Page 5899 – Christianity Today (2024)

YOU DON’T MISS THE JANITOR TILL THE GARBAGE PILES UP

“Come in, gentlemen. How may we of Aardvark Investigating Service help you? My name is Jones. I’m president of our little company. We’re not often privileged to serve men of the cloth. Our clientele usually runs to a seamier sort, if you’ll pardon the pun. Oh, well, how may we help you?”

“Can we be absolutely certain that what we say will be held in complete confidence?”

“Reverend, discretion is our byword. You can trust Aardvark. In fifteen years we have never revealed a client’s name or problem.”

“Very well, then let me introduce myself. I’m Dr. Andrews and this is my assistant, the Reverend Mr. Brown. Our problem is a matter of some delicacy: our superior has disappeared.” “Good heavens, if your grace will pardon the expression, this does sound serious! When did you last see the subject?”

“Well … it’s a little embarrassing … but … we’re not exactly sure. You see, he had become sort of an honorary figure in our operation without much real responsibility. We got so we didn’t notice him. Sort of like the janitor. You don’t notice him till he’s gone and the garbage starts piling up—that is to say, I’m not making a comparison, just speaking figuratively.”

“I understand perfectly, your eminence. Perhaps as a start you could tell me something about him personally. His habits, eccentricities.”

“He’s a very loving, generous person. Prodigally generous, you might say. You knew him well, Father Brown; can you think of other characteristics?”

“Well, he always showed an affinity for the poor. Perhaps he’s gone into social work.”

“Tell me, reverend, do you have any idea of where he may be? Did he ever speak of leaving?”

“Some of the things he said did seem to suggest he might leave the institutional church. And we have heard that he may be working among the Pentecostals or in some other small group. But we haven’t been able to verify this.”

“Your holiness, I can see this is going to be one of the most challenging cases Aardvark has ever undertaken. I’m going to put my two top men on it right away. You’ll have the bishop back in no time at all.”

“Bishop! Who’s talking about the bishop?”

EUTYCHUS V

OBJECTIVE AND HONEST

Having just reviewed a number of issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, I was impressed with the accurate and objectively favorable coverage on Billy Graham—seen specifically for the Chicago and Oakland Crusades (News, “Graham Crusade: Satanists Lose to Jesus Power,” July 2, and “Northern California Crusade: Decisive Hour for 21,000,” Aug. 27). With so many so-called “evangelicals” attacking Graham for one type of evil or another, it is refreshing to see him reviewed honestly.

Of all times, Christians today need to be unified in their support of the outgoing Gospel; there is no excuse for “intrabody” strife over ideological methodology and petty issues. The Church of Jesus Christ has as its duty the prayer, moral, and financial support of this unique evangelist; for Dr. Graham is more than just an evangelist—he is a modern apostle and prophet of God.

Deerfield, Ill.

MOTIVATING SANITY

Just a brief word of hearty commendation on Robert Larson’s excellent article, “China: Open Door to What?” (Aug. 27). How often wishful thinking takes the place of sane judgment. Larson’s exhortation to motivation in Christian missions is very well taken. It is our opinion that the Holy Spirit is quietly doing far more behind the Bamboo Curtain now than many thoughtless zealots might accomplish should the door even open now.… Thank you for the excellent work you are doing. Escondido, Calif.

CONFESSING CANDOR

I have just returned from three weeks out of state to find myself the recipient of your very kind remarks in the editorial “God-Talk Is News” (Sept. 10).

You do me great honor in writing of me along with such distinguished and veteran religion writers as Lou Cassels and George Cornell, both of whose friendship I cherish.

The same applies to your able and thoroughly congenial news editor, Russ Chandler, who, with Dick Ostling, has in my opinion made your news coverage outstanding, and certainly far better than a certain Christian publication in Chicago.

Sometimes, I must confess, your editorial policy has incited me to refer to you as “Christianity Yesterday,” and I once addressed a letter to Russ Chandler with this needle on the envelope. He responded with admirable good cheer by writing “Christianity Yesterday … Today … Tomorrow … And Forever.” Touché!

I would be guilty of less than the candor which you kindly attribute to me in your editorial if I did not mention one aspect of my reporting of the Billy Graham Crusade in Oakland: his prediction that those not listed in the Book of Life will be cast into the Lake of Fire.

Whereas this may be mentioned in Scripture (along with a number of other practices which most Christians would reject today) I carefully designated as my editorial interjection, in this news report, that: “This listener found it inordinately difficult to imagine the warmly congenial Graham (or God) being capable of hurling even the most reprobate sinner into a Lake of Fire.”

As for Mrs. Billy Graham, whom I met for the first time and can affirm that none of the photographs do credit to her beauty, I wonder why Billy is so strongly concerned with devils when he has such an angel at home in Montreat?

For example, when I interviewed Mrs. Graham after her arrival midway through the crusade, I opened with the following query:

“Mrs. Graham; your husband told 34,000 people last night that he had committed adultery—by looking upon a woman with lust. That would have been my lead, but my city desk wanted the identity of the woman!”

A loud guffaw from Billy.

With a smile of sufficient radiance to melt casehardened steel, his lovely spouse replied:

“We never tell house secrets! Besides, don’t you think there is an important difference between window shopping and shoplifting?”

I have not always agreed with Billy Graham. But I will here affirm that he married gloriously.

(REV). LESTER KINSOLVING

National Newspaper Syndicate

San Francisco, Calif.

ONLY A FIGMENT

If it takes a “Jesus with a red heart painted on his forehead, … dressed in striped pants, a Superman shirt, and sneakers resplendent with pompons” (“Box-Office Religion,” Aug. 27) to “reach today’s kids with the Gospel and to open them up to the claims of Jesus Christ,” then it is indeed true that the Bible is irrelevant for our day.

This sacrilegious caricature of our Saviour God is not the Christ of the Bible, but is rather the figment of carnal imagination.

West New York, N. J.

Surely you must not have been aware of the true nature of the Broadway plays you described with approval. “Godspell could well be one of the best ways to reach today’s kids with the Gospel and to open them up to the claims of Jesus Christ.” Really? By depicting Jesus and the apostles as clowns? By having them on all fours bleating and baaing like sheep? What’s happened to CHRISTIANITY TODAY?

Roscoe, N. Y.

PRAISING JESUS AND HIS MOVEMENT

I was happy to see the article by Donald M. Williams, “Close-up of the Jesus People” (Aug. 27). I have never even been to the West Coast, but have followed reports of the Jesus movement fanatically and with scrutiny. After reading so many self-righteous slams on what appears to be the Spirit’s greatest foothold in this century, I was refreshed to see this appear in your magazine.

Maybe, just maybe, some of the establishment-type churchgoers will be challenged to live up to their responsibility to the Jesus culture, even if their own social/cultural norms do not coincide.

Bel Ridge, Mo.

WHO’S HELPING WHOM?

I have just read Cheryl A. Forbes’s article Thou Shalt Not Copy, Right? (Sept. 10). I have worked with a music and publishing company, and I know some of the problems aired in this article. However, I know some other things, too. I know that the authors and publishers of sacred music have a restricted field of sale, generally. The churches and church members, gospel singers, and other musical groups who use sacred music constitute the major source of income for music publishers. On the contrary, secular writers and publishers find a much wider sales outlet which includes both secular and religious sources.

If the publishers want to sue the infringers, then let them run the risk of biting the hand that feeds them. Let’s be brutally frank about a gospel fact. The churches can do without the song writers and go strictly with the preached word. But the song writers and publishers will find a hard go of it without the churches, if it comes to that. In brief, the churches, to whatever extent they use music, are doing the composers and publishers a much bigger favor than the composers and publishers are doing the church. It is rather that the composers and publishers are beginning to feel just a little exclusive, superior, and judgmental about the only folks who can keep them in business, in the religious business. If they should choose to depart and go in the secular business, then that is on their conscience.

I am not pleading for the right to copy. We have done very little of it, then only of necessity, and have chosen the path through the years of buying the books, whatever the cost. We use Singspiration and John Peterson music more than any other, but if Mr. Raisley and Mr. Peterson want to be hardnosed about it, then we can stick to the church hymnal at less than a penny a song.

Further, church folks are very generous in recommending music to others. If the composers and the publishers had to pay for this kind of very effective advertising and promotion, they would not be able to afford the price.

Goshen, Ind.

ON GRACE

Just couldn’t let the day end without writing to say thank you for L. Nelson Bell’s column entitled “Amazing Grace” (A Layman and His Faith, Sept. 10). You can tell he is a man that truly has and lives the “grace of God.”

Cross View Lutheran Church

Edina, Minn.

IN PURSUIT OF TRUTH

I must apologize for writing this letter in response to your editorial “No Private Affair” (Aug. 27) at such a late date. Having returned from that most hospitable land in late August, it has taken me some time to recover from my Grecian holiday and return to the preoccupation of being an ecumenist.…

It was not at all my intention to plead that Orthodox Christians be “left alone” by conservative evangelicals or anyone else. Precisely the opposite. More exchange of views, more understanding, more collaborations, more charity—this is what I want also. This was said plainly in my letter. Therefore, I can only agree fully with your sentiments as expressed in the latter half of the editorial in question.

Perhaps where you misunderstood me is in my reaction to the particular issue which was addressed, that is, the divisive activities of people like Mr. Spiros Zodhiates. Unless one is prepared to admit that the Greek people and the Greek Orthodox Church are not Christian and therefore stand in need of a thoroughgoing evangelization, then Zodhiates’s mission stands under the kind of criticism I have in my letter. In my opinion, his mission to the Greeks is an uncharitable and ecumenically destructive act of proselytism which prevents the true interchange of ideas and any mutual benefit which the various Christian traditions may have upon one another. Openness to authentic dialogue and the pursuit of truth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit is where we must begin, not through the tactics of Zodhiates or for that matter those of triumphalist Orthodox Christians.

Director

Interchurch Office

Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America

New York, N. Y.

In every generation Christologists have sought to keep the Christ of the Gospels from being displaced by philosophically generated substitutes. One such alien Christ has arisen out of existentialist fiction, in a form that the four Evangelists would not have recognized. Since the vastly influential symbolism of the existential imagination is “anti-Christ,” Christian apologetics must offer a persuasive refutation. Let us seek to counter that existential symbolism by using three of its favorite terms: freedom, being, and reason.

Freedom And The Existentialist Christ

The disturbing thing about one prominent existentialist view of the freedom of man is its insistence that freedom can be realized only in the “death of God.” The “death of God” as a theological event in the teachings of the Christian atheists has been short-lived and only vaguely influential. But in philosophy since Nietzsche, the death of God has been considered a valid philosophical position and, oddly enough, one whose acceptance grants man freedom. Thomas Altizer may not have spoken for very many theologians but he did speak for a host of existentialists when he wrote: “Yet the ‘good news’ of the death of God can liberate us from our dread of an alien beyond” (The Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 145).

The creators of existentialist fiction have tended to see man as free only when he is free from the necessity of God. Consider the dialogue between Zeus and Orestes, who (as the redeemer of Argos) approximates a Christ figure himself, in Sartre’s The Flies:

ZEUS:Impudent spawn! So I am not your king. Who then made you?

ORESTES: YOU.But you blundered; you should not have made me free.

ZEUS:I gave you freedom that you might serve me.

ORESTES:Perhaps. But now it has turned against its giver [No Exit and Three Other Plays, 1948, p. 120].

Orestes can be free only when he is free of Zeus. When Orestes threatens to become an evangelist and publish his “good news” that Zeus (God) is no longer necessary, Zeus remarks:

Poor People! Your gift to them will be a sad one: of loneliness and shame. You will tear from their eyes the veils I had laid upon them, and they will see their lives as they are, foul and futile, a barren boon [p. 123].

Thus the freedom given to man in the death of God is not a beautiful and wondrous freedom. Rather it is an awesome and fearful freedom for which man must bear all the responsibility.

This same view of man’s freedom in the death of God is influencing many current novelists and dramatists. One reviewer, Andrew Sarris, wrote of the movie Rosemary’s Baby:

The Devil in Rosemary’s Baby is reduced to an unimaginative rapist performing a ridiculous ritual. It could not be otherwise in an age that proclaims that God is dead. Without God, the devil is pure camp, and his followers, fugitives from a Charles Addams Cartoon [Films, 68/69, p. 50].

Rosemary Woodhouse, the heroine, is seen in the book as a psychological captive; she is manipulated by her husband, neighbors, and physician. Her baby, once born, seems not so much the son of Satan as a negative infant Jesus (born in the year one of the new Satanic Age), whose life is threatened by his knife-bearing mother much as the Christ child’s was by Herod’s henchmen. Rosemary herself does not become finally free until she accepts the son of Satan as her own. If this logic does not symbolize the death of God, it certainly does symbolize his dismissal as sovereign.

The dominant error in the view of total freedom without God is the presupposition that in the biblical view freedom is light and easy. Christ taught consistently the awesome responsibility in the autonomy that God has extended to man. Matthew 25:31 ff., for example, illustrates the final fate of those who would not answer with seriousness the responsibility implicit in Christian freedom.

Further, Jesus taught that the path to ultimate human freedom lay through complete self-negation (Luke 9:23). Becoming free requires not the “death of God” but the “death of self.” It is an intriguing paradox in Christian thought that self-denial does not end the Christian’s responsibility but rather increases it. While the Christian does negate himself in entering into discipleship and while he continues to negate himself in his daily walk with Christ (Gal. 2:20), still as an individual he is accountable unto God (Rom. 2:16). Because Christian existence ultimately must face God for approval, it carries with it both temporal and eternal accountabilities far graver than those established in existentialism. Therefore Christologists may confidently bring the full force of Christ’s teaching on freedom against the second-rate freedom of the God-slayers.

Being And The Existentialist Christ

Being as posited by the Christ of existentialist fiction is ever a bleak affair. In Christ’s Address From the World Temple, Sartre has the Christ say:

I have been through the worlds, ascended to the suns and flown along the milky ways, through the wastes of heaven, but there is no God. I have descended as far as existence casts its shadow and looked into the abyss and cried, “Father, where art thou?” But I heard only the eternal tempest which none controls [quoted in Helmut Thielicke, The Silence of God, p. 5].

Then, in such a way that the drama tugs with pity, the dead infants come out from their graves and cry to the Lofty Christ, “Jesus, have we no father?” And the Christ is forced to answer, “We are all orphans, I and you, we have no Father.” Such views of being are indeed bleak.

This same ontology is offered by the 1964 film Parable, in which the Christ figure is a circus clown who goes about with wordless gestures of kindness trying to help other performers. In the end he is beaten lifeless by the ruffians he was trying to help. The film might have been a more adequate conceptualization with the addition of resurrection symbolism. Without this, it can offer only a barren view of essence.

The current rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar presents the Christ symbol as a dream-filled messiah, crushed by an existence that is completely absurd and void. Again, no hint is offered that resurrection followed the sequence and replaced absurdity with ultimate being.

William Blake pointed to the cyclical absurdity of existence in his poem The Mental Traveller, in which the Christ figure suffers symbolically for all who suffer and live:

And if the Babe is born a Boy

He’s given to a Woman Old,

Who nails him down upon a rock,

Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

She binds iron thorns around his head,

She pierces both his hands and feet,

She cuts his heart out at his side

To make it feel both cold and heat

[quoted in Literary Symbolism, ed. by Maurice Beebe, p. 143].

These lines are toward the beginning of the poem; the last two verses suggest that absurdity is cyclical and the ever-present circ*mstance of every man in every generation.

Being in the existentialist imagination is not subject to objectification or defined identity. As The Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, “Existentialists, believing as they do that reality always evades adequate conceptualization, are especially apt to treat ‘being’ as a name, the ‘name,’ in fact, of a realm which we vainly aspire to comprehend” (p. 148). Being thus is a kind of animated blur to existentialists.

Again we can see that the Christ of the existentialists is weak where the Saviour of the Scriptures is strong. Christ offers a fullness of being that can be complete only in himself, being that is characterized by hope and not despair. Christ offered himself as Ultimate Being, which, when contingent with human being, provides for man the qualities of greatness inherent in Christ’s being. One such quality is eternal life (see John 10:28).

If we substitute the word being for the word life in any number of Scripture passages, we can successfully answer the existentialists that being without absurdity is real in Jesus Christ: “This [being] is in the Son” (1 John 5:11). “In him was [being] and that [being] was the light of men” (John 1:4). “For God so loved … that whosoever believeth in him should not perish [eternal absurdity] but have everlasting [being]” (John 3:16). Paul ecstatically affirmed the ultimacy of human being when he proclaimed, “For me to [be] is Christ …” (Phil. 1:21).

The being offered by Christ is made secure by two great concepts: the Being of God the Father and the Resurrection. The Being of God the Father is that original being, complete in and of itself, from which all other being stems. God made his own claim of Ultimate Being when he said, “I am that I am” (Exod. 3:14). This statement is a constant and lays down the certitude of God’s being from everlasting to everlasting. Jesus made the same claim for himself (John 8:58).

In his resurrection, however, being became a laboratory proposition. If Christ had ended with his cross, we would have to concede that the existentialists are right in saying life is absurd and necessarily ends that way. Remember Paul’s admonition to the Thessalonians not to grieve over the dead in the same manner as their pagan peers. This is a firm injunction against any insinuation that Christian life ever ends in absurdity (1 Thess. 4:13). Paul further states in his letter to the Corinthians: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain.… If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. 15:17–19).

The resurrection makes it clear that no life in Christ is absurd, for all life ends in a new kind of being that absurdity cannot threaten. Therefore, let Christologists bring the real Christ against the orphaned model of the existentialists and teach the energized and meaningful ontology of our Saviour.

‘As An Army With Banners’

The hunt:

handlettered

vellum parcht

in Imperial flames,

the written word gave

a flickering,

smoking light/papyrus

scrolls leave

ashes of revelation to darken

the Emperor’s mind.

Burnt words spread

the Word.

Anointed

with Nero’s oil,

the saints

were candles of flesh

but their burning eyes

saw the Beast

cast down into

endless fire & dark.

“These atheists

are foes

of man, god

& state.

Both them & their fool

of a christ.”

Ignatius, Polycarp,

Felicitas, Perpetua,

Blandina, Stephanos,

Petros & Paulos:

blood seeds dropt

in the Roman furrow.

F. EUGENE WARREN

Reason And The Existentialist Christ

Briefly, at least, we must consider the Christ of the Gospels and the issue of reason. The whole field of philosophical existentialism came into being primarily as a reaction against rationalism.

Nietzsche felt that Christ would have found God himself unreasonable had he lived a little longer and reached a greater degree of maturity. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he wrote:

Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and the just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live and love the earth—and laugh also!! Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained my age!

Later in the same work Nietzsche cites the birth of Christ as an absurdity in itself:

‘Twas once—methinks year one of our blessed Lord,

Drunk without wine, the Sybil thus deplored:

“How ill things go!

Decline! Decline! Ne’er sank the world so low!

Rome hath turned harlot and harlot stew,

Rome’s Caesar a beast, and God—hath turned a Jew!”

Zarathustra’s Christ was totally unacceptable on the basis of reason: it was altogether unreasonable that God could or would become a Jew (although because of the anti-Semitism here one wonders if Nietzsche would have found it quite so unreasonable if God had become a German).

It is a strange dichotomy that the existentialists have used reason to demonstrate that faith in Christ is unreasonable, indeed, that reason itself is unreasonable. John 1:1 speaks of the “beginnings” with their logos—Divine, Ultimate Reason. And Jesus claimed in Revelation 22:13 that he was the Alpha and Omega of the human story. Much of what is going on between the Beginning and the End is characterized by an absurdity completely void of reason. But on either end of history stands the logos of God, the Divine Reason, against which the reasoning of the existential fictionalists appears insignificantly shallow.

So we see that freedom, being, and reason in their archetypes belong to the Christ of the Gospels. He is well able to offer meaning and hope to this generation, as he did to those that preceded it. In real freedom, heightened being, and hope, there is always redemption from nothingness and absurdity.

Calvin Miller is pastor of Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska. He received the B.S. degree from Oklahoma Baptist University and the M.Div. from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written four books.

Christians believe that Jesus Christ is incomparable, without a peer, but are often quite ignorant of the lives of great religious leaders with whom he may be compared. On the other hand, secularists, who are often equally ignorant, speak of Christ in the same breath with others without acknowledging any differences. Walter Lippmann in A Preface to Morals remarked, “There is no doubt that in one form or another, Socrates and Buddha, Jesus and St. Paul, Plotinus and Spinoza, taught that the good life is impossible without asceticism.…” Ben Franklin’s advice on humility was, “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”

The Roman emperor Severus Alexander (A.D. 222–35) set up statues of Orpheus and Abraham, Christ and Apollonius, and offered them equal reverence. Mani, the founder of Manichaeism in the third century A.D., taught that just as God had sent Buddha to India, Zoroaster to Persia, and Jesus to the West, God was now sending Mani himself to Babylonia. Many syncretistic sects both here in the United States and in Japan and elsewhere attempt to combine the teachings of various religious leaders.

I. Sources

From a historian’s point of view there are serious disparities in the sources available for reconstructing the lives of, for example, Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, Muhammad, and Jesus. One needs to distinguish sharply between first-hand or nearly contemporary sources and later apocryphal and apologetic materials.

A. Zoroaster (628–551 B.C.)

We do have what appear to be the genuine sayings of Zoroaster in the Gathas of the Avesta. The mass of Zoroastrian texts, however, are in late Pahlavi (ninth century A.D.) recensions. Contemporary Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions betray at best only possible allusions to early Zoroastrianism. There are some Greek and Arabic authors who allude to Zoroaster. The Persian national epic, the Shah Namah by Firdausi, also includes traditions of the prophet.

B. Buddha (567–487 B.C.)

For many centuries Buddha’s teachings were handed down orally. It was in the first century B.C. in Ceylon that his teachings were first set down in writing. The earliest written texts that have been preserved are in Pali, an Indo-Aryan dialect that may or may not be the dialect used by Buddha himself. The Pali canon of the Theravada (the southern) or Hinayana school is known as the Tipitaka or “Three Baskets.” Portions of this collection, such as the Samyutta Nikaya, the Majjhima Nikaya, and the Anguttara Nikaya, may date in origin to a century after Buddha’s death, but other portions originated much later.

The Sanskrit canon of the Mahayana school, which spread to the north to Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, dates at its earliest to the first and second centuries A.D. According to Christmas Humphreys, “the later Sutras of the Mahayana School, though put into the Buddha’s mouth, are clearly the work of minds which lived from five to fifteen hundred years after his passing” (Buddhism, 1955). In these later sources one notes a conspicuous exaggeration of the supernatural elements in Buddha’s life. It is possible that some of the parallels to the life of Christ in these sources may have been borrowed from Christianity.

C. Socrates (469–399 B.C.)

For Socrates we are fortunate in having the accounts of his disciples Plato and Xenophon as well as notices collected by Diogenes Laertius (third century A.D.). One is faced, of course, with the problem of trying to distinguish how much of Plato’s dialogues is really Socratic and how much Platonic. There is also the consideration that the Memorabilia and other writings of both disciplines were written to refute attacks on Socrates by the Sophists.

D. Muhammad (A.D. 570–632)

In the Qur’an we have the authentic sayings of Muhammad, which were at first written down on skins, palm leaves, pottery, and even the shoulder blades of sheep. Shortly after the prophet’s death the caliph Uthman (644–55) collected these sayings in a canonical edition.

Numerous oral traditions known as the Hadith circulated about the words and actions of Muhammad, involving even such details as his practice of regularly brushing his teeth. Some two centuries after the prophet’s death Al-Bukhari sifted through some 600,000 traditions to obtain 7,000 Hadith that he thought were genuine. The first life of Muhammad, based on the Qur’an and the Hadith, is the Sirat ar-Rasul by the Ibn Hisham in the ninth century.

E. Jesus

Apart from the four canonical Gospels, which were written on the basis of eyewitness evidence, we have very little else that is helpful or trustworthy. References to Christ in the rabbinical literature are veiled and hostile. The famous passage in Josephus (Jewish Antiquities XVIII:63–64) is partially authentic but is also filled with Christian interpolations (cf. P. Winter, “Josephus on Jesus,” Journal of Historical Studies, I [1968], 289–302). References in Tacitus, Suetonius, and in the letters of Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan are witnesses to the spread of Christianity.

The mass of apocryphal gospels of the second and third centuries, which attribute all kinds of fanciful miracles to Jesus as a child, are interesting but historically worthless. Some scholars believe there is a remote possibility that the recently discovered Coptic Gnostic texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, may have preserved some genuine sayings of Jesus.

[Note: In the following discussion, no sections on Jesus will be included, since the facts about his life, death, and teachings are well known to the readers.]

Ii. Birth And Family

A. Zoroaster (628–551 B.C.)

Zoroaster or Zarathustra was born into the Spitama clan, evidently in northwestern Iran, though he ministered in northeastern Iran. Greek sources placed him 6,000 years before Plato! According to Arabic sources, Zoroaster lived from 628 to 551 B.C. This would accord with the tradition that he converted Hystaspes, the father of Darius, who reigned from 522–486 B.C. Zoroaster was married three times and had several sons and daughters.

B. Buddha (567–487 B.C.)

According to legend Buddha entered his mother in the form of a white elephant—fully formed! Even in this relatively early Majjhima Nikaya we read that after his mother had given birth to him the infant Buddha stood firmly and proclaimed in a lordly voice: “I am the chief in the world, I am the best in the world, I am the first in the world. This is my last birth.”

Buddha, who is also known as Siddhartha (his given name), Gautama (his family name), and Sakyamuni (sage of the Sakya), was born in Kapilavastu, now in southern Nepal. His sphere of activity was northeast India near the Ganges River. Coming from a wealthy background, Siddhartha was married as a teen-ager. But after his wife had borne him a son, he abandoned his family to become a wandering monk.

C. Socrates (469–399 B.C.)

Socrates was born to Sophroniscus, an artisan-sculptor, and to Phenarete, a midwife. We know nothing about his youth. As Tovar has remarked, “you would think the Master was born an old man, with no childhood.”

His wife was the notorious shrew Xanthippe. Socrates remarked that if he could master Xanthippe, he could easily adapt himself to the rest of the world. Women may feel his wife was somewhat justified in thinking that Socrates should have paid more attention to the material needs of their three sons.

D. Muhammad (A.D. 570–632)

Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 into the Quaraish tribe. His father died before he was born, his mother when he was six. The lad was raised by a grandmother and then an uncle.

As a young man he worked in the caravans of a rich widow, Khadija, whom he later married though she was twenty years his senior. Although Muslims may be married to only four wives, Muhammad himself did not abide by this limit. He had some ten wives and additional concubines. One of his favorites was A’isha, who came to Muhammad when she was but nine, bringing her toys with her. In order to justify his marriage to the beautiful Zainab, who was the wife of his adopted son Zaid, Muhammad received a special revelation (Qur’an 33:37). Despite these many unions the prophet never had a full-grown son, a fact that was to play a role in the struggles for the caliphate or succession.

Iii. Life And Teachings

A. Zoroaster

Zoroaster served as a priest of the polytheistic Iranian religion before he was converted to the sole worship of Ahura Mazda at the age of thirty. He met strong opposition to his new teaching and responded in kind by pronouncing curses upon his opponents. He succeeded in converting some of his kinsmen, and also Hystaspes, a king in eastern Iran. Zoroaster denounced the intoxicating cult of the haoma plant, and exhibited great concern for the care of cattle. For him material prosperity and godliness went hand in hand, a trait that is perhaps reflected today in the remarkable prosperity of the Parsees in Bombay, India.

B. Buddha

After six years of searching for peace through physical asceticism, Siddhartha received enlightenment while sitting under a Bodhi tree and thus became a Buddha or “Enlightened One.” He realized that the way to Nirvana was to eliminate desire not by gratification or mortification but by the Middle Way, which includes the eight-fold path of: (1) right views, (2) aspirations, (3) speech, (4) conduct, (5) livelihood, (6) effort, (7) mindfulness, and (8) contemplation. He succeeded in converting his ascetic companions, then his parents and wife, and eventually King Bimbisara.

Late legendary accounts ascribe all kinds of miracles to Buddha. By washing his hands over the seed of a ripe mango, he caused a tree to spring up fifty hands high. According to another tradition Buddha flew into the sky with fire and water streaming from various parts of his body. He performed these miracles, according to a Jataka account, in order to dispel the doubts of the gods about his mission.

C. Socrates

Socrates was impelled on his life of ever questioning his hearers by a report of the Delphic Oracle, which proclaimed that he was the wisest man in the world. Realizing that this could not be true, he ever sought to find someone who was truly wise. As he interrogated various citizens in the gymnasiums of Athens, he attracted to himself a coterie of well-born young men. Unfortunately some of his disciples, such as Alcibiades and Critias, turned out to be such scoundrels that this factor played a role in the condemnation he suffered. Socratic love, as discussed in Plato’s Symposium, was a type of idealistic pederasty or hom*osexual love in which an older man sought to instruct and inspire a younger man.

D. Muhammad

Muhammad received his initial vision from Allah when he was about forty. He began preaching an uncompromising monotheism that infuriated the pagan Meccans, and he was forced to flee to Medina in the famous Hijra of A.D. 622. His forces battled with various opponents and slaughtered many, including 600 Jews. The prophet did not fight in person and did show mercy to captives after the capture of Mecca.

The followers of Muhammad do not worship him and should not be called Mohammadans; the right term is Muslims, from the word Islam, which connotes their submission to the will of Allah. The five pillars of Islam are: (1) the Shahada or creed, which holds that “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet”; (2) Salat or prayer five times a day, facing Mecca (before the Jews of Medina rejected Muhammad, the direction of prayer was toward Jerusalem); (3) Zakat or alms; (4) fasting during Ramadhan, the ninth lunar month, with a strict fast from food and even drink during daylight; (5) the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca, which involves traveling around the Kaaba building and kissing the black meteorite stone enclosed in its walls—a remnant of paganism that Muhammad retained.

The Qur’an does not claim any miracles on behalf of Muhammad. But to compete with Christianity later traditions ascribed to him numerous wonders: “Butter, a part of which Muhammad had eaten, increased continually.” “A tree moved from its place of its own accord and shaded Muhammad while he slept.” “A wolf spoke and converted a Jew.” According to Francesco Gabrielli, “his character appeared to later tradition and piety as the sum of all the moral virtues …—by dint of adding to the genuine testimonies of the Prophet’s life and character the fantasies of apologetics” (Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam).

Iv. Death

A. Zoroaster

According to Al-Biruni (A.D. 973–1048) Zoroaster was killed by invading Turanians. The Shah Namah (c.A.D. 1000) describes the event:

And all before the Fire the Turkmans slew

And swept that cult away. The Fire, that erst

Zardusht [Zoroaster] had litten, of their blood did die;

Who slew that priest himself I know not.

B. Buddha

In his eightieth year as he traveled northeast of Benares, Buddha became mortally ill after a meal of pork, perhaps from dysentery. According to the Mahaparanibbana Sutta, his last words to a disciple were these:

I have reached my sum of days.… It is only, Ananda, when the Tathagata [a title of Buddha] ceasing to attend to any outward thing, or to experience any sensation, becomes plunged in that devout meditation of heart which is concerned with no material object—it is only then that the body of the Tathagata is at ease.

The Buddha is further reported as saying, “Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye a refuge to yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp.”

After his death Buddha was cremated, and his ashes were distributed among eight cities.

C. Socrates

After the end of the civil war between Athens and Sparta, a political reaction set in that was partly responsible for the trial of Socrates in 399 B.C. In his famous Apology, Socrates also speaks of the lampoons of Aristophanes as being responsible for some of the accusations against him. Socrates eloquently defended himself against the charges of “atheism” and of corrupting the youth of Athens. But the jury voted 281 to 220 against him. Though he had ample opportunity to escape, Socrates chose to remain and calmly drank the poisonous hemlock. According to the Phaedo, his last words were: “I owe a co*ck to Asclepius [the god of healing]; do not forget to pay it.”

D. Muhammad

In 632 Muhammad became ill with violent headaches and a fever. Before he died the prophet exhorted the Arabs to remain united, proclaimed the duties of married couples, and decreed the abolition of usury and the blood feud. When he announced that if he owed anything to anyone that person could claim it, a hush fell on the crowd. One man came forward to claim a few dirhams. Muhammad finally succumbed and was buried in the house of his wife A’isha, who had nursed him during his last days. The prophet’s tomb at Medinah is the most venerated site in Islam after Mecca.

V. Relations To Deity

A. Zoroaster

It seems that Zoroaster originally preached a monotheistic worship of Ahura Mazda, the creator of two spirits—one good and another evil. Classical dualistic Zoroastrianism, which pitted Ahura Mazda against the evil Ahriman, developed only later in the Sassanian period (A.D. 226–652). Later Zoroastrianism also developed a doctrine of a Saoshyan or saviour who would raise the dead. According to Jacques duch*esne-Guillemin,

Zoroaster did not give himself out to be the redeemer. When his prayers call the redeemer who is to renew existence, he means the prince who shall accept his doctrine and realize the Dominion of Righteousness and Good Mind. He even allows the role of redeemer to any man, provided he practises righteousness [The Hymns of Zarathustra, 1963, p. 19].

B. Buddha

It is not correct to speak of Buddhism as an “a-theistic” religion, as some have. But it is a religion whose chief focus is on man himself and not on any god. The Buddhist Annual of Ceylon defines Buddhism as: “That religion which without starting with a God leads man to a stage where God’s help is not necessary.” Buddha himself came out of the polytheistic background of Hinduism. He seems to have treated even Brahma, one of the highest of the gods, with a cool superciliousness. As Junjiro Takakusu of Tokyo University explains:

The Buddha was, after all, a man, but a man with perfect enlightenment. As a man he taught men to become like himself. Though people are apt to regard him as a superman, he did not regard himself as such. He was simply a perfected man. The Buddha did not deny the existence of gods (Devas), but he considered them only as the higher grade of living beings, also to be taught by him.

By the second and third centuries A.D. Mahayana Buddhism developed a doctrine of Bodhisattvas, innumerable perfected Buddhas distributed through space and time who help mankind by their merits. According to the Lotus of the True Law, the Buddha is an eternal sublime being who appeared in human form as the saviour of mankind. The theology of Pure Land Buddhism was introduced into Japan by Honen (A.D. 1133–1212), and his disciple Shinran founded the Shin sect, which is the largest Buddhist group in Japan today. Buddhists of the dominant Amidha school in Japan believe that repeating the chant Namu-Amida-Butsu—“Hail Amida-Buddha”—will gain them access to the Western Pure Land. In Folk Religion in Japan Ichiro Hori tells us, “One nun named Anraku repeated the Namu-Amida-Butsu prayer fifty thousand times on each ordinary day and one hundred thousand times on each festival day.”

C. Socrates

Although Socrates did not fully subscribe to the old anthropomorphic Homeric deities, he was deeply devout in his own way. He was scrupulously obedient to his guiding daimonion, a personal guiding spirit. In Xenophon’s Apology, Socrates says, “When I speak of my daemon I am not introducing a new god. I believe in this divine voice as you believe.…” In his Memorabilia Xenophon says, “For myself, I have described him as he was: so religious that he did nothing without counsel from the gods.…”

D. Muhammad

The Qur’an emphatically stresses the Oneness of the Godhead not only against pagan polytheism but specifically against the Christian trinity. Qur’an 112:1–4 reads:

Say: He is Allah, the One!

Allah, the eternally Besought of all!

He begetteth not nor was begotten.

And there is none comparable unto Him.

Muhammad himself did not claim to be other than a mortal messenger (Qur’an 7:188; 17:95). On one occasion he is said to have exclaimed: “Oh, God! I am but a man. If I hurt anyone in any manner, then forgive me and do not punish me.” His fallibility is shown in the Qur’an, surah 80, where he is rebuked by Allah for turning away from a blind man who had sought him out.

Nor did he claim the power to save others. According to a tradition reported by Athar Husain (Prophet Muhammad and His Mission, 1967, p. 128), Muhammad said:

O People of Quaraish be prepared for the Hereafter. I cannot save you from the punishment of God, O Bani Abd Manaf.… I cannot protect you either, O Safia, aunt of the Prophet, I cannot be of help to you; O Fatima, daughter of Muhammad, even you I cannot save.

When Muhammad died, Abu Bakr, who was to be one of the succeeding caliphs, announced: “O men, whosoever worshipped Muhammad, know that he is dead; whosoever worshipped Muhammad’s God, know that He is alive and immortal.”

Vi. Conclusions

As we review the lives of these great men, we see that they share certain traits with Jesus. They were inspired to preach against the corruption of contemporary religion, often arousing intense opposition and persecution. Their deeds and words have attracted a host of admirers and followers.

On the other hand, to maintain that all these leaders are equivalent is to argue not from tolerance but from ignorance. Each had his own distinctive message and mission. In comparing the life and ministry of Jesus Christ with those of Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, and Muhammad, we discover a number of unique features about Jesus.

1. A fact that may be more significant than appears on the surface is that Jesus alone was celibate and left no earthly descendants.

2. Only Jesus came out of a background that was already monotheistic.

3. His death by crucifixion is unique. George Bernard Shaw in Everybody’s Political What’s What (1944) remarked rather cynically: “These refined people worship Jesus and take comparatively no account of Socrates and Mahomet, for no discoverable reason except that Jesus was horribly tortured, and Socrates humanely drugged, whilst Mahomet died unsensationally in his bed.” On the other hand, Jean Jacques Rousseau in “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard,” Emile, wrote:

What prejudices, what blindness it takes to compare the son of Sophroniscus with the son of Mary! What distance between the two! Socrates, dying without pain, without disgrace, maintained his character easily to the end.… The death of Socrates, philosophizing quietly with his friends, is the sweetest that one could desire; that of Jesus expiring under tortures, injured, ridiculed, cursed by his entire people, is the most horrible that one might dread.… Indeed, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god.

Yet what is so unique about the death of Jesus on the cross is not its manner but its alleged redemptive meaning. The early accounts as opposed to later hagiographical apocrypha do not claim for the other religious founders the ability to redeem men and to forgive their sins.

4. Leaving out of account later legendary and apologetic materials, the early sources do not attribute miracles to these leaders as is the case with Jesus.

5. None of the others is seen speaking on his own unquestioned authority. Zoroaster and Muhammad act as spokesmen. Socrates and Buddha urge every man to consult his own conscience.

6. The followers of the others did not claim to believe in the resurrection of their leader.

7. None of the others had the audacity to claim equality with a sole, supreme Deity. Buddha seemed to have felt superior to the gods of Hinduism in the same manner in which Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, felt superior to the anthropomorphic deities of Roman religion.

Now one may question the Gospels’ claim of deity for Christ and assert that this is a product of paganism, as has Hugh Schonfield in The Passover Plot. Or one may choose to believe with George Bernard Shaw, as expressed in the preface to his play Androcles and the Lion, that Christ was sincere but deluded in believing that he was a god.

As C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (1955, pp. 52, 53) points out, Christ’s claim of equality with deity leaves us with few choices:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Edwin M. Yamauchi is associate professor of history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Born into a Buddhist family in Hawaii, he was later converted to Christianity. He has studied the Qur’an and Hadith in Arabic. Among other subjects he teaches Greek and Persian history.

Anniversaries are celebrated in different ways, but seldom can there have been a parallel to the way the Protestant Episcopal Church has honored the final acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles by the English Convocation and Parliament in 1571. Having for many years relegated the articles to an obscure place in small print in the Prayer Book, this church has in the anniversary year brought out an experimental liturgy from which the articles are omitted altogether. Perhaps this is at least honest, for what many of the clergy and people know about the articles seems to be infinitesimal. All the same, it is strange and regrettable that the articles should be treated this way, and the possible consequences are grave in the extreme.

It is strange because the Protestant Episcopal Church regards itself as a Catholic body, and in many respects the articles are a solid reaffirmation of Catholic (as distinct from Roman Catholic) teaching. By formal endorsem*nt the doctrine of the early creeds is incorporated into the structure of Anglican doctrine. The historical canon of Scripture is accepted with a distinction between the Hebrew and Greek books of the Old Testament derived from Jerome. As in the early fathers, only what is found in Holy Scripture is to be regarded and taught as necessary to salvation; the conclusions of councils as well as individual theologians are brought under this rule. When medieval errors are rejected, it is because they are uncatholic as well as unbiblical. They are inventions or innovations representing a departure from the primitive church. While it is not explicitly stated, the thesis of Cranmer and Jewel, and indeed of Zwingli and Calvin, implicitly underlies the articles. The medieval aberration, not the Reformation, is the “new learning.” The point of the Reformation is to get back behind this to the real “old learning.” One would have thought that the Protestant Episcopal Church would gladly have paid its respects to this thesis underlying the articles. That they should rather be dropped out of sight is strange indeed.

And it is not only strange but also regrettable. For if the Thirty-Nine Articles endorse early teaching, they also embody some of the new insights into the biblical message that are the distinctive contribution of the Reformation.

In part these new insights derive, as we have seen, from an application of historical doctrine to medieval teaching and practice. Augustinian teaching on sin, grace, and predestination cuts across much of the distortion of the later medieval church. The christological understanding of the eucharist, based on the work of Hilary and Theodoret, provides both a decisive criticism of transubstantiation and a luminous, profound, and biblical alternative to it.

In part, however, these insights into the biblical message found in the Thirty-Nine Articles are genuinely new insights resulting from a more scientific study of Scripture and its application to complicated developments in theology. The doctrine of justification is the most obvious example. In relation to this, it is tragic and astonishing that Episcopalians should value their heritage so lightly just when Roman Catholics like Hans Küng have come to appreciate, understand, and very largely accept the Reformation witness. It is also regrettable that they should abandon it at a time when it has very pertinent implications for such matters as the subjectivism of modern liberal theology and the contemporary activism that so often fails to grapple with the proper relation of indicative and imperative in the Christian life.

Another instance of new insight is found in the articles’ extended definition of the Church in relation to its ministry of the word and sacrament. This is not meant to replace the four “notes” (unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity) of the ancient creed. But it does provide a dynamic definition in which the Church is also related to its mission. To be the Church, the Church must be doing what it is meant to do. At a time when the Church suffers from a confusion of role or identity, it is particularly unfortunate that this definition should be ejected even from the basem*nt. Is it so mistaken, so self-evident, or so generally irrelevant that we can now afford to disregard it?

The banishing of the articles is strange and regrettable; it can also have very serious consequences. An obvious danger is that a church which ignores its historic landmarks is much inclined to repeat its mistakes. Up to a point it will probably do this in any case. But it is one thing to do so with past discussions in view and another to do it as though for the first time. Already the new books of our day are full of “original” and usually not very helpful ideas that, though they are hundreds of years old, the brilliant explorers of the present seem to have missed in their theological training. The relevant modern church is thus condemned to the tiresome repetition of old aberrations simply because it has fallen victim to the illusion that what is past is outdated and irrelevant. When there is so much exciting work to do, not only in winning authentically new insights from Scripture but also in applying the insights of the past to changing situations, nothing could be more sterile and unprofitable than repeating the cycle of old and avoidable error.

A second and related danger is that the door will open to a full-scale relativism in which subsidiary standards can no longer do their proper work. The context of the dropping of the articles makes this clear. In some Anglican circles there has always been a tendency to use the liturgy as a doctrinal standard, and it is pertinent that an experimental revision of the prayer book, which can also be the occasion for introducing new doctrinal content or emphasis, should go hand in hand with a quiet dumping of the articles. The point is that the proper function of the articles is to act as an objective theological reference by which all else, including the implications of liturgical revision, should be tested. Without the articles, individual or partisan positions can easily be slipped in either to the perversion or to the confusion of the church.

In other denominations, of course, the same thing may be done in different ways. Presbyterians relativized their confession by associating it with several others, including the new and dated creed of 1967. Practical changes may also be made in worship, ministerial techniques, or organization that are not thought out theologically but will have theological implications, and will thus serve to change the real theological position whether given confessional status or not. The absence or ignoring of confessions obviously hastens this process of change, and may in some cases be used for this very purpose.

Honoring a confession can, of course, result in rigidity, but it does not have to do so. The possibility of revision is always open. Again, new issues arise on which there may be new insights, as at the time of the Reformation itself. In the long run a new confession may have to be worked out that can still incorporate historic teaching. But in the meantime the findings of the past act as an objective control, not of an absolute kind, but in the form of an agreed interpretation of the biblical norm that can check uncontrolled relativism in new theological, liturgical, or practical work.

A final and again a related danger is that ignoring the articles might mean a virtual end to serious scientific theology. Not the least value of historical theology is that the most significant theologians of the past really think and work theologically in contrast to many modern writers who substitute subjective or speculative philosophizing, or phenomenological religious investigation, or a purely historicist study of Scripture, for authentic theology. Now past theology can be presented in an abstruse, theoretical, and sterile form that robs it of vitality and power. It can also be advanced as a legal norm that creates impatience and revolt. In itself, however, the theology of the past that has survived is in the main an exemplary attempt at theology scientifically related to its object and allowing itself to be shaped and controlled by this rather than by subjective considerations, preconceptions, or requirements.

Very easily, then, abandonment of the articles may denote or become a rejection of all serious theological method, an opening of the gates to real theological irrelevance, and an end to authentic theology in the church. The modern Episcopal church is very vulnerable at this point, for years of confessional neglect have already produced a situation in which dogmatics counts for little and a-theologians are increasingly dominating the scene, unwittingly helped by those who pursue serious theology but have never come to appreciate, or perhaps to understand, the Reformation contribution. But the Episcopal church is by no means alone at this point. It is accompanied by many other churches that have never had confessions at all, or have seriously compromised them, or are in immature revolt against them, or carry on their business as if the confessions did not exist.

Certainly a purely formal honoring of the Thirty-Nine Articles would serve no useful purpose. But if elimination of the articles is more forthright, one may still see in it both a symptom of the contemporary malaise and an evil omen for the theological and practical future of the churches. An honest or even an honestly enquiring commemoration would be more to the point.

Geoffrey W. Bromiley is professor of church history and historical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. He holds the M.A. from Cambridge University and the Ph.D. and D.Litt. from the University of Edinburgh.

Has it ever occurred to you that the Protestant Reformation was largely a youth movement? Many of its leaders were young men. Ulrich Zwingli at twenty-two imbibed the message of the Gospel from the Greek New Testament and learned from his professor Thomas Wyttenbach that Scripture is the revelation of God and that forgiveness is through Christ alone. And he preached God’s perfect remedy in Christ with amazing skill. The theological father of Presbyterianism, John Calvin, made the Scriptures his chief study after his conversion at age twenty-three. When he was twenty-six he brought out the first edition of his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, which became the definitive rationale for the Protestant position.

Undoubtedly the most celebrated firebrand of the Reformation was a young Augustinian monk from Thuringia, Martin Luther. The early life of Luther seemed to indicate nothing outstanding. He was born to poor parents in Eisleben on November 10, 1483, and in less than a year the family moved to Mansfeld. His father was a laborer in copper mines. But though money was scarce in the Luther home, determination was there in abundance. By the time Martin was twenty-eight, his father had worked his way up to part ownership of six shafts and two foundries. Martin showed the same kind of determination as a theologian, translator, and preacher.

Two experiences had a great effect on young Luther. When he was a student at the University of Erfurt, he often went on trips to Mansfeld during his holidays. The journey on foot took three days. On one of these trips, when he was twenty-one, he accidentally fell on his sword a half mile from Erfurt and cut an artery in his thigh. In his distress he prayed, “O Mary, help!” The next year was a time of inner conflicts. His father wanted him to study law, but he felt inclined toward theology. He left law school for a while to visit his parents. On his return trip to Erfurt he got caught in a ferocious thunderstorm that nearly claimed his life. A thunderbolt that struck nearby threw him to the ground. But though he was shaken, he was unhurt. Nevertheless panic seized him, and he invoked the name of St. Anne. This experience confirmed his leanings toward theological study, and he vowed in the rain to enter the monastery. In his words, “walled around with the terror and agony of sudden death” he made his vow.

It would be unfair to discount Luther’s theological contributions as the ramblings and rantings of an obstinate, angry young man. He was not a perpetual naysayer who delighted in debunking traditions and institutions. As Dr. Boehmer says, “Luther did not discard anything which had once been sacred and precious to him until he had tried every possible way to recast, reinterpret, or, in some form, to save it” (Road to Reformation).

Somewhat like today’s student activists who issue demands to school administrations, the young monk urged some specific reforms upon his superiors. Luther’s demands were not unreasonable. While he called upon the church to abolish the pope’s secular lordship, he held that the pope should remain. While he urged that the college of cardinals be reduced, he did not demand that it be dissolved. Like Luther, today’s youth show remarkable frankness and forwardness, a certain defiance, a boldness to question old laws and to challenge the establishment. Yet it seems that for some, physical force has replaced sound reasoning. To the social revolutionary, philosophical discussion is useful only for making disciples, not for convincing governments.

God raised Luther up to needle the church over the inconsistencies in its theology, and one trait that gained the admiration of his generation was his unflinching honesty. He voiced his dissent and misgivings, even though what he said met with scornful rebuffs and even endangered his life. He showed this same honesty in the confessional box, where his confessions of sin were so full that the director of the cloister said, “God is not angry with you. You are angry with God.” The bureaucrats of Rome resented this outspokenness. But some present-day Catholic scholars admire him for it; Karl Adam, for instance, praises Luther’s “warm penetration of the essence of Christianity, his passionate defiance of all unholiness and ungodliness, … his surging soul-shattering power of speech, and not the least that heroism in the face of death with which he defied the powers of this world” (One and Holy).

Young people liked Luther because he was shrewd without being stuffy, pioneering without being disrespectful. His dogmatism was enlivened with touches of playful irony. His manner in the pulpit was both vigorous and vivid. All through his life he retained a passionate temperament.

Early in life Martin mastered logic, and he showed his fondness for the syllogism to his dying day. He could argue his case for Christ persuasively and cogently. The Reformation got off to a rousing start partly because of Luther’s tremendous ability to defend his position. If he had been unable to convince his colleagues of his views, the Reformation in Germany would have fizzled.

The arena of debate in the Middle Ages was the disputation. The disputation had all the drama of the courtroom, all the excitement of a football game. These disputations were a regular part of the academic program and put both students and faculty to the test. They stimulated thought, and in the case of Luther they convinced a generation. A professor would write the theses to be demonstrated and a student would be chosen to defend them in a large auditorium before professors and students.

Luther twice defended the ninety-five theses, written in 1517 and nailed to the Wittenberg church door. The first defense was before his own order in May, 1518, the second before Cardinal Cajaetan in October. Equally interesting are his other disputations: the disputation against scholastic theology in 1517; the Heidelberg disputation in 1518, which treated the place of works in the salvation process; the disputation on faith and law in 1535; the disputation on man in 1536; in the same year the disputation on justification; and, rounding them out, the disputations against the power of a council and against antinomianism.

Luther’s home became a favorite meeting place of students, and he loved to talk with them. A number of talented young scholars flocked to him. In time way-out Wittenberg “resembled a swarming ant-hill.”

Two hundred Wittenberg students armed with spears traveled with Luther, Melanchthon, and Karlstadt to Leipzig for the disputation with Eck. And young men accompanied him from the debates, for in arguing his cause he picked up more admirers. They admired his candor. They were convinced by his reasons and captivated by his Christ. Luther was heartened by this enthusiastic response; student support cheered him. After the Heidelberg disputation (1518) he wrote to Spalatin, “I now confidently hope that the true theology of Christ which those men who have grown old in their sophistical opinion [the Erfurt Occamists] reject, will pass over to the younger generation.”

Luther’s deep concern for youth is reflected in a searching sentence in his Open Letter to the Christian Nobility: “The young folk in the midst of Christendom languish and perish miserably for want of the Gospel, in which we ought to be giving them constant instruction and training.” As a young man he had experienced anguish, and he knew that the Gospel of Christ was adequate to answer the yearnings of the young heart.

Luther thought that through a prayer-filled life he could get rid of his nagging guilt and quiet his conscience. But he didn’t find monasticism a soul cure, and he bluntly said so. He proved that one can be upright and still be up-tight. Luther once confessed that he never considered himself absolved. He later discovered that he was trusting in his confessions, rather than in the promise of Christ. He was trying to clear his own record, rather than resting in the satisfaction of Christ who bore his sins. Once he realized that he was saved by the merits of Jesus Christ and not by his own strivings, it seemed as if the gates of paradise opened, and for the first time he knew true freedom. This theology, which got Luther into so much trouble, is taken from the pages of the New Testament.

We have lost much of the bite and explosiveness of Luther’s message in our churches. We are more apt to coddle Pharisees than to shock them. We want to keep the peace, sometimes at the expense of offending God. Luther dared to object to the system, to disturb the peace, and this won him the support of the younger generation. But we cannot attribute his success to the fervor of youthful rebellion. The Reformation became a lasting movement, rather than a passing revolt, because behind Luther’s youthful zeal and complete honesty was the substantial and stirring message of the Gospel of sovereign grace.

John Lewis Gilmore is minister of Olivet United Church of Christ in Livingston, New Jersey. He has the A.B. (Temple University), the B.D. (Reformed Episcopal Seminary), and the S.T.M. (Lutheran Seminary, Philadelphia).

Our executive editor, L. Nelson Bell, was honored last month at the eighth rally of Billy Graham’s ten-day Dallas-Fort Worth crusade (see News, page 36). At that meeting Dr. Bell, who spent twenty-five years in China as a medical missionary, gave his testimony, and Mr. Graham announced the publication of a biography of his father-in-law and our colleague. (Dr. Bell is also the author of our popular “A Layman and His Faith” column.) It was written by John Pollock and is entitled A Foreign Devil in China. The book provides excellent background material for those who are interested in China not only as a mission field but also as an emerging great power. Any reader of CHRISTIANITY TODAY can receive a free copy of it by simply addressing a letter to Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403, and asking for it by title.

October brings Reformation Sunday, and John Lewis Gilmore’s essay Young Luther calls attention to a frequently forgotten fact: the Reformers were young men. Our Lord Jesus was crucified at age thirty-three after a ministry of 2½ to three years. Approximately half of the population of the United States is under thirty, and the percentage is higher for countries like India and China and those in Latin America. But the power still resides in the hands of the elders; prominent on the list of world leaders are octogenarians Chang Kaishek and Haile Selassie and septuagenarians Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Francisco Franco, and Marshall Tito. We can expect that things will be different as members of the younger generation rise to places of leadership in China and elsewhere in the world. And we fervently hope the change will be for the good!

“NI MARX NI JESUS”: an anarchist slogan left over from the May, 1968, student revolts in Paris? Far from it. The phrase is the title of a book (published by Editions Robert Laffont) that has deservedly captured the attention of the French reading public during the last several months. The author, Jean-François Revel, is a columnist for L’Express, a weekly news magazine that functions in France much as Time does in the United States—but without Time’s essentially conservative-republican slant. L’Express is socialist in spirit, and so is Revel.

Here we must not see red. Revel is by no means Communist. Indeed, his position is what Engels contemptuously called “utopian socialism—an infantile disorder.” Why “utopian” and “infantile”? Because of its refusal to recognize “inevitable dialectic forces” in history and to accelerate them through acts of social violence.

The question for Revel is: What can be done for modern civilization if there is no built-in economic and political perfection? The subtitle of his provocative volume is: “From the second American revolution to the second world revolution.” He is convinced that the modern world—from the rise of secularism in the eighteenth century to our frenetic twentieth century—is in continual revolutionary ferment, and that the particular revolutionary atmosphere in the United States today constitutes the single genuine crucible for proper world renewal.

Obviously Revel operates with a broad definition of revolution (this is generally true of “utopian socialists”!). He specifically lists five “conditions” for genuine revolution: (1) critique of economic, social, and often racial injustice; (2) critique of the managerial and administrative inefficiency whereby human and natural resources are wasted; (3) critique of power politics; (4) critique of accepted cultural values and of the educational system and literary productivity that fosters them; (5) critique of the status quo in so far as it insists on conformity and prevents the individual from realizing his unique potential.

For Revel, the need for world revolution is perfectly plain from the miseries on the planet: every one of his five revolutionary “critiques” can well be leveled at our modern world. Remarkably, however, he expressly endeavors to show that neither in the Marxist sphere (Russia and China) nor in Western Europe and in the developing countries can a proper revolution come about; it can happen, to use Harry Golden’s expression, “only in America”!

Why not behind the iron and bamboo curtains? “If the second world revolution has to create real equality among men, it is clear that the concentration of all power—political, economic, military, technological, cultural, informational—in the hands of an oligarchy or even, in certain cases (Stalin, Tito, Castro), (in an autocracy, is the last means capable of leading to such a revolution.” Why not Europe or the developing peoples? Because in these areas true revolution is dependent, like it or not, on the situation prevailing in America.

The openness of American society allows it to engage in continual self-criticism and self-renewal. This is the spirit that can bring a non-violent end to nationalistic Realpolitik and the substitution of a just world policy. The single illustration of American mass-media—uncontrolled (in contrast to the government-operated TV of France and of many other nations) and able directly to influence events as well as record them (e.g., opposition to the Viet Nam war)—shows how dynamic is the American potential for positive change.

But why, since America is a “Christian country,” does Revel title his book “Neither Marx nor Jesus”? (This is a nagging question for all readers, since Jesus is first mentioned in the last chapter—twenty five pages before the book ends!)

Revel notes the amazing religious pluralism in the United States and the absence of any church establishment, and regards these factors as important elements in the American open society. But any search for a revolutionary Christian vitality leads one beyond the formally organized religious groups to the “Jesus freaks” who “drop out” of the societal stream to become “very first century” with their communities in which Jesus substitutes for alcohol, drugs, and promiscuity. Revel, however, sees this as an irresponsible retreat from the grave crises of the day, and he cites Bruno Bettelheim and André Stephané on the immaturity of sidestepping reality: “The narcissistic stage consists of wanting everything in one fell swoop and if one doesn’t get it, one hallucinates.”

This vague Jesus-mysticism will solve the problems of our revolutionary era no better than a Procrustean and doctrinaire Marxism. What is needed is responsible and positive revolutionary change within the imperfect political and economic frameworks whose functioning is essential to twentieth-century life, and the furtherance of open society where change can in fact occur responsibly.

Locating points to criticize in Revel’s thinking is not particularly difficult (like most humanistic utopian socialists he thinks, with utter naïveté, that proper values will be recognized and followed by reasonable men and that self-interest falls by the wayside in the face of true values; and he does not observe that the glories of American open society arose, indirectly and in part at least, from a biblical view of man). But are we mature enough to take his criticisms seriously? As an outside observer of our society (and such observers, like De Tocqueville in the nineteenth century, generally have much wisdom to impart to us if we are humble enough to listen), Revel sees our Christianity and our social existence as two separate and hermetically sealed compartments. “Separation of church and state” has become “separation of Jesus and society.” (I am haunted by the enthusiastic advocacy of this “separation” by a high-ranking East German government official whom I spoke with in Berlin recently: the church must stick to the “spiritual.”)

How sad that the Jesus freaks so vastly outnumber the Mark Hatfields. How sad that in our fear that we will alienate Christian brethren over “practical applications” we refuse as churches to speak and act decisively in fighting biblically condemned injustice. How sad that we will send our sons and daughters to third-rate Bible schools with the anointing of “full-time Christian service” and not encourage them to go to a university where, after training in political science, economics, and law, they could enter into the maelstrom of our modern revolutionary age and seek to revolutionize it responsibly for Christ. Only then will books be written with the adversative title: Not Marx but Jesus.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

On the eve of its twenty-first birthday, the beleaguered National Council of Churches agreed on a reorganization aimed at getting a new lease on life.

The plan is a compromise. But it represents something of a victory for ecumenists over activists. A struggle between those whose main interest is to see how inclusive they can make the NCC, and those who are primarily interested in its social clout, has increasingly been coming into the open.

Dr. Thomas J. Liggett, now the key figure in the reorganization move, suggested that the council may do less in the future but do it better. Meanwhile, he declared, “We hope this plan will commend itself to some denominations not now in the council.”

The reorganization plan was approved by the 255-member NCC General Board during a two-day meeting in New Orleans last month. It now goes to the NCC’s thirty-three member denominations for further consideration. A timetable calls for final ratification by the NCC General Assembly, to be held in Dallas in late 1972.

The restructure proposal, which represents the work of a twenty-two-member committee headed by Liggett, calls for that to be the last General Assembly, a triennial legislative meeting. The assembly’s functions would then be assumed by a Governing Board that would be an enlarged version of the present General Board.

The most debated facet of the reorganization plan during the New Orleans meeting was how much money should be set aside each year for the Governing Board to use as it sees fit. The lack of any appreciable amount of such funds frustrates the present General Board. Most of the money that comes to the NCC is earmarked, and the General Board has in the past adopted numerous programs for which little money could be found.

Activists sought, in effect, to make relatively large undesignated donations to the council a virtual condition of membership. The Reverend Robert G. Torbet, ecumenical officer of the American Baptist Convention, warned that such a move could nudge the ABC out of the NCC; the board voted to keep the restructure committee’s ceiling of $50,000 a year for the so-called priority contingency fund.

Another tension that has plagued the council since its inception in 1950 is that it has been out of touch with the grass roots. The restructure seeks to guarantee more involvement in decision-making by lay men and women, young people, and minority ethnic people.

Dr. Michael Watson, a physician from Bamberg, South Carolina, who serves on the United Methodist delegation to the General Board, doubts that it will work. “Liberal church professionals will continue to dominate the council,” he said in an interview.

The 52-year-old Liggett concedes that the plan doesn’t please everyone, but argues that a compromise was necessary. He characterizes the proposal as an attempt to accommodate the “diaspora of decision-making in the denominations.” He says it will seek to bring to the Governing Board those people who really hold the power in the NCC member denominations, both lay and clergy.

Liggett, a round, pleasant man, is head of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) missions arm. He was a missionary to Latin America for twenty years and for a time served as president of the interdenominational Protestant seminary in Puerto Rico. He also taught at the interdenominational seminary in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Liggett’s committee was created in January of this year after the General Board failed to show enough enthusiasm over the work of a special task force. That group had called for the NCC to be succeeded by a new organization composed almost entirely of consortia. Black churchmen construed it as a “cop-out” and called for continuation of the present NCC.

The new model provides for continuing program units along with consortia. It also introduces the concept of “matrix management,” an organizational process currently being tried by a number of business enterprises. Under this arrangement there are both horizontal and vertical lines of authority and responsibility. The horizontal lines are set up to make use of specialists for key projects, often when these need to be accomplished quickly.

It is clear that the new structure will provide the possibility of tighter control over programs and pronouncements. Whether this potential control is exercised, however, is an open question.

Because of unresolved differences, the NCC in recent years has been increasingly obliged to trim its budget. The result has been slow disintegration. Its youth ministry has gone out of existence. Its women’s organization has broken away. Numerous programs have been curtailed because of inadequate funding for executive salaries, including Faith and Order, and Evangelism.

Latest to part company with the NCC is A Christian Ministry in the National Parks (see June 18 issue, page 31). Director Warren Ost said savings to be made “by severing our administrative relationship to the NCC at this point in our history, we believe, will mean the survival of the program.” Ost reported that the NCC had ceased giving money to the ministry and that the ministry’s affiliation with the NCC was proving an impediment to obtaining outside funding.

The NCC is also losing sponsorship of the newsletter Religion in Communist Dominated Areas after terminating a stipend for its managing editor, the Reverend Blahoslav Hruby. A board resolution adopted in New Orleans expressed thanks to Editor Paul B. Anderson and Hruby and noted “the possibility of some continuing cooperative relationship to the council to be determined hereafter in accordance with established procedures.” Hruby is determined to resume publication if funds can be secured.

In other action, the board called for further investigation of the Kent State killings and urged suspension of all military and economic aid to Pakistan until “the President reports to the Congress that the government of Pakistan is cooperating fully in allowing the situation in East Pakistan to return to reasonable stability and that the refugees from East Pakistan in India have been allowed, to the extent feasible, to return to their homes and to reclaim their lands and properties.” The board also urged support to assure for East Pakistan political leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman “a full and open trial … and clemency in the event of his conviction.”

But the board turned down a request to review the case of an American girl who had to leave her husband, a Soviet citizen, because she was refused a residence visa by Soviet authorities. The board cited “the inadequacy of firm information with respect to the facts in this case.”

A welfare reform bill passed by the U. S. House of Representatives was termed “unacceptable” because it falls short of criteria the NCC has set up. A major policy statement on health care was adopted, urging equal access to health services with the burden of payment varying in proportion to ability to pay.

A sad note hung over the meeting after it was announced that a young student member of the board had been murdered the week before.

Let’S Hear It For Asbury

Francis Asbury, only 26 when he left England for Philadelphia to aid John Wesley, became the “father of American Methodism.” His arduous journeys, undertaken despite frequent illness and great pain, and his adherence to the simple themes of the Gospel give American Methodists something to be proud of—and they showed it last month when they celebrated the bicentenary of Asbury’s landing in the United States.

Held immediately after the World Methodist Conference in Denver, the Lake Junaluska (North Carolina) celebration September 3–5 included Methodists from several parts of the world. Bishop Paul Hardin, Jr., of Columbia, South Carolina, gave one of four historical addresses. He stressed the hardships Asbury endured, but refused to credit his success in the colonies to Asbury’s habits of rising at daylight or reading the Bible and meditating while riding. Asbury himself probably would have disagreed.

Another of the addresses emphasized Asbury’s lack of formal training—he quit school at an early age. Asbury felt it was a help rather than a hindrance; he didn’t have to unlearn a formal, stiff pulpit style.

Of the 500 delegates who attended, one-third were youth. A folk mass and musical about drugs highlighted the three-day affair. “Just Us,” a folk quintet from Emory and Henry College, Virginia, inspired the delegates with an enthusiastic version of “Amazing Grace.” At that point Francis Asbury would have felt right at home.

Care At 25

An eight-cent commemorative stamp will be issued October 27 at New York to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of CARE (Cooperative for American Remittance to Everywhere). Among the organizations that founded CARE and have helped direct its program for a quarter of a century are American Baptist Relief, Church of the Brethren World Ministries Commission, Congregational-Christian Service Committee, the Salvation Army, and General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

Starting originally with food and clothing packages for war-stricken Europe and Asia, CARE now sends thousands of self-help kits annually to assist poverty-stricken persons in underdeveloped nations in raising their standard of living.

Among other things, CARE has sent 750,000 kits of farm implements, 275,000 sewing machines, 297,000 woodworking kits, and enough seeds to raise 77,000 tons of fresh vegetables.

GLENN EVERETT

Black Baptists Condemn Racial Separation

The head of the nation’s largest Negro organization last month lashed out against the “theology of liberation,” put down black theology as “racist,” and suggested that eliminating persons over age sixty-five would be a more humane way to ensure population control than legalizing abortion.

Dr. Joseph H. Jackson, for the past seventeen years president of the 6.3-million-member National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Incorporated, described black theology as “a gospel of blacks against whites” in a paper given at the denomination’s annual convention in Cleveland, Ohio. More than 25,000 delegates attended.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the president of the three-million-member National Baptist Convention of America, another black denomination, made a plea for quality education. “The only thing we want is the chance for our children to read and be taught from the same books that Mr. White Man is taught from,” said Dr. James Clark Sams, 62, in an address to 5,000 at the city’s Civic Auditorium.

The head of the church’s Social Justice Committee, Dr. E. Edward Jones, plugged for a nationwide campaign for quality education for black children through busing and insistence upon qualified teachers. “Busing is necessary to achieve racial balance which leads, in part, to the kind of quality education we seek,” said Jones, a Shreveport, Louisiana, resident.

In his presidential address, Dr. Sams—like his counterpart in the larger National Baptist Convention—took a slap at racial separatism: “As Christians, we are lightholders for a confused and disturbed world. Unless we get to the point where we can take a brother, regardless of race, by the hand, we’ll all end up in hell.”

Dr. Jackson, at the Cleveland meeting, charged in his paper on black theology that it polarizes races, promotes racial segregation, and could negate civil-rights progress. A special target for his criticism was the Reverend James H. Cone, a Negro who is a theology professor at Union Seminary in New York. Cone is an exponent of radical black theology, and his writings espouse the revolt of blacks against whites.

“He not only polarizes blacks and whites in this country,” Jackson said of Cone, “but he freezes the polarization and leaves little or no latitude for future harmony to be achieved.”

Jackson’s paper was unanimously approved—and became an official position of the denomination—by the church’s board of directors.

Jackson, who doesn’t reveal his age, was re-elected to his nineteenth term as president of the church. In the prepared text of his annual address, he compared abortion to euthanasia as a destroyer of life. Delegates approved his statement condemning abortion—the denomination’s first stand on the issue.

The forced sterilization of welfare mothers is “too high a price” for relief, he said, adding: “A dollar in exchange for the right of life and a threat to the vitals of one’s being is a dollar for damnation.”

On the subject of euthanasia versus abortion, Jackson rhetorically asked: “Would it not be better to begin with people over sixty-five and eliminate the undesirables and clear the way for a new crop of human beings to come? Would it not be better to eliminate the confirmed criminals, dope addicts and peddlers, and all of those who have had their chance in life and have sinned against the opportunity? Would it not be rather selfish for this generation to insist upon remaining while it eliminates the innocent and makes a place for the guilty and for those who have proved to be unworthy?”

Australian Evangelicals: Up From Down Under

Over the platform hung the sign, “Christ calls us to a new obedience.” The National Evangelical Congress of Australia, the first such gathering to be held in that country, took the motto to heart as it tried to find out what obedience to Christ means for evangelicals in Australia in the 1970s.

Some 550 evangelicals from throughout the country gathered in Melbourne for the congress. Delegates followed a rigorous schedule, listening to position papers and participating in discussion groups from 7 A.M. until 10 at night.

Sir Paul Hasluck, Australia’s governor general, opened the August 23–28 conference by advising theologians to challenge men to respond to the whole of existence rather than simply to tell them they are sinners. Dr. Leon Morris, principal of Ridley College at the University of Melbourne, gave the opening address on “The Authentic Gospel.” Sharing the platform were the primate of Australia, Archbishop Frank Woods of Melbourne, and the archbishop of Sydney, Marcus Loane. Principal speaker was Canon Michael Green, head of St. John’s College, Nottingham, England.

A key thrust of the congress was the responsibility evangelicals must assume for their full role in the community regardless of whether this affords them opportunities for evangelism. In line with this, several speakers from outside the evangelical tradition were asked to say how they view evangelicals—an unusual feature for this country.

Mrs. Faith Bandler, an Australian aborigine, grabbed headlines in the daily papers with her accusation that Australians in general are racists. As a result, an action group to promote evangelical concern for aboriginal people was immediately formed.

Others from outside included a prominent Anglo-Catholic and a trades unionist. Several Christian radicals, speaking for alienated youth, criticized the faults of the older generation.

The congress adopted a statement recommending that evangelicals play a larger role in community affairs, and that they work for a church less dominated by the clergy and more ready to allow laymen to fulfill their ministry and to participate fully in liturgical reform.

Delegates were impatient at what they felt was the stuffiness of many Anglican practices, and were wholeheartedly with Green when he complained that too often converts are asked to be converted not only to Christ but to “sixteenth-century English, twelfth-century architecture, and fourth-century clothes.” If the will of the congress prevails, Anglican worship will be drastically altered—but it will be done in obedience to the Gospel. The primacy of the biblical revelation was never questioned.

Although there were discussions about the ministry of women—centering on what the Bible has to say about the matter—there was no central agreement (some held it teaches a subordination, others, that in ministry as in salvation all are one in Christ). The last word hasn’t yet been said.

There will also be much future discussion about the charismatic movement. Many wanted the congress to endorse neo-Pentecostalism; others hesitated. In the end the congress recognized that the Spirit gives gifts as he wills and commended the whole subject to the church for further study.

On the ecumenical movement, the congress held that evangelicals already have a unity that spans denominational barriers and that should be regarded as truly ecumenical. This kind of unity, the congress said, should be stressed in proposals for closer denominational unity.

LEON MORRIS

The Indefectible Dr. Küng

Four years after an invitation from Trinity College, Melbourne, to Swissborn Catholic theologian Hans Küng to speak at the school’s annual School of Theology, the noted professor was able to come; his visit coincided with the release in Australia of his book Infallible?Not surprisingly, the topic of papal infallibility held sway during his visit.

A disgruntled Roman Catholic commented: “Anglicans would be angry if Catholics brought out a radical Anglican theologian to deliver an attack on basic Anglican principles.”

Capacity audiences—including many Catholics as well as Anglicans and Protestants—attended. Küng asserted that not only can the Pope make errors; he has in fact made them, as have general councils. For good measure Küng suggested the Scriptures also contain errors. He argued for the indefectibility—rather than the infallibility—of the Church: the idea that though it may make mistakes, the Church will not finally fail of God’s purpose for it.

LEON MORRIS

Tycoons In The Temple

In the best tradition of Madison Avenue, radio preacher Carl McIntire last month tweaked the imagination of many Jews and students of Bible prophecy by announcing he will rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem—on fifteen acres at his new Cape Canaveral, Florida, complex.

McIntire refuses to disclose how much it will cost or when construction will begin. Finances of his own splintered organization are sagging, but—despite the arch-separatism he preaches—he may yoke himself to wealthy Jewish businessmen to fund the multi-million-dollar project. Several—including Maryland comptroller Leo

Goldstein—were invited to talks at McIntire’s Cape May, New Jersey, base where a model of the temple was on display (admission price: “a three-dollar donation”). McIntire escorted several others in a private plane to inspect the Florida site. Goldstein, for one, is for the venture. “It’s a great ecumenical idea,” he says. “I’m for anything that will bring people closer together.”

The 26-by-20-foot model is the creation of Lazare and Suzette Halberthal, Jewish refugees from Rumania. The couple spent more than thirty years building the one-fortieth scale model of Herod’s temple. Ten million visitors made it the leading attraction at the Pavilion of Judaism at Expo 67 in Montreal. It will serve as pattern for the full-sized temple in Florida.

After McIntire brought the Halberthals and their model to Cape May on a concession basis he told his radio audience it “is the most important thing ever in our possession.”

Citing Cape Canaveral’s proximity to Disneyworld (fifty miles away in Orlando), McIntire reportedly plans to market the Jerusalem temple nationally as a piggy-back tourist attraction. He already operates double-deck sightseeing buses between the two locations. The temple will be built in conjunction with his proposed biblical museum.

Wcc Racism Grants: Repeat Performance

The World Council of Churches apparently likes being controversial. The ecumenical body allocated another $200,000 to “anti-racist” groups around the world last month. A decision to fund such groups, including African guerrilla fighters, with a like amount a year ago (see October 9, 1970, issue, page 39, and November 20, 1970, issue, page 44), provoked a storm of protest and cost the WCC support from various sources.

The current grant is to twenty-four organizations, nine of which are southern Africa activist “liberation fronts.”

Following its reaction of a year ago, the South African Council of Churches again dissociated itself from the allocations. The largest slice of the grant—$130,000—goes to liberation movements in Rhodesia, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissao. The nine southern Africa groups listed as recipients by the WCC office also received money from the council in 1970. The largest individual grants are for $25,000; three groups, including The Peoples’ Movement for the Liberation of Angola, is allocated this amount. But The Revolutionary Government of Angola in Exile turned down its offered grant of $7,500, saying it was a “trap” and that the WCC had become “political.”

New in this allocation are funds to North American organizations. Two sure to evoke controversy are $7,500 grants to Malcolm X Liberation University in North Carolina and to the Southern Election Fund (it supports black political candidates in the South). Cesar Chavez’s California-based United Farm Workers will get a modest $2,500.

The WCC’s Executive Committee, which made the grants during its meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, explained that the basic concept of the special fund “is to assist in the process by which the racially oppressed and powerless people of the world are enabled to become powerful, be self-reliant, and determine for themselves the political and social system under which they want to live.”

The Executive Committee also said the grants are made without any control over how the money is spent.

Meanwhile, McIntire is reminding his followers not to forget the top priority on his agenda: fight Communism. He has scheduled another “Victory March” and rally in Washington, D. C., on October 23 to protest President Nixon’s upcoming visit to Red China.

When Nixon announced he would receive Red Chinese ping pong team members who will tour here, McIntire countered with some ping pong diplomacy of his own. He organized tournaments among Christians on Taiwan and brought a championship team of nine to this country, challenging the United States Table Tennis Association to matches and goading Nixon to invite the Christian team to the White House. The top brass of the USTTA, host for the Red Chinese team, ignored McIntire and ordered members to do likewise, an order that split the USTTA ranks.

McIntire featured the team in protest rallies across the nation; all opponents—including some sharp USTTA players—were defeated.

Last month McIntire and aide James Shaw played ping pong on a table carried in front of the White House, then featured the Taiwan team in exhibition matches in a park across the street. In interviews, the Chinese players indicated they were led to believe they would be playing tournament games before large crowds instead of the impromptu matches in small church-related meetings. They insisted their American visit was an expression of friendship for America and not a protest.

However, twenty Chinese Christian leaders in Taiwan have announced they will visit here to mobilize church support-against Nixon’s China policy. McIntire invited them to share his protest platform on October 23, but they did not immediately respond.

McIntire is claiming that the Communists “murdered ten million Christians” in China and thus should be defeated, not courted.

Deaths

WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT, 80, a leading biblical archaeologist, scholar, author, and longtime professor at Johns Hopkins University; of a stroke in a Baltimore nursing home (see editorial, page 32).

ROLAND DE VAUX, 68, biblical scholar and archaeologist who, as a French Dominican priest, achieved fame for his part in the discovery, transcription, editing, and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls; in Jerusalem.

VICTOR J. REED, 65, bishop of Oklahoma City-Tulsa, ecumenical leader and critic of the Viet Nam war; of an apparent heart attack in Oklahoma City.

(Actually, there were fewer than four million church members and catechumens when the Communists took over the government. Nearly three million were Roman Catholics. A missionary writing in last month’s Eternity magazine claims that the ranks of evangelical Christianity have in fact doubled since 1950. Many house church groups are thriving, he says.)

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Graham Kicks Off Cowboys

Billy Graham christened the new home of the Dallas Cowboys professional football team last month with a ten-day Greater Southwest Crusade. It was the first public use of the 65,000-seat stadium. Appropriately enough, Cowboy coach Tom Landry, a Methodist known for his evangelical convictions, served as crusade general chairman.

Crowds ranging from 41,300 to 51,200 were on hand for the first five services. A total of more than 7,000 responded to Graham’s invitation during that period.

Among the celebrities who paid a visit were former President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson.

The new stadium is located at Irving, Texas, between Dallas and Fort Worth (it is not the stadium selected for use by the Washington Senators baseball club, which is being moved to Texas). The Cowboys were scheduled to play their first game there October 10.

Panorama

Nearly 120 persons gathered at Elmhurst (Illinois) College last month for the first conference of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen, a spiritual renewal group within the United Church of Christ. The fellowship is composed mainly of pastors who are disenchanted with secularistic and humanistic trends within the denomination.

Zondervan will release The Jesus Generation by Billy Graham October 29. The book is Graham’s first youth-oriented title in fifteen years.

A youth-led volleyball marathon sponsored by Fall River, Massachusetts, Baptist churches netted $1,250 for a cancer-research fund last month. The game lasted 132 hours and “made people aware that evangelicals are alive and well in Fall River.”

Former Beatle George Harrison’sMy Sweet Lord was voted the best single record of the year last month in both the international and British sections of a poll by the Melody Maker, Britain’s largest-circulation music paper.

An eight-day evangelistic crusade in Gulfport, Mississippi, brought 1,032 professions of faith. Baptist leaders called the interdenominational crusade, led by evangelist James Robison of Fort Worth, “the greatest Christian happening on the Gulf Coast” in recent history.

COCU has a new associate general secretary: the Reverend William C. Larkin, 30, a former district executive of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Larkin succeeds W. Clyde Williams, who has become president of Miles College in Birmingham.

Archbishop Marcus Loane of Sydney, who made headlines during the Pope’s visit to Australia in 1970 by refusing to attend an ecumenical service in which Catholics and most Protestant denominations took part, was in the news again last month when he declined to attend the installation of Catholic Archbishop Freeman of Sydney.

Ben Haden, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga, Tennessee, preached in a White House religious service September 12. Billy Graham gave the benediction.

Greek Orthodox primate Archbishop Iakovos baptized the granddaughter of the late Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin, in ceremonies in Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Milwaukee last month. The child, Olga Peters, is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Wesley Peters; Mrs. Peters is the former Svetlana Alliluyeva.

Dr. Paul M. Nagano, pastor of the Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle, has been elected chairman of the newly formed Asian American Baptist Caucus.

World Scene

The first complete Bible concordance in Hausa, the native language of six million and a commercial language for many others in West Africa, is expected to be off the press this fall. Its author is a Southern Baptist missionary who has been in Nigeria since 1948, Bonnie Mae Moore.

Febias College of Bible in Manila has been accredited to grant the bachelor of arts degree. The school, under another name, was established in 1948 as the first project of Far Eastern Gospel Crusade.

The Swedish Ecumenical Council has appealed to the Soviet Union and other Eastern governments to respect freedom of religion in their countries. The council cited “undue interference” by authorities and cautioned against “the lessening of tension by silence.” Nearly 3,000 mainstream Protestant pastors and lay leaders from throughout Korea reportedly descended on Holiness Interdenominational Church in Pusan for an institute conducted by San Diego, California, charismatic evangelist Morris Cerullo, breaking down the church doors and smashing windows in order to gain entry to the packed church.

World Gospel Crusades has completed its Every Creature Crusades in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic; 850,000 homes were reached with Gospels of John. The nondenominational missionary literature agency is planning another crusade in Honduras this winter.

Between 6,000 and 8,000 Honduran villagers were touched with Christian love and the helping hands of Atlanta physicians from Northside Baptist Church during a medical mission program. In one village 1,691 patients were treated, 891 teeth extracted, 1,300 persons heard the Gospel, and 36 decisions were recorded.

A slight, bespectacled, 73-year-old dental technician has established his twenty-seventh church in the Philippines. “I manufacture dentures for a living,” says Urbano Castillo, who averages $85 a year for his dental work, “but my main business is winning souls to Christ.”

Another British religious weekly, the 56,000-circulation Sunday Companion that offered “family reading,” ceases publication this month.

The Baptists in Czechoslovakia have published a new hymnal with 670 hymns, the largest thus far for that country.

British humanists—like British churches—are having membership and financial woes: membership last year fell from more than 4,000 to fewer than 3,000, and the financial deficit increased threefold.

Gospel Films’ High on the Campus, a fifty-two-minute color documentary, will be used by the government of Brazil in its nationwide effort to halt the use of dangerous drugs.

University of Singapore medical students receiving evangelistic training from The Navigators organization say they have witnessed to all the non-Christian medical students in the school. Now they are evangelizing a nearby housing estate of carpenters and masons. Dozens of teen-agers and young adults have become Christians and are engaged in Bible study.

Television preacher Rex Humbard, 51, means business in Akron, Ohio. Last month—despite pending litigation by neighbors—he ordered pile drivers to begin construction of Ohio’s tallest building next door to his posh Cathedral of Tomorrow. The 750-foot structure will serve as a transmitting tower for his new commercial UHF station, and it will house a revolving 250-seat restaurant near its top—to help pay the $3.9 million building costs financed by a Teamsters Union pensionfund loan. Opposition has been sparse; the tower will generate more than $50,000 in local taxes annually.

Profits from the station will be used to help stake the Cathedral’s ministry, the same as profits from other Cathedral-related enterprises, says business manager Ellis Baird. These other enterprises range from girdle manufacturing to publishing, videotape production, and real-estate management.

In June, Humbard’s Cathedral acquired Akron’s huge downtown Cascade Plaza, including the twenty-four-story Akron Center office building and $20,000 annual air-rights payments from two others, for an estimated $10 million from contractor John Galbreath. Galbreath required no cash from Humbard, will stretch the down payment over ten years, and may forgive most of it, says Baird. Meanwhile, Humbard hopes only to keep abreast of the mortgage and says he expects no profits from the deal for at least five years. “Paul made tents for a living,” he explains. “We’re gonna rent buildings.”

Humbard plans to move the Cathedral business offices to the center and also to open a counseling clinic. No contributions to the Cathedral will be used to support any of the business operations, Baird vows. This includes the estimated $80,000 a week pouring in from those who tune Humbard in on more than 350 stations, mostly UHF. Humbard’s TV bills are reportedly about $100,000 a week.

A year ago the Cathedral purchased the nearby Shoppers Fair building for $3.1 million, also financed by the Teamsters. Humbard converted it into television studios, a restaurant, Sunday-school rooms, and offices for an advertising agency he bought. Local taxes yield $43,000 yearly.

Next month, says Humbard, he will open the most modern videotape facility between New York and Hollywood. Producers, directors, and other staffers have already been hired, and negotiations are under way involving several large Midwest firms that may let Humbard produce their TV ads. As a by-product, Humbard’s own TV ministry stands to be enhanced—and subsidized.

Under recent federal laws the Cathedral must pay income taxes on profits derived from its new businesses, and on businesses owned prior to this year beginning in 1976. Baird says the Cathedral will sell the latter as soon as possible. Unity Electronics of New York City has already been sold, and Real Form Girdle company in Brooklyn is up for grabs. Humbard bought these firms in 1965 after paying off the original Teamsters mortgage on the Cathedral.

Humbard’s business associates are holding their corporate breath over one of the latest acquisitions: the Mackinac College campus in upper Michigan (see May 7 issue, page 37). Humbard reportedly plunked down $3 million for the thirty-two-acre island campus, valued at $15 million, and announced plans to open his own college in September, 1972, to replace the Moral Re-Armament school that folded three years ago. Many blamed the isolated site and bleak winters for enrollment decline.

But Humbard says he can turn the liability into an asset. Last month he told the island’s residents he will buy additional land and turn the campus into a ski resort during winter months. Students will spend these months in work-related “cooperative educational programs” in businesses and industries elsewhere. Construction of the ski run has already begun, and ski instructors have been hired. During summers the campus will double as a Bible conference center and family vacation spa. Meanwhile Humbard is scouting for faculty and students.

The 6,000 who attend the Cathedral’s Sunday-morning services have no say in business affairs. The church and business operations are under the supervision of a six-person board; Humbard and his wife Maude Aimee are to of them.

The Cathedral’s ministry budget is $600,000 this year, with the bulk earmarked for mortgage payments and $25,000 designated for missions. The church has thirty paid staffers, half of them ministerial. It operates eighteen Sunday-school buses.

Humbard and brother-in-law Wayne Jones, the Cathedral’s assistant pastor, came to Akron in 1953 as an evangelistic team. They rented theaters and built up a following, then erected the $3.5 million Cathedral in 1958. (They were rescued from bankruptcy by the Teamsters) In lieu of salaries the pair lived on “love offerings” until the board put them on salary two years ago. Humbard gets $25,000 a year (from bond interest not the collection plates) plus housing, autos, and an executive-style expense account. He flies to out-of-town meetings is a private four-engine Viscount prop-jet.

The Humbard road show is largely a family affair: his wife, sister, and two sons all sing; Jones helps with platform chores and announces the offerings. Humbard preached to 8,000 at the recent Canadian National Exposition in Toronto, and this month he was scheduled to preach at Carnegie Hall.

The folksy Arkansas-bred Humbard, a fundamentalist, comes across on TV as a half Bible-belt Baptist, half hillbilly Pentecostal evangelist. He often mixes up verb tenses. His image is sometimes incongruous, as in his latest TV special aired on 344 stations from a beautiful Hawaiian coastal setting. Against an instrumental backdrop of “Beyond the Sunset” Humbard twanged out a recitation to his wife.

“I told my husband I’d live with him in a tent when he asked me to marry him,” Maude Aimee told a reporter when Humbard bought the Akron Center. “He was so poor we couldn’t afford a house. But I said I’d rather live with a man I loved than to live in luxury. Who would have thought it would come to this?”

Man From Miracle Valley

“Compassion Explosion” is what handsome, 31-year-old Don Stewart, successor to revivalist A. A. Allen, calls his current campaign. Some 15,000 people jammed New York’s Madison Square Garden September 11 to shout choruses, clap hands, sing praises and listen to the electric words of the evangelist from Miracle Valley, Arizona.

About half of the audience were black or Puerto Rican. Many had come for the healing sessions, the climax of Stewart’s meetings and a hallmark of the A. A. Allen operation. Allen died last year of acute alcoholism (see July 17, 1970 issue, page 38), and Stewart was “anointed” to take his place.

Located on a 2,400-acre tract about 100 miles southwest of Tucson, Miracle Valley enterprises have a staff of 200, a mailing list of 400,000 supporters, and a yearly budget of $3.5 million. The center includes a dozen major buildings, a two-year Bible college, a publishing plant, a motion picture and television lab, a 2,500-seat church, and the “Pool of Bethesda” healing residence. The organization has licensed about 8,000 independent evangelists.

“The Compassion Explosion may not have broken out in the beautiful temples and churches and synagogues of the outer world yet—but it has broken out in the hearts of you, and in the hearts of thousands of youth in the Jesus Movement,” Stewart told the New York audience.

During the healing service, apparent arthritis victims and drug addicts reportedly were cured. A thousand-voice predominantly black choir presented numbers during the three-hour meeting. It ended with an altar call during which about one-third of the audience streamed forward to receive Christ.

Most of the New York meetings were held in a huge tent set up in the Bronx. Following three weeks there, Stewart was slated to take Compassion Explosion to Dayton, Ohio, and thence to Knoxville, Tennessee.

Stewart, who stands six feet tall and weighs 200 pounds, said that he receives no fixed salary but that occasional offerings for personal expenses average about $50,000 a year.

NEWS

Leonard Bernstein, Kennedy friend and Angela Davis sympathizer, dedicated the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with what Paul Hume of the Washington Post called a “spiritual masterpiece” and Father Gilbert Hartke of Catholic University described as a “mish-mosh solemnis.” Although critics were generally harsh on Mass, audiences at all eleven performances gave the show long, boisterous standing ovations.

The Center also got its share of derogation: one critic called it a “Brobdingnagian shoebox.” Made of Carrara marble—all 3,700 tons donated by Italy—the building is a rectangle the size of four football fields decorated in a red and gold combination that verges on the gaudy. The Opera House, the Center’s middle theater, is designed for opera and ballet. Mass contains a little bit of both—as well as blues, jazz, marches, and even some fairly hard rock. To perform this motley music, Bernstein uses a string orchestra with organ and percussion in the pit, two rock bands, a brass marching band, and a woodwind ensemble on stage—plus two choruses, assorted soloists, and twenty-three well-trained dancers.

Kyrie eleison, a prerecorded twelve-tone soprano duet increasing in intensity and confusion, pierces the silent, darkened theater. The curtain rises and the celebrant, melodramatically played by Alan Titus, sings “A Simple Song” to and about his God. “God,” he says, “is the simplest of all.” The viewer isn’t told what this means, but apparently Titus plays a believer; as the song ends he dons the first robe of his clerical garb.

From this point on, the action never lags. The congregation—some dressed as straights, others as hips—sing, swing, and dance across the entire stage. The choreography is excellent, and most of the soloists certainly know how to sing; in fact, the enthusiasm and professionalism of the performers surprises and impresses.

When the purple-clothed monks enter with the elements, the mass begins to throb with conflict. The celebrant kneels to pray, mumbles a few Latin words, and is drowned out by the congregation and orchestra. As he begins the confession he is again silenced by the clamoring questions of the congregation, who refer to the Incarnation as a “small social call” and to God as “plastic.”

The Credo is turned upside down, becoming non credo in unum deum: One man wants to believe but can’t, another once believed but doesn’t anymore, and a third will believe “in any God who believes in me.” One God, three, or twenty-three—it makes no difference if only God will make himself known. “We’re fed up with your heavenly silence,/And we only get action with violence.” Perhaps the crowd has never stopped declaiming long enough to hear God’s still, small voice.

The celebrant is the thematic key. It is essentially his mass and his conflict. The congregation look to him as the answer man for all their doubts: he acts so self-assured. As he walks through the congregation, people rise with arms outstretched to him. After he reads the epistle, the song “The Word of the Lord” affirms that God’s truth will survive. But Bernstein’s political allusions to “men of power” and “local vocal yokels who we know collect a crowd” shatter what could have been his most positive religious statement:

For the Word,

for the Word was at the birth

of the beginning

It made the heavens and the earth

and set them spinning,

And for several million years

It’s withstood all our forums and

bad ideas …

It’s been tough

but it seems to be winning.

As in the traditional mass, the celebrant adds vestments as it progresses. The more outwardly religious he appears, the more confusion is seen in his face and heard in his voice. “Let us pray,” he repeats with increasing desperation. But there are no prayers, only plaintive music interrupted by painful electronic organ sounds.

The priest tries to praise God, but the choirboys take him from his task with stunts and acrobatics while they continue to sing the gloria patri. The symbolism is apparent. The children vie for the celebrant’s favor and attention with look-at-me hand motions just as human beings, Bernstein seems to say, vie for God’s favor.

As Mass draws closer to the consecration of the elements, the dancers foreshadow what is to come with frenzied, angular movements. The congregation taunt the celebrant with agnus deis and dona nobis pacems. They surround him, screaming, demanding peace—peace, not just meaningless religious ritual. Bernstein’s stage directions to be “menacing, wild, barbaric, and relentless” express exactly the congregation’s attitude. They are the visual image of the celebrant’s own soul, tormenting and mocking him.

The celebrant turns from his congregation to begin his ascent up a long flight of stairs, carrying the bread and wine. He stumbles but continues, bent low. Unfortunately, intended or not, the scene is reminiscent of Christ’s trip to Calvary. At the top of the stairs the priest stands with outstretched arms, still holding the chalice of wine and the bread.

The congregation then go berserk in one of the show’s most bizarre scenes. The lighting changes from purple to red to orange—and the music, singers, and dancers seem on fire with orgiastic ecstasy. The scene is suggestive of the Israelites in the golden calf orgy, with Moses holding the twelve tablets and looking down on the people from the mountain top.

This episode epitomizes the charge made by New York Times critic Harold Schonberg that the show is “vulgar … pretentious and thin, as thin as the watery liberalism that dominates the message of his work.”

The celebrant screams “let us prayer” and the orgy abruptly ends. As he descends the stairs he throws down the elements, crying “how easily things get broken.” “An accident, it was only an accident,” he says while he tramples the bread and wine into the ground. The sequence is meant to be tragic; instead, the celebrant is merely pathetic in his childish agony. He cries, babbles, and whines through sixteen tedious minutes. Ripping off his vestments, he asks the congregation why they look up to him: “Can’t you see? Underneath there is nothing but me.”

He desecrates the altar, plays in a sandbox (how unsubtle, Mr. Bernstein), and finally (thankfully) descends into the orchestra pit and exits.

In places Mass is shocking, almost blasphemous. At one performance a woman yelled: “This is pagan, not Christian.… It is sacrilegious.” She then left, sputtering.

Reaction of Catholics was mixed, but most felt horror and despair, according to Father Hartke, Catholic University’s drama head. He told CHRISTIANITY TODAY he had received numerous telegrams from throughout the country. He said of Bernstein: “It appears to me that this is a mind that neither understands nor believes in the mass.… This work and I are worlds apart.”

Although Bernstein’s intention “is to communicate as directly and universally as I can a reaffirmation of faith,” his conclusion is unconvincing. The congregation, singing laude, laude, resolve the spiritual crisis without God, whose voice is never heard. This emptiness drives the celebrant mad—and leads the congregation to rely on human emotion for salvation.

Even this humanism is shallow and vapid. The lyrics are devoid of deep meaning, the symbolism is overworked, the music is derivative, and the conflicts fail to grip the problem.

“Go in peace, the mass is ended,” Bernstein concludes. But no peace is found in this “reaffirmation of faith.” Man’s restlessness remains.