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In their attempt to rescue the Bible from conservative, scholars in the Jesus Seminar became liberal fundamentalists.
Here are some things Jesus didn’t say:
“Before the rooster crows you will disown me three times.”
“I swear to you, you who have followed me, when the son of Adam [sic] is seated on his throne of glory in the renewal (of creation), you also will be seated on twelve thrones and sit in judgment on the twelve tribes of Israel.”
“Congratulations to those who work for peace! They will be known as God’s children.”
That, at least, is the opinion of the Jesus Seminar, a group of 74 scholars who have crowned the first six years of their work by publishing The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (Macmillan). In fact, fully 82 percent of what the canonical Gospels ascribe to Jesus is deemed inauthentic, and much of the remaining 18 percent is only doubtfully authentic.
The book has garnered a fair bit of notice in the media, and the Jesus Seminar is poised to attract more attention in the months and years ahead. And that is what they want.
From their perspective, competent biblical scholarship has been unfairly cloistered, shut up in university seminar rooms, while the religious fabric of the nation is stitched together by televangelists. These scholars are coming out. Their aim is not to convince scholarly colleagues who disagree with them—in fact, they never acknowledge their existence—but to make a splash in the media and drown “the dictatorial tactics of the Southern Baptist Convention and other fundamentalisms.”
Funds for the project come from the Westar Institute, a think tank with headquarters in Sonoma, California, and directed by Robert W. Funk. Support for the Westar Institute in this venture has come from Polebridge Press and from the fellows and associate members of the institute. Fellows are scholars who are permitted to vote; associate members are interested clergy, laypeople, students, and sponsors.
The Jesus Seminar, then, is a semiannual gathering of 70-plus, mostly liberal scholars, who meet to evaluate the legitimacy of the New Testament’s record of Jesus’ actions and sayings. They present papers, discuss texts, and then, with self-conscious theatricality, vote on blocks of text (sometimes an entire section, sometimes as little as a word or two) using colored beads.
Casting a red bead means that the scholar thinks Jesus said this or at least something very much like it. Pink signals less certainty about a saying’s authenticity. Gray means that Jesus did not say this, but maybe something of his thought hides obscurely behind the passage. Black signifies that the text comes from earlier or later sources, but cannot be credited to Jesus.
On a modification of the grade-point average scheme, red = 3, pink = 2, gray = 1, and black = 0. The ballots are added up and divided by the number of votes cast in order to ascertain the weighted average. The scale is then converted to percentages: For a text to be printed in red, it has to rate .7501 or higher. Pink print reflects .5001 to .7500, gray ranges from .2501 to .5000, and black .2500 or under.
Yet despite this show of scholarly objectivity, authoritatively garnished with colors and numbers, everything turns on who the scholars are and what criteria they use. All else is of secondary importance. If I were to choose 75 scholars heavily weighted to the conservative end of the scholarly spectrum—members, say, of the Institute for Biblical Research, or of the Evangelical Theological Society—and then invested the enterprise with colored beads and weighted statistics, the results would be radically different. But none of this division of scholarly opinion is ever admitted.
In fact, that is one of the most striking features of The Five Gospels and of the press releases of the Westar Institute. The words scholars and scholarly are almost always attached to the opinions of the Jesus Seminar and detached from all others. We are told that one of their scholars, Daryl Schmidt, “is dubious that … sabbath encounters actually took place in Jesus’ day. Like other scholars [emphasis mine], he is inclined to the view that such stories reflect controversies of a later time between church and synagogue.” Which scholars? All scholars? Most scholars? Most scholars of the Jesus Seminar?
Not surprisingly, the “seven pillars of scholarly wisdom” set out in the introduction to The Five Gospels include the assumption that the burden of proof now lies with those who want to claim that any utterance ascribed to Jesus is authentic. All of Jesus’ words in the Gospels must be assumed inauthentic until proven otherwise.
This is “scholarly”? There is substantial literature on the “burden of proof” argument, and less and less of it aligns with such skepticism. But contrary opinions are rare and never fairly evaluated in The Five Gospels.
The red- and pink-lettered version
The Five Gospels reflects the opinions of the Jesus Seminar scholars by printing Jesus’ words in a color-coding system aligned with the infamous colored beads: red for most probably authentic, pink for probably authentic, gray for probably inauthentic, and boldfaced black for almost certainly inauthentic. The rest of the text, whether of the Gospels (narrative text, words assigned to other speakers) or of the accompanying notes, is plain black text (not boldfaced). The version of the Gospels on which this is carrried out is not one of the standard translations (such as NIV or NRSV), but one created in large measure for this purpose. Naturally, it is called the “Scholars Version” (SV).
“Foremost among the reasons for a fresh translation,” we are told, “is the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas.” That, of course, is why the title of the book is The Five Gospels and not The Four Gospels: Thomas is integrated with the canonical four. One has to read on another 30 pages to be reminded that the Coptic version of Thomas was discovered as long ago as 1945. In other words, the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas was not sufficient reason to prompt the translators of the RSV, the NEB, the GNB, the NASB, the NIV, the NRSV, and a host of other versions published since 1945, to produce their versions, still less to include Thomas. But almost half a century after its unearthing, the scholars of the Jesus Seminar think that the “foremost” reason justifying their work is the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas.
The translation itself is in earthy, colloquial English—definitely on the “functional equivalent” rather than the “literal” side of the translation spectrum. Sometimes this leads to very shrewd renderings, sometimes to mere pedantry. The well-known “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mark 4:9) is changed in the sv in order to preserve the assonance in Greek: “Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!” Sometimes the rendering is too colloquial. The leper says to Jesus, “If you want to, you can make me clean,” to which Jesus replies, “Okay—you’re clean” (Mark 1:40–41). And sometimes it is vulgar: “You scholars and Pharisees, you impostors! Damn you! You slam the door of Heaven’s domain in people’s faces” (Matt. 23:13). Somehow this does not sound like the Jesus who simultaneously denounces and weeps over the city.
The 38-page introduction provides a potted history of gospel criticism, almost every point of which needs to be modified or qualified. “The search for the Jesus of history began with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768),” the introduction confidently asserts. But the assertion, a common shibboleth in some circles, needs two caveats: (1) Richard Simon, a French Catholic priest (1638–1712), started down this track well before Reimarus; (2) it is not that earlier Christian thinkers displayed no interest in historical questions about Jesus, but that they refused to search for a naturalistic Jesus—which is what the Jesus Seminar means by “the Jesus of history.”
In the several pages devoted to distinguishing “Jesus” from “the Christ” (a commonplace in the more skeptical wings of biblical scholarship during the last two centuries), a variety of straw men are manufactured and destroyed. The finiteness of human knowledge destroys the possibility of certainty, the scholars argue, and “this view makes room for faith, which seems to be in short supply for those who think they have the absolute truth.” Or again: “Why, if God took such pains to preserve an inerrant text for posterity, did the spirit not provide for the preservation of original copies of the gospels? It seems little enough to ask of a God who creates absolutely reliable reporters.” The small element of truth in each barb may be enough to trouble untutored Christians who sometimes ask naïve questions. But these glib objections do not even attempt to wrestle with the massive literature on these subjects that has accumulated over centuries and that has long since effectively responded to such queries.
The rest of the book prints Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, and Thomas, in that order, complete with color coding, and noting ostensible parallels in the other four. The fairly extensive notes that surround the text primarily offer the Jesus Seminar’s justification for its skepticism from passage to passage.
What Jesus didn’t say
One must not become too optimistic over the fact that, whatever the seminar’s failings, at least it judges 18 percent of the words ascribed to Jesus as authentic. Surely that is better than nothing. But most of these are at best only “probably” authentic.
The criteria by which so much gospel material ascribed to Jesus is dismissed as inauthentic are not much more than restatements of old-fashioned form and redaction criticism. Doctrinaire redaction criticism has often insisted, for instance, that if a saying ostensibly from Jesus could have been uttered by his contemporaries, there is no particular reason to think it came from him. If it is demonstrably in line with later church teaching, it is best to suppose that the church created the saying. From these two criteria alone (and there are others of similar ilk), the only sayings of Jesus that scholars may judge to be authentic are those that are idiosyncratic.
Such criteria have been criticized repeatedly. Jesus was, after all, a first-century Jewish man. To begin by arguing that he must not sound like one is akin to arguing that Churchill must never sound like an Englishman. To turn around and say that Jesus must not sound like the church, either, is to assume that perhaps the most influential man in history never said anything that the church believed, cherished, and passed on. Even if these criteria were reasonable—in fact, they are blatantly reductionistic—they could not possibly provide us with a picture of the historical Jesus. At best, they might hint at a few of his idiosyncrasies.
The fellows of the Jesus Seminar seem to think that the witness of the Gospels’ writers cannot be accepted because they are passionately committed to what they are saying. Passionate witnesses, the fellows assume, distort the evidence: they are likely to write down whatever they want you to believe, simply because they themselves believe it so strongly. But counterexamples are not hard to find. The first survivors of the Holocaust were passionate in their witness, too. But by and large, their passion drove them toward great accuracy and carefulness, precisely because they wanted others to believe them. To put it another way: If the evangelists had handled their exalted themes with dispassionate distance, they could have been justly accused of blasphemy—in the same way that dispassionate witness in a Holocaust survivor would finally be judged obscene.
Moreover, where did all the wonderful teaching and reflection in the Gospels come from? Are we really to believe that the most influential mind in the Western world was unable to come up with more than a few platitudinous moralisms? Was he unable to comment on the swirling currents of his day—the political threats, the passion of many for ritual holiness, the apocalyptic and messianic expectation that fired many people, the hope of final vindication and justice?
Was Jesus a moralizing twit, while the church proved wonderfully creative? The anemic Jesus of the Jesus Seminar could not possibly have generated the robust, death-defying faith of the believers in the early church. The only credible explanation is the miracle of the Resurrection, attested by hundreds, just as Jesus had predicted.
What Jesus did not do
The fellows of the Jesus Seminar are now heading into a second phase. Having dismissed most of the words of Jesus as inauthentic, they are now holding their semiannual meetings to assess the deeds of Jesus, with very similar results. Among the verdicts: the account of Jesus walking on the water was inspired by a story in Homer, and Jesus never raised anyone from the dead.
Interestingly, they conclude that Jesus was able to cure some psychosomatic maladies: the fellows have “reluctantly admitted that Jesus probably functioned as what we would today call a ‘faith healer.’” The news release in which this statement occurs adds a pious reflection: “These conclusions contradict the claim made by many fundamentalists that critical scholars, such as Fellows of the Jesus Seminar, are unwilling to credit Jesus with unusual curative powers.” But the only “unusual curative powers” they do allow Jesus are in the realm of the psychosomatic, not the miraculous.
One of the papers for the October 1993 meeting of the seminar analyzes the account of “the resuscitation of a deceased youth” (Luke 7:11–17). Its author, Roy W. Hoover (who was also coeditor, with Robert Funk, of The Five Gospels), compares the account of the resuscitation of an apparently dead person by the Greek physician Asclepiados (told by Apuleius in his work Florida), and a similar “miracle” ascribed to Apollonius (in Philostratus’s biography of this first-century sage).
But the account of Asclepiados makes it clear that the “dead” man was not really dead: the good doctor “discovered in him a hidden vein of life,” insisted he was alive, brought him home, and nursed him back to health. Philostratus is explicitly uncertain about whether or not Apollonius’s “miracle” was of the same sort.
In the period before it became a legal requirement for a qualified doctor to pronounce a person dead, the period before almost universal embalming, the medical literature tells of not a few people who were thought dead but who sprang to life at inconvenient moments. That is one of the assumptions in the account of the raising of Lazarus (John 11): By the time Jesus called him forth from the tomb, he had been dead for four days and was badly decomposing, so that Jesus’ miracle could not be dismissed as nothing more than astute diagnosis. One may, I suppose, on the basis of naturalistic presuppositions, discount the record, but one should not confuse accounts like this and the one in Luke 7 with the ministrations of Asclepiados.
I imagine we shall shortly be treated to another volume of the multi-colored Five Gospels, with only a very small percentage of Jesus’ actions judged as authentic.
Rethinking the Canon
But even this will not satisfy the Westar Institute. Robert Funk has now called for a Canon Council, to meet jointly with the Jesus Seminar over several years. The council “will discuss whether the Book of Revelation should be retained as a part of the New Testament, in view of the recent tragic events in Waco, Texas, and the rising abuse of the last book in the New Testament.” The council will also ask whether reconstructed Q (from the German Quelle, “source,” referring to an ostensible source behind Matthew and Luke, roughly equivalent to their common material) should be printed separately in editions of the Gospels. Thomas has, in fact, been granted a crypto-canonical status in The Five Gospels. After all, if there is nothing distinctive about the four canonical Gospels, it is difficult to imagine why they should be the only ones given canonical status.
But quite apart from sophisticated treatments of revelation, inspiration, and authority as applied to the Gospels, the merest novice can see that the Gospel of Thomas is quite unlike the canonical Gospels. It is a collection of 114 sayings (in modern numbering) ascribed to Jesus, with almost no narrative contexts. The majority of scholars hold it was written after the canonical Gospels and under the influence of some early form of Gnosticism. Little of this is aired and none of it discussed by the Westar publications to date. But that does not inhibit their preparations to change the contours of the Scriptures as we know them. Considering the volume of sophisticated studies on the Canon, the hubris is breathtaking.
In short, the work of the Westar Institute represents bad history before it represents bad theology. This is frankly depressing, for many of the fellows have produced front-rank scholarship in other venues. Darryl Schmidt’s work on Hellenistic Greek is outstanding, and Robert Funk’s contribution to the Blass/Debrunner/Funk grammar, for example, is beyond praise. So what has gone wrong here?
First, Funk himself, not to say the seminar his Westar Institute supports, is passionately committed to philosophical naturalism. Mere evidence will never overturn it; historical evidence can always be explained away. Only this can explain the hermeneutical naïveté of a passage like this: “The Scholars Version is free of ecclesiastical and religious control, unlike other major translations into English.… Since SV is not bound by the dictates of church councils, its contents and organization vary from traditional Bibles.… The Scholars Version is authorized by scholars.”
Second, for all of its scholarly pretension, the Jesus Seminar is not addressing scholars. It is an open grab for the popular mind, for the mass media. Just as conservatives tend to view current events as the evil effects of secular humanism, so radicals line up televangelists, pro-life protesters, denominational disputes, and a growing conservative church as the evil effects of fundamentalism. The Jesus Seminar is not so much a work of scholarship as a tract for the times, an attempt to overthrow a perceived enemy.
The real irony is that, in some ways, the Jesus Seminar has itself become a parody of what it rejects. In tone and attitude, in its reductionism and self-confident exclusivism, in its self-righteousness and condescending pronouncements, it is more fundamentalistic than the fundamentalism it eschews.
Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.
- More fromD. A. Carson
Philip Yancey
What are we to make of a pro-choice President who is reaching out to evangelicals?
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President Bill Clinton’s relationship with evangelicals has become a major news story featured in such media as National Review, New Republic, and ABC World News Tonight. Why is he opening White House doors to a group that by and large has not supported him with their votes? Some Christian leaders (and some journalists) have called it a cynical political attempt to confuse and divide an important Republican constituency. Others see his contacts with evangelical leaders as consistent with his prepresidential religious life. And many evangelicals doubt the sincerity of Clinton’s faith because of his positions on key issues.
CHRISTIANITY TODAY asked Editor-at-Large Philip Yancey to review the controversy. Besides participating in a well-publicized White House gathering last fall, Yancey also recently joined Executive Editor David Neff in a private interview with the President that focused mainly on the topic of abortion.
Five separate times when conversation has turned to the President I have heard a comment like this: “No way he’s a Christian! All that religious talk is just fake.” When it comes to Bill Clinton, I sense in many Christians a feeling beyond anger, something closer to betrayal. Many evangelicals felt outrage during Clinton’s first few weeks in office as he announced new policies easing abortion restrictions and expanding homosexual rights, and appointed staff members who seemed insensitive or even hostile to the religious community. More than a year later, they still wonder whether the President is merely posing as a Christian.
Recently, Clinton has made deliberate efforts to reach out to evangelicals. Several leaders have spent the night at the White House, and the President has hosted at least five breakfast meetings involving key evangelicals. My report in this magazine about one of those meetings sparked a flood of angry responses. “You say Clinton has biblical knowledge,” said one caller, “well, so does the Devil! You people got snowed.” Numerous letter writers contended that evangelicals were wrong even to meet with the President; six drew parallels with Adolf Hitler, who used pastors for his own purposes.
Clinton’s critics remain unimpressed by religious words and other tokens of faith. One respected national leader wrote me that evangelicals are being “used effectively, although unwittingly, by the White House to confuse conservative Christians and divide the body of Christ.” Gary Bauer of the Family Research Counsel says simply, “Judge by what he does, not what he says.”
Whatever else one may say about it, Bill Clinton’s faith is definitely not a creation of White House spin doctors. He grew up in Bible Belt Arkansas in an era when ministers still conducted school assemblies and students read Bible passages over the loudspeaker every morning. Except for his grandparents, his family was nonreligious. His stepfather regularly got drunk and beat his wife; once he was arrested for firing a gun into the wall of his house. Partly to escape this domestic chaos, Bill began attending the Park Place Baptist Church from the age of eight.
Every Sunday morning young Bill Clinton would put on a suit and walk a mile down the sidewalks of Hot Springs to church, clutching his leather Bible. At age ten he made a public profession of faith and was baptized. A year later Clinton asked a Sunday-school teacher to drive him 50 miles to Little Rock to attend a Billy Graham crusade. He admired the evangelist for resisting pressure to segregate his crusade, and from then on Clinton set aside nickels and dimes to send to Graham. Schoolteachers thought Bill himself might grow up to be an evangelist.
As he attended Georgetown, Yale, and then Oxford universities, Clinton’s religious fervor cooled. He married Hillary Rodham, returned to Arkansas to settle, and became the youngest governor in the nation. He had an unbroken string of successes until 1980 when, in a stunning upset, he lost his bid for re-election. Clinton felt depressed and aimless. Problems in the marriage surfaced, and rumors about Bill’s alleged extramarital affairs began to spread.
In 1980, two events occurred that Clinton now cites as markers pointing the way back. First, his daughter, Chelsea, was born. Second, he took a pilgrimage to Israel led by the Reverend W. O. Vaught. The minister became a kind of father figure for Clinton, and soon afterward Clinton joined Vaught’s church, started singing in its choir, and for the first time in his life began serious Bible study. A neighbor says that C. S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity also played an important role in Clinton’s spiritual renewal.
A friend asked me, “What kind of religious animal is Bill Clinton?” To give a fair answer I would point to a species like the platypus: part reptile, part mammal, part bird. Our first President to graduate from a Catholic college now attends a Baptist church and is married to a lifelong Methodist. In fact, though, he may feel most at home with the more emotional worship style of African-Americans and Pentecostals. As governor, he would bring his saxophone to an annual Pentecostal revival marked by glossolalia, clapping, and rousing music.
Clinton says he was initially reluctant to talk about his faith in public life “because the story of the Pharisees made a big impression on me when I was a child.… And whenever I have spoken in a church I always stand up and say, ‘I come here as a sinner, not a saint, because I’m weak, not strong.’ ” Once, when asked if he believed in life after death, he replied, “Yeah, I have to. I need a second chance.”
Clinton told CHRISTIANITY TODAY that “in some ways faith is harder for me, and in some ways it’s easier” now that he is President. Washington, “the most secular city I’ve ever lived in,” is a challenging place in which to practice, say, the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. “Yet, believe it or not, even though I work long hours, I have more opportunities to be alone and to pray.” Clinton claims he prays more as President, reads the Bible—he stayed up until 3 A.M. reading the Book of Joshua before the Middle East peace signing—and looks to his old pastor in Little Rock for spiritual guidance. “Rex Horne calls me every Saturday night without fail.”
The White House staff tries to free up three hours of quiet time each day in which the President can read, write, nap, practice his golf stroke, or do anything except go to meetings, and this is the time when Clinton prays and reads Christian books. Richard Mouw’s Uncommon Decency and Tony Campolo’s Wake Up America! were recent titles. “And it helps me. You’d be amazed what it does, because I read everything—government reports, histories, mysteries—but the time I spend reading these books … gives me a certain serenity that would not be there otherwise. I always keep one going all the time, no matter what I’m doing.”
In person, Bill Clinton talks freely and convincingly about his faith. I have not met a single Christian leader who, after meeting with Clinton, comes away questioning his sincerity. One Christian college president is “absolutely convinced of his deep and sincere faith,” and says the President knows his Bible. Another evangelical guest at the White House claimed that the President is “not only a Christian but an evangelical Christian”—who believes the Apostles’ Creed and has a very high view of Scripture.
Edward G. Dobson, pastor of Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, has impeccable credentials with the Religious Right: he graduated from Bob Jones University, worked for Jerry Falwell (writing the original platform for the Moral Majority), and served as editor of Fundamentalist Journal. Here is his response after a White House meeting with others involved in AIDS ministry: “Is Bill Clinton a Christian? I don’t know. I’m not God. How do you know I’m a Christian? We look at clues and evidences. Does Clinton know the Scriptures? Is he affected emotionally by things like prayer? Does he go to church every week, carry his Bible, claim to have a relationship with Christ? The answer to all these questions is yes. I believe he’s more deeply spiritual than any President we’ve had in recent years.
“Next question,” Dobson continues: “How can I reconcile Bill Clinton’s faith with his policies? I can’t. But that doesn’t mean I won’t meet with him and have dialogue. Falwell called the other day, making plans to go to Cuba in an attempt to see Castro. ‘I’ve gotten a lot of criticism for meeting with the President,’ I told him, ‘but, Jerry, I have yet to meet with a Communist!’ ”
Ed Dobson, like others, has heard the charge that he is simply being used by the White House for political ends. “A Christian leader compared me to one of the false prophets who told Ahab and Jezebel what they wanted to hear. That hurt. But I’d go anywhere, including to hell, as long as there were no limitations on what I could say. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, Whom we wish to change we must first love. I’m trying to speak the truth in love, that’s all.”
Ed Dobson’s dilemma, reconciling Bill Clinton’s faith and his policies, lies at the heart of Clinton’s problems with evangelicals. How has it happened that a President’s policies have so thoroughly alienated him from a constituency he views as his spiritual kin? I had the opportunity to ask the question of Clinton himself.
“There are two big reasons,” Clinton said. “First, over several years the leaders of the evangelical community have gotten more and more identified with the conservative wing of the Republican party.
“Second, some of those same people have made abortion and homosexuality the litmus test of whether you’re a true Christian. Certainly these are not the most-mentioned issues in the Bible, but they’re the things that have become the litmus test, and if you’re wrong on them, it’s almost like saying you’re a fraud, you can’t really be a Christian.”
Church historian Mark Noll observes that evangelicals tend to remain aloof from politics except for occasional, impassioned campaigns. Some of these campaigns are highly moral, such as the anti-slavery movement; some are misguided, such as the campaign against Catholic immigration; and some are simply quixotic, such as the crusade against the Masons. In abortion and gay rights, evangelicals have found two big moral issues that galvanize the troops to enter the political fray.
Millions of Americans make voting decisions on the abortion issue alone. To them, Clinton’s support for abortion rights makes him a mass murderer. Nothing he might say about his personal faith could possibly counteract the devastating effect of that one policy. When Billy Graham merely agreed to pray at Clinton’s inauguration, pro-life activists blasted his decision as “a great embarrassment for all who call themselves evangelical.”
Clinton’s early pro-choice and progay decisions gave a wake-up call to the Religious Right. Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition has signed up 900,000 members, and Robertson sketches the political scene in apocalyptic terms: “America has become a predominantly anti-Christian pagan nation—and our government has become a weapon the anti-Christian forces now use against Christians and religious people.”
Beverly LaHaye, president of Concerned Women for America, echoes the same call, but her “open letter to President Clinton” shows that the agenda for concern has expanded well beyond abortion and gay rights to include Clinton’s “massive government intrusion into every aspect of our lives: dramatic tax increases, socialized medicine, government price controls, federal regulation of businesses and our free enterprise economy, official support of the efforts to redefine the American family, the use of federal tax dollars for abortion, and mandatory ‘valueless’ sex education and pro-promiscuity programs in our public schools.”
In his January letter to supporters, James Dobson listed 53 separate “developments that served to undermine traditional moral values” in the previous year. “Can there be any doubt,” Dobson concluded, “that a great Civil War of Values is being waged in Western nations.… [The family’s] demise is being orchestrated at the highest levels of government, and by radical special-interest groups.”
Dobson raised an excellent question: If Clinton is committed to having his high-level appointments “look like America,” he asked, why are there so few evangelicals in key positions?
It is against this background that some evangelicals question the wisdom of even meeting with President Clinton. As one person wrote to me, “What some interpret as hatred are very legitimate emotions in times of national crisis: despair, anxiety, discouragement, and righteous anger. People are alarmed to observe that their government has suddenly lurched to the left. Everything they have believed and fought for has been undermined by this Bible-toting politician who claims to be a believer.”
Those who read only the publications of the President’s Christian critics might think that the administration presents a unified front against all their interests. In truth, Clinton himself has been making speeches eerily reminiscent of the Traditional Values Coalition. His aides report that the reality of violence in America, especially that involving children, has turned the President’s focus in a new direction, causing him to give attention not just to government programs but to a spiritual renewal based on the value of hard work, self-discipline, and commitment to family.
In a speech to the Church of God in Christ last November, Clinton spoke of “the great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today.” Martin Luther King, Jr., said Clinton, “did not live and die to see the American family destroyed, to see 13-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down 9-year-olds just for the kick of it.” Clinton went on to commend the black church for its important role in holding communities together.
Encouraged by the response to that speech, Clinton started using the bully pulpit of the presidency to stress family values and personal responsibility. He talked tough on crime and stressed the need for welfare reform. Shocking some Democrats, he even resurrected the infamous speech in which Dan Quayle attacked TV’s Murphy Brown. “I thought there were a lot of very good things in that speech,” Clinton told Tom Brokaw, and then Newsweek. “Would we be a better-off society if babies were born to married couples? You bet we would.”
I witnessed a scene (barely mentioned in the press) that put Clinton’s bully pulpit skills to an extreme test. On the same day as the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Clinton visited Kramer Junior High School, a rugged inner-city school in southeast Washington. Clinton minced no words with the all-black student body. “I’m trying to do everything I can to give you more hope and more possibility for the future. But I can’t lead your life for you. Every day you have to decide whether to be on time or not, whether to attend classes, whether to take drugs, whether to do your homework. And I’ll be honest with you. The very best thing you can do to stay out of poverty is to make up your mind to wait to have a baby till you’re old enough to take care of it and until you’re married. You young men who get a girl pregnant and just walk away from her—you know it’s wrong. It’ll haunt you and stay with you all your life.”
Clinton went on to talk in explicit terms about sex and about drug abuse. The speech offered an unusual glimpse of the power of the presidency, a view not seen by most Americans and one barely imaginable to Clinton’s staunchest critics. Beverly LaHaye’s open letter had called for Clinton to “Preserve the moral values on which America is founded, speak out against promiscuity among our youth, and advocate abstinence before marriage.” At Kramer Junior High, though he stopped short of saying abstinence, he was clearly undergirding, not undermining, traditional values.
“That was a tough audience,” Clinton told us with a sigh as he folded his long legs into the presidential limousine. “Afterwards a girl came up to me, probably about 14, and showed me a picture of her baby. What I talked about is real life for these kids.”
It was eleven o’clock in the morning. Already that day Clinton had addressed the National Prayer Breakfast, listened to Mother Teresa speak to the same gathering, met privately with her, and crossed town in the presidential motorcade to give the speech at Kramer. Now he was headed back to the White House, and he invited two of us from CHRISTIANITY TODAY to join him for the ride. “I want to talk about the difference between what’s immoral and what should be illegal,” he had said.
At some level, of course, we all make distinctions between the immoral and illegal. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” yet who would suggest codifying that in U.S. statutes? Christians look to the Bible for guidance on morality, but in a pluralistic society, when should our belief in morality translate into laws?
Clinton asserts that he, too, accepts the Bible as his moral authority. At the White House breakfast last fall, he stated forthrightly, “The Bible is the authoritative Word of God and contains all truth.” Yet, he added, “there are people who read the same Bible, have the same convictions about its authority, and draw different conclusions.”
As we rode in the limousine, Clinton cited abortion as an example of an issue on which Christians disagree. “When I was a boy, it was illegal. I remember a motel near where I lived in Hot Springs where a man moved in and ran an abortion clinic. He was arrested, and I had to agree [with the decision].
“When I was a young man, I think I just automatically assumed that life began at birth. In the last seven or eight years, however, I’ve spent an enormous amount of time thinking about this—about the biological reality of how people are formed, about what point in time the various functions develop in an unborn child, about whether it would ever be possible to go beyond the viability tests to make any more sophisticated judgment about personhood—which is really a spiritual determination and not a biological determination.… The truth is, no one knows when the spirit enters the body. I have … read all the scriptural verses cited as authority for the abortion-is-murder thesis, as well as all those verses cited on the other side—what the root words mean and all that stuff. It’s a much graver issue to me now. I think having a child made it so.
“Abortion has now moved beyond the point of serious argument to a shouting match. A lot of pro-lifers in the Christian community think it’s self-evident and not even worth discussing [whether] the Bible clearly says the spirit enters the body at the point of conception.… I’ve heard it argued by dedicated Christian theologians both ways.” Clinton added that abortion should not be done casually: “My position has always been that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.”
Clinton has indeed helped to make abortion safe and legal, but hardly to make it rare. His public statements on the issue have changed dramatically in the past few years, in direct correlation to his national rise to prominence. In 1989, he opposed abortion but said he would allow it in the case of rape and incest or to save the mother’s life. In 1990, he affirmed that abortion should be illegal when the unborn child can live outside the mother’s womb, and he opposed public funding for abortion. Just one year later, in 1991, he said he supported the Roe v. Wade decision.
Clinton defends this shift by saying the approach to specific moral issues in a democracy should change as popular opinion changes. A moral issue should only be made a legal issue if “there is a consensus in the community that is sufficiently overwhelming to bring in the criminal law.” As the consensus has changed on abortion, so has the issue in Clinton’s mind. On many moral issues, in fact, it seems that the Clintons tend to follow rather than lead the public. Hillary Clinton, for example, sought out a minister for spiritual guidance on capital punishment and the Gulf War, and then rejected his counsel mainly on pragmatic grounds—popular support for both policies ran too high.
We talked about the distinctions between morality and legality for 20 minutes in the limousine before continuing the conversation in the Oval Office. Clinton seemed tired, still struggling with laryngitis. He frequently sipped water from a plastic Dixie cup.
A presidential motorcade does not slip quietly through the streets of Washington. At least 16 vehicles were involved: motorcycles, four-wheel-drive Blazers for the Secret Service, vans full of reporters. A police car blocked off every side street, with an officer standing by to enforce the blockade, and at major intersections, clumps of drivers stopped by the motorcade had gathered to wave to the President.
I had come away from my previous meeting impressed by the President’s listening skills. He made excellent eye contact, remembered names and faces, and gave each person the impression of full attention. This time, though, in his own limousine, he appeared to have trouble concentrating. Although we were talking over matters of great moral—and explosive political—significance, Clinton was looking left and right, searching out every last clump of bystanders to wave to. His aides had told me this Clinton trademark causes scheduling nightmares for his handlers: he never leaves a hand unshaken, a crowd unaddressed, a baby unkissed. He is a consummate politician.
Two hours before, we had both been present for Mother Teresa’s speech. It was a remarkable event. The Clintons and the Gores sat at elevated head tables on either side of the podium. Rolled out in a wheelchair, the frail, 83-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate needed help to stand up. A special platform had been positioned to allow her to see over the podium. Even so, hunched over, four-feet, six-inches tall, she could barely reach the microphone. She spoke clearly and slowly with a thick accent in a voice that managed to fill the hall nevertheless.
Mother Teresa said that America has become a selfish nation, in danger of losing the proper meaning of love: “giving until it hurts.” Both contraception and abortion, she said, distort love. “If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill each other?… Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.” She proposed a simple solution for those pregnant women who don’t want their children: “Please give me the child. I want it. I will care for it.” Already she has placed three thousand children with families in Calcutta.
Mother Teresa filled her talk with poignant stories of people she has ministered to, and no one who heard her could go away unmoved. President Clinton himself brought up her stories in our conversation. Mother Teresa, like saints and prophets before her, sees the world in stark, binary terms. In her talk, she managed to reduce the abortion controversy to its simplest moral terms: life or death, love or rejection. Ten feet away from her sat Bill Clinton, a politician stuck with the practical details of implementing policy on a contentious moral issue. When does human life begin? What moral laws should we impose on a pluralistic society? How do you get people who care so much about unborn babies to care also about the full-term babies born in certain neighborhoods and countries?
Indeed, from the perspective of the presidential motorcade—flags flapping from the antennae, police sirens blaring, streets blocked, the press pool reporting in on cellular phones—everything looked very complicated. As our interview progressed, the simple clarity of Mother Teresa’s address, which had obviously touched Bill Clinton, seemed to be slipping away.
It occurred to me that Mother Teresa probably would not make a very good politician: she would have little patience with public relations, compromise, and writing regulations. Likewise, in a political system where you never stop running for office, Bill Clinton would not make a very good saint.
As we talked about these moral issues—human lives—even as we reflected on Mother Teresa’s stirring words from that morning, Clinton’s eyes scanned the sidewalks, looking for people to wave to. As a politician, he would take his cues from the crowd.
Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.
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After 35 years of persecution, Cuba’s Protestants are experiencing revival.
The Cuban church has long been the target of intense political repression—a result of Fidel Castro’s infamous socialist revolution of 1959. But since 1990, the Cuban government has taken a less hostile position toward the church. Thomas Oden, professor of theology at the Theological School of Drew University in New Jersey, was recently invited by Joel Ajo, the Methodist bishop of Cuba, to address the Ecumenical Seminary at Matanzas. He immediately realized that there would be much more for him to hear than say. “I went with an open mind to listen empathetically to the voices of Cuban Christians,” says Oden. “My main concern was to attend carefully to those voices, hear them accurately, and replay them to a North American audience.” Although Oden wanted to assume the guise of an objective journalist, he found himself consistently moved by the emotion and tenacity of a people whose faith could not be extinguished. The following is his collection of snapshots and voices from a church in the midst of a spiritual awakening.
My first Sunday evening in Cuba took me to an Afro-Caribbean Methodist church on the outskirts of Havana. An exuberant charismatic revival was clearly in progress. The church was crammed full; no seats anywhere. People of all ages were standing in the front, back, and along the walls.
Although conditions have improved, being a Christian in Cuba is still a risky business. No one witnesses without peril. Hence, most Cuban Christians are willing to be martyrs in the classic sense of that word. This charges every baptismal decision, even every church service, with radical seriousness. It helps the church to understand precisely what is its most important task and to examine all other options accordingly. Cuban believers are learning firsthand where their most compelling accountability lies: to their risen Lord.
I was ushered to the front row and squeezed in. People were kneeling, facing the pew, praying aloud with an unpretentious abandon that caught me off guard. The Lord’s Table was set. Directly in front of me was a Casio keyboard, two large conga drums, a tangle of electronic musical equipment, and a rococo trap set. Cuban revivalism, I could tell, would have a strong Afro-Caribbean beat.
As the spirited praise music increased, kids from the street began peering in the windows. A whole baseball team of adolescent eyes were transfixed by the service of Holy Communion, scrutinizing every move, every syllable. The liturgical form of the Lord’s Supper was the old Book of Common Prayer-based Methodist liturgy, which I have known since childhood, adapted to the Afro-Cuban culture.
Six “glory singers” led congregational singing. Younger kids especially joined in with heartfelt praise, hands held high. This was a family event, a neighborhood happening.
As the music mounted in exuberance, the lights went off unexpectedly, leaving us in a blackout—a chronic symptom of Cuban life today. But the singing, rocking congregation never skipped a beat as a kerosene lantern was brought in to reilluminate the event.
From day one I could see that a dynamic, no-nonsense revival was taking place. Contrition, repentance, faith, and new birth were in the air. It was a scene that could not be faked, an unfeigned work of God. Emotion flooded my heart. These were my brothers and sisters—members of the body of Christ in which I live and breathe.
A YOUTHFUL PENTECOST
The sermon was as ardent as the prayers and singing. Its focus: We are in a war with Satan. We already know the end, but the struggle goes on. You are invited to make a decision. It could be the most important decision of your life: accept Jesus in your heart. Trust him for forgiveness of your sins.
Those ready to follow Christ wholeheartedly were asked to raise hands quietly. God bless you, the preacher said repeatedly, maybe 20 times. The Spirit was richocheting through that packed hall. More than a dozen came forward—many of them adults under 25, educated on a diet of socialist and atheistic ideology.
Whatever the ideological obstacles, they are not blocking the work of the Spirit in Cuba. No human power can do that. There is an incurable religiousness embedded in the Cuban consciousness. It has been there all along, frozen for some decades by the socialist revolution, but now showing itself as a vigorous survivor, like a seed planted in winter.
It is the Cuban youth who are busy leading their people in religious revival. The movement is youth-led because it is the hopes of youth that have been most fiercely undermined by the regime. Even state-managed television, replete with the bravado of socialist ideology, is less interesting than self-made music, dancing, reading, self-education, and family entertainment.
Roberto, born Methodist, educated in the atheistic school system, is lean and bony—gaunt, as are many Cuban young people. Along with seven colleagues in his central Cuban youth group, Roberto prayed on his knees well into the night, seeking the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
“At first we were a little afraid of it. Then we said together, as with one voice, to God: ‘We are going to remain on our knees until you baptize us with your Spirit.’ I was like Jacob wrestling with the angel, pleading: ‘I am not going to let go of you until you reveal yourself.’
“That night, when our pastor discovered that we were searching for this experience, he chided us, saying that nothing was going to happen, that we were wasting our time. But when he saw that some of us were receiving the gifts of the Spirit, he then joined in with us in our prayer vigil. Soon the pastor was asking the Spirit to anoint him as well. That night was the start of a ministry of the gifts of the Spirit: of discernment, of love, of understanding, and even of healing.”
As the young man spoke, my mind could not help turning to Acts 2: Were the events of Pentecost being replayed in the churches of this troubled republic?
Roberto beamed as he informed me that his youth group has 128 kids, and that 50 people would be joining his church the following Sunday. His faith was contagious.
CHOOSING LIFE
The only entrée for Americans to Cuba is by invitation. This has resulted in a long train of liberal ecclesial sycophants traveling to Cuba to pay homage to Castro and condemn American policy. When my invitation came out of the blue from Methodist Bishop Joel Ajo, I was glad to learn that this sort of quasi-political game-playing was no longer necessary.
With the revolution came an influx of leftist philosophies to the church. Prior to Castro’s regime, Protestant missions in Cuba were shaped by Anglican evangelicals, Reformed individualists, and Wesleyan revivalists. The majority of lay Cuban Christians remain basically conservative evangelicals. Yet the only link, ironically, between these lay congregations and the North American Christian laity has been through an ultra-liberal church bureaucracy whose liberation-theology rhetoric now sounds passé to Cuban ears.
Staying its course amid the ideological fog has been the Methodist Church of Cuba, an autonomous church that has been evolving with practically no help from the outside world for more than 30 years. This has freed the church to rediscover its own distinctive Caribbean evangelical identity, and now it is growing profusely. Once down to 6,000 members, Cuban Methodism now numbers over 50,000. One local church in central Cuba has 26 house churches averaging over 50 persons per home.
Cuba’s house-church movement is a prime example of the explosive growth taking place among evangelical believers. Born out of the repressive policies of the revolution, house churches evolved as Christians spontaneously began inviting people to their homes for prayer, hymn singing, and Bible study. As with the early Christian church, the threat of persecution became an impetus for expansion.
One thing is certain: in a crisis of life or death, Cuban evangelicals have chosen life—the life lived through the power of the Spirit.
SEARCHING FOR MEANING AND BREAD
Daytime in Cuba. The air in the city streets is tinted purple, dusted by diesel smoke. Unmuffled motor noises deafen ears and drown nearby human voices. Cars whiz down narrow streets, barely missing dogs and pedestrians.
I recall the surreal image of a wiry man on a bicycle carrying a large, unwieldy oil dram on his back, with the bike creaking and groaning beneath. There was a lot of movement on the street, more trucks than cars, and much more walking or cycling than driving. The streets were dotted with droppings from mules and horses pulling carts and carriages.
Economically, Cuba is running on empty. The fall of the Soviet Union spelled an end to the country’s main supply of oil, grain, and other essential resources.
I saw long lines of people in the city square waiting for breakfast. They had pesos, but there is little food available, even if you have the money.
As I strolled about the urban center of the provincial capital of Matanzas, I realized that the people are doing more with less than I have been accustomed to seeing. I was transported back to my depression-era boyhood in Oklahoma. We never thought of ourselves as poor, even though our state was as hard hit as any by the Great Depression. That is the way Cuba seems today. People have learned to get by, to invent. I remember making toys out of wood and tinfoil, spending hours collecting stamps and making model airplanes, never throwing anything away, and finding meaning in the simplest activities. The Cuban people exhibit that same kind of creativity shaped by limitation.
There are three types of Cuban Christian voices: prerevolutionary, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary. The prerevolutionary voices dream of turning the clock back to before 1959. The revolutionary voices still dream of making the socialist revolution work. But most of the voices I heard were postrevolutionary. Pablo is a good example.
Pablo is a young, brawny, athletic, blue-collar worker—a Protestant and father of two. As he cleaned out a carburetor, we talked about being a Christian in Cuba.
“For many years the people in Cuba turned their backs on God,” he explained as he tightened a bolt. “Now in this economic crisis, the Lord is showing us that he is accompanying the people despite their faithlessness.
“The restrictions that once prohibited Christians from joining the Communist party have now been overturned. The unexpected flip-flop is that there is a noticeable movement of old Communists back toward the church. Just as the government was deciding generously to permit Christians to become party members, the party members were beginning to abandon the party to join the church. They come out of hunger for meaning. One party member, after being baptized, returned her party identity card. She did not want it. Many young people have returned their party cards.
“Yes, there has been some indirect persecution of Christians for their beliefs, although the official reason given for arrests has always been the breaking of some other law. That harassment mentality is gradually being turned around. Before 1990, people would decide regretfully not to attend church for fear of losing out on a university education or preferred career.
“Now being a Christian no longer carries such a heavy onus. During the height of the revolution, the society did not look well upon the church. Even though the socialist establishment bureaucrats felt in their hearts a need for God, they worshiped God only in veiled ways. Today spiritual concerns rank above all political concerns among our young people. They are bored with political rhetoric.
“The search for meaning is just as crucial as the search for bread. While the economy around us is falling apart, Christians are living in a state of special grace. It is not difficult for Cubans to see the difference between the people of God and those who are desperately trying to live without faith. Ordinary Cubans are becoming aware of the church as a lifesaving community of hope.”
Pablo stepped away from his car and wiped his hands on a ragged handkerchief before reaching for a cup of water. His eloquence somehow seemed out of place there over a greasy carburetor. I asked him if there was some particular incident when his consciousness shifted drastically, when he clearly recognized that God was doing a special work in Cuba.
“I was already a Christian when this happened. Before this change, I could not conceive of an open, candid dialogue between the church and this regime. I could not conceive of the church as having a voice of its own or acting without the consent of the state.
“I found it incredible to see the confrontation between Bishop Joel Ajo and Fidel. Everyone in Cuba saw it on live TV on April 4, 1991. All the Protestant leaders had been called into a dialogue with Fidel. All these leaders were giving ‘yes, sir’ obeisance to Fidel except Bishop Ajo. Everyone was adulating Fidel, saying they were not going to ask him for anything. Then Ajo stood up and said: ‘I want to ask you to pay a debt that is over 30 years old.’
“After that, everyone was talking about what kind of guy would stand up and challenge Fidel publicly. Joel talked with him as if he were a friend. To Fidel’s face he pointed out that the Cuban-based churches were not permitted to have access to radio programming, but Cubans were able to pick up broadcasts from other countries. ‘Why do you allow radio programs from other countries, but not from Cubans themselves who have cast their lot with the Cuban people?’ Fidel said: ‘We will talk about that.’ Joel insisted that Fidel owed a debt to the churches: to restore their freedom. I knew then that God was opening new doors.”
REMYTHOLOGIZING CUBA
In a recent interview, Castro stated that it was never his intent to have a breach between the church and the revolution. That only happened, he said, because of the people surrounding him, not because of his own initiative. Many of those I surveyed begged to differ.
In an obligatory pilgrimage to the Museum of the Revolution, I saw history being blatantly remythologized.
Faded newspaper clippings proclaimed the glories of the revolution. I was at once struck by the idolatry of guns, arms, and other devices of war in that gallery of the revolution, each pistol sentimentally exhibited. Clearly, the entire museum is dedicated monomaniacally to a single hero, with his warped dream of absolute equality.
Castro’s reshaping of Cuban history looks to a theologian like a revised glossary of the order of salvation. Instead of an Adamic fall, redemption in Christ, and sanctification through the work of the Spirit, the order of salvation mimics Marxist-Leninist dogma: The innocent and productive aborigines fell into the clutches of inefficient, coercive colonial capitalism, but then came the savior whose name was Fidel. Instantly evil was overcome, and the new society is now going on to perfection. This romantic scenario of national salvation is really a bastardized version of the Christian view of history.
There is a mystique that pervades the official version of the revolution. It has its own saints and devils, its own hagiography. Cuba’s Christian history is demonized. Here history is being rewritten, from end to beginning.
If this museum is ever to become a sightseeing spot—which is the fond hope of the Cuban tourism office—something will have to be done to make it less laughable. For instance, to raise a serious question in this solemn environment would be like passing wind in a library. There is under this roof no tolerance for inquiry, and no thought of the possibility of free inquiry.
Across from the Museum of the Revolution stands the gleaming white Church of the Holy Protector, which contains a stunning statue portraying the dead Lord of glory covered by a shroud of delicate netting. The lines of his lifeless face are visible through gauze graveclothes. I could not help pondering the irony of this poignant rendition of the death of God, poised for resurrection, so like the church of Cuba.
LIBERATED FROM LIBERATION
A calm, serene, verdant vista enfolds one of the deepest harbors in Cuba: Mantanzas. My eye was drawn toward the ornate twin domes of a church where the rivers meet and touch the sea. On this holy hill stands the Seminario Evangélico de Teológico. I would soon have the privilege of addressing its students.
Reminders of the 1959 revolution abound: An ancient 1958 Chevy with no headlights rests in peace outside the faculty offices. A 1953 Dodge without wheels rests on blocks nearby.
There is something dying in that valley below the seminary. What is it? A system. An economy. A dream. A rhetoric. Yes, a revolution. In a distant dump site, I observed fragments of old revolutionary posters now shredded and mildewing. But the seminary remains standing amid this collapse of ambitious human schemes—a testimony to the mighty God who never left.
The seventies were the decade of crisis for the seminary. As I strolled the palm-lined seminary campus with an elderly professor I will call “Francisco,” I heard the history rehearsed: How the number of students during the revolution’s peak had diminished so that it equaled the number of professors. How the plant and installations were left unrepaired. How the Methodists no longer sent students. How the laity were afraid that if they sent pastors there, they would become so politicized as to become useless to churches.
At its lowest point, the seminary had only six students. The prevailing school of thought—liberation theology—accommodated Marxist rhetoric. Cuba’s major liberation theologian was the seminary rector, Sergio Arce, key author of the Marx-mimicking Confession of Faith of 1977, which declared commitment to Cuba’s communist revolution as “part of the creative, redemptive, and reconciling activity of God in the world,” and a matter of confessional faith (status confessionis) for Cuba’s Presbyterian-Reformed Church. Proletarian workers were conceded to be “the legitimate standard-bearers of the new order.” Sin and salvation were described almost exclusively in political and economic terms; Jesus was interpreted as the prototype of one who “took the side of the oppressed and exploited class.” The kingdom of God was in those days viewed as inextricably tied to “the class struggle that is manifested in the Bible in the contradiction between oppressors and oppressed.” It is from this pit that the seminary has gradually risen to a solid, more orthodox ground.
The seminary is now being led by a Methodist pastor and former district superintendent who is revitalizing the spiritual formation of the students. Under his guidance has come a shift toward pastoral identity in the curriculum, seeking to “join the two so long divided, knowledge and vital piety.”
During my stay at the seminary, Francisco invited me to his home one morning to chat over prebreakfast coffee.
A cartoon of Donald Duck whacking a baseball was on the door of the old man’s apartment—a single spare room that reminded me of a monastic cell. Three walls were filled with books on hermeneutics, psychology, and biblical studies. There was a tidy, unadorned bed and a few heating pots.
An ever gracious host, Francisco brought out some bread to complement our potent brew of Cuban coffee. The bread was dry and hard, he explained, but still good.
After I had eaten my breakfast bread, he broke his in half and put it in front of me, remarking with a knowing glance: “I don’t want you to go back to America and say you were hungry in Cuba.”
Between bites of my bread, I asked him questions about the present and future state of the Cuban church.
“We are right now in a situation of sheer daily survival. It is dangerous, challenging, and absorbing. The system itself is trying to survive. The vocation of the church is to show that it has the moral and spiritual strength to be of some tangible, useful help in this survival situation.
“To be a Christian amid a struggling socialist system is a wonderful adventure. Here you can discover that the promises of God belong to you. You grasp this only when you rely under risky conditions upon those promises. They are best proved true for the faithful in difficult, challenging situations. Here the church must truly be the church or its identity will quickly be lost.”
Francisco paused briefly to sip from his coffee. I could tell I had tapped the preacher in him. “The Jeremiah narrative is especially instructive for us in Cuba. The Lord addresses Jeremiah in jail: ‘Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things which you have not known’ [Jer. 33:3]. The Bible does not say, ‘Call to me and I will make you free.’ The Hebrew says I will show you not just magnificent things, but difficult and mysterious and inaccessible things, things otherwise out of reach to your slender imagination. Jeremiah has helped Cubans choose to be survivors amid this situation. This is a verse that we would do well to focus on in the coming years.”
SAVORY SALT
Today, I sit at home in Jersey, far away from the peculiar sights and odors of my Caribbean journey. But the spirited and profound voices of my Cuban brothers and sisters continue to play in my mind and heart. I know now that what I experienced was not just a church regaining vision in an ailing socialist regime; what I experienced was a firsthand view of the power and triumph of the Living God over the chains of the Enemy.
For 35 years, Cuba was the only state in the Western Hemisphere where the government was openly atheistic and determined to erase Christianity. But, despite intense police repression, this attempt has been singularly unsuccessful.
No one knows what the political future might be. Any partisan gesture could easily end up on the wrong side. What the church is sure of is that it will continue to accompany the ordinary Cuban people into whatever circumstances or along whatever trajectory they are hurled.
My insightful friend, Francisco, feels the church has the only solution to the republic’s ills: “Cuba is not yet fully ready to hope, but the Cuban church must take responsibility of offering hope where there is none. Hope, as Abraham and Kierkegaard knew, is a passion for the possible. The Cuban church has that passion. It is the salt that has not lost its savor.”
Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.
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Abuse After Bernardin
Churches must learn from the cardinal’s example and policies before the next sex-abuse charges are leveled.
Last fall, former seminary student Stephen J. Cook, 34, accused a highly respected Catholic prelate, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, of sexually abusing him at age 17. Last month, Cook, who is dying of AIDS, asked the federal court to dismiss his $10 million molestation suit. While this is clearly a personal and professional vindication for Bernardin, the issue of sexual abuse by clergy is serious, and Protestants would do well to learn from his example.
Charges of sexual misconduct against clergy in Protestant and Catholic churches are rising. Ten years ago it was almost unheard of for a Catholic priest to be charged with sexually molesting boys. Now there are new cases regularly. In a survey of evangelical pastors published by LEADERSHIP in 1988, 12 percent admitted they had engaged in sexual intercourse outside of marriage since being in local-church ministry, and 23 percent acknowledged some other form of inappropriate sexual contact while in local ministry. Baptist counselor Roy Woodruff, executive director of the 3,000-member American Association of Pastoral Counselors, estimates that 15 percent of clergy “have or are violating sexual ethical boundaries. I don’t think I would use the word ‘epidemic,’ but I suspect the number of incidents is increasing.”
Tragically, most of those charged with sexual abuse turn out to be guilty, but some are innocent. Like Bernardin, they have been falsely accused. In Cook’s case, hypnosis was used to help him recall “repressed memories” of being abused.
While hypnosis and other therapies may be helpful, they are not foolproof. As Cook told the court in dismissing the suit, “Based on information I have learned since filing the lawsuit, I now realize that the memories which arose during and after hypnosis are unreliable.” Because even an accusation can severely tarnish an innocent pastor’s reputation, great care must be taken in how any charge is handled.
Ironically, Cardinal Bernardin had already put into place impressive measures to handle allegations of priestly misconduct. He had set up a hotline to encourage the confidential reporting of complaints, and he had appointed a review board—consisting of a majority of laypersons—to handle cases reported. Among the board’s members are a psychiatrist, a former victim, the director of a sexual dysfunction clinic, a parish council member, and a parent. Heading up this board is a former prosecutor of child-abuse cases. What’s more, a separate Victim Assistance Ministry is now helping victims of abuse by priests to rebuild their lives.
Churches slow to respond
Unfortunately, few of the 187 Catholic dioceses have bothered to implement similar programs, nor is there indication that Protestant churches and denominations are doing any better. If the church is serious about protecting its flock from abusive clergy (and protecting decent pastors from false accusations), some type of review procedure along the lines of the Chicago archdiocese’s review board is needed.
Beyond that, help must be offered to victims. The 4,500 members of Linkup, a national group of victims of Catholic priestly abuse, in most cases first brought their complaints to church officials to seek therapeutic help and the priest’s removal, not financial settlements. But many were treated as a threat and with suspicion, rather than as wounded people. Is it any wonder so many have decided to sue the church? A victim-assistance program—separate from the investigation procedure—not only offers much-needed healing to the victims, but discourages costly lawsuits against the church.
Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from Cardinal Bernardin’s ordeal is the spirit with which he handled it. Here is a man who had been a priest for 42 years with 26 years as a bishop, who was, in his words, “humiliated before the world.” His accuser had appeared on CNN television saying, “I want to see the church rid itself of this kind of vermin.”
Yet Bernardin did not respond in kind. “He continued to act as a churchman despite the destructive attack,” his attorney, James Serritella, said. “He did not want his defense conducted so as to discourage victims from coming forward.” Bernardin was within his rights to countersue, but he knew the message that would send to other actual victims: Keep quiet or you’ll face even more abuse. Instead, he demonstrated Jesus’ tough admonition to love and pray for our enemies: “I have prayed for him every day and will continue to do so,” Cardinal Bernardin said.
Regardless of whether the victim is an adult female or a young boy, when abuse occurs there is an abhorrent betrayal of trust that demands greater attention and action from church leaders and denominational policymakers. Better mechanisms should be developed to ferret out the guilty and provide compassionate help to the individual victims. Church leaders, lay and clergy, need to realize how church congregations themselves are also victims. Sensitive training and education is the first step at preventing abuse, a goal all Christians should support vigorously.
By Michael J. McManus, author of Marriage Savers.
Prolifers’ Long, Dark Night
In a year that has seen many discouragements for the pro-life movement, March 10 marked a particularly low point; it was the anniversary of the killing of abortionist David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida. When the pro-choice movement tragically gained a martyr, they gained another boost in the fashionability of their cause. And those of us who oppose both abortion and murder must once again wonder why God allows these setbacks to occur.
Consider last month’s festivities in Pensacola. Headlined by the popular rock group Pearl Jam, the pro-choice movement hosted a “Rock for Choice” concert, selling out the 10,000-seat auditorium. Meanwhile, across town youth pastor David Hutchinson struggled to pull off a “Positive Life” rally in a high-school auditorium. He wanted to show the world that pro-lifers are overwhelmingly committed to not killing anybody—unborn babies or abortionists—and want to help women find alternatives to abortion. A few hundred showed up.
The sigh that wells up in pro-life chests at this scenario feels familiar. Why are we always the small, weak, struggling movement? Why do we so often come off like nerds? Why can’t our leaders walk onto a stage to a burst of glittering lights while 10,000 applaud?
After 20 years of seeing success slip out of our grasp, maybe it is time to stop being surprised at the unfairness of it all. Maybe it is time to wonder if God has lessons for us to learn in this time of fasting from jubilant victory. While pro-lifers feel deeply that God loves the babies lost to abortion, we may have forgotten that God loves us just as much. We may not recognize that love because we tend to think of God as a pal, always trying to make us happy. We forget that he is our Father, who “disciplines whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (Heb. 12:6).
For now, our chastisement seems to entail having to pay for a deadly mistake, having our words distorted and ridiculed, and seeing political victory repeatedly go to our opponents. It was, after all, within the power of God to give the pro-life movement easy, early victory within months of Roe v. Wade. We cannot say why he did not. But as the long years pass without the victory for which we have hoped, perhaps we ought to look for blessings we never thought to pray for: humility, broken pride, loss of trust in our own power.
These are not the kinds of blessings that make it to our prayer lists. We prefer the more utilitarian blessing of power to change things; power that is able to fix what is broken. Someone once said that when we imagine God dealing with the world, we think of a giant hammer driving a giant nail. This is, in fact, how God did heal his broken world, but he let that nail be driven into the hand of his Son.
When we dare to do God’s work, we enter into that same mystery: strength perfected in weakness, dying to self in order to live. Not that working in the pro-life movement is such a grand martyrdom. Most of us still live in comfortable homes with VCRs and microwaves; we vote and order out pizza. (That God has not exposed us to greater trials may indicate his estimation of our generation’s capacity for endurance.) But we should learn to call even our small taste of disappointment a blessing, just as Jesus did: “Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.… Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you …” (Matt. 5:10–11).
Our story does not end at the point of loss and powerlessness, regardless of the celebration by our opponents in Pensacola. It ends at a banquet table, a gathering of joy. We may imagine that gathering, uniting pro-life laborers with all the babies they saved as well as with the babies they were unable to save. We may imagine people who shared the work in earthly life, old friends and strangers, talking about their work on earth done in the public eye and hidden in humble settings. And we can imagine them saying to each other with joyful amazement, “Remember how discouraged we were for a while?”
Throughout history, God has used the uncomfortable tools of rejection and persecution to change his people and to change his world. It was the path he chose, himself, on the cross. Should we not expect to travel that path as well?
By Frederica Matthewes-Green, director of Real Choices, a research project of the National Women’s Coalition for Life.
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In the minds of many, the name of former Moral Majority spokesman Cal Thomas is synonymous with the Christian Right. But there is more to the syndicated columnist and former Moral Majority spokesman than staunch conservatism. “If you’re looking for a savior in Washington—Republicans or whomever—you’re making a big mistake,” he says. “Salvation isn’t going to come through this town.”
Thomas wants Christians to be more engaged with the national culture, and he has taken his own advice, having authored nine books and written a column that appears in 330 newspapers. Here he talks about The Things That Matter Most, which is the title of his new book, to be released next month.
Conservative columnist Cal Thomas is reaching out to liberals—and calling evangelicals to account.
What are the things that matter most, and why do we need to be reminded about them now?
This book is about what I call the broken promises of the 1960s. By that I mean the promises of sexual liberation, progressive education, liberation from the traditional family, bigger government, and what I call pharmaceutical enlightenment. But most important, I mean the broken promise of God’s “death,” the supposedly freeing notion that he was irrelevant if he was even around.
All of these philosophies sown in the sixties are reaping a whirlwind in the nineties. The consequences are broken homes, broken lives, broken spirits. This book is an indictment of that flawed philosophy and an Isaiahlike appeal, even to the Left: Come, let us reason together.
Is there one broken promise that has caused the rest?
Yes—the one that had us turn our backs on God as a nation. I’m not just talking about pagans. I’m talking about a lot of Christians as well who give lip service to God, and even go to church every Sunday, but have retreated into this kind of subterranean culture of their own in which they only associate with people of similar beliefs. They don’t go out and confront the culture like Paul did on Mars Hill.
I believe that this is the primary problem in the culture. It isn’t the Clinton administration. It isn’t the abortionists. It isn’t the pornographers or the drug dealers or the criminals. It is the undisciplined, undiscipled, disobedient, and biblically ignorant church of Jesus Christ. Several years ago, a USA Today/Gallup poll found that only 11 percent of people who claim to be believers read their Bibles every day. There’s your problem. If you’re ignorant of the Word of God, you’re going to be blind to the way of God and disobedient to the will of God.
Is any particular institution or group well-positioned to turn us back to God?
No. Institutions are the problem. Christ did not come to establish institutions. He came to establish a relationship. Believers turn to political institutions and wonder why they can’t save us, but they are turning in the wrong direction. Even as they turn to religious institutions—that’s even worse. Because the idea that this trickle-down morality from some hierarchical structure is going to deliver us from evil is a totally unbiblical concept.
How do you explain your success? Do you consider your audience to be only conservatives?
The very fact that I’m on the editorial pages—not the religion or sports pages—conveys a desire to communicate to a wider audience.
I use humor. I try not to be offensive in attacking people per se; I go after issues and character quality instead.
And I genuinely try to reach out to liberals. I have many liberal friends. I just love people, and I try to separate the value of an individual—which is established and never changes because individuals are made in the image of God—with their positions, which is something different.
I don’t take it as a given that because most of my colleagues are liberal and don’t agree with my philosophy that therefore I’m going to be locked out. That’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In what ways are traditional Christians and Jews the new counterculture?
We hold to a value system that is not popular—that never has been popular, really. The culture in the past has reflected more of it, or at least it has not been so aggressively opposed to it. But now, it is evangelistically antibiblical.
But I’m not depressed at all. I think this is one of the greatest opportunities we’ve ever had. Maybe Jesus is orchestrating this and saying, “Look, you’ve tried everything else: you tried the Moral Majority, you tried the Christian Right, you tried Reagan, you tried Bush. Are you ready to try me?”
How concerned, then, should we be about our leaders’ personal faith?
First and foremost, we should pray for our leaders, including, and especially, those we don’t like. I don’t meet a whole lot of Christians who pray for Harry Blackmun, author of Roe v. Wade. Oh, they send him letters condemning him to hell, and he reads them. That’s affected him more than anything. “Look at all these Christians who are writing and condemning me to hell.” And very few pray for my friend Ted Kennedy. I happen to love Ted Kennedy. George McGovern is a friend of mine.
What were the mistakes of conservative Christians in the eighties?
A lot of people burst back on the scene who had been disconnected from politics and, like any newly born individual, they were a little wobbly in their steps. Many went a little too far in thinking that Reagan was going to usher in the new millennium morally. While he certainly held off a lot of things the liberals wanted to do, that they are now doing with Clinton, even he told me once, “You know, people think this job is all-powerful, but I’ll frequently give an order and see it frustrated two or three levels down.”
Is the Christian Coalition using a different strategy from that of the Moral Majority?
They are grassroots oriented, and I think politically that is a much better way to be. Moral Majority and some of those other groups focused mostly on the national scene. When your President leaves, you don’t have much left if you haven’t built up the grassroots.
Why did you leave the Moral Majority?
I had never intended to stay there forever. I had always been in journalism, and I had wanted to return to it when the Lord literally dropped my column in my lap in 1984.
The column is important, but just as, or more, important is the access it has given me to people. I have had wonderful opportunities to share my faith. We’ve had a couple of television producers recently come to Christ. I had the privilege of leading to Christ the general manager of the local Fox television station about a year before she died of lung cancer; that was a great, great moment. These are the things that really matter most.
By John Zipperer.
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The majority of evangelical Christians have been remarkably quiet about President Bill Clinton’s health-care reform plan, perhaps because they have yet to grasp how financially detrimental that plan would be for most Christians.
For example, the administration wants to implement what is known as “community rating,” a health-insurance pricing system wherein everyone pays basically the same price, regardless of an individual’s health status. By contrast, insurance historically has been priced based on risk. The higher the risk, the higher the price.
Health-insurance companies try to consider risk when pricing health insurance. A person living a healthy lifestyle is a much better risk—and therefore deserves lower health-insurance premiums—than a person who smokes, consumes alcohol or drugs, or engages in risky sexual practices.
Under traditional health-insurance pricing, the healthy-lifestyle person would pay less and the risky-lifestyle person would pay more.
The administration’s plan, however, would average out the prices, requiring the healthy-lifestyle person to pay more so that the risky-lifestyle person could pay less. Christians who treat their bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit would, in effect, be subsidizing the inevitable cost of that risky behavior. Such a pricing scheme insulates people from the true cost of their risky behavior.
There is, of course, widespread concern about how to provide coverage for the less than 1 percent of the population who have preexisting medical conditions—often through no fault of their own—that make them uninsurable, especially since their uninsurability can result in a person’s entire family being unable to get health insurance. One solution would be to create a national “high-risk” pool (27 states already have such pools), paid for by general tax revenues, that would cover those with preexisting conditions. People in high-risk pools usually pay a little more for their insurance, but it is expected they will get a whole lot more in return because of their conditions.
Besides this potential distortion of the insurance market, the administration’s plan would also force Christians to pay for benefits such as mental health care, counseling for drug and alcohol abuse, and abortion services. Even though Christians might reject abortion or turn to a minister rather than a mental-health professional for basic counseling, they would be paying premiums for these services so that others could use them.
There is a health-care proposal, however, that has some bipartisan support in Congress and that would reward Christians or anyone else who lives a healthy lifestyle and avoids practices that lead to higher insurance premiums. It is called Medical Savings Accounts (MSAS), sometimes referred to as Medical IRAS. Personal Medical Savings Accounts would permit people to put the same money they or their employer are now spending on health insurance into a tax-free account used for health care-related expenses. Out of the account people could purchase a low-deductible health-insurance policy or make payments to a health maintenance organization (HMO). But with MSAs, people would have a third option: buy a high-deductible health-insurance policy (with a deductible of, say, $2,500 to $3,000) to cover any major health-care expenses, and leave the premium savings in the account to pay for smaller health-care expenditures. With the special, tax-free treatment, the premium savings can just about equal the amount of the deductible.
As a result, individuals would have first dollar coverage, but (and this is the key to the plan) if they don’t spend the money, they, rather than an insurance company, get to keep it. The money can grow over a person’s working life and can be used for health care after retirement, rolled over into a pension fund, or become part of the estate at death.
MSAs give individuals a financial incentive to be prudent health-care shoppers. But they also promote healthy living by financially rewarding those who take care of themselves.
By Merrill Matthews, Jr., the health-policy director of the National Center for Policy Analysis, in Dallas, Texas.
Speaking Out does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
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No Good Argument
Thanks for an article that underscores our secure foundation in Christ and complete identity as women. I’ve long believed there is no “pro-choice” argument that can be successfully mounted on intellectual, scientific, emotional, psychological, or spiritual grounds when the debaters are women. Even the legality of abortion appears to rest on a subjective, unsubstantiated foundation. Consequently, “pro-choice” advocates work harder to convince a still-wary society that this overdeveloped sense of entitlement and self-absorption is not wretched, but honorable. The women Ellen Santilli Vaughn chose to showcase in her story “For Women, Against Abortion” [Mar. 7] provide a nearly complete picture of feminine debate.
Although one women does not a study make, I can say from anguished experience that university degrees, jetting around the country, the best hotels, a comfortable six-figure income, a generally high-flying 17-year career in a male-dominated industry, a stable marriage and happy children all still lead back to my home where a teenager is missing: a child aborted by its young mother, who, with her 15-year history of abuse and incest at the hands of “Christian” men, believed in confused immaturity that a baby would stand in the way of her “escape.” There appeared to be no alternative.
How I yet grieve over the life potential I chose to crush. If, as “pro-choice” (even Christian) feminists argue, women are society’s heart, then we must unite to end the promotion of death experiences, much less their practice. Abortion tops the list.
Please give readers details on how we might contact some of the organizations highlighted in Vaughn’s story.
Sheri Castleman
Littleton, Colo.
Americans United for Life: 343 S. Dearborn, Suite 1804, Chicago, Ill. 60604; National Women’s Coalition for Life: P.O. Box 1553, Oak Park, Ill. 60304; Nurturing Network: 910 Main Street, Suite 360, P.O. Box 2050, Boise, Idaho 83701.
—Eds.
Small groups disciple
There is a saying that all politics is local. In the same sense, all Christian growth is in and through small groups. Warren Bird worries that small groups will distract the church from evangelism [“The Great Small-Group Takeover,” Feb. 7]. We focus on evangelistic endeavors because they can be measured. It is easy to count, and ignore the statistics that predict 90 percent will fall away. The important task is contained in the oft-ignored part of the Great Commission that requires us to “teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
In practice, large groups divert individual Christians from the one-on-one interaction that produces disciplined, mature Christians. That is only found in the closeness and accountability of small groups and is never present in any effective way in the larger congregational group.
R. T. Carruthers
Hammond, Oreg.
I was a youth director who worked in a community with evangelicals who worked hard to ensure the young people we met had a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and continually told the students, “Jesus is your best friend.” But I couldn’t help feeling that in their choice of words, they were somehow diminishing God—bringing him down to our level, so to speak.
Robert Wuthnow [“How Small Groups Are Transforming Our Lives,” Feb. 7] helped me better understand my intuition that we were somehow selling the kids short. I am frightened that we are portraying God as a friend (who is manageable and “user-friendly”) in an attempt to lure new people into the church. I fear for young people who may only view God as a handy, benevolent pal to call on when no one else will listen. God is omnipotent and holy. I can’t really relate to or understand a Being like that.
I hope our good intentions of reaching out to new people will not wane, but I pray that what we offer is not just a glimpse of the living God but the whole Truth. Because Jesus is not my friend. Jesus is Lord.
Karen J. Roles
St. Paul, Minn.
Death, the excruciating event
In the February 7 issue, I read Norwood Anderson’s compelling portrayal of death, “The Enemy,” and a notice reporting that my father [Paul F. Robinson] had died. Neither item was news to me. As we held Dad’s hand during the last week of his life, the words of Dylan Thomas haunted me: “Do not go gentle into that good night, … / Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
I hated my father’s resignation. I hated my own acceptance of his death. But Dad’s passing was a chronicle of Dr. Anderson’s account. Dad never bought a saccharine view of death. He knew it was unnatural and that death broke God’s heart. But in his final days, it was clear to all of us that Dad knew the Victor awaited him. Thanks to Dr. Anderson for treating death with both realism and hope. I’m sure his article will rescue many Christians who feel guilty about finding death to be the excruciating event that it is.
William P. Robinson, President
Whitworth College
Spokane, Wash.
Did Lewis lose his faith?
My wife and I viewed Shadowlands, the movie about C. S. Lewis and his love affair with [Joy Davidman Gresham], who died of cancer. As portrayed in the movie, Lewis seemed to have been robbed of his faith by the harrowing experience [News, Feb. 7]. I’m sure this was not true, but I would like reassurance that my opinion is correct. Did Lewis write about suffering from a Christian perspective after this incident? If so, what?
Reo M. Christenson
West Carrollton, Ohio
See Lewis’s A Grief Observed, first published in 1961.
—Eds.
Truth needs to be demonstrated
The evangelical cause is ill served by the atavistic musings of Pope John Paul II and Richard John Neuhaus [“A Voice in the Relativistic Wilderness,” Feb. 7]. Truth is apprehended not by discussion but by demonstration. Christianity is not a philosophical idealism in the Greek mode but a theological pragmatism in the Hebrew mode.
David Hager
Warrenville, Ill.
Please let go of R. J. Neuhaus and his pope. The very word pope should be revolting to you. To a Protestant, it is clear that anyone who is Roman Catholic has misused Scripture. To say, at the head of the Neuhaus article, that you want help from such believers is pathetic. It is also useless.
Mrs. A. D. Fraser
Montreal, Que., Canada
Is it really in a good evangelical tradition to praise the man who calls himself the Vicar of Christ on earth without noting that it was papal claims like his that have contributed to the existence of the evangelical movement to which you and we belong?
Harold O. J. Brown
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Deerfield, Ill.
The “voice” that Neuhaus writes about definitely has a different agenda and should be viewed with much suspicion.
Charles H. Gillespie
Phoenix, Ariz.
The issue is “trash”
Aren’t we being more than a bit silly when we emote all over the place about sex and violence on TV [“Violence Foes Take Aim,” News, Feb. 7]? After all, the greatest books of our heritage—Iliad, Aeneid, the Books of Kings and Chronicles—recount little else. The Odyssey adds dirty jokes and a scam artist. There’s a trashy way to handle any subject matter and a good way. The issue is trash, not sex-and-violence per se!
A quick and dangerous thought: get rid of pro football (violence) and basketball (and the reputed sex exploits of its superstars), and you’ll purge half the sex and violence on TV.
Douglas J. Stewart
Newton Centre, Mass.
The church impotent
Philip Yancey in his “Breakfast at the White House” [Feb. 7] has provided us with a wonderful explanation of why the church is impotent in its influence on our culture in this post-Christian world. He agonizes over the “alienation that exists between evangelicals and the current administration” and states his purpose in attending this breakfast with the President was to “address our concerns.” He fears our access will be cut off “because of disagreements over these issues,” referring to abortion and homosexual rights, and states that the meeting convicted all present about the need to bring “civility to the dialogue.”
Can Yancey point to a single passage of Scripture in which there is “civil dialogue” between the church and a government ruler? Could he show me one passage concerning believers groveling before earthly magistrates so that our “concerns” would be addressed, then fearing our “access” would be cut off? I see only two forms of dialogue between men of God and government rulers. From the prophets of the Old Testament to John the Baptist to the apostle Paul, God’s ambassadors approach government officials with only two purposes: (1) to confront sin, both personal and national, or (2) to share with the individual the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In either circumstance, they were more likely to lose their heads, as did John the Baptist, than simply to lose access.
Until the church regains its prophetic voice, it will continue to be as influential as a child emptying the ocean with a spoon.
Pastor James M. Harrison
Red Mills Baptist Church
Mahopac Falls, N.Y.
It was heartwarming to see there are still some “Christlike” leaders who realize that civility and prayer for Presidents is the Christians’ calling—not political strong-arming!
Unless my memory fails me, the Roman government, as well as its leaders, was an immoral and anti-God government. Jesus did not cry out to the “Moral Majority,” or the “Christian Coalition,” or to any “Religious Right” action group. Needless to say, these politically astute groups hanged Jesus. His agenda was not in line with theirs.
I pray that God will guide Bill (the sinner) Clinton, his wife, Hillary, and those currently in power. Those loud voices from the mob, to the Left and to the Right, are not practicing what Jesus taught his disciples. Christians, beware of voices who have their own agenda!
Jerry W. Owens
Walton, Ky.
As a long-time admirer of Yancey’s writing, I was stunned at his naïve and esoteric musings regarding Bill Clinton. First, no sane evangelical thinks President Clinton is the Antichrist or that his salvation lies in a political party or its leadership. Second, am I supposed to be impressed with “Clinton’s ability to articulate issues in spiritual terms, as well as his knowledge of the Bible”? What kind of litmus test is that? So can Satan.
Finally, who is Jack Hayford to deliver “an eloquent ‘apology’ for the un-Christlike way in which many Christians had treated the President”? Who is persecuting whom? Hayford does not speak for the millions of Christians who abhor the damage Bill Clinton is doing to their faith, freedom, and families. Speak the truth in love, but for heaven’s sake, take off your blinders and earmuffs and speak the truth.
Michael C. McHardy
St. Louis, Mo.
Over a year of the Clinton presidency has left many Christians wondering if all that “biblical knowledge” will ever have any impact on Clinton’s public policies that negatively impact unborn babies, public-school children, and the overtaxed American family—the future of our country.
Yancey asks, “Have we gotten to the place where it now takes courage to go to the White House and address our concerns?” What would have been really courageous is if Yancey and the rest of those evangelical breakfasters had firmly reminded the President he is supporting policies that are deeply repugnant to Christians all over America, and asked him—with civility, of course—what he intended to do about that.
Pastor John S. Sheldon
First Presbyterian Church
Ocean City, N.J.
Clinton has been judgmental of conservative thinking. He says, “A lot of changes we need in this country have to come from the inside out.” Does he mean that conservative Christian thinking has to change? Christian truth is reality and cannot be changed. To be anti-truth is to be anti-Christ.
Marvin Wahlert
Williams, Iowa
President Clinton has so far appointed 22 gays and lesbians to administration positions. Can you name one evangelical Christian who has been appointed? Since one out of four Americans call themselves “evangelical,” the promise that his cabinet would look like America sounded nice, but all it did was help him get elected so he could then break the promises.
Don Rosenow
Green, Kan.
I agree with Yancey and Hayford when they deplore the un-Christlike way some Christians have responded to Clinton. It also is easy to concur with Richard Mouw’s call for more civility in the dialogue between Christians and the President.
At the same time, one must ask where the civility was when, in his first week in office, Clinton took a direct slap at pro-lifers by announcing five steps that were good news for those favoring abortion and bad news for unborn children. One must ask why “the seasoned listener with an active, responsive mind” repeatedly responds to Christian concerns with appointments such as activist lesbian Roberta Achtenberg (HUD) and by seeking to legitimize the practice of homosexuality via such moves as forcing the military to accept gays. Perhaps such actions might help explain the alienation Yancey perceives between evangelicals and the Clinton administration.
We dare not become so engrossed in maintaining civility and “proper” dialogue that we lose sight of the gravity of the harm done by the Clinton administration’s promulgation of abortion and homosexuality.
Curtis Peck
St. Louis, Mo.
Grow up!
David Holmquist’s article proves once again that bad ideas can be wrapped in good English [“Will There Be Baseball in Heaven?” Jan. 10]. As a lively and engaging essay, it fails to support its claim that sports are beneficial. My research indicates otherwise. While play does promote many useful virtues, most educational literature tends to correctly differentiate between play and competitive sports (like baseball), although the article does not.
The article correctly observes that humans are “drawn to the magic of sports,” but erroneously attributes this to the Creator. Humans are also drawn to commit premarital sex, watch violent fistfights, and cuss out drivers who cut them off in traffic. We hardly want to attribute these passions to the Creator merely because they exist in the human. The article breaks an important rule of apologetics. Actions alone do not justify themselves. Just because something is hardly means that it should be.
Adults can get up every morning and go to work for 20 years, even when the roar of the crowd has long died out. Wow! We can work without all that praise, adrenaline, and coaching; that is growth. We’ve finally grown up!
Duane Covrig
Riverside, Calif.
How scandalous for CT to publish the wrong-headed musings of Dodger fan David Holmquist. As any native-born Californian of the right age can tell you, when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, God’s team also relocated in the West and became the San Francisco Giants. The forces of darkness and light have been thus arrayed ever since.
Rev. David J. Glass
Crossroads Baptist Church
Bellevue, Wash.
Brief letters are welcome; all are subject to editing. Write to Eutychus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188; fax (708) 260-0114.
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Until a few years ago, Carol Thiessen, who edits CT’S Letters column, would pray for mail. As each deadline approached, she wondered how she would fill the space.
But no longer. Our average mail response of 100+ letters to each issue gives her a different challenge: selecting and condensing letters to represent reader response proportionally.
Two topics are guaranteed to multiply our mail carrier’s load: gender roles and the politics of abortion. J. I. Packer’s 1991 essay on the ordination of women garnered a record 79 responses. But the flood of anti-abortion letters following a 1992 interview on the environment with Sen. Al Gore topped that. At this writing, Philip Yancey’s “Breakfast with the President” column is rivaling those records.
Many who protested the interview with Gore suggested that we give equal time to Dan Quayle. How had they missed the interview with Quayle published just three months earlier?
Our evenhandedness (on political, not moral, matters) has been noted by academicians. Scholars from the University of Houston analyzed the political content of four religious magazines over several decades. They contrasted the largely apolitical CT with the Christian Century—once so partisan it temporarily lost its tax-exemption.
In this issue, we continue our efforts at that historic balance: Philip Yancey reports on the puzzling relationship between Bill Clinton’s faith and his controversial policies (p. 24); while conservative columnist Cal Thomas speaks against trickle-down morality (p. 12) and policy analyst Merrill Matthews promotes an alternative to the Clinton health plan (p. 10).
Carol is awaiting your letters.
DAVID NEFF, Executive Editor
Philip Yancey
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Imagine my surprise at finding a theater packed with patrons awaiting the matinee showing of Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands. Did these people know what they would see—a film with no violence, no naked flesh, no dirty jokes, and not even a swear word, a film whose main character prays, believes in heaven, and lectures on theology?
Some evangelicals will complain that the movie distorts Lewis’s life and waters down his Christian message. True, in some ways the producers settled for the Hollywood formula of a tearjerker love story played by name stars (Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins). But let’s not be too harsh: these stars speak substantive dialogue to each other—about spiritual matters, no less.
The plot line: a repressed, clubby Oxford don, accustomed to winning all arguments and dominating his private (masculine) world, finds that airtight world invaded by a brash Noo Yawker. Joy Davidman Gresham, sassy, divorced, Jewish, and a former Communist, represents everything Lewis is not. The encounter “humanizes” Lewis, bringing him first acute happiness and then acute despair. Gresham, it turns out, is dying of cancer.
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you,” wrote Lewis. As he sat at the bedside of the dying woman, now his wife, suddenly everything became a matter of life and death. Especially his faith.
“Drippings of grace”
I enjoyed Shadowlands immensely, and I hesitate to carp about a fine film that is spurring a renewed interest in C. S. Lewis’s writings. Yet readers may note that the film subtly misconstrues Lewis’s views of pleasure and pain.
Several times the film repeats a scene from a lecture. We humans are not put on earth to experience happiness, Lewis declaims; that remains for another world. Lewis hammers home his ideas with percussive force even as the unfolding plot makes a conspicuous counterpoint: beyond the walls of the lecture hall, Joy is bringing him the happiness he has never known.
Colleagues who knew Lewis as a hearty, good-humored drinking companion would probably take issue with Anthony Hopkins’s stem portrayal. And those who know him through his books may sense a misrepresentation of how he viewed pleasure. Lewis indeed saw this life as a staging ground for the next, but he believed the “drippings of grace” on this planet Eire enough to awaken in us a thirst for eternal pleasures. He titled his autobiography Surprised by Joy, after all, and had the tempter Screwtape admit that pleasure “is His invention, not ours.” For Lewis, sweet longings in this life were intimations of a redeemed creation to come, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
In the same lecture in Shadowlands, Lewis delivers his philosophy of pain, which becomes the movie’s haunting motif. “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” he says confidently. The blows of the Sculptor, which hurt so much as they fall, are necessary to perfect our character. Lewis’s confidence, though, weakens as he sees up close the devastating effect of the Sculptor’s blows on the woman he loves.
The metaphor of pain as a megaphone is apt. One uses a megaphone to speak to a large crowd at long distance. As Lewis explains in The Problem of Pain, we might otherwise be tempted to assume this world is all there is. Pain reminds us that we live on a fallen planet in need of reconstruction. It keeps us from viewing this earth as a final Home.
Pain is a megaphone, though, not a headphone. For me, the Sculptor image in the film (I do not recall it in Lewis’s writings) raises questions by portraying God too tidily as the direct agent of common human suffering. In the Gospels I have yet to find Jesus saying to the afflicted, “The reason you suffer from a hemorrhage (or paralysis or leprosy) is that the Father is working on you to build character.” Jesus did not lecture such people; he healed them.
You need only read The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed back-to-back to sense that Lewis’s approach to this issue underwent change, a change that his letters also bear out. Pain became for him less an intellectual puzzle and more a cry of anguish. I wish Lewis had lived long enough to write a third book on pain, integrating abstract speculation with personal experience. I have a hunch his emphasis might have shifted from God as the Cause of our suffering to God as the One who can redeem even the evil that suffering may represent. He had seen that pattern of redeemed suffering in himself, in Joy Gresham, and in his Savior.
Shadowlands rightly sees pain and pleasure as two significant themes for C. S. Lewis. Yet, apart from redemption, these themes seem at times more a threat to his faith than its cornerstone. Understandably. How can the moviegoing world understand redeemed pleasure and redeemed pain if it does not believe in a Redeemer?
The movie ends with Lewis’s faith intact, but shaky. In real life, he emerged with an enriched hope for the ultimate transformation of both pleasure and pain. He memorialized Joy Gresham in this poem, now carved on her tomb:
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes yet with hope that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
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Confessions Of A Christian Psychologist
Finding God,by Larry Crabb (Zondervan, 217 pp.; $12.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Kevin D. Miller, editorial resident of YOUR CHURCH magazine.
Reading the introduction to psychologist Larry Crabb’s latest book is like sneaking a peek into someone’s diary: “I have come to the place in my life where I need to know God better or I won’t make it. Life at times has a way of throwing me into such blinding confusion and severe pain that I lose all hope. Joy is gone. Nothing encourages me.”
A confession from one of Crabb’s counselees? Sort of. In Finding God, Crabb attempts to diagnose his own lack of passion for God in his life. In writing the book, he becomes something of his own counselee, while the text becomes the therapy transcript.
The ailment that Crabb diagnoses in Finding God is one more commonly associated with atheists than Christians: unbelief. Too many Christians have shifted their focus from finding God toward finding themselves, he warns. “Helping people to feel loved and worthwhile has become the central mission of the church. We are learning not to worship God in self-denial and costly service, but to embrace our inner child, heal our memories, overcome addictions, lift our depressions, improve our self-images.”
While not the first person to offer such criticism, Crabb’s “countless hours providing therapy for hundreds of people” makes his conclusion worth hearing: “A focus on increased knowledge of self rarely leads to richer knowledge of God.” The obsession of many Christians with counseling and self-help books, he believes, points to a refusal to embrace the more painful—but the only truly effective—remedy: repentance.
It is from this biblical concept that Crabb presents his most original contribution, a descriptive, psychological profile of sin. The apostle Paul’s law of sin is our “inclination to believe that God is not good, or at least not ‘good enough’ to be fully trusted.” This, says Crabb, forms the foundation for a structure of unbelief, which has five levels: first, we turn to others to gain from them what we couldn’t get from God; second, we hate others when they fail to meet our needs; third, we hate ourselves, the way others have hated us for hating them; fourth, we resolve to survive, even if alone; and fifth, we take any steps necessary to ensure our survival.
A myriad of examples is given to illustrate each of these levels, many of them being unflattering incidents from Crabb’s own experience. An especially poignant story goes back to 1991 when his brother died in a plane crash. While speaking at the memorial service, Crabb recalls, “I noticed that a phrase I had used was especially rich.… I paused to let that phrase sink in. During that three second pause, I heard these words run through my mind, ‘I’m doing a pretty good job. That was a good pause.’” His selfishness at his brother’s funeral would haunt him.
What purpose do these stories serve? Call it the psychology of confession. “Telling our stories requires us to face painful truths about ourselves,” says Crabb. And he is on track, for, as the prophet Isaiah or the apostle Peter would readily attest, our seeing the ugly truth about our sinful condition is inextricably tied to our seeing God for who he really is.
But Crabb does not leave it there. “Once we’ve faced those truths,” he writes, “we will again feel the noble passions to love, … passions planted in our hearts by God’s Spirit.” Hence, God is found and the joy returned.
Slave, Pastor, Missionary
From Slavery to Freedom: The Life of David George, Pioneer Black Baptist Minister,by Grant Gordon (Lancelot Press, P.O. Box 425, Hantsport, N.S., Canada B0P 1P0; 356 pp., $13, paper). Reviewed by Mark A. Noll, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College in Illinois.
One of the most encouraging recent developments in religious history is the fresh attention being paid to African Americans. For too long the attitude prevailed that “Christian history” meant the story of Europeans and Americans (with perhaps a footnote or two for people of color). Grant Gordon’s thoroughly researched biography of David George (1743–1810) adds to the growing list of significant books demonstrating how vital the experience of African-American believers has always been to evangelicalism.
George was born a slave in Virginia, but as a young man he escaped and fled south. In the early 1770s, he was instrumental in establishing the colonies’ first independent Black Baptist church in Silver Bluff, South Carolina. Because he remained loyal to Britain during the War for Independence, George was resettled in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, where he established the first Black Baptist church in what would become Canada. George’s pioneering work was not yet finished, however.
In 1792 George emigrated to Sierra Leone, where he became the first Baptist pastor (White or Black) to head a church in Africa. George endured much for his faith from the hands of American slave owners and patriots; he was the object of racial prejudice in three widely scattered regions. But, throughout, he maintained a sturdy faith, which leaned toward Calvinism in doctrine and toward ecstatic experience in practice. Grant Gordon, who teaches at Ontario Theological Seminary, has included an illuminating selection of primary documents concerning David George in this most helpful book.
Downsizing Schindler’S List
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,by Deborah E. Lipstadt (The Free Press, 378 pp.; $22.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Richard V. Pierard, professor of history, Indiana State University, and coauthor of Two Kingdoms: The Church and Culture Through the Ages (Moody).
Four years ago a furor erupted in Hoosierland over a part-time history instructor at an Indianapolis campus who told his students that the Holocaust was a propaganda hoax designed to vilify the Germans and that he was presenting the “other side” of the matter since textbooks only gave the “orthodox view.” The school eventually dismissed him for teaching material that was irrelevant to the course and lacking in scholarly substance. However, because he had briefly taught at my university (he actually replaced me while I was on leave), various reporters contacted me. I told them in no uncertain terms that his assertions not only were a gross falsification of history but also were designed to arouse animosity against Jews.
Deborah Lipstadt’s recounting of this incident revived the memory of my first direct involvement in the struggle against “Holocaust revisionism,” and the book itself is a powerful indictment of the fastest-growing and most common form of anti-Judaism today. Moreover, David Duke’s use of such arguments in his presidential campaign in 1992 brought home to the evangelical community the seriousness of the problem. Even some of my fellow believers fell for Duke’s sweet-tasting conservatism that was laced with the deadly poison of anti-Semitism.
Informed denial
Lipstadt, a historian at Emory University, adopts a multipronged approach to the problem. She analyzes the various contentions of the Holocaust deniers and shows that virtually without exception they are founded on lies, half-truths, and conscious deceptions. In the process, she examines the historical origins of denial in the American and European extreme Right, dissects the writings of several high-profile deniers, discusses the movement’s use of the mass media as a tool for propagation, and assesses the matter’s role in German neo-Nazism.
Lipstadt denies the deniers even the least bit of respectability. She never calls them “revisionists” (a term professional historians use to refer to the reinterpretation of significant happenings through the discovery of new evidence and insights), since all they do is deny established facts.She insists that we must never debate or discuss with them in a public forum or the press, as that would imply there is an “other side” to this matter.
She also lays bare the anti-Semitism that undergirds their belief system. For instance, she quotes Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature, who calls the “so-called gassings” of Jews a political swindle designed to benefit “the state of Israel and international Zionism,” and Arthur Butz, an engineering professor at Northwestern University, who declares the Holocaust “the hoax of the twentieth century,” invented to further “Zionist ends.”
Lipstadt argues eloquently that the First Amendment provision on free speech does not give the deniers the right to a public forum. There is a difference between the government forbidding them to speak (censorship) and requiring the mass media and schools to grant them opportunity to present their views. She argues that the deniers are contemptuous of the very tools that shape an honest debate—truth and reason—and they twist or create information to buttress their beliefs and reject any evidence that counters these. Their use of video lectures and footnote-laden essays even gives their work the appearance of scholarly objectivity; however, they employ the language of scientific inquiry for what is a purely ideological enterprise.
Relatively speaking
One of Lipstadt’s most telling points is that the modern-day attack on the Western rationalist tradition has fed Holocaust denial. The deconstructionists’ claim that literary texts have no fixed meaning and the reader’s interpretations, not the author’s intention, is what determines meanings, leads to the logical conclusion that all truths are relative and nothing is objective. Rejected is the notion that one version of the world is necessarily right while another is wrong. In this ambiguous world, all experience is relative and nothing is certain, history may be rewritten for political ends, and ideological conformity supplants scientific historiography.
The author’s conclusion, “If Holocaust denial has demonstrated anything, it is the fragility of memory, truth, reason, and history,” should make evangelicals stop and think. We have nothing to do with those who deny the objective reality of God, the authority of Scripture, and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Should we, then, be any more charitable toward the convoluted relativism of the deniers who reshape history to fit their agenda?
Lipstadt’s work is a wake-up call that we need to hear. The fact that so many deniers call themselves “Christians” and “patriots” should alarm American evangelicals. Allowing them to gain a foothold in our ranks simply undermines the credibility of our witness.
Half-Full Ecumenism
Ecumenical Faith in Evangelical Perspective,by Gabriel Fackre (Eerdmans, 230 pp.; $17.99, paper). Reviewed by Harold O. J. Brown, professor of biblical and systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reported that doctrinal differences among Christians tended to lose all significance in the gulag. The modern secular world is not a “gulag” in Solzhenitsyn’s sense, but here, too, it makes sense for Christians of various colorations to overlook their differences and to stand together for their Lord. It is to this end that Gabriel Fackre, professor of theology at Andover Newton Theological School, has given us Ecumenical Faith in Evangelical Perspective.
Fackre presupposes and defines two distinct types of mostly Protestant Christians: evangelical ecumenicals—the group to which he claims allegiance—and ecumenical evangelicals, the group that he would like to attract. Fackre’s work is genial and generous. He offers a clear and fair typology of evangelicalism. This book will be especially useful in the current context where anyone who takes the Bible seriously, particularly biblical morality, is likely to be branded as part of the “detestable religious Right.” Here he offers valuable and sane correction.
Fackre identifies evangelicals primarily in terms of their approach to biblical authority and hermeneutics, rather than in terms of their doctrines of personal conversion and the new birth. Thus he tends to identify the difference between evangelicals and ecumenicals as being a question of emphasis or degree rather than of fundamentally diverse commitments. This may be a weakness, for evangelicals have difficulty accepting those who do not have a clear doctrine of repentance, conversion, and the New Birth as Christians, regardless of whether they may have a high view of the authority of Scripture. (After all, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses also profess a very high view of Scripture.)
This points to a fundamental difficulty, specifically the one presented by the late J. Gresham Machen six decades ago in Christianity and Liberalism. The Russian Orthodox, Baptists, and Pentecostals who were thrown together in Russia’s gulags discovered that they shared much in common as Christians; the fifth-generation liberalism in many of the mainline denominational seminaries, however, is, as Machen said, another religion.
This criticism does not apply to Fackre, but it applies to much of the liberal camp where he finds his home. This may cast a shadow on his project, for he cannot truly reconcile the evangelical and ecumenical camps when the ecumenical camp, as evangelicals see it, is populated, and to some extent led, by individuals who affirm neither biblical authority nor personal conversion.
Fackre’s book is beautifully written, tactful, and very well done in many respects, and his generous spirit and sincere desire for Christian unity are to be admired. Nevertheless, his work fails to do justice to the substantial difference that divides evangelicals from so many ecumenicals once they leave the genteel terrain of academic scholarship and enter into the task of contending for the truths of the faith. The ecumenical group in which Fackre finds his home surely contains many Christians, but it also contains much that is in harsh conflict with biblical Christianity. Much has changed since Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, but the problem that he exposed remains: “different religions.”