Page 5452 – Christianity Today (2024)

His rich treatment of grace and faith reminds us that Christianity is a way of life shaped by experience.

After his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930 at age 26, Evelyn Waugh observed: “In my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular—a preoccupation with style and the attempt to reproduce man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his relation to God.” In Waugh’s own words, Brideshead Revisited is an “attempt to trace the workings of Divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of an English Catholic family, half-paganized themselves, in the world of 1929–39.”

In the novel (recently dramatized on U.S. public television), Charles Ryder, a middle-aged World War II officer, finds himself stationed at Brideshead Castle, the family seat of the Marchmains, an old Catholic family. This undams a flood of memories: his first and later visits to the house; his friendship with Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of Lord Marchmain, at Oxford during the twenties; and his later, prewar romance with Sebastian’s sister Julia.

Some critics have seen the novel to be an apology for the Roman Catholic faith and have criticized its tractarian character. This is ironic because far from giving us a Catholic point of view (except sociologically), Waugh gives us an orthodox Protestant view. An important difference between Protestantism and Catholicism is the former’s exclusive connection of grace with faith. In Catholicism, faith is always more or less related to merit or works. But the Reformers maintained that the grace of God is prevenient, preceding and even preventing any movement of man towards God. Their touchstone was Paul’s lament in Romans: “… who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God who gives us the victory” (7:24–25). The Divine Shepherd goes into the wilderness to seek the lost sheep. We do not choose God. God chooses us despite ourselves. Brideshead reveals the operation of divine grace on people who are no better or more deserving of God’s favor than others.

In Sebastian’s own words, he and sister Julia are “half-heathen,” heavy drinkers and thrill seekers. Yet despite themselves, God chooses them. Their younger, pious sister Cordelia borrows a line from Chesterton and says prophetically to Ryder: “I wonder if you remember the story Mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk—I mean the bad evening. Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him [the thief] with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’” In Brideshead, it seems that God has a hook with an invisible line to Sebastian and especially to Julia. Waugh emphasizes her spiritual poverty by underscoring the intensity of her illicit sexual relationship with Ryder. But when older brother Bridey speaks matter-of-factly about her “living in sin,” the inescapable reality of God crashes into her consciousness, never to depart. She terminates her relationship with Ryder and gives herself unstintingly to the war effort.

While insisting upon the prevenience of God’s grace, however, the Protestant tradition has wanted at the same time to maintain that faith is a fully free and human act. Yet the affirmation of the actuality of God’s grace seems to suggest an automatic human response. Augustine and Calvin, for example, wrote of “irresistible grace,” saying God’s grace worked irresistibly to give the elect final perseverance lest they fall. How do we speak of prevenient grace on one hand, but on the other, still maintain that faith is a free, human response?

Alongside the seemingly irresistible grace operative in the lives of Sebastian and Julia, Waugh gives us in the conversion of Charles Ryder a portrait of faith as human and free. There is no hint of coercion in Ryder’s faith. He simply comes to understand that his love for Sebastian and Julia foreshadows a greater love that gives life profound meaning. His thoughts embody the disappointment inherent in human love, which merely hints of divine love. He observes: “… perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond language scrawled on gate posts and paving along the weary road that others have tramped before us.” Calvin thought the Fall had not completely effaced the image of God in man, and here, Waugh suggests, we are aware always if only vaguely of that ultimate destiny to which our restlessness is a clue. God’s original claim upon us never departs, and even when we reject God, we continue to be disturbed and enticed. But enticement and coercion are quite different things. Enticements can be more easily resisted. So to say as Waugh does that God entices us along the road to faith is to preserve the character of faith as a free, human act.

In Literature and the Christian Life, Sallie Mcfa*gue TeSelle observes: “It is the peculiar function of literature both to discover and create the basic structure of human experience. This means creating autonomous visions of life and of the human heart—visions of life that see it as paradoxical, rich, and difficult …”

This is Waugh’s great achievement in Brideshead Revisited. Taken together, his portraits of the lives of Sebastian and Julia on the one hand, and of Charles Ryder on the other, evoke the eternal paradox of the prevenience of God’s grace and of the free, human character of faith. Perhaps the encounter of the divine and the human is too difficult, paradoxical, and rich ever to be expressed adequately by our theological principles that aim usually for coherence at the expense of mystery. Waugh’s rich treatment of grace and faith reminds us again that Christianity is first and foremost a way of life and that Christian understanding is shaped most profoundly by our experience and our relations with other people. Theology is theology and not life; and theologians will do well to let their own thinking be enriched by the wisdom contained in Brideshead.

ROBERT AND BEVERLY BACHELDER

Mr. Bachelder is pastor of First Congregational Church, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Beverly Brandt Bachelder is director of music at Zion Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Screenplay by Melissa Mathison; produced and directed by Steven Spielberg.

Spiritual metaphors abound in E.T., a captivating tale of a seemingly timid, misshapen creature from outer space, and Elliott, the young boy with whom E.T. develops a psychical relationship after he is marooned on earth. E.T. is no ordinary fantasy, but a sophisticated production by Hollywood’s foremost director, Steven Spielberg. The Universal film promises to be this year’s blockbuster.

One can’t help but see messianic significance in E.T. He heals cuts with a touch of his glowing finger and raises shriveled flowers to life. Indeed, E.T. himself rises from the dead in a scene that brings cheers from the audience.

Spielberg intends for his audience to have a spiritual experience. Even the movie’s newspaper ad invites a direct comparison to Michelangelo’s creation scene—only the hand arching downward is not God’s, but E.T.’s.

The relationship of Elliott to E.T. is a “type” of the Christian’s relationship to Christ. In a touching scene, Elliott says to E.T., “I’ll believe in you all my life.” And we, too, want to place ourselves in E.T.’s hands and believe. As E.T. prepares to leave earth, he lifts his glowing finger to Elliot’s forehead and cryptically states, “I’ll be here.” A new Pentecost?

The most blatant Christian symbol appears in the awe-inspiring conclusion, when E.T.’s spaceship streaks across the sky leaving a rainbow in its wake.

E.T.’s most disturbing message is its “justification of sin”: a subtle attempt to justify sinful behavior. Children’s profanity is portrayed as an acceptable part of an American family’s conversation. E.T. himself unknowingly gets drunk when he discovers a six-pack of beer. While this maybe outwardly cute, it shows a continuing trend in our contemporary culture to debase our heroes.

For many people, E.T. will offer momentary emotional release from lives of quiet desperation. For the Christian, this movie reveals the deep desire of the world for a superior intelligence and Savior.

Reviewed by Tom Mulder, an intern pastor in British Columbia.

The free church must become involved with the needs of the suffering church.

More Christians are being persecuted today than at any other time in history. In this century, more Christians have been martyred than in all previous centuries combined.

During the Cultural Revolution, the wife of the late John H. Reed., Jr., medical missionary to China, spoke to an interdenominational Bible study class in Richmond, Virginia. Her focus was the suffering church. She brought this terse message from a Chinese believer:

We are walking to Calvary.

Pray for us.

We’ll see you in heaven.

That plea was the impetus for a prayer group in Richmond that now meets regularly to intercede for Christ’s suffering church.

Our group consists of seven “regulars” who are active laywomen from local Presbyterian and Episcopal churches. Most of us also attend the weekly Bible study conducted by Sallie Childrey Reed, who attuned us to the needs of suffering Christians.

Admittedly, prayers of intercession for persecuted Christians are not easy. Assembled in comfortable freedom, with our many Bible translations, it is hard for us to envision people without Bibles on the other side of the world who worship God under cover of darkness. Our open practice and life of faith are far removed from threats of prison, work camps, or unemployment. We risk nothing because of our beliefs.

Yet hundreds of thousands of believers do risk all for Christ. How does our group pray for them?

1. We pray for miracles. Interspersed in the many accounts of persecution we have received from the suffering church are occasional deliverances. Some, like Richard Wurmbrand, Haralan Popov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, miraculously survived prolonged ordeals and were brought to freedom in America.

2. We pray for our country. We ask God to revive us and spare us as a nation so that the American church can continue its work for Christ throughout the world.

3. We pray for specific needs of persecuted Christians. In order to do this we pool information from evangelical and suffering-church periodicals, news releases, and letters from missionaries or pastors.

4. We pray for the distribution of Bibles to persecuted Christians. How inexpressibly sad it is that so many believers who must endure trial are generally without God’s written Word. Here we ask the Holy Spirit to grant effective ways to get the Scriptures to suffering saints who wait.

Our prayers vary from week to week, but typical of our intercession is this one:

Father, for your servants about to be martyred, we ask a Christ-glorifying witness like Stephen’s. For those undergoing torture we ask power not to deny your name.

We remember how you kept former POW Jeremiah Denton from breaking down when, in the midst of torture, you relieved his pain. Savior, send to your suffering body divine intervention.

Knowing our weakness we pray forthose who have fallen, those who mourn false confessions made under brainwashing or threats to family. Lord, heal their broken hearts and tenderly restore them as you once did Simon Peter.

For those alone in prison we ask you to send the Holy Comforter, remembering many are without your Word. Recall to their minds life-sustaining words of Scripture.

For God’s pastors in monitored, registered churches and in the unregistered, underground church, give discernment in hard decisions.

For believers declared “unstable” and placed in psychiatric wards because of their faith, renew your promise that nothing, not even drugs, shall separate them from the love of God.

For children taken from believing parents and placed in communes, may holy angels minister. By your Spirit may these heirs of salvation and their parents be reunited in your heavenly home.

Hopefully, our three years’ intercession for believers under communism and Islam helps suffering Christians. But it has also benefitted us. We have become more realistic about the world in which we live. As American Christians, we have led insulated lives, while all over the world believers are experiencing tribulation. Someday we might also be forced to share their trial.

In Till Armageddon, Billy Graham asks the question: “How do we prepare for the suffering we may have to face as our world moves relentlessly toward a period of intense tribulation?”

Perhaps for pragmatic reasons alone, the free church must become involved with the needs of the suffering church. Perhaps it must learn now how faith survives under pressure so that it may one day be equipped to bear its own cross.

Our little Richmond prayer group has also been rewarded by a sense of fulfillment in intercession that is difficult to explain. Is it that we have, in a small way, participated in the fellowship of Christ’s suffering in prayers for his own?

Or is it that we have come to know, by faith, that through Christ our prayers are helping those who suffer in his name?

Mrs. Cooke is a piano teacher, the wife of a pastor in Richmond, Virginia.

Rights in the democratic West restrict the state. In the Soviet empire, the state is served first.

Voices are calling for help today from all directions. Some are shrill and strident, some muted and plaintive. Many come from the disinherited and the marginal, who feel shut out from the benefits of the onward movement of history. The caring Christian dare not refuse to hear and try to understand the cause and meaning of these cries for human rights and justice.

The age-old question of human rights remains a subject for study. In fact, the prestigious quarterly Ethics devotes an entire issue to it (U. of Chicago Press, Vol. 92, No. 1, Oct. 1981). The subject is filled with ambiguities, in turn reflected in a wide range of ideologies and human institutions. Many definitions clearly bypass the biblical understanding of human origins and capabilities. The issue obviously needs clarification, and many evangelicals are convinced it needs careful thought.

The Christian recognizes that both human rights and the sanctions that undergird them have their source in God as Creator and Sustainer of our universe. This view is held in opposition to much of the conventional wisdom of the day. Quite evidently there are various kinds of rights. Some are broadly defined as natural rights, and others as legal or positive rights. Both types are frequently embodied in codes set forth in various pronouncements or documents.

Document-defined natural rights are frequently called minimal rights, and define basic personal freedoms. Minimal rights are embodied in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, its Bill of Rights, and in the several documents of the United Nations. From such minimal standards have developed extensions and elaborations.

In the western democratic tradition, such rights as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are reckoned as belonging to man as man, and do not depend upon the decrees of the state. To the Christian, such “rights” rest more fundamentally upon man as made in the image of God. Their maintenance and exercise depend upon divine providence and sovereignty. But it must be noted that Marxist states operate upon a radically different basis, which assumes that all rights rest upon legislation or upon positive law. This is why we in the West fail to understand actions within the Soviet empire.

The rights of citizens in the democratic states of the West are chiefly spelled out in terms of what the state is forbidden to do, but rights are defined in the Constitution of the Soviet Union in terms of what a citizen may do. The root difference is that, while our rights in the democratic West are restrictive of the states, rights of the citizens of the Soviet empire are granted by the state in order to foster the state.

While we would in no case identify our understanding of human rights with a typically Christian view, we believe it valid to note that when embodied in law, the Western view is more nearly in accord with Christian perspectives upon, for instance, the nature of human sinfulness and human frailty. States tend to gather power unto themselves, and one need not be a cynic to recognize that governments need restraining limits.

Enough has been said to indicate that, in our American system, rights have a basis apart from the decrees and policies of the state. But this does not offer an unambiguous basis for a typically Christian understanding of human rights, or even for a broader and more general definition of such rights. Many capable writers are addressing the continuing need for clarification of the issues.

I find the above-mentioned issue of Ethics disappointingly ambiguous at the point of the source and nature of human rights. There is little mention of rights as grounded in man’s origin in God’s creation, or of the influence of this understanding upon the quality and validity of even minimal or natural rights.

Though the articles are well written and carefully documented, the prevailing emphasis is on utility—understanding of rights as those forms of prescription that are most productive of happiness. This does not mean these chapters are without merit in calling attention to the many moral facets of rights, and to the complexity of the social exercise of rights when their employment by one as normative infringes upon the equally valid rights of others.

The authors’ use of terms like asymmetry, average view, total view, and repugnant conclusion does not conceal the lack of down-to-earth consideration of the deeper basis upon which a discussion of human rights must rest. Some of the positions expressed seem to open the way to far-fetched legal controversy, such as those set forth under “The Problem of Conception,” by Jefferson McMahan. An extreme example is suggested by lawsuits purportedly brought against parents by handicapped offspring whose physical defects allegedly could have been known before birth and led to abortion.

What is sought in these investigations and in similar attempts is a viable and believable basis for a view of human dignity that will assure a recognition of the intrinsic (as opposed to the merely conferred) quality of human rights. And though “humanistic” is today employed as a smear word, it is fair to say that most of the discussions of the question of human rights in our time proceed upon a humanistic basis that limits man to a nontranscendental quality and dimension.

While nazism and applied Marxism do represent radical examples of such views of humans, we do well to recognize implicit perils in any purely secular understanding of man. History may in the long run undergird the imperative necessity for recognition of the biblical view of humankind as God’s special creation. Even if now marred by sin, men and women assume new worth when recognized as bearing the marks of a high image and ancestry. The Incarnation and Golgotha thus bear the ultimate testimony to human worth upon which human rights rest.

Dr. Kuhn is professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

Life As Faith And Learning

“Education is truly Christian only where there is the integration of faith and learning.” This is a statement frequently heard in Christian education circles today. Although most often used in connection with the Christian school, it is equally applicable to church education.

Faith and learning are integrated when one’s faith and his view of the learner, the subject matter, the role of the teacher, and the application of the subject matter to a life situation are all brought together into a harmonious whole. Almost with one voice Christian educators agree that this must be done. But the question is, How do you do it?

The integration of faith and learning was the concern of Lois LeBar in her book Education that Is Christian (Revell), originally published in 1958 and recently revised and updated. LeBar, a long-time leader in the field of Christian education, raised the question: “Why should Christians borrow a system of education from the secular world? Why should we not derive from God’s revelation our own philosophy?” LeBar’s approach to working out a Christian philosophy of education was more theological, however, than philosophical. While she acknowledged that the Bible was not written as a textbook on education, she did contend that “the believer who seeks ‘buried educational treasure’ will be richly rewarded.” “These treasures,” she said, “are not grouped by categories and openly displayed for the casual observer, but are ‘hidden’ for the earnest seeker who is willing to dig for them.”

LeBar’s method of “digging” for “buried educational treasure” was to examine the teaching ministry of Christ, being careful to note such things as the Master Teacher’s approach to the learner, his use of method, and his application of the lesson. She concluded that the Christian educator who follows the pattern of Christ should begin with pupils where they are with their felt needs, help them find the biblical answer, and encourage them to put the truth into practice. The Christian community owes a great debt of gratitude to Dr. LeBar for her significant contribution to the field of Christian education in general and to the ongoing discussion of the problem of integrating faith and learning in particular.

As a Christian philosopher, George R. Knight, an associate professor at Andrews University where he teaches philosophy and history of education, takes a philosophical approach to the problem of integrating faith and learning. His book, Philosophy and Education—an Introduction in Christian Perspective (Andrews), is based on the assumption “that philosophic beliefs provide the basic boundaries for preferred educational practices for any group in society.”

Knight surveys the relationship between education and various humanistic philosophies, including both traditional and modern schools of thought. He believes that while there is value in each of these philosophies, the Christian is not uncritically to accept a world-and-life view that may have philosophic roots incompatible with Scripture.

Neither is eclecticism the way for the Christian, according to Knight. As tantalizing as it may be, the practice of selecting the best insights from each of the philosophies that men have adhered to historically is fraught with danger. “The effect of such a method,” says Knight, “is to develop a patchwork quilt rather than a seamless tapestry.” Eclecticism is not only internally inconsistent, but it also has elements that are irreconcilable with biblical Christianity. It is incumbent upon the Christian educator to develop a personal world-and-life view that will provide a basis for interpreting all reality, including educational theory and practice. “Christian education that is Christian in fact, rather than merely in word,” Knight maintains, “must view the nature and potential of the student, the role of the teacher, the content of the curriculum, the methodological emphasis … in the light of its philosophic undergirding.”

Knight’s excellent survey of the relation of education and philosophy deserves serious consideration as a textbook in educational philosophy.

Ronald P. Chadwick, professor of Christian education at Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary, writes from the standpoint of biblical theology about the problem of integrating faith and learning. In his book, Teaching and Learning—an Integrated Approach to Christian Education (Revell), he asserts that world views are chosen rather than demonstrated. The world view of his choice is what he calls a “Word-centered world view.”

It logically follows from Chadwick’s world view that the Christian educator needs to develop expertise in the area of biblical theology as well as in the discipline he proposes to teach. In this way the teacher is better able to relate concepts from his discipline to complementary concepts derived from Scripture. For example, the psychological concept that each person has worth should be related to the biblical concept that God created each man in his own image. This combination of ideas results in an expanded concept that God has made each person, and each person has eternal worth. The integration process, however, is not complete until the expanded concept is applied to life. “Truth with truth and Truth/truth with life,” Chadwick would say.

The integration of faith and learning is not something artificial or contrived. Its application to all of life is the very essence of the Christian faith. The subject under discussion is not the exclusive property of the philosopher, the theologian, or even the professional educator. It is also for the lay teacher in the Sunday school.

How do we integrate faith and learning? The question is still not fully resolved. LeBar, Knight, and Chadwick, each in his or her own way, has made a contribution. But they would be the first to say that much remains to be done. Certainly an ongoing dialogue on this topic among Christian educators would be an invaluable help to all concerned.

Reviewed by Norman Harper, dean of the Graduate School of Education, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi.

A New Ethic Of Commitment

New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down, by Daniel Yankelovich (Random House, 1981, 278 pp., $15.95), is reviewed by Reed Jolley, pastor of Santa Barbara Community Church, Santa Barbara, California.

As we enter the eighth decade of the twentieth century, even the casual observer of Western culture will notice that changes in our values, mores, and goals are taking place. Historically, work has been viewed as a means of survival; marriage was to last until death; and leisure was the dividend of retirement. Recently, however, these norms have come to be seriously scrutinized, if not outwardly rejected, by vast numbers of Americans. It is these trends that Daniel Yankelovich examines in his latest book.

Before the late 1960s, Americans embraced a “giving/getting compact” that often required thorough self-abnegation. The individual would give hard work, loyalty, and steadfastness in hopes of receiving a rewarding family life, a devoted spouse, and an ever-increasing standard of living. Yankelovich argues that this unspoken ethic of self-denial shaped American society in the post-World War II period.

At present we are witnessing a shift in our traditional values. Having grown wary of the demands of self-sacrifice, our society is opting instead for immediate fulfillment of the self and its needs. Yankelovich points out that in addition to the demands of material well-being, we now demand such nebulous intangibles as “creativity, leisure, autonomy, pleasure, participation, community adventure, vitality and stimulation.” The quest for self-fulfillment has ushered in a new ethic that is rapidly replacing the old ethic of the giving/getting compact. Yankelovich writes, “In their extreme form, the new rules simply turn the old ones on their head, and in place of the old self-denial ethic we find people who refuse to deny anything to themselves—not out of bottomless appetite, but on the strange moral principle that ‘I have a duty to myself.’” The author does not denounce this new orientation as a “new narcissism,” yet he is skeptical regarding the viability of a self-centered ethos.

Yankelovich questions the premise of what he calls “humanist psychology” that places the “self” at the center of the universe. This thinking, which grew out of the writings of A. A. Maslow, Carl Rogers, Eric Fromm, and others, sees emotional cravings as sacred objects. To deny oneself the satisfaction of these cravings is a crime against nature. The author stands on the sidelines of the “me decade” asking what one does with the self once it is “fulfilled.” Instead of being a freeway to the kingdom, the new quest is a solipsistic cul-de-sac. “In looking to their own needs for fulfillment, they are caught in a debilitating contradiction: their goal is to expand their lives by reaching beyond the self, but the strategy they employ results in contradicting their lives, drawing them inward toward an ever-narrowing closed off ‘I’.”

The new consciousness is scrutinized on another front in that it is “the psychology of affluence.” Previous generations understood the “good life” as a reward for hard work and self denial. The “post-war baby boom” generation understand affluence as an inalienable right. Since primary needs will undoubtedly be met (food, shelter, economic security), this generation concentrates on pursuing the higher-order needs of the spirit. Yankelovich is critical at this point, arguing that we have turned a corner in our American economic history. Because of the rising cost of energy, the wealth of our country has declined and will continue to do so. In 1973 America paid $4 billion for imported oil. In 1980 our bill rose to $90 billion. The author sees this trend (among others) as a portent pointing to a reduction in our standard of living. The necessities of paying the rent and putting food on the table will take precedence over the quest for self-fulfillment.

In his conclusion, Yankelovich briefly recommends a compromise between the old giving/getting ethic and the new quest to fulfill the self. An ethic of “commitment” is what is needed in the last quarter of the twentieth century. A viable social ethic will ask individuals to curb certain desires to produce a better society. The word “commitment” shifts the focus away from the self (either self-denial or self-fulfillment) toward the world. If the “commitment” is to virtually anything other than the “self,” positive results will follow. The author writes, “The Christian injunction that to find one’s self one must first lose one’s self contains an essential truth any seeker of self-fulfillment needs to grasp.”

New Rules is essential reading for pastors, Christian leaders, and laypersons who want to understand current trends in American thought. Yankelovich brings over 30 years of sociological research to his perceptive and thoroughly documented study. He combines both case studies and nationwide surveys to analyze trends in our culture.

Obviously, Yankelovich’s “ethic of commitment” falls short of the Christian’s mandate to “seek first the kingdom of God,” but the similarities are clearly discernible. The Christian community in America, which is becoming increasingly self-centered and “me” oriented, could profit from the insights of this adroit critic of our times.

Brightening Up Dull Churches

Church Alive!: A Fresh Look at Church Growth, by Peter Cotterell (IVP-UK, 1981, 127 pp., £1.50), is reviewed by Peter W. Spellman, a group leader in Salem Community Church, Salem, Massachusetts.

What can another book on church growth contribute to an already saturated discussion? The answer is clarity and caution. Peter Cotterell, director of overseas studies at London Bible College, pulls the formal discussion down from the theoretical skies and presents it vividly and freshly for consideration.

Cotterell has written his book for those whose church experience has been relentlessly “dull, lifeless and empty” and want to do something about it. His burning passion is to bring such churches back to life, and his conviction is that church-growth principles, prayerfully and thoughtfully applied, can give direction to this task.

In eight witty and well-crafted chapters, Cotterell treats such topics as the various types of church growth, mobilizing spiritual gifts, seeking out those most responsive to the gospel, crossing cultural (and subcultural) barriers, keeping in touch with the findings of the social sciences, setting goals, and discipling new converts. Somehow he covers these diverse themes in 127 pages without them ever seeming crowded or cluttered.

Church Alive! is designed for use in study groups. It is supremely a church book. To this end Cotterell includes a “Now What Do We Do?” section after each chapter to offer creative, practical applications of the chapter’s content. For example, he not only intones the importance of statistics, but he shows the reader how he can use them to discern important trends in his own community.

The book also enjoins caution. In a helpful appendix, Cotterell evaluates some of the more questionable features of the church-growth movement: the hom*ogeneous unit concept, the “seven vital signs” of a growing church, and the Engel Scale. He finds each wanting in one way or another and does not believe them vital to a thriving church-growth program.

Foundationally, Cotterell believes the primary task of the church is evangelism, with worship and community second. This order leads to ongoing growth. I am, however, acquainted with a church whose primary purpose is worship and community with evangelism an important second, but which has nevertheless increased numerically by 400 percent in three years. I think the question of primary church purpose is one for review.

Church Alive! was written by a churchman for church people. Its brevity, lucid style, and practical concerns make it an eminent contribution to the church-growth movement, worthy of both pastors’ and laypersons’ attention.

Where Is The Light In The Darkness?

The Books of Lights, by Chaim Potok (Knopf, 1981, 416 pp., $13.95), is reviewed by Ronnie Collier Stevens, pastor of Faith Evangelical Bible Church, Newport, North Carolina.

Chaim Potok is an author whose questions seem more relevant than the answers of other writers, although he insists on exploring the wisdom of Judaism after rejecting Israel’s raison d’être—for example, that she be a light to the nations through her Messiah. Because of his non-Christian presuppositions, his questions must remain perpetual enigmas. Having removed the signposts and exits from the maze of man’s existence, Potok proceeds to show the reader the terrible splendors of the maze itself.

In The Books of Lights, Potok regains the strength that waned in his last novel, In the Beginning. In this, his fifth work of fiction, he expounds the familiar themes. His characters are always Jewish, always Orthodox (or from Orthodox families), and always precocious.

Gershon Loran is a young rabbi who has been pressured into the army chaplaincy in postwar Korea. He is a devotee of the Kabbalah, the great compendium of Jewish mysticism. Just as complex as the Kabbalah is Gershon’s seminary roommate and subsequent colleague in the chaplaincy, Arthur Leiden. The book focuses on the human and theological riddles Gershon encounters in his friend and his religion.

Artistically, Potok is a novelist at the summit of his powers. His prose has always been luminous without being didactic, his characters more real than the people we actually meet. In this new work he adds comic dialogue and the exposition of dreams and visions to his already extensive repertoire, but Potok has again presented us with the tragically enchanting vagaries of a messianic religion with no Messiah.

There is a passage in the Kabbalah describing the ascent from one luminary to another, each so much more bright and powerful that the former seems dark in comparison. So must these lesser lights of Potok’s fiction seem dark when compared with that “true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

Briefly Noted

Basically Biographical. Very often the best way to learn is by looking at ideas incarnate, both good and bad. The following collection shows this well.

Banner of Truth has again made available J. C. Ryle’s stirring Five English Reformers. Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform (distributor: Humanities Press), edited by J. C. McLelland, is a scholarly work on an important thinker. Robert G. Tuttle’s John Wesley: His Life and Theology (Zondervan) can be obtained in a new paperback printing.

Volume I of Saint Therese of Lisieux: General Correspondence (Inst. of Carmelite Studies), translated by John Clarke, is a welcome piece; there is much to learn in it. Much of a different sort can be learned from The Life and Times of Grigori Rasputin (Coward, McCann and Geoghegan), by Alex DeJonge.

Several significant Roman Catholic works have appeared. George Tyrrell: In Search of Catholicism (Patmos), by D. G. Schultenover, goes a long way toward explaining this complicated man in a scholarly, one might almost say definitive, fashion. An American Experience of God (Paulist), by John Farina, looks at the spirituality of Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulist order. Padre Pio: The True Story (Our Sunday Visitor), by C. Bernard Ruffin, is a challenging story about a modern mystic. Monsignor Ligutti: The Pope’s County Agent (Univ. Press of America), by Raymond C. Miller, concerns a saint of a more practical sort. Georges Bernanos (distributor, Humanities Press), by John E. Cooke, is a well-done, scholarly work.

The National Mass Media Gold Brotherhood Award was given to My Brother, Bernhard (Intergroup Center Press), by Elsa Olson-Buckner. It recounts the significance of Bernhard Olson’s untiring efforts at interfaith understanding through the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

Two interesting works on A. W. Pink are now available: The Life of Arthur W. Pink (Banner of Truth), by Iain H. Murray, which is well done, but tends to excuse Pink’s irritable disposition; and Arthur W. Pink: Born to Write (Richbarry Press, Box 302, Columbia, S.C.), by Richard P. Belcher; it is less authoritative, but more balanced.

P. T. Forsyth (Pickwick), by Donald G. Miller, Browne Barr, and Robert S. Paul, is a valuable look at the man and the message and also contains the full text of Forsyth’s Positive Preaching and Modern Mind and a valuable Forsyth bibliography. Adventurer in Archaeology (St. Martin’s), by Jacquetta Hawkes, is a fascinating look at Mortimer Wheeler, that strange and delightful digger into the past.

Two popular preachers are remembered in: Preacher of the People: S. G. Shetler (1871–1942), by Sanford G. Shetler (Herald Press), and Smith Wigglesworth Remembered (Harrison House), by W. Hacking. Gustavo Gutierrez (John Knox), by Robert McAffee Brown, introduces the life and thought of this well-known liberation theologian. In Hugh Miller: Outrage and Order (Mainstream, Edinburgh), George Rosie offers a biography and selected writings of a brilliant but enigmatic Scotsman who achieved fame as geologist, poet, essayist, naturalist, paleontologist, and churchman. Also from Scotland is the Fasti (St. Andrews Press), edited by D. F. M. Macdonald, a record of Church of Scotland ministers between the years 1955 and 1975, giving an account of their families, careers, and writings.

A very nice biography of Belfast Union College’s professor of church history is Henry Cooke (Christian Journals, distributed through 760 Somerset Street W., Ottawa, Ont., Can.), by Finlay Holmes.

Some issues are like that! We were all ready to go to press with this one—some articles had already been sent to the printer, and even the editorial was ready to go. Then, one by one, our nicely laid plans began to disintegrate.

First, public interest over Billy Graham’s trip to Moscow was rising. Evangelicals were deeply concerned about potential dangers as well as the unbelievable opportunities. So we asked Billy if we might run his entire speech at the nuclear arms conference.

Then we remembered that this month marks the tenth anniversary of the Watergate break-in. But anniversaries can’t be shoved around at will; you have to take them when they come. And Chuck Colson could do an article for us. So another reshuffle devastated our layout.

And then Cameron Townsend died. We were going to run Philip Yancey’s article on Townsend later, but decided we would rather join the heavenly party (in absentia) now and rejoice with them at the homegoing of this dear saint and missionary statesman. If this was God’s timing, we figured we had better adjust to it.

Finally, the press coverage of Billy Graham’s Moscow trip made us angry enough to toss out the beautiful editorial on which I had worked so long and hard, and we sought instead to set the record straight.

You would never recognize the June-issue-that-used-to-be. Besides the regular columns, all you would find are the China articles and Congressman Dannemeyer’s call for “honesty in government.” It is important to remind ourselves on national holidays like July 4 that moral integrity lies at the foundation of Christian patriotism. We do not love “our country right or wrong.” We love it so much we want to do all we can to make it right. And in a nation like the United States, there is much we can do—like informing ourselves about candidates for public office and registering to vote.

We think you will find the articles on China absolutely fascinating. Mao Zedong and the “Gang of Four” turn out to be the most effective evangelists for the gospel in human history. How’s that for an exciting twist in the story of humankind?

Go to Camp!

Parents are beginning to panic at the thought of a long, hot summer with children who have “nothing to do.” The camping business has become sophisticated and specialized, no longer merely offering “Camp Heep-Fun” on beautiful Lake Frigid with swimming, sailing, softball, and spaghetti. The new breed of camp offers three hours of computer instruction a day, wrestling, judo and kung fu, ballet, tie-dying, and electronic games. Even with these exotic offerings, parents may expect some emotional regression after Junior has been at camp for several days. The independent 10-year-old may become a wet noodle snivelling over the phone, “Come and get me!” Above all else, camp directors fear this.

They also fear, according to a recent poll, that: bed wetting is becoming a contagious disease; a plague will break out; the cook will quit; the cook won’t quit; parents will come before “parents day”; or the campers will decide “they have more fun at Camp Whoopee.”

Letters home are a major headache because the wrong letters could close the camp. Many well-run camps now give campers a letter home with blanks for them to fill in:

Dear _______1,

I’m having a wonderful time at camp. What I like best is _______2. The food is really good, especially the _______3. Yesterday we went for a hike and saw _______4. My counselor’s name is _______5. S/he is good at _______6, and wants to become _______7. Please send _______8. Write and tell them I don’t have to _______9. I won the _______10 contest. I need money for _______11. Don’t forget to _______12.

A camper I know filled it in this way: 1. Mom, Dad and Sybil; 2. electronic games; 3. pancakes; 4. people swimming naked; 5. Tom; 6. jumping; 7. a ballet dancer; 8. my comic books; 9. memorize verses; 10. pretty-leaves collection; 11. calomine lotion; 13. feed Sybil two mice a day.

George

In spite of the trauma experienced by everyone, there is still nothing quite like a summer at Camp Heep-Fun. It’s the stuff of memories. Go to camp!

EUTYCHUS XI

Long-needed Dissent

“School Prayers: A Common Danger” [May 7] was a long-needed bit of dissent. The basic flaw with “voluntary” school prayer is the same as the problem with the old forced prayers. You can’t really make anyone pray; you can only make him or her say the words.

It is strange that many of the same Christians who want schools to encourage kids to pray often insist sex education is too personal for classrooms. After seeing what so many schools have done with sex education, why trust them with prayer?

JAMES D. DAVIS

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

True Article

I am writing in response to the article Diet, Discipline, and Discipleship [News, April 9].

Both the 3D program and the Community of Jesus have been the gift of God to my life and calling. I count myself greatly privileged and blessed to have received so much of the love and life of Jesus Christ through these two Christian ministries.

REV. ROBERT SHANNON

Suffern Presbyterian Church

Suffern, New York

When I read your article on the Community of Jesus, my heart hit rock bottom as I relived the terrible experiences my son had in that school. It has taken him several years to sort out his feelings, his faith, and his life generally.

Christians today are involving themselves in all kinds of groups. We get such questions as: Is it Christian? Am I involved in something cultic? There are also the Christians who look for educational alternatives for their children (as we did), and then become involved in an experience that wounds a life, and takes time to heal. Some Christian parents worry about the influence of secular public schools on their children. They need to be concerned about some schools that bear the name of Christian.

MRS. LUCIE A. MILNE

Dorchester, Ontario, Canada

Is There a Middle Ground?

I was delighted to see the article “Hidden Agenda Behind the Evolutionist/Creationist Debate” [April 23]. Dr. Olson touches on every major facet of the controversy and bears strong testimony to a perspective that is consistent with a regard for both authentic science and authentic evangelical, biblical, Christian faith.

RICHARD H. BUBE

Journal of the American

Scientific Affiliation

Stanford, Calif.

I have been concerned for some time about the untoward influence the “scientific creationists” have had on evangelicals. Their aggressive salesmanship has resulted in scientific creationism becoming orthodox doctrine in many conservative evangelical circles. This bears the bitterest fruit in the Christian school movement where scientific creationism is the litmus test for hiring science faculty and establishing curriculum. In this technological age, Christian young people cannot receive defective science education.

JAMES C. PARKS

Millersville, Pa.

You need a clearer definition of “creationist.” My dictionary preserves the essence of the word and dispels the overly restrictive formulation. Were the orderly arrangements obvious in physical and biological science derived by random processes in conformity with the properties intrinsic to matter and energy? Or were they derived by the input of order and design from a source outside the cosmos? Let’s keep the theological baggage attached to creationist theory to a minimum.

STEVEN A. AUSTIN

Institute for Creation Research

El Cajon, Calif.

Neither evolution nor creation can be proved by the scientific method (hypothesis empirically verified via repeated experiments). One’s conclusion regarding the question of origins is largely based on basic assumptions (God vs. no God, supernatural possible vs. supernatural impossible, etc.). Thus, the evolutionary theory is no more “scientific” than the creation theory—both are out of the realm of strict scientific investigation.

REV. ROBERT E. LOGAN

Community Baptist Church

Alta Loma, Calif.

Many scientists and theologians who are evangelicals attempt to come up with a compromise between evolutionary science and the Bible. Your editorial note and publication of the Marsden, but especially the Olson, article only encourage the development of a compromise position and raise questions about the validity of the Genesis record on origins.

ROBERT E. LANDERS

Westfield, N. J.

Let’s Get to the Root

Parents should be notified when their children receive birth control devices, even as they are notified whenever they receive any sort of medical treatment [News, April 23]. But parental notification deals simply with the effects, and not the root cause, of the problem. The cause is our popular sexual attitudes and practices, which reduce sex from communion of life and love within marriage to mutual masturbation and a means of voyeuristic gratification.

HAVEN B. Gow

Arlington Heights, Ill.

Process Theology or Philosophy?

Being trained in analytic philosophy, I must respond to “The Relativity Blitz and Process Philosophy” [April 23]. There are a number of analytic philosophers who are not antimetaphysics, the most notable being Alvin Plantinga. I perceive process philosophy as a minor branch that is weak and declining, not increasing. Process theology may be a trickle-down effect of process philosophy and, as such, is a real hazard to be faced. We must still be diligent in our apologetics. For such a purpose I believe analytic philosophy can be a valuable tool.

JOHN WILLIAM UNGER

Houston, Tex.

Wrong Fight?

Your editorial “Of Evolution and Creation and the Space Between” [May 7] prompts a suggestion that this debate may be the wrong fight.

Perhaps humans came from a billion-year evolution, perhaps from recent fiat creation. In either case, Jesus lived, died, and was resurrected to redeem mankind. Our salvation depends on his sacrifice; our faith rests on the historical witness to his life. Neither of these is affected by our biological antecedents (if any).

DEL COON

Midland, Mich.

Whose Responsibility?

Count me as one evangelical Christian who takes strong exception to the Coalition for Better Television’s call to boycott NBC and RCA [Editorial, April 23].

It is up to us, not NBC, to disinfect our own minds, to guide our children’s TV-viewing habits, and to turn the set off. It is up to us, not RCA, to convince others that there is more to life than rotting in front of the tube. It is up to us, not any secular institution, to spread Christian values.

MICHAEL LOPEZ

Wheaton, Ill.

Graham In Moscow: What Did He Really Say?

Billy Graham presented the claims of Christ to many who had never heard before and might never hear again.

What many hoped would be the climax to the life of an evangelist devoted to preaching the gospel has threatened instead to end in tragic rejection by friend and foe alike. Scarcely had Billy Graham arrived in Moscow last month when the quiet warnings of some people rapidly crescendoed to a roar of disapproval. Never before in all his career has the evangelist faced such condemnation from the American press and from evangelical leaders.

Of course, the jury is not yet in with the final word. But in the continuing furor, two quite different questions must be examined: (1) Should Graham have gone to Moscow; and (2) Did he betray his own cause by things he said or omitted saying while there?

These two questions are intertwined. If making this trip of necessity required such a betrayal, then the answer to the first question is: No, Graham should not have gone.

The evidence, however, does not warrant linking betrayal with his going. Many religious leaders—members of the National Council of Churches, extreme theological liberals, mainline liberals, Southern Baptists (President Bailey Smith, for example), independents, and parachurch leaders (such as Bill Bright)—have all at one time or another visited the Soviet Union. Many church leaders attended the same conference on nuclear war.

In the past, no one has objected to others undertaking such trips. We must conclude, therefore, that there was nothing inherently wrong or unwise about Billy Graham’s visit to Moscow. Given Graham’s goals, his priorities, and the promises made to him, we are convinced he chose rightly. Any evangelical with similar goals, priorities, and promises would have—and should have—made the same decision.

But what were his goals? And what assurances did he secure from the Soviets before he went?

First of all, Graham did not go blindly or naively. He realized he would be used. In one interview, he said: “I knew there were risks involved in this mission. I knew I risked being misunderstood and even exploited, but I considered the risk worth taking.”

Graham’S Goals

1. He wanted to preach the gospel publicly at the nuclear conference, at the Orthodox cathedral, at the Baptist church, and privately to Soviet political officials and church leaders.

This he was able to accomplish. In each of these places, Graham presented the claims of Christ to many who had never before heard them and might well never hear again.

2. He wished to plead the case for religious freedom in private meetings with high Soviet officials.

Graham was assured that he would have opportunity to plead the case for the “Siberian Six,” the unregistered evangelicals, the registered evangelical churches, and for freedom of religion in general. This request was honored. He did in fact plead their case in private, and the results are yet to be seen. While direct confrontation has sometimes been effective, it is not the only way to move the Soviets to action. It would seem the act of charity and of wisdom to allow Billy Graham to attempt nonconfrontational, behind-the-scenes diplomacy in an effort to win some relief for the people of Russia who are being persecuted for their religious convictions and practices.

Before he finally decided to make the trip, Graham consulted many world leaders: individuals who are highly knowledgeable about Soviet affairs—including such people as Henry Kissinger, the Pope, scholars, diplomats, and many evangelicals. Their advice, overwhelmingly, was that quiet, nonconfrontational diplomacy would be far more likely to secure concessions for the persecuted in that land than direct confrontation and mass-media exposure.

3. He wanted to warn of the tragic consequences of nuclear buildup and the armament race.

More and more, Graham has become convinced of the horror of nuclear warfare. He sincerely hoped to do something dramatic to bring the world to its senses so that tens of millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—will not be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. He is not a pacifist. He is not even a nuclear pacifist. He did not argue for any unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons. Rather, he warned of dire consequences to come if the nations continue their current nuclear buildup and prolong indefinitely the arms race. He called for a negotiated reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear armaments and other weapons of mass destruction. Such disarmament would have to be by mutual agreement, and carried out with adequate means of verification. It is a sane, feasible, and very necessary approach to the present arms race. It would protect the innocent, yet it would hold out possibilities for great relief to our entire planet, and especially the tax-burdened peoples of Russia, Western Europe, and the United States.

4. He hoped to be permitted eventually to hold preaching missions in large cities throughout the Soviet Union.

Right from the first, this goal did not loom as large for Graham as it did in the public news media. Yet, he is convinced that Soviet leaders are open to the possibility of such a mission. He is still convinced that there is at least a fifty-fifty chance that he will be able to do this. Though Graham is aware that there would be great risk in such an evangelistic tour, he also knows that so far his public and private messages have not been censored. He also knows that many Soviet religious leaders wish such a mission.

Certainly these are worthy goals. No fair-minded person—let alone any evangelical Christian—could object to them.

The Cost To Graham

But what price did Billy Graham pay to achieve his goals? Was the cost too great, as his critics claim? To gain his ends, did he have to sell his soul? Or, more accurately, did he have to compromise his own integrity as a Christian, as a man who loves justice and freedom, as one who prizes religious freedom above life itself, and who wishes to be a loyal American? What was the price tag for Graham?

He was free to preach his gospel message; he did not have to deny his own precious conviction of freedom. Undoubtedly it was assumed by both sides that he would not make open and public denunciations of Soviet policies, including its repression of political and religious freedoms.

But Graham was not silent about political and religious freedom. In private, he pled the case for the Siberian Six and for the 150 imprisoned pastors. In his public address, he boldly called upon the nations of the world to uphold rigorously the Helsinki agreements. He pled especially for full freedom of religious worship and practice, for without freedom and justice there will be no peace: genuine justice is the foundation for peace. (See the full text of Graham’s speech, beginning on page 20.) His one concession on this occasion was not to single out specially, and bluntly condemn, the Soviet Union for its lack of religious freedom.

All of this Graham clearly understood. Yet he thought he could accomplish more through quiet diplomacy and public preaching of the gospel than by openly denouncing the Soviet government for lack of religious freedom. Was that price too great? Billy Graham thought not. We agree. But the decision of others will depend on the relative values each assigns, on the one hand, to preaching the gospel, to quiet behind-the-scenes diplomacy on behalf of freedom, and to the necessity of warning against nuclear war and the armament race, and, on the other hand, to the opportunity to speak out publicly in condemnation of Soviet violations of political and religious freedom.

It should not surprise us that many people disagreed with Graham. One leading newsman, who reacted strongly against Graham, denounced him bitterly: “Graham was a dupe—a fool. Mouthing the gospel to Soviet leadership and privately urging them to act contrary to their basic convictions was an utter waste of time. Of course, he could preach his gospel and tell them in private to relax their restrictions against religion. But do you think Graham will convert those Communists or move them to lower their tyrannic grip? Of course not. Graham was a fool to think so. He was duped by them to fit into their propaganda and their Marxist program for nothing in return.”

That criticism sums it all up. But Billy Graham believes that God can and does use the frail human preaching of the gospel to transform people. It is not his business to preach the gospel only to likely candidates, but rather to every human creature. Moreover, Graham manages his life and ministry by the long look. The gospel is a time bomb. Working quietly through it, the Spirit of God can overturn nations and civilizations. The first Christians rarely mentioned slavery, the rights of women, the gladiatorial shows, and direct governmental involvement in moral rottenness. In time, though, the dynamite of the gospel penetrated the Roman empire and its tyranny.

Was Graham Right?

The question of whether Graham did the right thing in going to Moscow depends on how highly a person values the proclamation and the power of the gospel. Only time and eternity will reveal the full answer. But at this point we are not prepared to condemn him.

The second and equally crucial question concerns what Graham said in Moscow. Did he, in the give-and-take with the press, inadvertently and foolishly betray his own cause and the cause of freedom? In short, did he play his hand properly and adroitly at every point during his six days in Russia?

Billy Graham would be the last person to claim infallibility for himself. Reflecting upon the outcry that greeted him on his return, he commented: “I am an evangelist—not an expert in church-state relations in the Soviet Union. I regret that some of the statements I made regarding my visit to the Soviet Union were misconstrued and misinterpreted by the media. I care deeply about the plight and suffering of believers everywhere in the world where religious freedoms are restricted, including the Soviet Union. I sincerely regret any public statements which I made that might seem to indicate otherwise.”

But we insist that the record be set straight. By taking Graham’s words out of the context in which they were spoken and placing them in an alien context of their own concerns, some news people, consciously or even unconsciously, falsified many of Graham’s statements. They thus wrongly pictured him as betraying his own deepest convictions.

For example, Graham never advocated a U.S. retreat before Russian aggression. He warned of the awful consequences of the nuclear arms race and called for mutual, negotiated, verifiable disarmament. Likewise he did not ignore publicly the issue of political, social, and religious freedom. Rather, in a most pointed manner, and in a most public way, he called the nations of the world to justice and freedom. He did so in a manner that all understood to be a rebuke of Soviet failures in this regard.

He got no applause when he made this point at the Soviet congress. He was met with only a stony silence. Nor did he declare in answer to direct questions that Russia is a land of religious freedom. He conceded instead—something that implied the opposite—that there was more freedom there than he had thought before going, and more than in today’s China, though it is not like the United States. And it is hardly an affirmation of approval to state that a political leader is not so bad as Hitler.

Neither did Graham say there is more religious freedom in Russia than in Great Britain. In a context not of religious freedom but of church-state structures, he pointed out that Britain, unlike Russia or the United States, has a state church of which the queen is the titular head. When someone called to his attention how his words had been interpreted, his response was: “Ridiculous! There is no comparison between the religious freedom in Britain and that in Soviet Russia.”

One of the most disturbing comments recorded in the news was Graham’s statement, “I have seen no religious persecution during my stay in Russia.” Out of context this sounded like a blanket endorsem*nt of religious freedom in Russia. Yet Graham’s answer was a reply to a very explicit question: “Have you personally witnessed any religious persecution while you have been here?” Graham later expressed deep regret that he had not cited the Siberian Six. He added: “I recognize that there is a difference between religious fervor, which is great in the Soviet Union, and religious freedom, which is severely restricted. The Soviet Union is an officially atheistic state, and many believers pay a price to follow Christ.”

The same can be said for his point that a Christian ought to work hard, be a better citizen, and obey his government. Scripture says all of this. But Graham himself has acknowledged that if he had the chance to do it over again, he would not have referred to these biblical truths in a context where they were liable to be interpreted far beyond what the Scripture passages really mean.

All of us can remember times when we should have said more about something, or less, or even differently. But we who sit on the sidelines in this classic struggle should be the last to condemn Billy Graham for lack of foresight in offhand comments to one or more newsmen. We should judge him on the basis of his stated goals and the main thrust of his formal messages. An ocean voyage does not make a missionary, and we should not expect a trip to Moscow to make an instant diplomat. After all, Billy Graham is an evangelist.

An even more obvious lesson to be learned from the news coverage of Graham’s trip to Moscow is that evangelicals dare not trust the secular news media’s coverage of religious news (see News, pp. 46–48, for further illustrations of the dilemma this poses). On the basis of initial reports, many evangelicals were dismayed at what they believed Graham said. Others became angry and violently attacked Graham for betraying the persecuted people of Russia. Among evangelical leaders, Jerry Falwell and Charles Colson stood out for their temperate response. Perhaps their own experiences with a press not careful to get things straight have taught them to be more understanding.

Finally, those of us who believe the gospel of Jesus Christ is the dynamite of God, able to blast away sin and the sinful structures of an unjust society, may indeed regret any slips and the unfortunate infelicities of unplanned spontaneous comments. But we rejoice at the opportunity to preach the gospel—actual and potential—with the hope that the power of the gospel can change the hearts of men, as well as the evil structures of even a Communist society.

An Employment Agency In Heaven?

What do you do when you are out of a job?

You apply for unemployment compensation.

You read the want ads.

You pound the pavements.

You follow up tips from friends.

You cut back on the frills.

You don’t eat as much meat.

You get your shoes half-soled—again.

You try not to let the kids know you’re worried.

Maybe you pray. Why not?

The paycheck seems far removed from God—until it’s gone. But the Bible says God was there all the time. Note this from the Book of Acts: “But [God] has always given proof of himself by the good things he does … he gives you food and fills your hearts with happiness” (14:17, TEV).

God cares. He is pleased when his children ask for jobs. “Lord, help me to trust you when I’m out of work. Send me the job I need. Thank you.”

As reports of Wycliffe’s accomplishments rolled in, he would listen with gratitude—then quickly return to the goal that eluded him.

In remote Papua New Guinea, a barefoot Iwam tribesman wearing a bone through his nose and a Hoosier T-shirt imprinted with a map of Indian steps up to computer typesetting terminal. In the Ecuadorian jungle, an Auca Indian, once a ferocious headhunter and now a polio victim, hobbles along a sun-dappled jungle trail with the incongruous help of an aluminum walker. And in Peru, a young Piro Indian who has never seen a car nor held a pencil boards a float plane for the first day of school. He will study first-grade reading for three months, then return to teach the rest of his tribe, always keeping just one semester ahead of his students.

Bizarre scenes like these are the fallout from civilization’s collision with the primitive world. For the past 46 years, the U.S.-based organization known overseas and in the scientific community as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, founded by the late Cameron Townsend, pioneered in the discovery and education of neglected peoples like these. With its sister organization in the U.S., chartered as Wycliffe Bible Translators, “Uncle Cam” Townsend’s linguistic descendants comprise a staff of over 4,200, scattered across the globe with a singular goal: to translate the Bible into every spoken language. It was the lifelong vision of that remarkable man, who died last April at the age of 85.

Working against great odds, Townsend founded and led the movement that became a worldwide phenomenon. (For an in-depth treatment of Wycliffe and SIL, see CT, Feb. 19, 1982). His life spanned a century that has seen most cultures, including the advanced West, undergo tumultuous changes. As a teen-ager, Townsend pedaled his bicycle past the level fields where aviation inventor Glenn Martin was trying to master the secrets of flight; communism was merely a theory debated in coffeehouses. The world consisted of a few colonial empires, and hundreds of different tribes and languages in the Americas and Asia were unknown.

Cam Townsend was a 131-pound boy of 21 when he took his first steamer trip to Guatemala in 1917. To his surprise, a National Guard captain had agreed to his unusual request for dismissal, saying, “You’ll do a lot more good selling Bibles in Central America than you would shooting Germans in France.” With a $25 monthly salary and a supply of Spanish Bibles, the skinny young kid arrived in Guatemala. A veteran missionary, sizing up Townsend as he arrived, predicted, “He’ll never last two months.”

On foot and muleback, Townsend tramped the rural trails of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Sometimes the jungle would grow so ominously dense that he would hike with his hat bobbing on a long stick held out before him—to fool the jaguars. He survived marauding hordes of Central American insects, and even learned to eat such delicacies as bugs, worms, and fried tadpoles.

Townsend could shake aside the momentary hardships of the jungle. But one overwhelming impression haunted him as he traveled: the broken spirit of the Indians. It seemed to him that Indians were treated almost as beasts of burden. Many of them he passed on the trail carried 100-pound loads strapped to their foreheads. Drunkenness and a plantation-style system approaching slavery kept them in perpetual poverty.

Having studied the history of the region, Townsend knew their ancient culture had rivaled that of contemporary Egypt or Rome. Yet, over the years of conquest, its proud tradition of mathematics, astronomy, and hieroglyphics had eroded away. Only one link remained between that mighty culture and its downtrodden descendants: a curious, complex language. He was fascinated by its melodic quality and strange-sounding consonants. But language, too, was under the threat of being absorbed. It had never been written down, and authorities at that time were insisting that all education must be conducted in Spanish.

Townsend kept running into the language barrier as he attempted to sell his Bibles. Were Spanish Bibles really that worthwhile, he wondered, when 60 percent of the Guatemalans spoke another language and could not read? At last, the probing question of a Cakchiquel Indian crystallized his frustrations and promptly launched a new career. “If your God is so smart,” asked the Indian, “why doesn’t he speak Cakchiquel?” Townsend had no answer; he knew that most meaningful concepts were fully communicated only in a person’s mother tongue.

Two hundred thousand Cakchiquels lived in Guatemala. Townsend decided to learn their language, devise an alphabet, and translate the New Testament. Friends scoffed at his idea, “Don’t be a fool. Those Indians aren’t worth what it would take to learn their outlandish language and translate the Bible for them. They can’t read anyhow. Let them learn Spanish.” But Townsend chose one small Cakchiquel village, San Antonio, and built a house of logs and corn stalks for $70.

He had undertaken a formidable task. With no linguistic training, not even a college degree, he tried to comprehend the subtleties of Cakchiquel. He quickly learned that its grammar, like that of many “primitive” languages, was immensely complex. One verb stem could take on as many as 100,000 different forms.

After 12 years of arduous labor, however, Cam Townsend presented the first published book in Cakchiquel, the New Testament, to the president of Guatemala. In his spare time he had also founded five schools, a clinic, a printing press, an orphanage, and a coffee cooperative. The Bible had its own power: churches sprang up spontaneously and arcane customs of witchcraft gradually disappeared.

Though villagers begged him to stay in San Antonio, a spark had been lit inside him and he knew he must move on to repeat the process in another village, another language. While recuperating from tuberculosis, he pondered the fact that at least 500 tribes—maybe even 1,000—in South and Central America had no written language. Mastering one had taken him more than a decade; to make a dent in that total, he badly needed help.

In 1934 Townsend convened the first official training program of what would become the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Classes were held at a rustic Arkansas farmhouse rented for $5 a month, and a grand total of two students showed up. The next year the student body doubled, and the advance of Wycliffe Bible Translators was under way.

Townsend selected Mexico as his next frontier—an improbable choice because of the revolutionary-minded government’s severe restrictions on religious activity. Patiently and persistently Townsend called on government officials and described how his band of linguists would commit themselves to nonsectarian translation and literacy training. They could only help the peasant Indian population, he insisted. His sincere zeal, and the obvious side benefits of medical and agricultural assistance, convinced Mexican officials to sign an official contract with SIL. Mexico’s reformist president, Lázaro Cárdenas, became one of his closest friends.

The end of World War II dramatically expanded America’s international involvement and opened up new vistas and opportunities. With its membership climbing past 100, Wycliffe sent representatives to Peru, Ecuador, the Philippines, and Guatemala. Townsend himself moved to Peru to supervise the work there.

As Wycliffe linguists penetrated remote tribes, accounts of amazing transformations began to surface. Townsend was severely criticized for sending two single women in a canoe to live with the Shapra tribe of head shrinkers. But after they had lived there several years, translating, Chief Tariri converted to Christianity and gave up his practice of killing (he had a collection of the shrunken heads of 30 of his victims). Tariri later said that he would have killed any male missionaries on sight, but the two women seemed harmless. He assumed they had come to look for husbands.

In the late 1950s, Rachel Saint, a Wycliffe missionary, made the first successful long-term contact with the murderous Aucas in Ecuador. In 1956 they had killed her brother and four other missionaries in the slaughter that shocked the world. Now Rachel was living in an Auca hut, learning their language in order to translate the Bible into Auca.

As Wycliffe grew, Cam Townsend found himself in a management role. How could he overcome the logistical problems of an organization expanding at a breathless pace? He removed one of the biggest hazards of isolated jungle settings by forming a division to specialize in airplanes and radios—after surviving the crash of a plane piloted by an inexperienced national. Suddenly, instead of 25-day canoe trips through crocodile-infested rivers, linguists could reach their destinations in three hours’ flight time. Medical emergencies posed less of a threat: missionaries, linguists, nuns, priests, and Indians all began to summon emergency flights by radio.

No logistical problem loomed larger, however, than the sheer vastness of the translation challenge. Working off his initial assumption of 500 to 1,000 new languages, Townsend had calculated the need for hundreds of dedicated volunteers to give a lifetime of service. He had always believed the job could be finished during his life—but as he approached 60 years of age, he started hearing reports of newly discovered languages in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. He sat stunned as an Australian unrolled maps and charts that proved the existence of over 1,000 more languages in that region alone.

At the age when most people begin thinking about retirement, Townsend slowly adjusted to the idea that the job was twice as big as he had thought. He gulped hard, prayed harder, and adopted a new slogan: “2,000 tongues to go.” Even that projection proved short-sighted. As the Wycliffe organization continued to grow, linguistic survey teams compiled languages by the score: 158 in Russia, 312 in India, 1,620 spread across Africa. In all, a staggering total of 5,171 are known to exist today. (For perspective, consider that all the known languages of Europe, 63, comprise just over 1 percent of that total.) By the time of Townsend’s death last April, the slogan needed to be revised to “3,000 tongues to go.”

Linguists still follow the same basic pattern Townsend devised out of ignorance in his youth. For the first few months they listen with trained ears and record all the different sounds—a major endeavor since English uses only 50 of 300 possible articulations. Townsend struggled with four different glottal sounds for the letter “k” in Cakchiquel. Other languages rely on sounds made with the mouth closed; one SIL linguist can “say” 140 words with his mouth closed.

Once the sounds and grammar of a language are mastered, a linguist faces translation hurdles. In Guatemala, Townsend had to figure out how to explain concepts like desert and snow to people who had always lived in a jungle. The Eskimo-Inupiat language offered 60 options for the word snow, but words for horse and camel were nonexistent. SIL translators rendered horse as “like a big caribou” and swine as “queer caribous.” Camel became simply “humpbacked carrier.” (TV has now acquainted most Eskimos with these domesticated animals, and their Bible has been updated.)

On the whole, though, Townsend and his linguists found that biblical concepts and scenes transfer more easily into primitive cultures than to modern ones. “After all,” he once said, “Jesus spoke to first-century Jewish peasants, and his parables have a striking immediacy to people who still tend sheep, prune grapevines, and sow seeds.”

The modern SIL linguist relies on many tools unavailable to Townsend in Guatemala: extensive training, computer typesetting, translation consultant teams, and concentrated workshops away from the tribe. Yet it still takes 15 years, on the average, for a two-person team to produce a grammar, dictionary, and New Testament in a new language. Dr. Kenneth Pike, president emeritus of SIL, looks back with amazement on Cam Townsend’s initial success with Cakchiquel—with absolutely no training.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Bible had been translated into 67 languages. Today, there are portions of it in 1,700 languages, while translation work progresses in another 1,200. Linguists take on a new language every 13 days.

The designation “uncle” fit Cam Townsend well because of his easygoing, avuncular nature. Despite his accomplishments in rallying a small army of linguists, he broke every stereotype of an effective manager. Of medium height, covered with freckles and not particularly concerned about clothing styles, he spoke slowly and deliberately in a soft voice that seldom varied in tone or volume. He never seemed to be in a hurry, whether talking with a secretary at the Wycliffe center in North Carolina or with the president of a country.

“If I had seen him in a crowd of a dozen people,” says a close associate, “I’d have picked him as the least likely leader among them. He looked more like a shy farmer.” Raised on a farm near Redlands, California, Townsend carried to his dying day many of the habits he acquired while growing up amid poverty: oatmeal porridge every morning, a raw egg in his coffee for protein, and a good night’s sleep on a hard floor.

His father was deaf, and growing up in that household taught him a reverential respect for the written word. It was the only way to communicate in his family, and it impressed on Cam Townsend the need to share the magic of literacy. His father often read aloud, ending every breakfast meal with a few chapters from the Bible.

As a teen-ager, Townsend would rise long before dawn, milk the cows, and work in a soda shop from 6 o’clock until 9 before heading to school. It was that kind of dogged determination, more than anything, that brought him success. Throughout his life, he singlemindedly pursued one goal: to make it possible for every person alive to read the Bible. He believed there was no higher calling.

In his quest, Townsend remained unaffected by the usual distinctions that divide people. He slept in jungle hammocks and government palaces, and felt equally comfortable in both. He patiently listened to shy Indian peasants stammer out their language, and also dined with the presidents of 39 republics. Political labels like liberal and conservative meant little to him: he had close friendships with Mexican radicals, Russian officials, and the heads of rigid military dictatorships.

In the months before his death, Townsend came under sharp fire for cooperating with authoritarian, even oppressive, regimes. He listened to those critics with confusion and dismay. “But don’t they realize we are the guest of those governments?” he asked. “We are there to serve the neglected people—to give them the Bible and to improve their lives. If we foment unrest, we will be asked to leave immediately, and then who will help them?”

Although an anomaly in the realm of power politics, Townsend’s unassuming, gracious style melted down barriers of governmental bureaucracy. He sometimes spent up to three hours waiting outside a politician’s office, sitting quietly, never bringing a book to read (that “would not be respectful”). He won over dissenters with his disarmingly friendly style, a quick apology for any slight misunderstanding, or a simple act of thoughtfulness. In Mexico, Uncle Cam would be sure to take a fresh-picked head of lettuce to urbane government officials.

Along the way, the organization he founded swelled to a staff of 4,255, making it the largest nondenominational Christian mission in the world.

Known for tackling unlikely, even impossible, assignments, Townsend took up in his seventies and eighties one of his most difficult challenges: to get the Bible into the languages of the Soviet Union. To the end, he still wandered the grounds of his North Carolina home, studying confusing Russian noun endings, struggling to enhance communication with his contacts in the USSR. With his wife Elaine, he had made 11 trips there, and eaten meals in 105 different Soviet homes. Somehow Townsend talked the distinguished (and officially atheistic) Academy of Sciences into translating the biblical book of I John into five Soviet languages that previously had no Scripture.

Townsend’s pace slowed in his old age, though he still managed several overseas trips each year to visit his friends in Latin America and to open up new frontiers. As impressive statistics on Wycliffe’s accomplishments rolled in, he would listen with gratitude, but quickly return to the goal that eluded him. Even after all his efforts, one fact haunted him: half of all language groups had no access to the Bible. His dream, to extend the Bible to all people in his own lifetime, was finally unfulfilled.

Last year Wycliffe sponsored a Golden Jubilee celebration honoring Townsend’s work and the fiftieth anniversary of the Cakchiquel translation. The tribute came in the midst of a tumultuous year, as Wycliffe was reeling from the shock of Chet Bitterman’s death. For many, the anniversary offered a time to pause and reflect on the original vision that first burned inside Cam Townsend so long ago. Townsend himself had become something of a legend, despite his mild-mannered demeanor; already Bible colleges were offering courses on three great mission leaders—William Carey, Hudson Taylor, and Cameron Townsend. And yet he told the crowd gathered there that what mattered most to him was not what had been accomplished, but what still lay untouched. Half the languages of the world had no portion of the Bible.

Townsend’s health was failing badly. It was obvious to everyone there, and to him, that he would not live to see his dream realized. The problems were too complex, the task too enormous. Less than a year later, on April 24, 1982, Uncle Cam passed away. Leukemia had ravaged his already weakened body. The news spread on wire services and shortwave relays around the world, and condolences soon poured in from heads of state, Christian leaders, linguists, and government officials.

Also, tucked away in remote hamlets, among people with strange names like Iwam, Auca, and Piro, several thousand people turned for a moment to recall the legacy Uncle Cam had left them before resuming their efforts to see that his dream does not die.

Philip Yancey, publisher of Campus Life magazine, is a frequently published writer and author. He wrote this article on assignment for Reader’s Digest, which granted permission for ct to publish it in advance as a memorial.