Page 5703 – Christianity Today (2024)

In a sense, Olafs Bruvers may be more representative of today’s Eastern European situation than those whose names are often in the headlines. Unlike Andrei Sakharov, Georgi Vins, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he is unknown to all but a few people outside his country.

Until he was expelled from his native Latvia late last year, Bruvers had never thought of leaving. He is thirty and has always lived under Communist domination.

He finds it hard to understand why some people might consider him a celebrity. He was in Washington last month to speak to a congressional committee studying the Eastern European scene. In an interview with Christianity Today, he made no claims to being anything other than an ordinary Christian, and his manner was somewhat shy and self-effacing.

Bruvers underscored his conviction that he is representative of many Latvians (and other Eastern Europeans) in his response to a question about the youth group he left behind. The Christian students in Riga will have no difficulty finding leadership, he told a reporter, since many have been willing to step forward as Christians in recent months. Before being deported in September, the slim, bearded young man led a group in Latvia’s capital city.

“I miss them,” he acknowledged, “but they don’t miss me.” Asked to explain the second part of that statement, Bruvers said his friends closed ranks when he left, added to their number, and developed new leaders. They have gotten along well without him. A general spiritual resurgence now sweeping the little Baltic state is “almost like a miracle,” he declared. More than at any previous time in his experience, young people are searching for spiritual freedom. Having long been surfeited with lies, he said, they are now looking for truth, he suggested.

Asked about life in the U.S.S.R. (of which Latvia is now one of the “socialist republics”), the exile said people are speaking out more than ever before. Students respond critically to professors, and anti-Soviet literature is distributed. Young people openly wear buttons (some handmade) that proclaim “I Love Jesus” or “Jesus Loves Me.”

Baptist churches are now crowded, according to Bruvers, and young people are well represented. Throughout Latvia the number of Baptist church members had dropped to about half the pre-war total, but that erosion has now been checked. Roman Catholicism too is attracting open identification among many Latvians, he reported. Other denominations are experiencing some new interest also but not as much as the Baptists and Catholics, he said.

While there is a steadily increasing amount of religious expression in the Soviet Union, it is not without its hazards. Bruvers cited the case of his friend Gunars Lagzdins as an example. Lagzdins is a Baptist minister who makes his living as a chemical engineer. Bruvers described him as a beloved pastor, a very attractive personality, and a man who has influenced many young people. He lives and works in Riga, but his parish is in the interior city of Jaunjelgava, southeast of Riga.

Despite harassment of various kinds from Soviet authorities, Lagzdins has continued his ministry, according to Bruvers. The state department of religious cults took away his official permission to preach late in 1973. He was accused of spreading anti-Soviet lies in his sermons. He has also had to face charges of black-marketeering and inciting to revolt. The one thing that has not been taken away from him is his engineering job. Bruvers explained his friend’s continued employment by saying that he is such an expert in his field at the Academy of Sciences that they could not afford to do without him. While studying architecture, Bruvers worked as a laboratory assistant in one of the institutes were Lagzdins is employed. The young exile believes that publicity for such spiritual leaders in the Soviet Union is helpful in the current state of affairs.

Communist authorities are now keenly sensitive to news in the Western media about dissidents within their borders. World attention is focused on their compliance with provisions of the Helsinki accords on European security and cooperation. A performance review is scheduled to be held in Belgrade in June.

“This may be the beginning of the end,” Bruvers declared. He doesn’t see how the Soviets can stop what appears to him to be a rolling tide of freedom. People all over Eastern Europe are pressing for Western recognition of their plight in light of the Helsinki guarantees.

Bruvers still is not sure why he, along with most of his immediate family, was expelled. The provocation used by the authorities was linked to the possibility that he was preparing to inform Western sources of internal problems. He was arrested for giving out a questionnaire to fellow students. He and his younger brother, a medical student, had drawn up the single-page form, asking mostly about leisure-time activities but also one question about “the situation in our country.” This question, the prosecutor at Bruvers’s ten day trial said, was framed in an “anti-Soviet way.”

The brothers had collected about 175 forms and had done nothing to announce the results when police confiscated the papers, he said. The fact that the prosecutor claimed Bruvers planned to send the poll out of the country was enough to convict him, he explained. But instead of carrying out his jail sentence, the authorities deported him.

While disclaiming that he had any important leadership role among Christian youth, Bruvers thinks his work among young people was the primary reason he was deported. The group that met at the University of Riga and around the city had frequent contact with groups in other parts of the country as well as in other Soviet states. There were virtually no contacts with Christian or student groups outside the Soviet Union, however, he maintained.

He did have one sister in the West, and this could have been a factor in the authorities’ decision to oust other members of the Bruvers family. His sister is the wife of a Latvian pastor, Janis Smits, who left the country last May. While Smits wanted to leave, his brother-in-law and other members of the Bruvers family were not seeking to emigrate. The decision to let Smits go was tied to a plan to get rid of the other members of the family, according to Bruvers. The parents are considered undesirables, it was brought out at the trial, since they “polluted” their children with religion. They are now looking for a place to settle. They were granted temporary asylum in West Germany and are living in Bonn.

Even though Bruvers is still puzzled about why he received so much attention from the authorities, he is not unaccustomed to being singled out. Because of his Christian family background, he was the target of verbal abuse in school before he was twelve years old. Teachers spoke of his “backwardness of belief” and of his failure to enroll in the Young Pioneers organization. In high school, because he was not a member of the Communist youth organization for that age group, his class was prevented from taking a long-anticipated trip to Leningrad. Teachers were under pressure to report 100 per cent enrollment, but he said fellow students defended his right not to join. Only classes with 100 per cent enrollments took the trip.

At seventeen he wanted to be baptized. Because the law did not permit public baptisms of believers under eighteen, he was baptized in secret. At eighteen he was drafted into the Soviet army and sent to a base on the Black Sea. Fellow soldiers there, impressed with his spirit and work attitudes, nominated him for secretary of the Communist party organization within their unit. Not being a member of the party, he declined the “honor.” He said his commander found out that he was a Christian because of the incident but did not send him to “re-education” camp because he wanted to keep him there as his chauffeur.

Official harassment, as much of a problem as it is, is not the chief obstacle to Christian work in Latvia, Bruvers said; what is worse is the shortage of Bibles and Christian literature. Most of the young people he knows do have smuggled Bibles, he acknowledged. He also noted that many people are hearing Western religious and cultural programs on radio.

Along with the well-known dissident leaders of Eastern Europe, the young Latvian exile believes that free-world attention to the human-rights situation there can do more for them than anything else now. While the American signing of the Helsinki accords was criticized by some exiles and anti-Communist groups, the dissidents are now using it as a tool for pointing out their plight. A report in the February 14 issue of U.S. News and World Report said: “The Helsinki accords have become a Pandora’s box of trouble for Russia and its Eastern European allies. In country after country, citizens are taking provisions of the agreement literally and pressing for more liberties.”

Campaign pledges on the human-rights issue made by candidate Jimmy Carter last year are being taken literally now that he is in office. Groups throughout Eastern Europe have been quick to pick up the statements and to inform him of their problems. Within a week of the inauguration, the Carter administration issued two statements aimed at the Eastern-bloc human-rights situation. The Kremlin promptly protested interference in internal affairs and retaliated against Western journalists and some dissidents.

A significant move in the Kremlin’s crackdown was the arrest of physicist Yuri Orlov, chairman of the unofficial committee to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki accords. His panel had been the first to bring together concerns of many Soviet dissidents—political, artistic, intellectual, and religious.

There were also new attempts at repression of dissent in the satellite states. Party pressure has been felt particularly in Czechoslovakia, where a manifesto called “Charter 77” was issued by some 500 prominent persons from all walks of life. Several clergymen are among the signers. Czech religious freedom, says the document, “is continually curtailed by official action.”

Official church bodies found after the charter was published that they were expected to denounce it. The Communist daily Rude Pravo promptly reported that the Roman Catholic bishops dissociated themselves from the manifesto, identifying it as a disturbance in “the life in our homeland.” The bishops’ lay employees came on stronger, according to the report in the daily, condemning the document as the product of a “group of shipwrecked individuals.” Seventh-day Adventist leaders were quoted in the Prague ecumenical weekly Kostnicke Jiskry as saying they “do not agree with the signatories of Charter 77 because their objectives and methods are not acceptable to us believers.”

According to Kostnicke Jiskry, the Synod Council of the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren learned of the existence of Charter 77 by reading the daily papers. “None of its members or officials was asked to sign that proclamation, and none of them has signed it,” said the council. Blahoslav Hruby, a Czech exile who edits Religion in Communist Dominated Areas from New York, said it was significant that among the signers of Charter 77 were some former leaders of the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren who had been disciples of the late J. L. Hromadka. Hromadka had promoted Christian-Marxist dialogue and led the Christian Peace Conference until he spoke out against the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

But whether for a prominent Czech, or a Russian, or for a relative unknown like Bruvers, dissent causes problems. The problems extend to the person’s family and friends as well.

In the February 21 issue of Time, the wife of exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “A sentence for a political offense is always a sentence against the offender’s family. Persecution against them starts immediately. Not only has the family lost its main provider but often the wife also loses her job. She has to feed her children, but she cannot find another job because there is but one employer—the state.”

Whatever the risks, the dissenters are gambling on getting attention for their cause before the Belgrade conference in June.

Americans United: Advocacy Role

Tax-exemption privileges and abuses in the religious community, deprogramming from the cults and freedom of belief, the teaching of Transcendental Meditation in public schools or with government money, the Roman Catholic “lobby” pressing for constitutional change that would prohibit abortions, rights of Sabbatarians who are employed to worship on Saturdays, taxes or utility rates to support religious beliefs or institutions not of the choosing of the tax payer or utility user, foreign aid put in the hands of sectarian groups that sometimes use it to proselytize, the Internal Revenue Service declaring what is or is not an integral part of a church or what its mission is.

These topics were seen as the most crucial for the preservation of religious freedom and the separation of church and state by delegates attending the twenty-ninth National Conference on Church and State last month in San Diego. The two-day convention marked the thirtieth anniversary of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the widely influential organization whose sole objective is to maintain the First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom.

Pronouncements and court cases initiated by Americans United (AU has won 90 per cent of its cases in court during the past decade) have sometimes endeared the organization to segments of the evangelical community; at other times conservatives have been infuriated or alienated by AU’s “liberal” position on such issues as abortion and prayer in the public schools.

But throughout, the organization, whose headquarters is in Silver Spring, Maryland, has attempted to keep its focus on church-state entanglements rather than on the theological aspects of the groups or practices under its scrutiny.

“Americans United is the advocate and not the adversary of the religious community,” Andrew Leigh Gunn, AU’s executive director, told about 100 persons attending the convention’s closing banquet. “Because of church-state separation, the church is stronger here than anywhere else in the world.”

Deprogramming was the hottest issue on the conference agenda—and one of the few on which opposing views were freely heard. A panel discussion generated such angry exchanges and accusations that moderator Edd Doerr, editor of AU’s magazine, Church & State, was at times barely able to keep order.

Deprogramming is generally acknowledged to have begun in San Diego in 1971, when Ted Patrick seized and held a member of a sect group in the same hotel where last month’s AU convention was held.

In an opening talk on the subject, Sharon Worthing, a law student at Fordham who was unsuccessfully “deprogrammed,” told of joining the New Testament Missionary Fellowship when she was a freshman at Yale. “To the extent that deprogramming requires the law to make value judgments as to the merit of particular religious beliefs and affiliations, it is treading on constitutionally impermissible ground,” the short, plainly dressed girl said. She added that the danger is that “when government acquires jurisdiction over the area of belief, it will use this … to suppress dissent and to deprive its citizens of true freedom. Ideas are to be tested by the mechanism of the marketplace, not by state officials who decide which beliefs and affiliations are healthy and right for citizens and which are not.”

In rebuttal, William Rambur, a retired U.S. Navy lieutenant commander who heads the Citizens Freedom Foundation in Chula Vista, declared: “We believe we are rescuing, not kidnapping” persons involved in the so-called new religions. Rambur said his group alone receives twenty-five to thirty phone calls and letters daily from distraught parents seeking to get sons or daughters out of cults (his daughter is in the Children of God).

In another presentation, speakers assailed the Roman Catholic hierarchy for allegedly waging an all-out campaign for pro-life, anti-abortion legislation that is contrary to the doctrine of church-state separation. But California congressman James Corman, a United Methodist who was a stalwart in the 1971 drive to defeat the reinstitution of prayer in the public schools, predicted that a threatened campaign to call a constitutional convention to revise the Constitution to outlaw abortion “will never come off.”

At the convention’s close, Calvin W. Didier, pastor of House of Hope Presbyterian Church, St. Paul, was named president of AU, succeeding Jimmy R. Allen, pastor of the First Baptist Church of San Antonio.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Amy’s Immersion

“I think it is terrible,” said a woman at Washington’s First Baptist Church, “how Amy’s baptism has been played up by the press.”

Terrible or not, the baptism of President and Mrs. Carter’s nine-year-old daughter provided Baptists an unprecedented opportunity to explain to the world what the ordinance means to them. The ceremony last month was dutifully reported by the White House press corps just as any other public event of the First Family would be reported. Journalists had some trouble handling details, however, since some of them had never before seen a believer immersed.

W. Barry Garrett, Washington bureau chief for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service, observed the work of the press pool assigned to report to White House correspondents. “It is enough to make us Baptists cringe to know that we have failed so miserably to communicate some of our most precious beliefs,” he lamented. “When you combine the baptism of a President’s daughter with baptism by immersion, you have a scenario that sends the non-initiated into a quandary.”

The pool reporters apparently got their questions answered, however, since the articles carried by news services and major papers were generally straightforward accounts of the ceremony.

Baptized at the same service was a sixteen-year-old girl from Cameroon. A member of the congregation was moved to send a note to reporters. It said, “Surely, this is a beautiful and loving witness of the love of God which transcends class, color, culture.”

The baptism took place the third Sunday after the Carters moved to Washington. That afternoon, the President took his family to see an opera.

Religion in the Cabinet

The only Roman Catholic in the Carter cabinet says the administration plans to stress alternatives to abortion such as family-planning services, sex education, and better programs for unwed mothers. Joseph Califano, testifying before a Senate committee considering his qualifications to be Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, expressed his opposition to federal aid for abortion. He added, however, that he does not favor a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion.

“I personally believe abortion is wrong,” said Califano, who was subsequently confirmed and sworn in as head of HEW. “I believe that federal funds should not be used for providing abortions.” Congress last year passed a law barring Medicaid payments for abortions, but it could be nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although Califano is the only Catholic actually in the Cabinet, two other top Carter appointees are Roman Catholics: Charles L. Schultze, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor.

Four of President Carter’s ranking appointees are Episcopalians, and three are Lutherans. Three are of Jewish extraction, but two of these are converts to Christianity.

The Lutherans are Robert S. Bergland, secretary of agriculture, Cecil D. Andrus, secretary of interior, and James R. Schlesinger, energy chief.

Schlesinger was reared in a conservative Jewish home but embraced Christian beliefs at the age of twenty-one while on a trip to Europe. W. Michael Blumenthal, treasury secretary, also had Jewish parents but has been affiliated with a Presbyterian church. Labor Secretary Ray Marshall is also a Presbyterian, a ruling elder.

Defense Secretary Harold Brown is Jewish, but currently has no religious membership.

The Episcopalians are Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Secretary of Commerce Juanita Kreps, Secretary of Transportation Brock Adams, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia Roberts Harris.

Attorney General Griffin Bell is the only Baptist in the Cabinet. The closest United Methodist to the president is Thomas B. Lance, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Andrew Young, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was the first clergyman to be given a high-level appointment by Carter. He is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ.

Top White House staff personnel have been urged in a handwritten memorandum from the President to spend “an adequate amount of time” with their families to assure a stable family life. Written on White House stationery and signed “J. Carter,” the memorandum says:

“I am concerned about the family lives of all of you. I want you to spend an adequate amount of time with your husbands, wives, and children, and also to involve them as much as possible in our White House life. We are going to be here a long time, and all of you will be more valuable to me and the country with rest and a stable home life. In emergencies we’ll all work full time. Let me have your comments.”

Rethinking Abortion?

The U.S. Supreme Court is taking a harder look at the abortion question, according to a noted Washington newsman who is an astute analyst of the judicial review process.

Signs of movement, said Lyle Denniston of the Washington Star, were evident last summer when the court upheld a requirement that a woman give “written and informed consent” to an abortion.

Denniston told the annual conference of the National Abortion Rights Action League that he believes there is “a fairly strong degree of impermanence” in the court’s abortion decision of 1973 “because it is based, so fundamentally (for the majority, at least), on present medical knowledge and ethics.” “The constitutional source of the decision, a woman’s ‘right of privacy,’ seems to me, after repeated re-reading of Roe, to be quite secondary in the mind of the court majority,” he said.

Denniston emphasized that he did not mean to imply that the justices would probably make abortion law depend upon whether they themselves, or other judges, think abortion is right or wrong. “It is to suggest,” he said, “that some aspects of the abortion question will be allowed to be controlled by whether legislators and other policymakers think it is right or wrong.”

A change in the court’s thinking from the so-called Roe case of 1973, he added, could be caused by “compelling advances in the medicine of fetal life—let us say earlier viability.

“But even if there should be at some future point a re-examination of the fundamentals of Roe, we should recognize that, for the time being, at least, the Supreme Court has indeed moved on to questions of when and how regarding the abortion decision and procedure. We have already seen signs of that in the decisions last summer upholding a requirement of written and informed consent by the woman seeking an abortion.

… We now await other signs of the court’s attitude on the when and how of abortions: Must there be public financing; the scope of Congress’ power regarding that, and the constitutionality of denying it for the indigent woman; and, must there be an availability of abortions at public hospitals, publicly aided private hospitals and clinics and Public Health Service hospitals?”

Denniston said that when those decisions are reached, “we perhaps will see the first indication of judicial decision-making in this field according to a ‘moral equation.’

“Then the court will begin to answer the question: Will legislators and executive officials be allowed discretion regarding public financing and public availability of abortions, to follow the moral sense of a community majority, or at least of a vocal, politically active and potent minority?”

Lifeletter, published by a strong antiabortion lobby in Washington, took note of Denniston’s speech by suggesting that perhaps the court is wavering “and just waiting to see if Congress will fight back. Certainly there is no reason to suppose that Denniston has any sympathy for the anti-abortion position. He repeatedly fills Star columns with ‘scare’ stories on the many dangers to the ‘right’ of abortion.” Lifeletter cited page-one headlines to bolster the “scare” charge.

Big Bible Year

Publishers’ reports reveal that sales of Bible translations continued at a high level throughout 1976. The Good News Bible (American Bible Society) was published on the first day of December, and a million copies of it were sold in that month alone. (An additional 313,000 were sold in January.)

The 1976 sales figure for The Living Bible (Tyndale), in its various editions including The Way, was 2.25 million; for The Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday), about 380,000; and for the New American Standard Bible (several publishers), 130,000.

Figures for the King James, Revised Standard, New American, and New English (all with multiple publishers) were not readily available, but all and especially the first two had continuing large sales.

Prominent annotated editions also did well: The New Scofield Reference Edition (Oxford), based on the King James, 100,000; the Harper Study Bible (Zondervan), based on the Revised Standard, 55,000.

In the category of non-Bible nonfiction (excluding cookbooks, dictionaries, and books issued more than two years ago), the hard-cover best sellers for 1976 included four Watergate-related titles among the top ten. The Final Days (Simon and Schuster) by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the list with 630,000 copies sold. Fifth ranked was Charles Colson’s testimony, Born Again (Revell), at 340,000 copies. (A mass-market paperback edition has just been released.)

Seventh place was won by Billy Graham’s Angels (Doubleday), of which 275,000 copies were sold. It led the list with 810,000 in 1975.

DONALD TINDER

India: Strategy For the Jet Age

Christians in India boast that their church was planted by the apostle Thomas. What he planted in his first-century missionary effort has not grown much, however. Only about 2 per cent of the more than 600 million Indians profess to be Christians.

For the first time in the nearly two-thousand-year history of the Indian church, a representative group of evangelical leaders got together early this year for serious talks on reaching the non-Christian 98 per cent of their fellow countrymen. They met for a week as the All-India Congress on Mission and Evangelization under the auspices of the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI).

The 400 Christian leaders assembled at a rural boarding school near Devlali, about ninety-five miles from Bombay. Their gathering was an outgrowth of the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, and participants were invited on the same basis as those who went to Lausanne (a cross section of denominations, types of work, men, women, youth, and so on). The congress replaced the EFI’s annual prayer conference. A spokesman explained that for the twenty-five years of the EFI’s existence, the promotion of revival in the churches has had priority, but this year attention was turned outward in the emphasis on mission and evangelization.

The effect on the participants, said the spokesman, was “chastening.” He said they went home “rebuked … for their failure to be His faithful and consistent witnesses to the 98 per cent” but “renewed in faith, in vision for evangelization, and in love for one another.”

According to “the Devlali Letter,” the congress’s principal document, participants also went home with a conviction that all Christians, particularly the leaders of churches and para-church groups, must cooperate in evangelistic strategy. The letter was drafted by a committee that received reports from each of the small groups that met throughout the congress. While the letter was generally thought to represent a consensus of those attending, it was not presented for a formal vote. Instead, all the participants were asked to sign it. The number who did so was not announced immediately.

“We are convinced that we live in such a time of open doors and great opportunities that the evangelization of India in the power of God’s spirit is an achievable goal,” the document declared. “We praise and thank God for his church in India and for placing us in a country where religious freedom is guaranteed to all by law.”

While little was said from the platform about the current political situation, the congress met amid rising tension in the nation over the “emergency” proclaimed in June, 1975. A newsman at the meeting said Christian leaders generally saw the sweeping political and economic changes in the land lending urgency to their task. The general secretary of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in India, P. T. Chandapilla, told a reporter, “The emergency has taught Christians to mind their own business—which is evangelization.”

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent a short written greeting to the congress. It was dated two months earlier. While the congress was meeting, though, she startled the nation with her announcement that parliamentary elections would be held in March. Calling for the vote, she said, was a part of a major relaxation of her emergency rule.

The evangelical leaders met in a retreat setting, but they were not isolated from the pressure of events. At the same time, millions of members of the country’s majority religion, Hinduism, were at a major gathering on the Ganges River. Some of the Christians found it difficult to make travel arrangements because space was already booked by those going to the Hindu festival.

Many of the participants who finally did arrive on trains at the Devlali station found they still had several miles to go before they arrived at the meeting site, the Barnes School. For some, the only available rides were in ox-cart taxis. The centuries-old mode of transportation was a reminder of their heritage, even as jet planes flying overhead were a reminder of current challenges.

Autonomy Ahead

Ecclesiastical wheels sometimes turn very slowly, but there seems to be little doubt now that Methodists in India are heading toward autonomy. Their church, officially known as the Methodist Church in Southern Asia, has been involved in an extended controversy over merger questions. Until it gains autonomy, the Indian denomination is an overseas branch of the United Methodist Church (U.S.A.). A decision by the United Methodist Judicial Council last year finally paved the way for it to go its own way.

Following the judicial decision, the Central Conference of the church in India unanimously voted to become an “affiliated autonomous church” by 1980. A doctrinal statement and other constitutional documents will be prepared next and then submitted to regional annual conferences. If two-thirds of them approve, the matter will come back for Central Conference ratification in, it is hoped, 1979.

The central body voted in 1968 to become one of the bodies that would found the Church of North India, but as union plans developed, the vote was rescinded. The reversal was challenged in the church courts, and it was this question that was settled last year. The church, one of the United Methodists’ largest overseas sections, has some 168,000 members.

Keeping in Touch

While mainline Western denominations cut back on their missionary efforts, Third World churches are stepping up their outreach at home and abroad. The growing number of missionaries and the societies to support them have brought Indian Christian leaders to the conclusion that they need a vehicle to foster cooperation. A consultation on forming an association of missionary societies in India is scheduled this month as a direct outgrowth of the recent All India Congress on Mission and Evangelization.

If that association is formed, it will be one of at least seven national groups of evangelical missions. All the existing ones were represented at a consultation in Bombay in January, the first ever held by executive officers of these groups. The convenor was Wade Coggins of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (U.S.A.), who is the retiring steering committee chairman of the World Evangelical Fellowship’s missions commission. The steering committee met during the consultation and named Ernest Oliver as the new chairman. He is the secretary of the Evangelical Missionary Alliance of Great Britain. The full missions commission is scheduled to meet next in January, 1979, and until then the top priority will be given to establishing contacts with emerging missionary movements.

An “enormous amount of mail” has reached New York Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, Jr., since he ordained an avowed lesbian earlier this year. Most of the response, he concedes, has been negative.

But the bishop says he is amazed at all the reaction because he does not think his ordination of Ellen Marie Barrett was “some sort of gesture condoning hom*osexuality or licentiousness.” He still believes the new priest is highly qualified by training and temperament to be an Episcopal minister.

Why, then, is he hearing from protesters around the nation as well as from Anglicans in other countries? Episcopalians, says Moore, are “upset about lots of things,” and his unprecedented act could have been a “catalyst for the release of this upsetment.”

Much of the reaction came from within his own diocese, and Moore acknowledged that he had “never had so much flak” on any subject before. Some of that flak was in the form of pledges by parish vestries to withhold annual assessments to the diocese.

With a straight face, Moore told a reporter, “The money is not spent for ordinations. Much of it goes for the mission work of the church.”

The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, John M. Allin, has also been on the receiving end of many of the protests, but he too has tried to minimize the importance of the New York ordination. He went to Memphis to address the convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee and declared, “One ordination does not make and does not break a church at any place, point, or diocese. The church has not gone down the drain; it really hasn’t. Pass the word along.”

The presiding bishop then tried to cool the Tennesseans: “Think of what a great thing it would be if we didn’t speak the first time we got the urge.… And we need not to pass any asinine resolutions that won’t change anybody. Harsh reaction can condemn a lot of people who have no defense.”

The diocesan convention then went on to pass a resolution calling “active hom*osexuality” contrary to Scripture and Christian tradition and expressing the “hope that other professed, active hom*osexual persons will not be ordained.”

The Diocese of (North) Florida proposed amendments to the national Episcopal constitution and canons that would “explicitly insure that such persons shall not be admitted to Holy Orders.” Southeast Florida Episcopalians, in their diocesan convention, officially asked that Bishop Moore and Ms. Barrett be disciplined.

In the Diocese of Washington, where Moore served before he went to New York, the question of hom*osexual marriage has claimed some attention. Two men active in an avant-garde parish were planning to be married by its rector last year until the parish was threatened with the loss of the diocesan subsidy. One of the pair, holder of a master’s degree from Wesley Theological Seminary, went to the Episcopal General Convention in Minneapolis last September, and after that they decided to “celebrate” a “holy union” in the presence of friends in “our church community.”

After an Episcopal church ceremony was refused, they exchanged vows in a hom*osexual congregation. They told a Washington Post reporter that the next bishop of the Washington diocese, John Walker, had declined his blessing by saying he “felt that if he did anything to bless the union this early in his episcopacy, he’d be ineffective for the rest of it.” They still hope to have Episcopal recognition of their marriage, however.

One Episcopal priest who went to the convention last year did not go home alive. He died in his hotel room, stabbed to death by a seventeen-year-old who was described by authorities as a “male hustler.” The youth recently pleaded guilty to the stabbing and was sentenced to one to twenty-five years in a state reformatory. He did not say and was not asked in court how he met the priest or what caused a quarrel that led to their struggle.

The Metropolitan Community Church, in which the Washington couple exchanged vows, continues to claim that it is growing nationwide. Troy Perry, founder and moderator of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, told a reporter in Minneapolis at the end of last year that there are now 103 congregations in seven countries with a total membership of 20,731.

Introduction of a “national gay civil rights bill” by ten members of Congress was announced by the MCC’s Washington office soon after the new Congress convened. In effect, the bill (H.R. 451) is an amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, adding “affectional or sexual preference” to the list of conditions for which it would be illegal to discriminate.

The MCC had a setback in Massachusetts when its Boston branch lost a bid to become a member of the Massachusetts Council of Churches. The council’s board unanimously voted to turn down the gay application without giving reasons. A similar application from the national body has been before the National Council of Churches, but an NCC official said it had been withdrawn.

The National Association of Evangelicals has meanwhile disavowed any connection with a hom*osexual group that describes itself as “Evangelicals Concerned,” headed by Ralph Blair of New York City. The group’s literature says it was formed at the time of the 1976 NAE convention in Washington.

The NAE’s executive director, Billy Melvin, declared, “An organization has no right to ride on the NAE’s reputation simply because it was formed in a hotel across the street from where the NAE meetings were taking place. NAE wants to disavow any connection with Evangelicals Concerned. The basic error in the teachings of such a group has been well documented.”

The gay activists have another group to contend with in the independent Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns. The group’s denomination, the United Presbyterian Church, is currently studying the ordination question, and the PUBC board last month issued a statement calling the ordination of avowed hom*osexuals “a clear violation of biblical teaching and a grievous offense against God, who requires a holy and blameless life of those who seek ordination to the offices of pastor, ruling elder and deacon.”

In Canada, Anglicans have been choosing up sides in a debate over whether their church newspaper, The Churchman, went too far in an issue dealing with hom*osexuality. In the paper’s features on the subject were details of hom*osexual relationships between two men and two women and the account of a priest who admitted hanging around bus stations to pick up sex partners. After the issue was published, one priest wrote that he is “no longer ashamed of myself” and that he knows “that hom*osexuality is the normal and natural part of my personality.”

Christian leaders in England have expressed concern over the new emphasis on hom*osexuality in society. The Nationwide Festival of Light organization urged Prime Minister James Callaghan to halt the “growing exploitation” of children by militant hom*osexuals in schools and elsewhere. The church is a part of that “elsewhere,” according to one recently published commentary. The authoritative Crockford’s Clerical Directory in its latest edition warns hom*osexual clergymen not to give physical expression to their tendencies. The list of Anglican clergymen and parishes is always preceded by a long, outspoken preface written by a leading churchman who is never identified. The anonymous British writer says in the new preface, “Christians should never be so charitable to deviants as to cease to oppose the flaunting of hom*osexual behaviour.”

More For Missions

The number of Protestant North Americans serving as missionaries outside their own countries is continuing to rise despite a decrease in the number sent by the mainline denominations. The eleventh edition of the Mission Handbook, published last month by the MARC division of World Vision, shows a record total of 36,950 from the United States and Canada.

Worldwide, the number of Protestant overseas workers is estimated at 55,000. The North American contribution to the total rose by about 2,000 during the three-year period ending December 31, 1975. The totals in the previous edition were dated January 1, 1973.

Mission giving in the United States and Canada is reported to have outstripped inflation by 29 per cent in the three-year period, from $383 million in 1972 to $656 million in 1975. The funds went to 620 agencies with workers in 182 lands.

Brazil was listed again as having the largest number of North American missionaries: 2,068. Japan was in second place with 1,545. The agency with the most overseas workers was Wycliffe Bible Translators (2,693), with the Southern Baptists close behind (2,667).

Also recently released, but with a much bleaker outlook, was the Handbook of British Missions. Since the last edition was published four years ago, the number of British overseas personnel has dropped from 5,507 to 4,592. The totals omit some societies, but the reported decrease is thought to be representative of the overall situation. Giving in Britain for missions was up over the four-year period, however. The pound sterling total increased from 17 million in 1972 to 26 million in 1976.

Among the North American sending agencies that experienced declines during the MARC handbook’s latest reporting period was the United Church of Christ Board of World Ministries. It has just announced plans to “stabilize” its overseas force at 165, down from the 244 reported in the tenth MARC handbook (1973) and 70 per cent below its 1960 strength.

The High Cost Of Caring

Many church-related retirement and convalescent facilities across the country are in trouble. Part of the reason is that life-care contracts written in the 1960s and early 1970s often were not flexible enough to keep income ahead of costs during a period of soaring inflation. Some institutions have been forced into bankruptcy as a result. There have been closures, revisions of contracts, dispossessions, and much distress for those affected. Some elderly people have lost everything.

Last month Pacific Homes Corporation (PHC), a United Methodist-related retirement and convalescent complex, filed bankruptcy proceedings after California’s department of health refused to allow it to renegotiate contracts with its 2,100 residents.

PHC’s deficit toward the end of last year was $27.6 million, and it was reportedly losing $500,000 a month. Included in the deficit are loans totaling about $12 million from insurance companies and a lien by the state to safeguard the interests of residents. The loans have been guaranteed over the past eight years by the 435-congregation Pacific and Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church, which may have to make good on the promises to repay if reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy fails. The conference has already cut its own annual budget by $540,000 (this included the release of a number of staffers) in order to subsidize residents who cannot pay higher rates.

Some 85 per cent of PHC’s 1,200 residents were said to have agreed to go along with the plan to renegotiate. Five of the corporation’s seven retirement units are in California. The other two are in Hawaii and Arizona. Additionally, six of seven convalescent facilities are operated in conjunction with the retirement centers.

A conference spokesman described PHC’s centers as “the best in California.” He said that “everything is being done” to ensure that residents continue to receive “the finest in care” and to prevent their being turned out.

There are about 175 United Methodist-related homes for the aging in the United States, and they have about 31,000 residents. About 20 per cent of the homes may be having problems of “crisis proportions,” according to Lynn Bergman of the denomination’s health and welfare ministries.

The typical life-care contract written ten years ago, he says, promised that for an entrance fee of $3,000 and $180 per month, the agency guaranteed full care, even during physical and mental breakdowns. Some contracts had no clause protecting the home against inflation, he points out, and even those with 5 per cent increase clauses are in trouble because inflation has run as high as 20 per cent in recent years. It might cost a home $20,000 or more a year to service a contract that calls for the resident to pay much less, he explains. The improved medical and social care results in a mixed blessing: people in the homes live longer, adding to ledger woes.

Expansion has halted in most cases because of the crunch. The number of persons who can be given free or part-paid care is lower, in part because of reduced denominational subsidies. Where possible, homes are renegotiating contracts.

Profit organizations have an out that churches avoid, says Bergman: “Private corporations can simply sell the home to someone else, which immediately cancels all contracts. Then they can go back the next week and rewrite monthly cost-of-care contracts for persons who can afford them.”

The for-profit sector of the $8-billion-a-year nursing-home industry has been ridden with scandal in recent years, and there have been a variety of crackdowns.

Church-related homes generally get higher marks than their secular counterparts in matters of care and ethics. Increasingly, however, their survival may be in jeopardy.

Last Will And Testament

The late evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman left a personal estate of $732,543, including her $130,000 suburban Pittsburgh home and jewelry valued at $94,000, according to a final court inventory of her wealth. The largest amount, $187,350, consisted of savings certificates and interest on them at Pittsburgh banks. More than $70,000 was found in checking and savings accounts. Household goods were valued at $88,000, including furnishings in an apartment in California.

The inventory also listed vacation property in Alberta, Canada, two fur coats, a $4,500 interest in Texas gas wells, $60,000 worth of shares in a corporation Miss Kuhlman formed to market her books and records, and $200 in coins—all 50-cent pieces she had culled from offerings at her services.

An attorney said state and federal estate taxes consumed $167,500, debts and expenses (mostly medical) of the evangelist amounted to $150,000, and legal and other fees for closing the estate totaled about $100,000. This leaves approximately $314,500 to be shared by two of Miss Kuhlman’s sisters, a sister-in-law, twenty employees, and D. B. “Tink” Wilkerson, 44, a Tulsa auto dealer who befriended Miss Kuhlman in the last years of her life. The amount was to be distributed according to a formula prescribed by the evangelist, who died February 20, 1976.

Uproar Over ‘Folklore’

A row has flared up in England over the firing of a religious education teacher who believes in Adam and Eve. David Watson, 56, told his pupils so, was subsequently dismissed, and had his appeal rejected by Hertfordshire County Council. Watson, said the verdict, “had refused the reasonable request of the headmaster and governors to conform to the requirements of the agreed syllabus.”

The syllabus, which dates back to 1954, says: “The Genesis stories of creation, read as their writers intended them to be and not as literalist interpreters have read them, do not conflict with evolutionary theories. They are, of course, only part of the collection of the myths and legends—Hebrew religious folklore—which make up the first 11 chapters of Genesis and they should be seen in that setting.”

A former missionary in India, Watson rejected this as the only view permissible, and he refused to give written assurances of conformity with it because of what he regarded as its dogmatic assertions. He had been head of religious education at Rickmansworth Comprehensive School since September, 1975, and is the author of two anti-evolutionary books, Myths and Miracles and The Great Brain Robbery.

He plans to appeal to an industrial tribunal on the grounds of unfair dismissal. A thirty-year-old British Education Act says: “No teacher may be deprived of any advantage by reason of his religious opinions.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Peril in Uganda

President Idi Amin of Uganda has survived approximately ten coup attempts since January, 1971, when he seized power in a bloodless takeover. Another apparent coup attempt came to light last month, and news sources indicate that many Ugandans were killed and hundreds arrested in connection with it. Among those arrested were Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum, spiritual leader of the 1.5-million-member Church of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Boga-Zaire. Luwum, a British-trained theological educator in his forties, was elevated to the archbishopric in May, 1974. Another Anglican, Bishop Yona Okot, was also accused of complicity in the alleged plot. Certain Catholic and Protestant leaders were reportedly targeted for arrest, too.

In a bizarre demonstration that Luwum and other church leaders were forced to attend, several alleged ringleaders of the attempted coup “confessed” their role, and 3,000 army troops chanted, “Kill them! Kill them!” Amin released Luwum with the admonition to “preach the Word of God … not bloodshed,” and announced that a military court would conduct a trial.

On February 17, Uganda Radio reported that Luwum and two cabinet ministers arrested with him had been killed in an automobile accident.

Religion in Transit

A sixteenth negative presbytery vote has now been cast against the proposed Book of Confessions in the Presbyterian Church U.S. (Southern), thus killing a doctrinal proposal that would have given the denomination a theological stance similar to that of the United Presbyterian Church (see issue of February 18, page 52, and related editorial this issue, page 31).

The Church of Scientology purchased the Cedars of Lebanon hospital complex in Hollywood, California, recently. Church officials, noting they had paid more than $5 million in cash to avoid interest payments, said the complex will become a major training facility for Scientology.

General secretary Philip Potter of the World Council of Churches apologized to the Church of Scientology for anti-Scientology remarks attributed to him last fall at an “informal meeting and luncheon.” He said he hadn’t known the press was there.

Rebecca Nash, 37, daughter of evangelist Oral Roberts, and her husband Marshall, 39, a Tulsa banker and real estate developer, were among the six persons killed in the crash of a private plane during bad weather at Anthony, Kansas. They were returning to Tulsa from a skiing holiday in Aspen, Colorado. The Nashes are survived by three children ages, 5, 8, and 13.

A federal judge ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to file with the National Archives all of its tapes and documents related to buggings and wiretaps of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. The materials cannot be made public for at least fifty years, except by court order. FBI officials in the sixties reportedly played tape excerpts for some church leaders in an attempt to discredit King and keep him off important platforms.

A pastoral letter issued by the majority of the eighty-two Catholic bishops in the Philippines was read from pulpits throughout the country last month. It attacked the government for allegedly interfering with the church’s work of evangelization (the bishops say this includes the teaching of salvation, liberation, and social development). The letter complained that priests and other religious workers had been arrested and foreign missionaries deported. A military list, was released in December charging 155 clergy and laypersons with “rebellion and inciting to sedition.”

Some 5,000 Roman Catholic and Protestant charismatics came together for prayer, sermons, and singing in Hordern Pavilion in Sydney recently. It was described as the largest indoor religious gathering ever held in Australia. “Your one desire,” noted Cardinal James Freeman of Sydney, “is to open your hearts to the power of the Holy Spirit, to awaken and bring to greater power his gifts within you, and by so doing come to a closer, more intimate union with our Savior.”

About 800 of Italy’s 4,000 Seventh-day Adventists rallied in Rome last month and urged Parliament to approve a proposed law recognizing Saturday as a day of rest.

Controversial Anglican theologian John A. T. Robinson (Honest to God) shook up his fellow liberals last month with the release of Redating the New Testament in which he says all of the New Testament books were written before A.D. 70 rather than between A.D. 50 and 150, as most liberal scholars contend.

Alan Geyer, former editor of Christian Century, was named executive director of a new interdenominational Center for Theology and Public Policy, to be located at Wesley Seminary in Washington, D.C. Research, not lobbying, will be the emphasis, he says.

Deaths

JAMES OLIVER BUSWELL, JR., 82, Presbyterian theologian, former president of Wheaton and Shelton colleges, and professor at Covenant Seminary; in Quarryville, Pennsylvania.

GILBERT L. (GIL) DODDS, 58, former world indoor record-holder in the one-mile run (1948), track coach at Wheaton College, and evangelist of the Brethren Church (Ashland, Ohio); in St. Charles, Illinois, of a brain tumor.

HERMAN DOOYEWEERD, 82, renowned Calvinist philosopher and professor at the Free University of Amsterdam in Holland; in Amsterdam.

JAMES G. KELLER, 76, Roman Catholic priest who founded the Christophers, an ecumenical movement dedicated to the spread of the Judeo-Christian ethic; in New York City, from complications arising from Parkinson’s Disease.

ALFRED A. KUNZ, 84, former executive secretary and international director of the Pocket Testament League; in Fort Myers, Florida.

For a long time scientists have speculated about the possibility that life exists on other planets. Some of them are pretty well convinced that life does exist elsewhere and that it is only a matter of time before we find conclusive evidence for it. Sometimes snide remarks are made about theologians who have made this earth the center of the universe and cannot admit there might be life anywhere else.

As a theologian I have nothing to say about the possibility. As I read it, the Bible confines itself to God’s concern for and demands on those who live on this planet. It says nothing about any who may live on other planets. I have no doubt that if there are such beings, the God who is love has made suitable provision for their needs. The important thing for us on this earth is not to speculate about what is on other planets but to get on with the business of living for God and serving our fellow men. It is enough for us that God loves us and sent his Son to die for us. That shows the depth of his love and concern for those he made.

William A. Rusher thinks some scientists are reluctant to accept the fact that they have no evidence for life on Mars. Although Viking I and Viking II carried out some very sophisticated tests, they came up with nothing that indicated life. It interested Rusher that those who reported the results of these space probes would say no more than that they had not proved either that there is or that there is not life on Mars. He points out that proving the absence of life would require an analysis of every part of the surface of that planet and, to be quite sure, of the interior as well. He ascribes the form of the report to the scientists’ unwillingness to admit that mankind seems to be alone in an otherwise lifeless universe.

Why should there be this unwillingness? Possibly, as Professor E. van den Haag says, because many “are at least unconsciously dissatisfied with the idea that ‘This is all there is.’ They need to feel that somewhere else in the universe, living beings are happier than we are—have solved the problems that beset our lives.” People have lost the idea of paradise. But they still have an unconscious desire for it, and this desire finds a form of fulfillment in the notion of happy beings on Mars or some more distant star.

It is an interesting suggestion and may well be right. The biblical position is that God loves us and has made provision for our needs. But if we turn away from God’s gracious provision, then those deep needs are not met. While they remain unmet they cause dissatisfaction. There can be little doubt that one reason for tension and unhappiness in our world is to be found just here.

There is, then, a continuing search for some way of meeting these needs, and van den Haag thinks that this lies behind the scientists’ hope for life on some other planet and their assumption that if there is such life it will be well disposed toward us. Somehow we all make this assumption. If there is life elsewhere we want to be in touch with it. But this may be a very great mistake. What reason have we to think that life elsewhere in the universe will not be hostile and seek to destroy or despoil us? Why should we assume it will be interested in helping us solve our problems? That is just wishful thinking, a manmade substitute for the God of love who sent his Son to be our Saviour.

We may observe similar results from the neglect of other Christian affirmations. Many who still profess the Christian faith have opted for a Christianity that dispenses with hell. The result has nowhere been better put than by W. MacNeile Dixon in his Gifford Lectures: “The kind-hearted humanitarians of the nineteenth century decided to improve upon Christianity. The thought of hell offended their susceptibilities. They closed it, and, to their surprise, the gates of heaven closed also with a melancholy clang. The malignant countenance of Satan distressed them. They dispensed with him, and at the same time God took his departure. A vexatious result, but you cannot play fast and loose with logic” (The Human Situation).

People do not realize that it is not easy to do away with hell without at the same time getting rid of heaven. I do not mean that we are forced into an acceptance of every detail of a hell that some of an earlier day knew far too much about. They spoke more confidently about the details of the place of punishment than Scripture allows, and in reaction some others abandoned the whole concept. But if there is nothing corresponding to hell, then we all pass into the afterlife. There is then no distinction between the good and the bad, between those who have trusted Christ and those who have not. All are in the afterlife together, with the evil apparently having as much right to it as the righteous. It is this world all over again! There is no place where righteousness dwells.

MacNeile Dixon also suggests that those who got rid of Satan found they had lost God. I think he means that if we take Satan as no more than the biblical personification of evil, we are logically compelled to take God as no more than the biblical personification of good. We should think through what we are doing when we tamper with the biblical picture.

The Christian faith is a coherent system that proceeds from the facts that God loves us. has made provision for our needs, and has revealed in Scripture what it is necessary for us to know about all this. We are made in a certain way and we have certain needs. On the physical level we need things like food and rest. And on another level we need forgiveness, the assurance that our evil deeds will not be held against us. We need a sense of purpose, the conviction that life is more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” To abandon the faith or part of it or to deny that these things are important does not alter the facts. We are human; we have human needs; and they are fully met in Christ. The world in which we live is proof that they are met nowhere else.

Joseph Hopkins’s interview on the Children of God and its founder, “Moses” Berg, is important reading. Knowing about this sect, you might be able to keep some young person from falling under its spell.

Robert Johnston tackles a subject currently in vogue in some circles, relational theology, tracing it back to Schleiermacher. He weighs the subjectives of experience over against objective revelational realities.

After learning about relational theology, go on to read William Willimon’s and Philip Yancey’s articles about that most intensive, most challenging, and potentially most rewarding human relationship: marriage.

From the Church’s Valentine Box

Do you remember those sheets of cheap paper, purchased for a nickel and given to assorted people on Valentine’s Day? They didn’t represent True Love—the loving kind had cupids and hearts on lacy paper, not caricatures in lurid color on newsprint. But they still expressed a kind of crude affection, like unrefined oil that sometimes spills and mucks up our beaches, yet is necessary to make the world go round.

Here is a recent offering of newsprint valentines addressed to familiar people in the church.

TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE WOMEN’S FELLOWSHIP:

Hail to thee, Queen of Potluck Meals,

Of circles, rummage and bazaar deals;

Shall our chicken be creamed, with peas from a can,

Or baked in the oven with rice in a pan?

I’ll call the whole committee together so we can come to a united decision.

TO THE YOUTH WORKER:

Your years, dear friend, show more and more,

And have you seen the Wittenburg Door?

Exit relational theology,

And enter gerontology.

Wow! Far out! Could you talk a little louder, please?

TO THE PASTOR:

You complain that people at twelve o’clock sharp

Stop paying attention and begin to carp;

Yet knowing they’ve already listened plenty,

You “Finally brethren” until twelve-twenty.

Since TV came in, I’ve found more sin and less and less hunger for the Word.

TO THE TRUSTEES:

The Singing Christmas Tree was good,

But where’ll we ever store the wood

That’s cluttering up the parking lot

Until December’s fresh “Fear not”?

Is there room in the hangar with the Gospel Blimp?

TO THE CUSTODIAN:

We give you our pews, our toilets and kitchen

Expecting them to be made shiny and glisten,

And when after thirty-six meetings they’re not,

We want you to know that your smile helps a lot.

I’m glad. Now how about raising my pay or giving me help?

TO THE BUS DRIVER:

We admire your courage and nerves of steel,

Ignoring the shouts and a missing wheel,

As you stop to pick up those unsaved twins,

Total Depravity and Original Sin.

My trouble comes more from the Saving Graces.

EUTYCHUS VIII

In the Key Of the Classics

I sincerely appreciate your recent editorial on Benjamin Britten (Jan. 7). As an evangelical and a church musician who is also working on a graduate degree, I find that there is far too little material dealing with the area of serious music and composers as it relates to us in the evangelical music ministry. As far as I know there is not one interdenominational music magazine which is keyed toward the trained evangelical musician. I hope you will provide more space and reporting on such in future issues.

WESLEY SMITH

The First Assembly of God

Cleveland, Ohio

No More On the Negative

From its inception I have subscribed to and enjoyed CHRISTIANITY TODAY. You are to be commended on a job well done. But I am getting tired of articles … by disgruntled ministers who couldn’t make a go of it in the ministry. I tried to wade through Andre Bustanoby’s “Why Pastors Drop Out” (Jan. 7). I couldn’t even force myself to concentrate on it. Please, a more affirmative tone on the ministry, which is the greatest job and challenge in the world.

RAYMOND GAYLORD

Cascade Christian Church

Grand Rapids, Mich.

I am constantly amazed at God’s good timing. When we need a word of understanding, he always seems to supply it. Last Tuesday, after a rather difficult weekend, I returned to my study to find the January 7 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY waiting for me. “Why Pastors Drop Out” provided much needed encouragement. It is sometimes comforting to know that others have gone through similar feelings and that there is hope.

DANIEL S. MILLER

Monmouth First Baptist Church

Monmouth, Ore.

Puissant Poem

Thank you for courageously publishing “For Christ the Lord” by George E. McDonough (Jan. 7). The poem was puissant and deeply Christian. (I suppose mine may be a minority view.)

(The Rev.) HENRY HUBERT HUTTO

Austin, Texas

Attention to Family Planning

The editorial “Matching Actions With Confessions” (Nov. 19) has come to my attention. I would like to call attention to some inaccuracies in the paragraph purporting to describe the family-planning program to be conducted through Buddhist monks in Thailand which the Planned Parenthood Program/Church World Service plans to partially support.

1. It would be incorrect to say that in certain parts of Thailand the best way to help with population planning is to work through Buddhist monks who are community leaders. It is more factual to say that it is one way which might prove effective. Since it has not been tried as yet, its success or failure has yet to be determined.

2. The agency responsible for the training is the Asian Cultural Forum on Development, a non-governmental and ecumenical organization. It is associated and actively collaborates with the Freedom from Hunger and Action for Development Campaign of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Its membership comes from the principal religious cultural groups of Asia—Buddhist, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.

3. I suspect that far from being insulated from any gospel witness, the religious beliefs of all members will be thoroughly in witness because of the very nature of family-planning education.

4. And finally, Christians, both Thailand nationals and American missionaries, were sought for their opinions. The response has been full support of the project.

ILUMINADA RODRIQUEZ

Director, Planned Parenthood Program

Church World Service

National Council of Churches

New York, N.Y.

Within Protestantism there are two classic approaches to theology. The one initially emphasizes God’s action in regard to man. The other begins with man’s experience of God. The former tends toward creedal definition and might be labeled a “theology of the Word”; its trinitarian focus is on Christology (on the revelation of God to man), and perhaps its most representative expression is the theology of Martin Luther. The latter tends toward the intuitive and interpersonal and might be labeled a “theology of experience”; its trinitarian focus is on the Holy Spirit (on man’s experience of God in his creation and redemption), and its classic theological statement is that of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Although the evangelical believes that Schleiermacher, the nineteenth-century romanticist and liberal theologian, made several crucial mistakes in working out his theology, his starting point was not necessarily in error. Even Karl Barth, a strong proponent of a theology of the Word, recognized the validity in principle of formulating an experiential theology. Barth’s term for such a theology was a “theology of awareness.” He said, “What Schleiermacher constructed by means of his theology of awareness by planting himself in the center which for the Reformers had been a subsidiary center, could be the pure theology of the Holy Spirit; the teaching of man brought face to face with God by God, of man granted grace by grace” (Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl, Simon and Schuster, 1969, p. 341).

Evangelicals are beginning to recognize the truth of Barth’s statement as they explore the possibility of an experientially based theology. Influenced by those who stress either a charismatic approach to faith (e.g., Michael Harper, Robert Mumford, Dennis Bennett, David Wilkerson, Larry Christenson) or a relational approach (e.g., Bruce Larson, Keith Miller, Charlie Shedd, Wes Seeliger, Ralph Osborne), evangelicals are beginning to build their theologies around what it means for man to be in the presence of God.

To stress one’s experience, which is an experience of the Spirit, is not, according to evangelicals, to ignore the Word as manifest both in Scripture and in Christ himself. Indeed, to do so would be foolish, for it would result in a formless mysticism. Word and Spirit must be joined together in any adequate Christian theology. What is being increasingly attempted today is a reversal of the Reformer’s approach to the Christian faith. Evangelicals are suggesting that theology must travel from Spirit to Word, not from Word to Spirit, the pattern of their heritage.

In this article I will look at the basis for this change in theological orientation in the evangelical world. I will then consider a criterion for judging the adequacy of any evangelical experiential theology. In conclusion, I will offer a suggestion as to the bipolar nature of theology based on the experience of the Holy Spirit.

Recognizing that theology is at best a stammering, an inadequate attempt to set forth an understanding of God, theologians such as Paul Holmer of Yale have criticized mainline evangelical theology for its desire to be “logically tighter” and “conceptually better defined” than the Bible itself. Evangelicals have been guilty, says Holmer, of a “tidying up complex,” which unfortunately works at cross purposes with the intended goal of their preaching, the development of the Christian’s life. Evangelical intellectualism based on a rationalistic and idealistic philosophy has so abstracted the Christian faith that it risks missing the heart of the Gospel. In their desire for precision, evangelicals have become so analytical, so mired in contrived conceptual schemas, that correct doctrine has superseded faith and life as the focal point of Christianity. The faith and life are there in the evangelical’s hymnody, preaching, and devotional life, but certain extrinsic factors have clouded them over in the theological arena. (Holmer’s comments appear in The Evangelicals, edited by David Wells and John Woodbridge, Abingdon, 1975.)

This charge against the evangelical’s formulations of his faith (not against this faith per se) is also being leveled from within evangelicalism itself. Influenced by the wider Christian world, evangelicals who have adopted either a relational (“incarnational”) approach or a charismatic (“neo-pentecostal”) approach to their theology are more and more challenging their fellow believers to rethink the Gospel from the standpoint of their own experience with it. Their claim is that traditional evangelical theology is largely irrelevant or inadequate.

For example, I spoke recently to a minister who is sympathetic to the charismatic movement and who had just finished a series of sermons on the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church today. He read traditional evangelical statements on the Holy Spirit in his preparation and granted their doctrinal orthodoxy, but he complained that he found them sterile and therefore incomplete. The Spirit, he felt, had suffered reduction. Formal statement did not match the exhibited power of the Holy Spirit within the Christian community.

The prescription for health that is increasingly being sounded from within evangelicalism is this: if the Church is ever again to set forth a relevant and adequate theology, it must begin not with reflection on the person of Christ but with reflection on our experience with him through the Holy Spirit.

In other words, to talk more adequately about the Word, one should begin with the Spirit. It is, after all, the Spirit who is the expression of the Father and Son to man. It is the Spirit who is at work in the world and in the lives of believers. As Jesus himself stated, “When the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:13–15). An adequate theology of the Spirit therefore will be at one and the same time a theology of the Son and of the Father. Its concern is to take seriously how we experience God in Christ within our faith and life, and this begins through the work of the Spirit.

While this critique of mainline evangelical theology has enough truth in it to cause the establishment to bristle in rebuttal, experiential theologians are not without their own potential pitfalls and excesses, as the example of Schleiermacher would suggest. Barth once remarked that even those who are judged to be heretics, with all their “recognized folly and wickedness, should and must have a voice in theology.” Evangelicals must be sufficiently confident of their theology to hear openly and attentively the voices not only of their favorites but of the Christian community in its entirety. For one never knows who among his theological forebears might provide a particularly needed and wholly unexpected word of correction or addition. Thus it may be that Schleiermacher has something to say to us today.

Schleiermacher’s theology was perhaps the most thoroughgoing modern attempt to carve out a theology of experience. It is not that Schleiermacher succeeded where contemporary evangelicals are failing. Rather, it is by the clearcut failure of his attempt at experiential Christian theology that he can be of service.

In particular, evangelicals can cull from Schleiermacher’s writing a criterion for judging any theology of experience. Put most simply, it is this: the success of an experiential theology must be judged by the ease (or lack of ease) with which it moves from Spirit to Word. As evangelicals work out their formulations of the faith in and for the life of the Church, they must keep in mind this built-in test. If Word and Spirit can be held in dynamic union, then experiential theology has the possibility of becoming definitive for the life and witness of the evangelical church today. If not, such theology must be called to task and dismissed as sub-biblical, as Schleiermacher’s was. The Word cannot take the place of the Spirit, as has often happened in conservative circles. But neither can the Word be ignored.

In Barth’s important study of nineteenth-century theology quoted earlier, he noted that Schleiermacher, like the Reformers before him, acknowledged two basic theological motifs: first, the question of man’s action in regard to God; and second, the question of God’s action in regard to man. The former was answered by “the Spirit of the Father and of the Word which enables man to hear the Word.” The latter was answered by “the Word of the Father which is spoken to man.” For Barth, the importance of Schleiermacher in the history of the Christian Church was that where the Reformers said “the Word of God” first and then added the human correlate of faith (justification by grace through faith), Schleiermacher reversed this order (justification through faith by grace). To begin with man, as Schleiermacher did, was not necessarily to dismiss God. Rather, it was to take man in the presence of God as the proper epistemological starting point for theology. Rather than exclude the Word, such a theology of the Spirit sought to bring the Word to bear on it as the other side of an experiential approach to Christianity. Rather than moving from Word to Spirit, Schleiermacher’s theology progressed from Spirit to Word.

A comparison with Luther is instructive at this point. Luther’s theology was above all a theology of the Word. But it was at the same time a theology of the Spirit. “Justification by grace (a theology of the Word) through faith (a theology of the Spirit)” might summarize his position. There was a trinitarian unity to his understanding. He moved with ease from a theological focus in the Word to one in the Spirit. Word opened out into Spirit.

Making use of this insight, Barth asked whether there is to be found in Schleiermacher’s reversal of traditional Reformation theology a similar trinitarian unity. If so, he suggested, it is a genuine, proper theology.

Unfortunately, though Schleiermacher was Christian in his intent and legitimate in his initial approach, the difficulty of convincing his readers that Christology was indispensable to his religious understanding suggests that the spirit that formed the center of his theology was not the Holy Spirit. That is, this theology failed the trinitarian test and thus proved sub-Christian. Even in his failure, however, he succeeded in permanently opening the question of the significance of experience, imagination, and affection in theology.

Until recently, it has been “liberal” theology that has continued systematically to explore Christian theology from the vantage point of the Spirit (e.g., Tillich, Gilkey, Keen). In “conservative” circles formal theology has been dominated by a propositional starting point centered in the Word (e.g., Henry, Schaeffer, Montgomery). But while an experiential starting point has been largely neglected by evangelical scholarship, such an approach has entered strongly into the life and witness of the conservative church through its informal and lay theology.

Such church-renewal movements as Faith at Work, pioneering in developing an “incarnational” approach to life and ministry, have been widely influential among evangelicals. Understood in “incarnational” or relational terms, Christ becomes known preeminently in and through the lives of others. It is for this reason perhaps that most of the literature in relational theology centers on a recounting of personal experiences. “If every man is a priest,” suggests Larson, “every man is a discoverer and a participant with God, and he has something valid to report about God from his own experience” (Living on the Growing Edge, Zondervan, 1968, p. 79). In the books of writers like Larson, Keith Miller, and Charlie Shedd, we learn by observing the Spirit at work in the lives of others. Often the correlate to relational theology is a bias against traditional systematic theology. For those whose lives have been influenced by relational theology with its focus on man’s experience of new life, formal doctrine seems sterile and often irrelevant.

Alongside the church-renewal movement centering in relational theology, the charismatic movement too has made wide inroads into evangelicalism, affecting both life and worship. The charismatics have discovered their focal point theologically in the demonstrated gifts of the Spirit. It is the charismata, not agreement in doctrine, that draws together this widely assorted group. Catholics, Episcopalians, Assemblies of God believers, Methodists, and Presbyterians all come together freely, experiencing the fullness of the Spirit and letting traditional denominational theological distinctives—all formulated with primary reference to a theology of the Word—fade into oblivion.

One of the leading spokesmen of the charismatic movement, Michael Harper, editor of the English neo-pentecostal magazine Renewal, states in writing about the demonstrated success of the Church of the Redeemer in Houston: “The world awaits a fresh manifestation of Christ within His body, the Church. It is tired of … the airy-fairy doctrines of theologians. ‘Show us,’ the world yells at the Church. ‘Let us see you do it. Then we’ll listen to your words.’ ” Harper than proceeds to tell about the experience of this charismatic, community-styled church, stating that he has “discovered a new way of living, not a new way of thinking about life.” We must begin, he says, with the experience of the Spirit, not with what has been written about the Holy Spirit and his gifts (A New Way of Living, Logos, 1973, p. 12).

Both in relational theology and in charismatic theology, an experiential approach to Christianity is being voiced. For Larson, to “live on the growing edge” is to feel “the breeze of God’s Spirit … blowing through the Church today.” For Harper, the new life in Christ is intimately tied to a fresh experience of the life of the Holy Spirit through charismatic manifestation. For both, the experience of the Spirit is crucial as their theological point of entry. It is for this reason that the similarly experientially oriented theology of Schleiermacher can be instructive.

The emphasis on an experience of the Spirit must be ultimately judged by its faithfulness to the Word. In this regard, it is not enough to note that the Word as Scripture is used both in relational theology and in charismatic theology (as it was by Schleiermacher); one must also raise the question whether it is misused. In both charismatic and relational theology, the danger is that of stressing what the Word says (or doesn’t say) to me, at the expense of what it says on its own terms. Evangelicals should reject such an approach. While direct illumination, dialogue, and application are necessary to any adequate reading of Scripture, they cannot lord it over the intended meaning and authority of the text. One’s experience with the Spirit must flow into and out of his experience with the Word, carefully studied.

The misuse of this hermeneutical principle can be illustrated from the literature of both the charismatics and the relational theologians. For example, in A New Way of Living Michael Harper reports being influenced by a woman who said within a worship service at the Church of the Redeemer, “The Lord [= Spirit] has given me a scripture … ‘Thou shalt not uncover thy sister’s nakedness’ [Leviticus].” The spiritual leader present at this occasion interpreted the text to mean, “God is saying that we are not to seek for or allow any publicity for the moment. This is a work of God which should not be uncovered” (p. 20). Given this “word” from Scripture, Harper felt compelled not to write on this particular charismatic group for five years until he was given a new direction.

No explanation of this allegorical interpretation was offered. It was accepted as a valid message from God. Spirit and Word have here been joined, but clearly at the expense of the intended meaning of the Word. Serious exegetical study has given way to a blatant manipulation of the text. Scriptural authority has been marshalled for a direction that has no scriptural basis.

Within relational literature the “Serendipity” books of Lyman Coleman illustrate this same danger of scriptural misuse through an overstress on the experiential. In one of his group Bible studies, for example, Coleman uses the account in John of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet (13:1–5). He asks you to close your eyes and “allow your imagination to create the scene for you.” He then goes on: “Ask yourself, if Jesus should come to me for the same reason that He went to His disciples—to serve them—how would He minister to me? What is my deepest need at the moment?… In other words, how would he ‘wash my feet’ today?” After meditating on this question the group participant is then asked to share with the others how Christ would minister to him and why (Discovery, Word, 1972, p. 50).

Although it is certainly true that Christ wants to minister to our present needs, is this the intended meaning of the text? Was the problem of dirty feet the focus of the passage? When we look at these five verses in their context, we find that what the author intended here was a statement of the meaning and value of Jesus’ death. Coleman avoids the author’s intention (an interpretation of the atonement) by reducing the twenty-verse pericope to only the first five verses. The foot-washing incident is shorn of its interpretative context and used allegorically. Unfortunately, under the rubric of Bible study, what is actually taking place is “Christian” sharing. The experience might support Christian community, but the Word has been manipulated in the process.

In fairness to both authors, let it be said that faithfulness to the Word seems to be their intention. But this makes matters all the more serious, for Scripture is therefore central, and not peripheral, to their theological formulations.

Let Schleiermacher be a constant reminder and goad to both relationalists and charismatics. An experiential theology must ultimately be judged by the ease with which it flows into a theology of the Word. Any friction created as one moves from Spirit to Word in his theology must be eliminated. Any attempt to hasten an experience of the Spirit by pressing on it a veneer of the Word must be resisted. Teaching and preaching can take place when someone presents the experience of his own heart as stirred by the Spirit. But how is this best done? Surely not by bolstering Christian experience with faulty exegesis. The Bible must not be used as a sanction for one’s independent Christian feelings and experiences.

As Schleiermacher worked out the implications of his theology of experience in his book The Christian Faith, he sought to distinguish two ways in which we become conscious of God’s Spirit, two modes of apprehending our dependence on him. The first was in our experience of the totality of the natural world. The second was related to our awareness of sin and redemption. To put it in simplified terms, we might say that Schleiermacher’s theology attempted to do justice to both general and specific revelation. Or to put it another way, his theology consciously had two points of focus, creation and recreation theology.

While generalizations are hazardous, it seems to me that experiential theology today is having problems similar to those Schleiermacher encountered in emphasizing concurrently these complementary aspects of the Spirit’s work. Relational theology, for example, in reasserting the role of the Spirit in creation, has tended to emphasize the insights of psychology and the human-potential movement. The cure of the soul has been discussed in terms of Maslow’s “Peak Experience,” Mowrer’s New Psychology, Transcendental Meditation, “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.,” the need to show your anger, a sanctified sensuality (and sexuality), and so forth. The uniqueness of the Spirit’s re-creative role as an agent of Christ effecting supernatural change in the life of the believer has tended to become blurred by this redefinition in natural terms.

It was such a danger that the theologians who met at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1975 warned against. In their appeal to the Church, they pinpointed the following themes (among others) as “superficially attractive, but upon closer examination … false and debilitating to the Church’s life and work”: “Theme 6: To realize one’s potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation. Theme 7: Since what is human is good, evil can adequately be understood as failure to realize human potential. Theme 8: The sole purpose of worship is to promote individual self-realization and human community.” What these theologians saw was a movement in current theology toward trivializing the gospel promise, underestimating the pervasiveness of sin, and downplaying the independent reality of God.

Although relational theology has by no means jettisoned the Gospel, sin’s reality, or God’s independence, its stress on self-realization and human community makes this an ongoing peril. Because rebirth in Christ through a personal experience with his Spirit has been central to all definitions of evangelicalism, this danger of overemphasizing the Spirit’s work in and through the natural remains only this—a danger. Evangelicals must take note, however, of the need to maintain the uniqueness of the Spirit’s work in the Church, apart from his creative and preservative role in creation at large.

Charismatic theology has tended to overstress the other focus of the Spirit’s work, his re-creative role within the faithful community. In the process, the Spirit’s creative witness in the world at large has been glossed over or denied. Within the charismatic movement, separation from the world has been a central tenet. Biblical passages such as “[escape] the defilements of the world,” “do not love the world or the things in the world,” “whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God,” and “keep oneself unstained from the world” are used as divine support for underinvolvement or noninvolvement in cultural activity, politics, and secular education. When this suspicion of the world is combined with a life of piety—of study, prayer, singing in the Spirit, group sharing and praise, faith healing, speaking in tongues, evangelism, mutual edification and support—the result is an intense concentration of energy within the believing community. Little time and interest remain for outside pursuits.

An aspect of the charismatic movement contributing to the neglect of the Spirit’s work in creation at large has been the tendency toward “charismania,” a preoccupation or fixation with the gifts of the Spirit so that this experience becomes an end in itself and the only adequate experience of the Spirit. The Spirit’s creative contribution in society and nature is neglected.

If the evangelical community is to be enriched by reflection on the Spirit in our midst, the Spirit’s role must neither be limited to the Church nor reduced to God’s creative presence in the world. Biblical theology can serve as our paradigm in this regard. For example, the insights of Old Testament wisdom literature (with its focus on creation theology) can be productively brought to bear on Pauline theology (with its focus on redemptive theology), and vice versa. In the wisdom literature, the Spirit’s role in creation is appreciated and highlighted in and of itself, even while on the horizon we are pushed outward to look for a further, necessary re-creative act by God (Job, Ecclesiastes). With Paul, on the other hand, the Spirit’s role in re-creation (both in redemption and sanctification) is emphasized, while we still look outward to that work of the Spirit which is preliminary and generally available to all men (Romans, Acts 14:15–18). If one centers on Pauline thought, one might tend to undervalue the richness of created life, of common grace. But to center, as wisdom literature does, only on the Spirit as observed in created life is to bar oneself from the glorious further revelation he provides in Christ. The Spirit’s work both in the Church and in creation at large must be valued within any adequate evangelical theology.

The exact nature of an experientially based theology has not yet been delineated within the evangelical community. Richard Quebedeaux’s The Young Evangelicals has perhaps provided a preliminary and hastily drawn map of the direction it might take. Whether this proves to be so or not, evangelicals will need to ask two questions continually as they develop their formulations of the faith based in their experience of the Spirit. First, does a stress on the Spirit open naturally and authentically into an emphasis on the Word? Second, have the work of the Spirit in creation (natural revelation) and the work of the Spirit in re-creation (redemption and sanctification) been kept in dynamic union? An evangelical theology of experience must be bipolar—Spirit and Word, creation and re-creation. If it is, it could be definitive for the life and witness of the Church in the years ahead.

During the past few years I have noticed that whenever my fellow pastors and I get talking about our frustrations in the ministry, the discussion inevitably turns to the apparent death of marriage. In my last parish I “presided over” more divorces than marriages. Keeping track of the divorces, near divorces, trysts, breakups, and swaps sometimes seemed almost like a full-time job. I increasingly found myself ministering to people in all sorts of open or clandestine “arrangements” outside marriage. And it seemed as if a time of cohabitation had replaced (or supplemented) the traditional engagement period. My fellow pastors report the same kinds of experiences.

At a recent conference on worship in my denomination, a number of participants called upon the church to develop new rituals through which it could solemnize amicable divorce, “hom*osexual marriages,” and the public union of two heterosexuals who are “committed to each other but not for a lifetime arrangement.” There seems to be a war against the traditional institution of Christian marriage, and many in the church are ready to enlist.

Other Christians plead for a return to the “sanctity of marriage” stand. As it was in Israel’s culture, marriage is the cornerstone of Western civilization, they say, a foundation without which our culture cannot survive. In their eyes, the taboo against sex outside marriage is as valid as ever. The Church must hold the line against this subversion of marriage.

I wish to argue that, instead of being merely a vestige of the past, or a dreary relic from a sinking bourgeois culture that we must labor to keep afloat, Christian marriage has a future, one that cuts to the core of our shallow, selfish, hedonistic culture. In a world gone crazy with its own self-delusions and falsehood, Christian marriage has become a subversive activity.

It was predictable that marriage would become a focal point of the revolt of the sixties. To subvert the institution of marriage, to call its values and mores into question, to uncover marriage as a tool of an oppressive society, was rightly seen as an attack on the very core of decadent “bourgeois morality.” There was a focus on the hypocrisy of many marriages, the drabness of many marriages, the tragic enslavement of women in many marriages. Many of the criticisms were valid, and for the Church to ignore or defend these weaknesses is unpardonable. (Of course, all this had been said before. Marriage has always been a prevalent but not a particularly popular institution in Western society. The Roman antinomians, the European Romantics, the Jazz Age flappers of the twenties—these and others had questioned the value of marriage.)

The first thing one notices about the current revolt against marriage is its failure to be truly revolutionary. To be revolutionary is to be radical, to cut to the root (Latin: radix = “root”) of a society. But the “revolt” against marriage seems only to accentuate and perpetuate the very worst elements of twentieth-century Western culture.

This revolt seems to have gone the way of many other so-called revolutionary expressions of the sixties. A true revolution is difficult to maintain in our society: the communications media quickly cheapen it before there is time for its meaning to come fully into focus. We become sick of it by satiating ourselves with it. Today’s revolution becomes tomorrow’s Pepsi commercial. The youthful exuberance of the defiant teen-age couple living in extra-marital bliss in Love Story becomes grist for tomorrow’s soap-opera sequel. What begins as a genuine symbol of revolt becomes the commercialized property of the herd. “Open marriage,” “living together,” “trial marriage,” “the amicable divorce”—these have become jaded symbols of a merely ersatz revolution.

The so-called revolution against marriage is no revolution at all. It is merely one more example of our modern Western craving for instant gratification. We want everything right away, without risk or investment—from instant oatmeal to instant sex. We are a society of instant hedonists. The pursuit of pleasure, companionship, and sexual joys for their own sake is in fact an unconscious collaboration with “the system” at its worst rather than a rejection of it. Immediate gratification is the fundamental value that sustains the dream world of advertising. Advertisers are constantly telling us that we can have what we dream of and have it now if we just smoke this, or swallow this, or smear this on our faces. Sex is predominant in advertising because it is so successful in selling the magic potions that promise to give us what we desperately want (popularity, immortality, happiness, perpetual youth, and the like).

The “revolt” against marriage serves only to reinforce the inhumane values that lie at the heart of the worst excesses of consumption-oriented systems. We live in a throw-away economy in which waste is a virtual necessity. Things must be thrown away to make room for the new and improved model. In such a system, carried to its logical extreme, not only every thing but also every person seems expendable. The need for labor (people) is controlled merely by supply and demand. People are of value only as long as they are useful in helping us to get what we want. Sex becomes recreation, quick gratification with no messy leftovers.

Spokesmen for the new hedonism as institutionalized in the so-called revolt against marriage would like us to think they are offering something new and important. They aren’t. What they offer is the inhumane values—disposability, expendability, instant gratification—that make up the darkest side of the “system” itself.

A truly revolutionary concept for our age is the Christian idea of marriage, of a sex relationship based on lifelong total commitment. According to Christian theology, marriage entails risk as well as commitment. It asks a person to venture out, to expose himself to the complex reality of another human being. It is risky to dare to link your future with another person’s, to accept all that person’s strengths and weaknesses. This element of risk will always be unpopular. “Liberation” in our world too often means liberation from responsibility for anyone else but oneself. We are, classical Christian theology maintains, basically self-seeking, self-gratifying individuals. The ritual of marriage itself is realistic about human weaknesses and limitations. It says that what we would do “naturally” is not always the best that we could do.

I am fond of a phrase (long since deleted) from the original marriage rite in the Book of Common Prayer in which the minister warns the couple not to enter into marriage “wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts.…” I sense a naïveté about human nature in many current “alternatives” to marriage. Advocates of the “open marriage” and the extra-marital “arrangement” assume that a feeling of “love” (abstractly and vaguely defined) is enough to ensure mutual trust and consideration.

The Christian marriage ceremony illustrates the belief that a deep sexual and emotional encounter between two people requires a revolution in which both turn away from self-centeredness. To be united to another person means to risk oneself in a rite of initiation and passage (as anthropologists call it) that entails a death of the old self and a resurrection of the new. Within the ceremony there are numerous images of this death and resurrection, such as “for this reason a man leaves his father and mother” and “the two become one flesh.” To remain your same old self after you are married is not enough. Many marriages fail because the partners fail to comprehend what a transformation is demanded of them.

Related to our fear of risk is our fear of permanence. To say that sex is best when experienced within a lifelong, unconditional commitment is to challenge some basic assumptions of modern society. We are obsessive “neophiles,” lovers of the new. We have a low tolerance for repetition, pattern, sameness. “Love” becomes an ecstatic experience of release occurring in a moment of bliss that cannot be duplicated. In fact, repetition or duplication somehow seems to rob this so-called love of its significance for us. Anthropologist Margaret Mead says she has seen this fear of repetition and permanence in no other society on earth. In other cultures, what is permanent and trustworthy is what is valuable. Perhaps our fear of permanence is due to our technology and its rapid-fire change, or our uprootedness, or the shallowness and youthfulness of our culture. Whatever the causes, it is a striking characteristic of our nation.

Karl Barth has said that the love of Christian marriage is love in its most mature and Christ-like manifestation. God has covenanted with us to be for us in a permanent relationship that transcends changes of time and circ*mstance, and marriage is meant to be a human equivalent of this divine covenant. Love is best in marriage because in the context of promised permanence and fidelity, love is truly free. Many couples report that the worst time in their relationship is the engagement. In each person’s mind are questions about the rightness of the marriage. There is always the possibility that each argument will be the last, that when the other person walks out and slams the door in a huff, he or she will not come back.

Marriage should change all this because, once permanence is promised, each person is free to be his or her real self. There is no longer a need for the games, the masks, the little falsehoods.

As Barth once said in another context, no one can truly repent or be truly honest about his shortcomings and sins unless he is first absolutely convinced of the security and permanence of God’s love. Any repentance and confession before this is just play-acting. What is true of the divine-human relationship is true of the human relationship of marriage. The covenanting of two people brings a sense of security and openness that is found almost nowhere else in human encounters. Only in this long-term relationship can the honesty, forgiveness, acceptance, and healing take place that make life together possible.

Marriage has suffered partly because the word “love” has been emptied of significance. “Love” has been commercialized, sentimentalized, and cheapened. Christian marriage affirms that love is more than a feeling; it is a conscious decision to yoke onself with another person through thick and thin (“sickness and health, richer and poorer, till death us do part”). In the marriage ritual the minister asks not “Do you love this person?” but “Will you love this person?” The faith assumes that loving is something one can decide to do. It can be an act of the will. I have often reminded couples who come to me to discuss divorce because “we don’t love each other anymore” that they once stood before God and the church and promised to love.

The shallow, gushy “love” of our contemporary world is pagan love that loves only the lovely and the lovable. It is a feeling and nothing more. It is the love of the white person who loves black people only when they conform to white expectations. It is the love of rich people who love poor people only when they are the “deserving” poor. Such selfish, on-again off-again affection falls far short of Christian love.

In the old Book of Common Prayer, one of the three reasons given for the divine ordination of marriage (the other two were “procreation of children” and “to avoid fornication”) was “for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that one ought to have the other, both in prosperity and adversity.” The uniting of two people in marriage is thus a paradigm of the manner of life that God intends, not only for these two people but for the world as a whole. The Puritans used to speak of the family as an ecclesiola or “little church.” They were right. In the Family of God (church) or in the Family of Man (humanity in general) there is a continuing need for permanence, mutual concern in times of joy and sorrow, openness, and risk. Marriage is God’s doing with one man and one woman that which he is always trying to do within the world as a whole.

Marriage will probably continue to be unpopular, and people will probably continue to search for “alternatives.” Many people’s dissatisfaction with marriage may be related to the fact that it is difficult and demanding, calling forth from us the best that we have. Its values challenge many of the values we have accepted over the past few years. In a world of flux where everything and everyone seems to have a price, where few dare to link themselves with other people for a moment much less a lifetime, where TV tells us we can have anything we want with no risk and have it right now, where people are used and disposed of almost as easily as soft-drink cans, marriage is a revolutionary, downright subversive activity! As revolutionary as the love of Christ himself.

Moses David Berg claims to be the “original founder” of the Jesus revolution. He is a former Christian and Missionary Alliance minister who in 1968 began a ministry to hippies in Huntington Beach, California. It has grown into a globe-encircling network of 800 “colonies” (communes) in seventy countries. There are reportedly 5,000 full-time disciples, two-thirds of them male; fewer than 15 per cent are in the United States. Since his “retirement” in 1970, Berg, now fifty-seven, has maintained a low profile in Europe, but he carries on his role of latter-day prophet (Moses) and King of Israel (David) by writing a profusion of “MO” letters—more than 500 in five years. These he mails to his colonies to be printed and distributed on street corners in exchange for donations.

Throughout their tempestuous history, the Children of God have become notorious for using profane and vulgar language excessively, for demonstrating their hatred against “the system” (disrupting church services used to be standard procedure), and for requiring converts to “forsake all” (parents, education, jobs, churches) and to turn over all their possessions to the organization. Hundreds of young people have disappeared into the COG, and the controversial Ted Patrick, charging that the COG used brainwashing methods, proceeded to kidnap (he prefers “rescue”) and “deprogram” disciples at the behest of distraught and desperate parents.

In recent years the COG has undergone radical changes in both theology and methodology. The MO letters have become increasingly sex-oriented. Berg, who is said to have several concubines, insists that his letters are “God’s Word for today” and have supplanted the biblical Scriptures (God’s Word for yesterday). Yet the letters endorse some totally unbiblical practices.

Much of the truth about the COG is shrouded in secrecy. But in July, 1973, Jack and Connie Wasson (whose “Bible” names were Timotheus and Gracie) broke with the COG. Connie had been one of the original four dozen members in Huntington Beach; Jack had been involved for just a year. Two years later, in July, 1975, David Jacks (Jonathan Archer in the COG) repudiated Berg as a false prophet and left the organization. Jacks, a member for over five years, had helped to pioneer South America for the COG. He was a COG archbishop and had access to top-level information denied to ordinary disciples and to leaders of lower rank. In the following interview these two young men—Jack Wasson, 28, and David Jacks, 24—hope to alert the public to the evils being perpetrated by David Berg on his followers (many of whom, they believe, are sincerely motivated Christian young people). Their charges can be fully documented from Berg’s own writings.

Contact was made with Eugene “Happy” Wotila shortly before this article went to press. Wotila’s seven-plus years in the COG date back to the sect’s beginnings in Huntington Beach. Known as Joab, he was a leading Bible teacher in the sect. In October, 1975, he was excommunicated by Berg for raising questions about COG teachings, among other things. His statements confirm the basic information provided in the interview with Wasson and Jacks.

Joseph M. Hopkins, the interviewer, is the author of a book on the Children of God scheduled to be published this summer by Acton House. He is a professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.

Hopkins. Very few people have seen a picture of David Berg. What is he like?

Jacks. He’s in his mid-fifties. A frail man. He has a bad heart. He’s got gray hair and sometimes wears a goatee. He has a large nose. And he has a strong face, strong features. He has piercing eyes, and when you meet him he seems like he’s really checking you out—not in a friendly way but in a very probing way that puts you on the defensive. Sometimes he rants and raves like a madman. Everybody is afraid of him. One time, while we were in Texas, he came in with a large chain and started throwing it down on the table, screaming that he had come to set the captives free from the system.

Hopkins. David, you were in the COG throughout most of its history. Would you describe a few of the changes?

Jacks. The COG started out small and grew rapidly. When I joined there was just one traveling colony of a hundred members, with David Berg teaching the classes. Berg’s immediate family were the key leaders. However, as the organization grew, people with business experience were recruited, and they soon rose to prominence in the group. The strategy is still evangelism, but the messages are 100 per cent different. It’s not so much Jesus Christ any more; it is Moses David. And the methods are different. Before, it was street evangelism. Now it’s peddling literature for money.

Hopkins. What about discipline?

Jacks. When I first joined the COG, it was very regimented. But as David Berg’s goals changed, more liberties were granted to the lowly disciples. Now, with permission, they can date—even date people outside the organization. They can also go to movies. By relaxing the rules, I think Berg is trying to buy acceptance, to gain popularity and more followers. Drugs and tobacco are still taboo, but alcohol is permitted in moderation—usually only at parties.

Hopkins. You say when you first joined there was just one traveling colony. What is the set-up now?

Jacks. Now colonies range from six to twelve full-time followers. The colony leader is called a shepherd. When it gets more than twelve members, a colony has to divide and create a new one. Three (sometimes two) colonies form a district, presided over by a district shepherd. Three districts form a region, headed by a regional shepherd. Three regions constitute a bishopric, presided over by a bishop, and three bishoprics constitute an archbishopric, headed by an archbishop. Three archbishoprics constitute a ministry, governed by a minister; and three ministries constitute a prime ministry, ruled over by a prime minister. At the time I left there were four prime ministers in the COG. They are members of the board of directors called “the King’s Counselors.” It’s a pyramid type of government, rule from the top down.

Hopkins. How important are the MO letters?

Wasson. The COG disciples believe the MO letters are the inspired word of God for today—and the Bible was the inspired word of God for yesterday. For this reason the MO letters are called the “New Wine” and the Bible the “Old Wine.” There are at this time more than 500 MO letters; and besides this, there are a number of tapes that have been sent out by MO to the colonies. The first MO letter was called The Old Church and the New Church. Berg had a wife but had been living with his secretary, Maria, and the word was beginning to get out. He was either going to have to repent or to sidestep the situation, which is what he chose to do. There was a meeting in Montreal, Canada, in 1969. David Berg had this prophecy about “the old church and the new church.” In it he said that Maria was the new church and Jane Berg, his wife, was the old church, and that God was putting away the old church, Jane, because she had been a hindrance to the work. In her place God was giving him a new wife, Maria. David Berg was doing what was explicitly forbidden by Scripture, and he knew it. To justify himself, he had to come up with something that was at least as authoritative as Scripture, if not more so. That was the very first MO letter.

Hopkins. Aren’t there various categories of MO letters?

Jacks. Here they are. First there are the “G. P.” (General Public) letters—the ones they sell on the street. After that come the “D. F. O.” (Disciples and Friends Only) letters. Next “D. O.” (Disciples Only). Then “L. T. O.” (Leadership Training Only). And after that, “L. O.” (Leaders Only). He even has “R. F. O.” (Royal Family Only) letters.

Hopkins. With David Berg out of the country, how are these letters processed?

Wasson. Copies are sent to area leaders, who print them up for the colonies. COG headquarters formerly got $.25 royalty per disciple on each letter as it was issued. But now at least 40 per cent of all the money the kids make on the street “witnessing” is sent to higher administrative levels. The remaining 60 per cent or less is used to finance the colonies. According to a recent issue of the New Nation News (the official COG news publication), 218,108,922 MO letters were distributed in a 4¼-year period beginning October 1, 1971, which breaks down to approximately 4.3 million per month.

Jacks. In Peru and Bolivia, over a period of a year and a half, we passed out 1.5 million letters, which was one letter for every twelve people in those two countries.

Hopkins. What is the average donation?

Jacks. Down there it was maybe $.08 a letter. Here in the States, they get anywhere from $.05 to $1.00 per letter. Berg gets 10 per cent of that. And of course he derives income from other sources, too—the kids who “forsake all,” contributions from sympathetic parents and friends, and so on. Benefactors are called “kings” and “queens.” Berg teaches that you should use them but don’t let them use you. But witnessing is the basic means of income. Kids go out on the streets for six to ten hours a day. In the States they bring in from $25 to $100 a day each. On the basis of ten people, that would mean $500 to $1,000 a day per colony, or $2,500 to $5,000 per week. This income is almost pure profit. Some letters cost less than a penny to print. At some of their discotheques (Poor Boy clubs) they now charge entrance fees. They put their slogans on coffee cups and sell little gold yokes and MO tee shirts with COG slogans such as “I am a Toilet” on them. They’re marketing tapes and albums.

Hopkins. Is the term “spoiling Egypt” still in vogue?

Jacks. Not in the old way; it’s bad public relations. But Berg still espouses this philosophy—of using the system but not letting it use you. They still practice “provisioning”—getting all the food and lodging they can free, along with paper, clothes, glasses, dinnerware, haircuts, anything they can.

Hopkins. What do they say when they go up to someone to “provision” something?

Jacks. They will say, “We’re a Christian group. We’re trying to help get kids off drugs. If you can help us out, we’ll really appreciate it and God will bless you.”

Wasson. And what kind of drug program do they have?

Jacks. They have no drug program whatsoever.

Hopkins. Isn’t it hypocrisy for them to rip off the system when they flatly condemn it in all its aspects—churches, government, education, jobs?

Jacks. David Berg takes the attitude, “I’ll take anything the devil has and use it for God’s glory.”

Hopkins. A year ago I wrote the IRS to ask for their most recent financial report on the COG. They wrote back, “We have no record of the COG as being listed as an exempt organization.” This suggests that an investigation of the financial operation of the COG in this country would be in order.

Jacks. It’s long overdue.

Hopkins. To get back to the MO letters, is it true that Berg claims to have received messages from occult sources?

Wasson. He has a number of what he calls “spiritual counselors” (the Bible calls them “familiar spirits”) that give him revelations, supposedly from God. His main counselor is Abrahim, a supposed Gypsy king who has been dead for a thousand years, who enters into Moses David’s body and speaks through his mouth in a broken-English dialect. The messages that come, as you will see, are blasphemies and heresies, filled with arrogance, pride, and lust. There are dozens of these counselors. Besides Abrahim, there are Rasputin, the Pied Piper, Joan of Arc, Oliver Cromwell, Merlin the Magician, William Jennings Bryan, Martin Luther, and many more.

Hopkins. You mean he actually claims that he is in communication with these people?

Wasson. Oh, yes. That they enter into his body and speak to him. Many of these revelations come in the middle of the night after he’s primed the pump with a little wine.

Hopkins. Do you have a MO letter in which he describes this method?

Wasson. Yes. In Jesus and Sex (March, 1974), Berg states, “When I get drunk, I yield to God’s spirit.… If you get intoxicated, why, it just makes you even more free in the spirit—at least it does with me.”

Hopkins. Did I read somewhere in a MO letter that he claims to have sexual relations with spirits?

Wasson. Definitely. He has mentioned in a number of letters his sexual involvement with spirits whom he calls “goddesses.” But these spirits have become so aggressive lately he admits to being afraid of them. In MO Li’l Jewels (September, 1976), he says regarding the goddesses: “I BUMPED INTO ONE OF those women the other night when the light was out in the hall. They were waiting for me and whispering to each other.… ‘Everybody keep quiet. Be still so nothing will disturb the sleep of David.’ (Maria explains: ‘He was talking about the whispering and giggling of the goddesses outside the door where they wait their turn to make love to him.’)”

Jacks. He seeks the help of a palm reader in one letter. In The Green Door he visits hell.

Wasson. The letter Madame M, subtitled “from one psychic to another,” was written at the time his son Paul (known as Aaron in the cult) either jumped or fell to his death in the Alps in 1973. He tells of visiting a Gypsy fortune-teller called Madame M. She told him some really wild things. Here’s a sample: “‘I THINK YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION, DON’T YOU?’ (David: ‘In a sense,’ I answered. ‘It is as though Abrahim my angelic helper comes in and blends with my body.’) Madame M continues, ‘YOU HAVE SUCH POWER!—LIKE MERLIN THE MAGICIAN!’ (In other words, I could have the power of the greatest of the magicians of the world to help me if I wanted it, even like Merlin the Magician, King Arthur’s court magician!)”

Jacks. MO has a long history of astrology, palm reading, and that sort of thing. He’s followed Jeane Dixon for years.

Hopkins. What status do the MO letters have in the colonies? Are they placed on the same level as Scripture?

Jacks. Let me answer in David Berg’s own words. In August, 1973, he wrote in a letter called Old Bottles: “I want to frankly tell you, if there is a choice between reading your Bible, I want to tell you that you better read what God said today, in preference to what he said 2,000 or 4,000 years ago. Then when you’ve gotten done reading the latest MO letters, you can go back to reading the Bible.”

Hopkins. I’ve been told that when a new MO letter hits the colony, the kids go wild.

Wasson. Oh, definitely! They believe David Berg gets the big “heavies” from God. Really, their veneration of MO approaches idolatry. When I was in the colony at Houston, it was expected that after new MO letters were read there would be received confirming prophecies from the disciples, like, “Yea, this is my servant, David. Hear him and obey him. Thus saith the Lord.” He definitely believes he is God’s endtime prophet. He believes he is the fulfillment of those Old Testament messages which refer to King David, who was to come in the future: Ezekiel 34 and 37; Hosea 3, and the like. Of course, most theologians believe these passages refer to Jesus Christ. And he teaches that many of the Children of God will be among the 144,000 spoken about in Revelation 7 and 14. He believes they are Israel restored.

Obviously, comparing himself to King David and Moses serves very nicely for his pyramid type of leadership structure, with penalties for disobedience to God’s endtime leader. If your leader is wrong, God will judge him; but you must obey your leader. There was a case in Los Angeles in the early days when Abraham (an early COG leader) was giving a class on obeying leadership, and this illustration was used: “If your leader had told you to stand on a corner and witness, and a truck came bearing down on you, in that case you might be able to move. Otherwise, it is your duty to obey, period.” The result of this sort of indoctrination is a reign of terror. If you even question in your mind Moses’ leadership, God will know it and you will be judged.

Hopkins. What about sex in the COG? There have been rumors of immorality and hanky-panky in the higher echelons. Are they true?

Jacks. extra-marital relationships, definitely. Berg cites Abraham, Solomon, David, and so on, as examples for his having concubines. The top leaders have sexual affairs with girls in the group. But the disciples themselves are practically eunuchs for a year or so until they get married in the COG.

Wasson. This fooling around with sex goes way back. Married couples were encouraged as a group to participate in “skinny-dipping”—swimming in the nude. It was considered unrevolutionary not to participate. And COG members will do almost anything to avoid being called unrevolutionary. It was also policy for all married couples to attend evening “leadership training” sessions at the TSC (Texas Soul Clinic) Ranch in west Texas in the early days of the COG. These sessions would be led by David Berg, and no matter what subject they started out about, they always ended up on the subject of sex, with David Berg quite frequently leading the couples into a mass love-making session while he looked on. Then this doctrine came up that was taught only among the top leadership: “all things common,” based on Acts 2:44. They applied the “all things” even to wives and husbands. The wife- and husband-swapping was not explicitly condoned in a MO letter, but it was allowed and participated in by the top leadership. But after the NBC “Chronologue” program, which exposed some of the inner workings of the COG, they panicked and forbade any more of this to go on for a brief period. Then it resumed.

Jacks. Listen to this quote from Beauty and the Beast (July, 1974): “There were a lot of times … when I would pick up a girl, not necessarily because I needed to make love to her sexually, although I often did in the long run, but just for companionship. Sometimes I did it as much, if not more, for her sake than even for mine. Because after talking with her for some time, she felt so much love that she wanted to make love, and I wanted to make her happy. And those girls usually think that they haven’t done their job or earned their salt till they’ve gone all the way.” Berg actually encourages fornication for the purpose of winning disciples. He says, “To go as far as kissing them on the mouth or deep-kissing them so that they get their germs and everything on you, that’s a pretty big sacrifice.… We have shown the world every other kind of love.… Now we’re going to go as far as giving them other forms of physical love, even sexual love, to minister to one of their finest and greatest needs.” In Flirty Little Fishy (March, 1974) there is a picture of a mermaid making love to a naked man with the caption, “Hooker for Jesus.” The COG now considers the “Flirty Fish Ministry” one of its most important, and there are a number of recent MO letters on the subject. Basically it means religious prostitution, and they are really into it now. As a result, recent reports from inside the group state that venereal disease is not uncommon and that there are numbers of mothers without husbands (the COG calls them “widows”!).

Hopkins. It’s reported that many of the COG marriages are really common-law liaisons, without benefit of clergy. Is this true?

Wasson. In the beginning, the COG taught that a marriage license was just a piece of paper and wasn’t really necessary. The actual marriage was when you went to bed. They had what they called betrothals—a kind of unofficial ceremony in the colony. Then when the COG started dealing with Fred Jordan (a Los Angeles evangelist and early benefactor of the COG who later repudiated the movement), he wanted the kids to get legal marriages, so that many of them did get legally married after that time. I would say about half of the COG are legally married to someone, although only a small per cent are living with their own legal husband or wife. All marriages, incidentally, have to be approved by the leadership. To go on with the effect of the COG upon married life, I’m going to quote from a MO letter called One Wife: “God breaks up marriages in order that he might join each of the parties together to himself. He rips off wives, husbands, or children to make up his bride if the rest of the family refuses to follow. He is the worst ‘ripper-offer’ of all. God is the greatest destroyer of home and family of anybody!… If you have not forsaken your husband or wife for the Lord at some time or another, you have not forsaken all.”

Hopkins:God is in the business of breaking up families? I thought that was the devil’s business!

Wasson: In the letter Mountain Maid David Berg promoted topless bathing and encouraged the girls not to wear undergarments, and since that day only a handful of girls in the COG have been wearing a bra.

Jacks. MO’s greatest pride now is his new sex book. He says it is hotter than anything in the latest sex shops. It’s called Free Sex. On the cover are a nude fellow and girl, and the whole thing is full of MO letters on sex. But the freakiest thing is his letter called Revolutionary Love Making. It is absolutely the grossest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. I don’t know how to describe it.

Hopkins. There are pictures of people actually engaged in various forms of intercourse. Before we leave this sex thing, how can the colonies remain clean with this lascivious material being fed into the members’ minds?

Jacks. The COG is degenerating. David Berg is getting more and more into p*rnography, spiritism, astrology, and other far-out things—substituting this garbage for the fundamental Christian faith.

Hopkins. The MO letters abound with four-letter words. Is this sort of language common in the colonies?

Jacks. Most of the Children of God, all the way down to the lowest disciple, swear like pirates. Even when they witness, they use four-letter words. They believe it helps them relate to people on the street.

Hopkins. The MO letters aside, how does COG theology compare with the doctrinal teachings of most mainline denominations?

Wasson. In the beginning the COG taught pretty much straight Bible. The main Bible teachers were Joab and Joel Wordsworth. Just recently, however, these two men were denounced by Moses David and excommunicated. He wrote to the colonies, “Any disciple in possession of Joel’s letters had better destroy them immediately or be in danger of excommunication if found with them in his possession.” This is like kicking the Bible out of the COG. Because practically all of the Bible lessons in the COG were written by Joel Wordsworth. Now his writings are contraband. The point is that COG theology is now based entirely on the MO letters. Those letters are totally heresy and blasphemy. They encourage witchcraft, religious prostitution, immorality, cursing, rebellion, bitterness, hatred. Another thing David Berg teaches is lesbianism. In Women in Love (December, 1973) he writes, speaking of sexual relationships between two women: “When He’s speaking of love, He [God] says if you do it in love, against such there is no law, right? If it’s real love. So why not? IT IS NOT EXPLICITLY FORBIDDEN SUCH AS IT IS WITH MEN WITH MEN. Male hom*osexuality is expressly, definitely and specifically forbidden and cursed and called sodomy. In that case it is absolutely forbidden and a sin. But I don’t see and I’ve never been able to find any place in the Bible where it is forbidden to women.”

David Berg also believes in universalism. Here’s what he says in this letter Old Bottles (April, 1973): “I’ll never be satisfied until everybody on earth is saved, which will never happen of course. But I’m looking forward to the day when … everybody or at least almost everybody will be saved—at least there won’t be many left in Hell if any.” Also, on the subject of Jesus, David Berg says in Revolutionary Sex, “From personal revelations and Bible study, I am convinced that Jesus Himself could have enjoyed His Father’s own creation of sexual activity with some of the women He lived with, particularly Mary and Martha, and yet without sin. Why should it have been a sin for Christ to have enjoyed sex that He Himself had created?”

Hopkins. In view of all these nonbiblical teachings that have been imposed on Berg’s disciples, what would you say about the spiritual state of the young people involved in the COG?

Jacks. I am convinced that in the early days most members were born again and really received Jesus as their personal Saviour when they entered the group. Salvation verses were really stressed—John 3:16; Romans 10:9, 10; Romans 3:23 and 6:23; John 1:12; Revelation 3:20, and so on. However, with emphasis on the Bible decreasing …

Wasson. Having a confrontation with Christ isn’t the big thing anymore. The key to success in the COG is how effectively a person fits into the Moses David witnessing machine, producing more income and more disciples for King David.

Hopkins. Let’s move on to COG eschatology.

Jacks. David Berg is a very apocalyptic person, and he believes the whole world—America, first of all—is under impending doom. He believes that we are living in the last generation, and that the United States is the “great prostitute that sits on many waters” and the “Babylon” of Revelation. Another interesting thing is David Berg’s courtship of Mu’ammar Gadaffi, the radical strong man of Libya. Berg believes the Children of God are actually going to rule the planet Earth before Jesus Christ returns. He says that they will evangelize the world and that Gadaffi will help them by making a peace pact with Israel.

Wasson. David Berg is into astrology, and he saw Kohoutek (the “Christmas comet” of 1973, which was to have been the brightest of the century but fizzled) as a sign of America’s coming destruction on or before January 31, 1974. A lot of the COG wrote their parents and friends in the United States saying, “Get out, get out, while there’s still a chance. America is going to fall.” The COG wore placards and paraded up and down the streets of almost every major city in the free world saying, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed.” And of course the comet just fizzled out.

Hopkins. If America is to be destroyed by God, then who is going to fight in the Battle of Armageddon?

Jacks. Israel is going to be invaded by Russia (Gog and Magog), according to Ezekiel 38 and 39. The United States will get involved, and Israel and America will go down the drain. A world Communist government will be set up. Armageddon will take place at Christ’s return, at the end of the seven years. The seventh trumpet will be blown, and Jesus will come in the clouds with all of God’s people rising to meet him. This, Berg believes, will take place in 1993.

Hopkins. Wouldn’t you say that one of the appeals of the COG is to be part of an elite group through whom God’s promises and purposes are to be fulfilled?

Jacks. Yes, indeed. It’s a very secure feeling. You feel that you are super-important, that you alone know what’s going on.

Wasson. David’s oldest son, Aaron (the one who died), wrote a song, “We are the 144,000. Who else could it be but us?”

Hopkins. What about sacraments in the Children of God?

Jacks. They started out baptizing in water in the early days. They did it by immersion. But it became a cumbersome thing to do and they just stopped doing it.

Wasson. Once in a long while—maybe on Christmas or some special occasion—they’ll get a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and have Communion. But they don’t do it regularly.

Hopkins. Are the charismatic gifts practiced in the COG?

Wasson. All claim they are Spirit-baptized and pray in tongues. On healing, the Children of God believe that suffering often is the judgment of God. So when they pray for someone who is sick, they ask the Lord to show the person where he has sinned so he will confess and so be healed.

Hopkins. Do they believe in natural childbirth?

Jacks. Yes. For a long time the women gave birth to their babies in the colonies. But they have lost some children in the past two or three years, so more of them have been going to hospitals.

Hopkins. What is their policy on medicine and doctors?

Jacks. They’re opposed to people who try to make money out of people’s afflictions. If you have faith and get better, then you get brownie points; but if you don’t, then there’s no condemnation about going to a doctor.

Hopkins. What happens on Sunday in the COG? Is it a special day?

Jacks. No, not at all. If they have a rest day at all, it’s usually on Sunday. But there’s no set day of the Lord.

Hopkins. It’s reported that the Bergs and their retinue live like kings while most of the lowly disciples languish in poverty. Is this an exaggeration?

Jacks. No, I think it’s well founded. David Berg doesn’t live lavishly, but he does live comfortably—very comfortably. I know for a fact that John Treadwell (Jethro) has always lived very nicely in the COG. He’s always had a nice apartment, has taken fencing lessons, and jets around the world like an aristocrat—all on his expense account.

Hopkins. An ex-member told me that in the colony where he was in Texas they ate moldy bread and whatever cheap food they could scrounge.

Wasson. Although the diet of the regular disciples was very poor in earlier days, since the practice of selling the MO letters became big, more money is available and diets are much improved. In poorer parts of the world, however, they can still be very bad.

Hopkins. Is it fair to say that Berg tolerates parents only if they support the COG?

Jacks. That’s right. This is what he says about parents in Who Are the Rebels? (March, 1970): “You, our parents, are the most God-defying, commandment-breaking, insanely rebellious rebels of all time, who are on the brink of destroying and polluting all of us and our world if we do not rise up against you in the name of God and try to stop you from your suicidal madness of total genocide. To Hell with your devilish system. May God damn your unbelieving hearts.”

Hopkins. What about the charge of brainwashing?

Jacks. The Children of God do not brainwash. They do not withhold food or sleep or anything like that. Leaders are not trained in the art of mind control.

Hopkins. Yet there are kids who come out of the COG and insist they were brainwashed. And their parents say that when they were in they had the glassy stare and the programmed grin. Ted Patrick now claims to have deprogrammed more than 1,200 young people from the COG and similar cults.

Wasson. We have had correspondence with 250 to 300 ex-members who were in anywhere from two to seven years, including long-term members who were in leadership all the way up to the top. One thing they are all adamant about is that they were not brainwashed. None of them feel that their mind or their free will was ever taken from them.

Hopkins. Then you don’t believe in the concept of mind-control—that people can be programmed into a cult and then need to be deprogrammed out?

Wasson. Not at all. I do believe in the Bible. The Bible teaches that we are free moral agents. If people believe a lie, they choose to believe a lie. As a matter of fact, God will send them a lie if they refuse to accept the truth. He will send a “strong delusion” because they have rejected the truth (2 Thess. 2:11).

Hopkins. Then what is your alternative to deprogramming?

Wasson. There are very few in the COG today who wouldn’t think seriously about leaving if they had what they considered an acceptable alternative. Those of us who are working in “Recovery” believe that those who have been through the COG and similar groups and have made it out O.K. are the most capable of understanding the particular problems of guilt and bondage that former members complain of. Just knowing there are others who have “made it out” is a major help to those who would like to leave but doubt they could make it on the outside. We are planning for the near future a course for former cult members and other interested persons dealing with the special ministry and problems of the “New Age Cults.” Also, we are preparing tapes and literature for former members and their families in an effort to help them through the difficult transitional time. We further expect to open at least one recovery center where former members can come and “get their heads together,” where we will offer counsel and encouragement. All of these efforts will be conducted with the help of former cult members.

Hopkins. What in your judgment is the future of the COG?

Wasson. My opinion is that the organization cannot survive much longer. The thing that holds it together is David Berg. If he goes, there’s no one person who has the charisma to inspire the loyalty of the thousands of disciples. And the leadership is torn asunder by bitter rivalries and jockeying for power. There is a good chance the group would split into various factions led by rival leaders—Jane Berg (“Mother Eve”), John Treadwell (“Jethro”), Maria, Joshua, Rachel, and so forth. Maria is right up there next to MO. But she has no charisma at all.

Jacks. But if anyone wanted to grab the reigns of the COG, he would have to go with her. She will have a strong bargaining position. Even though she lacks the charisma or the know-how to run the organization, whoever wants to take over will have to go with her. One reason for this is that MO has prophesied that Maria will be the oracle of God. There have been similar prophecies about Rachel (who married a wealthy Italian member of the COG).

Hopkins. Tell me, as you look back on your experience, do you feel that you learned something? Have there been any positive results?

Jacks. It’s hard to look back on 5½ years of your life and not find something there that was good. I still feel very close to those whom I knew in the group. We have been through a lot together. Actually, David Berg is and always has been the corrupting factor in the COG. If it hadn’t been for him, the COG could have been a force for good instead of for evil. I really believe that. One thing no one can deny is these are some of the most committed young people in the world. And as individuals in the COG are set free from the Berg influence, they turn out to be some of the most committed Christians in the world. “He that is forgiven much loveth much.”

Wasson. For me I guess it was like Marine boot camp. I wouldn’t do it again for anything, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. The fact is after graduating from a Bible college and being a denominational minister I was looking for something more. The original goals and vision of the COG were good. With this broad experience in the area of the “New Age Cults” I believe God has projected me into a ministry which has unlimited potential. I could never have understood it had I not been through it. Perhaps someone else could have, but I couldn’t. I thank God I can offer reassurance to the victims and families of these cults, not as an outsider but as one who has been there. Not as one condemning but as one forgiven.

Once Clyde Kilby of Wheaton College was asked one of those inevitable questions about literature: “Dr. Kilby, I just can’t understand why you spend so much time and attention on these fantasies by Tolkien and Lewis and Williams. What good do they do? They’re about an imaginary world; they don’t tell us how to cope better with this one. Why read them?”

With the longsuffering smile of a teacher speaking to one who had not seen the light, Dr. Kilby replied, “If I went down the street to a magazine rack, I could probably find two hundred articles on how to live better. How to improve my marriage, how to lose weight, how to attract a lover, how to succeed in business, how to banish guilt, how to get rich, how to love myself. People gobble up those articles. But does anyone really change? Another magazine will print the same advice next month, and people will still writhe with the same problems. These books by Tolkien and Lewis and Williams bypass all that good advice. They don’t tell me how to do something; they tell me what to be.”

I have almost (but not quite) come to the same conclusion about advice on marriage. I spent a year studying the first five years of marriage, the period when the divorce rate is highest. I began by interviewing nine couples who revealed to me the struggles of their first five years. Then I read every marriage book I could find, Christian and secular. The advice contained in most of them was compact and well-blended, a convenient pill I could offer to each couple. But the best advice cannot solve a problem without the cooperation of the people whose problem it is.

I remember well the long interviews my wife and I had with the nine couples. Most started at a restaurant with polite chatter about how they met and what attracted them and where their inlaws live. By midnight, however, back in our living room, the conversation had changed. Unresolved conflicts oozed open. Often a session intended to gather helpful information for others turned into a plea for help.

Listening to them, I sometimes questioned the whole notion of marriage. We have placed greater demands on marriage now than in previous generations. Besides satisfying the need for asexual relationship, marriage is now being asked to supply needs for comradeship and partnership as well. Added to this is the weight of ideals our romanticizing culture excites in us. It’s no wonder many marriages cannot bear the strain.

Some marriages seem cursed with a time bomb of impossible expectations that must soon explode. As I encountered these time bombs, both in the couples I interviewed and in written accounts, my first reaction was to lower the ideals. There must be, I thought, some way to disassemble marriage and put back only certain pieces of it—say, sexual release and companionship—without insisting that marriage bear all the pressure of two souls becoming one.

But a strange thing is happening. G. K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, described his spiritual journey as a long, romantic, tempestuous sea voyage. When he finally sighted land, however, he discovered he had ended up exactly where he started—in cozy England. Something similar is occurring among observers of the marriage scene. Counselors who were once offering new visions of open marriage and sexual license are starting to use words like “fidelity” and “commitment.”

As I talked to the nine couples with their varying degrees of conflict, I discovered that the ones whose marriages were in severe trouble were not those who expected the most from marriage but those who expected the least. Those with the highest ideals seemed to have the closest relationships, and after a year’s study I have come to the conclusion that our marriage ideals have been set not too high but too low.

The Bible at first reading seems to say little about marriage, but I found that God does show us what marriage requires and how we are to exercise the principles that build sound marriages. God himself embodies the ideal in three areas that encompass most of the marital conflicts of the nine couples I interviewed.

1. Ego sacrifice. The fundamental human need, says John Powell, is “a true and deep love of self, a genuine and joyful self-acceptance.” But marriage calls us to transcend that fundamental human need. The beloved’s needs and pleasures must take equal if not superior status to our own.

From our toddler years we learn to protect ourselves. A child grabs a toy and clutches it to his chest, yelling “Mine!” As we grow older, if someone criticizes us we want to lash out in revenge, or perhaps we begin to doubt ourselves. Our egos must be protected.

We go through life like so many clenched fists, striving to prove ourselves to one another, striking out when thwarted. As children we learned not to expose our deepest secrets even to a best friend, for they might be broadcast all over school the next day. Marriage, however, calls us to unclench the fist and allow someone to see what lies inside. We must expose our nakedness, physical and emotional, to another person. The secrets are out. Marriage calls for utter transparency and trust in a world where we have learned that these are a sure path to pain.

The ego sacrifice required by marriage does not, of course, entail a forfeiting of ego. I do not lower my self-esteem and think less of myself for the sake of my wife. Rather, I should raise my esteem of her so that in a thousand areas—squeezing toothpaste, picking up socks, buying records, tolerating dripping pantyhose, eating out, selecting TV shows—I sometimes consciously opt for her convenience or pleasure above my own. My will bends as I sublimate my own needs and desires for her sake, or the sake of the relationship.

The absence of this ego sacrifice manifests itself in great power struggles between husband and wife. Each fights for his own territory. Each insists on being “right,” with the result of devaluing the other. One couple I talked with, Brad and Maria Steffan (these names and the names given to the other couples I interviewed are fictitious) periodically fought emotional wars that could last a week. Says Maria, “It’s as if I’ve built a protective shell around myself I can’t let Brad enter. I have always been competitive. I can’t stand the image of the submissive, boot-licking wife. I despise the seductive, baby-doll wife taught in books like The Total Woman. I want my independence, yet I want to lean on Brad. Marriage is so confusing.”

She continues, “We read books on marriage which say the key is the self-sacrificing giving of each partner. But in our relationship, that’s dangerous. It’s like there’s a giant power struggle going on and we’ve both only got so much ammunition. If I take the peace initiative and let Brad through my defenses, he might hurt me. I might lose.”

In contrast, the biblical ideal shows God, the All-powerful, creating human beings almost as parasites who would require attention and a constant giving of himself with little in return. You can see the awesome figure of a sacrificial God in the Old Testament prophets’ description of him as the Wounded Lover. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?… Mine heart recoils within me …” (Hosea 11:8).

The best example of God’s self-sacrifice on behalf of his beloved creation is found in a New Testament passage that gives a profound insight into the Incarnation: “Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:5–8). God took a risk, exposing himself, becoming vulnerable, to the point of joining the human race to show us how it’s to be done!

One couple I talked to described a horrible two-year period of angry quarrels, temper tantrums, and walkouts. The wife, Beth Pestano, had come from a troubled family. Her father had left and her mother had died. Beth used the first few years of marriage to unleash her pentup anxieties. She would fly into irrational rages over insignificant details. Somehow Peter rode out the violence of those first few years and continued to show her love. Today they have one of the happiest marriages I know of.

I asked him, “Peter, how did you do it? What kept you from cracking in those long months of giving a lot and getting very little in return?” He then told me the story of his conversion, when God had tracked him down after months of angry rebellion.

“The most powerful motivating force in my life,” he concluded, “was the grace of God in loving me and giving himself for me. When I hated coming home to face Beth, I would stop for a moment, think of God’s sacrifice on my behalf, and ask him for strength to duplicate it.”

Marriage, as taught by God’s good example, challenges our lust for power and ego gratification. It requires sacrifice. The well-known prayer of St. Francis could be directed toward this aspect of marriage: “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; not so much to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.”

2. Acceptance. The world teaches us that worth is a quality to be earned. In school you earn a grade, or perhaps a starting position on the varsity team. In business you work your way up to a plush office and a good salary. In the army you earn stripes on the sleeve; those with few stripes take orders and those with many stripes give orders. Everyone understands the system and his own ranking within it.

Against this background, God carves out a unit, the family, where worth is not earned but given, determined by the mere fact of birth. A moronic son has as much worth as a genius—he deserves love simply because he was born into the family. At least that’s the theory of the family. The prodigal son who squanders his father’s riches is welcomed as eagerly as his older brother who followed all the rules. (And the lesson of the older brother is the lesson of one who tries to inject the world’s value system into the family, demanding that behavior determine worth.)

What does this have to do with a couple groping their way through their first few years together? Everything. The principle of assumed worth begins with marriage. If it is not present there, it cannot be passed down to the children. The sense of worth in marriage is set squarely within God’s value system, not the world’s. I should accept my wife totally. I should love her because she is my wife. Nothing is unforgivable. Nothing can sever the love—she can count on that. This is the bedrock ideal on which God built the structure of marriage.

A devout young Christian husband, Mark Parsons, told me how he almost pushed his wife away by jabbing at traits in her that he disliked. “You chit-chat too much; you’re not serious about things that are important to me; you don’t always make sense when you talk.”

Cynthia felt trapped. “When a problem came up,” she recalls, “Mark would want to talk about the causes immediately, just like an instant replay on TV. I couldn’t talk about it—I would lash out, attacking him personally, anything to avoid the issue. He would bring up the comment I made in anger and ask for an explanation. How could I explain my anger without showing more anger? So I would clamp shut and be silent. Then he’d want to talk about why I was so silent. I felt smothered, hounded, attacked, as if I was in a wind tunnel with hurricane-force winds coming from every direction.”

Just in time Mark realized that his pressure on Cynthia would never help her change. She needed to feel accepted and loved before she could make adjustments. He saw this by considering how Christ brings about changes in us. “Naturally Christ wants the church sinless and perfect. But how does he accomplish that? Not by pressuring us and berating us and sternly rebuking us. He is loving and forgiving toward us. He wants our growth, but he refuses to reach in with a magic wand and drive out all imperfections. He allows us the freedom we need to turn to him voluntarily.”

The Christian Gospel offers unearned acceptance, but many Christians seem to demonstrate that quality very poorly in their marriages. Husband and wife become self-righteous judges of each other’s behavior and attitudes. I know of a man who is completely turned off by the church because his Christian wife complains so relentlessly about his smoking habits. Another husband inspires unimaginable guilt in his wife. After the wedding he discovered she had had sexual relations with other men. Refusing to forgive her, he uses the fact as a dagger in arguments.

We forget that though Christianity sets our ideals high, it sets our forgiveness quotient even higher. There is no limit to God’s grace in accepting our failures.

I think of a married couple in their mid-fifties who have endured twenty-five years of difficulty in marriage. They are of opposite temperaments; they moved overseas unprepared for a new culture and suffered tearing family tragedies. Yet their marriage today exudes open, accepting love. Once the wife told me, “I used to think I loved Jack because of certain things about him—his good looks, his winsome personality, his dedication. But it didn’t take long to see through all that. I found out over the years there can be only one reason to make me love him. That reason is because I want to. We’re together, I believe, because God put us together, and I’m going to make it work. I will to love him and accept him regardless.”

Somehow a husband and wife have to learn to communicate love, a love that stretches around any bulges of failure and disappointment. Love and acceptance are not like rubber bands that weaken as they are stretched; they become stronger as they are tested and the partner perceives trust and faithful love.

In the book of Hosea, God showed that his fidelity was so great it could forgive gross adultery. Does God’s love seem weaker for forgiving such behavior? No, it is unfathomably greater. Similarly, active, accepting love within marriage can build unbreakable bonds of trust.

In my interviews, I encountered one beautiful example of this kind of acceptance. John and Claudia Claxton, a couple in their early twenties, were faced with the specter of cancer after just one year of marriage.

Claudia’s body quickly began to deteriorate. Surgeons removed her spleen and some lymph nodes. Even more draining than surgery were the radiation treatments that followed. Claudia was exhausted by the daily regimen. She would go to bed at 10 P.M. and sleep till noon the next day. The radiation damaged good cells as well as killing the diseased cells, so her energy was sapped. Her throat was raw and so swollen she could barely swallow. Areas of her skin turned dark, and the hair at the back of her head began falling out.

I talked with John and Claudia about the inevitable pressures. Claudia experienced waves of self-pity, questioning her worth because she was a constant concern to everyone around her. Yet somehow John managed to communicate an overpowering love. He would come and sit for hours on her hospital bed, holding her hand, touching her face, telling her he loved her. (She ultimately responded to treatment and now seems cured.)

John said the love was not an effort, merely a natural outgrowth of patterns that had been set even before their marriage. “When a couple meet a crisis,” he told me, “it’s a caricature of their relationship and what’s already there. We love each other deeply. We had always insisted on open communication; when something bothered us, we would talk it out. We trusted each other. Therefore when the Hodgkin’s disease came, there were no lingering fears and grudges to undermine our relationship. My love for Claudia would continue regardless of what happened to her body.”

3. Freedom. This third battlefield was the most common one among the couples I interviewed. A newlywed daily discovers something about his spouse he doesn’t like. Our natural human tendency is to want to control the other person, to squeeze him into our mold. We want to seize his freedom.

Here are some areas of skirmish that the nine couples brought up:

• frequency of sex (in most cases the husbands wanted their wives to change by wanting sex more often);

• moodiness;

• sloppy habits of dress and housekeeping;

• a desire to have “old” friends without involving the spouse in the activities;

• physical appearance, especially weight;

• verbal attack of the spouse in public;

• styles of settling conflicts;

• irritating hobbies or avocations;

• a complaining attitude;

• failure to talk things over.

I was amused to read of the adjustments Paul and Nellie Tournier worked through in their first years of marriage. “I’m an optimist and she a pessimist,” Paul Tournier reported in Faith at Work magazine (April, 1972). “She thinks of every difficulty, misfortune, and catastrophe that might happen, and I cannot promise her that such things will not happen. But God is neither optimist nor pessimist. The search for him leads one beyond his own personality and temperament to a path that is neither optimism nor pessimism.

“Little by little I have learned that God speaks to everybody—men and women, adults and children, blacks and whites, the rich and the poor. To discover the will of God, you must listen to him in all men. Of course, I prefer to have God speak directly to me, rather than through my wife, and yet in truly seeking his will I must be persuaded that he speaks as much through her as through me; to her as much as to me.”

Most of the problems about Christianity that puzzle so many people pertain to this issue of human freedom. How can God allow sin? How can he allow unjust rulers? What about pain and suffering? How can God allow people to go to hell? We want God to reach down with a wrench and forcibly fix things.

There is no adequate way to describe the premium God places on human freedom. But the Bible does contain some glimpses of the freedom ideal. One is in the analogy I already spoke about: the faithful, persistent wooing of an adulterous lover in Hosea. God respects freedom so much that through all of human history he has allowed human beings to play the harlot against him.

Another glimmer of God’s respect for freedom is captured in the scene of Jesus weeping as he contemplates the people of Jerusalem who have rejected him. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem …,” he explained. “How often would I have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not” (Matt. 23:37). Reading that, we may forget that the speaker is the all-powerful God. He could have charged into Jerusalem on a stallion of fire, streaking the skies with lightning, causing earthquakes with the resonance of his voice. He could have demanded their allegiance. But Jesus chose not to. He respected human freedom so much that he allowed himself to be rejected.

The final, most compelling glimpse of all comes in the image of the cross. God, eternal and omniscient, could see from the beginning the ultimate sacrifice our redemption would require. The lamb was slain before the foundation of the world. He could feel the sharp slap on his cheek and the crusted blood on his back and brow. He could hear the hooting and jeering as the world voted to murder him. And yet, knowing all that, he sacrificed all, spilling his own blood, to allow man the choice of responding freely to the love he offers.

Does it do any good to spiritualize about how marriage is like the Christian life and how true love is God’s love? Does it do any good to enlarge the ideals of love to divine proportions? Only if you believe marriage can be a crucial settlement in God’s Kingdom. It is exalted, not because it is so different from the rest of life, but because it allows us a frontier to practice God’s value system of ego sacrifice, acceptance, and freedom, so that we derive strength to present that system to the rest of the world.

The exalted nature of marriage assures us that it will involve strife and conflict. In marriage we are tiptoeing through a field of land mines on the way to paradise.

Henry james once said that America was too young a country to have any good stories in it. Perhaps he knew too little of New England (except for Boston). The rocks and walls, the steep mountains and hard winters alone make New England a natural setting for novels. Add to that people with high-pitched, clipped speech and sturdy—some might say rigid—religion. Complex characters rooted in rock and ground.

John Gardner, who lives in Vermont, takes us to this stubborn land and its people in October Light (Knopf, $10). Despite its mixed reviews, the novel was named by all publications that compile such lists one of last year’s most significant books (it was published in December). As its title suggests, the book hovers between seasons, not quite winter but no longer autumn. Not quite the future but no longer the past. A present unequally mixed of both. Eerie. Shadowed. A New England light in October is hard to see by; much of the action of the book takes place at dusk or evening.

Sally Page Abbott, eighty, lives with her seventy-two-year-old brother James, a crotchety beekeeper and farmer. He hates television—it spews immorality—and he shoots a hole in his sister’s set. That starts the quarrel. A few days later he chases her to her room with a log from the fireplace and locks the door behind her. At first he won’t let her out; then she refuses to leave her room.

Sally’s niece, her niece’s husband, her old friends, and her minister all try to talk her into what she considers surrender. To Sally the issue is not just a silly quarrel but a moral matter. James must recognize his sins, how he destroyed his son, his wife, and now his sister. Sally is the instrument of healing for James and his family.

While Sally stays in her room she reads a trashy novel about marijuana smugglers. And we read it along with her. Fortunately many of its pages are missing. As a satire on the pseudo-philosophical potboiler, it is nearly successful. But as a trigger for Sally’s memories of the past, it is farfetched. The everyday scenes and atmosphere that evoke James’s memories work much better.

The limbo-like quality disappears as the novel moves toward its close. Sally leaves her room; her niece Ginny undergoes a profound change; and James’s pain at his son’s suicide and his wife’s bitter death finds release. He too experiences a conversion of sorts. Winter rises, the past disappears. The novelist’s images of earth, the seasons, and farming unify and focus the story.

Gardner writes lovingly about New England and its people. His descriptions capture the country, his felicitous use of dialect, the people. Out of the decay of characters and country come repentance and forgiveness. Christianity is their anchor. Gardner understands what is true in life, and therefore what is holy. A dying man’s reflections on life near the end of the novel are worth the price of the book:

“I’ll miss that, this year, or ennaway take pot in it in a way I never did before. But I can’t complain.…

“James, how come you’re listening to all this?”

James thought about it. “Becauth,” he said at last, “ith true.”

Ed’s smile widened. “That’s what I tell my Ruth,” he said. “She’s got good poems and bad poems.… I explain to her only the good poems are exactly true.”

“Like a good window-thash,” James said, “or horth.”

By striving for truth, by doing good work, Ed and James and the others try to minimize the decay, which, says a painter, “most people hadn’t yet glimpsed.” As Catharine Marshall explained in a quite different way in Beyond Our Selves, Gardner shows how God releases the memories of the past to heal the present for the future. Or, in the words of Scripture, we must die to live.

The ‘Key’ Of Stevie Wonder

It took nearly two years of studio work to produce Songs in the Key of Life (Tamla, T13-340C2 $13.98), Stevie Wonder’s ambitious two-record set with an additional seven-inch extended-play disc. Many contemporary records suffer when producers spend excessive studio time working and reworking arrangements, but Stevie Wonder instills all twenty-one songs with color, variety, and a sense of spontaneity. The album is Wonder’s masterpiece, the apex of the maturation that began with Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Inversion, and Fulfillingness First Finale.

Songs is a “concept album” loosely based on Wonder’s life history. “I Wish” finds the superstar longing for the carefree days of childhood. In “Sir Duke” he pays tribute to his musical roots and proclaims music the universal language. “Knocks Me Off My Feet” tells of the joys of first love, “Summer Soft” bemoans love lost, and “Ordinary Pain” recalls the hurt of love gone bad. The ecstasy of fatherhood is celebrated in “Isn’t She Lovely,” in which he rejoices in what God has made through love.

We hear Wonder’s philosophy of life from the first cut, “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” in which he warns that hate is destroying everything: “The force of evil plans/To make you its possession/And it will if you let it/Destroy everybody.” He calls on everyone to combat hate with love.

“Pastime Paradise” divides humanity into those who live for the past by “conformation to the evils of the world” and those who live for the future by “conformation to the peace of the world,” always looking to “when the Saviour of love will come to stay.” Although life is filled with troubles, he proposes in “As” that “God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed.”

Synthesized strings provide the background for “Village Ghetto Land,” a picture of grim ghetto life. The singer asks, “Tell me, would you be happy in Village Ghetto Land?” God is the world’s “only free psychiatrist,” according to “Have a Talk With God.” Aided by a classroom of children he chronicles the contribution made by non-white people in building America in “Black Man.”

The upbeat Songs in the Key of Life shows that purpose and meaning in life are found in living for the future. Although a few of the songs have excessive refrains or some awkward phrases and rhymes, Wonder’s performance overcomes these flaws. This album is a tour de force.

DANIEL J. EVEARITT

Daniel J. Evearitt is the assistant pastor of Tappan Alliance Church, Tappan, New York.