Page 5887 – Christianity Today (2024)

God is the god of the infinite, and he is also the God of the infinitesimal. The God who brought the universe into existence and who sustains it by the word of his infinite wisdom and power is the God who is concerned about and sovereign over the infinitesimal details of human existence.

Three times within the past twenty-four hours I have seen this marvelous truth unfold before my eyes again, as it has thousands of times before. In such experiences, as I note the exquisite timing and minute detail of the way God takes over to make things happen, I feel an impulse to bow my head and worship.

Although the Bible plainly teaches this great truth, many Christians ignore it, to their sorrow. As a result, instead of peace there is tension in their lives, and failure rather than success. The sovereign God of the universe is interested in every detail of our lives, but he is often thwarted in his loving purposes by our lack of interest.

Abraham was not only the “father of the faithful” but also the father of those who put their faith squarely on the line of God’s leading. Concerned lest his son should marry one of the pagans by whom they were surrounded, he sent his servant back to his home country to find a wife for Isaac.

Abraham knew what he was doing, for the servant to whom he entrusted his mission was a godly man, a man of prayer. On arriving in Mesopotamia at the city of Nahor the servant stopped and prayed—not in pious generalizations but with a specific request: “O LORD, God of my master Abraham, grant me success today, I pray thee, and show steadfast love to my master Abraham. Behold, I am standing by the spring of water, and the daughters of the men of the city are coming out to draw water. Let the maiden to whom I shall say, ‘Pray let down your jar that I may drink,’ and who shall say, ‘Drink, and I will water your camels’—let her be the one whom thou hast appointed for thy servant Isaac. By this I shall know that thou hast shown steadfast love to my master.”

Even while he was praying, a young woman came out to draw water, and at the servant’s salutation she did exactly that for which he had prayed.

In this incident, Abraham’s servant saw the miracle of God’s answer to his prayer for unmistakable guidance in his mission. We read, “The man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord, and said, ‘Blessed be the LORD, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master. As for me, the LORD has led me in the way to the house of my master’s kinsmen’” (Gen. 24:26, 27).

Some have the mistaken notion that God intervenes on our behalf only in the “big” and “important” things of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the “small” problems we face may have tremendous potential for good or bad, and many of the seemingly “unimportant” details of our daily lives prove in the end to have been vital.

God wants us to confide in him about things that, though they might be trivial to others, are important to us. He wants to be able to give help and guidance far beyond anything we have expected from him.

Unquestionably, the key to such an experience is personal surrender—a willingness to know and to do God’s will in a given matter. Then, on God’s part, there is his purpose and his pleasure to direct his children, for their good and for his glory.

Do we “bother” God when we talk to him about the trivialities of daily life? Far from it! It is the will of our Lord to undertake for us in all these things. Only our blind ignorance and stubborn wills stand between us and blessings untold.

The Apostle Paul was not indulging in idle fancy when he wrote: “Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:6, 7).

This admonition specifies “anything” and “everything.” God knows that each of us is confronted by problems, difficulties, and uncertainties. He knows that our outlook is often beclouded so that we do not know which way to turn. He also knows that every day seemingly minor things arise in our lives that call for his loving guidance.

It is very probable that our Lord had our need for guidance in mind when he said, “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).

If we search our hearts we realize that it is pride that keeps us from stepping out of our self-life into a blessed companionship with our Lord in which we talk with him about anything, knowing that he is interested. In a number of instances in the Bible, we are told that Christ’s power was denied or limited “because of their unbelief.” The situation is no different today.

One of the greatest stumblingblocks to the Christian’s acceptance of the guidance and wisdom of God is his failure to realize that this relationship with God is the most personal thing in all the world. When we arise in the morning it is natural for us to greet our loved ones. But do we also speak to our Lord words of love, trust, and dependence? Do we surrender our wills to him and ask that his presence and power flood our souls? If not, we are missing some of the greatest blessings possible to the believer.

When the Apostle Paul admonished the Philippian Christians to stop worrying and to ask God to take over in their lives, he told them to do so with “thanksgiving.” And why not? Surely we finite beings should have hearts filled with thanksgiving at the fact that we can turn all our cares over to the infinite and loving God!

I once heard a Christian spoken of with derision because he said he always asked God to help him find a parking place. He might drive around the block a dozen times before he found a place, he said, but “then it will be God’s time and God’s place.” He was right. When we are in God’s time and place, we are in the center of his will. Romans 8:28 applies to the “big” things and to the “little.”

We are responsible for being alert and obedient, of course, but once we have committed everything to God, the problem is his, not ours. God never fails the one who puts his trust in him. For this reason Paul can end his exhortation with these words, “The peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:7).

When we have surrendered to God, trusted in him implicitly, and relaxed in him, then we feel peace, for we have turned over our anxieties and perplexities to the everlasting God of the infinite, who is also the God of the infinitesimal.

Commentary on the Gospel of John (a part of “The New International Commentary on the New Testament”), by Leon Morris (Eerdmans, 1971, 936 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by James M. Boice, pastor, Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

There was a time not very long ago when the names of Dodd, Bernard, Barrett, Hoskins, and Davey were linked to the four most significant commentaries on the Gospel of John in English. No longer. The commentaries that these five great English scholars provided have not declined in value; no recent discoveries have totally overthrown their approaches to the Fourth Gospel. The situation has changed simply by the appearance of several new giants in the Johannine commentary field.

The first of the new challengers was the two-volume commentary on John prepared by Father Raymond E. Brown for the Anchor Bible series. The first volume of that 1,208-page study appeared in 1966, the second in 1970. Earlier this year there appeared the English translation of the monumental and widely influential commentary on John by Rudolf Bultmann, which was first published in German in 1941 (see review in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, July 16, 1971, p. 13). Now, almost on the heels of Bultmann’s work, there comes the larger and equally comprehensive tome by Leon Morris, which may be the best commentary on any book of the Bible by an evangelical in recent decades. It is certainly the largest and most thorough evangelical commentary on the Fourth Gospel.

The dust jacket of this work tells us Morris spent “several years” on this volume. That is an understatement. Actually, Morris has been at work on John’s Gospel for the last ten years, and although the work was not without interruptions, still much of his effort during this time has gone into it. Two years ago a volume of Studies in the Fourth Gospel, a by-product of his work on the commentary, appeared, and before that two other works: The Dead Sea Scrolls and St. John’s Gospel (1960) and The New Testament and the Jewish Lectionaries (1964). In recent years Morris has also written commentaries on Thessalonians, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, The Cross in the New Testament, and other volumes.

In some ways the answers of this principal of Ridley College, Melbourne, to the traditional problems associated with the Fourth Gospel are of less importance than the details of the verse-by-verse commentary. Yet the answers deserve mention also, if only because many will use them to assess the commentary. Morris holds to the traditional Johannine authorship, including the identification of the beloved disciple as the Apostle John. He believes that John wrote the entire Gospel, including the disputed twenty-first chapter. Verse 24 may be an exception. Morris also quite naturally holds to a fairly early dating of the book, though he is not specific. He expresses “an opinion” for a date before A.D. 70 and the fall of Jerusalem, but he does not rule out Albright’s preference for a date in “the late seventies or early eighties.”

An interesting feature of Morris’s commentary is the inclusion of supplemental discussions of important words or issues at strategic points throughout the volume. These are called “Additional Notes” and occur on: the Logos, the world, the Son of Man, truth, believing, the Paraclete, miracles, the Last Supper and the Passover, and the right of the Jews to inflict the death penalty. The section of John dealing with the woman taken in adultery is treated in an appendix to the entire volume.

All the “Additional Notes” are interesting, but I found those on miracles and the dating of the Last Supper and the Passover most stimulating. The section on miracles points out the extraordinary significance of the Johannine “signs.” Morris notes and comments on Jesus’ apparent preference for the word works. The note on the Last Supper and the Passover is an informative discussion of recent evidence bearing on the apparent conflict between the dating of the Last Supper and the crucifixion in John and the Synoptic Gospels. Morris feels that the best explanation is found in the existence of more than one calendar, one of which was followed by Jesus and his followers and the other by the temple authorities.

The best way to measure the value and flavor of this work is to delve into it. On God’s sovereignty and electing grace in John’s Gospel:

People do not come to Christ because it seems to them a good idea. It never does seem a good idea to natural man. Apart from a divine work in their souls … men remain contentedly in their sins. Before men can come to Christ it is necessary that the Father give them to Him [p. 367].

On God’s wrath:

We may not like it but we should not ignore it. John tells us that this wrath “abideth.” We should not expect it to fade away with the passage of time. If a man continues in unbelief and disobedience he can look for nothing other than the persisting wrath of God. This is basic to our understanding of the gospel. Unless we are saved from real peril there is no meaning in salvation [p. 250].

On faith:

Basically faith is trust. But in our reaction against the view that faith means no more than a firm acceptance of certain intellectual propositions we must not go so far as to say that it is entirely a matter of personal relations. It is impossible to have the kind of faith that John envisages without having a certain high view of Christ. Unless we believe that He is more than man we can never trust Him with that faith that is saving faith [p. 447].

With passages like these set in the midst of a detailed and comprehensive commentary, Morris has produced a study that is somewhat like his own description of the Fourth Gospel: it is “a pool in which a child may wade and an elephant can swim.” It will be useful for the beginner in faith as well as for the mature Christian or biblical scholar.

Not To Be Avoided

The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States, by Vinson Synan (Eerdmans, 1971, 248 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Donald W. Dayton, assistant professor of bibliography and research and acquisitions librarian, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

Vinson Synan is chairman of the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Emmanuel College, Franklin Springs, Georgia. This book was his 1967 dissertation at the University of Georgia. Comparison with the original reveals only minor changes. Most interesting of these is the addition of “Holiness” to the title to emphasize “the overriding thesis … that the historical and doctrinal lineage of American pentecostalism is to be found in the Wesleyan tradition.” Others have advanced this thesis but have not defended it with such detailed and careful documentation. This work will surely rank with the most important interpretations of the origins of American Pentecostalism.

The author traces the development of Wesleyan theology with its emphasis on sanctification as a second work of grace subsequent to conversion, dwelling in particular upon the advocacy of this doctrine by the American Holiness Movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Among the many sects that emerged from this movement at the turn of the century were the various groups named “Church of God” and also the “Fire-Baptized Holiness Church” (which emphasized a third experience beyond sanctification). Charles F. Parham, to whom most students trace twentieth-century Pentecostalism, had some contact with the founder of this last group. Building on this foundation, Synan treats the well-known “Azusa Street revival,” Pentecostalism’s sweeping of Southern holiness churches, and the development of the “Assemblies of God” and the “Jesus Only” movements, as well as other more recent events.

Although Synan claims his book is not an apology, it is difficult not so to understand such statements as “a product of Methodism, the holiness-pentecostal movement traces its lineage through the Wesleys to Anglicanism and from thence to Roman Catholicism.” On one level this may be true, but one may question whether the “second blessing” theology of the American Holiness Movement preserved the nuances of Wesley’s teaching on “Christian Perfection” and also whether the thrust of the American movement is caught in Synan’s emphasis on the occurrence of such “motor phenomena” as the “jerks” and the place of religious emotion in prefiguring the Pentecostal emphasis on physical evidence of Christian experience.

Nevertheless, Synan’s thesis will stand in its broad outline. It is most nearly true of his own denomination, the Pentecostal Holiness Church (the group that Oral Roberts left when he joined United Methodism), and probably more true in the South, where the holiness movement was more radical in nature. No one really interested in understanding the rise of Pentecostalism in this century can avoid this book.

Newly Published

Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation, by William A. Dyrness (Eerdmans, 235 pp., $8.95). A penetrating analysis (see editorial, page 29).

Survival on the Campus: A Handbook for Christian Students, by William Proctor (Revell, 157 pp., $3.95). An invaluable aid to the beginning college student. From his own difficult experience as a Christian at Harvard, Proctor maps out a strategy for achieving spiritual growth through maximum involvement with non-Christians and their challenges to faith. He presents realistic approaches to problems of intellectual confrontation, drugs, sex, division among campus Christians, and political movements, using compelling illustrations from student’s lives.

A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, edited by William L. Holladay (Eerdmans, 425 pp., $15). A well-done abridgment for seminarians and preachers of the standard Koehler-Baumgartner (which costs more than twice as much).

The Returns of Love: Letters of a Christian hom*osexual, by Alex Davidson (Inter-Varsity, 93 pp., $1.50 pb), and Forbidden Love: A hom*osexual Looks for Understanding and Help, by John Drakeford (Word, 149 pp., $4.95). hom*osexuals are real people for whom Christ died, but one would never guess that from the lack of attention to them and their problems in evangelical literature. A warm welcome therefore to these two ground-breaking, helpful introductions.

It Is Written, by Jacob A. O. Preus, and The Apostolic Scriptures, by David P. Scaer (Concordia, 74 and 68 pp., $1.75 each pb). Defenses of evangelical views of the Bible based on Christ’s attitude and his delegation of authority to the apostles.

Trinity Studies: Volume I, No. 1 (2045 Half Day Road, Deerfield, Ill. 60015, 62 pp., $1.75 pb). A journal launched at Trinity with a report on an imaginary Vatican III by one of the professors, and studies of Rauschenbusch, Bultmann, and the destiny of those who do not hear the Gospel by three of the students. The goal is twice-yearly publication.

Commentary on the Old Testament, by C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch (10 volumes, Eerdmans, $69.50). Long a standard set for Bible students with some knowledge of Hebrew. This nineteenth-century evangelical classic was formerly bound in twenty-five volumes and sold at a higher price.

Experiential Religion, by Richard R. Niebuhr (Harper & Row, 143 pp., $5.95). A very scholarly and dispassionate analysis of religious psychology, less concerned with what evangelicals think of as Christian experience than one might expect.

Vox Evangelica: Volume VII, edited by Donald Guthrie (London Bible College [Green Lane, Northwood, Middlesex, England], 87 pp., $2 pb). Essays on Paul by F. F. Bruce, immortality by H. D. McDonald, John by D. R. Carnegie, and theological education by H. H. Rowdon.

Understanding Speaking in Tongues, by Watson Mills (Eerdmans, 88 pp., $1.95 paperback), and New Testament Teaching on Tongues, by Merrill F. Unger (Kregel, 175 pp., $1.75 pb). Two who don’t speak in tongues look primarily at what Acts and First Corinthians have to say. Unger takes a harsh approach, acceptable only to those who agree with him in advance. Mills is appropriate for those who have had favorable encounters with Pentecostalism but want to see how others understand the relevant Scriptures.

The Jesus Freaks, by Jess Moody (Word, 127 pp., $3.95 and $.95). Not at all what you might think. Rather than being only about the movements of youth recently converted to Christ, it is a potpourri of testimonies to all kinds of “spiritual” experiences and outlooks. Fully one-third of the book is a list of addresses of so-called Liberated Churches, almost all of which are basically humanistic.

Christianity and the Class Struggle, by Harold O. J. Brown (Zondervan, 223 pp., $1.25 pb). A study of some of the divisions in society—economic, racial, generational—with a call for a distinctively Christian response. Slightly revised, soft-cover reissue of a 1970 publication.

Servants of Christ, edited by Donald G. Bloesch (Bethany Fellowship, 181 pp., paperback, $1.95). An inside look at the important ministry of the deaconess, its origin, present status, and future. While concentrating on the diaconate within the Lutheran church, the editor has included an essay on the deaconess in the Anglican communion as well as an evaluative essay by a Roman Catholic sister.

The Justification of the Law, by Clarence Morris (University of Pennsylvania, 214 pp., $12.50). A careful treatment of the philosophy of law in society. Pays some attention to natural law but none to prescriptive revealed law.

Grace and Freedom, by Bernard Lonergan (Herder and Herder, 187 pp., $9.75). The sudden popularity of Bernard Lonergan motivated the 1971 publication of his earliest, altogether classic work on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. It not only furnishes a good analysis of Thomas’s views but also reminds the reader of what Roman Catholic theology stood for until recently.

The past year witnessed the production of a number of useful Old Testament books but few, if any, that could be considered outstanding. Even those that, by virtue of the significance of the subject or the venerability of the author, might be expected to merit top billing, usually fall short of greatness. This is not to deny that all our selections are good books; rather, it is to claim that most of them might have been better. In the paragraphs that follow, I have marked with an asterisk (*) those books suitable for the reader without seminary training. Other selections are primarily for the specialist.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUNDS Perhaps the most impressive works to appear are those in biblical and extra-biblical history. Under the editorial direction of Benjamin Mazar, volumes two and three (The Patriarchs and Judges) of The World History of the Jewish People* (Rutgers) provide a comprehensive linguistic, cultural, religious, and political coverage of the period from Abraham through the rise of the monarchy. Chapters are provided by such well-known scholars as the late E. A. Speiser, Yigael Yadin, H. L. Ginsburg, C. H. Gordon, and Y. Aharoni. The critical position is moderate, illustration is sometimes lavish, and coverage is unusually thorough. Several chapters are complete monographs on the subject while others seem rather a kind of summary article for inclusion in a more general history. This unevenness does mar the work, though no chapter is without merit. Such a book will not replace a general treatment like J. Bright’s History of Israel; nevertheless, it deserves wide distribution.

From a secular standpoint we welcome publication of the revised edition of the second part of volume one of “The Cambridge Ancient History,” The Early History of the Middle East (Cambridge), edited by I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, and N. G. L. Hammond. Chapters have been appearing separately since 1964, and it is now gratifying to find within one binding such a wealth of data on the biblical world from ca. 3000 B. C. down through the period of the earliest patriarchs. The first edition of this history has been a classic in its own right; the revised edition now takes its place, and we look with anticipation to the arrival of future volumes.

The year’s leading contribution in archaeology comes from the British scholar Kathleen Kenyon. Her Royal Cities of the Old Testament* (Schocken) combines coffee-table format and illustration with excellent technical discussion of those few cities from Solomonic times onward that were specially the cities of the king (Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, Samaria). Recent material from Jerusalem’s temple area, richly supplemented with the latest finds from excavations at Gezer and Hazor, makes this volume a valuable introduction to the subject.

An important study of a problem that has long intrigued biblical scholars comes in the form of a monograph entitled Who Were the Amorites? (Brill) by Alfred Haldar. Supporting evidence from texts is given for the derivation of the Sumerian MAR.TU (whence Akkadian amurrum) from the city name of Mari on the middle Euphrates. Further chapters relate the Amorites to settlement in the territory between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean, discuss their social and political organization, and further elucidate their relation to Babylonian society.

OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY Two short books that attempt a summary of Old Testament theology for the layman are Ronald Youngblood’s The Heart of the Old Testament* (Baker) and J. D. W. Watts’s Basic Patterns in Old Testament Religion* (Vantage). Youngblood approaches the subject through chapters on monotheism, sovereignty, election, covenant, theocracy, law, sacrifice, faith, and redemption. No attempt is made to give a real unity to Old Testament theology, a fact that makes this book less than ideal, though the treatment throughout is accurate, biblical, and well cast in laymen’s language. Watts divides his Old Testament theology into three basic patterns: the patriarchal pattern, that followed by Abraham; the amphictyonic, the religion of Moses; and the monarchical, the religion of Israel after the Davidic period. Although the book is a valuable attempt to cast current Old Testament theology in a form useful for the layman, we could wish it were more the author’s own synthesis and a little less a popularization of the latest German scholarship.

Evangelicals will note with interest the appearance of the first of two volumes of a new work in biblical theology by a member of the Mennonite tradition. Chester K. Lehman’s Biblical Theology, Volume 1: Old Testament* (Herald) may not be the final answer to the need for a first-rate evangelical theology of the Old Testament, but it will be a valuable addition to the limited literature in the field. Lehman cheerfully acknowledges his dependence on the work of Gerhardus Vos, and in a sense his book is an attempt to set forth the principles of historically based revelation in the tradition of the great Princeton scholar.

Of standard works in the same field, no one-volume presentation has had wider reception than An Outline of Old Testament Theology (Blackwell) by Th. C. Vriezen. Students will welcome a fully revised and enlarged edition that appeared in 1971, taking into account current work (particularly that of von Rad) and arguing strongly for the unity of Old Testament theology.

EXEGETICAL TOOLA Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Eerdmans), edited by William Holladay, meets a longstanding need for a lexicon intermediate between pocket-size glossaries and massive, expensive tomes. This is a skillful abridgment, using the latest available portions, of the Koehler-Baumgartner lexicon, which remains valuable for the specialist. Seminarians and pastors will be well served by this tool.

BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND INTRODUCTION The year’s leading contribution comes in the form of a published dissertation from Rome. Sean A. McEvenue, in The Narrative Style of the Priestly Writer (Pontifical Biblical Institute), has produced a most engaging literary study comparing passages of the so-called P Document with various genres of children’s literature. As a book that challenges deeply held assumptions (e.g., that “P” is a “rather superficial, pure, bloodless, theological writing”), this work is sure to provoke some reaction and open an old subject to new forms of debate.

A second significant work, Joel and the Temple Cult of Jerusalem (Brill) by G. W. Ahlstrom, considers the terminology, phraseology, and historical allusions in the Book of Joel. The author concludes from his detailed and comprehensive study that the prophecy was an attack on syncretistic and idolatrous elements within the cult of the second temple, sometime between 515 and 500 B. C. A closing chapter on composition finds the oracles of Joel originally spoken to the people of Jerusalem and later written down, either by the prophet or by some of his disciples, with no verses that need be considered secondary.

MONOGRAPHS ON BIBLICAL-THEOLOGICAL THEMESMan, God’s Eternal Creation* (Moody) by R. Laird Harris is a potpourri of data about man found in the Old Testament. The author, long known for ingenious, if not always convincing, solutions to problems of Old Testament history, has now brought together in one volume much of his collection (e.g., the Hebrew word for “flood” means “storm,” and what covered the higher regions was a snowstorm lasting most of a year!). A significant part of the book is devoted to questions of science and Scripture, with chapters on culture, worship, warfare, and the afterlife to round out the feast.

A second stimulating monograph studies the relation between the eighth-century Isaiah and the wisdom movement of that day. J. William Whedbee’s Isaiah and Wisdom (Abingdon), originally a Yale dissertation, looks at the parables, proverbs, and woe oracles in Isaiah, together with the attitude of the book toward counsel and counselors. Whedbee concludes that Isaiah manifests strong influences from the wisdom traditions of the Jerusalem court, part of which involved his use of wisdom forms to meet the problems of eighth-century Judah. This context, according to the author, provided a creative stimulus for Isaiah in shaping his message to the needs of his day.

Our next selection doubles as an introduction to the Wisdom books and a study of wisdom in its general biblical setting. The Way of Wisdom in the Old Testament* (Macmillan) by R. B. Y. Scott is designed for the general reader and presents wisdom as a movement in Israel with an influence equal to that of the prophets. Scott points out the considerable common ground between the wise men and the prophets, though acknowledging their differences, and stresses the need for wisdom’s message in the midst of our morally confused contemporary society.

Some old but much new ground is covered in Carroll Stuhlmueller’s Creative Redemption in Deutero-Isaiah (Pontifical Biblical Institute), a book that reaffirms the primacy of the redemption theme in Isaiah 40–55 and thoroughly explores the subordinate theme of creation in its relation to redemption. Here is a volume that demonstrates the continuing quality of doctoral work being done at the Pontifical Biblical Institute and provides a focal point for all future discussion of an important theological motif.

Yet another provocative book that originated as a doctoral dissertation, this one at Cambridge, is Ancient Israel’s Criminal Law (Schocken) by Anthony Phillips. Phillips argues that there was a clear distinction between criminal and civil offenses in Israel, and that the Decalogue with its covenant stipulations was in fact Israel’s criminal code. After examining each of the “Ten Words,” the book closes with a short history of the concept of criminal law in Israel from the time of Sinai through the post-exilic period.

COLLECTED ESSAYS It has recently become popular to collect in one volume some of the more important journal articles written by a scholar of note. Readers will welcome the appearance in English of fifteen essays from the pen of the late Dominican Roland deVaux, under the title The Bible and the Ancient Near East (Doubleday). Outstanding articles discuss biblical interpretation (e.g., “The Remnant of Israel”), archaeology (“The Sacrifice of Pigs in Palestine”), and biblical theology (“Is it Possible to Write a ‘Theology of the Old Testament’?”).

A second collection of essays, also from a Roman Catholic scholar, is “in large measure a by-product of editorial work on the New American Bible.” Studies in Israelite Poetry and Wisdom (Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monographs) offers twenty-six articles by Monsignor Patrick W. Skehan, most of which have to do with translation problems in the Wisdom books. Ten of the author’s book reviews and a complete bibliography of his work complete the volume.

A significant collection of technical essays appeared in honor of the best-known biblical archaeologist on his eightieth (which proved to be his last) birthday. Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright (Johns Hopkins), edited by Hans Goedicke, includes thirty-four contributions, most of them bringing archaeological discovery to bear on specific Old Testament questions.

Two further anthologies are concerned with Ancient Near Eastern backgrounds to the Bible. Toward an Image of Tammuz and Other Essays (Harvard) brings together the best work of the great Sumerologist Thorkild Jacobsen. Several articles on history and mythology will commend themselves to biblical students (note especially the title article) while grammarians will appreciate authoritative treatment of Sumerian and Akkadian verbs. A second, smaller book, Essays on the Ancient Semitic World (University of Toronto), edited by J. W. Wevers and D. B. Redford, combines three articles on Assyria and Egypt with four useful studies in Hebrew philology. The latter category includes a fresh approach to metrical analysis in Hebrew poetry, an article on the passive Qal, and two articles on Hebrew phonics.

COMMENTARIES The past year saw the appearance of several exegetical commentaries, though none of the scope that has marked publications of recent years. Two volumes were issued in “The New Century Bible” (Oliphants). J. Philip Hyatt’s Exodus* is committed to classical documentary division of the book, but contains helpful introductory material and a clear exposition of the text. Useful for the same reasons (though, like all volumes in the series, overpriced) is First and Second Samuel* by John Mauchline. Particularly valuable in both volumes is the wealth of contemporary bibliographical data.

Contributions to Doubleday’s “Anchor Bible” are still coming out slowly. Nineteen seventy-one brought only Carey A. Moore’s slim but scholarly treatment of Esther*. Although not all readers will be comfortable with his skepticism regarding historical material, all will welcome his thorough treatment of the text and extensive introductory section.

Among the prophets three books deserve mention. The verse-by-verse expositions of H. C. Leupold are by now familiar to most readers. His Exposition of Isaiah, Volume II* (Baker) covers chapters 40–66 and follows the same format as the previous volume. Though rejecting a second and third Isaiah, Leupold freely admits that the material of the prophecy “obviously implies that the Exile … has taken place.…” From there on, matters of introduction are generally passed over in favor of a running commentary on the text.

From the Dispensational perspective comes another book on the Prophet Daniel. Daniel, the Key to Prophetic Revelation* (Moody) by John F. Walvoord is primarily a theological and historical commentary. The author is well versed in all prophetic positions and quotes various authorities widely, but gives too little help to the student seeking to understand the meaning of the text itself.

A third book is just the opposite of Walvoord’s. The Book of Amos (Schocken) by E. Hammershaimb is short on theology but presents in English translation a splendid and detailed commentary on the Hebrew text of the prophet. This is not a book for the beginner, but the serious student of Amos will find each page rich in philological detail.

Misplaced Humility

Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs.…

But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason.—G. K. CHESTERTON in Orthodoxy (copyright 1936 by Dodd, Mead).

SHORTER COMMENTARIES AND SERMONIC COLLECTIONS The books that follow make no claim to be full, exegetical works, but have a value commensurate with a more limited purpose in writing. Deuteronomy: The Gospel of Love* (Moody) by Samuel J. Schultz is a worthy addition to the brief volumes of the “Everyman’s Bible Commentary.” Also issued in 1971 were the first two Old Testament volumes in “The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible.” The First Book of Samuel* by Peter R. Ackroyd and Amos, Hosea, Micah* by Henry McKeating are useful if used with discretion and supplemented by something more in depth. The latest in Zondervan’s “Study Guide” series is the slender but carefully written Job* by D. David Garland. On the Psalms, two books of sermons are offered for the first time. Those familiar with the radio preaching of David A. Hubbard (“The Joyful Sound”) will welcome Psalms For All Seasons* (Eerdmans), a paperback book of meditations on thirteen key psalms. Less familiar to most Americans is the Dutch preacher-theologian G. Th. Rothuizen, whose thoughts about the witness of each of the first fifty psalms are presented in Landscape* (John Knox). The chapters are both devotional and practical, and Rothuizen’s work should find a wide audience in conservative circles, despite the distinctly Dutch flavor of the work.

Our next book is neither a commentary nor a collection of sermons. Jacques Ellul, one of today’s most stimulating thinkers, presents in The Judgment of Jonah* (Eerdmans) a Jonah who is theologically related to the Christian. The worth of Ellul is not in the small details of theology but in the sometimes disturbing but never merely comforting direction of his thought.

A further monograph on a prophet challenges traditional views on the background of much of Jeremiah. Preaching to the Exiles (Schocken) by E. W. Nicholson concludes that much of the prose tradition of that prophet is theological writing originating with the “Deuteronomists” on the basis of some “original sayings of Jeremiah.”

Finally, mention should be made of two short books that are more history than commentary but follow a biblical outline. Solomon to the Exile* (Baker) by John C. Whitcomb is little more than a running historical commentary on the events described in the Bible for that period. But the author has a good knowledge of secular sources, and the book will be useful to those who want help in this area. Quite an opposite critical approach is taken by Peter R. Ackroyd in a volume in “The New Clarendon Bible,” Israel Under Babylon and Persia* (Oxford). Whereas Whitcomb might be accused of ignoring obvious problems in biblical history, Ackroyd assumes a critical reconstruction that enables him confidently to include in the literature of his period such works as the Deuteronomic History and the Priestly Work. Nevertheless, the book presents a wealth of historical and exegetical material and is a worthy addition to the series it represents.

ADDITIONAL VOLUMES OF NOTE In the field of introduction, James K. West’s Introduction to the Old Testament* (Macmillan) is designed for the college market. It is well written and illustrated, but not meant to replace the standard reference works. Two short handbooks that meet a real need are Literary Criticism of the Old Testament* by N. C. Habel and Form Criticism of the Old Testament* by G. M. Tucker (both Fortress). Both authors are committed to the subjects they discuss and give a brief (if sometimes too facile) case for the use of the method in question. In the field of Semitic linguistics, John C. L. Gibson’s Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, Volume 1: Hebrew and Moabite Inscriptions (Clarendon) replaces G. A. Cooke’s standard though outdated work. Although this is now the best text available in English, most students of the subject will continue to use the German work of H. Donner and W. Rollig. Also in the field of linguistics is the massive work of Saul Levin, The Indo-European and Semitic Languages (State University of New York). If the author’s claims are correct, Hebrew shares with Sanskrit and Greek certain common concepts and development, and the widely held view of separate development of the families will have to be abandoned. A very different kind of volume, designed for Roman Catholic laymen but of use to a Protestant audience as well, is Evode Beaucamp’s Prophetic Intervention in the History of Man* (Alba House). Father Beaucamp has written a clear and readable introduction to each of the major prophets. Finally, a plum for the student of rabbinics comes in Judah Goldin’s scholarly book The Song at the Sea (Yale), a commentary on the oldest extant Jewish commentary (The Shirta) on Exodus 15.

SIGNIFICANT REPRINT OR PAPERBACK EDITIONS The top news in this section is Kregel’s reprint of the classic work of E. W. Hengstenberg, Christology of the Old Testament*. This work, first issued in a 700-page abridgment in English in 1847, is possibly the most complete commentary on Messianic predictions ever written. Though it is photomechanically reproduced, the type is clear and the format pleasant. The publisher is to be congratulated for having made this classic again available and at such a reasonable price.

From Zondervan have come useful paperback editions of two small books by H. L. Ellison. Job: From Tragedy to Triumph* (1958) and The Old Testament Prophets: Men Spake From God* (1952) are handbooks known to many but should have an even wider audience in their new dress.

Finally, a more technical and recent study that is now available in paperback is Klaus Koch’s The Growth of the Biblical Tradition (Scribners), a book that three years ago provided the English-speaking world with its first complete study of form criticism.

SUMMARY Although 1971 may not have been “the year of the book” for followers of the Old Testament scene, the contributions show the continuing vitality of certain fields, particularly Old Testament history and theology. The current year promises a better selection of commentaries, and we may hope that the supply of stimulating theological work will continue unabated. Happy reading!

Carl E. Armerding teaches Old Testament at Regent College in Vancouver. He received the B.D. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the Ph.D. from Brandeis. He spent a year in Israel doing post-doctoral study.

Surveying significant 1971 books in the “practical ministries” area has been an exciting and frustrating task. Exciting, because letters to thirty-six publishers brought a flood of catalogs, release notices, letters, and review copies of new books, plus even a few sets of galley proofs. Frustrating, because the sheer weight of words has made it necessary to make some tough decisions—decisions not to mention books that probably would be mentioned if only a single topic (such as church renewal) were to be surveyed in this article.

I’ve tried to establish criteria for selecting books to mention. The first has been this: if a reader has a limited budget for books, and a limited amount of time for reading, which book or books in each area seem most helpful?

But “most helpful” demands definition. Here are the questions that determine for me whether a book is helpful: (1) Does it make me think? Some books that I disagree with theologically—disagree with so drastically that I can’t accept either premises or conclusions—are still tremendously helpful because they make me probe my own theology, and push me to spell out its implications. So most assuredly many books in this review will not be safely evangelical. And in mentioning them I will not be giving my own or CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S stamp of approval. (2) Do they get toward the guts of an issue? I can’t get enthusiastic about books that seem to be illustrational jewels strung together on invisible string. I feel a need for books that examine issues in an explicitly stated and developed theological or theoretical frame of reference. Thus a counseling book that records Pastor Joe’s fifteen years of experience but does not explore the nature of counseling, the counseling relationship, and such tough questions as how biblical truth is communicated in counseling, is one I’ll quickly set aside. (3) Does it expand awareness? Here I reflect a slight aversion to things said last year by someone else but now recast and recovered for new release. I want the kind of probing exploration in print that helps me see new relationships, new areas for personal growth, new ways to apply myself in ministry.

So there are the criteria. And now, with advance apology to publishers and authors whom I have purposely or inadvertently left out in this admittedly subjective approach, here is a list of helpful books that appeared in 1971 in the practical fields.

COUNSELING Among the varied offerings in this field recently, I felt closest to Jay Adams’s Competent to Counsel (Baker). He seeks to start with biblical presuppositions, and develops what he calls a “nouthetic” approach—attempting through God’s Word in “personal conference and discussion” to “bring about personality and behavioral changes in the direction of greater conformity to biblical principles and practices.” In Human Presence (Judson) by pastor and counselor Jim Ashbrook will probably be criticized by some as too “humanistic.” But as an exploration of the deeply human interactions in counseling it is helpful and thought-provoking.

Fortress Press has a series of “Pocket Counsel Books” under the editorship of William E. Hulme. These sixty-page books on such topics as When Marriage Ends, Drinking Problem?, When Someone Dies, and Helping Your Troubled Child are designed as supplements to person-to-person counseling. Written in a non-technical vocabulary, they give insight and help to persons in need and open up the counseling conversations. I think most pastors should look over each title of the series.

Several 1971 books on death and dying are especially rich. One is Gladys Hunt’s The Christian Way of Death (Zondervan). Another is Joe Bayly’s paperback, The View From a Hearse (David C. Cook). Both are worth reading, and worth having on hand to give to those recovering from (or about to experience) death in the family. Bayly’s simple thoughts and deep faith are shared from his own experience as a man well acquainted with grief, who knows the comforts of Christ in bereavement.

Of the many marriage-counseling helps produced last year (see a CHRISTIANITY TODAY review of many of them in November 19, 1971, issue), the two most noteworthy were God, Sex, and You: An Evangelical Perspective (Holman) by M. O. Vincent and Walter Trobisch’s I Married You (Harper & Row). I’d like to share the latter with a couple either about to be married or troubled in their marital relationship. Trobisch’s narrative approach communicates basic biblical concepts about marriage and relationships in a beautiful and gentle way.

CHURCH RENEWAL I think 1972 will be a “swing” year in the renewal movement. The past has seen us move through several book waves: a wave of criticism of the institutional church, a hesitant wave seeking to develop an ecclesiology (this has by no means crested yet), and now the first swellings of a wave of reports of significant pastoral experience with renewal in the local church. Journey Toward Renewal (Judson) by William R. Nelson and William F. Lincoln is a report of several years of ministry in a Rochester, New York, Baptist church. While I won’t line up with the authors’ ecclesiology, this overview of five years’ personal struggle in a large urban church, “written for laymen and clergy who want to be used by God as change agents within traditional churches,” is bound to be helpful. (Preview: look for David Main’s Full Circle [Word] and Bob Girard’s Hang Loose, Brethren [Zondervan], both scheduled for release soon. They are excitingly written, deeply revealing accounts of pastors and churches in the process of renewal based on a solid, biblical ecclesiology.)

An interesting addition is Bob E. Patterson’s The Stirring Giant (Word). Its 307 pages draw quotes from books and periodicals and organize them under such headings as “What’s Wrong With the Church?,” “Theological Bases for Renewal,” and “Emerging Strategies For Inward Renewal.” The book suffers as any would that extracts tidbits from context and arranges them without regard to the author’s theological or theoretical orientation. But aside from the dangers of indigestion presented by such a mixture, the book also suffers by ignoring some of the conservative publishers (like Zondervan) and periodicals (like United Evangelical Action and Moody Monthly) that have presented significant renewal material and viewpoints. Still, the book is a hardy sampler you may want to have on hand.

Finally I’d like to mention Stephen W. Brown’s little work, Where the Action Is (Revell). It doesn’t offer any great new insights, but it does reveal struggles of a young pastor to develop a healthy and biblical self-image. I’m somewhat convinced that the first step toward renewal in many churches must be the pastor’s honest evaluation of just who he is—and who he isn’t.

WORSHIP Renewal thinking has been nudging us toward a reappraisal of worship, just as it has been insistently calling for a reappraisal of preaching. Evangelicals haven’t responded with much enthusiasm in either area. But two books on worship that may help us probe a little deeper are Jay C. Rochelle’s paperback Create and Celebrate! (Fortress) and James F. White’s New Forms of Worship (Abingdon). Each presents a viewpoint more liturgical than some of us have. But each does spend about a third of its space exploring the nature and meaning of worship. If worship in your church troubles you, you may not feel these books give answers, but they may point you toward some of your own.

FAMILY LIFE The past few years have brought greater emphasis on the family and its role in the Christian growth of both children and adults. None of last year’s crop of books seems to me to compete successfully with older standards, but a few do rate mention. I was most impressed with David Augsburger’s little book, Cherishable: Love and Marriage (Herald). Billed as a book “for husbands and wives who want to explore creative relationships,” it is both sensitive and potent.

Concordia has released a revised edition of Oscar Feucht’s Helping Families Through the Church. Revision has not been extensive, nor have bibliographies been carefully updated. And “the church” remains undefined. Still, the book is a standard one, and any pastor who missed it first time around will want to pick up the 1971 version. Feucht also served as editor of another project of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Family Life Committee, a book called Family Relationships and the Church (Concordia). This book, organized historically, explores family living psychologically and sociologically and is far less “practical” than Helping Families.

Finally, two of the books written for laymen as stimulants to group discussion or personal guidance should be mentioned, primarily as examples of extremes. Wallace Denton’s Family Problems (Westminster) is full of good insights but reads like many of the secular texts I’ve surveyed. On the other hand, Larry Christianson’s The Christian Family (Bethany Fellowship) seeks a biblical base for understanding the home, and locates it in the authority and function structures of the family. The result is a system containing much truth, but with that truth distorted by the failure to see that authority must be understood as a function of a distinctive relational life-style.

MISSIONS AND EVANGELISMChrist the Liberator (Inter-Varsity) contains messages from Urbana ’70, including John Stott’s expositions of the upper-room discourses and a variety of speakers on issues in world evangelization. The Third World and Mission (Word) by Dennis Clark offers a provocative challenge by an experienced, well-traveled missionary and evangelical leader. Missionary biography has had a great influence on the Church, so Helen Manning’s story of modern-day martyrdom in West Irian, To Perish For Their Saving, and John Pollock’s story of L. Nelson Bell, A Foreign Devil in China (Zondervan), rate mention too.

The best and most practical book on evangelism in ’71 is Richard Peace’s Witness (Zondervan). The book is a manual for use by “small groups who are serious in their desire to learn how to share their faith” to use during an eight-week training and sharing experience. It is one of the few to attempt to blend the supportive dynamics of the small sharing group with a clear focus on witness and personal evangelism.

YOUTH Books on youth culture and ministry deserve a category of their own. Probably the most read of the 1971 crop will be Billy Graham’s The Jesus Generation (Zondervan). Zondervan also released The Untapped Generation by David and Don Wilkerson this past year. While neither book makes a major contribution to youth culture literature, each has something to commend it. Dr. Graham has maintained good rapport with youth through the years, and his healthy concern for them and positive attitude provide a good model for other adults. The Wilkerson book comes from years of experience with teens and has many illustrations from life as well as documented data. Both books are more about youth than for youth.

Drugs are still with us, and the very brief paperback The Drug Bug by Palmquist and Reynolds (Bethany Fellowship) is a good primer for someone who wants a little practical information without in-depth discussion. Charlie Shedd offers Is Your Family Turned On? Coping With the Drug Culture (Word), which is basically a helpful potpourri of comments by young people themselves.

The big shift in youth culture marked in 1971 was toward spiritualism and the supernatural. Several of the year’s books refer to this in chapters and illustrations, but the best whole book was Stars, Signs and Salvation in the Age of Aquarius (Bethany Fellowship) by James Bjornstad and Shildes Johnson.

Several booklets under the Victor imprint of Scripture Press offer short but solid content on youth issues. Finally, Wilkerson’s Jesus People Manual (Regal) is a tough-speaking, well received book on what commitment means.

ADULTS Emphasis on the youth culture should not detract from ministry to adults. This is an area that has been revitalized, particularly by the small-group movement. Bergevin and McKinley present an updated adaptation of the Indiana Plan in Adult Education for the Church (Bethany Press), and Robert C. Leslie surveys Sharing Groups in the Church (Abingdon). Each of these is limited in value, the first by cumbersome machinery and limited goals. Martha M. Laypoldt (who earlier wrote Forty Ways to Teach in Groups) now presents a slightly schizophrenic paperback, Learning Is Change (Judson). The first part seems to be a guide for group exploration of learning, with suggestions for personal reflection and group exercises, but the book gradually drifts toward the more traditional “how to teach adults” structure for the Sunday-school teacher (as illustrated by the disappearance of both “reflections” and “exercises” in the last chapters). Still, the first eighty pages of the book are valuable and provocative. My own Creative Bible Study (Zondervan) was written as a guide to small-group and family Bible study. It is designed to help the many small groups stimulated by renewal to sink the roots of their sharing deeply into the Word of God. In a day when small groups drift so easily into a pattern of relationships limited to the horizontal, Creative Bible Study seeks to help restore and establish the vertical.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Professional Christian educators should make good use of the massive tome Research on Religious Development (Hawthorn), edited by Merton Strommen, which has had a major review in these pages (December 17, 1971, pp. 25–28). Two other books are significant for the questions they raise. C. Ellis Nelson’s Where Faith Begins (John Knox) explores the process by which faith is communicated. This is really vital stuff. We evangelicals need to question the transmissive “classroom model” of education that has dominated our attempts at communication, and to develop a biblically and theologically rooted model of education to replace a present system that owes more to secular educational practice than theology. I see exciting breakthroughs in Christian education when we begin to ask the right questions, and to probe the Word of God for insight, understanding, and answers. Robert Dow’s Learning Through Encounter (Judson) gives a rationale for experiential education but sees learning and growth and God all as summable in interpersonal relationships. Each of these books, from an evangelical position, has a terribly inadequate view of faith, of the goals of Christian nurture, of the Bible, and of revelation. Each still holds to a view of revelation that is personal, and not propositional, in which selfhood but not Truth is expressed. At any rate, I think Nelson particularly is important, and I hope we evangelicals will read him, and then begin to ask ourselves the questions he is exploring.

PREACHING I include this category only to assure you that it wasn’t overlooked. I did read several books on preaching, with growing discouragement. All of today’s emphasis on renewal has failed—and should fail—to push the pastor out of the pulpit. But it should also force us to ask some brutal questions about the function of preaching, how God intends us to use the spoken Word in the Church, and whether there can be a theology of preaching that flows from our understanding of the nature and purposes of the Scripture. Surely the tired old books on titles, parts, illustrations, persuasion, and so on have always begged these questions. But evangelicals have not addressed themselves to the issues. Perhaps in 1972 we’ll see some vigorous efforts to reestablish the importance of the pulpit ministry and to give some needed perspective. I certainly hope so.

Lawrence O. Richards is assistant professor of Christian education at Wheaton College Graduate School. He has the B.A. from University of Michigan and Th.M. from Dallas Seminary and is a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern.

Finding the right teaching materials is a recurring problem for Sunday-school teachers, particularly those who are evangelical in conviction. The evangelical teacher finds he must reject the materials put out by most denominational and some independent publishing houses on theological grounds before he even begins to consider their educational merit. In effect, evangelicals ask publishers two questions: “What do you think of Christ?” and “Will your materials help us educate children, youth, and adults in the things of Christ?”

For a first step into the forest of available materials, here are twenty more specific questions to ask about prospective curricula. In addition, evaluators must expect to supply other criteria appropriate to their own needs and the needs of the people they teach. The first eight of the following questions should be of particular value to evangelicals. The rest are more generally applicable.

Theological Considerations

Evangelical teachers and leaders consider the Scriptures the unique and primary sourcebook in Christian education; other books, however relevant, rank as secondary sources. Evangelicals reject materials that negatively criticize the Scriptures, treat God’s power as limited, and view miracles as myths, as well as materials that encourage learners to “discover their own theology” by piecing together portions of the Scriptures and other literature. Discovery has become a vogue in secular education, but evangelicals, who believe that basic theology has already been formulated for them, use discovery techniques in Christian education only with great care. And they are wary of materials that use the familiar terms of biblical theology to express meanings significantly different from established ones; they reject outright those that use secular content to twist the meaning and intent of the Scriptures.

Some published materials present the Bible as a book that helped people of the past solve certain of their problems but is of limited use for problem-solving in our own sophisticated era. Evangelicals hold that the Bible continues to help man solve his persistent problems because Scripture offers a stable, dependable core of values. In a day in which “situation ethics” (the ethics of “it all depends …”) is taught nearly everywhere in our society, evangelicals want their instructional materials to reveal biblical answers to specific ethical and moral questions.

Evangelicals, then, will want to ask: (1) Are the materials based on the Scriptures as the major instructional source for Christian education? (2) Do they provide a faithful record of, and a friendly commentary on, biblical events and teachings, rather than an interpretation of events and teachings that is actually or potentially negative? (3) Do the materials speak with assurance of God’s power and goodness in performing miracles, including the great miracles of the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth? (4) Do they uphold the Bible’s validity in helping people solve problems today? (5) Do they emphasize the stable, dependable values that the Scriptures teach?

But proper doctrine is not the only theological consideration. Evangelicals believe that the issue of personal commitment to Christ should be raised early in the learner’s Christian education and that it should become a recurring point.

Their next questions will be: (6) Do the materials encourage the learner to commit himself to Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour? (7) Do they make it clear that the learner’s right relationship with God is a necessary precondition to his having right relationships with his fellow men? (8) Do they help those learners who have given themselves to Christ to increase their faith and trust in him?

Substance And Organization

Careful reading of the materials will help prospective purchasers judge whether details—events, facts, examples—contribute to development of main ideas and eventually to development of key concepts. In the best materials, details, main ideas, and key concepts are present in reasonable balance, none being overstressed or slighted. Tables of contents and chapter outlines help to show how selected details are used to build main ideas and key concepts, which are the fundamental elements to be learned. Obviously the materials should serve to teach important spiritual, moral, and ethical lessons. Obscure objectives should alert prospective purchasers to examine the materials with special care. The presence of unacceptable objectives should warn them against purchase.

Order or arrangement need not necessarily be chronological or traditional in some other way, but should provide both for surveying the scope of the subject matter and for “postholing,” dealing with some concepts in depth. Prospective purchasers should note what is surveyed and what is treated in depth. Worthwhile materials provide instruction in all essential biblical teachings at some time during the years they cover. Some essentials deserve repetition, or “spiraling,” in increasingly sophisticated form as students mature.

Evaluators should ask: (9) Do the materials state understandable and acceptable objectives? (10) Do they contain specific data, main ideas, and key concepts in balanced proportion and arrangement? (11) Do they achieve a focus on main ideas and key concepts to which all other content clearly contributes?

Good materials can be used and understood by most learners for whom they are intended, serving common or typical needs and interests. In this sense they are “graded.” But they also contain alternative or optional experiences for the benefit of those whose needs, interests, and abilities are uncommon or atypical—for example, the slow and the gifted learners.

Worthwhile materials avoid the superficiality and discontinuity that come from jumping around among experiences or from moving too hurriedly up important learning steps. Learning should accumulate. It may be expected to proceed in spurts interspersed with review and reinforcement. The materials should become increasingly harder, with fast pacing, slow pacing, and review apparent in the format.

To help determine worth, teachers might ask: (12) Are the materials appropriate to learners’ abilities, needs, and interests? (13) Do they cause learners to repeat important experiences and review important ideas? (14) Do the materials increase in difficulty throughout the span of years they cover?

Features Helpful In Learning

Attractive, stimulating materials prod people to learn. Whatever the general design of the instructional materials, they should foster learning by, for example, capitalizing on learners’ basic interests, fitting in with the normal developmental tasks of the age for which they are intended, stimulating learners’ desire to solve problems, recognizing their concern for tracing events and causes, and cultivating their liking for human biography. Wherever appropriate, materials should involve all the senses and include many varied learning activities. Supplementary learning aids, including maps, still pictures, films, slides, recordings, and bibliographies, should be included or suggested.

Evaluators should ask: (15) Do the materials provide a variety of ways to stimulate learning? (16) Do they contain and suggest supplementary aids to learning? (17) Do they make thrifty use of the time available for learning?

Features Helpful In Teaching

Materials should distinguish between basic, essential methods and teaching aids and more elaborate, optional methods and aids. Teachers’ guides should contain numerous practical suggestions for teaching content and should explain such procedures as grouping, case analysis, and role playing. Many teachers need help in planning teaching episodes and in developing teaching skill; that help should be readily available in the material chosen. Conscientious teachers also need means of evaluating the worth of their contribution to Christian-education programs.

And so, evaluators must know: (18) Are inexperienced teachers able to use the materials without difficulty or confusion? (19) Are teachers’ guides or teachers’ editions of the materials genuinely helpful, suggesting procedures that make teaching easier and more effective? (20) Do they contain suggestions for teacher planning and growth and for ways of evaluating teaching and learning?

The right answer to these questions is, of course, yes, but some yeses will have to outweigh others. Evaluators should note these value differences before they apply the criteria. Perhaps they will want to assign numerical weights to the questions. Although any evaluation system is necessarily subjective, using a system is more reliable than selecting materials by caprice or according to vague, general impressions. And, considering the goals and subject matter of Christian education, choosing the right lesson materials is serious business.

Ronald C. Doll is professor of education in The City University of New York. His doctorate is from Columbia University. He is author and co-author of nine books and monographs having to do with school curriculum.

Social psychologists have done a good deal of research on interpersonal attraction in general. They have done little, however, with the specific topic of friendship. We can sympathize with their reluctance to tackle this subject: friendship is something that everyone feels he knows all about but that few people can describe with precision. For me, several years of research on friendship have been well worth the effort; the rewards have more than justified the difficulties of conceiving and carrying out systematic studies.

C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves argues that friendship is the most nearly spiritual form of human love. He develops the point that this “nearness by similarity” is the reason why friendship is seldom the scriptural analogy for the relation of God to his people; the very similarity weakens the essential contrast between human and divine love. While specific biblical references to friendship between God and man are rare, the few we find are significant. They give the clear impression that being called a friend of God (or of his Son) depends upon complete obedience to him. God’s act of reciprocation is a deep revelation of his works and his nature to the man he recognizes as a friend (John 15:14, 15; James 2:23; Gen. 18:17–19).

Some biblical references to friendship denote deep affection combined with a willingness to act unselfishly and sacrificially on behalf of another person (e.g., John 11:5–11; John 15:13). Often the term friend is used in passing as a form of address, connoting little more than respect or cordiality (e.g., Matt. 20:13). The classic friendship between David and Jonathan reveals, by implication, that friends react to each other as total persons rather than as “things” or mere role occupants. It would have been easy, even natural, for David to see Jonathan as nothing more than heir apparent to the throne of a man who was trying to destroy him, and for Jonathan to see David as nothing more than a pushy peasant threatening his father’s kingship. Instead, they saw each other in breadth and depth as individuals, and their relationship is widely cited as the epitome of friendship.

Let us look at friendship from the perspective of secular social psychology. Please think of this analysis as a partially substantiated theoretical model. The validity of the general approach has been supported by research, as have some of the more specific ideas. But some of the ideas are educated guesses awaiting confirmation from field and laboratory studies. After reviewing the model, let us then explore some facets of the relation of evangelical Christianity to friendship.

Characteristics Of Friendship

The first point to be made is that friendship is a voluntary relationship. Writers from Montaigne to C. S. Lewis have stressed this, and they have been joined recently by sociologists interested in friendship as a social institution (e.g., J. G. McCall, Social Relationships, Aldine, 1970). Voluntary interdependence seems to be one identifying mark of a strong friendship. It is not merely that two people are willing to spend time together—circ*mstances may compel them to do so—but that they make it a point to spend time together without outside constraints. In effect, they allow their lives to overlap. The plans, decisions, and activities of one person are to some degree contingent upon those of the other. We may regard voluntary interdependence as the behavioral component of friendship. Usually, but not always, the greater the voluntary interdependence, the stronger the friendship.

Second, friendship is a reaction to a person qua person. Friendship is perhaps the least role-bound, the least normatively regulated, the least legalistic, and the least “programmed” of all interpersonal relationships. In the absence of normative definitions or formal trappings, friendship depends for its very existence upon the way the persons involved “see” or “interpret” each other. Thus friendship, more than more clearly structured relationships, has a strong and seemingly necessary phenomenological component. The partners must feel they are reacting positively to each other as individuals or as whole persons rather than to any particular set of characteristics. That is, each person reacts to the other as a person.

What does it mean to react to a person qua person? This concept has an existential ring, and seems to bear some kinship to what Buber was trying to convey in his description of the I-Thou relation (I and Thou, Scribner, 1958). Such concepts are interesting and provocative, but too nebulous to suit most data-oriented social psychologists. The person-qua-person concept becomes more tangible, however, if we think of some specific implications. Reacting to a person-qua-person implies reacting to his genuineness, his uniqueness, and his irreplaceability in the relationship.

A person may behave in stereotyped ways to fulfill role requirements, social expectations, or a particular kind of “image.” If so, it is difficult to react to the person qua person; we do not have the kind of information we need to ascertain what is genuinely “him.” However, when he departs from norms or expectations, when he behaves in situations permitting flexibility and freedom of choice, or when he talks frankly about his attitudes, ideas, and feelings, we regard these revelations as genuine and hence as a basis for reacting to the “person behind the act.”

On the other hand, we often fail to react to what is unique about a person even when we have the appropriate kinds of information. We tend to “economize” by thinking of our acquaintances in terms of classes and categories. But to react to a person as a member of a class does not do justice to him as an individual. To react to what is unique or at least out of the ordinary is to react to the person qua person.

Finally, to the degree that we react favorably to an acquaintance as genuine and unique, we are likely to find him irreplaceable as a companion. Irreplaceability is another aspect of reacting to the person qua person, and is an important part of the way people see each other when they consider themselves friends.

A third characteristic of friendship is that it involves identifiable benefits. By and large, writers have done a more convincing job of extolling the “fruits of friendship” than have social scientists. The essays of Francis Bacon and Emerson are especially insightful. Humorist-philosopher Charles Schulz carried his cast of Peanuts characters through a charming series of episodes that illustrate some of the values of friendship (I Need All the Friends I Can Get, Determined, 1964).

The classes of benefits or direct rewards of friendship that have been useful in research are stimulation value, ego-support value, and utility value.

Some people are valued as friends because they are interesting and stimulating; they have a knack for introducing us to new ideas and activities and for prodding us to expand our knowledge and perspectives. Some people are valued as friends because they are encouraging, supportive, and comforting; they have the ability to help us feel we are competent and worthwhile. Some people are valued as friends because they are helpful and cooperative; they are willing to use their own resources and abilities to help us meet our personal needs and goals.

It is sometimes said that friendship means different things to different people. This means, in part, that different people seek different kinds of benefits in their friendships. One person tends to become friends with highly stimulating people; another seeks out ego-supportive people. Moreover, a given person is likely to have different kinds of people for friends; he may be attracted to one person because of his ego-supportiveness, another because of his cooperativeness, and so on.

These different benefits may be expressed in a wide variety of combinations. In general, however, utility value seems to be the one most closely related to strong friendship. Also, women tend to consider ego-supportive value a more important aspect of friendship than do men.

A fourth characteristic is that friendship often requires patience and restraint. It is a mistake to assume that friends are invariably people with whom one gets along well all the time. Most friendships some of the time and some friendships much of the time are difficult to maintain. We have to spend a certain amount of time and energy soothing ruffled feelings, clarifying misunderstood actions or comments, and, in general, exercising patience and restraint to keep the relationship from breaking up. It is not unusual for friends to drift into situations involving conflicting goals, motives, or ideas, or occasionally to over-react to each other’s mannerisms or personality quirks. Sometimes the mark of a strong friendship is that it is difficult to maintain. This shows that the partners attach enough significance to the relationship to be willing to work at keeping it intact. They find ways of resolving or working around the tension and strain.

Human Nature And Friendship

What we have said so far helps us design research and organize information toward a better understanding of friendship. However, it says nothing about any particular philosophy of human nature. Let us think in terms of the increasingly familiar Greek words represented by our present catch-all word love—eros, philia, and agape.

Eros refers to self-centered love, love based solely on some need or desire of the one who loves. Love is extended only because the loved one is seen as capable of satisfying that need or desire. We would expect a friendship based on eros to last only as long as the loving person has the need or as long as the loved one is capable of satisfying it.

Philia refers to love based on mutual respect and devotion. It is extended to the loved one because of the particular person he happens to be. This love may be truly unselfish and self-giving, and requires only that the love that is expressed be in some way acknowledged and reciprocated.

Agape refers to unconditional love, a love that is extended to the loved one regardless of who he is or what he is like. It is love that emanates from the very nature of the loving person. It is, in a word, divine love.

Human friendship seems to be based on philia—considerably more than eros, but considerably less than agape. Much goes on in friendship that is motivated by one person’s truly unselfish interest in the other as a person qua person. It would do violence to a sizable body of data as well as to observations from daily life to say that friendship is based primarily on eros, self-centered love.

On the other hand, friendship falls far short of agape. Friendships sometimes originate in the partners’ common hatred or exclusion of another person or group. A popular and potent symbol of companionship and unity is the power salute, a gesture that clearly communicates the fact that the camaraderie within a group is based on its members’ alignment against a common foe. Aronson and Cope (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968, 8, pp. 8–12) have reported experimental evidence strongly supporting the old adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Moreover, friendship can be cruelly exclusive. Friends often enhance their relationship by making it clear that certain other people are outsiders and cannot, in any sense, consider themselves part of “the group.” There may be a lot of love shared within the circle, but little is extended beyond it. There may be a lot of philia, but there is certainly no agape. The love is too exclusive to be so considered.

The rarity of agape is easy to understand if we take at face value what the Bible says about the nature of unregenerate man. For example, the words of the psalmist in Psalm 14 (“They have all gone astray.… There is none that does good, no, not one”) and of the Apostle Paul in Romans 3 (“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”), and the realistic outlook Jesus himself expressed in John 2 (“Jesus did not trust himself to [those who believed in his name when they saw his signs] because … he himself knew what was in man”)—all this leaves no room for hope that man, relying on his own resources, will ever be capable of expressing agape. This biblical assessment is shored up by the evidence of human history, by the continued hatred and violence on the contemporary scene, and by what anyone discovers if he is honest enough to look candidly at the balance of good and evil in his own acts and motives.

The “humanistic” psychologists (e.g., Rogers, Maslow) have rightly insisted on man’s need for what amounts to agape—unconditional love—but they have wrongly insisted that man has it within his nature to create a world where such love is possible. Agape is divine love, and is ours to give only as we abide in the love of Christ through obedience to him (see John 15 and First John 3 and 4). There is a striking parallel between the qualities listed in First Corinthians 13:4–7 and those listed in Galatians 5:22 and 23. The former passage refers to attributes of love and the latter to “fruits of the Spirit.” In a number of places Christian love is yoked, explicitly or by context, with the presence of the Holy Spirit; see, for instance, Romans 5:5 and First John 4:13. The conclusion is unmistakable: The ability to express agape is imparted exclusively to fully committed Christians through the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

The Christian’S Mandate

Regardless of the hopelessness of human nature apart from the transforming love of Jesus Christ, Christians are commanded to love, not only their brothers, whom they know (John 15:12; 1 John 4:7), but also their neighbors, whom they often do not know (Luke 10:25–37), and even their enemies, whom they might prefer not to know (Matt. 5:43–48; Luke 6:35). Significantly, we are commanded not to love human nature but to love human beings. When we encounter a non-Christian, however sinful he may be, we are not facing someone in need of our condemnation—he is condemned already. We are facing a person for whom Christ died and who, for that reason, is completely salvageable. We are facing a person who needs God’s love. And the closest many people will ever come to experiencing God’s love is what they feel working through a committed Christian.

It is not stretching the point to say that Christians are commanded to be friends for God’s sake. Not only is the failure to be such a friend disobedient to specific scriptural commands; it probably is also one of the most serious threats to an effective evangelical outreach. Lenin is reputed to have said, “If I ever met a Christian, I’d become one.” And Nietzsche, famous for proclaiming years ago that God was dead, is also credited with saying, “Show me first that you are redeemed; then I’ll listen to talk about your redeemer.”

Because it involves an unselfish concern for another person qua person, friendship may well be, as Lewis says, the most nearly divine form of human love. But evangelical Christians must never overlook the fact that, in many respects, friendship is the most human form of divine love. New Testament exhortations to love are frequently exhortations to extend specific acts of helpfulness and support—to provide cups of cold water, to feed a hungering enemy, to assist a victimized stranger, to visit the sick and imprisoned, to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. And “because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit which has been given unto us” (Rom. 5:5), Christians have the power as well as the mandate to be the best kind of friends anyone can have.

Paul H. Wright is associate professor of psychology at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. He has the Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Kansas.

In the weeks before Mr. Nixon left Washington for Peking, we received letters from responsible missionaries and Sinologists expressing the view that the President’s trip would be futile. They may be right, but I personally hope and pray for God’s intervention; he can turn nations and men to his ends.

I am disheartened at the fiscal irresponsibility shown by the administration and the Congress in pushing the limit of the national debt to $400 billion. Nations cannot afford to adopt programs, however good, for which they cannot pay. We have already placed programs on the books that will add billions of dollars to the budget in a few years’ time. A balanced budget and prudent fiscal management have their roots in God’s order for men. To violate them is to invite not only economic disaster but also spiritual decay.

One of our board members, (James) Roger Hull, died recently. He was chairman of the board of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Among his other areas of service, Mr. Hull was a trustee of the United Presbyterian Foundation, a member of the Salvation Army New York Advisory Board, and chairman of the 1957 Billy Graham New York Crusade. We extend our sympathy to his family; “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.”

“If christ was not raised, then our gospel is null and void, and so is your faith” (1 Cor. 15:14, NEB). That is the way Paul put it, and that is the way it has seemed to Christians through the centuries.

But in recent times many have been taking a hard look at this central proposition of the Christian faith. There has been a spate of books and articles examining the subject from a variety of angles, mostly critical. The evidence has been subjected to close scrutiny, and so have the conclusions drawn from the evidence.

A few have come out in open opposition to the idea that Jesus rose. Some of them have made extremely wholehearted statements repudiating the whole idea. But it has been much more common for people to reinterpret the evidence than to deny that it has any reality. They have gone along with C. F. Evans, who suggests that in this area “the question for ‘believing knowledge’ is not so much whether to believe but what it is which is to be believed.”

Traditionally Christians have marshalled the evidence to show that Jesus’ tomb was empty on the third day after the crucifixion. It is unreasonable to hold that foes removed the body and equally so to hold that friends took it. This shuts up to the thought of a resurrection with physical aspects. Next the resurrection appearances are examined. These are shown not to be hallucinations, and we are left with the conclusion that Jesus rose.

To many this time-honored approach is as convincing as ever. But in many circles today it is questioned. With no desire to deny the possibility of miracle, some scholars are asking, “Is this the way the evidence should be treated?” They point out that all the evidence comes from convinced believers, and they suggest that we should ask what these men were trying to say. Thus Willi Marxsen holds that “all the evangelists want to show that the activity of Jesus goes on” (The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, p. 77; Marxsen’s italics).

If that is what the Bible writers are saying, we should, of course, accept it. But is it? Surely the empty tomb means more.

A lot depends on how we approach ancient sources. The careful historian does not simply transcribe the writers of antiquity. He weighs what they say and tries to evaluate it. For example, if he reads in some ancient writer that on a certain occasion five million people came into Jerusalem, he does not accept it simply because the statement is ancient. He says, “Jerusalem in antiquity could not have held so many. There was not the physical capacity on the site. This cannot be true.” But he will go on to ask, “Granted that the statement cannot be accepted as it stands, what does it tell us?” Clearly it tells us something about the crowd present on the occasion. It also tells us something about the writer.

I have given a fairly obvious example of a process carried on all the time by historians in one form or another. They must weigh their sources. When an ancient historian narrates something that is quite impossible, the modern scientific historian rejects the story as fact. But he does not necessarily dismiss it. He realizes that the ancient must have had some reason for his statement. So he tries to find out what it was and so to reach the reality that underlies the statement. It is something like this that modern New Testament scholars are trying to do when they examine the resurrection.

They think it highly unlikely that Jesus rose bodily. That kind of thing does not happen. They examine the New Testament carefully, comparing one resurrection account with another and testing each for consistency and probability. The result is that quite a few come to conclusions like that of Marxsen. Some are more radical; for example, Paul van Buren prefers not to speak of “the Easter event” as a “fact.” He thinks that the disciples were discouraged and disappointed before Easter, but they “apparently found themselves caught up in something like the freedom of Jesus himself” after Easter. But “whatever it was that lay in between, and which might account for this change, is not open to our historical investigation” (The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, p. 128).

All this may be made to sound both humble and convincing. It is humble, for the scholar is refusing to be dogmatic in the face of difficulties. And it sounds convincing, for when he is through he has said something that fits neatly into our twentieth century categories and world-view.

But we may well ask whether this is the right approach. Why should we regard the modern world-view as so binding? And why must our scientific historiography have the last word? Perhaps all that the objectors are really saying is that the resurrection of Jesus cannot be proved by the ordinary methods of historical criticism.

That may readily be conceded. Nobody claims that Jesus’ resurrection is just another resurrection. It cannot be “proved” if by that we mean adducing arguments to show that it fits into a neat human category. It is unique.

Of course there is a sense in which every historical happening and every historical personage is unique. There was only one Julius Caesar. There was only one Black Death. But the historian is apt to retort that this kind of uniqueness inheres in human affairs. That of the resurrection does not. Its uniqueness is different in kind.

This is, of course, true. If the resurrection of Jesus was only one of a whole class, it would not have the significance it has for Christians. Everything depends on the fact that Jesus’ resurrection is special. And that is why it cannot be “proved” by the normal canons of historical research. We have nothing with which to class it. The historian has no parallel by which to estimate its probability.

But that does not mean we cannot say anything. After all, the method of the scientific historian is not the only way of getting at truth. The scientist cannot prove that the beautiful thing is beautiful or the moral action commendable. Yet we do not doubt, either. Similarly the man of faith must be heard.

It is open to the Christian to say that the evidence demands our assent. Jesus rose from the dead, even though the scientist cannot use his normal criteria to establish the point.

The evidence for the resurrection cannot be discounted. We may agree that it does not “prove” that Jesus rose in such a way that any thinking person is bound to be convinced (as by a theorem in geometry). But it does point to an empty tomb, as Pannenberg has been insisting. And it does point to meetings between Jesus and his followers that convinced them, not that he still lived as, say, Moses lived, but that he had risen from the dead. To say that Jesus rose squares with the evidence. So far nothing else does.

LEON MORRIS

This year’s annual meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), representing 86 per cent of total religious broadcasting, was calm in comparison to last year’s stormy sessions over new gospel music. The majority of the 519 delegates seemed determined to ride the waves, not make any. Besides, there were other worries.

Congress recently passed a bill requiring all radio and TV stations to permit “reasonable access” to lowest-rate broadcast time by candidates for federal office. The NRB in a resolution asked that educational and non-commercial stations that do not air political broadcasts be exempted from the law.

Delegates also urged Congress to amend the Communications Act “to reestablish an orderly renewal procedure” with provision for “immediate hearings” in disputed cases. The move is directed at the current practice of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of permitting competitors to take over when station licenses are up for renewal. The license is awarded to the party stating in an application the best case for serving the public.

Some station operators wondered how they should respond to requests from atheist agitator Madelyn Murray O’Hair for free time under the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” governing controversial subjects. Guest speaker Vincent Wasilewski, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, replied that the FCC had left it up to local operators to decide whether religion itself is controversial, and that there is no obligation to answer Mrs. O’Hair’s letters.

During a panel session one night, Trans World Radio, a mission broadcaster, treated delegates to an intercontinental broadcast via satellite. Broadcasters on three continents chatted with one another live for half an hour on dual channels leased from an AT&T satellite at a cost of about $1,000. A number of Christian radio stations in the United States also listened in.

Afternoon workshops were sparsely attended; only four showed up to discuss how religious broadcasters should handle social issues. A missions seminar revealed several trends, including Far East Broadcasting Company’s help in getting nationals into broadcasting (stations are being built in thirteen provincial capitals in the Philippines). The U. S. based Rumanian Missionary Society reported that its broadcasts beamed to Rumania were getting nearly 8,000 letters per year.

As was true last year, no station managers or owners dropped in on the youth programming workshop. Disc jockey Scott Ross announced that his two-hour Jesus rock show was now on nearly eighty secular stations. His show features “message” songs, Jesus music, testimonies of name musicians, and even invitations to receive Christ. Response, says Scott, has been “fantastic.”

Although a few youth programmers reported innovative breakthroughs, there are indications that a stiff reaction to the young is building up among many broadcasters. WMBI’s Perry Straw said that Moody Bible Institute president George Sweeting handed down a “hard line” on youth and music programming after a youth show was picketed by discontented fundamentalist Paul Lindstrom of Chicago. The San Francisco-based Family Radio Network has cut back on youth programming, and owner Harold Camping has banned the use of much contemporary Christian music, as has evangelist Jack Wyrtzen on his Word of Life program. A young producer complained that his youth-oriented show was turned down by virtually every broadcaster there.

In interviews, some operators responded that they feared loss of donations if they kept pace with youth, and others admitted outright that they opposed the sounds and styles of the new young Christians.

National headliners and FCC commissioners also addressed the gathering. Senator Mark Hatfield chided those who aired political views in the name of religion, and suggested that “faith” broadcasters should spend less time begging for donations. Maintaining that 93 per cent of impact on persons is through non-verbal means, he implored the broadcasters to communicate love.

Africa: Unprecedented Response

Revival tides continue to flow high in Africa. Mission sources report that more than 15,000 new believers among the southern Ethiopia Wallamo tribe were baptized in 1971, and that Wallamo evangelists baptized more than 10,000 people from neighboring tribes. The Sudan Interior Mission has made translation of the Scriptures into the Wallamo language “a top priority project.”

SIM workers also tell of “unprecedented spiritual response” in the strongly Islamic Kano area of Nigeria—despite a cholera epidemic that wrought personal tragedy among families of national evangelists. After hundreds of persons received Christ in Kano city a Nigerian counselor commented, “Kano has never witnessed such revival before.”

“Tens of thousands of Africa’s bush people are coming to Christ,” declared Asbury evangelism professor Robert Coleman after a recent visit.

Forecasts Conservative Baptist foreign-mission head Warren Webster: “The entire Animist world of 150 million people is up for grabs in this decade; they will turn to Christ or to some ‘ism.’ The Church must keep its evangelistic task uppermost.”

The Multiplying Millions

Kuwait, a small country located at the southeastern tip of Iraq on the Persian Gulf, has the largest population growth rate, according to the latest population chart issued by the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D. C. At its present rate of 8.2 per cent, Kuwait’s estimated 600,000 population will double in just nine years.

Only about 2 per cent of that population is Christian. The Roman Catholic Church has two parishes and five priests in Kuwait; there are no Protestant missionaries. But in Costa Rica, which pulled the number-two spot with a rate of 3.8 per cent (its population will double in nineteen years), at least thirty mission organizations are at work.

English Church Merger

In the first union of English denominations since the Reformation, the Presbyterian Church of England and the Congregational Union of England and Wales have voted to merge. The Presbyterians were already committed to union and awaited the result of Congregational voting last month: 2,133 of the 2,280 churches voted, 1,668 in favor, 465 against. The total membership supporting the merger, to become effective in October, was 82.2 per cent. Earlier, all but two of the 308 Presbyterian churches voted approval.

Some of the Congregational dissentients have already formed an association to maintain an “essential Congregationalism” in which each church is free to govern itself.

The new United Reformed Church will have a membership of 260,000.

In May, the Anglican church will vote on whether or not to link up with the Methodist church, which has already approved such a move.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Bibles And High Ups

Kenneth Taylor’s Living Bible paraphrase, Pearl S. Buck’s Story Bible, and a recent translation of the Torah were presented to the White House library by Arthur J. Goldberg, former U. S. Supreme Court justice, on behalf of the Laymen’s National Bible Committee. Goldberg, the first Jew to hold the post, was chairman of the 1971 Bible Week; President Richard Nixon was honorary chairman.

Meanwhile, Chilean Roman Catholic cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez was reported to be shipping 10,000 copies of the Bible to Communist Cuba at the “personal request” of Premier Fidel Castro. The cardinal said Castro requested the Scriptures after Henriquez presented him with a Bible during his recent twenty-five-day state visit to Chile. At last word, however, a paper shortage had delayed shipment.

Rebuilding In Love

Barn-raisings may be outdated, but in Texarkana, Texas, several Baptist churches got together for a church-raising in a show of racial brotherhood.

Last March arsonists destroyed St. Paul Baptist Church, owned by a black congregation, following student racial disturbances that closed the high school. White Baptists from Tyler, Dallas, and Texarkana pitched in with St. Paul’s people to rebuild the church; Texarkana’s white First Baptist Church donated $5,000. The arsonists were never found, and the town’s $5,000 reward for their capture also was donated to the rebuilding fund.

The walls, made out of finished spruce logs trucked in from Colorado, were raised in just two weeks. The all-volunteer—and mostly unskilled—builders plan to have the $100,000 building ready for worship next month, one year after the fire bombing.

Commented Lory Hildreth, pastor of Texarkana’s First Baptist Church: “Both races are working together, shoulder to shoulder, rebuilding in love what was destroyed by hate.”

Stop The Music

A self-styled “oobie-doobie” girl, Canadian Carol Feraci, disrupted a White House dinner honoring Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt Wallace, founders and co-chairmen of Reader’s Digest and this year’s winners of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Miss Feraci was a last-minute substitute in the Ray Conniff Singers, the after-dinner entertainment. But the guests, among them Dr. and Mrs. Billy Graham and Dr. and Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale, got more entertainment than they expected. The Canadian singer pulled a hand-lettered sign from her dress that read “Stop the Killing” and said: “Stop bombing human beings, animals, and vegetation. You go to church on Sundays and pray to Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ were here tonight you would not dare to drop another bomb. Bless the Berrigans and bless Daniel Ellsberg.”

After Conniff ejected her and apologized, Nixon responded, “Oh, forget it. Those things will happen.”

Graham pointedly shook hands with each of the remaining singers—some of them visibly distressed by Miss Feraci’s action. “No matter how you feel, this was not the time or place,” he said.

Religion In Transit

More than 360,000 persons in North America applied for Bible-instruction courses offered in 1971 by the Seventh-day Adventist “Voice of Prophecy” broadcast, an increase of 82,000 over 1970.

The 16,300-member First Baptist Church of downtown Dallas plans to build a forty-story home for the aged, according to pastor W. A. Criswell.

Fourteen Presbyterian, Catholic, and Lutheran churches in eight California cities have formed a Sanctuary Caucus to offer refuge and meals to servicemen who don’t want to go to war.

Two records were set at the annual meeting of the General Board of the Church of the Nazarene: a budget of $7.7 million (including $4.9 million for foreign missions) and appointment of thirty-three missionaries.

A Minneapolis Jesus People congregation moved into its own church building last month. It is being purchased from the city’s First Christian Reformed Church, which has moved to the suburbs.

In memorial services for Martin Luther King, Jr., held at a Harlem Baptist Church and attended by more than 1,500, pastor Wyatt T. Walker described King as “the only authentic spiritual genius Western religion has produced” this century.

Members of the Yarmouth, Maine, Unitarian Universalist Church voted to refuse to allow the public, especially long-haired youth, to sit on the church steps and walk in the churchyard, ostensibly because of littering.

An emergency ministry to veterans of the Viet Nam war facing problems of employment, education, discrimination, disabilities, and drugs has been established by the United Presbyterian Church. With first-year funding of $20,000, it will join with other groups in a common program through the National Council of Churches.

Deaths

LEONARD CARROLL, 51, general overseer of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee); in Cleveland, Tennessee, of a heart attack.

GEORGE NAPOLEON COLLINS, SR., 73, bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Florida and the Bahamas and president of the AME Council of Bishops; in Lake City, Florida, after an auto crash.

PAUL G. ELBECHT, 50, president of Concordia Lutheran College, Austin, Texas; in Austin, of a heart attack.

HOWELL FORGY, 73, the Navy chaplain whose exhortation “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor became a World War II slogan and song title; in Glendora, California, after a long illness.

KARL HOLFELD, 69, former president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada; in Calgary, after a long illness.

FRANK HOUGHTON, 77, general director of the China Inland Mission (now Overseas Missionary Fellowship) during the crucial 1940 to 1951 period; in Tunbridge Wells, England, from bronchial pneumonia.

G. ELSON RUFF, 67, editor of The Lutheran, a Lutheran Church in America publication, since 1945; in Philadelphia, of a heart attack.

If the Supreme Court overrules a Wisconsin Court decision exempting Amish children from public high-school attendance, most U. S. Amish families will not comply but will leave the country instead, predicts public-education specialist Donald A. Erickson of the University of Chicago.

Clergy and Laymen Concerned, an interfaith anti-war group, has taken over a nationally syndicated radio program from the Businessmen’s Educational Fund and renamed it “American Report.” It is used by hundreds of stations.

The historic sanctuary and educational building of the Lake Avenue Baptist Church in Rochester were destroyed by fire. They were insured for $900,000.

Personalia

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference has named Baptist minister C. T. Vivian, a close associate of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., to head the SCLC’s Chicago branch. He replaces Jesse Jackson, now pushing his own new group, PUSH (People United to Save Humanity).

After three and one-half years, the sometimes besieged W. Seavey Joyce, S. J., has resigned as president of Boston College, one of the nation’s largest Jesuit schools.

Vaughan P. L. Booker, convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1970, was accepted as a candidate for the Episcopal priesthood by Bishop Robert L. DeWitt of Philadelphia. He aims to become a prison inmate-chaplain.

A new spat may be brewing in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod over the refusal by the Concordia Seminary (St. Louis) board to grant tenure to Old Testament professor Arlis Ehlen. He is being released, sources say, for alleged liberal views.

Dr. Walter F. Wolbrecht, who lost his job as executive director of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in a denominational shakeup last year, has been named president of Chicago’s Lutheran School of Theology, a Lutheran Church in America school.

Episcopal bishop Horace W. B. Donegan, 71, of the diocese covering New York City and its environs, will retire in May. Coadjutor Paul Moore Jr., will replace him.

Collins Radio engineering supervisor David M. Hodgin, a lay leader of First Christian Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, announced in a church service that he had quit his own job rather than force out two of his “more valuable than me” employees in a cutback of 550 persons at his plant. He wants to form a corporation based on “human dignity and full participation.”

Arizona mission vicar Harold S. Jones, a member of the Dakota (Santee) tribe, has become the first American Indian to be consecrated as a bishop of the Episcopal Church. He will serve the South Dakota diocese.

President Kent S. Knutson of the American Lutheran Church in a special message to members of the ALC’s 4,822 congregations appointed them “evangelists, all of you, each one,” in preparation for the nationwide Key ’73 evangelistic campaign.

The controversial Catholic pastor of San Francisco’s ghetto-district Sacred Heart parish, once the site of Black Panther breakfasts for children, changed jobs this month. Father Eugene J. Boyle is now director for justice, and peace—a newly created post—of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils.

A Harris poll shows SCLC’s Ralph David Abernathy as the black leader U. S. blacks respect most. Next are Mayor Charles Evers of Fayette, Mississippi, and Roy Wilkins, whose NAACP ranked first in respected organizations.

Life magazine says comedian Vaughn Meader, famous for his impersonations of President John F. Kennedy, is now “an aging Jesus freak,” following trips into the drug and occult scenes. His strange new comedy album, “The Second Coming,” about Christ’s return, rankles many radio listeners, but Meader explains, “My Jesus has a great sense of humor.”

World Scene

In Ethiopia the newly constituted 200,000-member Word of Life Evangelical Church, composed of 1,600 congregations and an outgrowth of Sudan Interior Mission work, has applied for government recognition.

Full intercommunion between India’s Mar Thoma Syrian Church and the Church of South India has been established, and negotiations are under way toward “organic union,” say sources.

Protestants and Catholics alike are victims of a renewed Communist hard line in Czechoslovakia. The regime has restricted religious education, stepped up ideological attacks, and arrested church leaders on political charges.

Christian mission work has been resumed—after a lapse of 120 years—among the “Sea Gypsies” who live on boats and on islands off the southern coast of Burma. A Burmese Baptist, a product of missionaries ousted in 1966, built a church and school on the island of Mali.

The Greater Europe Mission of Wheaton, Illinois, and the Belgium Gospel Mission of Philadelphia have merged, with the GEM assuming control. BGM’s Brussels Bible Institute becomes the sixth such GEM school; four other GEM institutes report record enrollments.

An Assemblies of God spokesman says his denomination is growing so fast in Korea that one church in Seoul now numbers 13,000 members, requiring six services and a pre-dawn prayer meeting to accommodate everybody. He adds that at least 10 per cent of the 36.5 million Koreans are believers.

The European Student Missionary Association will hold its annual conference March 3–5 at the European Bible Institute in Lamorlaye, France. About 300 youths from twenty Bible schools and fifty missionaries along with local evangelicals are expected to attend.

The Indian Parliament rejected a “Prevention of Conversion Bill” that would have virtually outlawed conversion to Christianity in India. Indian mission executive Rochunga Pudaite hailed the significant news and commended the government for “willingness to uphold religious freedom and democracy.”

The 200,000-member Presbyterian Church in Taiwan has called on Chiang Kai-shek’s government to hold parliamentary elections for the first time in twenty-five years. Other churches reportedly will join in the call.

A murder convict who recently received Christ through listening to the “Unshackled” broadcast in his Monrovia, Liberia, prison is the first person to be given clemency and his release by newly installed president William R. Tolbert, a devout Baptist.

The pan-denominational charismatic movement pulled headlines last month at evangelist Morris Cerullo’s Seventh World Deeper Life Conference in San Diego. Crowds ranged from 1,200 at afternoon seminars to more than 3,000 at evening rallies. On the program were internationally known speakers, national evangelists from fifteen foreign countries, specialists (including an ex-Satanist leader), and Cerullo himself.

Cerullo, surprisingly unassuming in contrast to the image created by his flashy PR people, is perhaps better known abroad, where he spends 80 per cent of his time. His overseas campaigns have sometimes attracted as many as 100,000 to a single meeting.

Herb Ellingwood, Governor Ronald Reagan’s chief legal aide, relayed Reagan’s greetings to the San Diego gathering and told of the charismatic movement’s reach into the state capitol. “We have more Spirit-filled janitors than any capital in the world,” he declared, sparking laughter. Prayer groups, he said, are growing in all levels of the legislature from secretaries to attorneys and elected officials. He stated that Reagan is aware of what is happening spiritually and that the governor’s own Christian life is deepening. Ellingwood also laid down legal advice at a seminar for those operating hotlines and other drug-counsel ministries. He estimated that 300,000 youths have been delivered from drug abuse by the Jesus movement.

Pastor Chuck Smith of the widely known Calvary Chapel near Costa Mesa, California, told how his church had become a haven for thousands of youthful Jesus people. It began, he said, when he encountered a hippie Christian “pouring forth the love of God.” Out of that meeting sprouted a super-effective “House of Miracles” outreach ministry, headed by two teen-age evangelists. Seventeen of the twenty-one young men who accepted Christ the first week at the house are now in the ministry, said Smith. He went on to offer guidelines to churches pondering a response to the Jesus revolution.

One of the favorites of newsmen at the conference was a mobile anti-occult display, soon to make a forty-five-city tour in the United States. Its samples of voodoo oil, Satan-worship paraphernalia, and other items were explained by Michael Warnke, a naval medical technician who says he used to be a Satanist priest and leader of a 1,500-member witchcraft group.

Warnke, in an interview, said witchcraft rites include mocking the Christian communion and often end in sexual orgies. Selfishness, he explained, is taught as equivalent to holiness. His own conversion to Christ occurred after drug trips, and near suicide.

Cerullo bore down heavily on the theme that Satanic forces are loose in the nation. He urged his audience to go home and declare war on the devil in the name of Jesus. Aides handed out 20,000 copies of his new antiwitchcraft newspaper.

He also hammered home the theme of the week-long conclave, “The New Anointing Is Here,” declaring that God had promised an outpouring of his Holy Spirit so that spiritual breakthroughs comparable to the vast strides made in science and medicine would be experienced today. God’s healing power will be demonstrated in a way that will “supersede what the early church saw,” he predicted.

As if to buttress the point, a number of persons testified how they had been miraculously healed of assorted afflictions. A surgeon told how his son’s poor eyesight was instantly corrected during a Cerullo healing service. And 1,400 made decisions for Christ.

Cerullo and foreign nationals gave highlights of his international ministry, headquartered in San Diego: “30,000 ministers” trained worldwide to keep giving “the full Gospel” to their people; fifty-five crusades sponsored monthly in scores of countries; effective literature-oriented outreach in Israel.

Cerullo says that he accepted Christ at age 14 in an orthodox Jewish orphanage, and that in recent years his ministry has brought hundreds of Israelis to Christ. A Pentecostal, he estimates that 60 per cent of those in his American audiences are not old-line Pentecostals, and that up to 30 per cent are Catholics.

The Troublesome Ten

Prophecy buffs are talking about recent additions to the European Common Market that bring its membership to ten countries. Some dispensationally-minded Bible students believe that a ten-nation alliance, composed of ten nations once a part of the old Roman empire, will have a central place in a seven-year period of war and tribulation leading to Christ’s second coming to earth. They also believe, however, that the Church will be raptured from the earth before the trouble begins. The teaching is based on interpretations of passages in Daniel and Revelation.

Prophecy analyst-author J. Dwight Pentecost of Dallas Theological Seminary believes that a literal ten-nation alliance is necessary, and that the Common Market ten may or may not be the “required” ones. Because of splintered history, it may take more than ten Western nations to come up with the correct ten revived Roman powers, he says.

At any rate, some prophecy students aren’t making any long-range plans.

Handclasps And Prayers

“America needs to repent” was a note sounded repeatedly, if somewhat obliquely, at the latest of the Washington prayer breakfasts, now attended by some 3,000 influential people annually. The note was not sounded as clearly as a country preacher would give it, but most breakfasters in the huge ballroom of the most prestigious hotel in the nation’s capital should have caught it.

“We have not arrived.” said Congressman Albert H. Quie of Minnesota in opening the program. “We are a gathering of sinners.”

Board chairman Arthur F. Burns of the Federal Reserve System carried forward the theme with readings from Ecclesiastes and Micah that warn of judgment as well as offering hope.

Mayor Walter Washington pleaded for unity and reconciliation, and said he found it hard to understand why the nation finds it so hard to help those who are poor or alienated. He closed by asking the audience to join hands around the tables as an expression of spiritual determination in the presence of their leader.

President Nixon said the breakfast “symbolizes the strength of America,” adding that if participants had not recognized their shortcomings “we would not be here.” He observed that to the everlasting credit of the United States it did not use nuclear blackmail when it could have, and that “we helped our enemies until now they are our major competitors.” But he went on to deplore the fact that the two great wars in this century in which some 20 million died were fought between “Christian” nations.

“Are we on God’s side?” the President asked. He said that while he appreciated prayers for his forthcoming journeys to China and the Soviet Union, he felt that intercession ought to be made primarily “that this nation will be on God’s side.”

Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa then got up to give the closing prayer and prefaced it with a request that his hearers clasp hands again. “Jesus also stretches his hand to you,” said Hughes. “Take it! Let him into your life.”

Several cabinet members and governors were present with their wives for the February 1 event, along with a number of international dignitaries, including a leading Irish government official. Business and civic leaders, professional athletes, and noted evangelical leaders from all over the country made up the audience. Every place was taken. The Washington Hilton served a menu that featured quiche lorraine.

Billy Graham read from Philippians 2 and voiced a reminder that the Bible promises a permanent peace. Christians, he declared, will have a fourth day to celebrate along with Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter, when God intervenes in human history and ushers in Utopia.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

The Jesus Movement Under Theological Scrutiny

An analysis of the Jesus people by the Archbishop of Canterbury highlighted a three-day conference in New York last month. It was the first time the contemporary phenomenon has come under scrutiny at a major theological meeting, convened in Riverside Church.

In a sermon at Lincoln Center, Archbishop Michael Ramsey cited three ways in which people today are seeking Jesus: through social action, through mystical experience, and through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

A number of participants seemed to presume that the Jesus movement today embraces such musical and dramatic expressions as Superstar and Godspell. Those involved deny any connection, and indeed point to profound theological differences. Some Jesus people have picketed Superstar performances.

The conference was sponsored by an Episcopal organization, the Trinity Institute. The director, Dr. Robert Terwilliger, asserted that the Jesus movement has rediscovered the historic Christ who has been rejected by the church. “The time has come to think again about the whole doctrine of redemption as it is being forced upon us,” he said. But with regard to Jesus people who emphasize the filling of the Holy Spirit, he warned that “instant experience, whether it’s sexual or religious, is transitory.”

DARRELL TURNER

Baptists, More Or Less

They’re smiling these days around American Baptist headquarters in Valley Forge. The $15.2 million budget income for 1971 was the largest in the history of the 64-year-old denomination, report officials. An economically imposed ban on sending out foreign missionaries was lifted. And a middle-of-the-road evangelical was nominated to fill the office of general secretary—the ABC’s top staff post, vacant for more than a year.

The nominee is Dr. Robert C. Campbell, dean and professor of New Testament at the American Baptist Seminary of the West, Covina, California. Nomination is tantamount to election, to be held at Denver in May.

Campbell holds degrees from Westmont College, Eastern Baptist Seminary, and the University of Southern California. Writing in his statement of faith, he says, “Our sense of estrangement is met by a vital confrontation with the living God and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Meanwhile, ABC officials are pondering the significance of action taken by an ABC-related school. Twenty-year-old Eastern Baptist College (enrollment 595) on the western edge of Philadelphia has dropped its middle name. “The dropping of the word Baptist does not diminish our commitment to Jesus Christ as an evangelical and conservative institution of Christian higher education,” insisted President J. Lester Harnish. Rather, the change reflects the fact that the board, student body, faculty, and staff include many non-Baptists, he said.

Spokesmen emphasized that the change in no way dissociates the college from the ABC. “We should not, however, give the false impression of full denominational underwriting,” they added. The ABC gave only $2,000 toward the school’s $2 million budget last year, a financial officer explained, and individual ABC churches accounted for about $50,000. Actually, he commented, the denominational label hurts more than it helps. So from now on it’s simply Eastern College.

Jewish Furor: Jesus (Again)

Rabbi W. B. Silverman of Kansas City’s Temple B’nai Jehudah, one of the nation’s leading Reform congregations, believes that the best defense is an offense.

In December, responding to the Jewish students in his congregation, Silverman set up some forums on Christianity designed to help both students and adult members of his congregation defend themselves against the Jesus onrush. The first program, featuring Lyle Murphy of Calvary Bible College, led to a heated controversy among local Jews.

The editor of the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle found Murphy’s language “offensive.” Murphy included in his speech such statements as, “The gift of life is the gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Silverman, however, said he found Murphy tactful and dignified. Although the controversy, which made news in many of the country’s Jewish newspapers, continued through January, the congregation supported Silverman’s judgment. “We should seek the truth,” the rabbi said, “no matter how controversial it might prove.”

The temple is planning another such forum on February 23: “Jesus Freaks, Jews, and Judaism.” The panel will include members of the Jesus movement, a Jewish student, and a Protestant minister, as well as Silverman and two laymen.

Silverman claimed that his students had been “harassed and heckled” in cafeterias and school buildings by fiery young believers, some of them Jewish Christians. When asked if he had lost many young people to Christianity, Silverman replied, “A few—here and there.”

CHERYL A. FORBES

Christian Zeal Miffs Soviets

Over-eager American tourists in the Soviet Union came close to provoking an international incident last month. One was a Lutheran congressman, Earl F. Landgrebe of Indiana. Landgrebe, a Republican, said he was picked up by Soviet police and interrogated for two hours after he had distributed Scriptures.

Ten students from Oral Roberts University were detained by Soviet customs agents for six hours because they tried to bring in quantities of Christian literature and records in the Russian language.

Soviet authorities confiscated the materials the students were carrying as well as a small number of Scriptures that Landgrebe had not yet given away.

The congressman was part of a seven-member House Education Subcommittee delegation that visited the Soviet Union in January while Congress was in recess. The House members were supposed to be studying Soviet education. Landgrebe readily admitted he had given away about 300 Russian-language copies of Scripture. He said some people wept and kissed the Bibles. The night before he was to leave the Soviet Union, he said, he decided to distribute what he had left. After he gave away two copies of the Gospel of Matthew in front of a theater, a young woman who Landgrebe said was obviously shadowing him called a policeman, and the U. S. legislator was taken into custody.

No official charges were placed against Landgrebe, but the Soviet newspaper Izvestia subsequently accused him and two other subcommittee members of “promoting anti-Soviet agitation, abusing Soviet hospitality, and threatening Soviet-U. S. cultural relations.”

Congressman James H. Scheuer, a Democrat from New York was expelled after he visited several Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel. He and Congressman Alphonso Bell, a Republican from California, were accused of aiding Zionists.

Landgrebe said he distributed only Bibles because the U. S. State Department had told him beforehand that Soviet authorities were leary of the content of literature brought into the country. The Soviet government has always forbidden the importation of quantities of foreign literature except without special permission. But tourists are generally allowed to bring in several books or Bibles, even if they are to be given away. Most Americans who have visited the Soviet Union say visitors are clearly warned about the literature restrictions upon entering and are told to declare openly what printed materials they are carrying.

A spokesman for the Oral Roberts students said Soviet authorities had overlooked about a dozen Bibles and two records with Russian hymns. These, he said, were passed out to Protestant congregations in Leningrad and in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. The group spent more than two weeks in the Soviet Union.

Christians who visit the Soviet Union almost invariably think of taking Scripture only in the Russian language, which is just one of a number of languages used in the Soviet Union. When they distribute Russian Scriptures in areas where another language predominates, they inadvertently aid the “Russification” promoted by the Kremlin but resisted by Soviet minority groups.

One mission source reports distributing 12,000 Russian Bibles and 182,000 Gospels in the Soviet Union in 1971, only a fraction of the total estimated input by many agencies and individuals.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Radio Network has been featuring a lengthy attack on what it calls the Roman Catholic Church’s “anti-communist campaign,” leading some observers to speculate that another anti-religion campaign has begun.

Churches And The ‘New Poor’

One year ago churches in the Seattle, Washington, area, along with two United Methodist-supported agencies, Fellowship of Christian Urban Service (FOCUS) and Ecumenical Metropolitan Ministry (EMM), formed Neighbors in Need (NiN) to help feed the 100,000 unemployed workers there.

These middle-class, highly-skilled professional people suddenly found themselves “the new poor” (as sociologists named them) when Boeing Aircraft’s work force was cut by almost two-thirds over a two-year period. Government help for Seattle, considered the area hardest hit by aerospace cutbacks, with unemployment at 12 per cent, twice as high as the national average, was almost nonexistent. Welfare officials refused to provide both food stamps and foodstuffs simultaneously to one area; “it’s never been done before,” they reasoned. Many of the unemployed couldn’t afford food stamps once unemployment compensation ended.

During 1971 NiN distributed more than $1.5 million worth of goods, often spending as much as $10–12,000 weekly. Churches and farms in the area donated some of the foodstuffs, said the Reverend Harold Perry, a United Methodist and administrative director of NiN. There have also been gifts from churches and organizations throughout the country—from New York, California, Florida, and the Midwest, he said.

Now foreign churches are getting involved. Five tons of rice was donated by Japanese Christian churches and organizations through NiN. The Japanese YMCA co-ordinated the gift with the Seattle-area YMCA, and the Reverend Sadao Ozawa of the United Church of Christ of Japan traveled to Washington on what Perry called “a mission to the various food banks throughout the state to dramatize the need for food.” Ozawa also made a symbolic donation in Seattle of the actual gift.

The Japanese gift is the first foreign aid to the depressed Seattle—and the first for the nation. But, Perry said, “there have been other inquiries. Soon we may be receiving gifts from other foreign churches.”

CHERYL A. FORBES