Page 5651 – Christianity Today (2024)

Frederick Fyvie Bruce is the acknowledged dean of evangelical New Testament scholars. Thirty-five years ago he published a slim volume, Are the New Testament Documents Reliable?, which is still available from InterVarsity Press. It was a solid work of careful scholarship that defended the genuineness and complete historical reliability of the New Testament. In the intervening years it has sold over 100,000 copies and has nourished the Christian convictions of countless college and university students. The book, moreover, proved to be a harbinger of good things to come. From Bruce’s fluent pen flowed penetrating reviews, two of our finest commentaries on the book of Acts, and a stream of scholarly works that have brought great honor to the evangelical cause. Rare is the conservative college or seminary in America whose faculty roster has not numbered one of his doctoral students. You will want to read the article by this justly famous evangelical scholar now retiring from his post as Rylands professor of biblical criticism and exegesis at the University of Manchester.

Evangelicalism today faces three major issues. One, engaging smaller numbers of people and not yet as easily recognizable in North America, is the question of socialism and its appeal to the younger generation of evangelicals. The second, fully in the open, is the question of the authority of Scripture. Evangelicalism here seems to be placed between the millstones of liberalism and a mechanical concept practically alienating the believer from Scripture. It must reaffirm the truth of the Reformation—that Scripture contains everything needed for faith and living.

The third issue is vast, but more hidden. It is moral license, spreading secretly, a kind of evangelical lawlessness that produces a Christianity without a change of life. Let us not now look for amorality outside the camp: We need to face the fact that the landslide of immorality has reached the Church.

For one, it is surprising to see the extent of enthusiasm with which young evangelicals greeted and embraced the “New Morality” with all its ethical ambiguities. For them, who grew up in a milieu of legalism without purpose and perspective, but with the endless quarrels of “mini-morality” about whether it was permissible to smoke, drink, dance, use makeup, or go to the theater, the New Morality meant freedom, Christian freedom from the law. The relativism of values in our educational system may have added to that effect.

As befits our times, the trend of evangelical lawlessness can be specified particularly in terms of sexual ethics. A phenomenon of this is the deluge of evangelical marriage counseling books with their suggestive titles and sometimes quite explicit sexual passages. Authors and publishers have discovered the market possibilities of an anointed version of the literary sex craze of our time. Yet preoccupation with sex and personal happiness, however, will never create the passion to take up the historic tasks of our time: to satisfy the spiritual and material hunger of mankind and to reconcile and heal its divisions.

The inevitable grim consequences of permissiveness are appearing. Leading young evangelicals coolly consider sterilization as a means of birth control. Divorce is accepted more and more and is obstinately defended as a Christian option. Common-law marriage is coming up. The breakdown of the family in the West does not stop short of the evangelical camp.

Strangely enough, the trend described seems to be further in the field of evangelism. Successful evangelists in their institutes teach their lesser colleagues how to be successful by avoiding to speak about sin. Worse, many people never seem to be taught just what conversion means. They register a decision for Christ, but there is no content to it. Conversion is a change of mood, of friends, of opinions, but not of daily life. It does not reach the level of behavior. It does not include moral change. When the recently converted publisher of a well known sex magazine announced that in the future his magazine would carry sex and Christ, he underlined the problem in question. And he is no exceptional case. CHRISTIANITY TODAY carried a story of some born-again Christians in a major American gambling center who felt they could continue as card dealers in the casino because they knew no other trade, or because the Lord wanted them to witness. But then, on the same two pretexts, should prostitutes also continue in that occupation? Did Christ become a customer or a promoter of a brothel to witness to its employees? Make no mistake, this relates to us all, not just those from more exotic milieus. The question is: Do we believe that conversion includes a change in life with all its activities, or not?

We need to reaffirm that Christianity has a moral backbone. The Christian faith is inseparably joined with God’s absolute moral standards and with a change of our relationship to society. In the New Testament truth is allied with justice and opposed to lawlessness. According to Christ the very truth of his message can only be discovered in its obedient application (John 7:17). Paul taught, “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity” (2 Tim. 2:19). There can be no Christian faith without distinct moral consequences.

Christians in the ancient world were known because of their different way of life (their positive attitude to children and to life in general being a noticeable difference). This remains a strong message to today’s children of secularism, who are fed up with a life of license and aimlessness and feel strongly drawn to a different way. They can see the abyss materialism and sensualism must necessarily lead the world into.

Martin Luther had to fight the same battle in his own time. He wrote of some allegedly evangelical preachers: “They are truly beautiful proclaimers of Easter, but shameful preachers of Pentecost. For they preach nothing about the sanctification of the Holy Spirit, only about salvation in Christ.… However, Christ has earned for us not only God’s mercy, but also the gift of the Holy Spirit, that we should have not only forgiveness, but also an end of sins. Whoever remains in his earlier evil ways must have another kind of Christ. Consequence demands that a Christian should have the Holy Spirit and lead a new life, or know that he has not received Christ at all.”

There is the biblical example of Zaccheus. Through his encounter with Christ his life was changed. The ruthless financier found a new goal. Thus his former gods could be pushed from their throne. His was an inward change that turned outward in actual deeds of restitution of justice.

Much of today’s evangelical lawlessness seems to be the fruit of an evangelical aimlessness, the lack of a larger goal. We need to understand and accept the discipline that goes with discipleship and that is needed for Christian creativity. Our God-given task is to fight for a reversal of secularism and a new recognition of God’s honor, authority, and commandment. That will also be the best service we can render to mankind. For God’s absolute moral standards sustain the very structure of life.

Klaus Bockmühl is professor of theology and ethics, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

Fifteen years ago when African Revolutionary Mzee Jomo Kenyatta manned the helm of this newborn nation, Kenya’s former colonial governor warned that the freedom fighter would be an “African leader to darkness and death.” Urging both blacks and whites to “forget the past,” Kenyatta quickly disproved such gloomy forecasts and successfully molded an east African nation of rare stability, prosperity, and multi-racial cohesion.

Last month when Kenyatta died, the global prophets of doom again cautioned that Kenya might crumble into chaos or violence during the nation’s first transfer of power. Yet an eerie calm soon settled over fifteen million Kenyans as vice-president Daniel Arap Moi, Kenyatta’s likely successor, assumed power as the nation’s transitional president.

“President Moi has three things going for him,” a civil servant and officer at Nairobi Baptist Church told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. “First, Kenyans want a man of God, and Moi is a Christian. Secondly, he’s guided by a sense of fairness, and makes himself available to the people. Thirdly, he’s from a small tribe, which will require him to cultivate a broad-based coalition, rather than leaning on the power of a major tribe to rule the city.”

Moi, who has been deeply influenced by the Africa Inland Church (planted by the Africa Inland Mission), one of Kenya’s largest Protestant denominations, moved immediately to quell simmering tribal, racial, and political resentments that could flare into major crises for his fledgling administration.

Barely two weeks after Kenyatta’s funeral, Moi announced an end to land allocations, which had permitted monopoly of prime properties by the political and social elite. “All Kenyans, including ministers and civil servants, are answerable to me, but I am answerable to God,” President Moi announced at a large public rally. “If I do not rule fairly I will be judged by God.” Kenya’s new president also promised a crackdown on crime and said he will not tolerate expatriate businessmen whose cut-throat tactics shut Kenyans out of business. The Kalenjin tribesman noted that although he had a heart to forgive he will deal “drastically” with civil servants or businessmen who abuse the Kenyan people through corruption.

Moi, who estimates that 75 per cent of his countrymen now profess to be Christians, has maintained his visibility with a cross section of the religious leaders of Kenya during the transition period. “Without a vision, the people perish,” he reminded Africa Inland Church delegates at an AIC memorial service for Kenyatta. Moi urged his audience to “continue preaching the Word of God to maintain peace, love, and unity,” adding that although the formerly dark continent of Africa is now a bleeding continent, it has been the grace of God that has granted Kenya peace and stability.

Under Moi, as under Kenyatta, the Christian community will probably enjoy privileges and prosperity rare in Africa, if not in the world. During the Kenyatta era, churches mushroomed, bulging with what a prominent researcher has estimated in recent years as 500,000 converts annually. Kenya’s Evangelical Quakers claim the largest Quaker community in the world; its Anglicans claim the globe’s fastest-growing diocese, with churches near Mt. Kenya confirming 20,000 new members annually.

Such surges of growth have created some 700 new congregations in Kenya annually, with more than 360 churches and congregations thriving in Nairobi alone. At current rates of growth, most churches are expected to triple in size by A.D. 2,000. Although Protestantism may merely double, Catholics and independent churches are likely to quadruple. More than twenty-five Protestant Bible or theological institutes and colleges have also been established in Kenya, training adult Christians at primary, high school, and college levels. Students from throughout Africa converge on Kenya’s Bible schools, often returning home to minister under conditions far less conducive to the growth of Christianity.

Supplementing the impact of churches and church schools, the Kenyan government finances Christian textbooks for primary schools and sponsors religious education throughout the educational systems. State-owned Voice of Kenya (VOK) radio and TV stations, which monopolize the airwaves, also offer large chunks of free time for churches to beam the Gospel to sophisticated city dwellers as well as to traditional tribesmen. “When we get back to pagan Britain, we’ll miss all this,” the imported Anglican provost of Nairobi’s All Saints Cathedral moaned during the barrage of hymns from Voice of Kenya radio since Kenyatta’s death.

Although Kenyatta, who was baptized by Scottish Presbyterian missionaries, firmly supported Kenya’s Christians, he deeply resented what some Africans call the “cultural castration” by early missionaries who arbitrarily outlawed cherished African customs, alienating entire villages in the process. He was often heard to say, “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.” Despite such harsh criticism, most of Kenyatta’s “deepest convictions were formed in those early days with the Christian missionaries,” claimed Kenya Attorney General Charles Njonjo, during a memorial service in Nairobi early last month. “Few realized how he treasured those formative experiences or how conscious he always was of his unique debt of gratitude to them.” Kenyatta’s commitment to basic Christian principles was evident in the impact of both his life and his death. “President Kenyatta hammered away at the principles of unity, peace, and goodwill for all men,” said AIC Bishop Wellington Mulwa. “There would be tremendous opposition from our people if anyone tried to change those policies.” On a VOK radio broadcast aired last month, Kenya’s Minister for Agriculture, Jeremiah Nyagah, added that Kenyatta “hated discrimination based on sex, race, tribe, and he stood above petty religious differences.” Kenyatta also followed Jesus’ example by “discipling” key leaders in the cabinet, said Nyagah, so that a firm foundation would sustain the country long after Kenyatta’s demise.

President Daniel Arap Moi has giant shoes to fill and a mammoth task in sustaining peace, prosperity, and stability in his slice of the turbulent horn of Africa. But he is backed by millions of countrymen whose tribal animosities have been blurred by common commitment to Christ, and he has inherited a nation that has already demonstrated dignity, maturity, and strength during its greatest crisis yet. As Bishop Mulwa said, Moi’s supreme strength and Kenya’s greatest hope may well lie in the new president’s character as a “God fearing man”—one who has publicly acknowledged his dependence on God.

Crossfire At Crossroads

By the middle of last month, South African police had made four night raids on the huge Crossroads squatters camp outside Cape Town in as many weeks, using tear gas, clubs, and dogs. In the mid-September raid two men were shot dead and a baby was trampled to death. Hundreds of blacks were arrested plus more than a dozen whites (including some clergy).

Now that the cold weather is past, the government plans to demolish this last and largest—20,000 residents—of Cape Town’s black shantytowns. It sees the illegal township as a challenge to fundamental apartheid policies, since black wives and children normally live in rural “homelands,” not with their working men in urban areas where they are legally considered “temporary” residents. But a world outcry over Crossroads, including public prayer for it by Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan and the late Pope Paul, caused the authorities to hesitate before moving in with bulldozers.

Church Ferment In West Germany

Evangelical Protestants in West Germany have a lot to think about these days.

The state Lutheran Church began and then delayed proceedings against controversial clergyman Paul Schulz. He is charged with holding views that violate his ordination vows. The 40-year-old pastor has been suspended from his duties at St. James Church in Hamburg pending the outcome of the trial, the first in sixty-seven years.

The eloquent and popular minister had drawn many back to the ancient but declining downtown church, best known for its exquisite baroque organ. He attempted to structure an “open congregation,” one possessing a spiritual and social format that would appeal to modern-day people.

Although the church leadership had long been aware of Schulz’s deviations from orthodoxy, his recently published book Is God a Mathematical Formula? brought the matter into the open. The controversial cleric espouses a type of ecclesiastical atheism that makes him the darling of “progressives” but the bane of conservatives. Above all, he rejects the biblical view of a personal God and a life after death. The proponent of an updated Enlightenment rationalism, he condemns the traditional Protestant church. “When people enter the chancel, they leave their minds in the anteroom,” he chides.

In a recent interview in Die Welt, Schulz declared: “The growing awareness of a need for religion is in no way evidence of the validity of religion. Rather it is a sign that mankind might be able to break out of its present existence.” Speaking of the Christian life, he said: “We Christians believe too much and act too little. Following Christ should consist of responsibility for mankind in this world rather than spiritual and heavenly endeavors.” His most jolting statement: “The gospel of the resurrection of Jesus is merely faith, hope, and illusion, not a real fact.… No man will rise after his death—there is no eternal life.”

The action against Schulz pleased the adherents of the “confessional” communities, a theologically orthodox movement that for several years has been calling German Lutheranism back to biblical principles.

The confessionalists’ most noteworthy achievement was a meeting in West Berlin in May, 1974. It attracted evangelicals from both the established and free churches, and they drafted the Berlin Declaration on Ecumenism, a hard-hitting critique of the World Council of Churches. The action, however, was overshadowed by the Lausanne evangelization congress two months later and attracted little news media attention.

Although some sources claim revival is spreading among German young people, with enrollments at the conservative Bible schools at an all-time high, interest has been flagging in the organized confessional movement. Attendance at its annual assemblies has fallen off since a high point in 1975, and some prominent conservatives have refused to embrace the cause. The decline, say some observers, is due partly to personality clashes but mostly to the seeming inability of the movement to advance beyond an essentially negative, oppositional stance and to develop a positive plan of action to spread the Gospel.

Conservatives have generally been dissatisfied with the quality of theological education at the German universities, and they have made various efforts in recent years to provide alternatives. Among the most successful have been the theological academies at Basel and Seehism.

Three years ago an evangelical consortium launched a frontal assault on the ecclesiastical-academic establishment by founding the “Free University of Hamburg.” With an impressive roster of reputable scholars, a high sounding curriculum, and abundance of press releases, the university got off to an auspicious start. However, because of controversial actions by its director, Helmut Saake, the school soon became a cause célèbre in the Hanseatic city.

Saake had previously been appointed professor for life by the Basel academy while on its staff. The Swiss school later announced it had withdrawn the prized academic title. Saake insisted that a lifetime appointment is irrevocable, and continued to use the title in Germany. But Hamburg education authorities have now filed a suit against Saake, alleging that he is using the academic title without proper authorization.

The most notorious wrangle occurred when the eminent conservative scholar and theologian Helmut Thielicke denounced the enterprise in a free-swinging article in the local newspaper as a “questionable theological nursery school with a sand castle mentality.”

Saake countered with a libel suit, and Thielicke was forced to retract some of his accusations, or face a two-year prison term.

In the meantime, a power struggle broke out between the director and board, and last September most of the faculty resigned in protest against Saake’s allegedly high-handed methods. They then organized a new theological school with more modest pretensions, and classes were to open this fall in the facilities of a defunct missionary training college at Breklum near the Danish border. Ironically, the same school had been closed a few years before in order to get rid of a tenured teacher who espoused heretical views. His name: Paul Schulz.

Meanwhile back in Hamburg, the Superior Court forbade the “Free University” to continue its operations within the city. The suit before it, also filed by the education authorities, contended that students would be misled by the name of the institution. The August verdict of the court declared that private individuals and associations are not permitted to establish a university or other institution of higher learning.

RICHARD V. PIERARD and ROBERT D. LINDER

Opening Up A Crack

The Chinese government in Peking has reactivated the World Religion Research Institute, dormant since the Cultural Revolution of 1966. Although the regime of Chairman Hua Kuo-feng is not seeking an “accomodation” with religion, the reopening of the Institute seems to indicate that it recognizes the importance of religion as a social force. The government has reopened some Buddhist temples and at least one center of Confucian teachings since Chairman Hua succeeded the late Mao Tse-tung in 1976.

Reliable sources indicate that Peking also has lifted its long-standing ban against informal contacts between foreigners and Chinese citizens. In another liberalizing move, China indicated in August that it will send about 10,000 students abroad next year, perhaps, as many as 500 to the United States.

Put-Down Protest

Christians in Pakistan are protesting remarks made by their minister of religious affairs in this largely Islamic republic. According to press reports, the official told a gathering of Asian Muslims that the Christian world did not fear the day of judgment and was not accountable to anyone for its cruelty, tyranny, and injustice. The remarks were made in an opening address to the First Asian Islamic Conference held in Karachi in July.

Soon after the speech Christians in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, came out with their demand that the minister, A.K. Brohi, be forced to withdraw his remarks and apologize to the Christian community. Christians in Pakistan number approximately 1 million and form the largest minority in this country of 75 million. In late July many Christians in Lahore wore black arm bands to church. As many as 10,000 gathered in the Anglican cathedral to protest against the minister’s speech.

Some Christians fear they have a bleak future in Pakistan, which is currently experiencing a resurgence of Islamic orthodoxy. Most major newspapers ignore the protests, but Viewpoint, a leading leftist weekly, supported the Christian demand that Brohi retract his statement. “It is a simple, generally accepted principle that praise of one’s religious beliefs should never be accompanied by disparaging remarks about the beliefs of others,” the magazine editorialized.

JONATHAN ADDLETON

World Scene

Soviet authorities have approved the constituting of a second Baptist Church of Moscow in Mitischi, a suburb about thirty minutes’ drive from the downtown Central Baptist Church. The new 200-member congregation, which has received approval for church registration within the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, also has applied for a building permit to construct a 400-seat chapel.

The World Council of Churches plans to alter what it calls the “scandalous” situation in which member churches do not recognize each other’s sacraments and ministry. At the triennial meeting in Bangalore, India, of its Faith and Order Commission, the council issued the carefully worded statement, “One Baptism, One Eucharist, and a Mutually Recognized Ministry.” The statement was intended to serve, with revision, as the basis for establishing reciprocity in those areas. Obvious hurdles include differing stands on the ordination of women and the priesthood.

Authorities in Nepal heard about a secret baptismal service in the lowland city of Butwal and promptly arrested the baptizer and the baptized—seventeen adults and children. The children were quickly released from jail, but, according to word from the isolated Himalayan kingdom, the adults were eventually released on bail but will face charges, which carry sentences of from one to six years. Under Nepalese law, conversion from the state religion, Buddhism, to Christianity is illegal.

One hundred West German Lutheran theological students signed a statement requesting that pastors live in communes. They declared, “We are no longer willing to live by the traditional marriage and sexual ethics of the Church and to work to enforce them.” The Rhineland provincial church headquarters rejected the declaration “with all distinctness.”

Twelve scholars commissioned by the Swedish government in 1973 to prepare a totally new translation of the Bible into modern Swedish are halfway home. They recently finished their New Testament translation that will be available in 1980. Their five-million-dollar project won’t result in a complete Bible until 1990.

Egyptian architects will go to Jerusalem to supervise repairs on the city’s ancient Al Aksa Mosque. The Muslim shrine, situated on the historic Jewish temple mount, was burned by an Australian Christian sheep-shearer in 1969. Israeli authorities ruled the arsonist “a paranoid schizophrenic” and deported him in 1974.

Pope John Paul has named Cardinal Bernardin Gantin president of the Vatican’s coordinating agency for Catholic aid and development projects around the world—the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, or “One Heart.” Gantin, 56, is a black African prelate from Benin.

Correction

The description of Eduardo Bonnin as a leader of a “Spanish charismatic movement” (as reported in the September 22 issue, p. 42) was incorrect. More clearly and accurately stated, Bonnin is a leader of the Cursillo movement, which is an international spiritual renewal movement that began in Spain; the movement has, however, influenced many charismatic leaders.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered Kosher food. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat prayed to Allah and in the direction of Mecca (though one reporter joked that the deeply religious Sadat was facing more toward Baltimore). And President Jimmy Carter had a daily quiet time of Scripture reading. To most observers, the Camp David summit conference had as religious an atmosphere as it did political. Rarely have world leaders been so conscious of the influence of the Divine.

President Carter attributed the success of the Middle East peace talks—two separate agreements were reached between Israel and Egypt—to worldwide prayer support. Prior to the conference, Carter, Sadat, and Begin had signed a joint appeal for prayer that read in part: “Conscious of the grave issues which face us, we place our trust in the God of our fathers, from whom we seek wisdom and guidance.… We ask people of all faiths to pray with us that peace and justice may result from these deliberations.”

The prayer request was acceptable to and embraced Begin’s Jewish, Sadat’s Islamic, and Carter’s Christian beliefs, but it had distinctly evangelical origins. The appeal evolved partly from an informal conversation between former senator Harold Hughes and Carter’s wife Rosalynn.

Hughes had mentioned to Rosalynn the need for prayer regarding the coming peace talks, and Rosalynn related their conversation to Jimmy. An enthusiastic Carter drafted a prayer appeal, and he easily got Sadat and Begin to approve it. Carter later asked Hughes to relay the prayer concern through Fellowship House, the Washington, D.C.-based ministry that conducts prayer breakfasts nationwide.

A spontaneous telephone prayer chain began as Fellowship House associates contacted evangelicals throughout the nation, who, in turn, contacted acquaintances of their own. A Fellowship House associate said Carter went behind the scenes in his prayer chain request because “he was very concerned that the request be personal, and not be construed in any way as political.”

Other evangelical groups joined the push for prayer. Southern Baptist Convention president Jimmy Allen mobilized that church’s thirteen million members. He sent telegrams to the executive directors of state Baptist conventions, urging them to ask the churches to support the joint call to prayer. Robert S. Denny, general secretary for Baptist World Alliance, asked regional leaders of the worldwide body to write or cable the White House with their prayer support.

Other segments of the Christian world also showed concern. Pope John Paul dropped the customary use of the formal “we” when he prayed for the Middle East peace initiative at his first public audience. The pope again prayed for the talks in a Sunday address to 40,000 persons gathered in St. Peter’s Square. Several days earlier. Archbishop lakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church in the Western Hemisphere had sent telegrams of prayer support to each of the three summit conferees.

Even the Muslim community in this country got involved. The Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., signed an interfaith statement of prayer support with the Synagogue Council of America, the National Council of Churches, and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. The statement noted that “the religious traditions represented by our communities can play a significant part in the reconciliation of the peoples of the Middle East,” and it was believed to be the first time that American Muslims had participated with Christians and Jews in such a joint venture.

With this outpouring of world church support, the talks began optimistically. But a deadlock over the question of sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip threatened to stymie the success of the Carter-initiated conference held in the secluded hills of Maryland at Camp David. Scheduled talks were shuffled to allow for Sadat’s Friday Islamic worship, Begin’s strict observance of the Jewish Sabbath, and Carter’s Sunday morning worship.

But the talks ended with an eleventh-hour diplomatic flurry that produced what American officials called “a significant step forward in seeking final resolution of the Middle East dispute.” Carter, Sadat, and Begin signed agreements that provided a framework for continuing negotiations for an overall peace between Israel and all its neighbors, as well as a framework for a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement.

Carter’s eyes showed black rings from the thirteen-day marathon of talks, but his face flushed with triumph as he announced to a national television audience that agreements had been reached. Before the agreements could be signed by Sadat and Begin, who stood beside him, Carter hearkened back to the conference’s original call:

“When we first arrived at Camp David,” Carter said, “the first thing upon which we agreed was to ask the people of the world to pray that our negotiations would be successful. Those prayers have been answered … beyond any expectations.”

The Candidates: Shaping Up

If the early lineup of official and unofficial candidates for the 1980 U.S. presidential election is any indication, there may be some bruising campaign slugfests ahead among evangelical contenders, both in the primaries and in the national election.

Among the leading Republican hopefuls are two congressmen known for their evangelical ties: Jack F. Kemp, a member of the Hamburg (New York) United Presbyterian Church in the Buffalo area, and John B. Anderson, an Evangelical Free Church member from Rockford, Illinois. When in Washington on weekends, both Kemp, 43, and Anderson, 56, attend Fourth Presbyterian, a well-known evangelical church in nearby Bethesda, Maryland.

There is a difference between the men: Kemp is a conservative; Anderson is usually identified as a moderate, sometimes as a liberal. Anderson is considering a try for the nomination partly to prevent Kemp and like-minded conservatives from taking over.

A moderate would have broader appeal and therefore a greater chance to win the presidency, Anderson explained to reporters last month. He said he will decide in January whether to formally declare his candidacy. Meanwhile, he intends to test his ability to raise funds and line up delegates to the Republican National Convention. His chief strategist is Paul D. Henry, political science professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Henry until recently was GOP chairman of the Michigan district that sent Gerald Ford to Congress for twenty-five years. He said he has not discussed his present role with Ford, another possible moderate contender with strong evangelical ties. In the waning days of the 1976 campaign, Henry mounted an offensive to show that Ford, an Episcopalian, was no less a born-again candidate than Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter.

Anderson, the third-ranking Republican in the House, is one of the most respected members of Congress. A conservative on most fiscal issues, he frequently has voted with liberals on social concerns, which has caused conservatives at the grass roots level to oppose him. Earlier this year, Anderson won renomination for a tenth congressional term after a bitter primary struggle with conservative pastor Don Lyon of Rockford’s Open Bible Church. It was Anderson’s toughest battle in years, and he emerged with 57 per cent of the vote. (He is expected to easily defeat a little-known Democrat in November.)

Kemp, active in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, played football for the San Diego Chargers and the Buffalo Bills before running for Congress. An all-pro quarterback, Kemp led the Bills to two American Football League championships. In 1965, he was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player. Kemp was also a cofounder and president of the AFL Players Association.

Although he majored in physical education at Occidental College in southern California, Kemp has flowered as a self-taught economist. He has won friends—and made enemies—all over America, especially for pushing proposed legislation to reduce the personal income tax rate by one-third; he is coauthor of the bill.

Kemp insists that his only plans are to run for Jacob Javits’s Senate seat in 1980, but Ronald Reagan’s people imply that America needs the likes of Kemp. The congressman, in turn, says it would be nice to have Reagan—or someone like him—as president. Meanwhile, Kemp has set up some initial campaign machinery. (Reagan, who may or may not run, attends the evangelical Bel Air Presbyterian Church in suburban Los Angeles.)

A Christian must be consistent, says Kemp. “As a congressman, I have to live the witness, articulate it, and let my light shine,” he explains.

Carter and Ford survived the 1976 presidential campaign with their Christian witness intact. The campaign itself was one of the cleanest in recent memory, partly because no sharp ideological differences separated the two antagonists. But as 1980 approaches, politicians perceive that more voters are drifting into conservatism, and the candidates are plugging ideology. A showdown is shaping up. Whether evangelical candidates can come through it unbesmirched remains to be seen. The Lyon-Anderson fight divided evangelicals in Rockford, and Anderson was pummeled in Lyon’s campaign literature with bitter accusations that permanently damaged him in the eyes of some.

The first declared candidate for the Republican nomination was congressman Philip Crane, 48, a United Methodist from Mt. Prospect, Illinois. Of the Barry Goldwater tradition, Crane is gaining a following in conservative church circles.

Sitting out the presidential race will be one of the best-known evangelicals on Capitol Hill: Republican senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, a moderate liberal. The late senator Everett Dirkson warned him in the Senate cloak room in 1968: “If you oppose the Viet Nam War, you will be politically dead.” “With the growing conservatism in America.” commented a Hill observer, “Mark hasn’t got a chance.” Besides, he said, “Mark likes being a senator.”

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Primary Piety

Primary elections held last month featured a religious twist in several states:

• Republican congressman Albert H. Quie, a leader in the evangelical Fellowship House ministry in Washington. D.C., won the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Minnesota. Polls show that he and Democratic candidate Judy Perpich are locked in a close race prior to the November balloting.

• Also in Minnesota, Democratic congressman Donald M. Fraser was upset by Minneapolis businessman Robert K. Shorrt in a bid for a U.S. Senate nomination. Fraser, a sixteen-year veteran of the House, has been leading a House Committee on International Relations investigation of Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church. Hearings have been stormy. Moon’s people accused Fraser, a liberal, of “hidden” motives in that he “consistently supported pro-Communist groups and causes and sought to undermine anti-Communist governments and individuals,” including Moon. The Moonies actively campaigned for his defeat.

• In Providence, Roman Catholic nun Leizabeth Morancy won the Democratic nomination for a seat in the Rhode Island House, upsetting a party-endorsed candidate. Her opponent in November will be a Baptist, Donald Morrison. If elected, she will become the first Catholic nun in the state legislature. Her campaign manager is another nun. Sister Claire Dugan.

• Mecklenberg County (including the city of Charlotte) voters made theirs the first locality in North Carolina to approve the sale of liquor by the drink. A similar measure failed in Black Mountain, a resort town adjacent to evangelist Billy Graham’s home community of Montreat.

Looking With Favor On Fuller

The graduate program in psychology at Fuller seminary received a favorable evaluation by the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) at its recent annual convention in Toronto. The school’s accreditation and evaluation had been challenged by members of the council, since Fuller requires faculty members to sign a statement of faith. Critics claimed the school showed discrimination in its admissions and hiring policies.

Unfavorable action would have stripped the school of its professional accreditation for the training of clinical psychologists. Approval by the APA is virtually mandatory for licensing of clinical and consulting psychologists. Fuller’s program, which attempts to integrate psychology and theology, is at present the only APA-approved training program in the country that is not affiliated with a major university.

The ruling by the APA Council makes it possible for school officials to require a statement of faith when a program is aimed at training workers for religious professions. Fuller has maintained that is what it does.

Neal Warren, dean of Fuller’s School of Psychology, said the school was prepared to go to court if the council vote had been unfavorable. The controversy probably arose, he said, because many members of APA were mistakenly associating Fuller’s statement of faith with “an oath of allegiance.”

The ruling also affects other schools with religious affiliations that are moving toward a request for APA approval of their graduate psychology programs. These include Baylor University, a Southern Baptist school in Waco, Texas, the Mormon-run Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and the Rosemead Graduate School of Professional Psychology, affiliated with Biola College in California.

ALLAN ANDREWS

New College Names First President

The New College for Advanced Christian Studies, Berkeley, California, has appointed W. Ward Gasque as president; the school is to begin full operations in the fall of 1979. That announcement by project director David Gill had been expected for some time. Gasque presently is registrar and associate professor of New Testament studies at Regent College in Vancouver, the Canadian school after which New College was patterned.

Gasque, a prolific writer who has been an editor-at-large for CHRISTIANITY TODAY since 1972, will also teach one course per quarter. New College has a goal similar to that of Regent: helping the laity better understand “the Christian faith and its implications for professional/vocational involvements.”

New College differs from similar lay-oriented schools in that it offers a masters degree program, and perhaps will offer a Ph. D. program under the auspices of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) and the University of California. GTU is a graduate school and consortium of nine theological seminaries in Berkeley, having more than 1,000 students. The exact relationship between GTU and New College has not been finalized. Plans are underway to give New College students and faculty access to the half-million volume GTU library, just as they had during the recent summer session.

Fall, winter, and spring quarter classes for the 1978–1979 school year will be held at night and within rented space at the First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley. Earl Palmer, pastor, is among the part-time faculty for the year that includes Richard Bube, professor of materials science at Stanford University, and Richard Quebedeaux, author of The Young Evangelicals and The Worldly Evangelicals.

PAUL F. SCOTCHMER

Religion In Transit

Canadian Pentecostals see Quebec as a wide-open mission field. Delegates to the recent biennial convention of the 250,000 member Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada heard home missions director Robert Argue say, “Progress in French Canada has been dramatic.” He said that twenty-six new Pentecostal congregations have been established in Quebec during the last two years, bringing the area total to eighty-two.

Convict-turned-model-citizen Mosie Harriell is free on bail, thanks to funds donated by friends and the Oakhurst Baptist Church. Members of the Decatur, Georgia, congregation earlier offered their $250,000 church building as security for Harriell’s $30,000 bond (see September 22 issue, p. 43). The court clerk stalled on that offer, so $750 was raised for a bail bondsman, who was willing to accept half his normal fee. Harriell, who had served twenty-five years of a life sentence for killing an Indiana policeman before escaping to Atlanta ten years ago, is free pending appeal of an extradition order, has resumed carpentry work.

A single, self-governing church in North America was requested by Eastern Orthodox theologians at an international conference held in Brookline, Massachusetts. The six million Eastern Orthodox Christians in Canada and the United States now worship in more than twenty separate jurisdictions—ethnic divisions created by nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants to North America from historic Orthodox countries.

(Correspondents Robert D. Linder and Richard V. Pierard recently visited several European countries, including Poland, where preparations were underway for evangelist Billy Graham’s preaching campaign this month. The pair filed the following background report.)

“This will be the greatest event in Polish religious history since the end of World War II,” declared a member of the Polish Ecumenical Council. Similar sentiments were expressed by others who were present at the recent council meeting, where members gave unanimous endorsem*nt to the ten-day preaching tour of evangelist Billy Graham that was scheduled to begin October 6.

Unlike other Eastern European countries, Poland is characterized by a vital, active, and numerically dominant Roman Catholic Church. The church is the most potent political and social force in the country today. It claims the allegiance of 90 per cent of Poland’s 35 million population, dwarfing the Protestant constituency.

Graham’s visit is framed against a complex religious and political background. To be comprehended, the present state of affairs must be seen in the light of the historical development of Poland, which has alternated between greatness and tragedy.

In the tenth century, Polians and other tribes in the area united, and in A.D. 966 they officially adopted Christianity. The medieval rulers gradually expanded the area under their control, and by the sixteenth century a viable Polish state extended from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea.

Poland became a center of learning and culture, and one of the great universities of Europe, the prestigious Jagiellonian in Krakow, was founded in 1364. The country was also a place of refuge for Jews who were expelled from western Europe during the Middle Ages. With the advent of the Reformation, Protestantism spread rapidly and became the faith of great numbers of the populace. The large-scale Protestant presence, however, was short-lived; the movement was crushed in the last half of the sixteenth century by the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation spearheaded by Jesuits.

While Poland became bogged down in internal political problems, neighboring states kept chipping away until finally in 1795 the country was “partitioned” for a third time in the century, and it vanished from the map. A deep sense of Polish national feeling persisted throughout the nineteenth century, though, despite brutal repression by Russian, Prussian, and Austrian overlords. During this period, Polish nationalism was closely associated with and nurtured by the Polish Catholic Church, especially in opposition to Protestant Prussians and the Orthodox Russians.

Poland was reconstituted at the end of World War I and existed for a short time as an independent republic, only to be partitioned again in 1939 by Germany and the Soviet Union. Under the Nazis, millions of Polish citizens were killed, including an estimated 85 per cent of the Jewish population, which before World War II numbered more than three million. Poland suffered widescale devastation during World War II (90 per cent of Warsaw was destroyed, for instance), and one-fifth of its population was relocated by the Soviets following the conflict.

The Soviet Union in 1945 retained most of the territory it had seized in 1939, and Poland was compensated with land from eastern Germany. By 1948, a new Communist regime—imposed on the Poles by the Soviets—attempted to take total control over all aspects of life. The efforts of the regime were stubbornly resisted by the Catholic hierarchy and the Polish workers and farmers, a pattern that has persisted over the years, resulting in modifications of the plans of the ruling party. For example, after riots broke out in 1956 the authorities were forced to halt the collectivization of agriculture, allow greater religious freedom, and grant more civil liberties to the people. Much of the recent international press coverage of the Polish situation shows that the church has become a major political fact of life.

What official stance, if any, the Polish Catholic Church will take toward the Graham endeavor was still unknown late last month. Church leaders have been friendly to an advance team of Graham aides, and there were plans for private visits between the evangelist and some Roman Catholic officials. For a number of religious and political reasons, most observers regard Catholic neutrality as essential to the success of the campaign. But many individual Catholics were expected to support Graham.

Before Vatican II, any kind of Roman Catholic support for Graham in Poland—official or unofficial—would have been unlikely. Even by international standards today, Catholicism in Poland is conservative and theologically traditional for the most part. A Baptist pastor related in an interview how as a boy in the 1930s he was beaten in school and even by a priest for being “different”; his father once lost his job because of his faith.

Present-day Polish Catholic relations with non-Catholics are more cordial. For instance, there has been growing cooperation with the Polish Bible Society. Many clergy are now purchasing Bibles through the society, and some are providing the society version of the four Gospels to children receiving religious instruction.

Especially interesting is the relatively new Oasis, a youth-oriented movement within the church headed by Father Francisvek Blachnicki. It has strong evangelical overtones and connections with both American Catholic charismatics and Protestant evangelicals. (Blachnicki recently spent two weeks at Campus Crusade for Christ headquarters in California.) An Oasis rally last summer attracted 27,000 people. The hierarchy presently is divided over how to respond to the movement. Many bishops seem uneasy, but the archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, is friendly to it.

Polish Protestantism, meanwhile, is small in comparison to the mammoth Catholic establishment. Virtually wiped out during the Counter-Reformation, it slowly reasserted itself after the eighteenth-century partitions. The Polish branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1816, aided this growth.

During the nineteenth century, there were strong concentrations of Lutherans and Reformed in the German-controlled areas, and numerous other Protestant groups formed congregations through missionary work. The Baptists, Methodists, Seventh-day Adventists, and a variety of Pentecostals emerged in Poland as the result of such endeavors.

The Bible society has been especially active since World War II. Until the late 1960s it annually distributed an average of 110,000 Scripture portions. Now the figure is appreciably higher, according to society secretary Barbara Enholc-Narzyńska. The society commissioned a new translation and released it in 1975; it was the first Protestant one since the Reformation era. Some 150,000 copies have been printed already. Currently, the society is working on a Polish version of Good News for Modern Man. The Gospels have been completed, and the entire New Testament is slated for publication next year.

Graham’s invitation to visit Poland originated with the Baptist Union of Poland, a small but energetic group with 200 congregations and 6,000 adherents. With roots going back only 120 years, the Baptists numbered more than 70,000 in pre-World War II days, but the churches lost most of their members in the war and in the postwar territorial shifts.

Baptist leaders had earlier approached Graham about holding a meeting as part of the nation’s millennial commemoration in 1966 but things did not work out. One of the Polish organizers for the crusade said in an interview that political reasons lay behind the refusal of the authorities to grant permission then. Polish government officials reportedly were displeased both with the Congress on Evangelism in West Berlin that year and with Graham’s then hawkish stand on the Viet Nam War.

However, encouraged by his reception in Hungary, the Baptists renewed the request for a Graham preaching visit, and last February received formal approval from the State Office for Religious Affairs. Again politics seem to have played a role. As Polish Lutheran pastor Jan Walter put it: “Jimmy Carter’s visit to Poland [last January] is what made Billy Graham’s coming politically possible.”

A committee was formed to coordinate the crusade, and the Polish Ecumenical Council—a body representing eight Orthodox, Old Catholic, and Protestant denominations—joined in the planning. A number of other small Free churches (Protestant) also associated themselves with the campaign.

The meetings are being held in six major cities (see map). Large numbers of visitors are expected to attend from neighboring East Germany and Czechoslovakia. More than 1,000 Czechs attended a Graham meeting in Hungary when Graham preached there last year. A special invitation was sent to Baptist leaders in the Soviet Union, and they were expected to attend. (Negotiations have already begun toward a possible Graham visit to the Soviet Union within the next two years.)

The Polish crusade has been advertised over Trans-World Radio’s Monte Carlo station and in church papers in Poland. In June, the principle Catholic daily published a long article featuring Graham. A planner reports that the committee has been deluged with inquiries about the crusade from throughout Poland and surrounding countries. (When Graham visited Hungary, there had been little advance publicity within the country.)

A Polish translation of How to be Born Again and Peace With God, two bestsellers by Graham, have been prepared for the campaign, and the Bible society has agreed to supply 100,000 copies of the Gospel of John for the meetings. Various churches and public halls are being used for the meetings.

In the view of Michat Stankiewicz, president of the Polish Baptist Union, Graham will have to be aware of behind-the-scene activities and pressures involving both church and state officials but concentrate on his primary task in Poland: “To preach the Gospel of salvation plainly and simply, and to address himself to the great moral needs of the Polish people, especially the youth, who are increasingly finding no meaning in life.” Other Protestant leaders in interviews said that they do not expect a great wave of conversions but they do believe that Graham’s preaching will, as one person put it, “revive and renew the Christian believers so they can go out and evangelize.”

Stepping Down And Moving On

Never an advocate of the status quo, Wallace D. Muhammad has engineered yet another change of character in the Black Muslim movement, otherwise known as the World Community of Al-Islam in the West. Muhammad resigned last month as “chief imam,” or spiritual leader, of the movement after two-and-one-half years in that position. He delegated his authority to a council of six regional imams who will be elected to one-year terms. In doing so, he noted that in Islam “there is no priesthood.”

Muhammad, the 44-year-old son of the founder of the movement, Elijah Muhammad, said he was tired of the “day-to-day” tasks of running the organization. He sees himself as becoming a roving ambassador-evangelist who will still figure prominently in the decision-making process.

Still, Muhammad’s sudden announcement jolted those who heard it during an Atlanta speech that was aired via direct telephone hookup to 200 mosques across the country. Muhammad had been a prime mover in changing the black separatist policies of his father, who once had preached that whites were “the human beast—the serpent, the dragon, the devil, and Satan.”

Wallace Muhammad changed the name of the forty-eight-year-old group to the World Community of Al-Islam in the West to eliminate the term “black.” He believes that use of the terms black and white is racist. Blacks became Bilalians (the name of an ancient Islamic warrior), and whites became Caucasians. Muhammad sees his American religious group as patriotic and nationalistic, though still dedicated to “Koranic purity.” He estimates that there is a national membership of 1.5 million, though outside observers say the total is closer to 100,000, with a large concentration in Chicago.

Muhammad’s innovations have caused a rift in the Muslim community. Many members defected earlier this year with disgruntled Abdul Haleem Farrakhan, once the national spokesman for Elijah Muhammad and minister of the large Harlem mosque (see April 21 issue, p. 47). Farrakhan would not accept Muhammad’s policy of working with whites to solve the problems of blacks. Neither did he and other Black Muslim purists like it when Wallace Muhammad eliminated the strict dress code and the paramilitary unit, the Fruit of Islam, that kept followers and ministers in step with the strict religious line.

Muhammad had emphasized the authenticity of the community’s religious roots. Islamic leaders long have criticized the Black Muslims as being a political party in religious dress. The Community of Al-Islam in the West traditionally has differed in theology from orthodox Islam, but not in matters of ritual and practice. The Black Muslims see Allah more as a Supreme Black Man among a race of divine black men, than as a spirit. They do, however, face Mecca in prayer five times daily, abstain from pork and alcohol, and follow a strict sexual code.

Lone Lawyer Slaps Skin Magazines

Hinson McAuliffe isn’t on a crusade. When this Atlanta prosecutor filed charges in August against the publishers of Playboy, Oui, and Penthouse magazines, he said his action was only the methodical enforcement of Georgia’s obscenity laws, which he helped write.

But the Fulton County solicitor general has a lone ranger struggle ahead if he is to convict the publishers of selling obscene materials in his jurisdictional area. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner and Penthouse publisher Robert Guccione have scoffed at the arrest warrants. Governors of the publishers’ states aren’t expected to comply if McAuliffe requests their extradition to Georgia.

In a telephone interview, McAuliffe said no organized church support has been given him or the state in this obscenity case, something that he says doesn’t really surprise him. In any case, the 64-year-old McAuliffe said his decision to prosecute “had nothing whatsoever to do with my religion.” McAuliffe is a Baptist deacon with twenty-five years’ Sunday school teaching experience.

As solicitor general, McAuliffe can only prosecute misdemeanors, offenses that have maximum penalties of one year in jail and a $5,000 fine. He has charge of a twenty-seven member staff that prosecutes mostly gambling, liquor, and traffic cases.

McAuliffe said his office also has prosecuted “hundreds” of obscenity cases, and, though he won’t second-guess the outcome of the Playboy-Oui-Penthouse case, he said his office’s conviction rate is higher than that of many others. McAuliffe acknowledged that more sexually explicit magazines may be on the shelves, but he cited Playboy and Penthouse particularly since they often get “into the hands of children.”

The soft-spoken lawyer bases his case on the 1973 Supreme Court decision, California vs. Miller (after which the Georgia law is patterned), that gives local communities the right to set their own standards as to what materials are obscene. Writing for the majority in that decision, Supreme Court justice Warren E. Burger ruled that materials were obscene if the “average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interests.”

McAuliffe, who admits that his religious background can’t help influencing his thinking, has a record of antip*rnography efforts. He once arrested Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, and the entire cast of the musical “Oh, Calcutta,” and he averaged five obscenity cases against every X-rated bookstore and movie house in Atlanta last year, according to a Chicago Tribune account. To tackle Hefner, Guccione, and Oui copublisher Daniel Filipacchi in the open courtroom (Oui is a Playboy publication), McAuliffe meets heavy opposition—if for no other reason than financial. A recent Forbes magazine description of America’s p*rnography industry said that the nation’s ten leading sexually-oriented magazines will gross up to $50 million this year. Hefner, himself, is reportedly worth $150 million: Playboy now has a circulation of 5 million. The p*rnography industry is estimated to generate $4 billion a year and more gross income than the conventional motion picture and record industries combined.

Personalia

Joe A. Rogers has been named president of World Gospel Crusades; he most recently served with the organization’s parent body, OMS International.

Cleveland Indians first baseman Andre Thornton was named the 1978 winner of the Danny Thompson Memorial Award for “exemplary Christian spirit in baseball.” Named for the late American League infielder who died of leukemia two years ago, the award is presented by Baseball Chapel—an interreligious group that conducts team chapel services before Sunday games.

Pulitzer Prize winning newsman Harold E. Martin has been named executive vice-president of the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission. Martin was a newspaper executive in several southern states and won the Pulitzer in 1970 for local reporting.

David L. Rambo has left his post as president of Canadian Bible College/Canadian Theological College to accept another Christian and Missionary Alliance position—head of its international missions program.

Outsiders Dispute Church Priorities

Most churches cancel remodeling plans because of lack of funds. But Church of the Holy Trinity—where the late President Kennedy worshiped—had a different problem. Although members of the Washington. D.C., church had the $350,000 needed for proposed renovations, those plans were shelved after opposition from a social activist group.

On the grounds that the money could be better spent—to help the poor and hungry—members of the Community for Creative Non-Violence conducted a summer-long anti-remodeling campaign. Some members of the eight-year-old group passed out leaflets criticizing the expense of the project. Others stood silently inside the aging Catholic church during masses as a means of protest. Later, some members held a fast outside—and then on—church property.

The fast lasted forty-two days before the parish council of the church produced a compromise early in September that satisfied the protestors: to halt construction plans for thirty days, to increase the memberships of the parish council and the remodeling committee, and to present their renovation plans before the entire Holy Trinity congregation before any final decisions are made. (Besides high cost, the community opposes church financial decisions that are made without the oversight of a majority of the congregation.)

John Minor, a member of the protest group, agrees that some repairs are needed. The church has a leaking roof, and chipped and falling plaster, and certain heating and cooling equipment fails to meet safety requirements. But he, like the group, thinks some costs—like $50,000 for organ repairs—are extravagant.

With roots in the Viet Nam antiwar movement, the Community for Creative Non-Violence since has shifted its focus to social concerns. Living in and maintaining four houses in Washington slum areas, members provide food and shelter for the city’s poor.

Certain Holy Trinity members have donated funds and helped staff the all-volunteer projects of the group. Those church members originally complained to the community about the costly renovations at Holy Trinity, community spokesmen say.

Although the community has no particular spiritual thrust, it describes its membership as ecumenical and its actions as “firmly rooted in the Christian tradition.” None of its members regularly attend Holy Trinity, though some have in the past.

Holy Trinity members endured the three-month protest of the group stoically. Few confrontations occurred. Some of the church members even attended an outdoor liturgy that community members held at the end of their fast.

The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by James M. Robinson (Harper & Row, 1977, 493 pp., $16.95), is reviewed by Edwin Yamanchi, professor of history, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

James M. Robinson, his team of thirty-one translators, and the publishers are all to be heartily congratulated at the completion of a monumental task—the translation into English, and in one volume, of all the tractates (excluding duplicates) of the invaluable codices found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, which provide for the first time extensive primary evidences of Gnosticism.

Gnosticism designates a variety of religious movements that stressed salvation through a secret gnosis or knowledge of man’s origins. These movements were most clearly attested in the writings of the church fathers of the second century, who viewed them as heretical perversions.

Gnostic movements were inspired by a radical dualism, which opposed spirit against matter. The creation of the world is often attributed to a foolish creator, who is a caricature of the Old Testament Jehovah. The divine spark of the Gnostic, which is imprisoned in his body, can be released by the knowledge that is revealed to him by the Saviour.

Since most of our knowledge depended upon the polemical descriptions of the church fathers, we were unsure about the nature of early Gnosticism in particular. German scholars, such as Rudolf Bultmann, confidently used later Gnostic texts of the Mandaeans to reconstruct a pre-Christian Gnosticism that served as the basis for their interpretation of the New Testament. Other scholars protested the retrojection of such late materials to the New Testament era.

Then in December, 1945 (almost the same time as the discovery of the better known Dead Sea Scrolls), a farmer in southern Egypt near the east-west bend of the Nile found a jar in which were a dozen leather-bound codices (a codex is a book), which have become known as the Nag Hammadi Library. The name is somewhat of a misnomer as Nag Hammadi, the largest city nearby, lies on the other side of the river six miles from the discovery site. Dated letters and receipts and other factors indicate that the collection was copied and deposited around A.D. 400. There are three theories as to the formation of the collection.

Jean Doresse (The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, Viking, 1960), one of the earliest investigators, had suggested that the collection was the library of a Sethian Gnostic sect who lived in the area. Seth, the son of Adam, was highly regarded as the ancestor of the race of enlightened Gnostics and is mentioned prominently in some Nag Hammadi texts.

James Robinson suggests that the texts were copied by Christian Gnostic monks before the time when they were considered as heretics and were expelled (pp. 16–18).

A third view, which has been advocated by T. Säve-Söderbergh, holds that orthodox monks had copied such works as references for their apologetic refutations. I would favor this last view in light of the extraordinary diversity of the treatises. There are not only non-Christian and non-Gnostic works, but also a variety of Gnostic materials including both docetic and antidocetic works (docetics denied the incarnation of Christ; cf. 1 John 4:3).

The Purchase And Publication Of The Nag Hammadi Texts

The history of what happened to the Nag Hammadi texts prior to their publication is both edifying and dismaying. Codex I was secured by a Belgian antiquities dealer in Egypt, Albert Eid, who managed to carry this priceless document out of the country. It was offered for sale to the University of Michigan in December, 1946, but the administration felt that the asking price of $20,000 was too high. After the death of Eid in Cairo, the codex was purchased in 1952 by Gilles Quispel on behalf of the Jung Institute in Zurich for $8,000. After the publication of the tractates in what has become known as the Jung Codex, the volume was returned to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, which has managed to purchase the remainder of the codices.

The director of the Coptic Museum, Togo Mina, had entrusted the publication of the Jung Codex to a committee headed by the French scholar, Henri Puech. Robinson has published some correspondence that reveals the chauvinisms and personal jealousies among scholars, which resulted in delays in publication and a monopoly that denied other scholars access to the materials (J. M. Robinson, “The Jung Codex: The Rise and Fall of a Monopoly,” Religious Studies Review, 3, 1977, 17–30).

After Mina’s death in 1949, his successor, Pahor Labib, turned to German scholars for the publication of the remaining texts. Such scholars as Martin Krause, Alexander Böhlig, and others have been prompt in publishing the texts and also more open in granting access to the materials to other scholars.

American scholar James Robinson, when granted the opportunity by Krause to see some of the texts in 1966, spent several days and nights excitedly copying the materials. As a student and an interpreter of Rudolf Bultmann, Robinson has had a special interest in the subject of Gnosticism. He deserves the greatest credit for organizing an international committee to supervise the publication of the facsimiles of the codices, and another committee to translate the codices into English. The first project comprises ten volumes of facsimiles, published by E. J. Brill, (1972–77, 1,935 guilders for the set). A companion volume of scholarly essays is to appear in 1978. The second project was completed late in 1977 with the appearance of The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Only a scholar of great acumen, infinite patience and perseverance, and extraordinary executive ability as James Robinson could have accomplished so much in a decade.

All told there are fifty-two tractates or separate works in the collection, six of which are duplicates. These texts may be divided into four broad categories for the sake of discussion: Non-Christian, Non-Gnostic; Christian, Non-Gnostic; Christian, Gnostic; and Non-Christian, Gnostic.

Non-Christian, Non-Gnostic Texts

In this category one finds a poorly translated section of Plato’s Republic. In Codex VI we have four Hermetic works: Authoritative Teaching, The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, The Prayer of Thanksgiving, and The Apocalypse From Asclepius.

The Hermetic literature includes a variety of writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos (“Thrice-Great”), the Greek title of Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom. The Hermetica lack the radical dualism of Gnosticism. Creation is not regarded in itself as evil, and the creator is not a rebel but the son of the supreme God.

Christian, Non-Gnostic Texts

1. The Sentences of Sextus. These maxims, which were well known before the Nag Hammadi discovery, are similar to proverbial statements found in Greco-Roman philosophical writings. A Christian editor collected these to inspire believers in the pursuit of moral perfection.

2. The Teachings of Silvanus. This is an early Christian wisdom composition, which assumes a Christology that is not docetic. It has affinities with a philosophy known as Middle Platonism.

3. The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles. Like other apocryphal Acts, this has a marked ascetic orientation. Peter and the other disciples travel on a ship. When a storm casts them ashore, they encounter a mysterious person named Lithargoel (actually Christ), who offers to sell them “the pearl.”

Christian, Gnostic Texts

1. The Gospel of Thomas. One of the most important and one of the most publicized treatises, The Gospel of Thomas, was translated as early as 1959. It contains 114 logia or sayings attributed to Jesus, about half of which were hitherto unknown. See my article on this and other apocryphal gospels in the January 13, 1978, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, page 19.

There is disagreement as to how independent and how authentic the traditions preserved by Thomas are. H. Koester has argued that the collection may go back to the end of the first century. Koester and Robinson believe that Thomas may be close to the hypothetical source Q (Quelle), which is represented by materials found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark (J. M. Robinson and H. Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity, Fortress, 1971, pp. 71–113).

On the other hand, Joachim Jeremias in his important study of the agrapha, sayings of Jesus not found in the authentic text of the canonical Gospels, accepts only two logia from the Gospel of Thomas as probably authentic (J. Jeremias, Unknown Sayings of Jesus, SPCK, 2nd ed., 1964, pp. 88 ff.).

2. The Book of Thomas the Contender. This is a later expression of the ascetic Thomas traditions similar to the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. The work inculcates a stringent asceticism by warning against the dangers of sexual passion.

3. The Apocalypses of James. These two works contain revelations made by the risen Christ to his brother James. The first stresses the period before his death, and the second describes his martyrdom. Both apocalypses portray a docetic Christ. In the first the risen Christ reassures James: “Never have I suffered in any way, nor have I been distressed” (p. 245).

4. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth; The Apocalypse of Peter. Two Nag Hammadi treatises offer striking confirmation of the description by Irenaeus of the teachings of Basilides, an early Gnostic teacher who flourished in the early second century. Basilides held that Jesus was not crucified but that Simon of Cyrene took his place on the cross.

In The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, we read the following passage: “It was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns.… And I was laughing at their ignorance” (p. 332). The Apocalypse of Peter distinguishes between a substitute who was crucified and the living Jesus: “The Savior said to me, ‘He whom you saw on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness’” (p. 344).

5. Valentinian Tractates. There are about a dozen tractates in the Nag Hammadi collection that we can associate with the teachings or followers of Valentinus, a famous Gnostic leader who came from Egypt to Rome in the middle of the second century, for example, The Gospel of Truth, The Treatise on Resurrection, The Tripartite Tractate, The Gospel of Philip, and The Exegesis on the Soul.

The Gospel of Truth is a meditation on ignorance as the cause of man’s lost condition, and on revealed knowledge as the means of his salvation. The Treatise on Resurrection describes the resurrection as a nonphysical phenomenon that has already taken place (cf. 2 Timothy 2:18). The Gospel of Philip includes surprising references to Gnostic sacraments—baptism, chrism, “redemption,” and an enigmatic “bridal chamber.”

6. Melchizedek. This tractate features the glorious figure of Melchizedek to whom Jesus is compared in Hebrews 7. What is most remarkable about the description of Christ in this Gnostic document is its antidocetic character: “[They] will come in his name, and they will say of him that he is unbegotten though he has been begotten, (that) he does not eat even though he eats, (that) he does not drink even though he drinks, (that) he is uncircumcised though he has been circumcised, (that) he is unfleshly though he has come in flesh, (that) he did not come to suffering though he came to suffering, (that) he did not rise from the dead though he arose from [the] dead” (p. 400).

7. The Gospel of the Egyptians. This text ascribes the creation of the world to the foolish Sakla, who is a caricature of the Old Testament Jehovah. The Gnostics are represented by the seed of Seth, the godly son of Adam. The Great Invisible Spirit sends Seth to save his seed. To accomplish his mission Seth puts on the living Jesus as a garment and brings “baptism” as a rite for rebirth.

8. The Apocryphon of John. There are three versions of this work in the Nag Hammadi Library. It relates a cosmogony that is similar to that ascribed to the Sethians and the Ophites by the church fathers. (The Ophites perversely venerated the serpent.) The creator is the evil archon Ialdabaoth.

Pre-Christian Gnosticism?

The most important, and the most controversial issue in Gnostic studies is the age of Gnosticism. Was it basically a post-Christian heresy? Was it roughly contemporaneous with the rise of Christianity? Its twin, as someone has called it? Or was it a fully developed movement preceding Christianity and influencing it, as Bultmann assumed?

James Robinson believes that the latter is the correct analysis and hails the Nag Hammadi texts as providing vindication for Bultmann’s hypothesis: “Rudolf Bultmann then reinterpreted the New Testament in terms of an interaction with Gnosticism involving appropriation as well as confrontation.… One cannot fail to be impressed by the clairvoyance, the constructive power, the learned intuitions of scholars who, from limited and secondary sources, were able to produce working hypotheses that in fact worked so well” (pp. 24–25).

In 1973 I wrote a book, Pre-Christian Gnosticism (Eerdmans), which sought to analyze the Patristic, Hermetic, Iranian, Syriac, Coptic (Nag Hammadi), Mandaic, and Jewish evidences that have been used to support the thesis of a developed Gnosticism prior to Christianity. I concluded that there were basically two types of evidences that had been used or abused: clearly Gnostic but late materials; and pre-Christian but not clearly Gnostic materials.

There was, of course, a serious reservation about my conclusions, which I myself explicitly recognized, and which many of the reviewers who were disposed to consider favorably my arguments also expressed (cf. CHRISTIANITY TODAY, May 10, 1974, issue, p. 46). In view of the fact that at the time only a portion of the Nag Hammadi texts had been translated into English, French, and German, there was doubt as to whether my analysis had been premature.

Now that the entire corpus has been translated, we can be assured that there are no unexploded bombshells. Or to change the metaphor, there are no hidden aces up James Robinson’s sleeves. That is, the vast majority of the Nag Hammadi texts are Christian or Christian Gnostic compositions that date to the second or the third centuries. The case for maintaining the thesis of a pre-Christian Gnosticism can be argued from only the limited number of non-Christian Gnostic tractates known before.

Non-Christian, Gnostic Texts

1. Eugnostos. In the case of Eugnostos, which has been classified as a non-Christian text, we also have The Sophia of Jesus Christ, which is a Christianized version of the former. One may still ask whether Eugnostos is wholly free from Christian influence. R. McL. Wilson was able to compile a list of possible allusions to the New Testament and to Christianity in Eugnostos (Gnosis and the New Testament, Fortress, 1968, p. 117).

There are no compelling reasons to date Eugnostos to the first rather than to the second century, much less to the pre-Christian era. H.-M. Schenke considers Eugnostos to be a late product of Valentinianism and therefore not to be dated before the late second century.

Eugnostos is cast in philosophical rather than mythological terms. It is quite apparent that the treatise has been influenced by the Middle Platonists whose view that the Divine Mind is indescribable also profoundly influenced such Christian theologians as Clement of Alexandria.

2. The Apocalypse of Adam. The Apocalypse of Adam is a revelation of Adam to Seth that recounts the salvation of Noah from the Flood and the salvation of Seth’s seed from a destruction by fire. Toward the end of the apocalypse is a long passage describing the origin of the Illuminator through thirteen kingdoms and a final “generation without a king.”

Of this apocalypse and The Paraphrase of Shem, James Robinson asserts: “They insert into the story a gnostic redeemer who cannot be explained as borrowed from Christianity. More nearly the reverse is true. These texts demonstrate the mythological wealth that off-beat Judaism made available to nascent Christianity for expressing the grandeur of Jesus” (p. 7). It should be noted that in spite of the impression left by Robinson, there is no unanimous agreement about the purely non-Christian nature of the document. G. W. MacRae concedes that other scholars have been able to discern Christian elements in the apocalypse.

Indeed, unless one has strong reasons for believing in an independent redeemer myth the traits of the Illuminator would seem clearly to point to Christ: the working of signs and marvels; the opposition of powers who will not see the Illuminator; the punishment of the flesh of the Illuminator; and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Illuminator.

Robinson believes that The Apocalypse of Adam was written in the first century and embodies pre-Christian traditions that could have influenced the Gospel of John written at the end of the first century (p. 13). M. Krause and G. W. MacRae date the composition to the first or second century.

A. Böhlig, the original editor, cited numerous Mandaean and Manichaean parallels, which would seem to point to a later rather than an earlier date. MacRae has recently speculated about relations with the baptist group out of which Mani came—the Elchasaites who flourished in the second century. An apparent reference to the tradition of Mithras’ rock birth would also require a second century date (cf. E. Yamauchi, “The Apocalypse of Adam, Mithraism, and Pre-Christian Gnosticism,” Iranica Antiqua, forthcoming). W. Beltz and H.-M. Schenke would date the work even later to the third century (cf. also P. Perkins, “The Genre and Function of the Apocalypse of Adam,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 39, 1977, 382–95).

3. The Paraphrase of Shem. F. Wisse, the translator, states: “The tractate proclaims a redeemer whose features agree with those features of New Testament Christology which may very well be pre-Christian in origin” (p. 308).

The savior is a figure called Derdekeas, whom Wisse believes is a non-Christian and a pre-Christian redeemer. Other scholars, however, would discern the figure of Christ. The passage that describes the baptism of Derdekeas seems certainly to be based upon the baptism of Jesus: “Then I shall come from the demon down to the water. And whirlpools of water and flames of fire will rise up against me. Then I shall come up from the water, having put on the light of Faith and unquenchable fire, in order that through my help the power of the Spirit may cross, she who has been cast in the world by the winds and the demons and the stars” (p. 322).

One of the most striking passages in The Paraphrase of Shem is a harsh attack against baptism. But against whom is the polemic directed? Wisse interprets this as an attack against the baptism of some pre-Christian sect. Others suggest that what is being opposed is the baptism of John the Baptist. Plausible is J.-M. Sevrin’s view that the baptism of the Elchasaites is involved. My own suggestion is that it is an attack against the baptism of a worldly church in view of the evils criticized in the passage that follows. The passage is similar to the Gnostic Heracleon’s polemic against the Church’s baptism, which he regarded as merely a “somatic” act performed on the body.

4. The Thunder. This is a unique document in which the High God (or Sophia?) expresses Itself in all kinds of paradoxes and contradictions.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whor* and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.

I am the mother and the daughter.

G. Quispel has recently hailed The Thunder as evidence of pre-Christian Gnosticism (cf. “Jewish Gnosis and Mandaean Gnosticism,” in Les Textes de Nag Hammadi, ed. J.-E. Menard, E. J. Brill, 1975, pp. 82–122). His arguments are based on far flung parallels between the goddess-prostitute Ishtar and fallen Sophia (Wisdom). But he builds too grandiose an edifice on the narrow foundation of the one phrase, “I am the whor* and the holy one.” The significance of the passage does not lie in any isolated phrase but in the overall concept of antinomy.

Other scholars have seen in the various paradoxes the expression of antinomianism, the view that the Gnostic is superior to all traditional norms and values. If this is correct, this would be the only antinomian text in an otherwise ascetic collection. A further suggestion by B. Pearson to associate this with the antinomianism of Simon Magus is speculative inasmuch as the patristic accounts of Simon are held suspect by most scholars.

As to whether The Thunder is a witness of pre-Christian Gnosticism or a late philosophical abstraction, the latter analysis is deemed the correct one by the Berlin scholars who have translated the work (cf. Berliner Arbeitskreis für koptischgnostische Schriften, Gnosis und Neues Testament, ed. K.-W. Tröger, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. 1973, p. 47).

5. The Three Steles of Seth. This is a Sethian liturgical text “without a clearly Christian overlay on the Jewish point of departure” (p. 8). On the one hand, there is a reference to Barbelo, a Gnostic figure, and on the other hand, there is no opposition between the supreme God and a creator.

Robinson wishes to use this text to argue that there was an independent Sethian Gnostic tradition that may presumably have been prior to Christianity as The Three Steles of Seth betray no influence of Christianity.

But the affinities of this text with the Neoplatonism developed by Plotinus (A.D. 205–270) make it quite plain that it must date to the third century A.D. In other words, this merely demonstrates that a text may be non-Christian in character and yet be post-Christian in date.

Journalistic Misrepresentation And Wishful Thinking

The Nag Hammadi texts are indeed a sensational discovery. At the same time there is a danger that their implications may be sensationalized beyond bounds. Let me give an example. John Dart, an able journalist, has interviewed many of the scholars working on the texts. He presents a fascinating account of their work in his book, which is, however, one-sided and which leaves some misleading impressions. Speaking of The Testimony of Truth, he quotes Birger Pearson as saying: “‘It is a gnostic midrash utilizing Jewish traditions. At the same time it is very simple and undeveloped, evidently a piece of “primitive” Gnosticism.’ As to its date and place of composition, Pearson ventured a guess; the first century B.C. in Palestine or Syria” (The Laughing Savior, Harper & Row, 1976, p. 64). One is left with the impression that here is a Nag Hammadi document that gives us evidence of pre-Christian Gnosticism.

Imagine the reader’s surprise when he turns to read the introduction to the tractate by B. Pearson in The Nag Hammadi Library: “The Testimony of Truth is a Christian Gnostic tractate with homiletical and polemical characteristics.… While no definite conclusion can be drawn concerning authorship, two possibilities have been tentatively suggested: Julius Cassianus (about 190 C.E. [Common Era, i.e. A.D.] and Hierakas of Leontopolis [about 300 C.E.])” (p. 406). In other words, The Testimony of Truth is quite clearly a post-Christian document. What Pearson meant and what Dart did not understand was that he believed that there was a pre-Christian Jewish Gnostic document underlying the present text.

But what makes Pearson believe that such a document existed at such an early date? Numerous parallels to Jewish Haggadic traditions, he replies. But almost all of these rabbinic comments or midrashim that he cites are patently from the second century A.D. and later. To hold that these go back to the pre-Christian era must be proved and not assumed.

On what ultimate basis does Pearson then establish his dating? It is a “guess.”

Although we must respect the scholarship and the opinions of men like Birger Pearson and James Robinson, we must not simply adopt their judgments without examining the Nag Hammadi texts themselves and without giving a hearing to other scholars who may differ with them. After analyzing all of the major texts which have been adduced to prove a pre-Christian Gnosticism, I remain unconvinced.

The eleventh conference of the bishops of the worldwide Anglican (Episcopal) Church concluded on August 13. The first (1867) was attended by 76 bishops, but this one brought 440 together plus 25 observers from other churches and 20 consultants of whom I had the privilege of being one.

This decennial assemblage of bishops is called the Lambeth Conference because the earliest conferences were held at Lambeth Palace, the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But this year for the first time the conference was held out of London, at the University of Kent, overlooking Canterbury Cathedral in which Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170. For the first time too the conference has been residential, permitting three weeks of communal living.

The Anglican Communion has recently been described by Edward Norman, Dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge, as “that ecclesiastical ghost of the deceased British Empire.” It is a rather harsh judgment, however. For there are hardly any “colonial bishops” left. Instead, the twenty-five “provinces” into which this church of some 65 million Anglicans is divided are all autonomous, with an almost entirely indigenous leadership. Approximately one-third of the bishops who converged on Canterbury last month came from the Third World, about 150 from Africa, and 50 from Asia. We specially rejoiced that 20 bishops came from Uganda. President Amin flew them out in a special plane, with a large security escort and an invitation to the Archbishop to hold the next Lambeth Conference in Uganda.

It was typical of Donald Coggan, the president of the conference, being the man of God that he is, to emphasize that the overriding purpose was “prayer and waiting upon God.” In his sermon during the opening service in Canterbury Cathedral he issued a mild rebuke to his brother bishops that “we have stopped listening to God,” and went on to describe his ideal for a bishop as “one who is open to the wind of the Spirit, warmed by the fire of the Spirit, on the look-out for the surprises of the Spirit.” So each day’s program began before breakfast with a service according to the liturgy of one of the provinces and after breakfast with a devotional lecture.

Only then did we turn to the day’s business, either in plenary sessions or divided into three sections or subdivided into thirty-three groups. These studied topics as varied as mission and ministry, politics, violence, conservation, social ethics, technology, the family, and ecumenical relations. Some people have mistakenly tried to draw an analogy between Vatican II and Lambeth XI, and in consequence their expectations have not been fulfilled. For the Lambeth Conference is a consultative, not a legislative body. Its only authority is moral and persuasive.

One of the thornie*st issues before the conference was that of women priests (i.e. presbyters). On the one hand 150 women have already been ordained to the presbyterate (in Hong Kong, U.S.A., Canada, and New Zealand), and half the member churches have agreed to it in principle. On the other, the ordination of women has caused deep division, including a small schism in the American Episcopal Church, while both Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches had plainly warned that an affirmative vote would jeopardize the continuance of Anglican talks with them. How, they asked, could one church, acting unilaterally, overthrow a universal tradition that had been unbroken for 1,900 years? In the end a confessedly compromise resolution was passed, securing 316 votes, with only 37 against and 17 abstaining. In it the conference recognizes the autonomy of its member churches, and encourages them to continue in communion and dialogue with each other; declares its “acceptance” both of those member churches that now ordain women and of those that do not; and emphasizes for the benefit of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches that this “holding together of diversity within a unity of faith and worship is part of the Anglican heritage.” Many people were disappointed by the lack of theological debate. It was said that the arguments on both sides had by now been well rehearsed. But Archbishop Marcus Loane of Sydney reminded the bishops that the 1958 Lambeth Conference had declared the arguments “inconclusive,” and that in his conviction they had still not been resolved. He pleaded with the conference not to dismiss the theological issues as if they were of no account. But his warning, and that of those who counseled a five-year moratorium, went unheeded.

Although a whole day was set aside for debate on this important question, I am glad to say that the bishops did not spend all their time on domestic matters. For the overall topic was “Today’s Church and Today’s World.” When the conference first convened, Lady Jackson (alias Barbara Ward) and the Reverend Professor Charles Elliott delivered notable lectures on conservation and economics. In response, the bishops approved a statement that challenges many modern assumptions and values. They plead for a new kind of society in which technology becomes the servant of the people, the economy is based on stewardship rather than waste, changed attitudes toward work and leisure are developed, the necessity of a redistribution of wealth and trade is faced, and progressive world disarmament is achieved. They passed another resolution on “war and violence,” and a third on “human rights and dignity,” which was originally put forward by some of the African bishops but was later universalized.

I was disappointed that comparatively little was said about mission and evangelism. True, one group’s report has a full statement about the relations between worship and mission, about evangelistic witnessing (“the spontaneous overflow of hearts filled with Christ”), about the urgent need for cross-cultural missionaries (“there are still millions of people in the world who have never heard of Jesus Christ or had an adequate opportunity to respond to him”), about social action, and about the need for the church to be radically renewed, since “mission without renewal is hypocrisy.” But the resolutions themselves, which alone carry the authority of the whole conference, almost ignore the subject. Bishop Festo Kivengere proposed an amendment to a resolution on dialogue, stating that “dialogue can never be a substitute for proclamation,” and calling on member churches “to respond with greater obedience to our Lord’s unfulfilled commission.” But it was narrowly defeated. Strange. I cannot believe that Anglican bishops have now washed their hands of evangelism; it is more charitable to guess that they had not fully understood the purport of Bishop Festo’s amendment.

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

The work of the French philosopher, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), was the fruit of two lifetimes, his own and his wife Raïssa’s, who was herself a poet. To their Roman Catholic conversion during their university years they brought the heady combination of his French Protestant background and her Russian emigré status. Left adrift by the fashionable fin de siècle relativism, these two intense students met one day in the Jardin des Plantes to make a pact that if they had not found a “meaning for the word ‘truth’” within a year, they would put an end to both their lives (Julie Kernan, Our Friend, Jacques Maritain, Doubleday, 1975, p. 25).

Fortunately, during that year they found some answers, not just in the lectures of the philosopher Bergson, but also in the novels of Leon Bloy and the poetry of Charles Péguy. Drawn into Bloy’s fervent circle of believers, the Maritains formed lifelong friendships with Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Claudel, and Jean Cocteau.

In the midst of such artistic ferment, Maritain, who originally intended to become a biologist, felt the need to sort out and clarify definitions of art and beauty, thus providing a means of escape for those minds of his period bogged down in what he called “sensual slush.” He wrote Art and Scholasticism in 1930 to set to rights the “immense intellectual disorder inherited from the nineteenth century” and to find “once more the spiritual conditions of honest work” (Scribners, 1962, p. 4).

Despite its ostensibly libertine attitude, Maritain found the modern world secretly inimical to art. “And now the modern world,” says Maritain, sounding much like his pessimistic Protestant counterpart, Jacques Ellul, “which had promised the artist everything, soon will scarcely leave him the bare means of subsistence. Founded on the two unnatural principles of the fecundity of money and the finality of the useful, multiplying needs and servitude without the possibility of there ever being a limit, destroying the leisure of the soul … and imposing on man the panting of the machine and the accelerated movement of matter, the system of nothing but the earth is imprinting on human activity a truly inhuman mode and a diabolical direction, for the final end of all this frenzy is to prevent man from resembling God …” (pp. 36–7).

Indeed, though Maritain was struck with the label of humanism, a term out of favor in evangelical circles today, the philosopher himself preferred the more precise term personalism: “the criterion by which all policies are judged is that of the worth of the human person.” He insists that his is “the humanism of the Incarnation, whereby the creature should be truly respected in his connection with God and because he is totally dependent on him” (True Humanism, Scribners, 1938, p. 65). Because God became man in Jesus Christ we can then take the making and doing of man with the highest seriousness instead of seeing them as the antics of clever animals.

Having established the awesome importance of human activity. Maritain then brings to bear the great weight of the Western world’s most austere philosophical system, medieval scholasticism, upon this uniquely human act of art. First of all, art is practical; it produces: “wherever we find art we find some productive operation to be contrived, some work to be made” (Art and Scholasticism, p. 6). Thinking beautiful thoughts is not art. The ability to appreciate a spectacular sunset is no indication of creative capacities. Art is first of all work, work that results in some tangible or visible or audible product.

But not all work is art. Although all work can and should be dedicated to God, as Paul advised the Colossians, art is work of a special kind. It is work that results in a work, and whose undeviating concern is the good of the work itself, not its producer. The architecture of the European cathedrals was not in the slightest concerned with the health and welfare of the stone masons or the wood-carvers who labored long and dangerously to build them. Art has a life of its own, a powerful and easily perverted life, but one that must necessarily be kept free from the prudential concerns of the artist. Charles Dickens knew this frightening fact when he wrote “I hold my inventive faculty on the stern condition that it must master my whole life, often have complete possession of me, make its own demands upon me and sometimes for months together put everything else away from me” (Wolf Mankowitz, Dickens of London, Macmillan, 1976, p. 245).

This powerful compulsion to create does not possess everyone equally, however, a fact that the insistent egalitarianism of the modern world resents. Therefore, in the place of true art, we seek to substitute method, “an ensemble of formulas and processes that work of themselves and serve the mind as orthopedic and mechanical armature.” Thus drama degenerates into the formula of TV situation comedy and the methodical violence of calculated cops and robbers. Today, Maritain observes, “it cannot be admitted that access to the highest activities depend on a virtue that some possess and others do not; consequently beautiful things must be made easy” (Art and Scholasticism, p. 40).

With the introduction of beauty into the issue, we come upon another difficult question, one that plagues us today, so assaulted as we are by works whose object seems to be horror rather than beauty. What is the relationship of art to beauty anyway? Maritain uses Aquinas’s deceptively simple definition of the beautiful—“that which, being seen, pleases” (p. 23). But if the fine arts are meant to produce works that delight the spirit by delighting the senses, why is there so much “ugly art” in the modern world? Or if not downright ugly, then totally incomprehensible. The answer is the artist’s revenge.

As an artist breathes in the essentials of our age, primarily those having to do with the absence of values, of incoherence and meaninglessness, he exhales a blast of rage back upon it. For his vocation demands balance, harmony, proportion, integrity in his works. Yet these are the very qualities denied him by his environment. So he launches a bitter attack upon his world through his art and then often lapses into silence. Unless, of course, the artist finds his very aggressiveness profitable, in which case he joins his enemy by cashing in on his own rage.

“The dismissal of beauty,” Maritain warns us, “is quite a dangerous thing—if not for art, which cannot in reality divorce beauty, at least for humanity. For as Thomas Aquinas puts it, man cannot live without delectation, and when the spiritual delectations are lacking, he passes to the carnal ones” (Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Meridian Books, 1955, p. 146).

Unfortunately, Christians by and large have responded to this frustrated rage in the same manner as the secular world. They have gone off in a huff to console themselves with the merely pretty and decorative. They choose mass-produced paintings that will match the color of their drapes, and stick up cute aphorisms on the kitchen wall, not because these are works well done but because they are blandly inoffensive. Having been assaulted by at least two generations of enraged artists, they feel perfectly justified in demanding nothing more than amiable mediocrity in art.

That sort of response is of course on a personal level. On a corporate level, Christians have felt somewhat uneasy with this complaisant, harmless sort of art. Clinging desperately to values considered archaic or benighted by their surrounding culture, the notion still gnaws at them that there should be some sort of identifiably “Christian art.”

Maritain too asserts that there is indeed a “Christian art,” but certainly not in the sense that one speaks of Byzantine or Gothic art. Rather it is “the art of redeemed humanity.… Everything belongs to it, the sacred as well as the profane. It is at home wherever the ingenuity and the joy of man extend. Symphony or ballet, film or novel, landscape or still-life, puppet-show libretto or opera, it can just as well appear in any of these as in stained-glass windows and statues of the churches.… If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to ‘make Christian’” (Art and Scholasticism, p. 65).

The good work. The work well made. That is Maritain’s proposed aesthetic foundation upon which all else may be built. No moralizing need intrude upon it simply because there is no good that opposes God. The craftsman’s works, those that are for some useful purpose, are bound not only to be well made but also to serve their purpose well. But the artist’s works are free to be purposefully useless, made only for play and delight.

Such aesthetic undergirding allows us to feel a compassion for artists, struggling unsheltered by grace against the same buffeting of the spirit that we are. It gives us insight into the suicides, the alcoholism, the addictions, and all other wounds artists suffer in our society. It frees us from the demands that art drudge away at teaching us a lesson. It frees us from being bullied into accepting inadequate artistic criteria of secular critics. It frees us from meekly submitting to shoddy work that trades upon its Christian context.

But it also makes a demand on Christians, and not merely the artists among us. It demands that we give serious attention to the art, both secular and sacred, that surrounds us. The Protestant tradition, for centuries chary of the intoxicating errors of art and the potential seductiveness of beauty, must now acknowledge the abundance of the grace that redeems all appropriately human activity. Otherwise, as Maritain concludes, “every time he finds in a Christian environment a contempt for intelligence or art, that is to say, for truth and beauty, which are divine names, we may be sure the devil scores a point” (p. 220).

Virginia Stem Owens practices the art of fine writing from her home in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

The arab-israeli conflict affects at least three groups of Palestinians: the refugees, the inhabitants of the West Bank, and the Israeli citizens. Any peace solution must take into consideration these three different groups, paying special attention to their particular problems. The refugees were initially some 700,000 persons who left their families, possessions, and homes in 1948 to flee for safety. It is customary to blame the Arab leaders of 1948 for the displacement of this group, though the conclusions of John Davis, the former Commission-General of UNRWA, have shown that Israel was also responsible for the mass Arab exodus during the fighting. At the present both Arabs and Israel are guilty for the way they have treated the Palestinian refugees. The Arab countries have not done enough to improve the living conditions and utter misery in the camps or to help the Palestinians blend with the rest of the population. Israel is wrong in not making greater efforts for the repatriation or compensation of a group that lost everything. Any positive solutions coming from Arab-Israeli negotiations must allow this group to determine its own destiny and speak for itself, whether it desires to meld with the rest of the Arabs, return to Israel as full citizens, or become a separate political entity in the Middle East. The Palestinians must be able to participate in negotiations, or else there can be no guarantee that they will abide by the terms acceptable to Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

The inhabitants of the West Bank are better off than the refugees, but they do face great injustices. Since they are not citizens of Israel, they have no right to vote and have no power to change the system. They must, however, pay high taxes to Israel and submit to regulations they did not legislate. Theirs is a classic example of taxation without representation. Americans who remember their colonial history should appreciate the hostilities of this group. To blame it for not accepting the yoke of Israel is like blaming the French resistance for opposing the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Arabs who live in Israel and have political rights are at best second-class citizens. This can be seen all the way from petty harassment at military check points to the number of Arab representatives serving in the Knesset. If the government wants to gain the allegiance of this segment of its population, then it should stop these foolish acts of discrimination and treat Arabs as full citizens with equal protection under the law.

The Palestinians, as a whole, are puzzled by two more things. First, they feel that they are being punished for what Nazi Germany did to the Jews. The world seems to be compensating the Jews for the evils of the Holocaust at the expense of the Arabs. The innocent party is paying for the guilt of Hitler’s Germany. Second, it is ironic that the Jews who experienced such discrimination and homelessness should turn against the Arabs and treat them unjustly. By reverting to such measures the Jewish people are in effect endorsing the very principles that their own persecutors used against them.

The Church must stop its indiscriminate support for Israel. The Arabs are wrong on some issues, but so is Israel. God demands that governments act justly, uphold his standards, walk humbly before him, and recognize his sovereignty. Some of the fiercest denunciations of social injustice, corruption, and immorality come from Amos, Micah, and Jeremiah. The prophets spoke boldly against the evils of their times, especially when the guilty party was their own government.

The Church must be careful not to confuse its political ideas with the teaching of the Scripture. Zionism is a human ideology that even many atheist Jews hold. God may indeed use the present state of Israel, but he does not have to. It is quite possible that he may allow it to perish and then replace it with another government. He is not limited by our theological charts and speculations; history lies in his hands, not ours.

The Church must take the great commission seriously. There are some one hundred million Arabs who need the Gospel. The message of the cross should not be clouded by political favoritism and prejudice. Such errors abound in history. At one time the “church” sent crusaders, who killed innocent people and ravaged the country, to the Middle East. At other times the “church” appeared as the champion of colonial imperialism in Africa. We cannot afford to repeat these mistakes. By identifying itself too closely with Zionism without denouncing the evils on both sides, the Church will unnecessarily alienate millions of Arabs. It cannot afford to evangelize the Jews at the cost of not reaching the Arabs.—SAMIR MASSOUH, instructor in Old Testament, Trinity seminary, Deerfield. Illinois.

The modern Arab-Israeli conflict is the story of a people who have lived peacefully in their own homes and in their own lands for generations. Then came Jewish invaders from across the seas. They thrust the Moslem and Christian inhabitants out of their own homes, vineyards, orchards, and fields, and seized them for themselves.

The Jewish claim to Palestine is falsely based on the ancient biblical promise to Abraham recorded in the book of Genesis. They interpret the “seed of Abraham” as referring only to those who identify themselves as Jewish in religion. But the Bible does not ever say that Abraham’s promise was exclusively limited to the Jews. In the context of the Bible, the words “to thy seed” include Arabs, who claim descent from Abraham through his son Ishmael. God’s promise to Abraham was made at the circumcision of Ishmael, which preceded the birth of Isaac. Ishmael was the father of a large number of Arab tribes and, in addition, Abraham also became the father of many more Arabian tribes through his concubine Keturah. Sarah’s rejection of Ishmael (Gen. 21:10–12) does not negate the clear statement of the account “and also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation, because he is thy seed.”

The promise made to the seed of Abraham, moreover, was not unconditional, but clearly revokable as Deuteronomy 28 states. The promises made to the patriarch could be and ultimately have been annulled by national apostacy. This is also in accord with what Christians hold on the basis of their New Testament. The Christian Paul argued that the promises of the Old Testament prophets apply to all mankind. More specifically, he uses such terms as “the Israel of God” to refer to the ideal Christian church and not to physical Jews. Even Gentiles, according to Paul, by accepting Christ could become heir to the promises made to Israel (Gal. 6:15, 16).

Not only are Jews wrongly claiming any exclusive right to the promises made to all Abraham’s seed, religious Jews today and especially contemporary Zionists are not physical descendents from Abraham’s stock. The vast majority of Jews are converts from other stock. There are black Jews, blond Jews, and blue-eyed Jews. The current political leaders in Israel and Jewish immigrants from Russia, Central America, and the United States are mostly of Khazar descent—Caucasian Russians converted to Judaism in the eighth century by Byzantine Jews.

Zionist claims to the land of Palestine, therefore, cannot be based on physical descent or ancient promises. They have no basis in century-long possession of the land. In fact, their sole claim to the land is the right of invasion and conquest.

Contrary to what Zionists would have the world believe, the “miracle” of the restoration of Israel is not to be defended as the sovereign will of God. Rather, Zionists have perpetrated an international crime against the Palestinian people, and it is tragic nonsense to speak of Jews as returning to their “homeland.” They are not “going home”; they are taking a homeland from the Palestinian Arabs, Moslems, Christians, and Jews who for centuries have dwelt in their own land.—GEORGE SHAMA, counselor, Jordan Mission to the United Nations, New York, New York.