Page 5841 – Christianity Today (2024)

In a day of cycnicism, disillusionment, and existential jargon we do well to remember that truth, honesty, love, faith, and faithfulness are words with deep, abiding meaning.

In the realm of the Christian faith there are also words that still have deep relevance to man and his relationship with God. But some of these—words like conversion, repentance, confession, salvation, and faith—are no longer popular in certain theological circles. Can it be that their significance has been discarded for new concepts, the fruits of human imagination rather than of divine revelation?

One modern theologian has said: “The Biblical revelation of God shows us a God who acts, who reveals himself in events, rather in the imparting of information about Himself. And so neo-orthodoxy (rightly, I believe) has misgivings about ‘plenary verbal inspiration,’ since it always runs the danger of leading us to believe statements about God, rather than in God Himself.” Now, no one denies that the Bible reveals to us a God who acts. Nor does anyone question that, as the God of all history, God reveals himself in events. But God has also revealed himself in words, and these words have eternal implications for all men.

Those who inveigh against the emphasis on words are those most prone to deny doctrines conveyed by words. If doctrines are to have ultimate meaning they must, of course, be translated through faith into action. But this in no way invalidates the fact that truth is expressed in words.

Conversion speaks of a spiritual transformation, a transition that our Lord declared to be a “must”: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).

Conversion is a good word because it speaks of passing from death to life, from self to Christ, from time to eternity. It means that the center of gravity of life is changed, the objective for living transformed; the motive of thought and action becomes to know and do God’s will.

Another good word, a part of the conversion experience, is repentance. Not much is said about repentance today, but this silence does not mean that change of mind and heart is not a necessity—it just means that some men mistakenly think they know a better way.

Repentance involves a recognition of sin for what it is and an admission that we too have sinned and come short of God’s glory. Repentance means that we come to grips with the enormity of sin, and are sorry for our sinful nature and behavior.

An equally good word is confession. Confession of sin is an integral part of repentance and conversion. It involves first of all a recognition and statement of our unworthiness before God. It means coming clean with the God we have offended, admitting our own helplessness to solve our problem.

Confession is also a positive affirmation of our faith in Christ as the Son of God, an acceptance of him as Saviour, and an indication of a desire that he become Lord of our lives.

The Bible emphasizes the significance and meaning of these and other words having to do with God’s saving grace in Christ.

Paul and Barnabas returned to Antioch telling of the conversion of the Gentiles through the preaching of Christ.

David, in Psalm 57, tells of the chain reaction of conversion—repentance and confession followed by forgiveness, and by the granting of spiritual power to go out to others: “Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee” (vs. 13).

Has not God indicated to us here the sequence of events? We become effective witnesses for our Lord only when we have experienced the conversion about which we preach to others.

In Luke 22:32 our Lord speaks to Peter of the conversion experience he was to have (involving a sense of sin, remorse, repentance, and confession), after which he would become a spiritual power. This same Peter, in Acts 3:19, preaching in the power of the Spirit, says to the people: “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out.”

The Apostle James declares: “Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins” (Jas. 5:20).

The Apostle Paul affirms: “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom. 10:9, 10).

Where man’s free agency and God’s sovereign grace merge, God alone knows. But man’s responsibility before God is a fact, as well as God’s offer of redemption in Christ. It therefore becomes a matter of the utmost importance that God requires of men repentance and confession and offers as their reward conversion—a new life in Christ.

Can we exchange these vitally important words for something else, something that evades the truths they convey?

God forbid!

An English missionary traveling in 1877 around the Ruvuma River, which flows between Lake Nyasa and the Indian Ocean, met an old man who preferred an ancient coat, partly disintegrated but of recognizably English cloth. This, he said, had been given him ten years earlier by “a white man who treated black men as brothers.… A short man with a bushy moustache and a keen piercing eye, whose words were always gentle and whose manners were always kind, whom as a leader it was a privilege to follow, and who knew the way to the heart of all men.” Uncannily accurate, the description readily identified David Livingstone, Scottish medical missionary and explorer, whose memory we salute on the centenary of his death (generally reckoned as May 1).

Born in 1813 at Blantyre, nine miles from Glasgow, David with the other children was later to erect a tombstone expressing thankfulness to God “for poor and pious parents” (he would not permit changing that “and” to “but”). At ten he went to work in the local cotton mill, but the omnivorous young reader culled a few words at a time from books propped up by his spinning jenny. Converted at twelve, he had a profound spiritual awakening at twenty, and resolved to be a medical missionary in China. Despite daunting obstacles, he determined to put “a stout heart to a stey brae [steep hill],” studied Greek and theology as well as medicine, returned to the mill during the six-month vacation to help pay his way, was provisionally accepted by the London Missionary Society, and after missionary training and qualifying in medicine, set out for Africa. China had been closed by the Opium War, and anyway David’s heart had been challenged by missionary Robert Moffat’s words about “the vast unoccupied district to the north, where on a clear morning I have seen the smoke of a thousand villages, and no missionary has ever been.”

Livingstone landed in South Africa one week before his twenty-eighth birthday. At Cape Town, before heading for his station at Kuruman, he preached against white exploitation of black, and was later to criticize the deployment of missionaries in the south while those innumerable villages in the north remained untouched. A burning conviction of his was that more use should be made of African workers—long since accepted missionary policy, but at that time alarming to many conservatives. He saw his task as opening up new ground, leaving native agents to work out details. He learned to speak Sechuana fluently during that first year, traveled widely, and treated even native medicine men courteously as having perhaps something to teach him. He got to know the native mind as few did. Writing home once, he mourned the death of a young attendant: “Poor Sehamy.… Where lodges thy soul tonight?… I told thee of a Saviour; didst thou think of him, and did he lead thee through the dark valley?… Help me, O Lord Jesus, to be faithful to every one.”

Robert Moffat’s daughter Mary, whom Livingstone married in 1845, knew three homes in three years as Livingstone moved further up country to Mabotsa, to Chonuane, to Kolobeng. He was doctor, teacher, builder, gardener, shoemaker, carpenter, and much more. All the time his eyes were on the “unknown north” beyond the fearsome Kalahari Desert, where he could establish work the Boers could not spoil. The Boers, who did not believe that natives had souls, were pushing up from the south, pressing the tribes back, commandeering their water-places, seizing their men for free labor—and once during Livingstone’s absence from Kolobeng looting his house and destroying precious papers.

In 1852 he sent his wife and children home before embarking on a four-year, 6,000-mile journey that took him west to the Atlantic at Loanda in Angola, and east to the Indian Ocean at Quelimane in Mozambique. During this and other long weary journeys, debilitating illnesses, danger from wild animals and hostile tribes, he never relaxed his self-imposed discipline but made observations, studied languages, prepared reports for scientific friends and for the Royal Geographical Society. Their acclaim did not change him. In his journal for May 22, 1853, he notes: “I will place no value on anything I have … except in relation to the Kingdom of Christ.”

In 1857 during his first furlough he gave an electrifying address at Cambridge University. “I direct your attention to Africa,” he said, with clipped compelling speech. “I know in a few years I shall be cut off in that country which is now open.… Do you carry out the work I have begun. I leave it with you!” One result was the formation of the Universities Mission to Central Africa. That same year, with mutual good will, Livingstone left the LMS on appointment by the government as head of an expedition to explore the Zambesi region. His British assistants found him tireless, exacting, and often uncommunicative about his plans, largely because of having worked so long alone. As missionary or explorer, however, he always had right priorities. Threatened once by a hostile crowd, he remembered God’s promise, “Lo, I am with you alway,” and commented: “It is the word of a gentleman of the most sacred and strictest honor.”

He was outraged by slave-trading, practiced for centuries by the Arabs and countenanced, if not actively abetted, by the Portuguese. His activities in freeing slaves from their chains (“the men … each had his neck in a fork of stout stick six or seven feet long and kept in by an iron rod which was riveted at both ends across the throat”) led to rumblings in Lisbon and London, and contributed to the recall of an expedition whose discoveries included the great falls Livingstone named Victoria after his queen.

In 1861 his wife died at forty-one, her sacrifices having been hardly less than his. He threw himself fiercely into his work, became more withdrawn, but never lost his indomitable will. It led him to refuse an invitation to go home from Henry Morton Stanley, sent to find him by the New York Herald. Stanley’s kindness greatly moved Livingstone, and probably saved his life for another eighteen months until at Ilala in what is now Zambia he was discovered dead, kneeling by the side of his bed.

His heart was removed and planted under a tree, then with incredible love and fortitude, and entirely on their own initiative, his native assistants bore his body to the coast 1,500 miles away. One of them was in the huge crowd at the funeral in Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874. Part of the inscription on his tombstone reads: “For thirty years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, to abolish the desolating slave trade of Central Africa.”

Were he still alive, David Livingstone would rejoice that the intervening century has seen Africa evangelized and explored, and that continent’s “open sore” of slavery healed.

The Leeks, The Onions, And The Garlic

On their pilgrimage through the desert to the Promised Land, the Hebrews remembered many of the things they had left behind them in Egypt, such as leeks, onions, and garlic (Num. 11:5). Americans are used to eating much and well—too much and too well, the health experts say, for a host of physical problems result from our over-refined, superabundant diet.

Americans spend a smaller percentage of family income on food than do the similarly well-stuffed inhabitants of Western Europe, and of course a much smaller percentage than people in the developing nations, who may spend almost everything they earn for what is little better than a starvation diet. But recently Americans have been spending more and enjoying it less. Wails of protest have gone up to anyone and everyone who might seem to have any power over the rising cost of satiety.

Land-locked, mountainous Switzerland imports most of its food. But between 1939 and 1945, when the war virtually cut off imports, the Swiss plowed up their lawns and public parks and grew almost everything they needed. Perhaps we need a new style of “victory garden” to win the fight against rising food prices. How are your leeks and onions doing this year?

From Good Friday To Easter

In the liturgical calendar, the forty-day season of Lent preceding Easter is considered a time for repentance, reflection, and self-discipline. The Lenten mood of fasting and meditation seems somewhat inconsistent with the promise of spring that is often in the air (indeed, the word Lent is from the Middle English lente, spring). It also seems somehow inconsistent with the turbulent period in the life of our Lord leading up to the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. This was certainly a time of tension, a time of expectancy and excitement for the disciples and for Jesus’ other followers. Although the hallelujahs we commemorate on Palm Sunday may echo hollowly in our ears when we think of what came just afterward, at the moment they must have sounded genuine and exciting.

The catastrophe that followed must have been triply disillusioning for those who were sincerely drawn to Jesus but who lacked the fortitude and constancy to remain faithful to him through that dreadful week: first, because he appeared to disappoint their hopes for a messianic triumph; second, because of their own fickleness and cowardice in turning from him when he incurred the wrath of both synagogue and Roman state; and third, when they saw the Good Teacher, whom their acclamations had brought to the attention of a harsh ruler, dishonored, bruised, and broken on a criminal’s cross.

The season of Lent with its habitual disciplines is undoubtedly intended to help us to reflect on the Passion of Jesus. And yet the events of the Last Supper and Good Friday occupy only two days of a forty-day season. The terrible tension is quickly released by the message of Easter, “The strife is o’er, the battle done!” It is as though a longer confrontation with the terrible price of our redemption, and with the human realities of short-lived enthusiasm, facile betrayal, and callous bowing to expediency that made it necessary, is too much to bear. To set aside a much longer time than the forty or fifty hours between a Maundy Thursday service and Easter eve for reflecting on all those faults of an ancestral generation might make us too acutely aware of how similar they are to our own. And thus with great relief we pass from “O sacred head, now wounded” to “Welcome, happy morning.”

Why the actual time between Jesus’ Crucifixion and his Resurrection was so brief lies in the sphere of God’s providential wisdom: he does not explain it. But when we realize how difficult it is for us as individuals or for the Church as a community to dwell for long on the events of Good Friday without taking refuge in those of Easter Sunday, we can sense what a tremendous benefit it was to the earliest believers to have to wait only “three days and three nights.” Good Friday without Easter is not good; it is the brutal and bloody extinction of all hope, and the realization that one has brought it on oneself. Therefore we rush on to Easter, and with God’s sanction, for evidently he did not want us to remain too long in the shadows of that blood-stained hill.

And yet we should never move so fast—either into the springtime with all its beauty or into the Christian Easter with its promise of a new and eternal springtide of soul and body—that we neglect to see Good Friday. For it is because he saw the sorrow and dereliction through to the end, to the “It is finished,” that our sorrows can be brief and our rejoicing without end.

Crime: The Broad View

Naturally we are glad to hear the recent reports that certain kinds of crimes are decreasing and other kinds are increasing at a slower rate. All men practice crimes, however, for which human courts will not judge us—pride, envy, sloth, anger, lovelessness, and the like—but which the Word of God views as serious offenses. Any professing Christian who looks at “criminals” as a different kind of person from himself had better examine his own relationship to God. Christians know that from the divine viewpoint all men are criminals and that we can be pardoned only because of the one who died the death of a criminal (in the eyes of the state) on our behalf.

The Bible teaches that in addition to crimes for which we will be held accountable by God, there are some crimes for which our fellow men must hold us accountable as well. The tendency of human nature is to be more concerned about the crimes of other people than about one’s own crimes, or those of one’s close associates. Christians must constantly be aware of this tendency and compensate for it. Are we, for example, more concerned about those robbed of money by someone on the street than about those robbed by hospital trustees who violate conflict-of-interest laws, or homebuyers robbed because of illegal “kickback”?

We should be concerned about rape and burglary, but we should also be concerned about unlawful discrimination in housing sales and rentals and in the employment of workers. It is a shame that we must spend so much money trying to make our homes, businesses, and cars secure. But it is also an indictment of our country that we have unilaterally violated many of our solemnly contracted treaties with Indian peoples. It is a crime to sneak into your neighbor’s house to go through his records, but it is also a crime to pay others to sneak into the headquarters of your rivals and then pretend that your hirelings were acting entirely on their own.

By all appropriate means we should try to reduce the amount of crime, to diminish whatever factors are found to foster crime, and to punish and also rehabilitate those who are guilty of crimes. But in doing this we must be careful to include all crimes against our fellow men in our purview, not just those practiced by the usually less affluent members of our society (who may well be encouraged in their lawlessness by evil at power level). And permeating all our concern for crimes with which the state deals should be the awareness that our crimes against God, our disobedience to his commandments, leave none of us righteous, no, not one.

Do Kouprey Matter?

The 1973 Britannica Book of the Year, just out, calls attention to a casualty of the war in Southeast Asia that few people know about: a rare wild cow known as the kouprey. According to an article by Jon Tinker, the kouprey wasn’t discovered until just before World War II. Tinker describes it as a large beast (the bull stands more than six feet tall at the shoulders), mostly blackish brown in color, with prominent white legs and a chestnut face pattern. “It was probably once distributed throughout Indochina, but by 1964 the total was down to 200, concentrated in three kouprey reserves specially established by Prince Norodom Sihanouk,” Tinker says. As a result of the war and poaching, there have been no confirmed sightings of the animal since 1968.

With all our problems today, we might be tempted to dismiss the apparent loss of the kouprey with scarcely more than a shrug. It is high time to realize, however, that God knew exactly what he was doing in creation and that everything had a purpose. Scientists point out that the extinction of any species involves an irreparable loss of genetic material. Some think that the kouprey could have been used to improve cattle strains and thus help to ease the world’s protein shortage.

The U. S. government had sent out a special expedition in 1968 to try to save the kouprey. It captured four of the wild cows in hopes of establishing a breeding herd in captivity, but all died.

We may have lost the kouprey forever. If so, perhaps the loss will at least serve as a dramatic illustration of the need to be more sensitive to the ever-more-serious environmental drain. As Tinker says in his powerfully illustrated article, “To most people, in comparison with the bloodshed and misery of the Vietnam war, the loss of the kouprey is totally insignificant. But by the year 2000 we may be regretting an easy dismissal.”

Pilgrimage To Paganism

Marlon Brando’s rejection of an Oscar gave a well-deserved jolt to the movie industry. It was his way of protesting the demeaning treatment of American Indians. He charged that film-makers have contributed to “degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing him as savage, hostile, and evil.” In the seemingly endless supply of Westerns produced by Hollywood there is more than ample evidence to support that accusation.

We applaud this awakened sensitivity to moral principals on the part of Mr. Brando, and we hope it may help to arouse the conscience of movie moguls generally. They have had a primary role in bringing about the permissiveness so evident in today’s society. Their exploitation of sex and violence and their appeal to man’s baser instincts in the interests of box-office return gives them a lot to answer for. Brando’s own latest film, Last Tango in Paris, should call forth a new outcry of indignation.

Dare we hope for a turn-around? The selection of Marjoe for an Academy Award as “best documentary” suggests that our glorification of evil has not yet run its course.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, the artist who died this month at the age of ninety-one, was both a person and an event. His influence over other artists and over twentieth-century culture is probably unparalleled. Elements of his technique have found their way into almost every phase of art from textile design to cartooning. His painting Guernica has been the subject of countless theological analyses. And Picasso himself has been the subject of numerous interviews, stories, and films.

The cubist movement in art is sometimes dated from his painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a work that looks like the results of some mad plastic surgeon’s running amuck in a bordello. The misplaced eyes of his heroines are vacant and expressionless. His subjects neither laugh nor frown. Several of the faces are distorted to resemble African masks, which intrigued Picasso.

The inside of his own head seems to have been Picasso’s primary concern. And a lot of what was in there seems to have been sex-related. The objects and persons he painted were less important to him than his own feelings about them.

Picasso was a man of his times in the truest sense. His canvases reflect the obsessions, self-preoccupation, confusion, and despair of twentieth-century man. The world of his paintings is an increasingly dehumanized world without meaning in which transcendence is dead. The reason for his great success is probably just that: he speaks what so many feel.

No doubt Picasso’s influence will continue for years to come. Part of that influence could be to show fallen humanity how serious is its fall and how great its need for redemption. As his work is viewed all around the world, it should remind Christians how very much we depend on the Holy Spirit for our very humanity.

Another Little Step

When the United States Supreme Court handed down its 7–2 decision nullifying state laws against abortion, we warned that the court’s reasoning could be used, with equal warrant, to justify much more—infanticide and euthanasia, for example. At that time, only three months ago, we were accused by a number of correspondents of clouding the issues and attempting to create a kind of hysteria.

It was made public this month that in 1971 a branch of the National Institutes of Health recommended the use of human fetuses in medical research, as is currently being done in Great Britain and perhaps—one infers from the somewhat evasive language used in the recommendation—in the United States also. Fetuses, though some are still alive after the abortion procedure, will die anyway, it is argued, and so the living ones may legitimately be used for research and other worthwhile purposes—provided, the British say, “that the required information cannot be obtained in any other way.” (Could not similar reasoning be used to justify interrogation by torture?)

“I don’t think it’s unethical,” explained Dr. Kurt Hirschhorn of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and Medical School. “It is not possible to make this fetus into a child; therefore we can consider it as nothing more than a piece of tissue.… How do we know what drugs do to the fetus unless we find out?”

Why is it not possible to make the fetus into a child? Because a doctor, bolstered by the Supreme Court decision that the fetus has no rights in the first six months of its existence, has removed it from the environment in which it would have developed into a child. First take away its chance of life, and then argue, in what Dr. Andre Hellegers of Georgetown called the Nazi approach, “If it is going to die, you might as well use it.” Thus Nazi scientists obtained “required information” in concentration-camp experiments.

In an earlier editorial (issue of February 16, 1973, pp. 32–33), we pointed out that the Supreme Court’s criterion, namely that life must be “meaningful” in order to warrant legal protection, is capable of much wider application than the Court saw fit to give it. Nazi Germany defined Jewish, gypsy, and certain other varieties of human life as not meaningful, with the consequences we all know.

Dr. Charles U. Lowe, scientific director of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Development, is not yet sure we can go along with such proposals, “using federal dollars.” Does he have ethical scruples? No, political ones: “First, we have an articulate Catholic minority which disagrees. Second, we have a substantial and articulate black minority sensitive on issues of human life.” Soon, however—the hope was not formulated explicitly, but it seems to underlie the approach of the government scientists—these politically difficult minorities will be reduced, like the white Protestants and the Jews, to a docile and inarticulate insensitivity, which will enable official agencies to proceed as they choose to obtain all “required information.”

Blend Is Beautiful

For years, ecclesiastical engineers have been trying to get Christians to merge their organizations. This, they argue, would more fully manifest the unity that Christ taught, and would serve a witnessing function; it would encourage the outsider to believe. The Consultation on Church Union, which has sought to evolve into the Church of Christ Uniting, is the most daring of the ecumenical efforts.

But is Christ’s prayer “that they all may be one” really suggesting this kind of sameness? The context indicates otherwise. God in the wonder of creation has made us all different (even the Godhead is composed of three distinct persons), and we are inclined to worship and witness in varying ways. Unbelievers recognize this; they do not expect Christians to show the same face. What they rightly expect, and do not get, is an essential unity in doctrine. The ecumenical movement long ago gave up trying to achieve a meaningful theological consensus. Within the main Protestant framework, the only wide area of theological agreement to be found is that of the evangelical community (and yet conciliar leaders persist in labeling evangelicals “separatists” and “independents”).

Let us grant that wasteful overlap and competitiveness create some discord in the work of the Church today. But the remedy is not to insist that all voices from the coloratura to the basso profundo sing in unison. It is to teach them all to sing their parts in better harmony.

The Dh Factor

The number of places where a person can get away from it all and relax and yet not be bored stiff is dwindling. One holdout is the baseball park. Appropriately for warmer weather, baseball proceeds at a much more leisurely pace than football, basketball, and hockey. It does provide its share of exciting moments, but on the whole baseball soothes more than it stimulates. And considering the hectic pace of society today, we surely need such a tranquilizer.

Under pressure to get more action into the game, the American League introduced a provision this year whereby the pitcher, traditionally the weakest hitter on the team, does not have to bat. His turn can be taken by a non-fielding designated hitter. The rules change is the most significant in major-league baseball since 1903, and its effect on the game will be widely discussed this year. First indications are that this effect will be something less than startling. In the opening three days of the new season the “designated hitters” got 23 hits in 104 times at bat for a .220 average. Good. We occasionally need to be where the action isn’t.

On Sitting This One Out

CHRISTIANITY TODAY has been intimately involved in Key 73 and its burden of “calling our continent to Christ.” Since the nation-wide project was conceived a number of years ago, it has found energetic support even in circles where enthusiasm for proclaiming the biblical Gospel of salvation through a personal faith in Jesus Christ was, to say the least, faint. This has led some of our readers to suggest that the message proclaimed may be compromised or diluted, and a number of evangelistically minded congregations and groups have refused to take part.

At the same time, the No Other Gospel Movement in Germany has declined to participate in the German Protestant Kirchentag (see News, page 42) on the grounds that it is basically pluralistic. We approve this stand by the German evangelicals, and yet we regret some American Christians’ reluctance to cooperate in Key 73. What is the difference? It seems to us that Professor Walter Künneth of Erlangen put his finger on it when he stated that the problem with the Kirchentag is not that the Gospel will not be represented there but that it will be presented only as an “option,” one among many, including liberalism, modernism, the social gospel, and several others. Every different group will be testifying to its own particular interpretation—or misinterpretation—of the biblical message. In this babble, Künneth knows, it will be next to impossible to discern the gospel call.

If the disparate groups cooperating in Key 73 were examined as to their underlying presuppositions and the details of their understanding, significant areas of controversy would certainly arise. But Key 73 is not presenting the areas of conflict and urging that the Christian message lies somewhere in a pluralistic confusion. The participating groups have all agreed to silence whatever babble of disagreement might normally exist among them and sound the Gospel clearly. We think that in Key 73, it will be possible for multitudes to discern the gospel call. And we pray that many will hear and accept it, for it is indeed, in Paul’s words, the power of God unto salvation.

Luke and the People of God: A New Look at Luke-Acts, by Jacob Jervell (Augsburg, 1972, 207 pp., $8.50), The Gospel According to Luke, by G. H. P. Thompson (Oxford, 1972, 291 pp., $10.25), A Translator’s Handbook on the Gospel of Luke, by J. Reiling and J. L. Swellengrebel (American Bible Society, 1972, 798 pp., $4), and A Translator’s Handbook on the Acts of the Apostles, by Barclay M. Newman and Eugene A. Nida (American Bible Society, 1972, 542 pp., $2.50 pb), are reviewed by W. Ward Gasque, assistant professor of New Testament, Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia.

In reviewing the English translation of Ernst Haenchen’s influential commentary on Acts (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Aug. 25, 1972, p. 24), I pointed out that there were good reasons to doubt the validity of many of his underlying assumptions. This very important collection of essays on the Third Gospel and Acts by Jacob Jervell, professor of New Testament at the University of Oslo, Norway, indicates some of these reasons. In the last and probably most important essay, “The Problems of Traditions in Acts” (first published in 1962) Jervell marshals evidence that strongly contradicts the opinion of Martin Dibelius—the guiding light behind the work of Haenchen—that circ*mstances were very unfavorable in the early Church for the formation of a tradition about apostolic times. This assumption that “there was no preaching about the apostles as there was about Jesus in the early church” (Dibelius) leads Haenchen and others to take a very dim view of the accuracy of the historical material contained in Acts.

On the contrary, argues Jervell, early Christian preaching contained at least three elements: the actual gospel message, mention of the missionaries who brought the message, and mention of people from other parts of the world who had received the Gospel. Jervell carefully examines the letters of Paul and produces an abundance of material in support of his thesis. As a result, there are good reasons to believe that the author of Acts did not write the story of the first three Christian decades simply as he thought it might have happened, but rather incorporated into his narrative authentic traditions (using legitimate literary methods, of course) concerning what actually happened during apostolic times.

The remaining six essays treat the theology of Luke’s writings. Jervell views the problem of the unity of the people of God, Israel, as an important factor in Luke’s theology, one with which the author struggled constantly. Luke was concerned about the alienation of Jewish Christians as a result of the great influx of Gentiles into the Church and rumors concerning Paul, and he attempted to resolve these problems for his readers. Jervell seems to be advocating a position similar to that advanced by M. Schneckenburger more than one hundred years ago and, more recently, by A. J. Mattill, Jr., and others. If he is correct, the situation reflected in Acts is a much more “primitive” one than that assumed by Haenchen and associates, and Acts should probably be dated fairly early (which Jervell implies, but does not state). This is an essential work for all serious students of Luke-Acts.

Thompson offers an introduction and commentary on Luke for the general reader. It is a part of the “New Clarendon Bible” and is based on the RSV. The author takes a very conservative approach; indeed, he includes a defense of the virgin birth of Christ in his introduction. He inclines towards an early date for Luke-Acts (c. A.D. 65), accepts the probability of the traditional authorship, and takes Luke seriously as both historian and theologian. “Judged by the criteria for historical writing that Lucian lays down [in his essay, How to Write History, c.A.D. 170], Luke would in his contemporary world be thought to attain a high standard as a historian.” The author includes a rather full account of the theology of Luke. All in all, this is a good commentary for the beginner.

The two handbooks on Luke and Acts were prepared with the work of missionary linguists in mind. They will be of value primarily to those engaged in Bible translation work or in attempting to communicate the Good News in the thought-form of other cultures, but they will also be of use to the ordinary Bible student who seeks to understand the meaning of the text. The volume on Luke uses the RSV and makes regular reference to the Greek text and therefore will be of value to those seeking to use an elementary knowledge of Greek in exegesis. The volume on Acts uses the Today’s English Version and has eliminated all references to Greek from the discussions; it will therefore be of less value to the Greek novice. Both volumes should be in the libraries of all seminaries and Bible colleges.

Personal Evangelism And Social Concern

Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists, by John Lee Eighmy (University of Tennessee, 1972, 249 pp., $11.50), is reviewed by George M. Marsden, associate professor of history, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Protestants whether politically liberal or conservative can learn a great deal from the history of the Southern Baptist Convention. For about eighty years the most prominent politically liberal analysts of American Protestantism have been declaring that evangelism without a progressive social stance lacks relevance to modern man. Yet during that time the Southern Baptists, who have stressed evangelism and have generally lacked progressive social programs, have grown spectacularly even beyond the South and have emerged as America’s largest Protestant group.

On the other hand, conservatives who disdain social involvement can profit from considering the ironies of Southern Baptist relations to society. Few denominations have more strongly proclaimed separation of church and state as a principle by which the church can be preserved from secular forces. Yet few American churches have been more an integral part of their culture or more directly shaped by social concerns. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 in the midst of the social crisis over slavery. When that issue was removed by war, the denomination remained separate from its Northern counterpart largely because of the cultural differences that the political division had accentuated. Throughout most of its history, no religious organization has been more closely identified with the Southern way of life.

John Lee Eighmy, a history professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, died suddenly at age forty-two just as this work was being completed. He leaves us with a valuable and well-documented account of Southern Baptist social pronouncements. The basic message is that the convention leaders should provide more positive and progressive guidance on modern social problems. This point of view accounts for Eighmy’s concentration on official declarations and activities of the denominational hierarchy rather than on the social attitudes of rank-and-file Southern Baptists.

Eighmy expresses considerable enthusiasm for his discovery that since early in the twentieth century the progressive social gospel has had somewhat more influence in the convention than is usually supposed. Yet at the same time he displays general disappointment that this influence has never been dominant, and he no doubt would have agreed with the observation in the very helpful epilogue by Samuel S. Hill, Jr., that “the salient point here is that secular humanitarian organizations were more active than were Baptist churches in considering the social ills of the Southern people and the means with which to cure them.”

NEWLY PUBLISHED

Those Curious New Cults, by William Petersen (Keats [212 Elm, New Canaan, Conn. 06840], 214 pp., $4.95). The executive editor of Eternity takes a look, from an evangelical perspective, at astrology, I Ching, Edgar Cayce, spiritualism, witchcraft, Satanism, Scientology, Black Muslims, Armstrongism, the Children of God, Hare Krishna, Zen, Transcendental Meditation, Baba, Bahai, and Gurdjieff. Chances are that most of us have had some contact with one or more of these religious leaders or burgeoning groups of devotees. This is not a technical book for detached scholars but an excellent overview of movements that are proving to be unexpectedly attractive to young—and not so young—Americans.

The Politics of Jesus, by John Yoder (Eerdmans, 260 pp., $3.45 pb). A major study by the president of Goshen Biblical Seminary (Mennonite) that deserves thorough consideration by all evangelicals concerned with a biblically controlled social ethic.

Preventive Psychology and the Church, by Glenn E. Whitlock (Westminster, 174 pp., $5.95). A model for the pastor’s role in counseling as a non-specialist that outlines how to appropriate professional services and the dynamics of crisis intervention counseling. Helpful.

The Seven Last Words of the Church, by Ralph Neighbor (Zondervan, 182 pp., $1.25 pb). A Baptist pastor tells how his church was spiritually renewed as it experimented in restructuring its form to meet the needs of its community. Distinctive insights, spiritual depth.

Religion Among the Unitarian Universalists, by Robert Tapp (Seminar Press [111 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10003], 268 pp., $10). A well done sociological analysis of 12,000 questionnaire responses, or, Why are certain non-supernaturalists still interested in religiosity?

Born to Heal, by Ruth Montgomery (Coward, McCann, Geoghegan, 224 pp., $6.95). Fascinating story of Mr. A, Superhealer through energies, with no apparent Christ-centered awareness. Needs investigation from a biblical perspective.

Wishful Thinking, by Frederick Buechner, (Harper & Row, 100 pp., $4.95). Witty, sometimes profound reflections on Christian topics arranged alphabetically from Agnostic to Zaccheus.

Crescent and Star, edited by Yonah Alexander and Nicolas N. Rittrie, (AMS Press, 486 pp., $25, $6.95 pb). More than fifty essays and statements from Arabs and Israelis on most aspects of the Middle Eastern conflict. Comprehensive and technical. Attempts to avoid excessive partisanship.

Where Do I Go to Buy Happiness?, by Elizabeth Skoglund (Inter-Varsity, 157 pp., $3.95). Deserves a wide audience. She understands and uses modern psychological techniques, and her sensitivity is heightened by the Holy Spirit and a thorough belief in the Christian world view. More Christian counselors need to follow such an approach.

Colossians: The Church’s Lord and the Christian’s Liberty, by Ralph Martin (Zondervan, 180 pp., $5.95). An excellent commentary, more than introductory without being excessively technical.

Catholic America, by John Cogley (Dial, 304 pp., $9.95). A highly readable, unfootnoted history of the Catholic experience in America, followed by an analysis of Catholic institutions and life today. By the former religion editor for the New York Times. Thoroughly interesting and highly recommended, especially to Protestants lacking knowledge in this area.

Robert Owen’s American Legacy, edited by Donald Pitzer (Indiana Historical Society [140 N. Senate Ave., Indianapolis, Ind. 46204], 88 pp., $1.50 pb). Six essays plus a panel discussion on a leader of New Harmony, one of the more interesting communes of the last century.

Fractured Personalities, by Gary Collins (Creation House, 217 pp., $4.95, $2.95 pb). Third in a series by the author that brings the advances in psychology to church leaders. Discusses the causes, symptoms, and available treatment of abnormal behavior; includes a chapter on alcoholism, drug addiction, and social deviance. Very helpful.

The World Directory of Mission-Related Educational Institutions, compiled by Raymond Baker and Ted Ward (William Carey [533 Hermosa, South Pasadena, Cal. 91030], 882 pp., $19.95). A page of information on each of more than 800 “third world” schools, mostly theological. Thirteen indexes enhance the usefulness of this admittedly incomplete reference tool.

Principalities and Powers, by John Warwick Montgomery (Bethany Fellowship, 224 pp., $4.95). A well documented and illustrated historical discussion of various occult phenomena (astrology, lycanthropy, levitations, secret societies, tarot, time travel, ghosts, and divinations). Interprets them in the light of Scripture.

The Fifth Gospel, by Godfrey Kloetzli (Prentice-Hall, 248 pp., $15). Large size pages with photographs, many in full color, and explanatory captions. The purpose is to increase understanding of the four written Gospels by a pictorial look at their setting. Worthwhile.

The City and the Sign, by Geoffrey Bull (Baker, 157 pp., $3.95). A commentary on Jonah by a missionary long imprisoned in the “belly” of Communist China.

The Jesus Life, by Alvin N. Rogness (Augsburg, 112 pp., $1.95 pb). A guide for young Christians that discusses in simple terms what the Christian life is all about. For pre-teens and teen-agers; light but sound.

Victory Over the Devil, by Jack R. Taylor (Broadman, 134 pp., $2.25 pb). A practical book, especially appropriate in these days of growing occultism, by a best-selling evangelical author.

The Social Sciences and the Churches, edited by C. L. Mitton (T. and T. Clark [38 George St., Edinburgh 2, Scotland], 270 pp., £ 1.10 pb). Reprints of twenty-two articles first published in the Expository Times reporting how insights from psychology and sociology can provide information for and be adapted to the work of the churches.

Philosophy and Technology, edited by Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (Free Press, 399 pp., $12.95). Perceptive, stimulating, often controversial essays on the problems posed for human self-understanding by technology. A number of important Christian thinkers such as C. S. Lewis and Jacques Ellul are represented together with important secular thinkers. Assembles some of the most representative thinking on the subject.

They Call Me Coach, by John Wooden (Word, 190 pp., $5.95). An interesting, folksy basketball book by the most successful coach ever. Mostly anecdotes, but with some discussion of success and brief Christian testimony statements interwoven.

The Book of a Thousand Tongues, edited by Eugene Nida (American Bible Society, 536 pp., $15.95). Major updating of a 1939 publication includes several sample lines from each of some 1,400 languages and dialects into which at least one book of the Bible has been translated, from Abbé (spoken in Ivory Coast) through German (in seven varieties) and Massachusetts (extinct) to Zuni (New Mexico). Fascinating, inspiring; all congregational, school, and public libraries should have a copy.

Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, by Paul H. Kocher (Houghton Mifflin, 247 pp., $5.95). An entertaining and informative introductory or review study of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, longer narrative poems, light verse, and shorter fiction. All students of Tolkien will appreciate this book.

Christian Living in the Home, by Jay E. Adams (Presbyterian and Reformed, 143 pp., $3.95, $2.50 pb). A helpful, highly readable application of scriptural principles to family living, especially the husband-and-wife relationship. Brief but potentially useful as a guide for counseling and as a basis for group study.

Program Planning For Adult Christian Education, by James Schaefer (Newman, 262 pp., $7.50, $4.95 pb). A detailed and comprehensive presentation of theory and practice, with more emphasis on technique and educational philosophy than on presuppositions and content.

The Search For the Twelve Apostles, by William Steuart McBirnie (Tyndale, 312 pp., $1.25 pb). Well-researched study that reconstructs the scanty evidence on the lives of the apostles after Jesus’ resurrection. Intriguing.

John Wesley: A Theological Biography, Volume 2, Part 1, by Martin Schmidt (Abingdon, 311 pp., $12.95). Third of a four-part translation. Well documented, smoothly written, but too advanced for those without previous study in theology and Wesley’s life. Theological questions explained adequately.

Office and Ministry in the Church, edited by Bas van Iersel and Roland Murphy (Seabury, 150 pp., n.p.). Ten articles on various aspects of episcopacy, women’s ministry, and the biblical basis for clericalism comprise Volume 80 of Concilium.

The Failure and the Hope, edited by Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway (Eerdmans, 266 pp., $3.95 pb). Seventeen essays on the problem of racism in Southern churches. Originally published in Katallagete—Be Reconciled, the journal of the Committee of Southern Churchmen.

Death Comes Home, by Simon Stephens (Morehouse-Barlow, 115 pp., n.p., pb). A sensitively told story of how one family coped with the accidental death of a young son. The author adds insight and aid for the counselor.

The Lady Was a Bishop, by Joan Morris (Macmillan, 192 pp., $6.95). A historical study that shows the ruling power of women in the Church up to the Reformation. Fascinating, informative; makes a good case for equal rights.

The End of Youngblood Johnson, by Aaron (Youngblood) Johnson (Chosen, 190 pp., $4.95). No matter how many books on drug addiction you read, the horror never diminishes. This is one of the best.

Bibliography of the Continental Reformation, by Roland Bainton and Eric Gritsch (Archon [995 Sherman Ave., Hamden, Conn. 06514], 220 pp., $10). First issued in 1935, this valuable guide to materials available in English has now been considerably expanded and updated.

Crash Go the Chariots, by Clifford Wilson (Word of Truth [Box 2, Burnt Hills, N.Y. 12027], 128 pp., $1.25 pb). In March the New York Times listed Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods as the number-one best seller but wrongly classified it as non-fiction. Its cleverly illustrated thesis—that civilization may well have evolved, along with countless religious practices, including those of the Hebrews, because of visitors from other planets—is here authoritatively refuted by an evangelical scholar who was formerly director of the Australian Institute of Archaeology and is now a professor at the University of South Carolina.

The Old Testament in the Book of Revelation, by Ferrell Jenkins (Cogdill Foundation [Box 403, Marion, Ind. 46952] 151 pp., $3.95). A Church of Christ professor of Bible examines the use of prophecy, imagery, divine titles, and descriptions in Revelation in the light of the Old Testament. Straightforward style, with a good selection of photographs. A very helpful study.

A Manual For Evangelism/Church Growth, by Vergil Gerber (William Carey [533 Hermosa, S. Pasadena, Cal. 91030], 95 pp., $1.50 pb). Church growth should be of concern not only to missionaries but to North American congregations as well. This introductory guide includes sample work-sheets to help each congregation evaluate itself. Very worthwhile.

Tyndale Bulletin, Number 23, edited by A. R. Millard (Tyndale Press [39 Bedford Sq., London WC1B 3EY, England], 128 pp., £2). The latest annual edition of one of the best sources for evangelical biblical scholarship. The nine essays include studies of God’s wrath, Malachi 1:11, Mark 4:1–34, and Second Corinthians 1:9.

The Pastor and the People, by Lyle E. Schaller (Abingdon, 176 pp., $2.45 pb). Practical and helpful discussion of local church planning, including the selection and responsibilities of a new pastor, congregational decision-making, finances, and the introduction of new ideas and forms to groups in the church.

King Jesus’ Manual of Arms For the Armless: War and Peace From Genesis to Revelation, by Vernard Eller (Abingdon, 205 pp., $4.75). A strong and colorful style is used to argue for pacifism. Eller develops admirably a biblical theme of a God who battles evil (through men who need only trust in him) and defeats it on “Skull’s Hill.” Copious use of Scripture. Recommended as an able presentation of a position that must be countered by those who would use force to accomplish a “good” end.

A Christian View of Origins, by Don England (Baker, 138 pp., $2.95 pb). A chemistry professor at Harding College (Churches of Christ) offers a semi-technical presentation, including many charts, concluding that “existence of life on earth is an enigma without the supposition of the existence of God.” He deems the earth to be very ancient.

Religion and Soviet Foreign Policy: 1945–1970, by William C. Fletcher (Oxford, 179 pp., $11.25). An account of manipulations of policy toward internal and international religious groups (Christian, Buddhist, Islam, but amazingly sparse on Judaism) that served to strengthen the impact of Soviet foreign policy. Very narrow; primarily for international relations specialists.

Professor Eighmy’s own analysis repeatedly suggests three principal reasons why the Southern Baptist Convention has seldom challenged the prevailing views in Southern society on social questions. First, the ultimate ecclesiastical authority among Southern Baptists resides in the individual congregations, making cooperation with the convention and assent to its social pronouncements essentially voluntary. Secondly, as the title Churches in Cultural Captivity suggests, the pressures of social environment have usually made local congregations reluctant to promote any major changes in social attitudes and practices. Thirdly, Eighmy argues that the prevailing Southern Baptist theology emphasizing the conversion of individuals and personal ethics is basically antagonistic to social concerns. Relating this to the previous point, he generalizes that “churches successful in reaching the masses through an emphasis on the personal and spiritual side of religion tend to accept the values and institutions of their culture as divinely ordered.”

Professor Eighmy’s arguments on these latter points, which reflect assumptions widely held among American church historians, are partially correct but somewhat misleading. It is certainly true that churches often tend to reflect, and even to endorse, prevailing social attitudes. Southern Baptists surely have been no exception to this, and to the extent that this tendency indicates a complacency about certain forms of the values of this world they should be deplored.

But such common failings among Christians are not primarily caused by zeal for evangelism and the conversion of individuals. Non-evangelical churches, both Roman Catholic and liberal Protestant, have been every bit as prone to endorse popular social views. The American social gospel itself has always closely followed the trends of secular social philosophy.

It is indeed accurate to observe that among American evangelicals, especially for the last century, interest in evangelism has often been presented as a reason for not speaking on certain ethical questions that have social and political implications. But as Eighmy’s own evidence concerning the Southern Baptists indicates, such arguments have been applied only very selectively. The most ardent evangelicals among Southern Baptists and elsewhere have seldom hesitated to speak strongly and even to campaign for legislation on certain social-political programs. Long struggles for such causes as prohibition and Sabbath legislation, as well as the strongest endorsem*nts of national political policy especially during wartime, illustrate this point. That there have been social pronouncements among evangelistically oriented groups indicates that evangelism in itself is not necessarily a deterrent to presenting the ethical aspects of the Gospel as applying to social relations.

Neither is there (contrary to suggestions of many church historians) any clear distinction that can be consistently maintained between personal ethics and social concerns. Evangelical groups are not simply “preoccupied with the spiritual and moral welfare of individuals” (to use one of Eighmy’s phrases), since individual ethical acts can seldom be separated from their social implications. Individual acts of racial discrimination would be a clear case in point. Evangelicals, moreover, as much as any other group, have maintained that Christian standards of morality and justice should be the ideals for societies as well as for individuals.

Furthermore, if it is true that, as Eighmy and others point out, socially conservative religious groups often remain silent about prevailing social practices because they in fact approve of those practices (for example, silence on slaveholding implied a judgment that slavery in its American form was not sinful), then it hardly seems accurate to claim at the same time that such “individually” oriented groups lack social views. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that they have different views than do political liberals.

If nothing in evangelism makes it inherently antagonistic to social concern, and if it is impossible to maintain consistently a distinction between groups with private morality and those with social programs, then there is not only a need for reevaluating some of the assumptions of politically progressive American church historians, but there is also reason for evangelicals to evaluate the sources of their social views. While Professor Eighmy may have been incorrect in assuming there was something inherent in evangelical theology that made it socially complacent, his suggestion that churches may experience “cultural captivity” is supported by overwhelming evidence. Any honest examination of Christian ethical attitudes in their social setting will reveal tendencies for Christians to take on some of the standards of the culture in which they live. Historical studies such as Eighmy’s may be of great value for gaining the perspective necessary for effective self-evaluation.

Evangelism, rather than being the antagonist of new departures in social outlook, should be the starting point. Conversion of individuals through God’s grace is surely the prerequisite to effective Christian influence in society. But the Christian experience never stops at conversion. Growth in sanctification must follow, and sanctification should involve all of man’s relations. Consistent preaching should therefore always be searching for new areas to apply the challenges of the Christian life as opposed to the ways of the world. In any group such challenges can be found in most firmly held attitudes and practices of the surrounding community.

With regard to many aspects of life American evangelicals have often fearlessly preached, “Do not be conformed to this world,” regardless of how unpopular that message might be. Yet every pastor and parishioner must recognize that in all probability there are other areas of both private and public activity where he has been reluctant to examine the full implications of Christian non-conformity to the world. Such departures from secular social norms may be most difficult to initiate at the local congregational level, but in America’s decentralized denominations it seems that it will have to be locally that such renewals of evangelical social action will have to begin.

Arkeology

Noah’s Ark: Fact or Fable?, by Violet Cummings (Creation Science Research Center [2716 Madison Ave., San Diego, Cal. 92116], 352 pp., $5.95, $3.95 pb), and The Quest for Noah’s Ark, by John Warwick Montgomery (Bethany Fellowship, 296 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by Carl E. Armerding, assistant professor of Old Testament, Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia.

These two books discuss past and present quests for the remains of Noah’s ark. Mrs. Cummings’s book is a personal reminiscence of the search conducted over a lifetime by her husband, Eryl. She has collected the legends of claimed sightings through the years into a most readable tale, but she seems totally unable to sift and evaluate those traditions by standard historical methodology. For example, she claims great antiquity for various legends or geographical identifications because they are cited in the Ancient Imperial Cyclopedia of Biblical Knowledge. Since these legends and identifications are intended to prove such things as the fact that Mt. Ararat in Turkey has always been remembered as the mountain of Noah, we are surprised to find on another page that this “ancient” tome dates from “around 1830 or 1831”!

The other volume is also a collection of bits and pieces concerning the ark through the years, but this one is edited (not authored, as the jacket implies) by a working historian. John W. Montgomery has brought together over two hundred pages of documentation from other writers, revisions of two of his own previously published articles, and about twenty pictures of his own expedition to the mountain.

After reading both Montgomery and Cummings, I feel forced to conclude that although there may possibly exist some great wooden object on the mountain, neither they nor others have ever been able to prove that it was an ark or that it dates to whatever period the flood may represent. In fact, most of the evidence presented, when carefully scrutinized, led even Montgomery to negative conclusions. Particularly noteworthy is the failure to find any firm confirmation of the well-publicized Russian expedition in 1916.

We are left, then, with two source-books for the history of ark research, together with the authors’ expressions of confidence that someday something will be found. I was impressed with a brochure inserted in my copy of Montgomery’s book inviting me to buy a comparatively high-priced tour of “Noah’s mountain” with the assurance: “No riding experience necessary; no age limit; gentle horses can accommodate participants from age 7 to 70.”

They found him dead on his knees by his bedside. Dr. David Livingstone had drawn his last breath in prayer near Chitambo’s village in Zambia 100 years ago—May 1, 1873. As the centenary of his death is remembered in memorial services around the world, let us catch a glimpse of this colorful man whose heart was captured by Africa.

He was born in Blantyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland, on March 19, 1813. From the age of ten he worked all day in a cotton factory. His days at the factory, 6:00 A.M. to 8 P.M., were followed by two hours of evening school. He read every book he could come by. At the cotton mill he disciplined his mind to separate the noise and confusion of machinery from the clear, quiet thoughts he had feasted on the evening before. He even devised a method of reading while working.

Young Livingstone attended Anderson’s College and later Glasgow University, graduating with a degree in medicine. The London Missionary Society sent him to South Africa in December, 1840.

For thirty years this little giant tramped across Africa. His primary motivation was to serve God with his whole being. On the birthday before his death he entered this prayer in his journal: “My Jesus, my King, my Life, my All, I again dedicate my whole self to thee.”

The vast African continent drew him to launch some of the most daring adventures in human history. Not even the porters who accompanied him knew where their journey might end. Using any form of transportation available he crossed Africa’s harshest terrain under the severest conditions. His best-known means of transportation was Sinbad the Ox, who finally died from tsetse fly bites.

Dysentery, malaria, insects, lions, thieves, hunger, unfriendly villagers, slavers, rain, drought—he knew them all, yet persevered. In his younger years he withstood the perils of unknown Africa. “He could throw off fevers, drink gallons of stagnant poisonous water, eat African food, and march for hours in sun and rain without getting tired,” wrote Northcott (Livingstone in Africa).

In his later journeys, malarial fever and rains kept his body almost perpetually wet. On January 20, 1867, he recorded that a couple of his hired porters stole his medicine chest: “I felt as if I had now received the sentence of death.” Yet for four years, believed by the world to be lost or perhaps dead, he tramped the lonely, pest-ridden paths of primitive Africa.

In November of 1871, H. M. Stanley, a young American reporter, found Dr. Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika. Stanley saw a living skeleton of a man dressed in grey tweed trousers, red sweater, cap, and patent-leather shoes. What endurance—four years without medicine, hiking across Africa, with not even a pair of decent hiking boots.

The slave trade caused him grave concern. While traveling the interior, he would meet long lines of slave gangs, witness burning villages, treat abandoned slaves, and bury dead bodies. Once while traveling on a regular slave trade route he passed numbers of dead bodies, some still with the goree or slave stick bound to their necks. The dead bore wounds that showed they had been killed because they delayed the rapid pace of the slave group.

Innumerable scenes of this sort spurred the little Scotsman on. “If the good Lord permits me to put a stop to the enormous evils of the inland slave-trade I shall not grudge my hunger and toils,” he wrote shortly before his death. His zeal to stop the slave trade never waned.

He was an outstanding explorer and geographer. His sketches of rivers and notes on position and terrain are amazingly accurate.

But what of the missionary Livingstone? Let him speak for himself. When challenged that his explorations were primarily geographical, he stated emphatically: “I would not consent to go simply as a geographer, but as a missionary, and do geography by the way, because I feel I am in the way of duty when trying either to enlighten these poor people, or open their land to lawful commerce.” And in his journal we find this comment: “I am a missionary heart and soul. God had an only Son, and He was a missionary and a physician. A poor, poor imitation of Him I am, or wish to be. In this service I hope to live, in it I wish to die.”

Mission-station life in South Africa he found confining. After listing his daily duties he once concluded: “I do not enumerate these duties by way of telling how much we do, but to let you know a cause of sorrow I have that so little of my time is devoted to real missionary work.” He soon left the station for his journeys.

As a preacher, it is said, he was never fluent. He presented the Gospel in short, jerky sentences and a conversational tone. Yet he was a good linguist and could teach and preach with ease in the African languages.

On methodology Livingstone ruffled the feathers of mission-station colleagues by asserting: “I have no hesitation in saying one or two pious native agents are equal if not superior to Europeans in the beginning of the work. The natives look so much upon the Gospel as just ways and customs of white men that little progress is made, but from their fellows the truth comes quickly.”

His honesty caused him to oppose the idea of making large numbers of conversions in order to please supporting constituencies in England. He withheld communion from a polygamous chief, yet advised him to take care of his personal wives lest they fall into even more dangerous sin.

His 1845 marriage to Mary Moffat, eldest daughter of missionary Robert Moffat, was for the large part marriage at a distance. Although his family traveled with him for some time, they returned to England in 1852.

Dr. Livingstone never spent much time in one place and cannot be credited with many conversions in his lifetime. However, following his lead many dedicated missionaries have gone to Africa to spend their lives presenting the Christ he so selflessly served. The myriads of Africans who have turned to Christ in the hundred years since his death have him to thank for opening the door and letting light into the dark country.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

As evangelical theologians we are called to secure for our Christian congregation the urgently needed eschatological orientation within the growing confusion, which in itself is one of the apocalyptical signs indicated in the Bible. The way of the Church resembles the journey of a ship at night. On the voyage to our port of destination we are sailing through dangerous narrows and are passing near insidious reefs. To avoid shipwreck we have to observe carefully the beacons that mark the safe course.

The biblical prophecies constitute quite a number of such beacons, signs, for the eschatological stage of our journey. Not all of them are equally obvious. But I think all evangelical theologians will agree on the following three, which I will mention in reversed order.

3. The greatest and final event we are heading for is the appearance of the sign of the Son of man. It will be an ultimate signal given in the darkness of the greatest tribulation—probably in the shape of a cross flashing in the sky—by which believers and non-believers will know that Christ’s coming is imminent.

Christ’s return is the real goal of present world history. It will mean, first, the gathering and rapture of the true Church to be united with its Head; second, the revenge over the ungodly nations; and third, the establishment of the messianic kingdom in power. This threefold eschatological event is the ultimate point toward which the behavior of man, Christian and non-Christian, church and nation, is to be directed.

The creedal confession “from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead,” therefore, is the presentation of the most important of all beacons, by which we daily have to adjust our course. Any attempt to extinguish this beacon by way of demythologization or reinterpretation, therefore, is an assault against the one relevant hope of the world.

2. But there is another assault against the message of Christ’s parousia that is equally disastrous and is sometimes committed even by evangelical preachers. This assault consists of emphasizing the return of Christ without taking notice of the beacon that signalizes the most crucial eschatological event before his coming: the revealing of “the man of lawlessness” (2 Thess. 2:3–12). His name, Antichrist, means he not only is the rebellious enemy of God and the persecutor of the Church but for some time will successfully occupy the place of Christ himself as Lord of the visible church and the world.

The Christian Church on earth is not going to be united with its Head before it has passed the final, almost superhuman test of being confronted with the apocalyptical temptation by Antichrist. Therefore the widespread teaching of a rapture that dodges this serious reality must be refuted as a dangerous distortion of New Testament eschatology.

Moreover, the biblical prediction of the coming of such a self-styled Christ induces evangelical theology to watch carefully over the authenticity of all contemporary presentations of Christ in preaching, arts, and personal imitation. Any misrepresentation of his genuine biblical image for the sake of adaptation to modern fads plays the game of Antichrist.

1. The flashes of the penultimate light can already be seen in many symptoms of a rapid antichristian transformation of church and society. Still the clearly apocalyptical character of our present epoch becomes more evident by the appearance of one beacon that for preceding generations was still hidden. This is the return of the Jews from their two-thousand-year dispersion, and the national rebirth of Israel in the country that God had assigned to its fathers.

When the enlightened King Frederick II of Prussia asked the Danish diplomate Count Reventlow for one proof of God’s existence that had not yet been refuted, Reventlow replied: “The Jews, Your Majesty.” Today a Christian needs to be totally blind to ignore the events around Israel as a clearly predicted eschatological sign. It is too unusual in history to be explained as a random event.

But even the sign of Israel needs to receive theological attention. We need, for example, to rediscover the interrelation between the restoration of Jerusalem and world mission (cf. Luke 21:24). This would inject more biblical realism into some enthusiastic evangelistic programs.

And we should carefully distinguish between the two stages of Israel’s physical and spiritual restoration according to Ezekiel 37. This prevents us from stating too directly the soteriological significance of present-day development in Israel. And it also refutes the fatal misinterpretation of Joel 3 as a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Christian Church. The historic event of Pentecost is as unrepeatable as the events of Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. But what we may rightfully hope for is the outpouring of a spirit of compassion and supplication on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, “so that when they look at him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for his only child” (Zech. 12:10–14; cf. Ezek. 39:29, Isa. 44:3).

These three most important eschatological events need a thorough biblical reexamination if evangelical preachers are to interpret the signs of the time. Each of these events stands as a link in a whole chain of other eschatological events that ought to be carefully considered. But we should refrain from constructing too detailed apocalyptic timetables. The eschatological signs are given to us not for the sake of systematic completeness but to give us orientation in the crucial hour, when without them we would perish in confusion and despair. “Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is near” (Luke 21:28).

As the last American prisoners of war headed home from North Viet Nam, those who had preceded them confirmed and expanded reports of a spiritual movement in the prison camps (see March 2 issue, page 50). Details about life in the prisons are sketchy—the military POWs were maintaining a strict “code of silence” until the last prisoner was freed—but the returnees talked quietly and forcefully about their faith and the part it played in sustaining them through captivity.

In San Diego, California, Navy Captain Howard Rutledge, shot down seven years ago, credits his faith and the prayers of “Christian people” for his release in relatively good health. A church dropout and self-described “backslider,” Rutledge said he made several promises to God while in prison. One of them, a promise to join his family’s church, was fulfilled on his first Sunday back in the United States when, before more than 700 worshipers, he joined the First Baptist Church of Clairemont in suburban San Diego. He also gave a testimony and, says pastor Charles Foley, five persons were converted because of it.

Rutledge and other prisoners told of church services that were led by appointed cell-block chaplains. There was even a choir of from four to sixteen voices. The services were organized as treatment improved in later stages of confinement. When guards disrupted the meeting, the men sang louder. Favorite songs included “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “In the Garden” (especially the chorus: “And he walks with me and he talks with me …”), and “God Bless America.” Sermons and devotional talks followed, sometimes with members of different denominations discussing their faiths and the reasons for the various doctrines.

The men also collaborated on a Bible made up of memorized portions. (One returnee dubbed it the “Revised Prison Version.”) A major project, said Captain James E. Ray, a Texas Baptist, was memorization of the Sermon on the Mount from a Bible that guards allowed them to see and copy one hour a week. At one point, Ray said, each man given the opportunity to see the Bible memorized a different passage, and then all shared with fellow prisoners. “We had our own ‘living Bible’ walking around the room,” Ray told the Baptist Standard shortly after his return.

One Easter, the men pieced together enough Scripture on the Last Supper to hold a communion service using oranges and rice wine for the elements. Thanksgiving and Christmas services were “the most meaningful services I’ve ever been a part of,” said Ray. Among Scripture passages cited by returnees as favorites were Psalm 23 and Philippians 4:13 (“I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”)

Other prisoners told debriefing authorities at Clark Air Base in the Philippines that God appeared to them as they parachuted from destroyed planes. One, a senior officer and one of the longest held prisoners, told of seeing Jesus Christ as he was taken to the prison camp. “As I walked up and down those muddy hills,” he told debriefers, “I would look up and see Christ and he’d say ‘Larry, you’ll make it.’”

Another flier, shot down and imprisoned by the Germans in the last months of World War II and later imprisoned for seven years by the North Vietnamese, said that when he landed, he felt God was beside him telling him he could make it—“if you believe in me.” Said the pilot: “I believed and had great faith and I shared that faith within our camp.”

Until the latter years of captivity, the prisoners said, treatment was harsh, and they were often kept in solitary confinement. As world attention focused on their plight, however, conditions improved, and there was greater religious freedom.

“No individual can tell everything that went on,” said Captain Rutledge. “We were never all together. We were in different cells and prisons. Spiritual activities varied widely in each cell block. But each man depended on his own religion and personal experience.” He added: “Generally, we came out better Christians and better men than when we went in.”

Catholics and Protestants worshiped together. One exception was Christmas Eve in 1969, when several Catholic prisoners were taken to a church in downtown Hanoi. Colonel Tom Sima, one of the men attending the “showcase” service, called it one of the highlights of his stay despite the lights and cameras of reporters, who were apparently used by the North Vietnamese to show the world their “humane” treatment of POWs.

Sima told the Catholic Star Herald, a New Jersey diocesan newspaper, that he wasn’t a “particularly devout Catholic” prior to his capture. The imprisonment, however, deepened his faith. Prisoners would repeat the Lord’s Prayer while in groups, he said, and several Catholics in his cell block also met once a week to repeat the rosary. Sima participated in the choir—which, he said, guards repeatedly tried to drown out. “They’d do their best to discourage us by yelling at us during the services, or screaming at us to shut up. Usually, the louder they shouted, the louder we sang.”

The spiritual activities were not limited to the military captives. Michael Benge, 37, a civilian working with the Agency for International Development (AID), was captured by the Viet Cong outside Ban Me Thuot during the 1968 Tet offensive. Also captured were missionaries Betty Olsen and Henry Blood.

In a press conference and later in discussions with Christian and Missionary Alliance personnel, Benge told a horror tale of untreated diseases, rat-infested cells, and forced marches of hundreds of miles. Choking back tears, he told of the friendship of CMA missionary Betty Olsen and Wycliffe Bible translator Henry Blood, and of how the two died painfully, untreated by their captors. According to Benge, Blood died of malnutrition and pneumonia in July, 1968. Miss Olsen conducted a simple funeral for him in the South Vietnamese jungle. (North. Viet Nam listed Blood as having died in prison in October, 1972.) Benge then described the painful death from malnutrition and dysentery of Miss Olsen. “It took Betty about five days to die, and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese refused to give her any medication at all,” he told reporters.

Benge said he too would have died had it not been for almost constant nursing care provided by Miss Olsen. At one point she encouraged him to eat while he suffered thirty-five days of delirium.

In a letter to Alliance churches, CMA president Nathan Bailey said Benge told church officials “that he came to a personal faith in Jesus Christ because of the radiant and unfailing demonstration of Christian faith and love that Betty and Henry showed during mistreatment, suffering, and death.”

Benge said he inquired many times about missionaries Archie Mitchell, Eleanor Vietti, and Dan Gerber, captured during 1962. However, he said the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese provided no information on their fate. Among the last POW’s released were nine held by Laotian communists, including two Plymouth Brethren, missionaries—Samuel A. Mattix, 20, of Centralia, Washington, and Lloyd Oppel, 20, of Courtenay, British Columbia.

On The Docket

Parochaid, prayer in public buildings (including schools), and the tax-exempt status of religious organizations are among the issues facing the United States Supreme Court and Congress.

Thirty-seven parochaid cases pending in state and federal courts could be affected by Supreme Court decisions expected during the current session. Eighteen other religion-related cases, such as prayer in public schools, religious symbols on public property, and tax exemptions for religious organizations, are on the docket. Also awaiting Supreme Court action are matters involving alleged government interference with religion. Cited are cases involving selective conscientious objection, job rights of Sabbath observers, Indian use of the peyote drug for religious rites, the theory of evolution, and sex education.

Meanwhile, nine bills calling for prayer in public schools or buildings were introduced in the first two weeks of the new Congress. One of them calls for a constitutional amendment to allow “voluntary nondenominational prayer” in public places. It was introduced by Senators Hugh Scott and Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania.

Three bills calling for removal of tax-exempt status from organizations that fail to file returns, carry on propaganda activities, attempt to influence legislation, or engage in litigation for third parties have been submitted in the House of Representatives.

Backing Their Man

With the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) heading for a theological showdown in New Orleans in July, backers of incumbent president J. A. O. Preus are intensifying efforts to have their man re-elected and continue the crackdown on what Preus and the denomination’s conservatives feel is unbiblical teaching at the church’s leading seminary, Concordia in St. Louis. At the same time, Preus’s opposition is gearing up around radio preacher Oswald Hoffmann, described as a “moderate,” despite Hoffmann’s denial that he is a candidate for the top job.

A pro-Preus group of laymen and clergy under the name “Crossroads” is circulating a petition among churches and leaders calling for endorsem*nt of Preus. Six of the forty LCMS district presidents signed the petition before the majority of their colleagues on the Council of Presidents came out against circulation of the petition.

A leading Preus critic and Hoffmann backer, Illinois pastor Dean Lueking, took a poll within his own church—and Preus won by a single vote. Angered, and calling the vote a “power play by conservatives” in the congregation, Leuking ordered but later canceled a second vote.

Meanwhile, the Concordia Seminary Board of Control, after a fact-finding committee’s report, voted to “commend” the seminary’s professors, in effect stating they were not guilty of theological error. Preus reportedly had told the board earlier it should either commend or correct the professors where necessary.

Robins(On) In Richmond

The advent of spring at the University of Richmond brought not only robins on the lawn but Robinson in the lecture hall. Students and faculty at the Southern Baptist school last month got a personal preview of a new book by controversial British churchman John A. T. Robinson in a three-part lecture. The book, The Human Face of God, is due for release in May.

Robinson contends that Christ offers “the clue to, though not the exclusive embodiment of, God.… The Christ is God with a human face.” The virgin birth is described as “one possibility” of the origin of Jesus. “If the virgin birth story throws doubts on the humanity of Jesus, then it is very much better that you shouldn’t believe it.” While he was in Virginia’s capital city, the former Anglican bishop of Woolwich (now dean of the chapel at Trinity College, Cambridge) was honored at a reception marking the tenth anniversary of the book that brought him theological notoriety, Honest to God. Dean Thomas A. Langford of Duke University Divinity School was the speaker.

The University of Richmond first came to appreciate Robins in 1969 when an industrialist by that name presented the school with a $50 million gift ($40 million outright plus a $10 million challenge grant). The gift is still said to be the largest in American history to an educational institution.

Religion In Transit

The Religious Public Relations Council bestowed a Merit Award for outstanding religious journalism on the Washington, D. C., Evening Star and Daily News (religion editor: William Willoughby); Dallas Morning News (Helen Parmley); and the Wooster, Massachusetts, Telegram (George Labonte).

On the third night of a week’s crusade at the First Baptist Church in Nederland, Texas, conducted by student evangelist David Stockwell of Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth, there were 398 professions of faith.

Unhappiness over the politics and liberal theology of the Canadian Council of Churches has led the Union of French Baptist Churches of Canada to disavow any affiliation it may have had with the CCC through the Baptist Federation of Canada.

An executive staffer of the Maryland Catholic Conference warned that Catholic legislators of that state may risk excommunication if they vote for an abortion bill that has been introduced in the legislature.

The eight-denomination Evangelical Council of Puerto Rico (ECPR) protested the manner of selection of island delegates for a recent World Council of Churches meeting on development. ECPR spokesmen say the ten delegates were leftists and did not accurately represent the majority viewpoint of Puerto Rican churchmen.

The biggest block of stock ever traded on the American Stock Exchange—714,000 shares worth about $16.8 million—involved the Vatican, which sold 427,000 of its shares in Vetco Offshore Industries, apparently in response to a Securities and Exchange Commission crackdown on alleged law violations in speculative transactions.

At a luncheon in a Washington, D.C., Baptist church, press attaché Alexander P. Eustafiev of the Soviet embassy acknowledged there were “believers” among his older relatives but not among the younger ones. He estimated that between 10 and 15 per cent of the people in the Soviet Union attend religious services.

A reduction and shakeup of chaplains is apparently under way following the ceasefire in South Viet Nam.

Southern Baptists passed the 12-million membership mark in 34,500 churches in 1972, set a record number of nearly 446,000 baptisms, and reached the billion-dollarlevel in total receipts for the first time. The $1.07 billion represented an increase of $96.2 million over 1971.

Personalia

Dr. Victor Adrian moved from the presidency of Mennonite Brethren Bible College in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to an executive position at Ontario Bible College in Toronto.

Mennonite churchman-author Frank H. Epp will assume the presidency of his denomination’s Conrad Grebel College in Waterloo, Ontario, in August.

Michigan Episcopal bishop Richard S. M. Emrich, 63, born in Turkey of missionary parents, has retired; his successor is H. Coleman McGehee.

Presbyterian minister Hugh McHenry Miller of Dover, New Jersey, was elected chairman of the General Commission on Chaplains and Armed Forces Personnel, a civilian agency in Washington maintained by forty-one affiliated religious bodies.

Miss America, Terry Ann Meeuwsen, 23, who used to sing with the New Christy Minstrels, says she received Christ two years ago while reading Campus Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws” before a concert. Later, five of the other eight Minstrels became Christians, she adds.

Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, 77, of Washington, D. C., a central figure in the world’s most sensational fight over Pope Paul’s 1968 encyclical reaffirming the ban on artificial contraception (O’Boyle put down a revolt by fifty-four of his priests), retired. His successor: Bishop William W. Baum of a Missouri diocese, an ecumenical-affairs specialist.

World Scene

The dollar devaluation has placed the World Council of Churches in “an acute financial situation.” The WCC Central Committee meeting set for Helsinki in August has been shifted to Geneva, and WCC general secretary Philip A. Potter is on tour apprising U. S. churches of the crisis.

A high-level court in London awarded custody of a divorcee’s three children to her ex-husband because she is a Jehovah’s Witness. Her beliefs would tend to isolate the children from mainstream society, the court ruled.

A proposed new constitution for Syria calls for a socialist state and freedom of religion. Serious disorders, resulting in scores of injuries and deaths, erupted as Muslim militants demonstrated for a declaration that Islam be the state religion, according to Lebanese press reports.

Members of Hungary’s “free churches” (Baptists, Methodists, Moravians, and Pentecostals) fear new government restrictions are ahead. A pastor and treasurer of a Budapest Pentecostal church were arrested recently on assembly-without-permission charges.

The new Vatican yearbook ($170 per copy) estimates there were 659 million Catholics throughout the world at the end of 1970, an increase of 26 million over the previous year.

Publication of the New Testament in Pidgin (1969) has made such an impact that Pidgin may become the official language when Papua New Guinea (population: 2.3 million) becomes independent, say some Lutheran observers. The Evangelical Lutheran Church is the country’s largest religious body.

The ecumenical movement should study the Pentecostal movement, declares a World Council of Churches study document written by Franciscan monk Emmanuel Sullivan. He cites spiritual growth, prayer, love, service, faith, and experience as “essential ingredients” the ecumenists need to emphasize “on the journey to rediscovering … full visible unity in Christ.”

The respected Catholic fortnightly Glas Koncila in Yugoslavia editorially accused the government of open and direct attacks against the believers’ faith. There have been trials of clerics, bans of religious publications, and increased anti-Christian criticism and propaganda in the secular press.

Since the invention of printing, at least one complete book of the Bible has been published in 1,500 languages and dialects, according to the United Bible Societies, an increase of forty-three languages during last year. Complete Bibles appear in only 255 languages.

Church of England clergymen against whom a divorce decree for adultery has been pronounced no longer will be automatically subjected to loss of office and disqualified; their cases will now be handled by their archbishops.

The Polish Baptist Union reported that evangelistic meetings were held in all churches and missions last year, and eighty-nine were baptized. Evangelistic programs were broadcast weekly. The state gave the union fourteen church buildings that had been rented from the government.

South African Congress: Breaking New Ground

South Africa and its churches may never be the same again. Many of the 650 delegates to the South African Congress on Mission and Evangelism left the coastal city of Durban with that conviction after ten precedent-shattering days. Organizers of the meeting believe that many of them also went home dedicated to more aggressive seeking of the lost through word and deed.

The last in the series of regional follow-up meetings of the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism broke new ground—and old racial barriers—for southern Africa. It was different from congresses conducted in other parts of the world in that it was co-sponsored by the South African Council of Churches, the first church council to back a regional congress. The other co-sponsor was Africa Enterprise, a ten-year-old independent evangelical missionary organization directed by Michael Cassidy, a Fuller Seminary graduate. The large and influential Dutch Reformed Church was unrepresented officially, but other denominations sent delegates as did some thirty missionary or service organizations, and observers were present from still other bodies. Altogether it was considered the most broadly representative group ever assembled under Christian auspices in the nation.

Even though the congress organizers had hoped that 60 per cent of the delegates would be non-white, they considered it an achievement of sorts when 45 per cent of those who attended were Bantu, Indian, or colored. Not as large a proportion of the speakers were non-white, but program leaders considered it an important breakthrough when some overseas blacks were allowed to enter the country to speak. Precedent was broken when a formerly all-white hotel was rented for the use of delegates from all racial backgrounds. Delegates ate their meals together there and at the congress headquarters, the modern downtown Central Methodist Church.

A feature of the program was an evangelistic rally in King’s Park Rugby Stadium; evangelist Billy Graham preached to the largest multi-racial meeting ever held in Durban (see following story).

Unlike many other conferences conducted by Christian groups around the world, this one had a follow-up budget item (about one-eighth of the total). Some of that money will be used for literature and other educational materials, and some will be used to help delegates put their commitments into action. Planners believe the follow-up will be even more significant than the remarkable events of the congress itself. Foundations were laid in Durban for extensive work.

In some sessions, delegates from the country’s various sections met together, the first time many had ever met one another. There were also gatherings of denominational families and special-interest groups. A high priority was urged for the task of drawing Dutch Reformed personnel into follow-up.

In an address on the last day, Cassidy appealed to all the delegates to go home and befriend their local clergymen and to work with them in the cause of Christ. Within a week of the meeting’s adjournment, the plea was already bearing fruit in an unexpected way. Dutch Reformed ministers were approaching Cassidy to express appreciation for the congress and to invite him to speak in their churches. There were other indications that more will result from the meeting than was immediately evident. At their last national conference, the Methodists decided to wait until after the congress to adopt a missions program. A number of other groups reported that the congress was a prelude to action on their part.

Confrontation was avoided by the planning committee’s early decision to clarify issues rather than to seek consensus. No legislation was considered and no votes were taken. Yet the issues were faced squarely. Speaker after speaker emphasized the need for a credible witness with a biblical message. One mentioned that in the Afrikaans language one word, predicant, means both “preacher” and “signpost.” The challenge was clear. Delegates went home realizing that they must “go the way” as well as “show the way” if they are to evangelize South Africa in this generation.

Many are praying that the absent Afrikaaner Christians get the message too.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Graham In South Africa: Showing How It Can Work

More than twenty-five years after getting his first invitation to South Africa, evangelist Billy Graham finally preached to record crowds in Durban and Johannesburg stadiums. He voiced regrets at waiting so long, but told crowds estimated at 60,000 in Johannesburg (about 45,000 were at the Durban rally) that 1973 was “God’s moment,” now that it was finally possible to invite people of all races to the meeting. The decision to allow them to mingle at the public facilities (Wanderer’s Stadium in Johannesburg and King’s Park Stadium in Durban) was taken at the highest level of government.

Graham was also one of the foreign speakers allowed by the government to participate in the South African Congress on Mission and Evangelism. His Durban rally was a part of the congress program. He attended congress sessions and gave one address to the delegates.

His insistence on racial integration at his meetings had been his reason for turning down the earlier invitations, Graham reminded reporters.

The Daily Mail in Durban editorially lauded Graham and chided the government on the issue of race. Graham preached racial harmony, said the paper, “but it was the crowd who showed how it could work in practice.… For once there were no artificial racial barriers and 45,000 people demonstrated conclusively that they did not mind a bit. A truly Christian government might wish to learn something from that.”

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Those rumors about the death of Soviet defector-turned-evangelist Sergei Kourdakov just won’t go away. And apparently, if the Underground Evangelism (UE) mission agency of Glendale, California, has its way, they never will. Kourdakov, who worked for UE, died early January 1 of a self-inflicted gunshot (see January 19 issue, page 39) that was ruled an accident by a coroner’s jury last month in San Bernardino, California. But evidence notwithstanding, UE seems intent on convincing its constituency that he died a martyr, a victim of assassination.

The whole affair has opened old wounds in persons once associated with UE, and an embittered congressman who feels he was burned by UE hints he has called for investigation of UE by authorities. (UE has been the subject of postal investigations in the past, but the cases were dropped.) Charges are flying between UE and former staffers who have fallen out with the organization and gone on to establish their own missions to eastern Europe.

A study of the situation by CHRISTIANITY TODAY has raised serious questions about UE’s operations and credibility. UE founder-president Loy Joe Bass is inclined to attribute much of the mess to the fierce fund-raising competition among missions to Iron Curtain countries. But it is deeper than that.

The most glaring recent innuendo in the Kourdakov case is contained in an epilogue to a book manuscript on the young Soviet’s life. In it, Bass implies that an assassin was in the fated motel room with Kourdakov and a girl companion, and that the attacker left when the girl ran to call police. (The Kourdakov “autobiography,” written by Bass and colleagues V. Dale Smith and George Santa with Fred Bauer of Guideposts, was offered to publishers this month on a bid basis.)

It was such statements by Bass in the first place, declared San Bernardino county coroner Bill Hill, “that led me to call the inquest so that we could put to rest all these rumors.” Hill said he had been “outraged” by some of Bass’s press releases prior to the inquest. Bass, called to testify under oath at the inquest, said he knew of no cause of Kourdakov’s death other than an accident, whereupon Hill privately instructed him to relay this word to the news media.

Earlier, Bass had mailed a pamphlet to his “co-workers” (UE’s contributors). It bore the headlines: “Sergei Kourdakov Killed.… [He] had warned his life was in danger. Told many his death would look like suicide or accident, ‘but don’t you believe it!’ he cautioned.” He cited alleged threats against Kourdakov’s life, recent fears, and “the perfect place and time” for “an accident” to happen—midnight in a “rural county … with a small population and relatively small law enforcement staff.” In reality. San Bernardino county suffers from urban sprawl and has one of California’s largest police forces. Bass went on to deny four rumors: that Kourdakov’s death was a suicide, that he did not believe in God, that he was involved in misconduct with a girl, and that he was a Communist agent.

Asked why his press releases and letters to the UE constituency had evaded the facts and insinuated assassination, Bass in an interview replied it was to “balance” rampant rumors of suicide, to show that there were “other possibilities.” (A chief source of the suicide theory is former UE worker Richard Wurmbrand, who now operates his own mission to Communist lands from a warehouse-like building a few blocks from UE’s modern headquarters.)

The jury sat through about three days of testimony from a parade of witnesses, from the seventeen-year-old girl who was with Kourdakov when he shot himself to a ballistics expert. Testimony established that Kourdakov, 22, had been killed by a bullet from a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver he’d mishandled. The bullet entered the lower right side of his head at almost a vertical angle from a distance “of no more than twelve inches.” Part of it lodged in his head; the other part lodged in the ceiling.

Kourdakov first hit the headlines in late 1971 when as a radioman in the Soviet navy he jumped from a trawler off British Columbia and swam ashore seeking asylum—and God, he said later. He carried along a number of photos and other documents; many of these were later reproduced in Bass’s magazine, Underground Evangelism.

While his story was being checked out by Canadian officials, Kourdakov was baptized in a Russian Orthodox church in eastern Canada. He stayed for a while in the home of a Russian Orthodox family in Ontario and attended their church. But Valentine Bobowich, a girl he met in St. Catharines, introduced him to Pentecostal churches, and at a youth conference in the Ukrainian Pentecostal Church in Toronto Kourdakov received the Pentecostal experience. He was baptized by immersion by the church’s pastor, William Dawidiuk. Dawidiuk and others arranged for Kourdakov to give his testimony in a number of Pentecostal and Baptist churches, for which he received hundreds of dollars in offerings. (He was also getting $47 a week from the Canadian government.) American mission agencies and Christian publications sought his services.

UE first established contact with Kourdakov in Toronto in January, 1972, according to Bass’s testimony at the inquest. Bass said he stopped over on trips to and from Europe in February and visited the youth, signing him to a book contract with a $500 advance. In March, Bass assigned V. Dale Smith to push negotiations, and in April a contract was signed, effective May 1, tying Kourdakov to UE. (Smith, Bass’s Munich-based European director and formerly a broadcaster, owns an ad agency in Mexico City. Bass once identified him as “Marcus Gonzales,” director of UE’s Cuban work.) In May, while other missions were seeking him, Kourdakov suddenly dropped out of sight in Canada, setting off frantic searches and speculation that he had been kidnaped or murdered. He emerged a few weeks later in the United States in UE’s employ.

Bass told the jury a management program had been drawn up to involve the likeable, happy-go-lucky Kourdakov in English classes, Bible study, and speaking in churches. The program, authored by Smith, dealt mostly with developing Kourdakov’s potential as a UE fund-raiser. Various agreements provided for the youth to receive a salary starting at $150 per week with periodic increases to $225 per week, 10 per cent of the net offerings in meetings (after expenses), 25 per cent of gross sales of cassettes, 50 per cent of book royalties (a recent UE announcement said the book would be published in seven languages), and all expenses. Affidavits showed Kourdakov earned $1,688 after taxes in October, 1972, and got $2,600 for expenses. Earnings averaged $925 per month during Kourdakov’s span of service with UE, said Bass.

(The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has reportedly located two brothers of Kourdakov in the Soviet Union. They may be awarded his royalties and shares in UE sales when the estate is probated. That decision will most likely be made by Hill.)

Although it was not mentioned, Kourdakov was also fed a stream of information on religious life in the Soviet Union by Angelo Cosmides, a San Francisco translator and Soviet affairs researcher who services UE and other agencies.

Ann Johnson, a dark-eyed blonde high school senior who attends a Pentecostal church in Glendale, followed Bass to the stand. She said she had first met Kourdakov at a church youth camp in August and that they dated the next few weeks. In September and again in December Kourdakov was a guest of the Johnson family in their suburban Los Angeles home. On Saturday, December 30, Miss Johnson said, she and Kourdakov went to the mountains above San Bernardino for a weekend of skiing and work. Kourdakov took along a Russian typewriter to work on immigration papers and a novel. He also took along the revolver from her father’s gun cabinet, she said.

Most motels were booked but they finally found a room that afternoon at the Giant Oaks Motel in Running Springs, she stated. They bought some beer and wine, had dinner, and slept together that night. (Miss Johnson insisted that a polygraph report be entered for the record showing their love-making stopped short of the sex act.) She added that they had encountered briefly three men outside the restaurant; there was a brief exchange of words, apparently in Polish. Kourdakov said, “Shut up, guys,” but didn’t seem rattled, she affirmed, and the pair didn’t see the men again. She emphasized that she and Kourdakov were in each other’s presence the entire weekend.

On Sunday afternoon Kourdakov showed her how the gun worked, replaced all but one of the five bullets (“so it wouldn’t go off the first time” if jolted accidentally, he told her), and put it under their bed.

That night they sipped champagne as they watched the New Year’s Eve celebrations on TV, the girl stated. The window was closed and the curtains were drawn at the time. Kourdakov at one point stood by the bedside and joked with her, then got the gun and held it in an upward position at the side of his head, still smiling at her. Miss Johnson said she looked away toward the TV set and then the gun went off. “Sergei had a horrified look on his face,” she said, and then he fell. “I thought he was kidding around. I said, ‘Sergei, get up.’” She said she tried to pull him up, saw the blood, then got the key, locked the door behind her, and ran to the nearby restaurant to call her father and the police.

Another witness, a youth from San Diego, said he found her crying outside the restaurant and tried to comfort her. Both he and Miss Johnson recall her saying, “Sergei killed himself; he didn’t mean to do it.”

When a sheriff’s deputy arrived, Miss Johnson went with him to the cabin and gave him the key to get into the room. (Bass in his epilogue to the Kourdakov book says they found the door already open.)

A truck driver in the next room said he was awakened by a noise at the time of the incident but did not realize it was a gunshot and went back to sleep.

The girl’s father, Eugene Johnson, 43, an electrician, said he knew Kourdakov had the gun and, indeed, that it was with his blessing despite the law against possession of firearms by aliens, because “a hyped-up kook” might attack the youth. Bureauracy moves so slowly, declared Johnson, that Sergei would be dead by the time legal permission came through. “So I felt obligated,” he explained.

Private detectives hired by UE alleged that Bass had misled them—a charge he denied. They said they could find no evidence of foul play.

The hearing was interrupted and the jury’s deliberations were postponed a week when Hill learned from congressman Earl F. Landgrebe that UE representatives were allegedly spreading the assassination-by-Russian-agents theory in the legislator’s northwestern Indiana district. Again there were no facts to support the theory, and the jury proceeded. UE deputation director Don Kyer, a former Salvation Army officer, said it was probably all a misunderstanding but allowed as how a film representative might get carried away a bit “because people want to believe Kourdakov was assassinated.”

(UE has nearly 100 film men in Canada and the U. S. who show UE movies in churches and collect names for the UE mailing list. Described as independent contractors, they are paid the equivalent of from 50 to 60 per cent of offerings. Kyer explains that offerings go into UE’s overseas literature fund and that the men are paid out of the operating fund. The film people account for about 20 per cent of UE’s income, says UE treasurer Joe Beliveau. UE’s income in 1970 was $1.07 million, and the 1971 total was $1.7 million. Last year’s figures were still being audited last month.)

Landgrebe, a Lutheran known for his staunch anti-communist stance and an erstwhile Bible smuggler himself, says he engineered Kourdakov’s entry into the U. S. on UE’s behalf but feels now he was “exploited” by UE. He is distressed by Bass’s “repetitious and unfounded insinuations” and by UE’s fund-raising tactics. Just prior to the inquest, Kyer—under instructions from Bass—called Landgrebe’s office and offered to forward a $300 honorarium that the congressman apparently turned down at a speaking engagement at UE’s conference last year. Landgrebe wonders if it was an attempt to buy him off in some way, but Bass insists he was only trying to find out if Landgrebe was upset by a possible mix-up involving the honorarium. At any rate, the legislator implies that authorities have been requested to investigate UE.

Bass was born and raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas. He attended the Bethesda Bible Institute, a Pentecostal school in Portland, Oregon, served a short stint with the “Wings of Healing” organization, then struck out for Nigeria and the Philippines as an independent Pentecostal missionary-evangelist. In the late fifties he opened shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as Evangelism Center, came up with the UE name in 1962, and moved to California.

Bass’s switch to UE followed a visit to Yugoslavia where evangelist Nick Gruick, an American Pentecostal of Yugoslavian descent, had been ministering for five months. Gruick, now a missionary in Haiti, recalled in a telephone interview that Bass showed up in Osiejk with a movie camera, took pictures in Gruick’s church services (including scenes of hands raised Pentecostal-style in praise), and asked to preach but was denied because he lacked the government permission then required. He was, however, allowed to lead in prayer several times—and he did so on camera. Bass went on to visit elsewhere, but several days later Gruick was ordered out of the country because, Gruick charges, “Bass had done something wrong.”

When Bass returned to the U. S. he put out both a silent movie he narrated and a pictorial booklet entitled, “The Red World.” Bass is portrayed as holding “a series of crusades behind the Iron Curtain” with “thousands marked by the Communists” because they accepted Christ under his ministry, a claim he supported with close-ups of persons with hands uplifted. In one picture, Bass is shown in front of a building purportedly “a thousand miles behind the Iron Curtain.” The building is actually Communist headquarters in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, about 200 miles from the Italian border.

In another picture, Bass identified Gruick as his “associate and chief interpreter.” In fact, said Bass, Gruick’s help “was so great that the Communists gave him twelve hours to flee the country.… His forced departure worked very many hardships upon [me], but [I] continued the crusades and they grew even larger than before.” Bass closed by taking credit for “trail-blazing this ever-spreading revival behind the Iron Curtain.” Meanwhile, said he, “I felt more like an observer than a participant,” a comment that insiders insist is closer to the truth.

Bass’s credibility in print has been questioned in other notable instances. Former UE overseas director Haralan Popov, a refugee minister from Bulgaria, claims that Bass altered his book Tortured For His Faith without his knowledge, injecting untruths into the translation from the original work in Swedish. Indeed, asserts a UE office employee at the time, Bass “gave us strict orders not to let Mr. Popov see the manuscript until after it was published.” Popov quit UE last year, obtained the rights to his book from UE, and has asked the publisher to revise it.

After Stephen Bankov and his family left Bulgaria in 1969, UE signed him aboard and transformed him in print from the deacon of one church that he was into the pastor of fifty-six underground churches. Bass justifies the wording by saying Bankov performed the “function” of a pastor. Readers are led to believe that Communists forced the Bankov car off the road in Austria. Ladin Popov, Haralan’s brother (he left UE in 1970) under whose ministry Bankov became a Christian, was escorting him at the time and says it is simply not true. Popov claims there is other fiction in the Bankov book.

Additionally, former employees speak of fabrications in UE’s magazine, fundraising appeals, and financial reports.

UE is virtually a case of one-man rule. All members of UE’s board of directors (currently five) are UE employees, including Bass, his wife, and treasurer Beliveau. The turnover among the other members has been high; most have left amid controversy, usually over how UE’s money is handled. In all, there are about forty UE employees, most of them workers at the headquarters office.

The two centuries from 1700 to 1900 in America were marked by great religious activity. Denominations were being transplanted to America as Scotch Presbyterians, German Lutherans, English Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, and a host of other immigrants arrived with church traditions intact.

Joseph Smith founded the Mormon church, one of America’s indigenous religions, while Unitarianism was beginning its stealthy and surprisingly successful attack on Protestant orthodoxy. Roman Catholicism grew quickly through the surge of Continental emigration, and there were riots and intemperate press attacks on the newly arriving “papists.”

George Whitefield, Charles G. Finney, and Dwight L. Moody were among the great preachers who brought new vitality to American Christianity. Revivalism spread rapidly.

Midway in this period the American early missionary enterprise began. In the early 1800s Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians founded missionary boards.

During these two centuries Christians were instrumental in founding the American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, the American Tract Society, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Abolitionist movement.

Slavery was a heated question, and white Christians lined up on both sides while black Christians poured out their frustrations in spirituals like “Deep River.”

And as the period drew to a close, fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic nomination for the presidency on the strength of his “Cross of Gold” speech.

Curiously, this religious hurly-burly is not reflected by the religious fine art of the period—if the collection put together under the auspices of the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley is representative.

The exhibit, which had a recent stand at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D. C., is the brainchild of Jane Dillenberger, the union’s associate professor of theology and the arts.

We might have hoped the artists would leave us a record of religious profession and practice that would help us better to stand in the brogans of our spiritual forebears. Something to help us feel the frenzy that sometimes characterized the revival meetings—some Daumier-like insights into the inconsistencies between profession and practice that characterize every age of the Church.

And how refreshing it would have been to find the collection something that would strengthen the faith of the twentieth-century viewer.

Instead, we are presented with an exhibit of biblical scenes that tell us little of the religion of that period and that generally fail to speak across the age gap.

The most striking pieces in the collection are the works of Robert Loftin Newman (1827–1912), Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), and Edward Hicks (1780–1849).

Madonna and Child in a Landscape and The Good Samaritan, two small oils, are Newman’s best works. Both have a dim-lit, nebulous quality reminiscent of the paintings of Albert Ryder, yet they are more life-like than some of the more photographic representations in the exhibit. In Madonna a real woman holds a real child who gestures in typical childlike abandon.

Newman heightens the contrasts in the story of the Good Samaritan by making the injured man young and the Samaritan old. The old man leans over the prone figure of the victim apparently holding a cloth to one of his wounds while his donkey hovers disinterestedly in the background. Newman has drawn attention to the act by making the cloth the only white element in a murky twilight scene. He effectively conveys that this is an act of great compassion.

Sadly, the painter of these two moving paintings died an apparent suicide in New York in 1912, an unknown pauper.

Henry Tanner, a fourth-generation American of Negro extraction, offers an annunciation scene in which a frightened and puzzled young Jewish girl dressed in an oversized gown sits on the side of a ragged bed. The viewer, too, is puzzled, and afraid of such reality.

The exhibit includes three paintings from the charming Peaceable Kingdom series of Edward Hicks. In each, Hicks, a devout Quaker, shows the Quaker fathers landing on the shore of a peaceable kingdom inhabited by nonferocious leopards and lions fraternizing with placid sheep and cattle—a land governed by small children.

Hicks thought the art of painting was of little importance, “one of those trifling, insignificant arts which has never been of substantial advantage to mankind.” C. S. Lewis reflects this same thought when he says, “I think we can still believe culture to be innocent after we have read the New Testament; I cannot see that we are encouraged to think it important.”

Perhaps because art is in the right perspective, Hicks’s peaceable kingdom, like the kingdom of Narnia, is an inviting place.

Thomas Eakins, whose Crucifixion is cited in the notes on the exhibit as the most important American crucifixion painting, presents an unmarked Christ peacefully asleep on the cross.

America’s first professional sculptor, Horatio Greenough, is represented by three competent but uninspired works. His bust of Christ shows a heroic Apollo with well brushed locks and neatly trimmed beard.

Naturally, most of the work in the exhibit seems dated. No modern viewer is likely to respond to Washington Allston’s slick, stagey Prophet Jeremiah Dictating to his Scribe Baruch as a contemporary commentator did: “I wish I felt at liberty to tell Mr. Allston how grateful I am to him for having shown me one of the prophets of old, and for having sent me away a more thoughtful and religious man.” The melodramatic, theatrical look vaguely embarrasses the modern viewer.

The failure of most of these works to speak to the viewer today should remind us of how culturally conditioned we are and how restrained our judgment of Christians in other times and places should be.

What Lutherans Think And Do

A Study of Generations: Report of a Two-Year Study of 5,000 Lutherans Between the Ages of 15–65: Their Beliefs, Values, Attitudes, Behavior, by Merton P. Strommen, et al. (Augsburg, 1972, 411 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by Erling Jorstad, professor of history, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.

This book is a major breakthrough for an informed understanding of Christianity in contemporary America. It is the result of a 740-question survey conducted in 1970 among 4,745 Lutherans throughout the United States on every conceivable phase of their “religious life.” Both laity and clergy were represented, and equal weight was given to the various age groups (hence the title, “A Study of Generations”), and to the three largest Lutheran bodies, the Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and the American Lutheran Church. For the first time we have an astoundingly broad and deep insight into the values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior of this religious family, which in its three largest bodies has some six million American church members. No other denomination has made so comprehensive a study.

The work was financed by a Lutheran insurance company, and the principal research was planned and executed by four scholars trained in behavioral science and opinion research; three of them are also Lutheran clergymen. They were aided by several dozen consultants and advisors. The work offers specialists in this field a valuable case study of model scholarship Using sophisticated research techniques. Any subsequent denominational study of such scope will have to come to terms with its precise methodology, explained both in professional jargon for the expert and in general terms for the average reader.

On another level, the book shows that such research can help destroy old stereotypes that Lutherans and non-Lutherans may have held about themselves—such as clannishness, and wide doctrinal differences among the alleged “conservative,” “moderate,” and “progressive” factions of the three bodies. The evidence simply shows that these and some other conceptions are not so. At the same time, other general impressions are now substantiated by the data: Lutherans do tend to be more Republican than Democratic, more white than blue collar, and more willing to base their interpretation of Christianity on the traditional Lutheran law-gospel dichotomy than are members of other mainline Protestant groups.

The candor and forthrightness of the questions and the willingness of the research team to publish all the answers suggests that denominations are now willing to expose their own shortcomings in public rather than trying to keep a slickly devised camouflage over that which is embarrassing. The survey reports on the incidence among Lutherans of seeing X-rated movies, engaging in deviant sexual practices, and using narcotics. In the study “Biblical ignorance,” 32 per cent said Deuteronomy was an Old Testament prophet.

In a masterful chapter, this reviewer’s favorite, the authors capture the essence of “Lutheran piety” and lay bare its essential teachings and practices. Surely, similar studies of the indigenous nature of other denominations would be of equally great value. The researchers also put to rest the older claim by some behavioral scientists operating in opinion research that Christians are more anti-Semitic than are non-Christians in America.

Readers of this magazine would be especially interested in the summaries of the questions on “Liberalism-Fundamentalism,” “Individual Christian Responsibility” and “Church Involvement in Social Issues” as well as questions and answers on glossolalia, pre-millennialism, the substitutionary atonement and related doctrines. The results, which will surprise many, are of great value in documenting now precisely what a very wide section of Lutherans really do believe and practice. Such knowledge can only help improve communication in this year of special concern for evangelism as Key 73 embraces Christians of all denominations.

The four authors conclude with excellent advice for Christian educators, pastors, and theologians. They point to areas where a good deal more formal attention is needed to correct misinformation they uncovered on subjects like foreign missions and the dual nature of Jesus as God and man. They show beyond any reasonable doubt the existence of a generation gap, and they suggest what the future generation expects from its churches. Such information will be of great help not only to Lutherans but also, since this body shares socio-economic characteristics and many doctrinal loyalties with other Protestant bodies, to all those who seek to know with precision what those who count themselves Christians in this country really do believe.

IN THE JOURNALS

An irregularly appearing evangelical journal, Inter-View, seeks to provide a forum for developing Christian leadership with a global perspective. The latest issue (Fall, 1972) includes articles and dialogues from Korea, Switzerland, India, and Japan as well as the states. (Box 276, Houghton, N. Y. 14744; $2.50/copy.)