Randy Frame
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They say government opposition deepens their commitment to help Central American refugees.
In March 1982, Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, became the first “sanctuary” for Central Americans fleeing violence in their home countries. Since then, some 180 churches have followed suit, much to the chagrin of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) of the U.S. Justice Department.
In January, culminating an elaborate 10-month undercover operation, federal authorities indicted 16 sanctuary workers for aiding illegal aliens. In addition, authorities arrested some 65 Central American aliens across the country. Most of the approximately 500 people being sheltered by American churches are from El Salvador.
Sanctuary leaders say the aggressive federal action will make their workers more determined and their movement more visible. They say the arrests in Texas last year of sanctuary workers Stacey Merkt and Jack Elder stirred the pot of their rebellion.
“The church is a peculiar institution,” says John Fife, pastor of Tucson’s Southside Presbyterian Church and one of the 16 indicted. “It always responds to pressure with renewed vigor. Governments never understand that.”
The recent indictments and arrests caused attendance to soar at a recent national conference on sanctuary held in Tucson. Nearly 1,700 attended the meeting.
At the gathering, Merkt announced to a jubilant audience that a Texas jury had acquitted Elder, a Catholic lay worker who had been charged with transporting three undocumented Salvadorians 30 miles after they had crossed the border illegally. Jurors said that action was not a major violation.
Federal District Court Judge Hayden Head ruled in Elder’s trial that freedom of religion is a legitimate defense for sanctuary workers accused of aiding illegal aliens. Attorneys for the government have argued that religious motivation is irrelevant and have sought to narrow the focus of the issue to specific violations of the law.
For Merkt, the legal battle is still going on. She was sentenced last June to two years probation, and since then she has been charged with reneging on her probation agreement.
The Refugee Act of 1980 states that aliens must demonstrate “well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality … or political opinion” in order to be considered refugees. Gary MacEoin, a Tucson attorney active in the movement, notes that the United Nations high commissioner on refugees stated in 1981 that any Salvadorian who left his country since 1980 has a “prima facie claim to political asylum.”
UN spokesman Nicholas van Praag says that, technically, the aliens in question do not qualify as refugees. But he says the high commissioner used his office to demonstrate the UN’s concern for “displaced persons in a refugee-like situation.” Van Praag says the UN respects the sovereignty of its member nations while it remains deeply concerned about those who have fled violence in Central America.
INS spokesman Verne Jervis stresses that, according to the law, the U.S. government is responsible to determine who is a refugee. Jervis says sanctuary workers are “quite openly taking the law into their own hands” and thus “usurping the power of the attorney general.… If they would have brought [the aliens] to the proper authorities, it may not have been a crime.”
Sanctuary workers respond that those who do go through the proper channels meet with little success.
“The U.S. government defines these people as economic refugees, and we can understand that as a political position, but we can’t accept it, …” says Bill Price, of the evangelical Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. Price says his church’s mission work has brought it into close contact with the Hispanic community in the United States. He says he is convinced that most Salvadorians are fleeing government persecution, not poverty.
In fiscal 1984, INS examined 13,373 requests for asylum from Salvadorians. Only 328 of the requests were approved. In 761 similar cases involving Guatemalans, asylum was granted in only three instances. In contrast, asylum was granted in 1,018 of the 8,292 cases involving Nicaraguans. Sanctuary workers say Nicaraguans have a better chance of obtaining asylum because the U.S. government opposes that country’s leftist regime.
However, Jervis, of the INS, says those statistics are based on cases in which only a first step was completed. He notes that there are four levels of appeal available to those seeking asylum. Of the approximately 19,000 Salvadorian aliens apprehended last year, he says, only 4,000 were deported. The rest have appealed their cases.
Jervis denies that asylum cases are influenced by the applicants’ nationalities. He says judges are not dominated by the Reagan administration’s political positions, noting that a high percentage of applicants for asylum from Communist Cuba are rejected.
One major reason the sanctuary movement and INS are at an impasse is that the law, as interpreted by INS, makes no provision for Central Americans who are politically neutral but are caught in the crossfire. According to Jervis, an alien may be able to prove that the rest of his family was “wiped out.” But if he cannot prove that the government in his country was responsible, that the action was intentional, and that he could be next in line, then he does not qualify for asylum.
Jervis concedes that the issue is complicated. But, he says, “at least one thing is relatively simple: there are legal avenues available to [sanctuary workers] in order for them to attain the same ends. And they’re avoiding those legal avenues.”
Evangelicals who are sympathetic to the plight of displaced Central Americans have for the most part steered clear of the sanctuary movement. Most of the churches supporting the movement are Roman Catholic or mainline Protestant.
The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) takes no official stand on sanctuary. “I do not want to condemn anyone in the sanctuary movement,” says Don Bjork of World Relief, the relief and development arm of NAE. “They have come up with some very convincing biblical and historical arguments to justify their actions.” Bjork adds, however, that he does not encourage evangelicals to join the movement. He says that respecting the U.S. government will produce more fruit.
Legislation being considered by Congress could make the sanctuary movement unnecessary. Authored primarily by U.S. Rep. Joseph Moakley (D-Mass.), it proposes that Salvadorians be allowed to remain in the United States for at least two years while the Congressional General Accounting Office studies the situation. Bjork calls the measure “a positive bill” and says it would solve the problem.
Moakley staff aide Jim McGovern says support for the bill is not limited to those who oppose U.S. foreign policy in El Salvador. “The humanitarian question of what happens to these refugees should not be a partisan political issue,” he says.
Indianapolis Wants To Become The Protestant Center Of The United States
The city of Indianapolis is trying to convince six Protestant denominations to join a seventh in building headquarters in the nation’s thirteenth-largest city.
The long-resident Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, and three Lutheran bodies that will merge by 1988 have been asked to consider building national offices in Indianapolis. The Lilly Endowment and private citizens have amassed a substantial dollar pool, which inside sources put at $50 million, to help attract the denominational headquarters.
“We see this as an opportunity to serve American institutions of enormous importance, as well as to enrich the life of our city,” said Robert Lynn, senior vice-president of the Lilly Endowment. Headquartered in Indianapolis, the endowment makes some of the nation’s largest grants to religious groups.
The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is considering a move from its aging facilities on Indianapolis’s east side. Kenneth Teegarden, the church’s general minister and president, said the downtown area is a primary choice.
“We hope to make a witness to religious faith by having headquarters with a unique architectural style in the middle of a major city,” Teegarden said. “The city [of Indianapolis] has been good to us. The presence of several foundations in the city committed to enhancing human values is also a distinct attraction.”
Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut III, a Presbyterian clergyman, said the churches might want to build in a downtown campus-type arrangement. “Why not go ecumenical and foster development of a shared life,” he said, “… to have out here in the heartland an ecumenical expression of that shared life with others.”
All seven denominations have expressed interest in moving their offices from current locations. The American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches plan to merge by 1988. The three Lutheran bodies are scheduled to vote this year on a headquarters site for the new denomination.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has had headquarters in two cities, New York and Atlanta, since a 1983 merger. The church is planning to consolidate its offices, but the site has not yet been determined.
The United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church are reconsidering the location of their denominational offices because of high prices in New York City.
Indianapolis—ranked the most accessible of the largest 100 U.S. cities—is a day’s drive from half the U.S. population, Hudnut said. A 1984 survey of chambers of commerce revealed the city to have among the lowest cost of meals, lodging, labor, and taxes.
If the denominations agreed to move to Indianapolis, Hudnut said, liberalleaning national church staff would have to adjust to a population where “the Atlantic and the New Yorker [magazines] are not as avidly read.… If they came here, they might find out how out of touch they are with the man or woman in the pew.”
RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE
DEATHS
Lance B. Latham, 91, cofounder of the Awana Youth Association, founder and former pastor of Chicago’s North Side Gospel Center; January 15, in Chicago.
Rachmiel Frydland, 65, survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, Talmudic scholar, Jewish Christian missionary, helped organize the Jewish Christian movement in Israel, instructor in Judaica with Jews for Jesus; January 12, in Cincinnati.
John W. Baker, 64, general counsel and director of research services for the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, one of the nation’s foremost specialists in church-and-state law; January 12, in Bethesda, Maryland, of congestive heart failure.
Avis B. Christiansen, 89, poet, known for her texts that were set to music by some of this century’s leading hymn composers, worked in conjunction with Moody Bible Institute’s music department; January 14, in Niles, Illinois, after a stroke.
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Anita and Peter Deyneka, Jr.
Christians in the USSR are seeing revival despite the most severe repressions since Khrushchev.
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Christians in the USSR are seeing revival despite the most severe repressions since Khrushchev.
In the late 1950s Nikita Khrushchev boasted that religion in the USSR would become obsolete by 1965. When that happened, he hyperbolically said he would insist that at least one Christian be preserved and placed in a museum so that future generations of Soviets could view an extinct species.
The fossilization of religion in the USSR predicted by a succession of Soviet leaders has not happened despite Communist rule that cost the lives of an estimated 60 million Soviet citizens between 1917 and 1953. Some 66 million others were incarcerated, of whom as many as half may have been Christian believers.
Not only has religion survived in the USSR, but reports—from sources as wide-ranging as the Soviet and Western press—are reaching the world of a recrudescence of religion. Not yet a conflagration, sparks of spiritual revival are discernible from the Baltic Sea to Siberia, and in some satellite countries.
This rise in religious interest is occurring despite the most severe repression since Khrushchev’s virulent antireligion crusade of the early 1960s. Beset by internal problems and international setbacks, Soviet leaders have assumed an increasingly isolationist, reactionary stance. The Kremlin’s campaign for conformity and compliance in a tightening, totalitarian society includes a crackdown on religion. “Were living on a precipice these days,” said one Soviet Christian.
Despite current repressions, some Soviet sources acknowledge that 15 to 20 percent of the adult population in the USSR are religious. David Barrett, compiler of the World Christian Encyclopedia, estimates that in the Soviet Union (pop. 273 million) there are 96,726,500 “affiliated” Christians, 23 percent of them nonpracticing. In his book Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population, Sovietologist William Fletcher estimated in 1981 that “around 45 percent, and hence 115 million of the [total] population, belong to the religious sector to some degree or another.”
That nearly half of its citizens may be religious may not be surprising in a country once called “Holy Rus,” where most citizens once belonged to the state Orthodox church. Also, as many as 50 million Muslims live in the Soviet Union, primarily in Central Asian regions. Nevertheless, strong religious adherence is remarkable in a country that has experienced 68 years of militant Marxism-Leninism, an ideology to which atheism is integral.
The number of known Christian prisoners in the USSR has risen to 332, more than twice the number at any period since the early 1960s. Most leading Christians and other dissident activists are in prison or have been exiled from the USSR.
During 68 years of Soviet rule, the “freedom of conscience, that is, the right to profess any religion, and to conduct religious worship or anti-religious propaganda” guaranteed by the Soviet constitution has consisted primarily of freedom to perform religious rites in a restricted number of houses of worship permitted by the government. In the last few years, even the limited freedoms allowed during some periods of Soviet history have been further circumscribed by new legislation. For example, a 1983 law making infractions of labor camp regulations a criminal offense has been used as a pretext for extending the sentences of Christian prisoners. Since 1984, Christians and others who accept Christian literature or funds from abroad are subject to heavy prison sentences under the revised penal code on anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Under a 1984 decree, Christians and others who offer foreigners lodging or transportation may be fined severely.
Furthermore, continuing covert Soviet policies lead to closure of registered churches, harassment of pastors and priests, removal of children from Christian families, and discrimination against believers at all levels of life.
But a correlation exists between repression and religious revival. During some periods of severe persecution (such as the earlier Stalinist years), open religious adherence in the USSR plummeted. By the end of 1939, only four Baptist-Evangelical Christian churches remained open. During World War II, however, Stalin granted concessions to the church in order to enlist the support of Christian citizens; as many as 20,000 churches sprang up across the USSR in the 1940s and ’50s. Later, during Khrushchev’s antireligion campaign, at least 12,500 of these churches (primarily Orthodox) were closed. Citing a proverb to describe the complex relation between religious repression and revival, one Russian Christian told us, “If you pound a stick, it may break. But if you pound too hard, it will stick.”
In some nations, such as Albania, restrictions, repressions, and persecutions have seemingly annihilated religion. In others, such as Poland, adversity has roused Christians, and religion has rooted more firmly. Even during the most severe periods of persecution in the Soviet Union, seeds of the gospel were sown by Christian prisoners and martyrs. “The churches of the Soviet Union can easily be closed,” Stalin once said. “But then the peasant and the peasant woman become a church underground and build the church in their souls. Such churches cannot be controlled by the secret police.”
Even before the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin sounded the battle cry against religion: “Religion and communism are incompatible in theory as well as in practice.… We must fight religion.” Although strategies and tactics have varied, Lenin’s successors have all waged war against religion and promoted atheism as a crucial part of that campaign. Six million professional propagandists promulgate atheism in the USSR. In 1982 in Ashkhabad, the capital of mostly Muslim Turkmenistan, local Soviet authorities announced the opening of the first of 22 new “universities,” featuring a two-year curriculum to train missionaries of atheism.
From kindergarten through university, atheism courses are compulsory in Soviet education. One book, Atheistic Education in the Schools: Questions of Theory and Practice, states: “The atheistic education of youth in our country is realized through a system of educational and upbringing institutions and through Young Pioneer and Komsomol [Young Communist League] organizations … a major role in this system belongs to the schools.…”
Annually, the Kremlin invests millions of rubles to produce a plethora of atheistic publications, films, lectures, exhibitions, and other presentations. In the Soviet press, articles regularly appear calling for more convincing atheistic propaganda and greater vigilance in the struggle against religion.
The October 11, 1984, issue of Pravda exhorted, “It is imperative to carry out more active propaganda of scientific-materialistic opinions, pay more attention to atheistic education.… The Party is particularly concerned that young people should form firm atheistic convictions.” The steady stream of articles related to religion and atheism in the Soviet press indirectly confirms continued and seemingly spreading spiritual interest in those areas of the USSR where religion is strongest.
The surfeit of atheism in the Soviet Union has helped ignite spiritual curiosity. University students are increasingly asking, “Why, if there is no God, is it necessary to speak against him so much?” Staff members of the Slavic Gospel Association have heard of many conversions of atheists and agnostics. In the Ukraine, an atheism propagandist permitted to read the Gospels so as to combat Christianity became a believer in the process. In Siberia, a scientist, whose mother was an ardent member of the Znanie Society (an organization that propagates atheism), had never attended a church, read the Scriptures, or been well acquainted with Christians. He became a believer as he read the account of Nikolai Gogol’s conversion in Gogol’s letters.
The chasm that exists today between Marxist promises of another generation and the reality of the present situation in the Soviet Union has severely shaken the Russian soul. It is almost as if the country has lost its moral moorings. Commenting on this phenomenon, observer George Feifer says, “People from nonideological societies cannot easily grasp the significance of this. It is as if the American Bible Belt had lost its faith in God. A traveler in Russia has a sensation of moving in the wake of an epidemic of rejected belief.” Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovski states, “From top to bottom no one believes in Marxist dogma anymore, even though they refer to it and use it as a stick to beat one another with.”
Even jokes often display disdain for Marxism. One such joke asks and answers three questions: “What is philosophy? Searching in a dark room for a black bed. What is Marxism? Searching in a dark room for a black bed that isn’t there. What is Marxism-Leninism? Searching in a dark room for a black bed that isn’t there and shouting, ‘I’ve found it!’ ”
The spiritual emptiness created by the bankruptcy of Marxism is especially abhorrent to Russians, an innately ideological people. In his book Origins of Russian Communism, Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev characterizes this idealism, which initially attracted many to Marxism: “What was scientific theory in the West, a hypothesis or, in any case, a relative truth, partial, making no claim to be universal, became among the Russian intelligentsia a dogma, a sort of religious revelation. The Russian spirit craves for wholeness.… It yearns for the absolute and desires to subordinate everything to the Absolute.…”
Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote, “Yes, for real Russians the questions of God’s existence and of immortality, or, as you say, the same questions turned inside out, come first and foremost, and of course they should.… For the secret of man’s being is not only to live, but to have something to live for.”
The quest for spiritual reality is particularly pronounced among Soviet youth. Significantly, the ranks of Christians are being replenished by many young people from nonreligious families—some from the Soviet elite. These trends alarm Soviet authorities, who may tolerate religion among the old and ignorant but cannot ideologically explain its existence among youth, inculcated from infancy in Marxist atheism.
Even official Soviet sociological surveys reveal increasing indifference toward atheism among youth. One 1982 survey asked young workers what their attitude would be toward a colleague who participated in the baptism of a child. Between 1969 and 1978, those who would openly condemn the colleague fell from 12.4 percent to 10 percent. Those who would tacitly condemn him fell from 15.7 to 8 percent. Those to whom the matter was immaterial rose from 60.5 percent to 66.3 percent.
Evident among all Christian denominations, the revival of Christianity among youth is most visible among evangelicals. In a 1982 article in the Los Angeles Times, Robert Gillett wrote: “Interest in religion in the Soviet Union has unquestionably declined in the more than 60 years since the Bolshevik revolution, but many young men and women are now turning back toward religion—and often not to the relatively passive and ritualistic Orthodox faith of their grandparents but to the passionate and proselytizing evangelical Christian sects that Soviet authorities find much harder to co-opt and control” (© L.A. Times; reprinted by permission).
One young Baptist, Valeri Barinov—recently sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for his impassioned Christian witness—composed music that struck a resonant chord among many searching youth. In response to his opera, Trumpet Call, young people across the Soviet Union wrote to Barinov, asking about the message of his music. In a letter to the West, the musician wrote, “On the basis of these letters it is evident that people, especially young people, are beginning to wake up from a spiritual slumber which has been caused by official atheism. People are beginning to understand that a desolate soul cannot be satisfied wth alcohol, drugs, or even wealth. It is as if the cry of the spirit of our people is expressed in these letters—we want to know about God, we need God.…”
Besides the noticeable numbers of young people in church meetings, spiritual renewal also is manifest by unofficial groups and gatherings held outside churches. One of these, the Christian Seminar for the Problems of Religious Renaissance in Russia, is representative of an unknown number of similar house groups that meet secretly. They are often dismantled if discovered by the KGB (the Soviet secret police). Formed in 1974 among newly converted young Orthodox Christians, Christian Seminar pursued obschina (community) and sobornost (fellowship), and considered the works of a spectrum of Christian writers, including Berdyaev, Solovyov, and Billy Graham. One member, Vladimir Poresch, now in prison, notes that seminar members welcomed “the normal human speech” they were able to cultivate with each other in unfettered discussions.
The founder of Christian Seminar, Alexander Ogorodnikov, also now in prison, followed a path illustrative of other young Soviet intellectuals who have turned to Christianity. An outstanding student, Ogorodnikov’s interest in Christianity was stirred when he was permitted to see Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St. Matthew at the cinematography institute where he was studying.
Youth and intellectuals are the two often-overlapping sectors of Soviet society where flames of spiritual revival are today burning most brightly. For example, spiritual themes are becoming increasingly visible in the arts. Reports also are reaching the West of spiritual probings among scientists—intellectuals who should have no spiritual inclinations according to Marxist cosmology.
“We Used to Think the Churches Would Disappear”
Articles in the Kremlin-controlled Soviet press are confirming the phenomenon of religious renewal in the USSR by deploring the resilience of religion and acknowledging its resurgence.
• In an August 24, 1984, interview with Christian Science Monitor, Yuri Smirnov, head of international information for the Soviet Council for Religious Affairs, conceded, “We used to think in a primitive way, after the revolution, that the old people would die and the churches would disappear. But that hasn’t happened.”
• The Soviet armed forces newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), expressed concern in a March 21, 1984, article about signs of religiosity among recruits. Urging instructors to “step up atheistic work,” the writer of the article complained, “Time and again one sees the glint of a copper cross on the chest of a recruit.”
• In a June 1983 speech to the Central Committee Plenum, Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko acknowledged that religion still influences the lives of “not a very insignificant part of the population.”
• A 1982 article in the Soviet publication Questions of Scientific Atheism examined what the author, P. Kurochkin, called “causes of a definite revival of religion or at least of the interest in religion in certain regions and in some population layers” of the USSR.
• On October 18, 1984, Pravda indicated increased Kremlin concern that large numbers of young people are drifting to religion and called on schools and youth organizations to intensify atheistic propaganda. The editorial accused “imperialist circles” in the West of using religion as a weapon against communism.
Recently, Western media also have spotted signs of religious renewal in Iron Curtain countries.
• A 1984 report from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the publication of the broadcasting service to the USSR and Eastern Europe sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency, states, “A new phenomenon, which is often described as a ‘religious revival,’ can be observed in Eastern Europe and in parts of the Soviet Union, especially the Baltic States.”
• A January 23, 1984, New York Times article entitled “Signs of Religious Renewal Rising Across East Europe” reported: “Eastern European communist parties, with the exception of Albania, appear to have abandoned the hope that religion—Marx’s opiate of the people—will vanish in some foreseeable future.”
• On September 10, 1983, The Economist observed, “Church attendances are increasing in many cities in Russia, Rumania, and Bulgaria … the religious stirrings are viewed with apprehension by communist governments.”
• In a February 1981 article in Harper’s magazine, Soviet observer George Feifer wrote: “Hence the return-to-roots search for ‘new’ values in old Russia. This is linked to the religious revival, the country’s most important social movement by far, despite persecution whose severity and range is scarcely [comprehendible] to Westerners.”
An acquaintance of ours, a Christian Eastern European scientist, told us about working at a science research institute in the Soviet Union. Although none of his colleagues dared attend church, several were intensely interested in spiritual subjects and eagerly participated in a clandestine Bible study that our friend organized.
In 1970, dissident publicist Mark Popovsky unofficially conducted a survey to analyze the extent of religious belief among scientists. One hundred questionnaires were cautiously distributed among scientists from several cities in the Soviet Union. Ninety-five percent of the respondents maintained that there was no contradiction between science and religion. Some went to considerable lengths to explain that the two have again come very close after a period of mutual estrangement in the nineteenth century.
In response to a question asking how widespread are religious convictions among Soviet scientists, most respondents said that of 1,200,000 natural scientists in the USSR, 100,000 to 150,000 were religious believers—some 10 percent on the average. Almost all respondents stated that religious convictions have a direct positive impact on man’s creativity and, hence, on his productivity as a scholar.
Religious renewal among intellectuals, youth, and other strata of Soviet society is a complex phenomenon, of which evangelical Christianity is only one strand. For some Russian Orthodox Slavophiles, for instance, Christianity is inextricably interwoven with patriotism and nationalism. Nationalism is also a potent force in spiritually fervent Catholic Lithuania and in the religious revival occurring in Poland.
A return to Christianity for some Soviets appears to be motivated primarily by the desire to dissent. Christianity, with its historic and nationalistic supports, provides a strong challenge to the Soviet Communist government and, even with all the restrictions imposed upon religion, offers almost the only officially tolerated alternative to communism within Soviet society.
The search for spiritual reality by some Russians is characterized by a fascination with the occult and with Eastern religions. In 1983, the Soviet newspaper Trud reported that some young people are seeking the services of fortune tellers rather than relying on the Komsomol. All of this is a manifestation of the current religious renaissance, and Western Christians may wonder how strong an element biblical Christianity is among the swirling currents of religious revival.
Statistics seemingly do not indicate significant growth among evangelicals. However, in a nation where religious manifestations are restricted, statistical data may primarily reveal the cost of open membership in registered churches and the difficulty in obtaining government permission to build new churches. Neither do statistics shed much light on the number of catacomb churches and crypto-Christians.
Several identifiable factors are, however, fueling the flames of biblical Christianity. Forbidden to proclaim their faith verbally, Christians provide powerful witness through the presence of Christ radiated in their lives. In Moscow, a Christian youth group regularly visits nearby villages and seeks out widows, invalids, and other needy people for whom they can chop wood and perform other chores. In a city in Siberia, an atheistic agitator persistently harassed believers meeting in an unregistered congregation. The agitator became ill with cancer. Dying in the hospital, he received few visits from his atheistic comrades, but the Christians he had persecuted, laden with flowers and food, came to his bedside daily.
No missions or parachurch organizations are permitted in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Soviet believers strive to fulfill the Great Commission. “In our country, every Christian is a missionary,” a Baptist leader once told us. Although Soviet Christians cannot travel to foreign countries as missionaries, some are moving to unevangelized areas of their own country, primarily for missionary purposes.
Soviet authorities regularly blame rising religious interest in the USSR on external influences. An article in Radyanska Ukraina (Aug. 18, 1984), titled “Blessing—in the name of the CIA: Clerical Anti-Soviets—an Instrument of Anti-Communism,” condemns religious organizations in the West that are preoccupied with the religious situation in the USSR. The May 25, 1984, issue of Pravda charged that there was a worldwide conspiracy by Christians, Muslims, and Jewish extremists to undermine the Soviet Union by fostering religion there. “One must not underestimate the danger,” Pravda cautioned.
It is true that many Christian individuals and organizations are actively stoking embers of spiritual revival in the USSR. Western Christians are officially and unofficially importing Bibles and Christian literature into the USSR. Also, monthly, more than 2,000 broadcasts are beamed into the Soviet Union from Protestant international radio stations. Catholic and Orthodox programs also are transmitted from Radio Vatican, Voice of America, Radio Liberty, the BBC, and elsewhere.
Christian broadcasts have stirred spiritual renewal. David Barrett estimates that there are 39,750 congregations of isolated radio churches scattered across the Soviet Union. Radio missionaries emphasize the significance of Christian broadcasting to church growth. One reports: “In one town of Russia there were no Christians at all. Eight people of that town began listening to the Christian broadcasts.… Because of those eight friends, today there is a registered church there. Many young people are being converted. There are revivals all over the country.… Many Russian believers fast and pray every Friday for better reception of shortwave broadcasts and for revival.”
While the future path of religious revival in the USSR is impossible to predict (“the wind blows where it wishes”), many Christians in the East and West are expectant. Russian Orthodox priest Dmitri Dudko, for example, forecasts a religious revival in the USSR—particularly among youth—that cannot be halted. “Persecution and attacks on religious themes accelerate the religious process,” he says. “Young people who are always sensitive to contemporary processes of any sort are interested in religion and this can’t be halted anymore. It’s useless to even try. Everyone must hurry to take part in the process.”
In a samizdat (underground press) article circulated in 1984, a Russian Christian named N. Alexiev, wrote: “But the ‘transmission of religion’ in our country is occurring outside the limits of the religious ‘family.’ It escapes the control and even the observation of the forces that would like to see the church annihilated from Russian soil.… The authorities can, with great effort and loss, slow the growth of religiousness in our country.… But to stop this movement, this growth, to crush it, to annihilate it, they can’t do it.”
Malcolm Muggeridge has written, “After more than half a century of authoritarian government bent on extirpating the Christian religion and all its work, Christ is alive in the USSR as nowhere else.”
French Catholic writer François Mauriac once said that if he saw light anywhere in the world, it was coming only from Russia.
Some East European Christians envision a spiritual fire in the USSR and Eastern Europe that will spread beyond their borders, kindling revival in other countries. An East European scientist told us, “Communism with the suffering it has brought to believers has swept away corrupt and lukewarm Christianity in our country. It has created a vacuum in millions of people … which can be truly filled only with vital Christianity. And that is what is happening—Christianity, purified and revitalized, is spreading throughout our country. Perhaps the day will come when our suffering church will be sending missionaries to your country.”
After 68 years of militant Marxist atheism, religion has not been incinerated in the Soviet Union. In fact, out of the ashes of atheism, a phoenix of religious revival is rising.
1Anita Deyneka is a teacher in the Slavic Gospel Association’s Institute of Slavic Studies. Her husband, Peter, Jr., is the director of the sga.
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Ben Patterson
M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie explores the dimensions of human and satanic evil.
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M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie explores the dimensions of human and satanic evil.
If it is true, as Baudelaire suggests, that “the Devil’s cleverest wile is to convince us that he does not exist,” then psychiatrist M. Scott Peck has dealt the Devil a serious blow in his best-selling book, People of the Lie. The Devil is not all Peck talks about in this unlikely book. He originally set out to write a work dealing with human evil, and that is what he has done. When he began he believed, along with 99 percent of his psychiatric colleagues, that there was no such thing as the Devil. But as he contemplated writing such a book, it seemed to him that, in the interests of scientific objectivity, he ought at least to examine the evidence for the existence of the Devil. His conclusion? “I now know that Satan is real. I have met it.”
That makes for interesting reading—so interesting, in fact, that People was in its fifth printing as of November of 1984, had sold more than 150,000 copies at the rate of 1,000 per week, and its publishers were showing no signs of issuing it in paperback. No small portion of its readership is among evangelicals. Both People of the Lie and another book by Peck, The Road Less Traveled, appeared on Eternity magazine’s Book of the Year list, finishing seventh and sixth, respectively. (Eternity’s list is determined by the votes of a group of evangelical writers, leaders, and theologians who have been associated with the magazine.) The success of these two books has kept Peck so busy speaking and writing that he has had to stop practicing psychiatry, at least for the time being.
What makes People of the Lie so unlikely is that it comes from a man thoroughly trained in the canons of a secularist psychological discipline. His education was at Harvard and Case Western Reserve universities, he did not read the Gospels until he was 39, and was not baptized until March of 1980, sometime after he wrote The Road Less Traveled. That last item causes astonishment for the many who read the book and were sure that the author must have been a Christian. But he was not. His path to Christianity came by way of Zen Buddhism in his youth and mysticism as an adult. The Road Less Traveled was, by his own assessment, part of a pilgrimage toward Christianity, not the end of the road.
Peck has a gift for writing the captivating opening line. The first sentence in The Road Less Traveled is, “Life is difficult.” For People of the Lie it is, “This is a dangerous book.” He is also a fine storyteller. People of the Lie is loaded with the fascinating and chilling stories of patients he has treated who have struggled with evil people or who were themselves evil. Unforgettable is the story of Bobby, whose parents made him a gift of the rifle with which his brother had committed suicide; or of the mutually parasitic marriage of Hartley to Sarah, an “evil couple”; or of Billie and her spider phobia; or of Angela’s dream of a voodoo ritual.
Peck’s thesis is simple: There really is such a thing as human evil, and it has certain definable characteristics. What is evil? He once asked that question of his eight-year-old son, who answered, “That’s easy, Daddy, evil is live spelled backwards.” That definition is good enough for Peck. Human evil is that which destroys human life. More telling, however, is what characterizes evil. According to Peck, it is the persistent and accumulative refusal of the evil person to face the truth about himself. He may admit publicly that, of course, he is a sinner just like everyone else. But deep down inside he does not believe it. So rather than face up to his own sin he is constantly scapegoating: laying it on other people, making his faults theirs. Evil people are masters of disguise, morally. They are constantly dodging their conscience. In other words, evil people are liars. Hence the title of the book.
This scapegoating mechanism is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the evil personality. Children are most often its victims, because they are so vulnerable. Parents have an almost godlike power over their own children, and to the degree that they will not face up to their own evil, to that same degree they seem to project it onto their children. Peck observes that rarely will evil people turn up in psychotherapy. This is because psychotherapy is what he calls the “light-shedding process par excellence.” Evil, by definition, avoids the light. So the persons who end up in the therapist’s office are not usually the truly evil ones, but the victims of someone else’s evil. Again, children figure hugely in this group of victims.
Where and how does the Devil figure in all this? Peck is not sure. He writes, “Perhaps it will forever be impossible to totally discern exactly where the human Shadow leaves off and the Prince of Darkness begins.” His tentative conclusion is that the Devil has very little to do with evil in everyday life. Most of us do not have to be recruited to do his work; we recruit ourselves. Of this much he is sure: the Devil does exist, and on rare occasions does take possession of people. But only on rare occasions. In preparation for his book he was able to participate in two exorcisms. It was his experience in these events that convinced him of the Devil’s reality.
Peck the psychiatrist is bold, unconventional, and imaginative. In his field of endeavor it would take such a person to take a serious look at the possibility that the Devil might exist, and to risk the ridicule of the psychiatric dogmatists when he published his findings. Peck the theologian is also bold, unconventional, and imaginative. As he put it in a telephone interview, “When I talk theology I am utterly speculative.” That he is, indeed.
For instance, take his view of man. Man is radically free to choose to do good and evil. Says Peck, “It is always within our power to change our nature.” In view of this, I asked him what he meant when he called Christ “Savior.” He suggested that there are three ways to understand what it means to call him Savior. One way is to think of him as Savior in the sense that he atones for our sins. Peck termed that “my least popular level.” A second way is to see him as Savior in the sense that he is “a kind of fairy godmother who will rescue you when you get in trouble as long as you remember to call upon his name.” Peck believes that Jesus does just that. A third way to see Jesus as Savior is to see him as the one who shows the way to salvation through his life and his death. So Peck likes Jesus the Savior as fairy godmother (a term I am sure he does not use flippantly) and as exemplar, or one who shows us how to live and die. But he does not like the idea of Jesus the atoner.
In all fairness, Peck does not reject the idea of Jesus as atoner, he just does not see that as very helpful in the healing of human evil. Why? Because, in his view, it compromises human responsibility. He thinks that as long as we think Jesus has done it all for us we will be encouraged to live passively in the face of our own sin and evil. Therein lies Peck’s chief weakness as a Christian thinker. He lets what he deems to be psychological necessity dictate theological truth. With him it is like the old joke, “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb really has to want to be changed.” So it is with salvation from sin and evil. Peck insists that this is not Pelagian heresy, but I have difficulty in seeing how such a view of the Atonement is not.
No one has ever resolved the classic theological problem of the relationship between the sovereignty of God and the freedom of man. I am certainly not going to attempt that here. But whatever is said, it must take into account the mass of biblical material asserting that, apart from God, no one is free. Even the freedom to choose is a gift that God gives. I find it very difficult to have an extraordinarily high view of human freedom when Jesus tells us that we are all the servants of one of two masters, either God or Satan—or when the apostle Paul tells us that without Christ we are blinded by the god of this world (Satan), dead in sins and tresspasses, and by nature children of wrath. It appears that Peck is so anxious to give human freedom its due that he does not give the Devil his due. A radical view of human freedom may be very useful in psychotherapy. How else can you convince a patient to respond to treatment? But I suspect that it is a salutary fiction.
Peck’s view of God is even more disturbing. He ends up looking suspiciously like a psychotherapist. Peck declares flatly that God does not punish evil, that he “cannot destroy, he can only create … having forsworn the use of power against us, if we refuse His help, He has no recourse but, weeping, to watch us punish ourselves … having forsaken force, God is impotent to prevent the atrocities that we commit.” That description of what God can and cannot do sounds a lot like what a psychiatrist can and cannot do, but not like what the Sovereign Lord of the universe can and cannot do. Peck is big on God’s love, but not on God’s power. More accurately, for Peck God’s power is his love, only his love. It is interesting that earlier in the book he cites with approval Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He terms it a fine treatment of the problem of “natural evil”: the evil that befalls us from the seemingly blind and remorseless forces of nature. (Kushner wrote his book out of the pain of watching his young son die the painful death of progeria, or rapid aging.) Kushner attempts to explain this kind of thing by affirming God’s great love, while asserting his less-than-great power. God can’t help it when these things happen, he can only help us through them when they do. Kushner’s God and Peck’s God are very similar. But he is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, nor of Job and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. All Peck’s and Kushner’s God can do and will do in the face of evil is to wring his hands and weep in impotence and frustration. This, I repeat, is not the God whom the apostle Paul warns us “will give to each person according to what he has done … [on] the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:5–6).
These are serious, maybe even fatal, flaws in Peck’s thinking. Nevertheless, People of the Lie is a remarkable book and well worth your time. It is a significant contribution to the dialogue between psychology and theology. Peck’s discussion of the value of a multimodel approach to the study of human behavior is alone worth the price of the book. For pastors it provides some crackerjack sermon illustrations (Charlene’s lonely protests against God are a devastating example of the power of evil to isolate and destroy a human being). More important, the book is invaluable for alerting the pastoral counselor to the dynamics of evil on an interpersonal level.
The book also leads to a very urgent consideration of the role of the Christian community in dealing with human evil. I say “leads to” because he did not mention this in the book, but said it later in a telephone interview. He said he felt that something very inappropriate was taking place during the exorcisms of which he was a part. It was that the exorcisms were not taking place in the church, but outside it. He commented, “The church, I think, has failed in not being willing to be that battleground. What the church has done is to try and hush up and avoid any kind of conflict.… The church should properly be a place for conflict just as Jesus’ body was stretched apart and tom apart on the cross.… Our job in the body of Christ should be in some ways to be torn apart and experience great stress rather than great peace. I think we generally want church to be like going to a good movie, Mary Poppins or the like, and it gives us a good feeling for an hour a week.” Right on, Scott Peck.
When he said that, I felt as I did so often in reading his book. I felt as though I had had a glass of ice water thrown in my face. Thanks, I needed that. For a long time I thought it was only the liberals who had a weak view of human sin and evil, and who therefore avoided those subjects in their preaching and publishing. But of late, we evangelicals have out-liberaled the liberals with our self-help books, positive thinking preaching, and success gospels. Peck’s book has come along at a propitious time. It deserves a critical reading by evangelicals, but also a wide reading.
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“There is a husband and a wife. The husband committed adultery and came to me about it. It was possible for a confession to his wife to occur, and for there to be a true period of anger. But that was the beginning of a drama that ended with honest forgiveness and repair of a marriage. The preparation, the ministry in this place, laid the foundation for that man to come and talk, and for him and his wife to have the language of sin and forgiveness. And it was there for them when they most needed it. That is how I define success in the pastorate.”
The speaker is Walter Wangerin, Jr., for more than ten years the pastor of a small church in inner-city Evansville, Indiana. It is characteristic of Wangerin to view the reconciliation of a marriage in the terms of a drama. To him, all of life is dramatic and significant. Novelist Walker Percy has worried that people of the present are terminally nice: without conviction, void of passion.
Wangerin is a bones-and-blood antithesis of Percy’s terminally nice man. He is gracious, to be sure, but first and foremost charged with passion. Faith, story, ministry—all these things strike deep in Wangerin. Even as he speaks of them privately, behind the closed door of his office, he cannot help acting out the excitement straining at the well cap of his imagination. Any question, it seems, may promote a gusher. He leans back in his chair and hoists his feet onto the desk. He paces the room. He kneels. He puts a hand over dark eyes and clamps his temples. He modulates his voice with the intensity of Olivier at a command performance and uses rich, old, full-bodied words such as “mercy” and “unto.”
Wangerin has an easy and natural eloquence that has ripened with years of paying attention to words. As a child he read slowly, subvocalizing or silently sounding out each word (with Dostoevsky, “even those blamed Russian names”). It taught Wangerin the limberness of words and the rhythm of sentences. His adult life has been consumed with writing and speaking, as a radio announcer, a college professor of English, a novelist, and a preacher.
He has written several books, the most highly acclaimed being 1978’s The Book of the Dun Cow, a fantasy novel that won an American Book Award. His latest book is a diverse collection of essays, parables, and stories, Ragman and Other Cries of Faith. The Book of Sorrows, a sequel to the Dun Cow, will be published this spring.
Less visible than the writing, but undertaken with equal intensity, has been his ministry to the 200 members of Evansville’s Grace Lutheran Church. Television is the “cool” medium, and large, comparatively impersonal churches are part of a mass society; but for Wangerin, Christ is first of all “the truth you can hug.” “I cannot imagine ministry apart from relationship,” he says, and so finds the electronic or large churches personally unthinkable. When he preached at Grace, he stood and moved in the aisle, physically touching his parishioners.
Not surprisingly, Walter’s stories are populated with warmly characterized individuals: a boy afraid his mother will abandon him, a lunatic woman, a dying man who will not leave his living room chair. To read these stories is to care for the people they describe. It is to see that their author knows firsthand about service to Jesus when there is no wealth or health, and that he knows about the true riches of God’s creation and redemption. And to read them is to want to look that author in the face, to close his office door and provoke him to speak—something we did last October while Wangerin was still in the thick of his parish work.
In January of this year, Walter left the pastorate at Grace Lutheran, devoting himself “for a time” to writing and speaking. He especially plans to speak often at ministerial conferences. “I’m not quitting my ministry, but putting it on a new level—going out to present a face with my thoughts to pastors.”
Walter Wangerin was born in Portland, Oregon, the oldest in a family of seven children. His father was a Lutheran pastor and educator, and the Wangerins moved often, both in the United States and in Canada. Walter was shy, he says, and “had no ready means of entering society.”
My brothers were good at sports and used that to make friends. But I wasn’t good at sports. I had strong legs but they weren’t necessarily coordinated. In Canada, at the middle-school track meet, they always gave me the 100-yard dash. That was the garbage-can thing: “Those who can’t do anything else, let them run.” I would always come in last. Much later I tried to play baseball, and one guy hollered as I ran around the bases, “We don’t mind if you carry the piano when you run—just don’t stop to play it.”
I was much more comfortable with reading and writing. We had a bookmobile that came nearby every Saturday afternoon. I delivered papers. A good Saturday would be to finish delivering the papers, come home, pick up my books due, and walk to the bookmobile. In a Canadian winter, it gets dark early. It might have been only 4 o’clock in the afternoon, but the darkness was good because the bookmobile was lighted and the smell of books was very warm. It had the effect of the smell of fire, good hearth fire.
I would take four or five books home and eat supper, and then off came the dirty, stinking clothes, and I got into the bathtub and read for two or two-and-a-half hours. I left the warm water on, just barely: drip, drip, drip.
It was a natural progression from reading to writing. Someone else had written words, I’d write words. It was similar to children watching their parents take care of babies, then playing with dolls. I learned to type in third grade, at a Lutheran school in North Dakota. I remember typing stories on a little, beat-up German portable. I have this memory: Before my eyes is the story, and sitting inside the bathroom, on the other side of the door, is my mother. Every time I wanted to read a story to her, she had to go to the bathroom. I guess she didn’t want to hear the story. But that was okay, I read it through the door.
At age 14, after having lived in Oregon, Washington State, Illinois, North Dakota, and Canada, Walter entered a preparatory school for the ministry in Milwaukee. But upon finishing high school and college in the Lutheran parochial system, he decided he would be a writer instead of a pastor. The next step was Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, for graduate studies in literature.
At that point I don’t think I had a faith in God through Christ. I didn’t doubt the existence of God, but I saw no reason to be in relationship with him. As I look back on it, I see that I was involved in faith even then, that I was involved in faith even when it finally came clear in my head that God wasn’t important to me. In fact, I had taken a stride toward recognition of faith. I had stridden out of ignorance. I had thought I was a Christian because I had performed the rituals, because I had such wonderful knowledge of the faith. But I didn’t trust in God. I had stepped toward faith because I had come to be honest: God had not been significant in my life for a long time. I had a fine intellect, and I trusted it to be my creator. I had to fail and I did. Now I look back on that time and I say it was as painful as dying, and it wasn’t good. At the time, I said, “My God, this is as painful as dying,” and thought I was.
I began to suffer a deep loneliness that had no end, so deep that I could not name it unto other people. I had moved into a small town, Oxford, in which I knew no one. I lived alone in a one-room, efficiency apartment. I was at a secular school where I was fearful I wasn’t going to be smart enough. The banging of the radiator in the room where I lived was the only sound there. It snowed early that year. I quit going to church. All those things did it to me.
I tried things that were very natural. I made friends where I was. It didn’t help. That was confusing, because I thought loneliness meant that you needed community. I decided I was lonely because I couldn’t explain my parochial school past to the people in Oxford. It had no meaning to them.
So I went back to friends at seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Again and again I went back to them. And yet, even when I was with them, I sensed pain, a separation. Then there was my class, the people I had spent seven years with in school, and most of them were at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.
In winter, I got in my little Volkswagen in Ohio, and I drove all the way through Indiana and Illinois, and into Missouri, to see my class. I went to chapel, and a guy got up and preached about a Lutheran who had died a hundred years ago on that date. I was just hollow. As I drove back, I was past despair into desolation. I wondered, “What is this loneliness that my own class can’t fill it?” It was snowing. You know how close the windshield of a VW is to the driver’s face. It’s inches away, and these were great flakes showing up in my headlights. I drove all the way back to Ohio with snow attacking my face, falling lightly and then all of a sudden shooting toward the window. And I took it personally, which is strange. All those snowflakes were attacking me. It became symbolic of what I felt like in the world. I remember writing a poem after that: “Suddenly winter will have at you all in the dip of a small snowflake.”
Paralysis came in the spring. I had four papers to do and I had oral examinations. To say it very briefly, I couldn’t do any of it. I was teaching a class, and I would wake up in the morning and wouldn’t get out of bed. There were people who depended on me, but my being saw no purpose even in going to that class. I really believe all of this was because I had become my own creator, but I was incapable of creating myself. I was the prodigal son who had gone away with my gifts, without realizing that the Giver is infinite and the gifts are finite. I had gone through my gifts, and the world wasn’t going to love me.
At that point I began to pray. I hardly even knew I was praying. It was a two-word, impassioned prayer, going on always, “Love me, love me, love me.” A terrible prayer to have to pray. Finally I said, “All right, there is a God, and God is the Infinite.” That’s how God comes to us first: impersonal rectitude, impersonal infinity. This was the terrible thing about God; he was infinite and I was finite. But my desires, my will, my dreams, all were infinite. This was the image I had in my head that made me honestly hate God: God could be sleeping, and all he had to do was turn over in bed and let his arm fall out, and it would brush me and nearly kill me. Because it was God’s very being that condemned my being. If he wasn’t there I could pretend infinitude, because my dreams were infinite.
But as I say, I had four papers. I had to complete them within a few weeks in order to maintain my stipend, and without it I couldn’t afford school. It looked impossible. Who was “I”? “I” was a good graduate student. That was the only “I” there was, and it had failed. I was walking out of town and came across some sheep. I hated them because they were sheep. Someone had been quoted in Time magazine saying that all Christians were sheep. And when I read it I said to myself, “That’s true.” Now I saw the sheep and I hated them. My impulse was to run at them. Their bland faces and scared eyes were looking at me. I knew I could get at them, and I hated their weakness. At that moment a farmer in overalls came through the woods behind me and he clucked at the sheep, and they instantly forgot me. They turned around and followed the farmer. I no longer had power over them. I remembered Jesus’ words, “I am your shepherd.”
It was that that made it click for me. I didn’t fall down on the ground and worship God or anything, but I said in my heart, “You take it.” I suddenly didn’t have to pass the classes or anything. That I didn’t have to do anything was grace, although I didn’t know it at the time. And when I didn’t have to do it, I wrote the papers and passed the exams.
Eventually Wangerin landed at the University of Evansville, where he taught literature. A local pastor persuaded Walter to work as his assistant. It was in association with that assignment that Wangerin came to know Grace Lutheran Church, and finally to receive the call to pastor Grace full-time.
I began to work with Grace part-time in 1974. The church had lost its pastor, was reduced in number, and had an income of $8,000 a year. The members were thinking of closing it. They came to us and asked if we would shepherd them through a two-year period in which they would decide what to do about the church.
It’s a lovely thing to begin a ministry where the church is fearing dying. If you are about to die, you are willing to be baptized. You are not bound by all the old ways you did things. There can be death and resurrection.
I was about 30 years old, but scared of the inner city. If ever I had thought of being a pastor, I had thought of doing it in a rural parish where I could go into a corner and write and no one would care. But my fear and the church’s dying were good partners. It meant that I had to keep my eyes open and learn from everything that was happening. They were willing to try new things. So we worked well together. We became significant to each other.
After two years the question for Grace came clear: It was not so much “Should we exist?” but “Why should we exist here?” Why on this corner, in this neighborhood? People could go to a different church and meet Jesus. The whole issue of the Word and sacraments, which is important to Lutherans, was not our issue. No one would be deprived of the Word and sacraments if Grace ceased to exist. We had to make it a very specific question. This would be good for any church to do. The trouble is that even if a church does it, it is not under the gun and won’t do it with the same passion. Someone should hold a gun to your head as a church and say, “Why are you here?”
Grace Church, we decided, is here to serve the poor and the needs of this neighborhood. We recognized that we had resources in the congregation. We should stay here because there were talents and abilities in the church. We also had contact with the neighborhood. We had watched other churches move out. But not black churches—they were stuck here. The black churches could grow in importance, but they were stuck here. The white churches could move to the suburbs and care less and less for this area.
The members of Grace decided to keep the church alive, and they called me as its pastor. I asked myself then and have thought often about it since: What does it mean to be a pastor? In every denomination, ordination is special. Even those denominations that don’t call ordination a sacrament elevate certain individuals to represent certain things for them. Remember the Nazirites from the Old Testament. In Numbers 6, there is a law for the Nazirites. They lived differently from the rest of the population of Israel. They didn’t cut their hair, they ate certain ways, and so on. Their existence among Israel imaged Israel to itself. Israel was to be a people separated from the rest of the world and special. And so the Nazirite walking by was like the flesh-and-blood declaration of the personality of Israel itself.
We say in the church that the church is the body of Jesus Christ. Saint Paul meant that now, if you seek the flesh-and-blood body of Jesus Christ, you see it in the flesh-and-blood body of the members of the church. So, in effect, within the world the church images Christ. Even as Adam and Eve were made in the image of God, the church is made in the image of Jesus Christ. The church is the visible image of the invisible Lord.
Within the church are individuals who image the church to the church. These people are the pastors. They are those who are singled out as special—special in terms of preaching the Word in less liturgical communities, and special as dispensing the sacrament in more liturgical communities. There isn’t a church or community without there being special individuals who are responsible for special priestly functions or prophetic functions. They become significations or signs of the presence of God. And that means an awful lot.
The most dramatic way I can declare the presence of God to the people is by being something. And that’s what I mean by imaging: sometimes to hug the people and sometimes to be the severe morality that they’ve got to get around. So I’m not talking about me being moral; that goes without saying. I mean that sometimes I must demand morality of them and be ashamed of them. That is the worst part of the pastorate. I hate having to force them on to a morality when they should be doing it on their own. But I need to be ashamed of them. I don’t mean in front of the entire congregation. I mean face to face. And I don’t have the right to be ashamed of anyone until first we love each other. I can’t come in like a prophet or like some beady-eyed preacher and consign someone to hell. That’s easy; that’s nothing. We’ve got to love each other before my shame means anything at all to that person or will call that person unto shame.
That’s imaging Christ. That’s bringing them into the drama with their Lord, because Jesus can be ashamed. It’s hard for him to tap them on the shoulder and let them look into his face and see the shame there. So it has to be in the human face. I come and I am ashamed until they are as well. And out of their repentance I have the ability to do another thing, to say, “God forgives you.” My face shows forgiveness, and that makes real or images forgiveness. People know that God accepts them for what they are. But I just heard their sin, I just heard something terrible about them, and they expect the preacher to turn away from them. But I don’t. I still love them. I image what is the source of my love, which is Jesus’ love.
Following the success of The Book of the Dun Cow, Walter’s reputation spread. He was asked to teach at colleges and seminaries and, inevitably, invited to pastor larger churches. But he stayed at Grace Lutheran.
I could never envision a call apart from these people. And now I say that I could not envision a parish ministry apart from these people. My whole concept of parish ministry is shaped and colored by their shapes and colors. I couldn’t get into it except that there was flesh, and I can’t now imagine it apart from the flesh that I know, if that makes any sense at all.
It took me a long time to get to know these people. For me, it’s exhausting to be that open. You have to know not only the parishioners, but their extended families, in case of a crisis. Early on at Grace, I got a call from the hospital. A young woman in her twenties was dying. I walked into the hospital room and I recognized her grandparents because they had been in church. Her mother I barely recognized: she had been at church once or twice. The young woman was in intensive care, and the hospital was working to save her life. I walked in, and her husband was at a desk with his head down. He lifted up his head—a total stranger to me except that I saw the fire in his eyes. And the father, whom I had never met, was also there. I walked in and I was supposed to do something. I felt cheap and tiny. I didn’t know if I had the right to touch them or to read a Bible passage or pray or talk about the football game. I sat for four hours in pain and kept saying to myself, “Never again, never again. Never am I going to walk into a crisis situation and not know these people.”
So a large church? No, never. Even when I preach, I’d much rather preach to these people in a small building, where I can touch them. Sometimes I’ve been frustrated and thought about going back into teaching. I’ve gotten feelers from other churches. But I always concluded, this is it.
The people of Grace Lutheran have made me understand Isaiah 53, the Suffering Servant passage. We in the Christian community say that finally it applies to Jesus. And I look at these people, especially the older ones who are close to dying now, and I see them to have suffered and to have baptized suffering itself into something effective and good. Not only did they endure without bitterness, they endured with love. When their suffering was baptized—black folk, I’m talking about black folk underneath racism—when they endured and loved anyway, they not only baptized their suffering, they baptized those who hurt them.
Of course, not all of those who hurt these people would hear forgiveness. But if they would, if they had the heart to hear forgiveness, it was there for them. I just saw the capacity there for it and then I understood Jesus, the suffering Servant: “By his stripes we are healed.” In that sense they ministered to me: they preached, they interpreted Scripture to me. They offered me a theology out of their gut, out of their black skin.
They also ministered to me and my family as community. I think pastors fail when they do not allow their parish to forgive them, when they are not vulnerable before the parish and will not indicate they need forgiveness. That’s the wonderful thing about telling stories on yourself. I don’t mean when you’re in the midst of it, not when you’re actually involved in some kind of sin or terrible thing; you don’t want to suck parishioners into the middle of a storm. But after it’s done and passed, the dear thing is that they come up and forgive you. You have given them the ability to communicate the grace of God to you. And that effects community.
Finally, they minister to me because two of my children are adopted and are black. Matthew and Talitha have a sense of their blackness not from me, but from the black people of Grace.
Soon enough, Wangerin was involved in aspects of the ministry that were less appealing, but necessary. Those included jail visitation and occasional sessions at the city council, to plead the case for neighborhood poor.
When I go to jail, I’m scared. I’m scared of the guards. And it stinks in there. The prisoners are dangerous. I don’t mean that they’re going to cut me, although sometimes that’s the case; most often it’s not. I mean they are emotionally dangerous. They play the feint game, dangerous games that suck the emotion out of you. The easiest thing in the world would be for me to go in there and preach a sermon, in the worst sense of that word: give them a formula and leave myself out of it.
“You must believe in this, Jimmy,” I could say. Say “you must” and I’m free. Throw the formula out and it’s between Jimmy and God. But the prison demands me. Above all, prisons and hospitals scorn formula. They show how flat formula is. It doesn’t work. So what’s left? Me. Relationship. In other words, it’s not the formula that stands between Jimmy and God, it’s me who stands between Jimmy and God.
The beauty of fiction, of stories, is relevance. Fiction sets up truths. It sets up truths and allows the freedom of response. Pontius Pilate looked Jesus square in the eye and said, “What is truth?” Pilate couldn’t see it: Jesus was the living truth. Pilate had the answer, and the answer was flesh and blood. He could have put his arms out and hugged it. We repeat Pilate’s error. We don’t want to put Jesus in front as a living thing. But that’s how it is and that’s what story allows. It allows Jesus to be there as a living thing, standing and gazing into our eyes.
Working here gives me a perspective, but not one I’m happy to have. It’s a painful perspective, that human nature is not in its essence good.
I don’t just mean that across the street there lived a woman to whom men went regularly in the evenings. I don’t just mean that I walked out of this church several years ago and was propositioned by a prostitute, until she found out I was a pastor. I don’t just mean that—that I see the downside of human nature because a woman propositions me or because I see a man on the side of the road vomiting blood, I mostly don’t mean that.
I mean that I look from the downside up at the systems of the world: governmental systems, economic systems, class systems. From the topside down they look good, they comb their hair very well. From the downside up it doesn’t look as good. I want not to see that. I would rather not see the sin of those systems because it makes my life and the life of my children a most mortal thing, a most haphazard thing. I would rather not see from the downside up because then I see how powerful evil can be. I would rather not see from the downside up because I know many of the people who are participating in it. I like them. I don’t want to be a prophet. I hate to be a prophet. I would rather just like my country peacefully, in this city. I really would rather just like it instead of love it.
So there are all kinds of reasons why I would rather not see from the downside up, and I know that apart from this place, this church, I would see it from the topside down. I would see its combed hair, its fine dressing. I’m not saying that those things aren’t true, that they are merely hypocritical. From the topside down, you do see the truth. It’s just that it goes to the surface. It doesn’t exist down in the dregs, down below. Here, I’m forced to keep the perspective of Jesus. I’m forced to see the world the way that Jesus saw the world and not, in my sin, to lose that vision. That’s another reason why it is terribly, terribly good to be here.
The Book of the Dun Cow is filled with natural imagery and has as its main characters a rooster and a dog. So, as his readers might guess, Wangerin doesn’t spend all of his time in the city. Several months ago he was in the Cascade Mountains. Some fellow campers asked him to tell stories.
I had a manuscript with me and started reading it. I got three-quarters of the way through the manuscript before we had to break it up. There was an American Indian woman there. She came up to me, crying, and she gave me some reasons why that story spoke to her, why she identified with it. Then she said, “I sat and I watched the hawk. I watched the hawk circle in the air above your head as you told that story.” She gave me a stone, which she called an Apache tear. It was a black, smooth, and translucent stone.
So I think of the hawk and what the hawk has to say. Or, more particularly, what animals have to say about the nature of God unto us. And how few of us with civilized eyes can read the hawk. This Indian woman read the hawk. She saw something that I believe was the truth, and she changed it into words and tears and a stone in order that I might be able to understand. This is not a metaphor I am telling you. This is the truth. God speaks to us in these animals, and the native Americans know it. That’s not them making up a false religion. That is them hearing the word of God through a hawk or through a bear or a wolf. We don’t see it and don’t listen to the animals, and so a great amount of the word of God is lost.
I don’t mean the Word, capital W, Jesus Christ, but the word, small w, communication from the Creator unto his dear created. God is not nature. But he dwells in it, and nature gives him praise. When the hawk circles as the hawk was taught to circle, it is praising the God who created it and who set that law there for it. Some of us will say, “I am going to shoot the hawk,” and think we have triumphed. Others say, “I have no time to watch the hawk.” Others of us have time but no feeling to read it.
We who do not hear the voice of God in creation and in the animals, we may come to the truth of Jesus Christ, but we do so by a narrow ladder. We don’t hear all that God said first that ended in the name of Jesus. On the other hand, the native American—or a friend of mine, a Zimbabwean who was not all of his life Christian, but was a so-called primitive—these people came to Jesus Christ by a mountain, not a thin ladder.
After the success of The Book of the Dun Cow, Walter was often asked to speak on university campuses. There he found a curious thing. The students regarded writer Wangerin as a priest; they had less respect for the pastor Wangerin.
When I go to the campus as a writer or storyteller, I am a priest, by which I mean a mediator. They look to me to give them peace. “Tell us a story,” they say, and they sit down like children. And when I tell a story I mediate between their anguish and bewilderment to some sense of peace or understanding. I bless them. I give them forgiveness. I give them life again.
When I go as a pastor, I come on the campus as someone who, they believe, thinks he has all the truth. My truths are considered to be definitional, to put boundaries on reality, and those definitions not only lock reality in but lock the students out. The students are kind to me, but they assume I know nothing. They assume I’ve had no experience. If I go as a writer they assume that I’ve gone through all the torments, all the anguish a prophet should go through and, I mean, I’ve suffered. And not only have I suffered, but I’ve survived in order to write, and I’ve come to some sense of hope because writing is always putting disorder into order.
It makes me sad for pastors who don’t have the alternative of speaking as a writer. These perceptions make me angry at the churches and previous pastors who have projected this kind of image, the image that they’re not really involved in life. It gives to pastors an air of never having seen that people have sexual parts, that people shoot drugs.
On the other hand, it also makes me angry that, on the college campus, sin is considered to be the real world. What those students are doing is revealing how they view God and goodness. It’s as if they are saying, “Goodness is in itself a plausible philosophy, which, under different circumstances, we might consider. But the world itself is not good.” That saddens me for what it reveals about these people: that they do not know what the cross means, what Jesus saw from the cross. He experienced the real world from the cross: more foulness, more filth, and, if that’s what reality is, more reality, more dog eat dog, more dog eat God than they can even begin to imagine. If they put Jesus anywhere else besides on that cross, they have the wrong Jesus.
I do not in the name of Christ first see one who is triumphant and is standing with one foot on cloud and one foot on earth. Now, as Saint Paul says, Christ is highly exalted. But that exaltation did not precede his bodily suffering and death. I get very uncomfortable when I see churches speak Jesus’ name merely in triumph, merely as a trumpet blast to use in identifying their Christianity as something that always must win victory according to worldly terms. I’m uncomfortable with Christians and Christian systems or communities that believe they are of God because they are happy or because somehow or another they are triumphant in the world’s terms. To love God means to suffer. Christ is not Christ except that he suffered on the cross, and Christ cannot be followed in triumphalism. Triumphalism says, “No more sickness, only health.” And the Christians who believe it put themselves behind protective laws and protective cars and houses and protective theologies, and they do it all in the name of Jesus. Then they say, “I am saved by the triumphant Jesus.”
But Jesus hung on a cross and he calls us to take up our crosses, he calls us to service. I become passionate about this. Why? We evangelize the world. On the one hand is the Christian who bears the cross on his back and looks broken, and is scorned by the secular world. On the other hand, someone stands up straight and smiles and is rich and protected and announces that you do not need to hurt. To whom shall the world go? To the one who says God wants us to prosper, that’s the one. And what angers me is that when the world goes to that one, it leaves Jesus.
The gospel is the word that Jesus transfigured suffering so that we can witness unto the world the powerful message of Christ. After Jesus, suddenly suffering was not futile anymore. It was extraordinarily important. Jesus didn’t say we would not suffer. He said, “You will suffer but I will go before you.” And he gave an example of how to suffer. Read the Gospel of Mark and see with what dignity he allowed the spit and the whip. He was an example. He goes before us, which means that wherever we are, he is there too. “Remember what happened to me,” he says. There was a resurrection. For Jesus, the resurrection is in the past. But for us the resurrection is in the future.
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An evangelical can find much of value in recent Catholic pronouncements, but …
This time it is a 120-page draft of a “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the Economy” (Nov. 1984). The document aims to set forth a Catholic approach to poverty. In October 1982, the bishops had issued a revised statement on nuclear armament. Both pronouncements received wide public attention and general acclaim from the mass media and the liberal establishment. Not surprisingly, they also drew sharp fire from some evangelicals and fundamentalists as well as from many conservative Roman Catholics and the New Right generally.
Of the draft on nuclear armament, for example, Roman Catholic Michael Novak writes, “I cannot be certain that my own vision of reality is correct. Yet if it is, then this draft statement moves the world very close to war. That is not its motive, clearly. But it may well be its effect.” And on the most recent statement by the bishops, dealing with issues related to the U.S. economy and poverty, a Roman Catholic lay commission has just published what many consider a “Catholic alternative” to the position taken by the bishops (Toward the Future: Catholic Social Thought and the U.S. Economy).
Should They Speak Out?
Not a few have decried the bishops’ endeavor as “a politicization of Christian faith,” like that of many publications of the World Council of Churches. Others see in it a contemporary recurrence of traditional Roman Catholic disregard for the doctrine of separation of church and state.
Neither of these accusations hits the mark. Certainly Roman Catholic bishops have every right to address such issues as nuclear armament and poverty. Americans crave answers to such desperate problems. It is, in fact, their duty as bishops to provide moral instruction and guidance for the faithful in their own communion. And we are confident that loyal Roman Catholics who sincerely acknowledge their authority in faith and morals will take what the bishops have to say with great seriousness.
Moveover, the bishops surely have every right to offer the general populace whatever moral wisdom they believe they have. They are, after all, citizens as well as bishops, and their office does not disenfranchise them as members of the commonwealth. Certainly Catholic bishops have every bit as much right to provide guidance as the World Council of Churches has to speak for liberal Christianity, or, for that matter, as the Reverend Jerry Falwell has to speak for fundamentalism.
Of course, the bishops run the danger of politicizing and thus compromising their spiritual message and universal ministry. Yet in presenting their case, the bishops neatly distinguish between, on one hand, what is “first and foremost”—“belief in Jesus Christ” or the call of Christ, “Follow Me”—and, on the other hand, the “inescapable implication” of their gospel—a commitment to economic justice. In this way the bishops safeguard the integrity of their faith so no one is liable to misunderstand it or draw from their statements that social action is the whole message of the church or even its primary concern. There are Catholics of whom that is not true. Much of so-called liberation theology is really not Christian in spite of its strong commitment to social ethics. It is really preaching quite another gospel—a gospel whose fulfillment is to be found in this life as freedom from want and oppression. How to be free of poverty and oppression is, indeed, good news; but it is not the gospel.
Still, we believe the bishops have not fallen into the heresy of a gospel of social action. Rather, they have taken the quite legitimate role of spiritual and ethical guidance.
Pitfalls
The bishops, however, may not be able so neatly to avoid two other dangers flowing from a politicization of the church’s message. On this matter, the Reverend Jerry Falwell could have taught them a thing or two. In spite of his valiant endeavors to keep separate his role as fundamentalist pastor and his quite different role, as he conceives it, as head of the political organization Moral Majority, he has not really been able to keep them distinct in the public eye. Whenever a pastor or denominational leader speaks, others assume—more often than not quite wrongly—that he speaks as the mouthpiece of the body he represents. This is especially true of Roman Catholic bishops, who by canon law of the church are official interpreters of theology and ethics for the faithful. This can become exceedingly embarrassing for the future when the church commits itself to positions that later experience and deeper insight render unacceptable. Even short memories can recall how past pronouncements on birth control shook the confidence of the Roman church in its spiritual and moral leadership.
Further, the bishops have pronounced in matters concerning which most Americans not only strongly disagree but also feel very deeply. Just because of this, the bishops jeopardize their ability to function as trusted pastors and guides of those in their communion who vigorously disagree with them. Yet they must speak.
On Target
The bishops have said much that desperately needs to be said today. Every Christian should be a peacemaker. Not only should he stand for peace in this world, but he should be willing to work for it. Indeed, he must be willing to sacrifice for it. And the awful threat of nuclear warfare with its unimaginable grief and terrifying devastation surely must stir any rational person to action. Christians—and every morally serious person—should be opposed to the use of nuclear weapons, chemical warfare, and poisonous gases. They should, in fact, strive for the reduction of arms with the clear goal (however unrealizable they may know it to be short of the eschaton) of the elimination of warfare from our entire planet. How else can followers of the Prince of Peace place themselves if they are true to their Lord? And something quite similar could be said about poverty. In our materialistic culture, the poor and suppressed cry to heaven unheard and unheeded by their fellow human beings—and unheard and unheeded, all too often, by Christians living in plenty on the God-given resources of our planet.
But the Scripture is unequivocally clear. True religion before God is not tested simply by pious language and orthodox doctrine. It is marked by visiting the fatherless and the widows in their want. The true sign of the church of Jesus Christ is an active concern for all in need.
These things the bishops are saying, and they ought to be said. It is to the everlasting shame of evangelicals and fundamentalists that they are not voicing these truths with equal or greater clarity and commitment.
But Whatever Happened To Sin?
Nevertheless, we believe that in both the recent statements the Catholic bishops have shot too quickly from the hip—and in both cases have missed the target. No doubt subcommittees studied many aspects of the problems of nuclear disarmament and poverty, yet their strength may have been more sociological than theological. Really nothing is wrong with the bishops’ recent pronouncements that a stiff dose of Augustine, or Reformed theology, would not cure. At root, the good bishops have forgotten the doctrine of original sin, the inherent bent toward evil that plagues our race. As a result, in both areas of pronouncement they have advocated superficial solutions that do not reckon with the complicated realities of the situation. Michael Novak has accurately assessed their statement on nuclear weapons: “The ultimate logic of the bishops’ second draft is unilateral disarmament.” In their analysis, the bishops are banking on the sweet reasonableness of the Soviets not to take advantage of the West’s inferiority in conventional armaments, and not to engage in nuclear blackmail if the West unilaterally renounces the use of any nuclear weapons—tactical or strategic. Neither the Bible nor human history gives us much ground for trusting in the sweet reasonableness of any nation or state—and who would argue that Soviet Russia is an exception?
The case is similar with respect to the U.S. economy and the poor. The bishops’ solution is: less materialism, less luxury spending, less selfishness, and especially larger and better government handouts. The goal is the redistribution of “income and wealth in our society, and even more … on the world scale.” They label it “Economic Democracy.”
Most morally responsible persons would readily agree with the bishops in their approach to materialism, luxury spending, selfishness, and the moral necessity to “guarantee the minimum conditions of human dignity in the economic sphere for every person.”
But many of us are far less sure that large additional handouts by the government constitute the proper solution. Already the government is laying out in welfare programs almost twice as much money as would be needed (if given directly in cash) to raise every man, woman, and child in the U.S. above the poverty level. What is needed is a way of helping the poor and needy that will not drive them into permanent dependence. Alas, the bishops do not help us much on this crucial point.
The bishops need to go back to the drawing boards and do their homework—based on the realities of the human situation.
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Harold L. Myra
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For the past several years we have heard much about “the vacuum in Christian leadership.” While this means different things to different people, our particular concern is that the best evangelical thinking often is not communicated from scholars to the parish leaders of the church. Scholarly books and conferences, though many, seldom directly affect nonscholars.
We feel an increased responsibility to glean the best thinking from evangelical thought leaders and to disseminate their seasoned judgments widely. We therefore are developing a think tank called the Christianity Today Institute, which will address many of today’s most pressing theological and ethical issues. More than 50 fellows and resource scholars will be involved on a continuing basis, and their work will periodically appear in this magazine in the form of special institute supplements.
We have been working on this project for the past year and sense considerable excitement. Kenneth S. Kantzer has been appointed dean of the institute, and V. Gilbert Beers has been appointed executive director. In November, they led a two-day meeting with carefully selected scholars on the subject “The Christian As Citizen.” Present were Myron Augsburger, Vernon Grounds, Nathan Hatch, Carl F. H. Henry, David McKenna, Steven Monsma, and J. I. Packer. Guests—who interacted in lively fashion—included Charles Colson, Jerry Falwell, and James Wallis.
From the extensive dialogue and research initiated by this meeting, we will publish a 32-page section on the subject in our April 19 issue. (Future institute supplements will cover such topics as “The Church’s Mission for the Rest of the Century,” and “The Sanctity of Life—the Quality of Life.”)
As executive director, Dr. Beers’s primary work over the past four months has been launching the institute. As it fully develops, he will not only work with Dr. Kantzer in producing the periodic 32-page supplements, but he will also draw the very best of these scholars’ writings into the regular pages of CHRISTIANITY TODAY magazine.
There will be more on this as the institute develops.
On another subject, most people have vague ideas about magazine advertising. Upset readers write to us about an ad’s wording or a book’s theology or a seminary’s policies. They don’t notice the small line on the masthead, “advertising in CHRISTIANITY TODAY does not necessarily imply editorial endorsement.” Instead, they assume we write it, design it, and endorse it. Actually, we have one basic control over advertising: acceptance or rejection. Advertisers themselves prepare the finished ads.
We regularly reject ads for a variety of reasons. We ask ourselves, “Do the aesthetics of this ad measure up to minimum requirements?” “Does the copy offend our readers’ intelligence?” “Is the ad theologically sound?” However, decisions do become subjective and difficult. We screen ads, reject quite a few, then trust our readers to make careful judgments.
Some think we should severely limit advertising, saying it detracts from the magazine. But a survey of our subscribers indicates the vast majority appreciates the ads and would like additional ones in their special interests. To most readers, ads provide an important service.
Yes, juxtapositions sometimes clash. It always amazes me to watch Ted Koppel, live via satellite interviewing a head of state, interrupt the world leader’s statements for a deodorant commercial. But commercials pay for satellites, and Koppel, and the possibility of viewership. It’s the same in magazines. Advertising is the reason a full year of CT costs the price of one or two books instead of a dozen or more, and most ads contribute useful information. We want them to benefit you, and we are open to your suggestions and viewpoints.
In the press of “christian business” here at CTi, we have been concerned anew about the reality of spiritual warfare. We “full-time Christian workers” find ourselves vulnerable to special traps, for the father of lies is subtle. He really does pose as an angel of light. He wants to make us think we are energetically going down the right track when we’re actually on a dangerous spur. Of Christian workers of all types, Oswald Chambers observes, “Satan’s great aim is to deflect us from the center. He will allow us to be devoted ‘to death’ to any cause, any enterprise, to anything but the Lord Jesus.”
Sobering words. He goes on to say, “To have our eyes on successful service is one of the greatest snares to a Christian worker, for it has in it the peril of evading the soul’s concentration on Jesus Christ, and instead of being friends of the Bridegroom we become antichrists in our domain, working against Him while we use His weapons; amateur providences with the jargon of Divine providence, and when the Bridegroom does speak we shall not hear His voice” (The Place of Help, p. 23).
How easily we embrace our stirring causes! But when our eyes shift from Christ, the basis of the cause, to the excitement, or perhaps “righteous indignation,” of the cause itself, we have been duped.
As we work “for Christ,” we must ask daily “Is this really for him or for me?” When we can say in honesty, “Your will be done” (even when it may mean personal humiliation or failure of “his” cause), then we invite Christ in to fight the battles.
Peter tells us, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith.…”
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Amazing! Life Without Television
Recently I visited the home of an old college buddy, and to my amazement discovered he doesn’t own a television. He hasn’t watched one in almost ten years. He says television inhibited communication and creativity in his family. Frankly, I’m amazed his family has maintained at least a semblance of normality without the vital information transmitted by commercials.
How have they survived socially? They have no way of knowing about the mouthwash that kills germs that cause bad breath, the dishwashing liquid that prevents dreaded dishpan hands, or the laundry detergent that protects us from the unforgivable ring around the collar.
How have they managed at home? What do they do when they spill something if they don’t know about the quicker picker-upper? What do they do when they need an antacid that consumes exactly 47 times its weight in excess stomach acid? How can they ever know if their headaches are of the Excedrin or the non-Excedrin type?
Yet, somehow, this family has survived—I daresay, flourished. I met my friend’s children, and as far as I could tell, their teeth weren’t falling out—even without the toothpaste most recommended by the American Dental Association. They seemed well groomed without the shampoo that controls problem dandruff.
During my entire visit I could detect just a single flaw in my friend’s armor. We were laughing about a practical joke we once played, and wouldn’t you know it, his dentures popped right out. What a terrible embarrassment! How could his wife stay with a person whose dentures pop out during a belly laugh? It never would have happened if he owned a television.
Strange thing, though. He picked up his dentures, rinsed them off, put them back in, and—to my astonishment—life went on.
EUTYCHUS
Lindsey, Walvoord, And Armageddon
Were you fair to Hal Lindsey [“Nuclear Armageddon,” News, Dec. 14]? Lindsey was only following the method of interpretation he had learned from John Walvoord in The Nations in Prophecy. In 1967, Walvoord used current events of that year to prove that Armageddon was imminent in 1967. Hal Lindsey used current events in 1983 to prove that Armageddon was imminent in 1983. That device has been used for hundreds of years. The Armageddon passage in Revelation 16 is all past tenses. It had happened.
Both Walvoord and Lindsey treat hundreds of past tenses throughout the New Testament as future in meaning anytime their foregone conclusions require a future tense.
IVAN GROH
St. Catharines, Ont., Canada
The ultimate offense of Hal Lindsey is not found in the hype and pizzazz he adds to his sermons. It is that he takes seriously the Bible’s teaching concerning the literal second advent of Jesus Christ to judge the wicked and save the elect. Ask the members of the Christic Institute if they can stomach even that simple orthodox teaching. My bet is that orthodox eschatology of any school will make those boys gag.
DAVID J. MACLEOD
Dubuque, Iowa
Who’S Changing?
Regarding your January 18 editorial [“Beyond 1984: An Evangelical Agenda”]: You say, “The act of compromise is not sinful; it is usually realistic and often thoroughly Christian.” Name me one time that our Lord and Master compromised.
You say, “The God of the Bible does not seek compulsory worship.” He does not force it, but his very nature demands we worship him or deny him and worship the counterfeit one.
You say, “… the right of parents to provide a Christian education for their children without the handicap of paying twice.” Where were you when there were only a few Christian schools? Did you argue this point forcibly in the ’40s and ’50s when the Catholics complained about double taxation?
You say, “Evangelicals represent a minority.” I know what you mean, but as for me and my family, we’ll stand upon 1 John 4:4. Usually I agree with you; are you changing or am I changing?
VERL E. STOCKTON
Zanesville, Ohio
I affirm Kenneth Kantzer’s statement: “prochoice is a singularly malicious euphemism for the right to murder for convenience,” but was distressed at his alluding to the acceptability, in the name of compromise, of first-trimester abortions. Why should persons be expendable at any age?
Twenty-four prominent medical specialists recently presented a well-received report to President Reagan stating that unborn children are pain-sensitive as early as eight weeks gestation. This, in itself, makes a strong statement against first-trimester abortions.
JAMES HILT
The Chapel of the Air
Wheaton, Ill.
Kantzer said evangelicals should agree to support any governmental action to protect unborn children, and that it may “be possible to outlaw abortions for trifling causes and all abortions beyond the first trimester except to save the life of the mother.” To construe that statement as Kantzer’s or this magazine’s approval of abortion at any stage is inaccurate.
—Eds.
Ct And Issues
I appreciated the Baby Doe issue [“A Legacy of Life,” Jan. 18]. It is clear that people who accuse CT of not addressing certain issues like abortion do not read the magazine.
LLOYD BILLINGSLEY
Poway, Calif.
I am often troubled by the “either-or” positions of the pro-life and pro-choice movements. They often battle each other like Republicans and Democrats. To say that one political party has a monopoly on truth would be mere propaganda. The same is true of the pro-life and pro-choice movements.
Dr. Elkins’s concern for the person over the issue is something that the abortion groups could have more of. He possesses the characteristics and the attitudes that would fit nicely into a third group, which could be called pro-compassion.
REV. WILLIAM D. WOLFE
Mason, Mich.
Dr. Elkins is to be thanked for raising our theological consciousness to the new issues raised by medical technology. Let this be the start of an ongoing discussion in future issues.
The response by Dr. Smedes indicates the need for further clarity on the question. To say theologically “we must always be on the side of healing and preserving human life, whether prenatal or neonatal” is to plunge the doctor into an impossible situation when dealing with an anencephalic, for example. Were we to say “we should normally be on the side …, etc.” would give the Dr. Elkinses of this world the ethical room needed to exert their Christian consciences as God gives leadership.
REV. JERRY BATTS
Christ Community Church of Naperville
Naperville, Ill.
Iowa Evangelicals And The ’84 Senate Race
I must respond to the impression given of the Jepsen-Harkin senatorial race in Iowa [“Election ’84: Some Surprising Winners and Losers,” Jan. 18]. While portrayed as a battle between the villain Harkin and the evangelical Jepsen, many evangelicals here in Iowa perceived it quite differently. Mud was slung from both sides of the fence, and many feel it came from Jepsen’s side first. I fault neither Harkin nor Jepsen on that score, but rather overzealous supporters.
I applaud Jepsen’s pro-life position and his evangelical convictions. But I voted for Harkin for his exemplary moral integrity in leading the fight against major, though largely overlooked, human rights abuses in the Third World, as well as his fight to save the small farmer in the American Midwest. In contrast, Jepsen apparently winked at the horrendous crimes of dictators in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
TOM HARDEE
Orange City, Iowa
Those Hopeless Bookaholics
What utter delight to read Calvin Miller’s “Confessions of a Librophiliac” in the January 18 issue. I, too, am a bookaholic—a hopeless addict, with no desire for reformation. If a severe blizzard is predicted for our area, do I go to the grocery for milk and bread? Never. I rush to the public library for an armload of books. One must have the necessitities of life when shut in!
RUTH JOHNSTON
Fort Wayne, Ind.
Could you please tell me, what is a librophiliac? Do you mean someone who phlees books? I believe the word would be librophobic. But that does not seem to describe Calvin Miller very well.
REV. ANNA D. GULICK
St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church
Lexington, Ky.
Miller insists on the right to make up both his own words and definitions.
—Eds.
Too much reading is not good. Calvin Miller evidently has not learned this yet.
JOHN GILL
Chattanooga, Tenn.
Missing The Point
Regarding the review of The Killing Fields [Jan. 18]: Clearly, the political biases of your reviewer have blinded him to the impact of this powerful and much-needed film.
In sharp contrast to the present insistence on patriotic trivializations of America’s past wrongs, this is one film that demands sober reflection. Certainly, the use of John Lennon’s “Imagine There’s No Heaven” at the end of the film was itself a trivialization of a highly complex and tragic situation, but to reduce all of Cambodia’s troubles to the atheistic Khmer Rouge is to sidestep American responsibility, which is the point of the whole film.
REV. DANIEL PLYBON LOVE
The Wesleyan Church of Oak Park
Oak Park, Ill.
Twentieth-Century Prophet
The space given to A. W. Tozer’s classic, Knowledge of the Holy [Jan. 18], was appropriate. The books by this “twentieth-century prophet” are selling better today than they ever did in his lifetime.
Tozer himself wrote for publication only 7 of the 19 full-length books bearing his byline. The others, nearly all produced by Christian Publications, were compiled and edited from his editorials in The Alliance Witness or tapes of his sermons.
H. ROBERT COWLES
Christian Publications
Camp Hill, Pa.
An Accurate Evaluation
Leland Ryken’s description of the value of a Christian liberal arts college education [“The Student’s Calling,” Jan. 18] was accurate and articulate. Parents, even more often than undergraduates, think in terms of what education will allow the student to earn rather than what that student can become.
RICHARD J. STANISLAW
Vice President for Academic Affairs
Taylor University
Upland, Ind.
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Why the infatuation with management books?
One of the phenomenal publishing successes of all time has been In Search of Excellence, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. Subtitled “Lessons from America’s Best-run Corporations,” this book was first published by Harper & Row in October 1982 and has since sold more than 2.4 million copies in hardcover and one million in paperback. That is about 3,400 copies each day—a record for Harper’s 157-year history.
And this may be just the beginning. The authors have produced a series of audio- and videotapes that are sweeping the business world, as well as an ‘In Search of Excellence’ desk calendar. In January, the Public Broadcasting System presented a 90-minute TV documentary on the book and its impact.
Both Peters and Waterman have themselves become multinational corporations, jetting around the world to deliver lectures to this group and that, reputedly at $ 15,000 a shot. Their volume stands at the head of the list of a series of best-selling books in the management field that have come to the fore in the past few years. Anyone who takes time to browse the displays at city or airport bookshops will be familiar with Megatrends by John Naisbitt and The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, both of which have made megabucks for their authors and publishers. Yet these are merely the best known. At the time of writing, for example, half of the books listed on Time’s nonfiction best-sellers list focus on management.
Why The Search?
When you consider the figures, it becomes obvious that In Search of Excellence is being read by people outside the board rooms of corporate America. There simply are not that many managers in the business community. (It’s not even certain there are that many readers.)
Among those outside the board rooms reading the book have been church and parachurch leaders. Some denominational executives and parachurch CEO’s have even made it required reading for their subordinates. (Every Evangelical Covenant Church pastor, for example, was urged in a letter from the denomination’s president to read the book.)
How can one account for the success of Search and so many other books on management and management principles? A first and obvious answer is that they fill a gap: many of the people who find themselves in management positions today, whether in business, government, or the nonprofit sector, have had little or no training in management skills. Like Topsy, they just grew into their present jobs—and they are all too conscious of their personal inadequacies.
If this is true of secular corporations, it is even more true of the church and parachurch organizations. Seminaries and Bible colleges do not normally offer courses in management, yet most of their graduates become managers sooner or later. Management courses are sometimes available through the commerce departments of Christian colleges, but pastors and parachurch leaders seldom darken the doors of these departments.
It usually takes three or four years for Christian leaders to realize that their formal education has been woefully lacking in this area; some, alas, never recognize their need. To remedy this ignorance, they begin to look around to see what help is available. They may pick up books like the ones mentioned above, or they may have the good fortune of having a friend in the corporate world who recommends a seminar by the American Management Association or some other group. They may hear of seminars offered by an organization like the Development Association of Christian Institutions in Dallas or Fuller Theological Seminary’s Institute for Christian Organizational Management in Pasadena. Or they may join the Christian Management Association, a Los Angeles-based AMA look-alike for managers of Christian organizations. Seeking to overcome a “handicap” imposed upon them by the lack of educational training, they seek to improve their management skills in whatever ways they can.
Structure Versus The Spirit
Not everyone approves, however, of this new emphasis on management in Christian ministries. Still very much a part of evangelical thinking is the sense that the secular structures of the business world work to limit the free expression of God’s Spirit springing forth from these spiritual enclaves. Indeed, the article on “Spirituality” in the recently published Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Baker, 1985) lists the current interest in administration as one of the primary reasons for the “dearth of spiritual leadership and direction in the evangelical world” today.
Moreover, some feel this particular pursuit of excellence is simply another example of the world’s encroachment on the church—the latest attempt by Christians to ape current secular concerns. A graduate of the Harvard Business School, who had been tremendously helped in the past by a Christian ministry, recently asked to be removed from its mailing list “because I see that you are beginning to use the same principles they taught me in my M.B.A. program.”
But should Christian organizations seek to use bad management principles as they go about serving the Lord? Is there nothing of value for Christian ministry taught in the business schools? Are the principles of management that are to be applied to churches entirely different from those that are to be applied to business and government agencies?
It may come as a surprise to the Harvard grad that the particular organization whose style bothered his Christian conscience used to find it difficult to hire any other than single staff or people who had independent incomes, due to the limited support they received from the Christian community (and in spite of the fact that it was the most effective ministry in its area of specialization). Today staff members are still not overpaid, but at least they are paid a livable wage (and on time).
Biblical Overtones
“Management” should not be a dirty word. It is, perhaps, the best English equivalent of a key New Testament word: oikonomia—usually translated “stewardship.” A “steward” (Greek oikonomos) in New Testament times was essentially a business manager; his responsibility was to manage his master’s affairs faithfully. It was a concept that everyone was familiar with, so it became a key image in the teaching of Jesus, Paul, and Peter to indicate the nature of Christian discipleship and the apostolic mission (Luke 12:41–48; 1 Cor. 4:1–2; 9:16–17; Col. 1:24–26; 1 Pet. 4:10).
Christians do not cease to be human when they commit their lives to Christ. Rather, they share a common humanity with all people. Therefore, it is not surprising that they should learn truth from people who are not themselves believers. The church has done so in the past, to its everlasting benefit, and will doubtless do so in the future. This will come as no surprise to anyone who believes in the biblical doctrine of creation.
One of the striking features of a book like In Search of Excellence is the way it is filled with scriptural teaching without being even slightly aware of the fact. When the authors enumerate eight basic principles followed by the “excellent companies,” what they are really doing is commenting on the residual Christian values in our Western culture. For example, Peters and Waterman’s “Productivity through people” (where excellent companies treat the rank and file as the root source of quality and productivity gain), fits neatly into Christ’s own ethic of viewing people as more important than principle. And their “Close to the customer” (learning from the people you are serving) simply reiterates Christ’s call to selfless giving and to understanding the people we are seeking to serve spiritually.
The gospel has made a profound impact on Western society, and the business world has been touched as much as any other segment (as it has, in common with other institutions, been affected by sin). Thus, it would not be difficult to attach specific Bible texts to each of Peters and Waterman’s principles, although a believer in general revelation and the “image of God” in humankind should not find it necessary to do so.
Reviewed by W. Ward Gasque, vice-principal and professor of New Testament at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia Canada.
In Search of More Excellence
CHRISTIANITY TODAY asked Ward Gasque to name two or three other management titles that he considered to be “must” reading. He responded with five (and one magazine). His reasons for selecting each follow:
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, by Peter F. Drucker (Harper & Row, 1973)
“The ‘Bible’ of modern management studies.”
The Christian Executive, by Ted W. Engstrom and Edward R. Dayton (Word, 1979)
“Attempt to combine contemporary management studies with Christian leadership principles.”
The Organized Executive, by Stephanie Winston (W. W. Norton, 1983)
“A wonderful look at new ways to manage time, paper, and people.”
Theory Z, by William G. Ouchi (Addison Wesley, 1981)
“How successful Japanese businesses operate and how their principles can be applied here in the states.”
Spiritual Leadership, by J. Oswald Sanders (Moody Press, 1980)
“Attempt to systematize principles of Christian leadership as derived from the Bible.”
Harvard Business Review
“This outstanding quarterly journal offers a distillation of management theory and practice in extremely readable form.”
An Excerpt
“Minister or manager? Unfortunately, too many Christian organizations are led by men or women who have a gift for ministry and little training (or perhaps even inclination) for management. Witness the large number of leaders of Christian organizations who are ordained. Of course, ordination does not exclude a person from having management gifts and skills, but it does give an indication of the leader’s basic training and probable bias. This emphasis on ministry or ministering to people may lead the organization back to the same dilemma that the local church faces.
But assuming we have selected the best managers we can find to lead the organization, do we not still have a responsibility to minister to each other? Of course.
Even a tough army top sergeant knows that people are the ultimate key to a successful organization. A great deal of thought and study has been given to how to make people more productive by giving them more satisfying work, by providing adequate remuneration, by placing them in an environment which is conducive to their well-being, and by generally helping them to feel good about themselves, the organization, and their task. Most of the management literature indicates that all of this is done for the good of the organization, or the good of the product. This is probably only a half-truth. Most men and women, be they Christian or non-Christian, enjoy helping others and seeing others operating effectively.
But what about the Christian manager? If he or she is leading an organization made up of members of the same mystical body of which he or she is a part, is there not some special relationship implied?”
The Christian Executive, by Ted W. Engstrom and Edward R. Dayton (Word, 1979).
- Business
Harry Cheney
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The Cotton Club
Orion Pictures, directed by Francis Ford Coppola; rated R.
At the center of The Cotton Club is a heart that beats to the rhythm of a distinctly American musical idiom: jazz. Structurally complex, the film is the visual equivalent of a sizzling Duke Ellington tune—as wildly different from any other movie this year as a fugue is from a sweet saxophone solo. Its free-form style supplies an ironic counterpoint to the solemn themes of spiritual bondage and the inevitable perpetuity of evil.
The real “Cotton Club” was, in fact, as sordid as it was exciting. Founded in 1923 by mobster Owney Madden, the infamous Harlem speakeasy played host to a wide variety of celebrities and gangsters. The whites-only audience would carouse amid ersatz Southern plantation splendor while enjoying the finest all-black entertainment the Jazz Age had to offer.
Into this milieu director Francis Coppola introduces two sets of upwardly mobile siblings seeking their fortunes in the competitive atmosphere of the Cotton Club and its environs. The Williams brothers (played superbly by Gregory and Maurice Hines) battle discrimination and fraternal jealousy as they tap-dance their way to the top. But success requires submission to the apartheid policies of management, and despite their growing celebrity status, the two hoofers struggle to maintain a semblance of dignity.
In a parallel tale of captivity, the brothers Dwyer find themselves employed by bootlegger Dutch Schultz after cornet player Dixie Dwyer (Richard Gere) inadvertently saves the homicidal mob boss. Being a gangster’s flunky, however, can make for an abbreviated career, and the musician is reluctant to spend his retirement at the bottom of the river. Unfortunately, working for a psychopath can become a form of involuntary servitude, and when Dixie falls for the boss’s mistress it gets very hot in Harlem.
With slavery as his central motif, Coppola, like a demented bandleader, lays down each sizzling scene like a jazz riff, then takes off in unrestrained improvisation. His style is both nonlinear and expressionistic. Unlike a novel, followed point by point, The Cotton Club must be absorbed like a painting that conveys its thoughts spatially. Its characters—drawn broad and colorful—must be seen, not as caricatures, but as symbols of power and subservience.
Harlem is pictured as a microcosm of the world, where souls are bought and sold in a writhing human marketplace. Dixie and company learn all too quickly that “to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are.” Emancipation, Coppola implies, belongs only to those whose creativity can become a source of personal authentication. That is the kind of moral assertiveness that transcends the spiritual prostitution too often required for success. But evil can only perpetuate itself; it can never offer freedom. The figureheads of power are interchangeable and the rewards they offer are the same.
Reviewed by Harry Cheney, a sound editor at Metro-Godwyn-Mayer.
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Lloyd Billingsley
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1984
Virgin Films, written and directed by Michael Radford; no rating.
George Orwell claimed in his latter years that every line he wrote was “against totalitarianism.” Should this system triumph, he believed, all human values would perish.
This is the vision of 1984, a godless world of fear and loathing, of chronic war and shortages, of the Lie and Doublethink, of a materialist puritanism. The tortured hero, Winston Smith, shows that he understands the situation by scrawling GOD IS POWER while being cured of “thought crime.” “If you want a vision of the future,” says O’Brien, kind of a Grand Inquisitor character, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”
The film 1984, unfortunately, is poorly timed. It arrives on the heels of two years of Orwelliana in the media, much of it futuristic nonsense trivializing Orwell as a novelistic Alvin Toffler predicting which gismos we would be using by now. To their great credit, the filmmakers avoided this sort of thing. Like Orwell, their vision is not technological but moral.
The trouble is, film itself has a totalitarian dimension; unlike a novel, it takes away our ability to imagine for ourselves. And like totalitarianism, film tends to destroy, or at least maim, everything it touches. 1984 is too vast, too diverse, too verbal to be spread thin onto celluloid. Lovers of Orwell’s novel will be disappointed; those who have never read it will be utterly confused.
Though exposition is provided by a voice-over of Winston Smith’s inner monologue, not nearly enough of this emerges. Too many of his hates, fears, and struggles remain hidden. This is also true of Julia, his lover, a lively, resourceful character who here seems almost demented. The expository device of Winston’s journal, used effectively by Orwell, is wasted, as is John Hurt in the lead role.
Richard Burton is simply miscast as O’Brien, who, in the novel, flies from calm speech to ranting megalomania as quickly as a hummingbird. We see none of this. The great Shakespearean actor often seems to be merely reciting. But he is not the problem.
The script is meager and the direction poor throughout. Orwell describes the children of Oceania as veritable terrors, spying on and denouncing everyone. The film depicts them, with few exceptions, as obedient boy and girl scouts.
Better done are scenes of the Two-Minutes Hate, the constant propaganda from the telescreens, forced and fraudulent confessions, the shabby conditions, the omnipresent heretic and enemy of the people, Emmanuel Goldstein, Orwell’s symbol for Judeo-Christian values.
These, of course, are already hated not only by totalitarian governments, where Big Brother is definitely watching over all, but also here in the West, where, unlike Winston Smith, many are learning to prefer Big Brother over God all by themselves. The alteration of the past and the destruction of words were well under way when Orwell began writing. 1984, as Marshall McLuhan once pointed out, is more about the past than the future.
Overall, the film is a major disappointment. It probably means the end of media preoccupation with George Orwell. (People who want to see it should be forewarned that there are several nude scenes.) But if it causes anyone to pick up the novels 1984 and Animal Farm it will not have been in vain.
Reviewed by Lloyd Billingsley, a novelist and screenplay writer in Southern California. His novel, A Year for Life, is scheduled for publication by Crossway Books.
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