on only two news services, Associated Press and United Press International, for all their national and world news, and that humanist editors at AP and UPI tightly control what gets out over those news wires.

This is a scary statement—except to anybody who knows anything about newspapers. First of all, there are not just two news services; there are many (other large ones are the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service, the New York Times service, the Chicago Tribune-New York News service, and the Gannett News Service).

Second, the larger a newspaper is, the less it depends on any news service, because it uses its own reporters. It would be highly unusual, for example, for the Washington Post, New York Times, or Wall Street Journal to use a wire story to explain a significant event anywhere in the world.

Third, one of upi’s top reporters, its White House correspondent, is Wesley Pippert, an outspoken evangelical Christian. All of this hardly adds up to a humanist conspiracy.

LaHaye argues that the “giveaway” of the Panama Canal was a prime example of humanism at work in the political arena because the congressmen who voted for it held a socialistic, one-world view. I was a newspaper correspondent in Washington during the time of the Panama Canal debate, and I heard many arguments for transferring ownership of the canal to Panama: it is obsolete, it is indefensible from terrorist attack, the U.S. fomented the revolution that gained it the Canal Zone in the first place, and so on. Never, however, was there any hint of anything akin to what LaHaye alleges.

Some of his claims are just silly. “No humanist is qualified to hold any governmental office in America.” “Now that John Wayne has passed away it is hard to find a Hollywood personality who takes a strong stand on America.” (How about Ronald Reagan?)

It is a shame the book is marred in this fashion, for it becomes easy for those in government and in the secular news media who need to pay attention to this book to dismiss it as a bad joke. This they must not do.

We have here two books. One, Quebedeaux’s, tries to explain for outsiders what’s happening inside Christendom. The other, by LaHaye, tries to explain for Christians what has happened in the secular world to make it so intolerant of the faith. Both sides still have a lot to learn about each other before they draw such strong conclusions, much less battle lines.

Reviewed by Tom Minnery, CT news editor.

Out Of The Heart

Theological Reflections, by Henry Stob (Eerdmans, 1981, 267 pp., $11.95), is reviewed by James Daane, senior professor of theology and ministry, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

The author of this collection of essays on various theological themes taught philosophy at Calvin College for many years. For even more years he taught philosophical and moral theology at Calvin Theological Seminary.

A companion volume to his earlier Ethical Reflections, this book of 29 essays is representative of Stob’s thought and contains the best of his reflections on a diversity of subjects clustered and treated under six headings: Science, Philosophy, Theology, Revelation, Church, and Education. Some of these pieces are brief; none are long. Some have appeared in CHRISTIANITY TODAY and many in the Reformed Journal, of which Stob was a founding and long-time editor. A few of the essays deal with the Christian view of the relationship of science, philosophy, and theology, and few men have done so in a more lucid and readable manner. Other essays concern three basic kinds of minds found in churches that are unquestionably Christian (The Mind of Safety, The Militant Mind, The Positive Mind). Two essays are under the heading Notes: one to young seminarians and one to college freshmen. Others are reflections on specifically religious subjects: Prayer and Providence, The Death of God Theology, and Christianity and Other Religions. All are selected from the best of Stob’s 30-year authorship.

Wherever Stob’s theological and highly perceptive mind roams, it never forsakes his initial point of departure: the bottom line to every man’s being is that he, whether he knows and acknowledges it or not, is a religious being. Some men are scientists, some philosophers, some theologians—or something else. Whatever their scientific, philosophic, theological posture, it is basically and radically determined by their inherent, inescapable relationship to God. This points up Stob’s basic position. He grants that philosophy, theology, and every other proper human pursuit has a legitimate field in which it may freely operate. Yet, at the same time, Stob excludes any dualism between Christianity and science or reason by his basic recognition that all such achievements are governed—for better or worse—by the fact that they issue out of his prescientific, pre-rational heart relationship to God. Stob’s basic tenet is “out of the heart are the issues of life.” A person’s deepest relationship to God shapes and determines his scientific, rational, theological posture toward all reality.

Stob deserves a much wider reading than he has received. Few men in our generation have written with clearer Christian perception, greater literary grace, or more reasoned precision about man’s relationship to God and to the world.

Not Tough Enough

Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask about the Christian Faith, by Josh McDowell and Don Stewart (Here’s Life, 1980, 198 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Paul D. Feinberg, professor of biblical and systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Josh McDowell and Don Stewart nave produced an “apologetic first-aid kit” in which they respond to 65 questions that skeptics have about the Christian faith. The questions fall roughly into 10 groups: the Bible, Christ, God, miracles, Bible difficulties, world religions, Christianity, faith, the shroud of Turin, and the creation accounts. The actual problems range from the Apocrypha to the Resurrection, from the Trinity to the priority of Mark, and from the validity of Christian conversion to the beliefs of Islam.

A survey of the topics covered will alert the reader to the fact that the skeptic in view is not always the same. In some cases the skeptic is an outsider to the Christian faith (Why should I become a Christian? The worst hypocrites are in the church). Other times the objector is a Christian, but has doubts about evangelical positions (How many Isaiahs were there? Doesn’t Mark disagree with the other three Gospels about Peter’s denial of Jesus?). Still other questions relate to differing evangelical positions (Were the days of Genesis 1 24 hours or long periods of time?).

The great advantage of this book is that it answers many questions from an evangelical perspective in a relatively short space. Having said that, we must note some serious defects.

First, taking up so many questions in so few pages tends to make the answers extremely superficial. This problem is further aggravated by the fact that discussion of the two accounts of Creation in Genesis 1 and 2 (26 pages) and of the shroud of Turin (14 pages) take up a full fifth of the book. On the other hand, the discussion of the uniqueness and inspiration of Scripture is treated in 2½ pages, and evolution is dismissed in a page and a half.

Second, the style often clouds clarity. Here is an example: “The relative merits and defects of the opposing views will be examined for logical proof, internal consistency, common sense, harmony with knowledge of Hebrew grammar and ancient literary styles and usages, archaeological discoveries and what is left as far as faith in the Scriptures is concerned if the theory of contradiction is demonstrably plausible and probable” (p. 173).

Third, some answers are imprecise at best and contradictory at worst. In one of the worst examples, in which McDowell and Stewart are answering the question of whether Christians worship three Gods, they try to explain the Trinity: “… God is one in His essential being or nature, although He is also three persons” (p. 71). This is an accurate statement of the Christian position, but three times in the next five paragraphs there are contradictory statements: “God’s plural nature,” “plurality of God’s being,” and “This one God has a plural nature.” If these last declarations are true, then Christians indeed worship three Gods.