Page 4990 – Christianity Today (2024)

Evangelical Christians must rediscover the Reformation truth that God can be glorified through a life of scholarship.

“You are invited,” the invitation read, “to attend a banquet for the 48 American Jews who have won a Nobel Prize in science.” I have trouble thinking of one evangelical Christian who has won a Nobel Prize, I thought, after reading the invitation. Jews number about 8 million in the United States; some evangelicals have claimed their number to be 40 million. Why this comparative lack of scientific accomplishment by evangelical Christians?

A partial answer is that not many evangelical Christians have academic appointments in the science departments of the universities where the majority of the Nobel Prizes are won. Neither are evangelicals represented in proportion to their numbers among the graduate students who will become the university professors of the future.

And while evangelical Christians do graduate from college, of course, often it is not with the expectation of pursuing careers in university teaching and research. Even before they come to college, few have been challenged by their church leaders to consider scholarly science as a career that can glorify God. In many cases, such a career is even discouraged before the student arrives at college. Potential scholars are thereby lost to the academic pipeline before reaching the college gates.

Little is done during the college years to change this situation. For 40 years, parachurch groups such as InterVarsity, Campus Crusade, and the Navigators have ministered to students on the university campus. That generation of students now occupies the faculty positions in our universities. Yet, the university faculties are as secular as ever. Where are the Christians?

The question then becomes: “What causes evangelical Christians to turn away from a life of teaching and scholarship?”And the answer is: “Teaching and scholarship are not on the list of activities given the ‘seal of approval’ by much of the evangelical Christian community.”

Approved Activities

A few months ago, a missionary spoke to our church and told about his family problems. Two of his daughters had been on drugs but, providentially, everything ended well: One daughter married a man studying for the ministry, the other married a missionary. But I cannot recall any evangelical Christian father who was proud and relieved that his daughter married a graduate student. While this lack of respect or appreciation for scholarship certainly does not afflict all quarters of evangelical life, it is pervasive enough to cause us concern.

If one talks to a staff member for a Christian group ministering to students on a university campus, one might well hear, “We had a good year; three of our graduating seniors are going on staff.” I have yet to hear: “We had a good year; three of our seniors are going to graduate school.”

And, of course, there is that Christian expression that summarizes the whole problem: “full-time Christian service.” It would be difficult to find a phrase that better implies that Christians in certain “unapproved” activities are not full-time Christians.

Despite the efforts of several vocal leaders to set this matter right, students continue to hear the refrain that certain vocations are more “Christian” than others. This attitude of our evangelical culture inevitably deflects these young people from choosing a life devoted to teaching and scholarship.

True, there are factors—economic, for example—that may discourage the prospective student. But economic hardship has traditionally been part of the mission call, and just as we make no apology for asking people to live with economic stringencies in order to serve on the mission field, so we should make that part of the challenge to those who have a vocation to scholarship.

We see a contrasting attitude among Jews. Their admiration for scholarship is the source of their scholarly accomplishments. For more than two millennia, the rabbi, or teacher, has occupied the pre-eminent position in Jewish society. Consequently, today the best of their youth strive to attain a university position where they can devote their lives to study and research.

Evangelicals’ acceptance of the “approved activities” list even cripples the few evangelical Christians who manage to trickle from the academic pipeline. Consider, as an example, this perspective once voiced by a Christian faculty member: “I am being paid by the university to work 40 hours a week, and I will conscientiously fulfill that obligation. But the rest of my time is for my family and for my church.”

What a contrast this is to the attitude illustrated by the delightful story of the Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli. A friend met him one beautiful spring weekend in Copenhagen. The friend asked, “Why do you look so glum on such a beautiful day?” Pauli replied, “How can anybody be happy when we don’t understand the anomalous Zee-man Effect?” Nobel Prize winners don’t punch time clocks.

I am by no means suggesting that Nobel Prizes should come before families. According to Scripture, husband and wife become “one flesh,” one body. But God will not be pleased on the day of judgment if our sole accomplishment has been to care for our bodies, for our families. That would be too much like the servant who was given one talent and did not use it. Our families are given to us as a home base from which we sally forth into the world to glorify God. They are not an end in themselves.

As for his relationship to the church, the academic Christian gives of his first fruits just as any other Christian. Very likely, he teaches in the church. And the quality of his teaching will be enhanced by his academic experience. Nineteenth-century physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, for example, who discovered the law for generating electricity, preached every Sunday in his little church in London. Yet, he worked so hard on his research that he suffered a nervous breakdown (which I am certainly not advocating).

Evangelical Christians, however, should take care that in their haste to leave the campus and serve the church, they are not neglecting a fertile mission field in which they work every day. As those of us on secular campuses have found, opportunities abound for speaking to student groups, for discussing one’s faith with both individual faculty members and students, and for sponsoring Christian student organizations for the university administration.

A caution is in order, however. When some academic Christians recognize these opportunities, they may be tempted to say, “I will teach in a university so that I can have a Christian influence on young people.” Of course, no Nobel Prize work will be done when this is the only motivation for the work of scholarship.

One can excel in intellectual endeavors only by immersing oneself in his work as Pauli did. I am immersed in physics because I am fascinated by the insights that physics has obtained about God’s world. I find in physics an aesthetic appeal that enriches human existence and gives the same kind of satisfaction that is experienced by hearing great music or viewing unspoiled nature. My fascination with the physicist’s description of nature led to my seeing the same aesthetically satisfying patterns in Scripture; on this basis I became a Christian.

There is an even graver criticism of the Christian who joins a university faculty solely to wield a “Christian influence.” Such a motivation, by itself, not only cripples the scholar, it leads her to join a community of scholars under false pretenses. Instead of joining other scholars to explore the frontiers of knowledge, the real purpose is found somewhere else.

We have no respect for Communists when they infiltrate an organization for their own purposes. Non-Christians also have no respect for Christians who do the same thing. The opportunities for a Christian influence on a university campus are interwoven into the life of teaching and scholarship; they are not an end in themselves.

Paying The Price

What price has the church paid for restricting its vision of “approved” activities and vocations?

First, Christian influence has largely departed from the universities. And, with this departure from the universities, Christian influence has inevitably declined in our culture as well. Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches television knows how the culture of our country has changed.

However, the early church flourished in a non-Christian culture, and one can contend, properly, that the church can do so again. After all, the purpose of the church is to make disciples of all nations, and we should pray to that end. For countries such as China, our prayers should have special urgency.

But God does not always answer prayers as we expect. In their wilderness wanderings, the early Israelites prayed for meat, and God buried them in meat. The church in our day has prayed for the Chinese, and God has buried us in Chinese—40,000 of them, in our universities. These are not the Chinese peasants for which we have been preparing our missionaries with long years of language study (a field that we need to continue to cultivate). Rather, these are the elite of the next generation; they know our language and already admire our culture. These are the leaders of China’s next generation. What an opportunity we now have to reach China with the gospel! I know, from my own experience, how surprised the Chinese are to meet Christian university professors. They have been taught that science has exposed religion as only a superstition. They have not heard that science developed in a Christian culture and that it is reasonable for scientists to be Christians.

As evangelical Christians, then, we have not only stopped influencing our own culture, we have missed an opportunity to reach another culture. Because our promising young Christians have been sent to the mission field, not to university faculties, we have missed taking advantage of a mission field placed on our very doorsteps.

The Cure For What Ails Us

If some evangelical Christians have fallen into the belief that certain “works” are better than others, the cure lies in a return to the insights of the Protestant Reformation. In pre-Reformation Europe there were two classes of Christians, the clergy and the laity. This division was aggravated by the belief that salvation was by “works.” Common lay people despaired of having the time or opportunity to withdraw from the world and devote themselves properly to good works.

Lord of Creation and Academy

What does a calling to the academy mean for the Christian?

Theologian H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, written almost four decades ago and still relevant, was one Christian’s analysis of the ways Christians have interpreted their obligations to the societies in which they live. At one extreme, he observed, are the separationists, seeing culture and scholarship as evil, or at least dangerous to faith. At the other extreme are the accommodators, who reduce biblical faith to the best that human culture and learning have attained. In between are the “churches of the center,” whose members neither reject culture and scholarship nor embrace them uncritically. Instead, such Christians affirm three important themes: (1) God in Christ is Lord over the entire universe. (2) All persons are called to obey God in their cultural activities, which include everything from language, art, science, and philosophy to government, technology, education, and recreation. Finally, (3) all of us are sinners and thus will fulfill God’s “cultural mandate” incompletely. Nevertheless, part of our grateful response to God’s grace is to embrace that cultural mandate, using our minds and skills in the transformation of culture so that it conforms more and more to God’s norms.

I myself was raised in an “accommodationist” church that saw little if any tension between Christianity and the entire world of scholarship. I was first evangelized by “separationists” who catered wonderfully to my needs for salvation and fellowship but also gave me the distinct impression that the price to be paid for becoming a Christian was putting my mind into cold storage for life. (I simply put off becoming a Christian instead.) By God’s grace, when on the verge of completing my doctorate in psychology, I finally became a Christian through the witness of believers who understood that the Lord of salvation is also the Lord of creation, and the One who sends us back to the world of culture and scholarship to reclaim it for him.

The Calvinist tradition of which I am now a part has always maintained that “all of life is religious,” by which is meant that whatever one does to the glory of God, be it building a business, changing a diaper, inventing a microscope, or analyzing a literary text, is, in fact, “full-time Christian service.” This is a tradition in which most adherents are as pleased with their daughters who marry graduate students as they are with those who marry missionaries. They are even learning—somewhat more slowly—to be pleased when the daughters themselves want to be graduate students.

Indeed, Calvinists have been called “the Jews of Protestantism”—intellectual, clannish, and highly achievement oriented. For this reason their churches, schools, and colleges have attracted not a few bright, young evangelicals looking for ways to build a life of faith that does not disparage the life of the mind. But if Calvinists are similar to Jews in this way, why have they not garnered a similar proportion of academic accolades, such as Nobel Prizes?

Part of the answer, I suspect, has to do with the question of whether Christian scholarship is best done in Christian or secular institutions. As a Christian, I have worked in both settings and can see advantages and disadvantages to both. The large university often offers better pay, smaller teaching loads, and more sophisticated facilities—especially for natural scientists. But for an interdisciplinary scholar like myself, with overlapping interests in psychology, theology, and philosophy of social science, the atomized, overspecialized university setting was often a drawback. So was its “selective secularism,” which welcomed faith-based, “world-viewish” scholarship when coming from Marxists, but scorned it as “partisan” and “subjective” when coming from Christians. It was only when I settled into my present, Christian liberal arts college that my particular scholarly interests were able to flourish optimally.

Evangelicals will continue to give different answers to the question as to how Christian scholarship can best be nurtured, both individually and communally. But we need to agree that it should be nurtured, and be prepared to commit the necessary resources. Whether our universities are re-Christianized as a result is not the point. Our God demands obedience, not temporal success, and part of that obedience means using the minds he has given us to bring every thought captive to Christ.

By Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, professor of interdisciplinary studies at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

All this was changed with Martin Luther’s rediscovery of salvation by faith. No longer were certain “works” required for salvation. Consecrated Christians were free to devote their lives to any lawful pursuit. Luther’s shoemaker could glorify God by making good shoes.

Science, in particular, benefited from this new Christian freedom. One could glorify God by studying his creation. Johannes Kepler, one of the first scientists of the Reformation, devoted 20 years to discovering the motion of the planets around the sun. Describing his work, he said that he was thinking the Creator’s thoughts after him.

Commenting on the study of astronomy, Calvin wrote: “For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God. Wherefore, as ingenious men are to be honored who have expended useful labor on this subject, so they who have leisure and capacity ought not to neglect this kind of exercise.”

This kind of interest in science among Christians extended through several centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, evangelical Christians largely disappeared from the scientific scene. They had turned to “Christian works” and had become isolated from science and the universities. The Reformation’s insight on Christian vocation was forgotten.

Until evangelical Christians rediscover the Reformation truth that God can be glorified through a life of scholarship, the universities—and not the church—will continue to be the source of nourishment for the secular culture of our day.

When I realized my prayer life needed more than resolve, I began to pray about praying.

When one of my sons was a toddler, recurring ear infections dulled his hearing and slowed his mastery of speech, despite his eagerness to learn. This made his part in our nightly prayer time a real trial. Micah had to take his turn after his talkative six-year-old brother, who managed to include in his prayers, it seemed, everyone he ever knew.

While Micah’s command of language was limited to a few words, he so longed to participate in our bedside ritual that he bowed his head and “prayed” in what can only be described as an unrolling string of wordlike sounds, a long stream of unintelligible syllables with all the inflection and rhythm of real language. In the dark of the boys’ room, the sound of his solemn, mumbling attempts left the rest of us alternating between stifled laughter and quiet awe.

To want to speak, but not know how, to want to pray, but not have the words, is a handicap that afflicts us long after childhood. It is painful to be speechless before God, to discover, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “that every call to [God] dies within itself.” For all my adult facility with language, I am still much like Micah when it comes to prayer.

I suspect that our failed attempts to pray more often lie partly in this dread of not knowing what to say, in our ambivalence about sitting still in God’s presence, unprotected by distraction, unhidden by the facile words that seem to get us by in everyday speech. Like the writer’s proverbial blank page waiting to be filled with prose, the prospect of addressing God can intimidate us into silence. It is easier, some days, to avoid completely trying to piece together the words. Only the specter of not praying at all looms more agonizing and terrible. And so we keep trying.

In my searching for words, I have found that the longing to pray itself holds great promise. We learn how to pray better, I believe, by first paying attention to our desire to pray.

Linguists (and parents) will tell you that infants begin to pick up words without prodding or pushing, without vocabulary drills and other techniques of formal training. “Talking, like walking,” says one childhood language specialist, “is built into our genes.” The motivation to speak is instinctive. A child wants to squall out his or her need for milk, or giggle with affectionate phrases, or ask us endless questions to satisfy his or her innate curiosity.

On one level, prayer is, likewise, something we want to do, something for which longing and motivation seems “built in.” One writer discovered this in a memorable way while traveling in the majesty and beauty of the Swiss Alps. Although she had rejected the faith, in a moment of insight and longing she wrote to a friend, “If only I could make some small sound of praise to someone—but whom?”

We grow in prayer by attending to just such stirrings. Prayer has less to do with charts and diagrams and lists of things we must do to achieve intimacy with God, and more to do with cultivating a relationship. “We approach God through love, not navigation,” said Augustine. We learn to pray by praying, by attending to the natural longings the Creator has placed in his created. More than a class in techniques of praying, or a degree in the history of spirituality, we need to look at our desire for God, implanted within us by the God who has made us restless until we find our rest in him.

This means that deep prayer is often quite uncomplicated. The prayers of the great figures of the Bible, in fact, display a simplicity that belies the need for elaborate vocabulary. Moses, it should be remembered, stammered his way through the times he had to speak to the people of Israel. “O Lord,” he complained, “I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue” (Exod. 4:10; all Scripture references from the NIV). And yet, before God he conversed freely, “face to face” (Exod. 33:11).

“Often it is the simple, repetitious phrases of a little child,” says seventh-century Byzantine John Climacus, “that our Father in heaven finds most irresistible. One phrase on the lips of the tax collector was enough to win God’s mercy; one humble request made with faith was enough to save the good thief.”

Indeed, prayer is rooted in God’s listening, gracious invitation. Thus Jesus reminds us, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8). What matters most is his ability to read our hearts, to understand our faltering words, to draw us to himself in a way that mutes our fears about what to say.

This became clear to me in a dramatic way recently. Long influenced by the brand of piety that emphasizes the indispensability of an hour of “quiet time” every morning, I nevertheless seemed to be unable to keep it up. I would read inspiring stories of saints who would let nothing stop them from their daily hour, and something within me would stand at attention; but my new resolve never carried me beyond a couple of weeks.

Recently I read again of a woman who simply decided one day to make such a commitment to pray, and my conscience was pricked. But I knew myself well enough to know that something other than resolve was called for. I began to pray about praying. I expressed to God my frustrated longings, my jaded sense of caution about trying again, my sense of failure over working at being more disciplined and regular.

I discovered something surprising happening from such simple praying: I was drawn into the presence of One who had, far more than I did, the power to keep me close. I found my focus subtly shifting away from my efforts to God’s, from rigor to grace, from rigidity to relationship. I soon realized that this was happening regularly. I was praying much more. I became less worried about the mechanics and methods, and in turn I was more motivated.

And God so cares for us, I realized anew, that he himself helps us pray. When we “do not know what we ought to pray for … the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Rom. 8:26).

One finds in an authentic devotional life a growing awareness of this divine side of the praying proposition. We care less and less about articulating everything “just so” and more and more about opening ourselves to the one who first addressed us in Christ and continues to speak through the Spirit.

“The moment you wake up each morning,” C. S. Lewis reminds us, “all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.”

It is reassuring to realize that prayer is ultimately a work of that “other, larger” life, that it is something we participate in, not manufacture. Says the Quaker Thomas Kelly, “The Living Christ within us is the initiator and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock.’ And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us.” And sometimes, unaccountably, we will find the Spirit helping in a way that surpasses all expectation, lifting our praying beyond words, carrying our hearts to a communion and undiminishable wonder that language cannot capture.

This is why the medieval spiritual writer likened God to lightning. “Whatever lightning strikes,” he wrote, “be it a tree, an animal, or a man, it turns the object immediately towards it. If a man has his back to the lightning, he turns around in that moment to face it. If a tree has a thousand leaves, they all turn instantly toward the flash.”

That the impulse to address God lies deep within does not call for passivity on our part, however. That we are made for relationship with God does not mean we do nothing to cultivate our desire to pray or to nurture this primal impulse. We deepen our fluency in praying not only through wanting, then, but also through learning.

That is why the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Teach us to pray.” There are insights to be gained. Our stuttering words and awkward silences need to be schooled in and patterned after wisdom. They need instruction in the words God has already spoken to us in Jesus Christ and Scripture. Prayer is answering the God who has already addressed us, not striking up conversation with a distant deity.

This means, moreover, not simply learning what Scripture says about prayer, although that is vital, but also taking cues from its approach to and immersion in prayer. One of the most transforming insights for my devotional life came with the discovery that Scripture could not only be read, but also prayed. I began to approach the Bible as something more than a theology primer. Paul’s words to the Ephesians, for example, about their having the “eyes of their hearts … enlightened, in order that [they] may know the hope to which [God] has called [them],” began to become the basis of my own prayers. I would take such passages and fill in the names of friends, or even use them in voicing prayers for myself. “Repeating God’s words after him,” writes Bonhoeffer, “we begin to pray to him,” just as my son repeated, as best he could, the sounds of praying he heard from his father.

The psalter, called the “prayer book of the Bible,” is an especially good place to begin “praying the Scriptures.” In the church’s history, in its worship and spirituality, the psalms stand out with striking singularity. Many psalms are, in fact, explicit prayers, and the whole book carries with it the inflections and rhythms of praise, worship, anguish, anger, hope, confession, and shame. It is, in other words, patently true to life.

Those who discover the rich joy of praying the psalms in an ordered way may find of earlier praying, as did Martin Luther, “Ah, there is not the juice, the strength, the passion, the fire which I find in the Psalter.” And in the thick of day-to-day living, to be able to call to mind a snatch of Psalms—“[Your] steadfast love endures forever” or “Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations”—may make all the difference in how we move through an anxious moment, when prayers may not roll off the tongue.

The memorizing of Scripture plays a role here, as well. We memorize not only to share it with others in “witnessing” encounters, but so that God’s Word may soak the soil of our thinking, and thereby our praying. Waiting in line at a checkout counter, riding in a car, or taking an early morning walk can become opportunities for reflective recital of the promises of God. Such passages need not be lengthy; indeed, for a time, a friend of mine spent much of his formal and informal prayer time quietly, persistently repeating the phrase, The Lord is my shepherd.

That we learn to speak to God because God speaks first to us is especially true of the prayer Jesus gave his disciples. The Lord’s Prayer can be far more than a hastily recited, distracted exercise, as illustrated in a story about a nineteenth-century spiritual director. Someone asked her about cultivating a deeper prayer life. “Say the Lord’s Prayer,” she told her charge, “but take an hour to say it.”

The petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, many find, can give our longings and prayers focus, helping us to think prayerfully through the issues and urgencies of our day. “Thy kingdom come” is a wonderfully suggestive request, for example, that can reorient the sometimes self-centered concerns of our little world.

Luther, to cite another example, tells of praying the first petition, “Hallowed be thy name”: “[I] say, ‘Yes, Lord God, dear Father, you do hallow your name in us and in all the world. Pull up and destroy the hatreds, the self-worshiping.’”

Luther went on to say that “to this day I am still nursing myself on the Lord’s Prayer like a child and am still eating and drinking of it like an old man without getting bored with it.”

The ways to give voice to our longing to converse with God, then, are really many; they far outnumber the few mentioned here. There are many outlets, and one may fit our needs at one time better than another. Experimentation with the myriad ways of praying found in Scripture and church tradition is eminently appropriate, just as is the “practice” of children learning to talk. For a period of some weeks, I found the Lord’s Prayer the most helpful basis for praying, using it along with other kinds of praying, such as adoration and supplication. Other weeks I use a monthly cycle of psalms (such as found in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer), or I read a chapter of Scripture a day, open not only to what it might teach me about God or the world, but also alert to how it may shape my prayers.

It must be said as well that our learning to pray is not a solitary exercise. Others not only have wisdom to share, but help us keep our desire for God, which can get crowded out of busy lives, fanned into flame. We need the reminder of Eugene Peterson that “the assumption that prayer is what we do when we are alone—the solitary soul before God—is an egregious, and distressingly persistent, error.… We are part of something before we are anything, and never more so than when we pray.” Prayer begins in community. The weekly, flesh-and-blood mentoring and modeling that worshiping with others can give is indispensable.

It has been five years since my son graced our family’s evening prayers with his mellifluous mumbling. He has learned to pray (and talk) like a typical eight-year-old, and now gives his older brother a run for the money during our family’s nightly routine. He has learned some things about piecing together words to pray into the silence. But his mother and I still detect a frustration in him, at times, when he cannot think of the right words.

I do not concern myself with it anymore. His irritation is a sign that God has indeed placed within him a desire not only to speak, but to pray. He will learn—from his parents, from Scripture, from our church—greater proficiency. And for now, we know that even faltering, stammering words are both prompted by God and heard by him.

Great mourners can be great rejoicers.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). With his second Beatitude, Jesus uttered one of the strangest sentences imaginable. What sense does it make to declare happy those who are sad? We would congratulate those with eyes lined by laughter; Jesus congratulates those with eyes flooded by grief. We would congratulate those with mirth in their hearts; Jesus congratulates those with an ache in their guts. What sense does this make?

Very little, if we share the values of our culture.

A few years ago, Russell Baker commented that “the number of places a person can escape entertainment becomes smaller every year.… It used to be, for example, that a man could go to his dentist and count on an undisturbed bout of suffering which helped him to grasp the transience of life and perceive the agony of the flesh. No longer. Nowadays, while the drill bites at his nerve endings, he will be entertained by an invisible orchestra playing ‘The March of the Wooden Soldiers’ through a hole in the ceiling. The invisible orchestra is spreading across the country like the chestnut blight.… A people forced to live with Leonard Bernstein in the elevator, Doris Day at 30,000 feet, and ‘The Animals’ on the commuter bus is a people that will have precious little to smile about at the end of a hard-day’s entertainment. To restore entertainment to its proper role in society, we must restore the right to brood undisturbed.”

And, I would add, we must restore the right to be sad. The stampede toward entertainment begins, so often, with the flight from sorrow. Better to have something pleasant distract us, we might think, than have something painful destroy us. Too many hurts seem ready to ambush our emotions and beat them senseless if given half a chance. So off we go to the movies or the mall, the boat or the ball game, the pool or the party—off to almost anything at all promising protection from sadness and the possibility of happiness.

If we’re beating our hooves in this stampede, we have defined happiness much too narrowly. Authentic happiness does not mean absence of sorrow. In fact, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn.”

Mourning, Not Moaning

Mourning: Jesus was not referring to the sadness I feel when, say, the Padres lose three straight games, or when a patrolman pulls me over and my fast-talking preacher mouth can’t get me out of a speeding ticket. He was not even referring to the sadness I feel when I have hurt my wife’s feelings, or when I have been short-tempered with my daughters. I feel bad about these things, but I don’t mourn.

The word used here is the strongest one for sadness in the Greek language. It is used for mourning the dead, for the passionate lament of a broken heart. It is intense sorrow. “Happy are the mourners,” Jesus said.

Happy are the mourners, not the moaners. Some find pleasure in complaining. “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” they sing, and they enjoy the effect their music has on others. They like the attention; they wallow in the concern of others. But these people are mostly manipulators, more to be pitied than congratulated. Moaners are too content with their shallow pleasures to move into deep happiness.

But the mourners will be happy, according to Jesus. Why? We would not expect this. After all, mourners have had a great hurt penetrate them; a sharp suffering has lanced their spirits, leaving a gaping wound to bleed grief all over their lives. Why are they the blessed ones? How could anyone consider them worthy of congratulation?

The first and obvious thing we can say about mourners is that they have enough sensitivity to hurt. That, in itself, deserves praise.

It is not easy to escape the conspiracy to save us from suffering. A host of saviors waits to serve us: psychologists to numb our neuroses and pastors to absolve our guilt, doctors to heal our diseases and insurance agents to calm our worries, the surgeon general to save our lungs and Jane Fonda to firm up our flab. And we are separated from the suffering of others, too, by comfortable neighborhoods to protect our families, hospitals to care for the sick, and funeral homes to tend the dead. Deliverance from discomfort may be the most bullish industry in contemporary America. A team of people, like maintenance workers at Disneyland, is quick to sweep the garbage out of our lives to make our visit to the Magic Kingdom as pleasant as possible as we go from one entertainment to another.

But Jesus congratulated those who have left the Magic Kingdom to enter God’s kingdom.

When the poor in spirit, having given up on themselves and their attempts to find happiness, turn in humility toward God, they discover they have been seized—wholly seized—by the grace of God. Kingdom people, therefore, mourn. God transforms their values and changes their perspectives. They cannot live under God’s authority in a sinful world without mourning. As their hearts begin to beat in rhythm with God’s heart, their hearts begin to break over the things that break God’s heart.

And the paradox is this: Great mourners are great rejoicers. In opening the door to pain, they also open it to joy. People who do not mourn, who slam the door on all sorrow, never feel the deepest delights. Their lives, like freeways on which they speed from one entertaining distraction to another, are too hard for anything but the most superficial pleasures to pass over. But those sensitive enough to be crushed by sadness are those who also can be lifted by happiness.

Surely few have grieved as deeply as Mother Teresa over the wretched poor on the streets of Calcutta. But what do visitors to her Home for the Dying report? They testify to a joy so authentic, so palpable, that words of description drop like arrows falling short of a target. The great grievers, I am convinced, are the great rejoicers, for opening eyes in the night have enabled them to see clearly the shafts of light breaking through to harass the darkness.

As a pastor, I’ve had the privilege and pain of sitting with families in anguish over the death of a loved one. I have often witnessed the unlikely marriage of tears and laughter. We’ll be seated in the living room, say, planning Bill’s funeral. The silence of sorrow surrounds each sentence. “Why did he have to die so young?” Sharon says. “With two little children, with so much of a future ahead of us?” And maybe I mutter something to the new widow, or maybe I just cry with her.

Then George, who has just flown in from Denver to be with his sister, after a blast from his nose that might very well have raised Bill himself from the mortician’s table, says, “If I’d known there were this many tears in the world, I’d have bought stock in the Kleenex company.” Silence follows, for about two seconds; no one’s too sure how to respond, given the circ*mstances and the minister’s presence. But then, a snicker from one of the kids. It’s enough. Like bubbles rising from the bottom of a kettle sitting long over the fire, the laughter rises to the surface until the whole room boils over with mirth far out of proportion to the humor in the comment.

It is a release of tension, of course. But I think more, too, as I see Sharon’s eyes: She’s looking at her big brother—the boy who had tried to force-feed a lizard down her screaming throat, the teenager who had begged for her help when he was going down for the third time in a sea of algebra, the college student who telephoned (collect) once a week for no reason other than that he missed her, and the young man who had cried like a baby at her wedding—her big brother who wishes he had bought stock in the Kleenex company—her big brother whom she loves with an ache almost as great as the ache in her heart because of her husband’s death.

Who can understand the strange union of grief and joy in a moment such as this? Sorrow pierces the soul, cuts through protective defenses, leaves feelings exposed, vulnerable—and joy slips in.

“Blessed are those who mourn.” Congratulations to them, for they have sensitive hearts.

Children Of God

Now let’s take it a step further. Mourners feel something more than a passing sorrow for events that remain external to them; mourners have allowed pain to penetrate their lives. In this way, they show they are children of God.

Not every sad thing causes me to mourn. Some things pass over my life like rainwater over oilskin, without soaking into my being. The evening news tells me of a flood in Bangladesh, a mass murder in a schoolyard, and a terrifying increase in AIDS cases, and I shake my head over the tragedies of life. But then, without so much as a moment’s reflection, I go into the kitchen for a cup of coffee, on the way tickling my daughter and asking my wife if she picked up the dry cleaning. For the most part, this may be fine; a person, after all, could not function if every tragedy pierced the heart.

Mourning, though, is different. I grieve deeply when something penetrates deeply. When I sat at Garth’s bedside, for example, I mourned. My normal defenses were no match for this tragedy, though God knows I would have preferred to keep a professional distance. But there is no such protection when it’s your cousin’s son lying there with his head smashed and swollen because a drunk driver ran into a car full of Westmont College students on their way to a mission project. I had just told his parents, who were waiting to board a flight from Seattle to San Diego, that no life remained in their firstborn’s brain, and I had promised to stay with him until they arrived. So I did. That is what destroyed the professional distance—sitting there, hour by hour, next to the pumping and wheezing technology of an intensive-care unit and next to the silence of God, too, as I wondered why such things have to happen. There was plenty of time to think. I remembered how his mother and I had played together as kids, how his father had been in my wedding, how I had been the first to suggest his name, and how his dad had told me, just months before, how pleased he was that his son loved the Lord. And I mourned.

I didn’t really feel all that blessed. But according to Jesus, I was. Why? Because when we mourn in this way, when hurt slices through us like a woodsman’s ax, we are being true to our heritage as children of God.

Jesus Christ, according to the witness of the church, revealed the character of God; in the apostle’s words, “In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19). What the Father has shown through sending the Son is a divine being, not safely separated, but profoundly pierced by the suffering of the world. So we see Jesus weeping over the death of his friend Lazarus; we see Jesus filled with compassion, suffering with the sick and dying; we see Jesus taking the sadness of the entire world into himself and dying of a broken heart on a Roman cross. “A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.”

“Blessed are those who mourn.” Congratulations to them, because they are like Christ, because they prove themselves to be children of the God who mourns.

In addition, mourners, like Jesus Christ himself, are more likely to become instruments of God’s healing in this world; they may transform their tears into action. Behind every hospital and hospice and food bank and school and social-service agency was someone who grieved over a human need—who grieved deeply enough to do the hard work of making a difference.

Martin Luther mourned the church’s erosion of simple faith in the grace of God; John Wesley mourned his contemporaries’ lack of disciplined piety; William Wilberforce mourned the slave trade; William and Catherine Booth mourned the conditions of the poor in London; Albert Schweitzer mourned the suffering of Africans; Dietrich Bonhoeffer mourned the church’s captivity to nazism; Martin Luther King, Jr., mourned racial prejudice; Candy Lightner mourned the death of her daughter and formed MADD—Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

“Blessed are those who mourn.” Congratulations to them, because they may hurt enough to do something about it.

God At The Broken Places

Happy are the sad? I have suggested several reasons why mourners are blessed. They have sensitive hearts; they prove themselves children of God; and their tears may be turned into healing action. But there is a more important reason, the one Jesus gave—“for they shall be comforted.”

Comforted by whom? Comforted by God.

God comes to the brokenhearted in a way that sustains and renews. Karl Barth introduced a section of his Church Dogmatics with these words: “We must begin by saying something about the nature of the man who is in some sense illuminated by the light of the kingdom of God. What kind of man is it to whom Jesus turns in this particular activity? The answer is obvious. It is the man with whom things are going badly; who is needy and frightened and harassed.… The picture brought before us is that of suffering—the demon possessed, the relatives of a sick friend who is dear to them, the bereaved and those who walk in the fear and shadow of death.”

Jesus turns to the one for whom things are going badly. I have witnessed this, again and again; I have seen, coming from those in crushing grief, surprising peace and even startling joy.

The first time I saw Al outside of church was at the beach. I had just run about six miles and had the raised chin and easy stride of a man clearly in charge of the world. Good pace, I told myself. Pretty Hot Stuff.

And then a voice brought me out of my silent self-admiration: “Hi, Pastor! Great day for a run!” I looked up to see a trim, sweat-soaked, white-haired man in his midsixties.

“Well, Al,” I responded, “I didn’t know you’re a runner.” That’s what I said, but this is what I thought: How wonderful for an old guy like you to be out getting a little exercise. Pretty Hot Stuff pulled in his stomach and made sure he wasn’t breathing too hard. “How far have you run today, Al?”

“Eighteen miles,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Eighteen. I’m doing a lighter one today. It’s my training schedule. I’m getting ready for another marathon. How far you going today?”

I muttered something about a sore calf, and limped away—not from a wounded muscle but from a chastened spirit.

Al became my hero. Whenever I ran, he came to mind; by God’s grace, I wanted to grow to be just like him. Running 18 miles at 65! The very thought of it lightened my feet and enlarged my lungs.

Then one day the church receptionist buzzed me on the intercom. Al had stopped by, she told me. Did I have a few minutes to chat? A man always has time for his hero, so I told her to send him up right away.

“Uh, well …” she faltered. “Perhaps you had better come downstairs.”

When I saw Al seated I sensed something was wrong. He didn’t look quite right, and I felt my spirit sinking even before he reached out and said, “Pastor, can you help me up? My legs aren’t working very well.”

His weight bearing down on me, as we hobbled down the hallway like two hopeless runners in a gunnysack race, was nothing compared with the weight dragging my spirit onto the floor. How could this be? In a way, I felt some of my own dreams being crippled with each halting step we made.

But then his words lifted me and held me, and to this day they hold me still and keep me, well, if not flying with eagles, at least walking without fainting. What he said was this: “Pastor, about a month ago I noticed myself slowing down on my run. Things have happened rapidly since then. The neurologist says I have A.L.S.—Lou Gehrig’s disease. I don’t know how long I have to live.

“But you know, Pastor, God is good. I feel such peace. It’s incredible. I’ve never felt closer to God. I know my life is in my Savior’s hands, and I’m ready for whatever he has for me.”

“Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus said, “for they shall be comforted.” That’s what Al had: the comfort of God.

And that’s what Frank felt, too. Just hours after a highway patrolman told him that his 20-year-old daughter had been killed on the freeway, he looked up at me and said, “Don, I don’t like it. I’m mad. I don’t understand why God would allow this to happen. She was on her way home from helping lead a Young Life Club! I don’t understand! I will never understand. But Don, it’s going to be all right.” And then once more, with tears streaming down his cheeks and his voice raised as if he was speaking past me and his wife, Joan, and past his own anger and doubt to some place behind it all where the company of heaven was bearing witness: “It’s going to be all right!”

“Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus said, “for they shall be comforted.” Simply put, it’s better to mourn, to have your heart ripped out and stomped to bits by the spiked boots of tragedy, than never to mourn and miss the comfort. The God revealed through Jesus Christ and present in the power of the Holy Spirit comes to the broken places and holds the loose ends together with his powerful love.

Mary Magdalene has been one of the most maligned women in history. Popular tradition holds that she was a prostitute. Pope Gregory the Great (sixth century A.D.) started the rumor when he decided she was the woman caught in adultery whom Jesus saved from death, and his opinion stuck to her like a bad reputation. But there is absolutely no scriptural evidence for this.

We do know, however, that she had the courage of a great mourner. A faithful disciple to the end, she followed Jesus to the Passover celebration in Jerusalem and mourned as he was hauled before the authorities on charges of blasphemy and sedition. She mourned as the wretched procession marched outside the city gates and up the skull-shaped hill. She mourned when the nails sunk deeply into his flesh. She mourned when he cried out in agony. Peter and the others could not handle it; they ran for safety, from the horror of it; they ran back to tax collecting and fishing, back to families and homes. But Mary stayed with her grief.

So to the tomb she went early that morning, simply to be there like a widow goes to the garage and runs her fingers across an abandoned workbench—remembering; or like a father sits in an empty bedroom trying somehow to fill an aching emptiness within, remembering. Through the dark, empty streets outside the gates to Jesus’ tomb, she went to continue her work of mourning.

She stayed with her grief and didn’t run from it; she let herself be drawn into the pain and tragedy of Jesus’ death.

Do you know the end of the story? To whom did the resurrected Lord first appear on Easter morn? Who felt the Comforting Presence before anyone else? Mary. It was Mary, who stayed with her grief until the comfort came. Blessed Mary.

Whatever the Kinsey Institute says, understanding the true purpose of sexuality requires far more than lessons in biology.

If ignorance is bliss, when it comes to sex we must be absolutely ecstatic. At least that is what one recent poll might suggest.

Nearly 2,000 persons participated in a survey conducted by the Roper Organization, which sought to ascertain what we know about sex. The results are included in the Kinsey Institute’s New Report on Sex: What You Must Know to be Sexually Literate (St. Martin’s Press). The findings surprised us. No one answered all 18 questions correctly. Less than half (45%) of the respondents could answer correctly even as many as half of the questions.

The survey included topics such as the frequency of some kinds of sexual behaviors, the average size of sex organs, and inquiries related to conception and contraception. The respondents were not asked about their own practices or experience but rather what they believed was true of people in general. The researchers asked interviewees what they knew, not what they did. The results pointed to widespread ignorance and misinformation.

The Kinsey Institute staff, after calling attention to this dismal sexual illiteracy revealed by the Roper study, devote the majority of their 540-page New Report to telling us more than most anyone could want or need to know about matters of sexuality.

On the one hand, we find it ironic that a society so “sexually active” could be so uninformed. With the sensuous and sexual so prominent in our cultural life, including the advertising we heed and the entertainments we increasingly choose, how can it be that Americans don’t “know the score”?

Part of the explanation could be the type of knowledge the survey tested. Do we really need to know the size of an average penis or whether couples engage in sex daily, weekly, or semiannually? Genuine knowledge has intrinsic and extrinsic value, of course, but is this kind of information necessary for a healthy understanding of sex? The fact that some aspects of sex are still a mystery for many is even somewhat heartening.

The Kinsey report authors disavow any intention of giving guidance for how we ought to behave. At most, they suggest, the report provides individuals with information they need to make responsible decisions about their sex lives. But to make such a suggestion may at best be naive and is probably irresponsible. It ignores or denies the empirical evidence that knowledge does not insure wise or morally appropriate behavior. Teenage pregnancy is rampant, even among the well-informed. And, despite the rigorous AIDS information campaign, a persistent promiscuity has resumed among the high-risk hom*osexual and bisexual population. To know right is not necessarily to do right.

The Kinsey authors do recognize the important role that parents and the church must play in transmitting the essential values related to sexual behavior. It is both the duty and the privilege of the Christian family, in partnership with the church, to combat sexual illiteracy. We need to engage in sex education that is knowledgeable and candid. Used with discernment, the Kinsey New Report can be a helpful resource. But our children, young people, and we ourselves will remain sexual illiterates unless we know and tell the whole story. That means beginning with what God has revealed about human sexuality in the Scriptures. It also means acknowledging our fallen sinfulness and our need for the redemptive power of divine grace.

Sexual promiscuity is still a moral problem, not a knowledge problem, and the antidote to sin is not education but reconciliation.

By George K. Brushaber.

Scottish scholar Frederick Fyvie Bruce (1910–90) not only led the way for the renewal of evangelical biblical scholarship in our time but towered over it as a giant among ordinary men.

When his first major commentary was published in 1951, it was rare to find any book by an evangelical scholar listed on a course bibliography in a mainline seminary or university. Prior to Bruce, the twentieth century had produced two outstanding evangelical biblical scholars, J. Gresham Machen and E. J. Young; but their writings were often so polemical it was hard for anyone unsympathetic to their perspective to give their arguments the care they deserved.

Bruce represented a new approach. Rather than rail against “the unbelieving critics,” he offered careful scholarship wedded to a confidence in the God who reveals himself in Scripture and in Christ. He was never ideological. He was delighted to be called an “evangelical,” but not if that meant a party within the larger community of faith. To be evangelical was, for him, to be committed to the gospel of God’s grace revealed in his Son. He eschewed the label “conservative evangelical.” “If many of my critical conclusions … are described as being conservative,” he once commented, “they are so not because … I am conservative, but because I believe them to be the conclusions to which the evidence points.” He was concerned for truth alone, not truth in the service of a cause.

In the 1940s, he inaugurated a new era in scholarship by helping to establish the Theological Students’ Fellowship to encourage students to take the academic side of theology seriously and to remain faithful to the Lord who had called them, and also the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research, which was to produce important Bible study aids, such as the New Bible Commentary, the New Bible Dictionary, and the Tyndale Commentaries, and thus prepare the way for the fine evangelical reference works available today.

The Bruce Prescription

The state of academic biblical studies is totally changed from the day of Bruce’s youth. The work of evangelical Bible scholars is of a higher quality than any time prior to the end of the last century. In this remarkable change, no one has been more influential than the late F. F. Bruce. Still, there are weaknesses.

First, biblical scholars tend to become experts in the secondary literature rather than the primary texts. Bible courses in conservative seminaries and colleges often degenerate into discussions of what various scholars have written about the Bible. Bruce’s application of the method he learned as a classicist, listening to the words of the original authors before turning an ear to their later interpreters, has much to teach us.

Second, biblical languages are undervalued. Bruce found it hard to understand how anyone who had a sense of call to “the ministry of the Word” would be unwilling to learn Hebrew and Greek. He not only knew those languages, but the whole Bible by heart in the original tongue. At a time when many pastors undervalue their biblical languages, it is urgent to remind church leaders that an understanding of the original is fundamental to the interpretation and application of Scripture.

Third, the Testaments are too often divided. Having separate departments of New Testament and Old Testament, each with its experts who have little dialogue with the other, reflects the secular fragmentation of knowledge. Bruce believed a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew Bible was a prerequisite for understanding the New Testament. Perhaps it is time to stop appointing professors of New Testament or Old Testament in favor of professors of biblical studies.

Fourth, Bruce’s positive defense of the faith provides a model for contemporary evangelical scholars. All too often the work of evangelical scholars has consisted of pointing out the errors of liberal theologians. But if Bruce’s work had an apologetic tenor, it was simply because he let truth speak for itself.

The Christian community has lost a great leader. But he has left a great legacy. There is every reason to hope his work will be continued by the host of younger scholars who have answered the call of the same Lord.

Guest editorial by W. Ward Gasque, Eastern College.

Back when televangelism’s two Jimmies were still smiling, the buzzword was accountability. As in, besides God, to whom is any ministry accountable?

Fortunately, only Paul Crouch of Trinity Broadcasting Network has had the audacity to name publicly the Almighty as his only watchdog. Though we would never doubt our Heavenly Father’s vigilance, we recall how often he has given greater leaders ample rope on which to hang. Eventually we all get what is coming to us; but in the meantime, it helps to have structures that encourage us to behave.

The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability is one of those structures, but some have worried that it is more a rubber stamp than a seal of quality. Stop worrying. Last month, the ECFA released its new membership list, along with a list of ministries that either were kicked out or departed on their own because they could not live within ECFA’s minimal standards (CT, Oct. 8, p. 59).

A pat on the back goes to ECFA director Art Borden, who has patiently spearheaded efforts to help evangelical ministries follow acceptable accounting procedures, provide donors with approved financial reports, and form boards not dominated by relatives.

We hope those former ECFA members will take the necessary steps to return to the ECFA fold. And we must congratulate one ministry—the Bible Memory Association—for its refreshing candor. Instead of the usual denials and rationalizations, a spokesperson simply admitted the ministry had made mistakes. We are used to hearing that after someone gets caught.

If you are looking for evangelical organizations to support, we suggest you send your checks to those bearing the ECFA logo.

By Lyn Cryderman.

Graveyards are not everyone’s favorite haunt. And, I must say at the outset, I don’t spend the bulk of my time in them. Yet ever since visiting Melrose Abbey and Greyfriars Kirk during my student days in Scotland, I’ve been fascinated with tombstones and their inscriptions.

Part of my interest has to do with the stories tombstones tell about the times, whether of events that transpired or of social history. One cannot help being impressed by the depth of Christian conviction that some of the inscriptions express, by the moralistic admonitions that some give, and by the simple tomfoolery that appears at times as well. A tombstone is often the last attempt of a person to make a statement, and they are frequently, for that reason, quite revealing.

What interests me most about tombstones and their inscriptions, however, is what they unintentionally say about the people who wrote them. I have two favorites. The first is from a churchyard in a small village north of Zurich, Switzerland, where I was looking for branches of my own family tree. The Swiss have a habit of burying their dead within parish churchyards in neat, tidy rows according to date of death and not necessarily in family plots. In this particular graveyard is a rather recent grave of a 34-year-old lady with only one word on its headstone: Warum? (“Why?”). Four graves beyond this lady, with the date of death being given as eight months later, is the grave of a 74-year-old man with the following answer on its headstone: Mitt Gott ist keine Warum! (“With God there is no questioning ‘Why’!”). One can only wonder what these two people were like, the circ*mstances of their deaths, and the debate that went on within the community regarding them.

Resurrection Luck?

My second favorite epitaph comes from the largest of the burial complexes chisled out of the base of Mount Carmel at Beit She’arim in southwest Galilee, Israel, where a number of the famous rabbis of talmudic lore and their families were buried. Many of the chambers and sarcophagi of Catacomb 20 are impressive, with much to be learned about the social and religious history of the Jews in this region during the second, third, and fourth centuries A.D. Inscribed in graffitilike fashion on each side of the entrance to one of the chambers, however, is a most revealing two-part Greek inscription. On the left side it reads: “Be Comforted, Holy Fathers; No One is Immortal.” On the right side: “Good Luck in Your Resurrection.” One may argue theoretically about the relation of immortality and resurrection in Jewish thought. But here is an expression right from the heart that pretty well captures the thinking of the people of that day.

What always overwhelms me, however, in viewing tombstones and their inscriptions, are humankind’s varied attempts to attain immortality. We all want to be remembered by posterity, and so our last endeavor is often to erect a stone monument to ourselves with an inscription that preserves something of the essence of our being. Or, perhaps, we try to accomplish the same end by founding a self-perpetuating institution, building a classic edifice, painting the ultimate masterpiece, or writing some memorable piece of poetry or prose. But monuments become defaced, institutions and edifices are soon altered, and most artistic and literary works have only a limited life span.

Memorials are best written in people. And somewhat paradoxically, the truly lasting memorials come when we do things for others’ best interests and not our own. Inscriptions, buildings, and great works of art leave a valuable testimony, but it is by what we have helped to build into the lives of our children, our students, our parishioners, our neighbors, and our friends that we will be remembered in days to come. This, I am sure, is the primary lesson I have learned from tromping around graveyards. It is, however, a lesson easily forgotten—one that needs constant repetition.

So I find myself often revisiting graveyards. Perhaps we’ll meet sometime.

Recovery For Acoas

Thank you for the great article on adult children of alcoholics [“Sins of the Fathers (and Mothers),” Sept. 10]. Charles Sell’s information was informative, correct, and timely. It is important to remember that not all people in ACOA programs come from families with an active alcoholic. Children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families learn that coping tool of denial so well that sometimes individuals who could be helped think the program isn’t for them because there wasn’t an active alcoholic in their family.

I believe Christ is an active participant in these programs, and the hope of recovery is available in all—in denial, out of denial, angry, sad or abandoned.

Mary A.

Redlands, Calif.

It is a shame that churches are hopping on the latest psycho-fad bandwagon promoted in Sell’s article. Labeling believers as adult children of alcoholics and funneling them into support groups directs their focus and attention to themselves and their problems. This is to be expected from the world’s self-absorbed multitudes. But Christians need to look upward, not inward. Sell is wrong when he says the greatest need is love from the church. The greatest need is love for the Lord.

Bob Franck

Colorado Springs, Colo.

Pelikan An Example

Thanks for Mark Noll’s [profile of] Jarsolav Pelikan [Sept. 10]. Those of us pursuing academic vocations in history can look to the example of Pelikan for excellence and inspiration.

Pelikan also brings up an issue that should receive more attention—namely, the lack of academic freedom that Christian scholars often experience in Christian institutions. The notion that “most churches and seminaries remain fundamentally ambiguous about scholarship” lends further credence to the historic failure of evangelicals in rising to the occasion in its pursuit of scholarly excellence and honesty. Please continue to run more of this kind of article!

David L. Russell

William Tyndale College

Farmington Hills, Mich.

I think Professor Pelikan’s remark that we are not entitled to the beliefs we cherish apart from the theologians who “worked this out” for us is for the birds. Where is the credit for the work of the Holy Spirit who guides us into all truth?

Robert E. Fishback

Tulsa, Okla.

Sometimes They Actually Sing

I don’t know about you, but one of my pet peeves is singers who talk too much. Maybe you’ve had them at your church: They show up with a van and a trailer full of electrical stuff, spend all day setting it up, kick off the concert with a rousing number complete with a light show and sometimes even a little billowing smoke, then shut everything down for what seems like a couple of hours while they “share.”

They share their dark and dreadful “before-conversion” stories (pretty neat stories, actually). They share their concern for believers in communist nations. They share their plans to visit those countries someday, if only they could raise enough money from records and tapes for sale in the back of the church (which they don’t share). They share their indignation at the way Christians shoot their wounded. They even share little winks with the junior-high girls in the front row. Why can’t they just share their music?

I used to think they did all this sharing because they only knew two or three songs. But then I bought one of their tapes and discovered at least one group knew six (not bad for an eight-song tape). And there wasn’t one word of talk on the tape!

Once we had this guy who wore a turquoise tux, sat at the piano, and occasionally ran through some chord progressions, then forgot the words—to his talk.

Maybe these singers are just slow rappers.

Anyway, I think we’ve just been too nice. If our pastor sang instead of preached on Sunday morning, we’d either hoot him out of there or not show up next Sunday. So I propose we come up with a nice, but not-too-subtle way to let those singers know we want music, not talk. Catcalls or rotten fruit might be too nasty. Raising your hand would be kinder, but it might encourage them to keep going.

I wonder what would happen if someone would just shout “Sing!” in a crowded auditorium?

EUTYCHUS

The Health-Care Dilemma

As a recently retired hospital chief executive officer, I would like to compliment you on your excellent series of articles on what I would refer to as “the American health-care dilemma” [CT Institute: “Emergency,” Sept. 10]. I agree that the American public would never tolerate the overt and covert rationing and lack of availability of new technology that exists under both systems. The solution lies in two areas.

First, we must develop a national health policy that will include a basic package of health-care benefits administered through both the public and private sectors. Second, we must move, on a phased-in basis, from our present “model” of health care, which concentrates the vast majority of its financing on “making sick people well” to one that increasingly concentrates on “keeping people well.”

Herman A. Kohlman

Otwell, Ind.

I may have missed it, but in all your articles on the church’s role in health care, I did not see one word on Scripture’s specific directive in this area: James 5:14–16 says that when someone is sick, he is to call for the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil; and in that context of prayer and confession of sin, “the Lord will raise him up.”

Carol H. Blair

Hinsdale, III.

The Christian body has this primary witness to the medical profession: any real skill and ability for healing that it has ultimately is God’s gift and intended by him to mercifully bless the suffering. Yet, the modern American medical establishment is a notorious example of an institution taking in its clients for high fees—clients who often are miserable enough already. The medical profession must be called to face up to its godlessness and its greed—ironically, therein lie both its pride and its limitations.

John Schwane

Broken Arrow, Okla.

The articles on the subject of the health-care crisis show an amazing absence of discussion of the one problem of gigantic proportions that has caused more health-care crises than anything else. You can’t kill 1.5 unborn babies every year and get away with it.

J. W. Jackson III

Clearwater, Fla.

The article by G. Timothy Johnson displays how far down the slippery slope we have slid when a Christian minister can call nourishment treatment. I think most of us feel there is justification for discontinuing or not starting medicines or medical procedures and letting “nature take its course” for terminally ill patients; but the withholding of food goes to the roots of our religion. We must face the fact that such a decision really means we are doing something to people in the name of doing it for them.

George-Ann Castel

Kalamazoo, Mich.

Dr. Johnson’s principles for guiding medical decisions (especially “quality vs. quantity of life” and “limits on medical tech”) made so much sense to me. On the other hand, his mention of not rescuing preemies with a poor prognosis reminded me how wrong we can be in assuming a case is hopeless.

Four years ago my amniotic sac ruptured and never resealed. I was encouraged to abort and continually reminded of the birth defects the child would probably have if he survived. At 30 weeks his sudden delivery and underdeveloped lungs prompted doctors to tell me he had little chance to survive. Over the succeeding four days I watched my gracious Lord perform a miracle. Seven weeks later, thanks to God and an excellent medical staff, I took Joel home. Today he’s a normal, healthy boy.

Joy Berends

Galveston, Tex.

Caring About Robin

Ronald Enroth would have your readers believe that the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) does not care about Robin George and her mother (Speaking Out, Sept. 10). He is wrong. We care deeply. (Incidently, the California appellate court flatly rejected Robin’s claims that she was kidnaped, brainwashed, and falsely imprisoned, observing that she was an intelligent, mature 15-year-old when she ran away to join the International Society of Krishna Consciousness [ISKCON] and was free to leave at any time.)

Enroth has also accused us of giving “indirect aid and comfort to enemies of the gospel” because we filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court. Although we respect his right to such an opinion, we believe a dispassionate, objective examination of the facts will reveal he is wrong. NAE filed a friend of the court, not friend of ISKCON, brief.

He fails to acknowledge the critical religious-liberty issue associated with this case. If the courts can act against unpopular religions in ways that attack religious freedom and we remain silent, the time will come when those devastating precedents will be used to deprive us of our religious freedom.

The importance of our action was underscored recently by Michael J. Woodruff, past executive director of the Christian Legal Society, who wrote: “The George case does raise an important and difficult legal issue about punitive damages. I respect NAE for joining with others and providing the court with the benefit of an amicus argument that considers this question from the broader perspective of the religious community.”

NAE will not stand idly by while religious freedom erodes. Our freedom to spread the gospel is at stake.

Billy A. Melvin, Executive Director

National Association of Evangelicals

Carol Stream, III.

Cheers to Ron Enroth for pointing out the folly of legitimate Christian organizations that are so concerned about “free exercise of religion” that they file friends of the court briefs in support of destructive cults.

Legitimate faith will thrive with or without the help of the Supreme Court. But we end up aiding the enemy when Christian leaders forget where our security lies and seek religious liberty at the expense of truth and sound doctrine. They should be ashamed for being so narrowly focused and short-sighted.

Jim Heugel, Campus Pastor

University Christian Fellowship

Seattle, Wash.

SPEAKING OUT

Real Patriots Learn Real History

American conservatives, including religious conservatives, frequently argue that our students need to know more about our nation’s heritage, that young people need to be better schooled in the stories that make Americans proud. If students learn such pride in their country, the argument runs, they will better withstand the corrosive influences of the radical partisans or media celebrities who threaten traditional values.

There is some truth in such arguments, and if the patriotic impulse leads to greater emphasis on American history, I can only applaud. Young people need to know about those facets of the American experience that make us all grateful to live in the U.S.

But that is not enough. Students also need to know enough about our failures and dark moments. They need a balanced picture to help them avoid the kind of nationalistic arrogance that forgets that ultimate loyalty belongs to God, not the state.

The Hebrew prophets, we should remember, did not flinch from pointing out Israel’s sins, even when they spoke of God’s great works on Israel’s behalf. And biblical accounts such as 1 and 2 Chronicles are replete with the shortcomings of Israel’s leaders, not just the triumphs. As Christians, we should adopt the same spirit in evaluating our own country’s historical experience.

On the one hand, then, students certainly should know about our Constitution—the source of our democratic freedoms. They should hear about the fortitude of our pioneers, about the steadiness and continuing democratic commitment of our people to live during the Great Depression. They should know of the courage of those who endured the horrors of wars they did not start, and about the flowering of the democratic spirit as women and blacks finally won equal standing before the law. We should inform them that we devised and carried out the Marshall Plan, promoted the Peace Corps, and voluntarily yielded control over the Panama Canal to a tiny nation that lacked the military power to press its claim of ownership. And we have helped starving people around the world when the need arose. The stories of Roger Williams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Jane Addams, Louis Brandeis, Will Rogers, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and a host of others should also not be forgotten.

But to keep things in balance, students need to know about our lamentable treatment of Native Americans, our equally disgraceful treatment of blacks, our frequent indifference to environmental hazards, the shame of the Nisei concentration camps during World War II, the scandals of the Grant, Harding, and Nixon administrations, and the support Sen. Joseph McCarthy got from those who should have known better. And while America entered Vietnam for honorable reasons, continuing the war when its folly became apparent, and devastating that hapless land with bombs and shell fire, was hardly America’s finest hour. The cowardice of presidents and Congresses alike when confronting clamorous and selfish special-interest groups can hardly be a source of satisfaction. (Alas, we the people punish them if they behave otherwise.)

Such a balanced view will help our children realize that America’s historical experiences contain the same mixture of good and bad as do our personal lives—with much to respect and much to regret. And while we claim that the U.S. is one nation under God, it is not the only nation under God, and we do our students no favor by implying otherwise. Whatever our appreciation for our country, no nation—our own included—is worthy of ultimate loyalty. That allegiance is to be given to God, who transcends all boundaries of nation, race, and culture.

By Reo M. Christenson, adjunct professor of political science at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

Speaking Out offers responsible Christians a forum for their views on contemporary issues. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Reach Neighbors, Not The Unborn!

In response to your article “Time to Face the Consequences” [News, Sept. 10], the Scriptures do not mandate “civil disobedience,” but do mandate that we be obedient to servanthood—that is, to help the needy, the sick, the homeless, the lost, and the brokenhearted—first, within the church, and second, outside of the church.

I am against abortion, but abortion is a moral, not a legal matter. We waste much of God’s time and money fighting legal battles on this and other issues when, in fact, the only way to change the abortion issue is to change the heart of the individual. This will not be accomplished in the courts. It seems we are more concerned with trying to save a child than we are trying to save our neighbors.

John Rhinehart

Matthews, N.C.

Groups like Operation Rescue should look beyond the “killing mentality” they perpetuate as the only reason women have abortions. I have heard many individuals ask those in the prolife movement why they don’t do something about the children who are living and suffering from poverty, abuse (physical and mental), and lack of proper medical attention.

Surely, out of all the thousands who protest against abortion, a couple hundred would find the desire to really “save a child.”

Robert Durler

Las Vegas, Nev.

Forget The Name Calling

Having just read your interview with Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry [Sept. 10], as well as some literature from the Christian Defense Coalition, I am very disturbed by their apparent lack of compassion for their “enemies” in the judicial system. While I agree that Christian rescuers have received outrageously severe sentences, Terry’s name calling will only serve to further alienate those who desperately need to hear Christ’s message of love for this dying world.

Cindy Osborne

Santa Cruz, Calif.

Dropped From The Canon?

I can only imagine how tough it is to translate the Bible into the language of the Navajo Indians [North American Scene, Sept. 10]. But I would think that counting the number of books in the New Testament is much easier. My several copies all have 27 books—have I added one, or have your editors eliminated one?

Rev. Robert R. Collins

First Presbyterian Church

Mexico, Mo.

Oops!—Eds.

Fight The Good Fight

I greatly agree with the editorial by John Stapert [Sept. 10] regarding the proposed postal-rate increases. It is ridiculous that nonprofit publications must bear the brunt of this increase, while trash mail reaps the benefits. I truly hope the Postal Rate Commission will reconsider. I fear, however, that our efforts may be in vain. But I do feel it is necessary to fight, regardless of the outcome. Enclosed you will find a copy of a letter I wrote the Postal Rate Commission as suggested by Stapert.

Bonnie Robbins

Greensburg, Ind.

Thanks to many readers who have written the Postal Rate Commission.—Eds.

At CTi’s biennial corporate roast, managing editor Lyn Cryderman was nominated for the 1990 “I Wish I Were Dan Rather Award.”

Like CBS’s intrepid evening-news anchor, Lyn likes to visit the embattled scenes where the news is made. Last year the blond Lyn traveled, incognito and illegally, into a banned Palestinian village in Israel. Before that, he felt the effects of pepper gas at a student demonstration in South Korea. This year, he braved bullets to visit Christians in bombed-out Beirut.

Lyn’s report begins on page 41. Several of his discoveries did not find their way into his account. For example, most middle-class Lebanese families have two cars—a shiny, late model that sits unused most of the time in an underground garage, and a rusty, scarred “shrapnel special” to drive whenever the bullets are flying.

He also found Lebanese Christians discussing the eternal destiny of faithful Muslims. This concern does not proceed from mushy theology or liberalism. It sprouts naturally in the soil of experience in a country where Christian betrays Christian and where many Christians have learned they can count on certain reliable Muslim friends.

Although Lyn came bumper-to-barrel with a tank of unknown loyalties, he didn’t win the “I Wish I Were Dan Rather Award.” That prize was awarded instead to assistant editor Timothy Jones for braving hordes of pacifists to attend the Mennonite World Conference in Winnipeg.

Once I filled this entire column with questions that came to mind as I read Walker Percy’s book The Message in the Bottle. I received more mail from that column than from any other, including at least three letters responding to my question, “Why don’t more Christians read Walker Percy?”

“We’ve tried,” said these readers. “His novels are too hard to understand. What’s he trying to say, anyhow?” Walker Percy died in May of this year, two weeks shy of his seventy-fourth birthday. His passing seems a good time to try to answer their question.

Originally Percy had trained as a medical doctor, but during his residency he contracted tuberculosis, probably as a result of performing autopsies on derelicts. The year was 1941, and as Percy’s friends were enlisting for the war in Europe, he was confined to a sanitarium in Lake Saranac, New York.

Percy used his five years of recuperation to read and reflect on the state of the world. How was it that Germany, the epitome of advanced Western civilization, was suddenly acting like a barbarian tribe? Percy read philosophy, especially the modern existentialists, but found the sanest explanations in Søren Kierkegaard, the melancholy Dane who had first protested German rationalism.

Kierkegaard had said, “Hegel told everything about the world except one thing: what it is to be a man and to live and die.” Percy sensed that while the scientific method had superbly analyzed humanity as an organism in an environment, in the process it had lost sight of us as selves in a world. Nietzsche and then Hitler had simply taken the scientific method to its logical conclusion: If humanity merely represents another gene pool, how can we claim such unique properties as reason, freedom, “inalienable rights,” and human dignity? What allows us to grant intrinsic worth to any one individual?

The war ended, and America settled into the comfortable suburban consumerism of the Eisenhower era. Walker Percy married, converted to Catholicism, and began to raise a family. Yet still he fretted over the basic question, “What is a human being?” He never did get around to practicing medicine.

Over the next decade, Percy wrote philosophical essays on the question of meaning (many have been collected in The Message in the Bottle). But soon Percy searched for a way to express his ideas to a wider audience. And that’s when he decided to write novels.

The Moviegoer, written for a $300 advance when Percy was 45, attracted a few favorable reviews but scant attention until it was awarded the National Book Award for 1961, beating out Heller’s Catch-22 and Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Suddenly the literati had to take note of this “failed doctor” (his term).

Percy wrote slowly, producing six novels in 26 years. Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome tell the story of psychiatrist Tom More; and The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming share the main character Will Barrett. Some have termed the novels apocalyptic, and indeed the titles themselves betray a hint of decline and doom. “Malaise” is a more accurate characterization, for Percy’s protagonist is typically a troubled, rootless wanderer. The reader is never sure how reliable, how sane each character is.

Autobiographical elements turn up, especially in the Will Barrett stories. Percy grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in a new home on the edge of a golf course, a setting not unlike Barrett’s. More poignantly, Barrett is haunted by his father’s suicide—Percy was 11 when his father killed himself.

A Diagnostician Of The Soul

It would be a travesty to view Percy’s fiction as a form of propaganda, an Ayn Rand-like device to communicate personal philosophy. Judged by rigorous literary standards, the novels earned for him a place in the front rank of American writers. On the other hand, Percy himself described his fiction as diagnostic. Something is wrong with society, he said, and one of the novelist’s tasks is to isolate the bacillus and give the sickness a name.

Percy risked his literary reputation by continuing to crank out essays spelling out his diagnosis. In the breezy and funny Lost in the Cosmos, he took on scientism, soap operas, genetic manipulation, Phil Donahue, and p*rnography. The book playfully promises to reveal, among other things, “how you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians.” To Percy, modern man resembles a castaway on a desert island who tries to interpret the message in a bottle washed onshore—or a prisoner in an isolation cell straining to hear a code tapped out on the wall. Percy believed he had heard those messages, and they were the echoes of orthodox Christianity.

Percy saw grave danger in a modern world that has made technocrats and scientists lord and sovereign. We are told that human problems are being solved, but signs of despair and alienation in the young and in the wealthy suburbanites prove otherwise. In such a world, the artist must function like a canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air. Walker Percy had caught a whiff of something lethal.

Although trained as a scientist, Percy nevertheless viewed with suspicion the promise of modern technology: “If the first great intellectual discovery of my life was the beauty of the scientific method, surely the second was the discovery of the singular predicament of man in the very world which has been transformed by this science.”

Percy was well aware of the challenge he faced in presenting an alternative: “The Christian novelist nowadays is like a man who has found a treasure hidden in the attic of an old house, but he is writing for people who have moved out to the suburbs and who are bloody sick of the old house and everything in it.”

Why read Walker Percy? The answer to that question is the same as the answer to this one: Why understand the twentieth century? Even Percy’s harshest critics had to acknowledge his skill as diagnostician, although they deplored his old-fashioned prescription. Percy had a comment on that, too. He wondered aloud, “whether, in fact, the preposterousness of Judaeo-Christianity is not in fact an index of the preposterousness of the age.”

The Gospel According To Updike Et Al.

Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament, edited by Alfred Corn (Viking, 361 pp.; $19.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Philip Yancey.

In this day of Christian bookstores, Christian school systems, Christian radio stations, Christian publishers, and even Christian Yellow Pages, it is tempting to conclude that America is polarizing into two parallel civilizations. Do any Christians read Scott Turow, let alone Saul Bellow or Tom Wolfe? Do any ordinary suburban pagans read the megasellers by Swindoll and Dobson? For that matter, do any nonevangelicals ever read the Bible?

That last question bothered poet and critic Alfred Corn. He worried that fundamentalists, who claim to read the Bible all the time, act as if they don’t read it enough; meanwhile, the general public grows increasingly ignorant about the book that serves as “the cornerstone of our customs, our laws, our literature and art, our family structure, and our notions of romantic love.”

Following the successful model of the book Congregation, in which various Jewish writers commented on each book of the Old Testament, Corn solicited short essays on New Testament books from 23 distinguished American writers. Most of them do not bow to the scriptural authority claimed by the New Testament, but rather circle around it, commenting on the texts with familiarity, respect, and even reverence.

Two of the pairings are simply travesties. Novelist David Plante devoted his entire essay on Romans to reliving the repressed sexuality of his Catholic childhood. As a persecuted minority, hom*osexuals may look with disfavor on Paul’s pronouncements in chapter 1—but, really, is that the only issue worthy of comment in Paul’s masterful treatise of theology? In another mismatch, one of the two Jewish writers (Anthony Hecht) drew the contentious Letter to the Galatians, with a predictably defensive response.

Other assignments were strokes of genius. Who better to comment on 1 Corinthians than Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian minister whose novels are populated by precisely the kind of ornery lechers who stirred up the church in Corinth? As for Revelation, why not offer it to John Hersey, a missionary kid who made his reputation writing about Hiroshima, our century’s dress rehearsal for the Apocalypse? (That gambit failed: Hersey has no stomach for Revelation and wishes it had flunked the test of canonicity.)

The success of individual essays in this book depends on the delicate blending of personal autobiography with enlightening commentary on the biblical book. As might be expected, the novelists and poets succeed best with the former. Essays such as those by Rita Dove, Annie Dillard, John Updike, Alfred Corn, Michael Malone, and Marina Warner poignantly reveal moments of religious epiphany. Many contributors felt transcendental longing as children; many of them still feel it.

One surprise, for me, was that traditional obstacles to belief do not seem to deter these writers. No one brought up the problem of pain. Nor did supernaturalism pose any great barrier. One gets the impression that even such literary luminaries as Mary Gordon, Amy Clampitt, and Marilynne Robinson would have little hesitation signing on to the Nicene Creed.

On the other hand, perceived New Testament prejudice against women and against Jews constitutes a major problem. In general, these authors admire Jesus, but find Paul much harder to swallow. Specific doctrines like Hell or the Second Coming may cause some consternation, but not nearly as much as the question that ought to concern all of us: Why doesn’t the church more closely match the ideals the New Testament sets forth? More bluntly: Why don’t Christians look more like Christ?

Even Merer Christianity

No book by such a menagerie of writers can present anything resembling a coherent approach to the New Testament. It is not meant to. For the unbeliever, or biblical novice, Incarnation offers a kaleidoscopic glimpse of sacred writings by those friendly toward, but not necessarily committed to, faith. For the Christian more accustomed to reading biblical commentary by John Stott or William Barclay, it offers a series of small, fine observations on “even merer Christianity” from poets and novelists who excel at noticing what may elude the rest of us. Consider the following sampling:

John Updike on Jesus: “He is the new wine, and of all the Gospel writers Matthew takes the most trouble to decant him from the old skin.”

Mary Gordon on the Gadarene devils: “Better to be embodied in a pig than to be bodiless.”

Reynolds Price on the Gospel of John: “In all the mountain ranges of commentary—the all but endless attempts to explain John’s dislocations, his stops and jolting starts, his glaring clarities and sudden fogs—I have never met with an intelligent attempt to see it as an old man’s book. Yet an arresting case can be made for its being the product of a large but aging mind, a mind at hurried final work on the scenes and words of its distant youth—now precise and lucid, now vague and elliptical, all its procedures screened through the thought of intervening years.”

Frederick Buechner on Corinth: “They were in fact Christ’s body, as Paul wrote to them here in one of his most enduring metaphors—Christ’s eyes, ears, hands—but the way they were carrying on, that could only leave Christ bloodshot, ass-eared, all thumbs, to carry on God’s work in a fallen world.”

Rita Dove on the Damascus Road conversion: “Saul was terrified because the eyes that had studied the Law and looked calmly on at the slaying of another man had for the first time failed their owner.”

Michael Malone on James: “James takes two of these witnesses—Abraham, the most revered of Hebrew patriarchs, and Rahab, a Gentile, a woman, a harlot—two extremes, as if to say again there can be no respect of persons—to show how faith is completed by works.”

Marilynne Robinson on the church: “It is as true of Christendom as of humankind that its fall came so briskly on the heels of its creation as to make the two events seem like one.”

And, finally, Larry Woiwode on inspiration: “For me, a writer, aware of how much more complex each story or book grows with each sentence added, it was the power of these patterns and structure in Scripture, and their ability to interlock with one another through as many levels as I could hold in my mind, that convinced me that the Bible couldn’t possibly be the creation of a man, or any number of men, and certainly not the product of separate men divided by centuries. It was of another world: supernatural.”

Less Than Certain

The Sunnier Side of Doubt, by Alister E. McGrath (Zondervan, 160 pp.; $7.95, paper). Reviewed by Michael G. Maudlin.

By the look of things, Alister McGrath is a hyperactive scholar. Not only does he have a degree in theology, he has a doctorate in molecular biology as well. Of the dozen or so books he has in print, some should be clearly stamped “For Scholars Only,” while some deal with basic issues of the Christian faith for new or young Christians, with the rest falling somewhere between these poles. To top it all off, he teaches at Oxford and has yet to hit the ripe old age of 40.

This present volume is one of his popular treatments, and the subject is doubt. After defining the genus, he tackles all the species: Doubts about the gospel (e.g., “The gospel seems to have little effect on my friends”), about yourself (e.g., “I’m not sure I’m a Christian”), about Jesus (e.g., “Did Christians get Jesus wrong?”), and about God (e.g., “Is God really there?”). In all these areas, the advice is wise, clear, balanced, and biblical.

One problem in having an academician handle the question of doubt is that you receive an academic answer. While the treatment is scrupulously reasoned, some of the existential dimensions of the issue are either ignored or dismissed. For instance, the reader is told repeatedly not to trust emotions, as if the feelings Christians experience during worship or prayer contribute nothing to the subject. Nevertheless, if someone is struggling with doubts, no matter what species, The Sunnier Side of Doubt is an excellent first resource to turn to.

Dusting Off The Old Hymnal

The Worshiping Church, edited by Donald P. Hustad (Hope, 845 selections; $9.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Carol R. Thiessen.

Every so often a hymnal appears that breaks fresh ground in its appeal both to where the singing church has been and where it appears to be going. Hope Publishing Company’s 1954 Worship and Service Hymnal was such a book as it found its way into thousands of churches and worship assemblies. Hope is gambling that its latest endeavor will follow the same pattern.

Unveiled at a conference on worship last July, The Worshiping Church, with its 845 selections, ventures into territory unfamiliar to many traditional evangelical congregations, at the same time acknowledging both past and present preferences. Editor Donald P. Hustad, senior professor of music at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, headed a committee of 26 that labored for six years on the first completely retooled hymnal in Hope’s long history of music publishing.

Believing evangelicals are on the verge of renewal in their worship practices, Hustad has characterized the compilation as offering congregations a “broad spectrum of musical expression that is comparable to that of the first-century church, which sang ‘psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.’” A major section of the new book is devoted to “Psalms and Canticles,” and many other selections are paraphrases of Scripture.

The new book is carefully organized. The major categories (God, God’s Word, God’s World, God’s People) are broken into subdivisions (under “God,” for example, one section is devoted to each member of the Trinity), and each subdivision is divided further into specific categories. Responsive readings, poetry, prayers, and responses have all been moved from the back of the book and interspersed among the hymns. Service planners will thus find it relatively easy to locate a variety of worship elements on particular or related themes. (Under “God in Society,” for example, is a section on “Art, Science, Education,” which includes, among other things, a prayer for the dedication of a new organ or other instrument.)

Those worship elements also provide much more congregational involvement than in previous Hope hymnals. Added to traditional responsive readings are participative prayers, poetry—even refrains to be sung as responses. (One example is a phrase out of the spiritual “Yes, He Did” that is matched with the first 11 verses of Psalm 40.) There is also a wealth of the popular new praise and worship material already being sung in countless churches, and descants have been added to a number of familiar hymns providing the opportunity to give a lift to a final stanza. Numerous songs that can be sung as rounds are also included.

Some old hymn tunes have been revived with new texts, as with Timothy Dudley-Smith’s Easter text set to a 1623 Orlando Gibbons melody (“All Shall Be Well”). Conversely, some older texts appear with new, usually more appropriate, settings; “I Will Sing the Wondrous Story” is now set to a 1988 arrangement of the tune Cecelia, for example.

Many churchgoers are surprised to discover a wealth of new hymnody has been developed over the past 20 or so years. Textually and musically, scores of these are on a par with the well-known and oft-sung classical hymns we have known from childhood. Many of them that appear in The Worshiping Church are deserving of an equal place in history. Congregations unwilling to try new hymns will be the poorer for not discovering the richness of this new material. British writers such as Brian Wren and Bishop Dudley-Smith, Canadian Margaret Clarkson, and Americans Brian Jeffrey Leach and Jane Parker Huber are but a few among those whose new hymns reveal biblical truth in contemporary language and settings. Even jazz musician Dave Brubeck has an entry, “God’s Love Made Visible,” included in the section on Christ’s birth, and complete with scoring for rhythm (claves and maracas). And there is an eminently singable new Gloria Patri by John F. Erickson.

No hymnal, of course, is perfect. The type in this one seems a bit crowded when compared with its predecessor, Hymns for the Living Church, and “amens” are no longer optional: they’re gone. Retaining the rich theology of the second verse of Adeste Fideles—“O Come, All Ye Faithful”—which most translators have related to the Nicene Creed, and missing from most evangelical hymnals—is commendable, but one wishes the language hadn’t been tampered with. (Other choices were surely made on the basis of theology: excluding the fourth verse of “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” will now prevent unthinking congregations from extolling the universalism implicit in the idea of the “Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man” characterized by that verse—which most evangelicals would deny they believed.)

Also, though the addition of many hymn texts appearing as poetry is clearly a plus, referencing tunes in a different location will surely make them little used for singing.

“Short services”—related music and Scripture for use as worship units—are weaker here than in Word’s Hymnal for Worship and Celebration, and less clearly laid out. An accompanist’s book (to be published later) that will add the musical bridges and key-change modulations will help. Books for brass accompaniment and handbells are also planned, but will disappoint music directors who want full orchestra parts. Also planned is a worship leader’s book, which will give aids to worship and background on particular hymns.

While in some ways this hymnal is for the adventuresome, Hustad’s committee did not slight the songs that always appear on lists of “all-time favorites”—songs and hymns whose omission would probably mean instant rejection of the book by congregations unwilling to give up the sloppy theology, sentimentality, and just plain poor texts and tunes they grew up with and to which they are emotionally attached.

Though the editors did neutralize sexist language in places where it could be done easily, they are to be commended for not perpetuating some of the silliness that a few newer hymnals have introduced. “Good Christian souls, rejoice” rolls off the tongue every bit as easily as “Good Christian men, rejoice,” but most congregations would have trouble singing Child in reference to Jesus rather than Son as some hymns have lately been recast. Also to its credit, Hustad’s committee opted to drop capitalization of words that begin a second phrase of a line, which may help congregations sing the sense of a line and not interrupt its thought.

In all, The Worshiping Church is a fine book and deserves wide usage. It can make a great contribution to congregations willing to be lured away from a more limited repertoire and challenged to make many elements of their worship more meaningfully God-directed.

Christian groups and individuals have virtually unanimously opposed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But some have now begun to take issue with specific aspects of U.S. policy in the region.

A coalition of 15 national church organizations recently criticized the inclusion of food and medicine in the economic embargo of Iraq. It calls for distinguishing between the Iraqi regime and Iraqi citizens. In a letter to U.S. senators, the coalition stated that if people are allowed to starve, the U.S. as well as Hussein, “would stand accused of using civilians as pawns.”

Two Washington, D.C.-based Southern Baptist groups have issued separate appeals to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney protesting a Defense Department policy prohibiting the mailing of Bibles and other devotional literature to military personnel in the Middle East. The purpose of the policy is to avoid offending Muslim sensitivities in Saudi Arabia, where the practice of any faith other than Islam is illegal.

Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs executive director James Dunn wrote, “The fact that our service personnel are in an area of the world not protected by the free exercise rights in our constitution does not mean that they have lost their religious freedom.” In a similar letter, Christian Life Commission (CLC) executive director Richard Land stated, “Surely our grateful hosts in the Persian Gulf would accede to a reasonable accommodation of fundamental religious freedom for U.S. service members.”

Others have expressed concerns that go more to the heart of the U.S. presence in the region. The 7.8 million-member National Baptist Convention U.S.A. adopted a resolution supporting President Bush’s dispatch of troops to the Persian Gulf. But the resolution adds that “the U.S. must be careful not to become allies with nations that may prove to be an embarrassment to our moral leadership upon being found guilty of violations of human rights in their own back yard.”

In a similar vein, Gabriel Habib, general secretary of the Cyprus-based Middle East Council of Churches, issued a statement calling for the rejection of “double standards and self-centered Western policies in the region.” Such statements imply that the U.S. is not so intent on seeing international justice done when its economic interests either are not at stake or would not suffer.

Robert Douglas of the Altadena, California-based Zwemer Institute, believes the crisis has been oversimplified. He observed that Iraq, Kuwait, and other Arab nations became nations “by the stroke of European pens.”

Douglas also noted that for generations some Arab leaders have dreamed of a united Arab nation. Among the entities that have stressed this is the Baath (Awakening) political party, which exists in several Arab nations and is currently the ruling party in Iraq. Without justifying Hussein’s actions, Douglas noted that Kuwait had been hurting Iraq economically by not staying within the oil-production quotas established by OPEC.

According to Douglas, the U.S. is at best a temporary ally of many Arabs. Noting suspicion of Western motives and influence throughout the region, Douglas said, “Every Arab country has a segment of its population ready to destabilize any ruler who seems to allow Western interests to take precedence over Arab/Islamic interests.”

Douglas suggested the current crisis will mean that American Christians working in the Middle East may have a tough time overcoming the negative effects of the message sent by U.S. military intervention in the region.