Page 5807 – Christianity Today (2024)

Eight years ago the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association called a Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission. The EFMA and the IFMA have as members most of the faith mission boards and agencies and the smaller evangelical denominations in the United States. This Wheaton (Illinois) congress was United States oriented, and was limited in the sense that the large denominations and their churches on the mission fields were not represented. Yet the gathering was significant, its results—including the “Wheaton Declaration”—encouraging.

Later that same year, 1966, the World Congress on Evangelism drew eleven hundred persons from some one hundred countries to Berlin. In a real sense the Lausanne congress is a followup of Berlin. But Berlin dealt quite specifically with evangelism per se, especially the theology of evangelism, and was not in a technical sense a missions-oriented gathering. It did not concern itself chiefly with the fulfillment of the missionary mandate throughout the whole world.

Now the focus shifts to Lausanne, Switzerland, for the Congress on World Evangelization (see the article “Lausanne May Be a Bomb,” page 12), to convene in July. Participants will come from almost every church group and nation; twenty-seven hundred have been invited, from more than a hundred and fifty countries. They will be evangelical in their theology, clear in their conception of the mission of the Church, and committed to finishing the task of world evangelization in this century.

One critic has called the Lausanne congress a “jet age junket,” and has questioned whether such a gathering merits the expenditure of large sums of money and whether the results will be worthwhile. No one can guarantee in advance what the results of the congress will be, of course. But one thing is certain: if there were no congress there would be no results at all. Although no one can be sure that the congress will have the results desired for it, not holding it would deny to the Church a great potential boost toward its God-given goal of world evangelization.

Without question the congress is meeting at what from the economic standpoint appears to be a bad time. However, Third World participants, who will make up a large proportion of the congress, would need financial help to attend no matter when the congress was held. The money they need could be obtained simply and easily if each of 2,000 churches in the United States would pay the costs for one participant. This would be a splendid investment in worldwide missionary outreach.

There are good reasons to hold this congress and to do so at this time. The Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches met in Bangkok at the end of 1972, and from the evangelical perspective this meeting was a disaster. Salvation was defined as “a personal commitment to God’s liberating struggle.” The emphasis was on changing economic, political, and social structures, by revolution if necessary. Lausanne ’74 is needed to reaffirm the vertical dimension of man’s relationship to God, the divine command to preach the Gospel to all men, and the need for personal conversion. What happened at Bangkok makes Lausanne necessary (though Lausanne was planned before the Bangkok meeting and before it was known what Bangkok would say).

Holding the Congress on World Evangelization this year is also important because it will be followed in 1975 by the World Council’s Fifth Assembly, to take place in Indonesia. Evangelicals will join in the fervent hope that the conciliar movement will pay serious attention to what comes out of Lausanne and that it will take steps to recover in principle and in practice the historic mission of the Church. Indeed, the prospect of Lausanne may have had some influence on a statement from the recent Basel meeting of twenty-five members of the WCC’s evangelism and mission commission. This statement said the commission’s purpose is to assist “the Christian community in the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, by word and deed, to the whole world to the end that all may believe in him and be saved.” This has a far different ring from that heard at Bangkok a year ago. We welcome the statement and hope that it signifies a change in practice. If Lausanne were to do nothing more than to help to bring the World Council back to the earlier commitment of the International Missionary Council and even to some of the statements from the WCC’s own early years, it would be a tremendous success.

Every evangelical should be aware of Lausanne and should get behind it in whatever way he can. Each day of the congress a leader from a different land will preside over the session. Dr. Oswald Hoffmann of “The Lutheran Hour,” an enthusiastic backer of the congress, will be the leader from the United States who fulfills this function. Dr. Billy Graham, whose vision led him to spearhead the effort in its formative stages, is honorary chairman of the congress.

W. Maxey Jarman is chairman of a large committee set up to assist invited persons who must have financial help in order to attend. Churches and individuals who would like to contribute to the congress for this purpose can address him at 4410 Gerald Place, Nashville, Tennessee 37205.

Mission Retrenchment

In our view, the primary mission of the Church is the evangelization of the world. With this in mind we publish graphs (A and B) that compare the number of missionaries sent out by North American agencies in 1958 with the number sent in 1973. The statistics are from reports of the Missionary Research Library. The 1958 report was a mimeographed in-house production; the 1973 report was prepared by MARC in Monrovia, California, for the MRL.

The statistics reveal a shocking decline of missionary personnel in the churches holding membership in the National Council of Churches. Other groups, many of them with fewer members and less money, show increases. Underlying the decline in outreach among NCC churches is liberal theology with its depreciation of Scripture and its view that evangelism consists in combatting injustice by changing political, economic, and social structures.

The personnel figures must be interpreted in the light of the population graph (C), which reveals a greater need for evangelistic outreach today than at any time in the history of mankind. The ecumenically related churches, on the whole, are doing less than they were doing a decade and a half ago. But even the groups that are expanding or holding their own are not doing enough in view of the spiritual needs of the world.

Not For Girls Only

Put it down that Camp Fire Girls is not among the many groups in our pluralistic society retreating from religion. Here is one organization that refuses to be intimidated by the specter of religious controversy. New program materials, while very sensitive to the risk of offense, nonetheless emphasize the claim that religious loyalties may properly have upon every aspect of our lives. The trend is to say that there is no such thing as true religion so why bring it up? But we know better, whether we agree or not on what constitutes truth.

To Each His Own?

When challenged about allowing the Jesuit order to survive in Protestant Prussia when it had been suppressed by the Pope throughout Catholic Europe, King Frederic the Great reportedly replied, “In my Prussia anyone can go to hell any way he likes.” But what seemed right to a Prussian autocrat of the Enlightenment era and what is appropriate for a Christian institution may well not be the same.

Recently, American University of Washington, D. C., appointed a part-time Buddhist chaplain to its student ministry. The move, according to a member of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, is an attempt to minister to the religious needs of both foreign students and the increasing number of American students who are interested in the major non-Western religions. Without approving the United Methodist university’s action in supporting a platform for non-Christian religious preaching and teaching, we would observe that if the presence of an increasing number of interested students is the criterion, then there are quite a few schools that ought to start hiring evangelical ministers as chaplains.

Test Of A Prophet

Periodically in the history of the Church, during times of national and international stress, there has been a resurgence of predictive prophecy. This has occurred in the stressful period in which we now find ourselves. Witness, for example, the phenomenal sale of Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth. Witness also the predictive disclosures of well-known Pentecostal leader David Wilkerson, who first came to national attention through the events reported in The Cross and the Switchblade.

Last August Wilkerson announced he had a vision of “unbelievable disasters … roaring down upon us” with the “upraised fist of God … ready to destroy pride and to condemn the self-proclaimed greatness of mankind.” Wilkerson foresees “five terrible calamities” that will take place during this generation: (1) economic recession; (2) earthquakes and famines; (3) a flood of filth (p*rnography); (4) hatred of parents by youth; (5) a period of persecution of Christians, which will include the rejection of Catholic charismatics by the Pope and church leaders.

The first four parts of the vision have happened—and are happening in different parts of the world all the time. The last one has not happened, and this is the one that has drawn fire. Another well-known Pentecostal leader, David DuPlessis, discountenances the prediction that the Pope will oppose and persecute Catholic charismatics. Ralph Martin, a leading Catholic charismatic, thinks Wilkerson’s promotion of his vision borders on sensationalism.

We surely must acknowledge that God has given prophetic visions of the future to his servants in past ages. It would be quite hardheaded to declare that he cannot or will not do anything like that today. But how are we to know whether Wilkerson’s vision or anybody else’s is true or false?

Scripture gives us a simple test for true and false prophets. What the prophet prophesies must take place—not some of it, but all of it. “And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?’ … if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you need not be afraid of him” (Deut. 18:21, 22).

Wilkerson has made known his prediction; the days ahead will either confirm or deny it. We need not decide now whether to believe it or not. While we wait for the verdict of time we can do nothing about the vision and its possible fulfillment. But we can do something about ordering our lives according to Scripture and about carrying out God’s orders to preach the Gospel to every creature.

Belated Regrets

From time to time we have called attention to the reluctance of the World Council of Churches to speak prophetically about the grave limitations on human freedom in the Soviet Union. We have noted particularly its failure to affirm support of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet writer.

After his exile the Ecumenical Press Service released a statement by an unnamed(!) WCC spokesman regarding Solzhenitsyn. We deeply regret that, in a grand gesture of too little and too late, the best this anonymous spokesman could do was to “deeply regret” what has happened to Solzhenitsyn. The statement then went on to lambast other countries around the world where “many thousands of people … are either in prison or being tortured or fleeing for their lives because of their expressed conviction on the right of human beings to life, liberty and justice.” The statement concluded by saying, “We hope the concern shown for Solzhenitsyn will be matched by vigorous action on behalf of those many others who are still suffering in detention throughout the world.”

We hope, as the World Council spokesman does, that there will be both concern and action for all who “are suffering in detention.” The World Council has consistently targeted right-wing dictatorships—in Africa and South America, for example. But it has failed to condemn with equal forcefulness the brutal incarceration in Siberian labor camps and in mental hospitals of tens of thousands of Soviet citizens—not to mention the plight of the Soviet Jews, or the absence of even ordinary religious freedom for those Baptist believers who are not, at this time, in labor camps.

The World Council recently publicized the substantial monetary grants it has made to dissident groups around the world. But there have been no announced grants to Soviet dissidents who suffer from the worst and most vicious forms of deprivation, persecution, and brutal physical mistreatment.

We urge the World Council to abandon its policy of selective indignation. We hope for and would publicize widely a statement in which the WCC speaks as directly and vigorously about the deprivation of freedom in the Soviet Union as it spoke about—for example—the United States’ involvement in Viet Nam. And if the WCC wishes to match concern with action, let it invite Solzhenitsyn to address its forthcoming consultation on human rights.

Have You Learned The Secret?

The energy crisis has come crashing upon us in ways we scarcely expected. Inflation continues on the rampage. Recession is at least hovering nearby, and has actually descended upon thousands who find themselves newly unemployed. Christians now more than ever need to heed the testimony and counsel of the Apostle Paul, who told the Philippians: “Not that I complain of want; for I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circ*mstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want” (4:11, 12).

We need not only to memorize these verses but to absorb them into our attitude. It is all too easy to go along with the whining, complaining spirit that is common these days. Of course, murmuring about circ*mstances is nothing new. Earlier in the same letter the first specific item that Paul mentions after the general challenge to show forth salvation is: “Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may … shine as lights in the world” (2:14, 15).

Paul said he had learned the secret of contentment, and this secret was not to call upon God to smooth out every rough path (or, in our terms, to keep one’s wallet and gas tank full). Paul, unlike some Christians, did not even come close to portraying God as a kind of superservant in the sky who would, if we only ask, eliminate every hardship. He did indeed tell us to “have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6). However, his promise was not that God would give plenty but that he would give peace. This peace would surpass human understanding because it would not be like the world’s contentment, which is utterly dependent upon satisfactory circ*mstances.

Paul testified that he could “do all things in him [Christ] who strengthens me” (4:13). By this he meant that when he contemplated the person and work of Christ and had fellowship with him through the Spirit, and when he was thankful for all that God had done and promised to do, he was supplied with the strength to be content, whether in prison (where he was while writing to the Philippians) or free, whether hungry or full, whether cold or warm. The same, power of Christ is available to his disciples today.

The following is a guest column by Thomas Howard, associate professor of English, Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.

CHRISTIANS, AFFIRMING as they do that the Bible is the Word of God, will naturally look into this book with a set of expectations that they do not bring to any other literature, no matter how exalted, noble, or elevated that literature is. To be sure, Sophocles and Dante are “inspired,” if by that we mean that every gift, including poetic genius, is from above, and is given to men by the Father of Lights. A keen mind, a lithe body, a glorious soprano voice, a quick ability with sums, a green thumb, a special efficiency in housework—these, surely, are all gifts to us men from heaven.

But the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are unique, somehow, on the Christian view. Historic orthodoxy has ordinarily had it that they are the Word of God. Efforts to lessen the difficulties that this affirmation raises for our imaginations have been persistent and inventive. The Scriptures “contain” the Word of God, or they “become” it, or they “witness to” it. All these ways of phrasing it are fair enough, as far as they go, of course, and they are attempts to grasp more realistically the dynamic nature of God’s Word to us men than formularies of, say, dictation, could do, with their efforts to safeguard the uniquely divine character of the Bible.

The trouble with any theory of mere dictation as a description of the dynamics of biblical inspiration is, for most Christians, evangelical and otherwise, that it does violence to our perception of how God appears to work in all other situations. He seems to operate, that is, paradoxically—via the humanity of his human agents. The great patriarchal and prophetic and apostolic figures in Scripture, who were singled out to obey and enact and exhibit in their lives the special activity of God, were far from being ciphers. Abraham was no nonentity. Jacob, surely, was no wallflower. Moses was no pawn. And so forth, with David and Ezekiel and John the Baptist and Paul, to say nothing of the post-biblical figures who loom in church history: Athanasius and John Chrysostom and Augustine and Francis and Luther and Knox and General William Booth.

The point about this survey of characters is that they, and a host of others like them (no—unlike them), with all their oddities and inclinations and limitations—cultural, temperamental, physical, and intellectual—with all their humanness, in a word, have functioned somehow, in the annals of the people of God down through history, as bearers of the Word to us. In their experience, or by their preaching or writing, or whatever it has been, they have disclosed God to us in one way or another. In all of them, we could see God at work; but that work did not ride upon the flattening out of the human figures via whom it went forward.

We can never, of course, quite work out the paradox. The work is all of God, all of grace, we say; and that will be the song of the redeemed at the final consummation of things, when we are given to see the whole sweep of the work of God. It is, in fact, all of God. But the other pole of the paradox is that it was, indeed, that man who did that work. It was his obedience that responded to the call of God; it was his arm that wielded the sword, or his feet that walked from Ur to Canaan, or his mind that constructed the sermons, or his voice that sang. And the work had that particular flavor and hue because of that man. Savonarola, Zwingli, Calvin, Menno Simon—the work looked like that because the man was like that. Perhaps there is a clue here.

Perhaps it can be said that at every point where the eternal touches the temporal, or where the divine touches the human, or the ultimate the proximate—however we want to phrase it—perhaps at that point we have a mystery that can never quite be unscrambled by human efforts at explanation. So that we can never, for example, “explain” the Protestant Reformation by looking into Luther’s personality, with all of its oddities; any more than we can, on the other hand, talk as though it were all a purely divine action of the Holy Ghost in the Church, engineered from above, with no reference to the kind of mind and emotions Luther had.

Or again, we can never get very far with questions that ask how much of a man’s salvation is to be attributed to anything he did, and how much to God’s activity. Neither of the two extreme explanations will do at all; but exactly where the nexus of the divine and the human is to be found, no one can say. Or again, when we speak of our own responses to Scripture, say, in the process of sanctification: how much of it are we to see as a matter of sheer obedience to Scripture, and how much of it does God bring about in us?

The question itself becomes paralyzing, and hence nonsense. It cannot be a quantitative matter. It cannot be a matter of sorting two separate things out from each other. It is a paradox—the paradox you get every time the eternal touches the temporal.

Perhaps it is this way with the Scriptures themselves. They are, most assuredly, what anyone can see them to be: an odd collection, made over hundreds of years, of various sorts of writings—such as poetry, parable, history, epistle—by an astonishing assortment of hands, and got together eventually by who knows what procedure. Textual studies and archaeology and so forth can uncover this and that about them. But these pursuits can never quite establish the divine nature of these writings, any more than gynecology can quite yield the mystery of the Incarnation to us, or geometry can plot the trajectory of the Ascension. The very phrase makes us wince with the awareness that we have somehow, suddenly, got into an absurdity. “That’s not what we’re talking about when we say we believe Jesus ascended into heaven. It’s nothing any lens can scrutinize.” “Oh, well, then, you don’t really believe it was anything real. Just a sort of spiritual metaphor?” “No, no! Christians do, in fact, believe that the man Jesus of Nazareth really did ‘ascend into heaven,’ to quote their creed. But that event brought us to the edge of the divine mysteries themselves, like the Incarnation, or even the Creation: what is the relationship between the eternal and the temporal? We affirm the mysteries, and the reality of what the mysteries proclaim.”

Perhaps the Scriptures exist on that same frontier, so that, just as we do not hesitate to describe the Incarnate Word as a provincial Jewish boy brought up under the instruction of Joseph the Carpenter, and thereby affirm a great mystery, so we do not hesitate to describe the written Word as a peculiar collection of all sorts of literature got together in a very odd way, and thereby affirm a similar mystery. Perhaps the paradox of the one gives us a clue to the paradox of the other.

Ze Question Ist …

Some years ago the late Paul Tillich was fond of saying, in his impressive Teutonic English, “Ze question dot efery chilt has asked itself zince reaching der age of zix years ist, How did I come to be part of ze zum totality of being?” This is the root, no doubt, of Tillich’s own life-long concern with ontology. I always thought it a bit farfetched until the other morning when my four-year-old daughter asked before breakfast, “Daddy, how did we get to be real?”

My first reaction was, “Already?” And I was preparing to launch into some kind of explanation of biological reproduction. But fortunately my wife was equal to the occasion. Her philosophy is: Never answer a difficult question—ask another. So she asked, “What would we be if we weren’t real?”

The answer was prompt: “Puppets.”

You see, the second question sorted out the first. My daughter’s concern was ontological, not biological. (It’s always good to know the question before you give the answer.) She wanted to know about the very nature of being, not about how she came to be biologically.

And her question has a good answer, ontological and theological at the same time: We are real and not puppets because God made us to be able to respond to his love, to love him and serve him.

We take curiosity about biology, especially sex, to be basic and primary, natural questions, so to speak. Ontological questions, those relating to being and the nature of reality, we think of as unnatural, sophisticated, and abstract—questions demanding a high order of intellectuality to pose or answer.

But, in fact, they too are fundamental—and even before the age of six.

The Bible presents us early on with the statement that God made man in his own image. Man is first of all a creature and God’s image bearer; biology, psychology, sexuality, and all other aspects of human reality make sense only in the light of that primary fact.

We have accused past generations of suppressing or diverting children’s questions about sex and reproduction. We recognize that such questions should be answered, not evaded. But we are likely to evade the ontological question. To “Why am I here?” we answer, “Well, God made mommies and daddies …” That may be the modern ontological equivalent of the biological evasion, “The stork brought you.”

And when all is said and done, it is far more important to know from an early age why we are not puppets than to be perfectly enlightened about storks and their limited role in the production of babies.

EUTYCHUS VI

Messianic Oneness

Congratulations for your excellent articles on the Messianic Jew (Feb. 1). I believe Dr. Goldberg scripturally justifies the unique position we hold in the body of the Messiah. Unfortunately, a few have accused us of “rebuilding the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile.” May it never be so! To quote Dr. Goldberg’s article, “In the Messiah’s body there is a oneness of all believers in the spirit, but the Jewish person does not lose his ethnic identity and it should not be stripped from him.”

JOE FINKELSTEIN

Executive Director

Young Hebrew Christian Alliance

Chicago, Ill.

Seldom have I seen a magazine put theory and practice back to back like this issue did. Dr. Goldberg’s article certainly presented the theology and philosophy of Hebrew-Christianity while the article by James Hefley presented the theology in practice.… It was good to know that the voice of Messianic Jews or Hebrew-Christians is being heard.

ARNOLD G. FRUCHTENBAUM

Missionary and Editorial Assistant

American Board of Missions to the Jews

Englewood Cliffs, N. J.

Prophetic Musings

Your editorial “A Becoming Modesty” (Feb. 1) is so apt and needed in our day of budding prophets who seem to divide the future so clearly from the Scriptures. The constant bombardment of the public from pulpit, radio, and TV about the end times, rapture of the Church, tribulation, pre-tribulation, and other millennial musings has confused the thinking of millions. Your editorial deserves reading by every honest believer, especially preachers, with the last paragraph capitalized!

MAX R. GAULKE

President

Gulf-Coast Bible College

Houston, Tex.

Alas and alack! Your editorial was a source of no little tribulation to this and other pre-trib readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Undoubtedly both pre- and post-tribs would agree with several of your major observations. The popularity of the modern sport of prognostication has indeed brought about some unbiblical ideas about the Second Coming. Current events may or may not indicate the proximity of that blessed event.

However, the rather strong inference that those who hold to a pre-tribulation rapture are guilty of date-setting is a somewhat tenuous generalization. In eight years of college and postgraduate study in institutions subscribing to the pre-trib position I have yet to hear the first intimation that “God would never let his people suffer.” Christian suffering could hardly be equated with undergoing the Great Tribulation! Furthermore, no pre-trib really claims to know when Christ will return. We pre-tribs aren’t the occupants of your “predictive limb.”

Finally, it seems that a “becoming modesty” would recognize that evangelical pre-tribs are “looking for Jesus and not the rapture of the Church,” just as their evangelical post-trib brethren are. After all, Paul’s encouragement to the Thessalonians was not merely that “we … shall be caught up” but “so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

DONALD W. HAWKINS

Moss Bluff Bible Church

Lake Charles, La.

Bangladesh Brief

One of the valuable features of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the significant place it gives to world-wide missions, and I am grateful to you for this emphasis. May I draw attention to “Bangladesh in Brief” (News, Feb. 1). Here it is stated: “Protestant work in the land, then East Bengal, was pioneered in 1815 by British Baptist missionary William Ward, who traveled to India with ‘the father of modern missions,’ Baptist William Carey.”

May I respectfully point out:

1. William Ward did not travel to India with Carey. Carey arrived in India in 1793, Ward in 1799.

2. Joshua Marshman, one of the famous Serampore Trio of Carey, Marshman, and Ward, went on a tour of the Jessore area of East Bengal in July, 1802, and preached the Gospel to crowds there. The Baptist Missionary Society of Great Britain gives 1805 as the year Jessore became a mission station. The date of 1815 for pioneer work in East Bengal is not correct.

WALTER BRUCE DAVIS

Thornley B. Wood

Professor of Missions

Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

Examining Exorcism

I am one of the many evangelicals who would observe a strict boycott of the film The Exorcist. I am totally appalled that in two articles in your February 1 issue you give at least passing approval if not encouragement for Christians to attend this film. I have already warned my people and trust others would do the same that this film is from the pit of hell.

In the editorial entitled “Who Believes in Exorcism?” you state that “the eerie film shows the reality of that which our secular society has scoffingly relegated to the superstitious Middle Ages”.… It would seem far better to examine the Bible, God’s infallible Truth, on the subject rather than consult something which in your own words is not “truly Christian”.… We must heed the many warnings concerning the conduct of our lives such as “abstrain from every form of evil” (1 Thess. 5:22).

JOHN C. BAKER

First Baptist Church

Fallbrook, Calif.

I thought you took the right line. I bought a copy of the 1614 Roman rite for exorcism after seeing the film. It is overpowering. Tremendous.… St. Michael the Archangel is called upon once or twice in this rite that I have, which seems biblical to me. I tried to read it aloud to some friends, and found it too much. I couldn’t carry on. I also felt that perhaps one ought not simply to read it like that—it seemed a bit like reading the Canon of the Mass out loud—you wonder if you’re treading on ground that you ought not to be treading on.

THOMAS HOWARD

Associate Professor of English

Gordon College

Wenham, Mass.

The review of The Exorcist I believe does disservice to the Christian reading public. Ms. Forbes correctly perceives the mistakes of either preoccupation or denial in these areas. Her displeasure at the film’s lack of portraying the power of Christ as the way of freedom is also admirable. However, the disservice comes from a lack of clear biblical warning in her writing of the dangers of such a film.… Only a removal from the people who wrestle with phobias, obsessive thoughts, etc., could enable Ms. Forbes to make such a banal judgment of the film’s dangers. To study the depths of such possession is not something the Christian is called to do; he is called to exorcise demons by the power of Christ in prayer. There are types of knowledge we avoid (remember the temptation of Eve). The intense psychological involvement with bizarre evil that this film requires is a certain cause of stumbling, and we had better take heed lest we fall.… David Elliot, in the Chicago Daily News, writing from an admittedly non-biblical perspective (Jan. 13), roundly condemned the film as gross, a banal portrayal of religion, demeaning to the viewer in exposing him to such gross horrors, immoral and p*rnographic.… Is it not sad that a Christian reviewer would say less?

DANIEL JUSTER

The First Hebrew Christian Church

Chicago, Ill.

Hope For Openness

Thank you for your review of Dr. Mildred Wynkoop’s book, A Theology of Love (Books in Review, Feb. 1). Naturally, I was gratified by the generous treatment afforded by the reviewer since I am of the Wesleyan-Arminian persuasion; however, of even greater satisfaction was the very fact that you devoted time and space to such a book.… I trust that this review is a ray of hope in the direction of a new openness to the editorial skills of some who are not of the neo-calvinistic school of thought.

EUGENE L. STOWE

General Superintendent

Church of the Nazarene

Kansas City, Mo.

On Celebrating Lent

Sherwood Wirt seems to assume in his article on observing Lent (“Let’s Lengthen Lent,” Feb. 15) that all liturgical churches observe the church year for reasons that are basically legalistic. He says, for instance, “Non-liturgical churches … consider the forty days before Easter to be no holier than any other time of year,” assuming that liturgical churches do. He asks, should we “observe Lent or ignore it? Follow the disciplines or celebrate our Reformation heritage?,” assuming that those in the Reformation heritage would would have nothing to do with Lent. I wonder what Martin Luther would have thought of that.

I am a member of a church that is liturgical and evangelical, and I see no reason whatever why “the approach of the Lenten season [should bring] a furrow to the evangelical brow.” “What are we to do with it?” Wirt asks. I would humbly, evangelically, liturgically, and within the domain of Christian liberty suggest that he celebrate it!

RONALD L. WATERSTRADT

St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church

Clare, Mich.

Reminder Of Freedom

Thank you for the excellent article “The Mystery of Scripture,” by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (Feb. 15). Dr. Hughes has brought out a point that many of us need to ponder: the paradox that we become free in direct proportion to the degree to which we let God control us. So often we are tempted to think and act as if such freedom and control were opposites like wet and dry, when actually they are nothing of the kind; one supports the other as surely as bedrock supports a skyscraper. The product of man’s initiative will topple if it is not anchored in the more solid result of God’s initiative.

C. S. Lewis, perceiving a similar truth in his conversion experience, wrote in Surprised by Joy:

In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, “I chose,” yet it did not seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives.… Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives he could only say, “I am what I do.”

In our day, when freedom is so much discussed and so little understood, Dr. Hughes has given us a useful reminder of the word’s true referent. He has also given us an intellectual standard against which we can measure our own view of Scripture, showing us the integral connection between inspiration and the Christian life.

WILLIAM A. HOLT

Assistant Professor of English

Tarrant County Junior College District

Fort Worth, Tex.

Responsible Argument

I would argue with the article “Should the Christian Argue?” (Feb. 15), but it is too good to argue with.

While serving as editorial editor for our student newspaper on a Christian campus, I many times asked myself, “Are we as a staff being unspiritual by printing comments that people frequently disagree with?” I thank you, Robert W. Smith, for not only showing a true perspective of argumentation, but also stating it is the responsibility of the Christian to oppose error openly.

LEN BLACKSTONE

Winona Lake, Ind.

Comic Communication

In the February 15 issue, the article by John Lawing, Jr., under “The Refiner’s Fire,” I thought you made one of the greatest contributions your publication has ever made. This keen and incisive insight into the comics, American style, is terrific! I have long felt that perhaps the American comics are a door through which we can more readily communicate more things (both good and bad) than in any other one thing on the American scene.

HAROLD FREDERIC GREEN

Central Baptist Church

Gainesville, Ga.

Participating In The Evil

In his essay “On Evil in Art” (issue of December 17, 1971), Professor Thomas Howard of Gordon College asked: “Does there come a point at which the portrayal of evil passes a certain line and begins to participate in the evil it is portraying?” Clearly the mere portrayal of evil characters and deeds does not constitute participation. The crucial factor, as Howard notes, is not the presence of evil but the way it is treated: Is the artist standing on the side of the evil figures and acts he describes, leering at the audience, or with the audience sharing its revulsion and dismay?

To say that a writer has not participated in evil does not necessarily imply that he has explicitly condemned it. Indeed, because of the complexity of evil and the ambiguous situation of fallen man in a darkened world, a novelist or dramatist who realistically grapples with the problem of evil may find it impossible to sum up his work with an unambiguous moral judgment and the meting out of appropriate punishments and rewards.

This is done in medieval miracle and mystery plays and in some specimens of early modern mass culture—for example, the “Gangbusters” school. While not without a certain educational value, especially for the young, these highly moralistic efforts are seldom satisfactory. Not only do they frequently fail from an artistic perspective, but they generally are morally deficient as well, since they minimize the power of evil in this world. That evil will ultimately be judged and punished is a valid and necessary statement. But in this fallen world, evil may go unpunished, and art that depicts a situation in which the due punishment for evil appears inevitable may not be only unconvincing but unreliable and unhelpful as a representation of man’s moral predicament.

Nevertheless, between a moralistic and unpersuasively automatic condemnation and punishment of evil on the one hand and identification with it on the other (what Howard means by leering at the audience) lies a broad realm for creative work that is neither artistically nor morally defective.

In considering the way artists deal with evil, we may properly limit ourselves to literature, including drama (and in modern times, film). The plastic and graphic arts are not well suited to the unambiguous portrayal of moral evil. The visually ugly may represent evil, but not necessarily so, for great moral evil may clothe itself in apparent beauty. The literary arts, as Lessing pointed out in his classic essay Laocoon, deal in the element of time, which the merely visual arts cannot do. As a result, they can show the motivation and consequences of evil actions, and these are far more important for the moral significance of characters and situations than mere appearances.

Does an artist portray any moral awareness, any internal conflict, any self-examination or remorse in the agents of evil? Are they moral beings who struggle with evil, even though they may ultimately act wrongly? Does the evil in which they involve themselves have consequences that they are consistent with a moral universe ordered by God? Or is the evil presented as a good, or as a goal, without complications, without remorse, while any unpleasant consequences—the fate of its victims, for example—are glossed over? Points like these are significant clues to where an artist’s sympathy lies.

Broadly speaking, we can discern three major stages in the literary treatment of evil: the pre-Christian pagan, the Christian, and the post-Christian pagan or apostate. This three-fold division is an oversimplification, of course; there are moods and movements in literature that do not fit into it. But it may provide a helpful insight into the general development of the artistic imagination in dealing with evil.

If we look at pre-Christian paganism, we see that the problem of evil plays a central role in Greek tragedy. In the Oresteia cycle by Aeschylus, for example, a single but momentous wrong decision by King Agamemnon sets in motion a chain of evils that other characters seem unable to break. In order to secure propitious winds so that his fleet could set out on its expedition against Troy, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter. Having avenged the seduction of his brother’s wife Helen by Paris of Troy, Agamemnon returns home with a concubine as part of his spoils of war. His queen, Clytemnestra, brooding over her husband’s murder of their child and seeking consolation in an affair with Aegisthus, traps and kills Agamemnon on his return. Their son Orestes feels duty bound to avenge his father’s murder, but in so doing he must kill not only Aegisthus but also his own mother, Clytemnestra. Because this crime violates the order of nature, he becomes the target of the Furies, those baleful spirits who hound the perpetrators of unnatural violence.

Despite its stylized and schematic form we can see in Aeschylus’s trilogy some of the authentic characteristics of evil in human experience. He shows that an endless chain of evil may result from a decision not totally bad but from an ambiguous one. Evil may be committed under apparent duress, by a person who lacks real freedom of action, who may even be fulfilling a duty. Nevertheless, although he acts under some duress, and although the evil in which he becomes involved may result from a mere flaw in an otherwise great character, the tragic hero is accountable for the evil he does and ultimately must pay the consequences. Perhaps, likes Orestes at the end of The Furies, he will gain a final tragic insight into the high principles of justice and fate and into the distance that separates men from gods, even though he will still be destroyed.

In this respect the Greek tragic hero is a model for certain real-life figures in our post-Christian world: a flawed hero, driven by apparent necessity, involves himself in evil, and the very greatness of his gifts serves only to increase the inevitability and severity of his ultimate disaster. Both ancient tragedy and modern life seem to cry out for a redeemer who can break the chain of ambiguous motivation and guilty complicity. But the pagan Greeks had not yet heard of Him, and too many modern Americans have forgotten.

To turn to the Christian period: it has been frequently and aptly observed that for Christians tragedy in the classic Greek sense does not exist. Where the light of the Gospel shines, guilt and ambiguity can be overcome. If a person continues to reject the Gospel and its message of redemption and salvation, he will end in misery, but we can no longer call his fate tragic nor him a hero. The hero of pagan tragedy was not without guilt, but his tragic end was the result of forces and factors too great for him to understand, much less resist. The unrepentant sinner in a Christian context stands self-condemned, rebellious and self-destructive to the end, his own.

For this reason the genre of tragedy in the Greek sense is rare in Christian culture. When it is found—as in French and German classicism—it represents a deliberate and artificial attempt to recapture a vanished world. The great antagonist of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan, despite all his brilliance and his grief, cannot really merit our admiration or sympathy as a tragic hero does; his fate is self-inflicted, and even in his humiliation he perversely refuses to relent and seek forgiveness, for he views repentance as submission. Yet he does possess a certain insight into his own character. Milton’s Satan knows that if he could repent and be restored to his former state of grace, he would soon “recant/Vows made in pain … And heavier fall” (IV, 11. 96, 97, 101). Milton knew of God’s justice and of redemption and hence did not write tragedy of man or of Satan.

As the dominant influence of Christian thought on Western society began to recede, something akin to a tragic sense developed again. It was possible to present evil in literature without placing it in the context of ultimate divine judgment or forgiveness. But the omission of the Christian message does not mean that modern artists have really rediscovered the tragic sense of life. The Gospel rejected and forgotten is not the same as the Gospel never heard. The consequence of this rejection is not a return to the tragic heroism of the lonely individual in his unequal struggle with immortal gods and iron necessity. The meaningfulness of the conflict between good and evil that was given by the perspective of God’s judgment and mercy is lost, but the ancient nobility has not been restored. Modern theater does not know tragedy; it knows absurdity and despair.

The ancient tragic hero, such as Aeschylus’s Orestes, may suffer, but in suffering he realizes that he is penetrating to the threshold of being and sees things as they are—himself a tiny speck, dwarfed by the gods and powerless in the harsh grip of Fate. This understanding of man’s predicament may form a powerful vehicle of pre-evangelism, because it shows the way in which even those who aspire to goodness and nobility are entangled in evil of their own and others’ doing and are brought to a situation that almost cries out for a message of redemption and salvation.

Post-Christian literature, by contrast, has lost the element of flawed nobility that is essential for ancient tragedy. In Eugene O’Neill’s re-creation of the Orestes cycle, Mourning Becomes Electra, everything is obscured—there is no great guilt, no great nobility, no tragic insight. It is curious that neither the Calvinistic concepts of sin and forgiveness nor the lofty optimism of Unitarianism, both very much present in the New England of O’Neill’s setting, intrudes to resolve, or even illuminate, the sordid and somehow bloodless tangle of guilt and consequences he portrays. Post-Christian “heroes” such as K. in Franz Kafka’s Trial or the tramps in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot are even farther from tragedy in the classic sense. O’Neill’s Lavinia attains, at the end, a minimal insight into some kind of ultimate judgment, but K. and the tramps attain at best an insight into absurdity and hopelessness.

Yet even this post-Christian way of dealing with evil, ending not in insight but in absurdity, does not involve the kind of participation of which Howard speaks. Kafka and Beckett, for example, no longer hope in the good, but they do not turn and embrace evil. They recognize it and expose themselves, together with their audience, to its shriveling mockery.

This type of literature, while it may be more despairing than pre-Christian pagan tragedy, by its very bleakness cries out for a source of hope that it does not know and cannot itself provide. As a consequence, Kafka and Beckett, like Aeschylus, exert no seductive influence in favor of the evil they portray, and they too can be used effectively in pre-evangelism, at least in order to reveal how desperate the human condition appears to the most sensitive and creative minds when they do not know, or will not recognize, the reality of God. Where Aeschylus breaks autonomous man on guilt and fate, Kafka and Beckett break him on absurdity, and that too cries out for redemption.

Participation in evil, in Howard’s sense, comes not when the art is too realistic about the reality of evil and its consequences for human life, but when it is dishonest or unrealistic. In our day the prime offenders are found not so much in “serious” art (e.g., O’Neill, Kafka, Beckett) but in mass culture, and specifically in films.

Howard discussed The Devils, and I have previously commented on A Clockwork Orange, but we need not turn to such esoteric films to see where the problem lies. If we consider the police or detective story, we find that the old, moralistic but valid “crime does not pay” motive has broken down in two different ways. In the detective story and related films, the transition from the pursuit and exaltation of justice to the praise of evil is marked by the transition from The Maltese Falcon to The Godfather. In the one, evil is ugly and ultimately defeated; in the other, evil, while not exactly pretty, appears more attractive than its opposite, and if not altogether triumphant, it at least gains a moral (!) victory over the forces of good. The detective story has become the criminal story.

An equally significant transmutation is that from the detective story to the spy story. In the spy story, the secrecy motive prevents the hero from identifying with good. If we compare the series of French films about Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret with the far more successful British series involving Ian Fleming’s creation, James Bond, we notice significant differences. Maigret, an unprepossessing, dumpy bourgeois, knows evil and its consequences first hand. He understands criminals and their motivation; frequently he can even sympathize with them. He intuitively recognizes the pathetic chain of wrong decisions and mixed motives that can plunge relatively ordinary people into dreadful crimes. There is nothing pretty about crime in the Maigret films, neither for the victims, nor for the perpetrators, nor for Inspector Maigret himself. Often it is with mixed emotions that he turns a pitiable but guilty miscreant over to the courts of justice.

Bond by contrast is brilliant, but only slightly more so than his enemies. They all live in a world of illusion, luxury, glitter, cruelty, and sudden if not always merciful death. Bond’s only superiority to his enemies, apart from a certain elegance of style, lies in the fact that his salary is paid by the British queen, a figure held by Fleming’s literary convention to be morally preferable to ominous combines such as SMERSH and SPECTRE. What Maigret shows us, but Bond never does, is the real consequences of evil for those other than the hero—the murdered man, his aging widow, the criminal, his broken and despairing wife, the permanently crippled victim of an assault.

Simenon’s stories do not teach a moral in the superficial sense, for Maigret is occasionally unsuccessful, frequently unsatisfied. Bond, by contrast, always “gets his man.” But Maigret sees, avenges, and to some extent participates not in evil but in the suffering caused by evil. Bond instead participates directly in the evil, and to a considerable extent enjoys his participation. It may be that the old police and detective genre did little to discourage potential evil-doers of an earlier day from embarking on their misdeeds, but it is likely that entertainment of the Godfather and James Bond type stimulates their successors today. Good is seen as distinguishable from evil only by a convention, always as less exciting, frequently as less successful.

It would be foolish to minimize the debasing effect of the current flood of p*rnography on the human spirit. To apply Howard’s question about participation in evil to that monstrous and lush enterprise would certainly be useful. But it may well be that the greatest threat from the entertainment world to the moral sense in our day lies not in the spectacular cinematic dramatization of sexual vice and perversion but in the trivialization and beautification of violence that characterizes the shift from The Maltese Falcon to The Godfather and from Jules Maigret to James Bond.

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

Nicodemus has often had what may be called a bad press among preachers and Bible commentators. He has been accused of timidity, even cowardice, on two chief grounds: first, that he came to Jesus by night instead of in broad daylight, and second, that he was a disciple in secret, failing to identify himself publicly with Jesus Christ until His crucifixion and death. For instance, Clovis G. Chappell says that “his timidity was at least part of the reason for his coming by night” (Questions Jesus Asked). A. Leonard Griffith says, “We cannot escape the conclusion that for obvious reasons Nicodemus did not want to be seen either by the common people or by his colleagues of the Sanhedrin” (Encounters With Christ). J. D. Grey speaks of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea as “two outstanding men [who] having failed to stand up for Christ during his life, came to shed their tears too late after his death” (Epitaphs For Eager Preachers).

But this idea that Nicodemus was timid and even cowardly is certainly open to question. Take first the matter of his coming to Jesus by night. It may not have been due to fear at all; there are several other possible explanations. For example, Raymond Calkins says that Nicodemus came by night “simply because he could not wait for day.… Some wonderful word of Jesus had entered into this man’s heart” (Religion and Life).

Another possible explanation is that only at night would he have the opportunity for the calm and unhurried conversation he wanted. Or it may have been caution rather than cowardice that compelled Nicodemus to come by night. After all, he occupied a highly important and influential position among his fellow Jews: Clovis Chappell quotes a description of him as “at once the equivalent of a college professor, a judge of the supreme court, and a bishop of the church.” In view of his position Nicodemus had to be careful not to take any public stance on a religious matter before he was sure of his ground. So he came to Jesus by night to avoid undue publicity on a matter about which he had not yet made up his mind.

Furthermore, Nicodemus’s failure to identify himself publicly with Jesus until the crucifixion may have been due not to cowardice but to uncertainty and puzzlement. At his memorable interview with Jesus recorded in the third chapter of John’s Gospel, Nicodemus was told of the necessity of a new birth in order to enter the kingdom of God. Bewildered, he asked, “How can a man be born when he is old?” (John 3:4). Even when Jesus explained that he was talking about spiritual and not physical rebirth, Nicodemus apparently did not understand. It may well be that he did not really comprehend Jesus’ message until Calvary, when he came to realize the meaning of Jesus’ statement to him that “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14, 15). Then, and only then, did Nicodemus experience the repentance, the change of mind, that is essential to the new birth. So genuine bewilderment and uncertainty, rather than cowardice, may have kept Nicodemus from publicly identifying himself as a follower of Jesus until His crucifixion.

On the other hand, on two occasions Nicodemus displayed what must be called courage, even heroism. In the seventh chapter of John’s Gospel it is recorded that when the Pharisees sent officers to arrest Jesus, these officers returned empty-handed, saying, “No man ever spoke like this man!” Hearing this the Pharisees chided them, saying, “Are you led astray, you also? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him?” At that point Nicodemus interjected this question, “Does our Law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and knowing what he does?” (John 7:51), thus exposing himself to the taunting reply, “Are you from Galilee too? Search and you will see that no prophet is to rise from Galilee” (John 7:52). Though Nicodemus was here stating a well-recognized principle of Jewish law, by doing so to these bitter enemies of Jesus he risked their scorn and opposition.

It is recorded, too, that after Jesus had been crucified, Joseph of Arimathea (it is he and not Nicodemus who is described as a “disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews” in John 19:38) asked permission from Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, to have the body of Jesus in order to give it burial: and Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes to anoint the body. James Black points out that in doing this Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea “threw in their lot with [Jesus] at the very ebb of his defeat, when the world laughed at him … when they ran the danger of the scorn of the world, and the … prejudice of the triumphant priests” (An Apology For Rogues). This was not the act of a coward.

Nicodemus’s relation with Jesus permits the interpretation that he was a sincere and high-minded religious seeker who, when he became convinced of the truth of the Christian message, did not hesitate to express his Christian discipleship publicly. And though no authentic records of Nicodemus’s subsequent career have survived, there seems no reason to doubt that he continued in the Christian way until his life’s end.

The explosive secret of nuclear energy that has blasted the world into a radical new era of history is the critical mass. Neither a spark nor a shock can detonate it. When an adequate quantity—a critical mass—of fissionable material is suddenly brought together, the awesome detonation occurs. Similarly, my hope is that the International Congress on World Evangelization—to be held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in July—will result in a great spiritual fission whose chain reaction world-wide will speed the completion of Christ’s great commission in this century.

The spiritual fissionable material will be there: invitations have gone to some 2,700 evangelical leaders from every known Protestant denomination and evangelistic organization in more than 150 nations. All these persons were selected for their evangelical commitment and influence. Lausanne will be the most representative Protestant conclave in history. Given the blessing of the Holy Spirit, it could become a twentieth-century Pentecost.

The World Congress on Evangelism held in Berlin in 1966 illustrated this principle of a spiritual critical mass initiating far-reaching chain reactions. I well remember seeing there a dark-skinned Pacific islander, clad in a mixture of Western and national dress. Titus Path was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in the New Hebrides, a former moderator of his denomination’s General Assembly, and a member of the government’s Advisory Council. He did not say a lot at Berlin, but he took in a lot, and went home to apply it in his own remote island church, which was afflicted with second-generation nominalism. He secured the consent of his General Assembly to inaugurate a five-year plan for evangelism throughout the church. He planned campaigns lasting six or seven weeks in each area, involving large numbers of national and missionary workers.

The amazing result was that almost one-fourth of the population of the islands made commitments to Christ. The local congregations have been revitalized. Social evils have been strongly challenged. A will to witness was engendered in the national church. And young lives were offered for the Lord’s service. This last fact led Titus Path to move in the 1970 General Assembly that a Presbyterian Bible college be set up. Since its inception the college has had more applicants than it can take, more than half of whom are the direct fruit of the evangelistic campaign spurred by Titus Path.

Other incalculably significant results of Berlin have been the many continental and national evangelistic congresses that in turn have sparked countless new programs of nation-wide in-depth evangelism, cross-cultural missionary outreach, revivals in churches, and so on. These results have been particularly apparent in the Third World, where the majority of the world’s two billion unreached live.

“The vision for Explo ’72 in Dallas [the largest gathering of Christian youth in history] was given as a result of the inspiration of the U. S. Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis in 1971,” Director Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ reports. The Minneapolis congress was but one outgrowth of the Berlin congress. And springing from Explo ’12 came Spree ’73 in London and next summer’s Explo ’74 in Seoul, Korea, where 300,000 are expected.

The Berlin congress did not program these results. But many of the world’s spiritual leaders were present. Speakers, fellowship, and insights through interaction stimulated vision and imparted new motivation. And the Holy Spirit initiated chain reactions.

The potential for spiritual results in many parts of the world is many times greater in 1974 than in 1966. Twice as many countries will be represented at Lausanne. (For that matter there will be twice as many as at the historic Edinburgh conference in 1910.) Immense effort is being made to see that each country of the world will be represented; at this writing only Albania and the People’s Republic of China are excepted. Bringing the influential evangelical leaders of every nation to the congress has been the goal of the participant-selection process. This is the fissionable material making up a critical mass, the potential for a total thrust in world evangelization in this century.

Specifically, what does the congress planning committee (thirty men drawn from five continents and sixteen countries) hope will result from Lausanne ’74? Primary goals are these:

1. To impart vision and motivation to the churches of the world regarding their responsibility for E-1, E-2, and E-3 evangelism. E-1 evangelism is the evangelism of one’s own culture and community; E-2 evangelism is witness to culturally similar peoples who may be close at hand or far away, such as Germans to Greek immigrant workers in Germany; E-3 is cross cultural evangelism, the so-called foreign missionary evangelism. (See “Existing Churches: Ends or Means?,” by Ralph Winter, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, January 19, 1973.) Acts 1:8 is the basis for this helpful terminology: the biblical emphasis is that all Christians are to witness simultaneously, “both in Jerusalem and … to the uttermost parts of the earth.”

2. To inform churches and leaders of the successful strategies, methods, and tools God has given to accomplish the task of total evangelism. Specially needful are the 1,200 Third World participants, whose knowledge of what God is doing is largely limited not just to their own countries but often to their own areas. Through demonstrations, models, and fellowship with participants from around the world, whole new horizons of possibilities will be opened to these men. The hope is that new faith and confidence that their own nations and the world can be evangelized in this generation will be born in the hearts of many as it was in the heart of Titus Path at Berlin.

3. To encourage the basic spiritual unity of evangelicals world-wide for cooperation in a new, all-out thrust for world evangelization. Often the criticism of the fragmentation of Protestant evangelicals is exaggerated. Evangelicals are one in Christ. Current conditions of world crisis and opportunity are increasing their consciousness of the need to work together. Lausanne will provide the climate for strengthening this authentic unity.

The Asia-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism in Singapore, 1968, was a spontaneous outgrowth of Berlin. There some of the most productive movements began in unscheduled free sessions. Theologians met together; out of their meetings have come several Asian evangelical theological societies that today are confidently propounding biblical theology. Asian mission leaders met; last year, as a result, the first all-Asian conference of national foreign missionary societies was born and pledged itself to a goal of sending at least 200 Asian foreign missionaries to the world this year. COFAE (Committee for Asian Evangelism) was born and has served to inform and bind together Asian leaders in prayer and cooperation for Asian evangelism.

Lausanne, too, may provide the conditions for the birth of many such spontaneous cooperative efforts. There will be regional sessions, international sessions of those sharing vocational interests (such as radio evangelists, theologians, missiologists), and free times for informal meeting.

4. To identify the unevangelized enclaves of the world population so that they may be reached; to reemphasize the biblical basis of evangelism and missions in this day of theological confusion; to relate biblical truth to crucial issues facing Christians everywhere; to awaken our Christian consciences to the implications of expressing Christ’s love to men of every class and color—these are other important objectives of Lausanne.

The Church of Jesus Christ now has at its command three great resources never before adequately available. First are the technological tools of transportation and mass communication. No area of the world is now geographically inaccessible to God’s servants. Radio, television, inexpensive literature, mass literacy campaigns, and almost universal Bible translation and publication make total world evangelization physically possible for the first time in this generation.

Second, God has been sovereignly creating a huge manpower pool of committed youth in the last decade. Frequently bypassing customary channels, the Holy Spirit has through such movements as the Jesus People worldwide, Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth With a Mission, Operation Mobilization, and Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship brought tens of thousands of young people to Christ. Last Easter Sunday I worshiped in a renovated garage in The Hague, Netherlands. Seated on the floor celebrating Christ’s resurrection that morning were a hundred young people, nearly all converted from the drug culture there within the last year. In Muslim Egypt an amazing revival has been taking place among the young. I believe that the commitment of these youths in many cases is clearer and deeper than that of members of my generation. If alongside the present army of Christian workers thousands of these can be channeled world-wide into E-1, E-2, and E-3 evangelism, the manpower needs for world evangelization can be met.

Third, money to finance the task is in the Church. William Carey’s words are contemporarily pertinent: “God’s work done in God’s way will not lack God’s supply.” Those who say that funds are inadequate need to reexamine the facts prayerfully. In England, where churches and Christian organizations are perennially impoverished, a relatively new American evangelistic organization challenged the Christians, and the equivalent of more than $300,000 was contributed for evangelistic projects within the last two years. Particularly in the West, million-dollar church sanctuary blueprints must be sacrificed for world evangelistic strategies. The responsibility of affluent Western churches is great. I repeat, the money to do the job of world evangelism in this century is in the Church, if it will reexamine its priorities and reapportion its money. Many people hope that Lausanne will motivate church leaders to do this.

Amazing open doors around the world invite the Church today. More nations are accessible to the Gospel than ever before in history. Three of the four formerly forbidden Himalayan kingdoms are now open to tactful evangelism. Such nations as Brazil, Indonesia, Korea, and others are experiencing unprecedented movements to Christ. The “two billion unreached” are now within reach of the Church, since most are located in populous enclaves or areas within countries where the Church is already planted.

The day obviously calls for new strategies and patterns of evangelism. There are few totally pioneer “mission fields” left. Missionary colonialism wherever it remains must be abandoned (that it was ever widespread is a doubtful assumption). Partnership in mission and evangelism is the strategy of the hour.

New leadership for both church and mission is strongly emerging from the younger churches coming of age in the Third World. Lausanne will feature these persons on the programs—almost half of the program personalities and group leaders will be new Asian, African, and South American leaders, unfamiliar to most Westerners. Lausanne ’74 will mean for the Western churches a new vision of mission, I believe. Though interest and funds are rapidly waning among ecumenically oriented missions, evangelical Third World leaders welcome the cooperation of the right kind of evangelistic missionary partners. Witness the thrilling challenge of the Ethiopian Lutheran church leaders to their European partners in 1972, asking for less relief money and more Gospel-preaching missionaries.

While the World Council of Churches’ Conference on Salvation Today (Bangkok, 1973) may well have presaged the death of evangelistic mission programs in many WCC-related denominations, evangelical national churches still warmly welcome biblically oriented, evangelistic missionaries. Lausanne should give ample evidence of this. And it will graphically demonstrate that total world evangelization in the last quarter of this century will be the task of Easterner and Westerner, black and white, younger and older church leaders working shoulder-to-shoulder to finish the task committed to Christ’s Church. “You don’t need a crystal ball to predict that during the 1970s the number of missionary societies will increase, not decrease. They will spring up from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Missionary budgets will swell, but different priorities will exist for spending money,” Peter Wagner predicts (Stop the World I Want to Get On, Regal, 1974).

“Vast numbers of people have been prepared by God’s spirit to respond to the good news of Christ.… We are persuaded that God has brought us to one of history’s great moments,” reads the official “Call to the International Congress on World Evangelization.”

The congress planning committee wholeheartedly acknowledges that ultimately the success of Lausanne ’74 depends upon the Holy Spirit. But every human effort is being made to bring together the people, to provide the information, to share the resources available for world evangelization. This fissionable material in the hands of the Holy Spirit may detonate an evangelism explosion and initiate the spiritual chain reaction that will complete in this century the task committed by Christ to his Church.

The Christian mind

One of the most ill-advised dogmas in the American cultural creed is the belief that intellectual activity is somewhat sissified, that it is something for the pointy-heads to fritter away time on while the real folk get along with the business of living. No attitude, imported into the assembly of Christians, could be deadlier. For a Christianity that is aware of itself, self-confident, and eager to follow the mind of its Lord is a Christianity that by hard study and diligent thought has steeped itself in the truths of Holy Scripture. And the way these truths are extracted and applied to Christian life is by reading, by rereading, and by bending every mental gift from God toward an understanding of his Word for us.

It is evident that the anti-intellectual trend has penetrated the Church, for if it had not, ignorance of the central themes and the great teachings of the Bible would not be so pervasive. It cannot be overstressed that if there is to be a Christian life today, it will arise by Christians’ coming to terms with God’s self-revelation in Scripture; as Christ was the Word of God in the flesh, so is the Bible God’s Word for us in written form. Most Christians have a nodding acquaintance with some rudiments of the Christian faith, but it is questionable whether the average churchman can explain or apply such essential biblical teachings as justification, propitiation, sanctification, and glorification, to mention only a few. And since these doctrines lie at the heart of our faith and our life as Christians, it is only to our eternal peril that we neglect to study them.—MARK A. NOLL, graduate student in church history at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.

During 1973 we saw the inauguration of a President boasting an overwhelming electoral victory, after which he moved on to a higher pinnacle of success as he disengaged our nation from the longest war in the history of the United States. We paused. We prayed. We breathed a sigh of relief as the ceasefire went into effect. We watched the POWs come home. Many of us saluted the efforts of the commander-in-chief, Richard M. Nixon, who stood at the apex of his career.

Now, a year later, the President stands as a tragic, isolated figure. Dozens of public officials have been swept from positions of great influence, accused of betraying our trust. Bludgeoned by fuel shortages, rising costs, and international unrest, our President and nation seem unable to cope creatively with these problems, held as we are in the clutches of the unresolved Watergate affair.

In looking at Watergate, I do not intend to attack persons or assign guilt. Nor do I intend to defend anyone with a declaration of innocence. I have a deep love for President Nixon and value highly his graciousness to me during my six Key Biscayne years. I greatly appreciate my friendship with him, his family, and some of his White House associates. For me to make fallible human judgments on incomplete data would be foolish. Fortunately, we have a legal system that we can expect to proceed deliberately, convicting those who are guilty and acquitting the innocent.

What I would like to do is to look at Watergate and see what biblical lessons appear. The problem is bigger than any one man, any one administration. We have a responsibility to learn from these distressing events in order to free ourselves by God’s grace from the bondage and inertia of such tragedies.

God’s Word calls for transparent integrity on the part of every single believer in Jesus Christ. It leaves no room for accommodation with wrongdoing. It calls for frankness, honesty, open discussion of difficult problems within the context of biblical faith. Here are some of the biblical lessons we can learn from Watergate.

I “Let Your ‘Yea’ Be ‘Yea’ And Your ‘Nay’ Be ‘Nay.’ ”

The desire to shade truth for personal benefit is a part of human nature. And when we engage in this shading, we are unlikely to analyze the future cost. I have been personally acquainted with some of the principal figures in the Watergate matter. Some of these men either have confessed their dishonesty or clearly appear dishonest if one compares their public statements over a span of several months. I am convinced that some of them did not originally intend to get caught up in such a complicated web of dishonorable activity and dishonest coverup. They rationalized their actions along these lines: “Little white lies don’t make any difference. In fact, they can protect many people from hurt. There’s nothing wrong with a little concealment when the security of our nation is at stake.”

How about you? Have you ever instructed your secretary to get rid of a phone caller by saying, “Tell him I’m not in”? If so, you have compromised your integrity. You’ve involved yourself in a life style of coverup. How much better to say, “Tell him I’m not available now.” Or, “I’ll return his call later.” Or, if necessary, “I’ll not be able to talk with him at all.” Jesus said, “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil” (Matt. 5:37, RSV).

Clean, crisp honesty. A “yea” that is “yea” and a “nay” that is “nay.” Pay some prices right now. But then be free from the possibility of your own Watergate. Coverup functions not only in public life but subtly in our own interpersonal relations in business, marriage, family, and other areas. Yet God wants you and me to be stripped of our phoniness, to be authentic people whose word can be trusted.

II The New Morality Does Not Stand Up

Since the early 1960s there has been a lot of discussion about situational ethics, which also goes under the name of contextual ethics or the new morality. Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopal theologian, has been one of the main articulators of this concept. Granted, the new morality means different things to different people. It seems to me that in its purest form it is calling us to be ethically motivated by love instead of by arbitrary laws. Situation ethicists say that a mature person who desires the best for someone else in love is set free to make his ethical decisions, not on the basis of what is set down in the Bible or some legal system, but on the basis of what is really best for all parties involved. An appeal is made to Christ’s statement that love should be our motivation for everything. The greatest commandment of all is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Following this logic, proponents of the new morality would release us from the arbitrary bondage of rules. For example, some say there are circ*mstances in which an altering of the truth or adultery are permissible.

I believe Watergate teaches us that this kind of morality does not stand up. In fact, it leads us to an Old Testament statement that underlines the plight of Israel caught up in moral and political anarchy: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eye” (Judg. 21:25).

God has revealed to us, through the Scriptures, how you and I function best. No, we’re not bound by law. We live in the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, a grace that promises God’s forgiveness for everything we have done wrong. But this does not free us to live in the bondage of wrongdoing. Some highly intelligent, capable men felt that the reelection of Richard Nixon was in the highest ethical interest of our nation, and they did all kinds of wrong, which they called right, to gain this end. According to their value system, for him not to be reelected was evil; therefore their defiance of law, in the pursuit of what they considered to be good, was permissible. This explains why they could self-righteously point the finger at criminal and immoral activities carried out by other elements in society without realizing that their activities, both the initial acts and in the coverup, were wrong.

God’s Word calls us to assume an ethical discipline, to live obedient to the guidelines the Lord has revealed in Scriptures. The order we have in society came through the efforts of people who took the moral or divinely revealed law seriously. The relativistic approach in which a person feels he can live above God’s law will only cause him trouble, and hurt those whom he is trying to help.

III Two Wrongs Don’T Make A Right

In discussing Watergate some people have said, “But that’s politics. Everybody else does it. The only thing wrong here was that these men got caught!” It is true, tragically, that elections can be stolen in America. And it is true that a study of our American political process points out some enormous ethical inconsistencies. But does this give us any right to “fight fire with fire”? Absolutely not! We should do all we can to uncover other coverups. We have a God-given responsibility to see that justice prevails.

We are on dangerous ground when we presume to take divinely revealed law into our own hands, using it to our own advantage when it is convenient and dismissing it when we are trying to get even with those who function in a lawless manner. Our insistence that “they all do it” will mean that the horrible experience of Watergate will not purge our society but will only make us look for more subtle ways to get around what is right.

5. A Letter to Sardis

He saw the broken stone

of your dead works;

and stooped to clay

to form the tablet of a Son,

on which He wrote His love

with you in mind.

Why do you pass

the finger of concern

beneath sin’s

lettered tombstone

of the past? Repent!

He comes,—a thief,

to take those ready

and the choice to be.

6. Church of Philadelphia

Girdling the world with witness,

you’re His key chain.

Through you

He opens doors

that can’t be shut.

Now, urge the seeking world,

“Pass through,—”

to mount the stairs

of His descent, before

a tampering tribulation

will try to change

the locks.

IV Success In A Christian Context Is Determined By Eternal, Not Temporal, Standards

The secular pragmatist is interested in getting results and getting them now. To lose an election is to fail if one’s highest priority is winning. The Christian has the exhilarating opportunity to see beyond the immediate external success syndrome. He is able to realize that in losing he may make a moral and spiritual impact much larger than that made if he wins (especially if he wins using illegal methods). For example, take the election of 1972. As we look back we can say it was inevitable that Richard Nixon would win. Why were any dirty tricks needed? Yet it was not always inevitable that he would win. These illegal activities were carried out long before the election was secured. The highest priority, according to some involved in the campaign, was to win the election. How much happier all the parties would be today if the election had been lost with personal honor and integrity kept intact. Joseph “lost” when he rejected the seductive advances of Potiphar’s wife. Doing what was right sent him to jail. Now he stands in the pages of history as an eternal winner, a man of character who would not adapt to the expedient.

The man of God is going to lose at many points in this world. Jesus warns us that the Christian life is a difficult life. Yet he says, “He who loses himself shall find himself. He who would be first shall be last. The last shall be first.” Christ sets our success-failure motivations into a context of the eternal. In reality, Jesus is saying, “God’s payday is not always Friday.” To put it more crassly, it is better to win on the day of judgment as you stand before Almighty God than to win down here.

Pragmatic, non-spiritual man has no scales on which to measure success or failure except those of the immediate. An editorial in the Christian Century stated it crisply,

The functional man dares not to view his immediate victories in the light of a thousand years, because his entire life is dependent upon that victory. Not to have it treated as ultimate is to require that all our victories be measured against the victory of Advent, which promises us a hope that is not seen. And the moment we are driven into an arena of waiting for something not to be seen, we lose the win-or-lose certainty that powers functional man [December 12, 1973].

Now I realize that this kind of conversation has been used as a narcotic to dull the senses of those who suffer. Give people promises of the future life and they are much more exploitable in this life. God forbid that we twist this to our own purposes.

7. Laodicean Church

The church social

makes sure the coffee’s hot,

with saccarine blend

of animated talk

to sweeten and to cream

for connoisseurs;

but poured into cracked cups

without saucers,

water is shared elsewhere

tepid, lukewarm;

spit out by Christ,—

who stands outside the door.

“Behold, I Come Quickly!”

V Don’T Put Your Faith In America; Put It In Jesus Christ

During the past several months quite a few people have said to me, “I’ve lost my faith in politicians.” But why did they have their faith in politicians in the first place? “I’ve lost my confidence in our public leaders.” The Christian’s confidence is to be in God Almighty, not in human leaders. We all have heard people say, “I believe in the United States.” Imagine that the United States disappeared just as Rome disappeared from its position of world leadership. What would that do to our faith? Would it mean that God was any less alive than he is today? Granted, our circ*mstances of life would be quite different. But would Jesus Christ be any different? An editorial in Eternity magazine stated:

Hopefully, the relevations of Watergate have brought us back to reality. Unpleasant as the facts were, we can be grateful for the jolting reminder that no man, no party, no administration can give us assurance of righteousness in government.

Thousands of conservative Christians across the land, consciously or unconsciously, felt that the conservative politics of the administration, coupled with Mr. Nixon’s religious roots and associations, pointed toward a high moral tone in government. The facts have demonstrated otherwise, and we are driven back to the total dependence and trust in God that should characterize us at all times, under all administrations, Democratic, Republican, or otherwise [November, 1973],

I thank God that in the United States there is still some concern about right and wrong. There are countries in this world where corruption in government would never be aired. At least there is a kind of residual ethical impulse that makes us recoil from abuse of the public trust. Former Vice-President Agnew has talked about a post-Watergate morality, using this as a rationalization for his lawless actions. Thank God that there is a kind of post-Watergate morality. And let’s hope that it sticks. Let it never be forgotten.

VI Watergate Gives Us A Correcting Confrontation With The True Nature Of Man

A strange kind of double standard has developed. Some of us have the capacity to speak stirring words about righteousness at public hearings, political rallies, or religious gatherings even though our own lives do not support our claims. One political party points its finger at the coverup morals of another when that same party covered up the corruption of the Bobby Baker scandal. The evening after the resignation of the Vice-President, I had dinner in Washington with a prominent congressman. He said, “Many a governor and ex-governor is shaking in his boots as a result of these Maryland allegations against Agnew. Those same companies which gave him kickbacks are functioning in a number of other states. That’s the way this political business functions.”

There is a tragic disjuncture between personal and social morals. Some of the very men and women who are most quick to accuse the President and others of dishonesty are now totally disregarding the marriage vows of fidelity that they made “till death do us part.” The Bible says, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Watergate puts a mirror in front of me, alerting me to the coverups in my own life. My subtle shadings of the truth. My unfaithfulness to the trust people have put in me.

Jesus had some terse words for those who tossed that pathetic adulteress at his feet. With a penetrating expression that could come only from one who had ultimate authority he said, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” Suddenly there weren’t many accusers. The self-righteous became guilty. The guilty one was set free with the words, “Go and sin no more.”

Vii Remember, These Are People

There’s a danger for us in trying to find a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong. I do not for a moment mean to excuse illegal activities. Those who have done wrong should be held responsible. At the same time a man should be considered innocent until proved guilty. And even if he is found guilty, he should be treated as a person who is created in the image of God and still loved by Him. Watergate will help us, I hope, to reanalyze our whole attitude toward the criminal, to show a greater compassion toward people who have sinned against society.

Thank God that the coverup is being uncovered. Thank God that the breaking of laws has been discovered. Thank God that our country, at least for the moment, has been halted in its direction toward a totalitarianism in which the powerful few see fit to live above the law. Let’s remember that these men have children and wives. Many of them were misguided zealots who thought they were serving their country. Some of them, in the process of trying to do their best, failed. There needs to be a love, a compassion, a concern that says, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Too long have we taken p*rnographic delight in the misadventures of others. For too many months now we have eaten away at the vitals of our political and moral system, enjoying Watergate for its entertainment value. Let us love. Let us care. Let us make certain that justice prevails. Let us call for repentance from those who have done wrong, refusing to put a glaze of respectability on immoral activity. But let us temper justice with mercy for all in our society who have failed. Perhaps this is the time for a kind of amnesty, a year of forgiveness, both for those who failed to serve their country in military service and for those who failed to serve their country in the highest levels of leadership. Let us reach out with a gesture of love as we have been loved, a gesture of forgiveness as we have been forgiven, in the name of Jesus Christ, our Saviour.

First of Two Parts

That the Easter faith in the Resurrection of Christ is the core of Christianity can hardly be denied. Whether that conviction is rooted in myth, in hallucination, or in history has often been debated. Some have maintained that the Resurrection of Christ is a myth patterned after the prototypes of dying and rising fertility gods. Others argue that subjective visions of the risen Christ were sufficient to convince the disciples that their leader was not dead. Even those who do not doubt the historicity of Christ’s life and death differ as to how the Resurrection may be viewed historically. Let us examine the evidences for these alternatives.

I. Easter As Myth

A. Dying and Rising Fertility Gods

John H. Randall, emeritus professor of philosophy at Columbia University, has asserted: “Christianity, at the hands of Paul, became a mystical system of redemption, much like the cult of Isis, and the other sacramental or mystery religions of the day” (Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis, 1970, p. 154). Hugh Schonfield in Those Incredible Christians (1968, p. xii) has declared: “The revelations of Frazer in The Golden Bough had not got through to the masses.… Christians remained related under the skin to the devotees of Adonis and Osiris, Dionysus and Mithras.”

The theory that there was a widespread worship of a dying and rising fertility god—Tammuz in Mesopotamia, Adonis in Syria, Attis in Asia Minor, and Osiris in Egypt—was propounded by Sir James Frazer, who gathered a mass of parallels in part IV of his monumental work The Golden Bough (1906, reprinted in 1961). This view has been adopted by many who little realize its fragile foundations. The explanation of the Christian Resurrection by such a comparative-religions approach has even been reflected in official Soviet propaganda (cf. Paul de Surgy, editor, The Resurrection and Modern Biblical Thought, 1966, pp. 1, 131).

In the 1930s three influential French scholars, M. Goguel, C. Guignebert, and A. Loisy, interpreted Christianity as a syncretistic religion formed under the influence of Hellenistic mystery religions. According to A. Loisy (“The Christian Mystery,” Hibbert Journal, X [1911–12], 51), Christ was “a saviour-god, after the manner of an Osiris, an Attis, a Mithra.… Like Adonis, Osiris, and Attis he had died a violent death, and like them he had returned to life.…

B. Reexamination of the Evidences

A reexamination of the sources used to support the theory of a mythical origin of Christ’s resurrection reveals that the evidences are far from satisfactory and that the parallels are too superficial.

In the case of the Mesopotamian Tammuz (Sumerian Dumuzi), his alleged resurrection by the goddess Inanna-Ishtar had been assumed even though the end of both the Sumerian and the Akkadian texts of the myth of “The Descent of Inanna (Ishtar)” had not been preserved. Professor S. N. Kramer in 1960 published a new poem, “The Death of Dumuzi,” that proves conclusively that instead of rescuing Dumuzi from the Underworld, Inanna sent him there as her substitute (cf. my article, “Tammuz and the Bible,” Journal of Biblical Literature, LXXXIV [1965], 283–90). A line in a fragmentary and obscure text is the only positive evidence that after being sent to the Underworld Dumuzi may have had his sister take his place for half the year (cf. S. N. Kramer, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 183 [1966], 31).

Tammuz was identified by later writers with the Phoenician Adonis, the beautiful youth beloved of Aphrodite. According to Jerome, Hadrian desecrated the cave in Bethlehem associated with Jesus’ birth by consecrating it with a shrine of Tammuz-Adonis. Although his cult spread from Byblos to the Greco-Roman world, the worship of Adonis was never important and was restricted to women. P. Lambrechts has shown that there is no trace of a resurrection in the early texts or pictorial representations of Adonis; the four texts that speak of his resurrection are quite late, dating from the second to the fourth centuries A.D. (“La ‘resurrection’ d’Adonis,” in Melanges Isidore Levy, 1955, pp. 207–40). Lambrechts has also shown that Attis, the consort of Cybele, does not appear as a “resurrected” god until after A.D. 150. (“Les Fêtes ‘phrygiennes’ de Cybèle et d’ Attis,” Bulletin de I’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, XXVII [1952], 141–70).

This leaves us with the figure of Osiris as the only god for whom there is clear and early evidence of a “resurrection.” Our most complete version of the myth of his death and dismemberment by Seth and his twofold resuscitation by Isis is to be found in Plutarch, who wrote in the second century A.D. (cf. J. Gwyn Griffiths, Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, 1970). His account seems to accord with statements made in the early Egyptian texts. After the New Kingdom (from 1570 B.C. on) even ordinary men aspired to identification with Osiris as one who had triumphed over death.

But it is a cardinal misconception to equate the Egyptian view of the afterlife with the “resurrection” of Hebrew-Christian traditions. In order to achieve immortality the Egyptian had to fulfill three conditions: (1) His body had to be preserved, hence mumification. (2) Nourishment had to be provided either by the actual offering of daily bread and beer, or by the magical depiction of food on the walls of the tomb. (3) Magical spells had to be interred with the dead—Pyramid Texts in the Old Kingdom, Coffin Texts in the Middle Kingdom, and the Book of the Dead in the New Kingdom. Moreover, the Egyptian did not rise from the dead; separate entities of his personality such as his Ba and his Ka continued to hover about his body.

Nor is Osiris, who is always portrayed in a mumified form, an inspiration for the resurrected Christ. As Roland de Vaux has observed:

What is meant of Osiris being “raised to life”? Simply that, thanks to the ministrations of Isis, he is able to lead a life beyond the tomb which is an almost perfect replica of earthly existence. But he will never again come among the living and will reign only over the dead.… This revived god is in reality a “mummy” god [The Bible and the Ancient Near East, 1971, p. 236].

C. Inexact Parallels From Late Sources

What should be evident is that past studies of phenomenological comparisons have inexcusably disregarded the dates and the provenience of their sources when they have attempted to provide prototypes for Christianity. Let me give two examples, Mithra and the taurobolium.

Mithra was the Persian god whose worship became popular among Roman soldiers (his cult was restricted to men) and was to prove a rival to Christianity in the late Roman Empire. Early Zoroastrian texts, such as the Mithra Yasht, cannot serve as the basis of a mystery of Mithra inasmuch as they present a god who watches over cattle and the sanctity of contracts. Later Mithraic evidence in the west is primarily iconographic; there are no long coherent texts.

Those who seek to adduce Mithra as a prototype of the risen Christ ignore the late date for the expansion of Mithraism to the west (cf. M. J. Vermaseren, Mithras, The Secret God, 1963, p. 76). The only dated Mithraic inscriptions from the pre-Christian period are the texts of Antiochus I of Commagene (69–34 B.C.) in eastern Asia Minor. After that there is one text possibly from the first century A.D. from Cappadocia, one from Phrygia dated to A.D. 77–78, and one from Rome dated to Trajan’s reign (A.D. 98–117). All other dated Mithraic inscriptions and monuments belong to the second century (after A.D. 140), the third, and the fourth century A.D. (M. J. Vermaseren, Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae, 1956).

The taurobolium was a bloody rite associated with the worship of Mithra and of Attis in which a bull was slaughtered on a grating over an initiate in a pit below, drenching him with blood. This has been suggested (e.g., by R. Reitzenstein) as the basis of the Christian’s redemption by blood and Paul’s imagery in Romans 6 of the believer’s death and resurrection. Gunter Wagner in his exhaustive study Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries (1963) points out how anachronistic such comparisons are:

The taurobolium in the Attis cult is first attested in the time of Antoninus Pius for A.D. 160. As far as we can see at present it only became a personal consecration at the beginning of the third century A.D. The idea of a rebirth through the instrumentality of the taurobolium only emerges in isolated instances towards the end of the fourth century A.D.; it is not originally associated with this blood-bath [p. 266].

Indeed, there is inscriptional evidence from the fourth century A.D. that, far from influencing Christianity, those who used the taurobolium were influenced by Christianity. Bruce Metzger in his important essay “Methodology in the Study of the Mystery Religions and Early Christianity” (Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish and Christian (1968), notes:

Thus, for example, one must doubtless interpret the change in the efficacy attributed to the rite of the taurobolium. In competing with Christianity, which promised eternal life to its adherents, the cult of Cybele officially or unofficially raised the efficacy of the blood bath from twenty years to eternity [p. 11].

Another aspect of comparisons between the resurrection of Christ and the mythological mysteries is that the alleged parallels are quite inexact. It is an error, for example, to believe that the initiation into the mysteries of Isis, as described in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, is comparable to Christianity. For one thing, the hero, Lucius, had to pay a fortune to undergo his initiation. And as Wagner correctly observes: “Isis does not promise the mystes immortality, but only that henceforth he shall live under her protection, and that when at length he goes down to the realm of the dead he shall adore her …” (op. cit., p. 112).

On the other hand, the followers of Dionysus (Bacchus), the god of wine, did believe in immortality. But they did not hope for a resurrection of the body; nor did they base their faith on the reborn Dionysus of the Orphics, but rather on their experience of drunken ecstasy (cf. M. Nilsson, The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age, 1957).

In any case, the death and resurrection of these various mythological figures, however attested, always typified the annual death and rebirth of vegetation. This significance cannot be attributed to the death and resurrection of Jesus. A. D. Nock sets forth the most striking contrast between pagan and Christian notions of “resurrection” as follows:

In Christianity everything is made to turn on a dated experience of a historical Person; it can be seen from 1 Cor. 15:3 that the statement of the story early assumed the form of a statement in a Creed. There is nothing in the parallel cases which points to any attempt to give such a basis of historical evidence to belief (Early Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Background, 1964, p. 107).

THE TIME IS AT HAND

Seven poems on Revelation 2 and 3 by JEAN RASMUSSEN

1. The Church at Ephesus

The ushers pass the plate:

collect loose change,

collect the folded green;

service, worship, patience

are dropped from week-day hands.

The count is made before

the ushers walk—aisle to altar;

He knows what’s left

in pockets boasting bulge for self.

He knows you do not sweep the house

to search the coin

of your first love.

2. Letter to Smyrna

Not all prisons you will suffer

are dungeon walled,

not all arena lions stalk with roar.

In catacombs

above the ground,

where death

is parlored with bouquets;

sin still is sin,

death still is death,

with you the wine

at Satan’s wedding

to the world;

God’s marriage gift—your chains,

while you receive a crown.

3. To the Church at Pergamos

The food they offered to idols

they offer you;

for idols don’t break bread,

bear cross,

or leave the tomb.

You have your choice

of feasts—His soon to come.

You have your choice

of bread, and choice

erases names;

or writes them on a stone.

4. Message to Thyatira

Yours is the vineyard

in which they slew the Son,

where little foxes

spoil the grapes,

and idols chipped from sin

are pedestaled on lies

of Jezebel—who pleads,

“Give me your vineyard.”

Would she be satisfied?

Or do her foxes bear

the brands of fired hate

consuming those who yield.

Plant and prune—until

chariot wheels of His return

pass over her.

II. Easter As Hallucination

The Latin word that is the root of “hallucination” meant “to wander in thought” or “to utter nonsense.” The modern concept defines “hallucinations” as “subjective experiences that are consequences of mental processes, sometimes fulfilling a purpose in the individual’s mental life” (W. Keup, editor, Origin and Mechanisms of Hallucinations, 1970, p. v).

David Strauss in his famous Life of Jesus (1835) suggested that the recollection of Jesus’ teachings in the clear air of Galilee produced among some of the more emotional disciples hallucinations of Jesus appearing to them. In a more positive vein, Theodor Keim in his work on Jesus (1867–72) proposed that the basis of the Easter faith resulted from God-given “telegrams from heaven.”

Hallucinations do play a major role in religious cultures, but they are induced either by drugs or by the extreme deprivation of food, drink, and sleep (cf. E. Bourguignon, “Hallucination and Trance: An Anthropologist’s Perspective,” in Keup, p. 188). These factors were not present in the various appearances of the risen Christ to his disciples.

The details of the varied epiphanies of Christ, which in several cases were to more than one individual and on one occasion to more than 500, are not typical of hallucinations. A visual hallucination is a private event; it is by definition the perception of objects or patterns of light that are not objectively present (ibid., p. 181). The variety of conditions under which Christ appeared also militate against hallucination. The appearances to Mary Magdalene, to Cleopas, to the disciples on the shore of Galilee, to Paul on the road to Damascus, all differ in their circ*mstances. C. S. Lewis suggests:

And any theory of hallucination breaks down on the fact (and if it is invention it is the oddest invention that ever entered the mind of man) that on three separate occasions this hallucination was not immediately recognized as Jesus (Luke 24:13–31; John 20:15, 21:4) [Miracles, 1947, p. 153].

Hugh Schonfield in The Passover Plot (1966) concedes: “We are not dealing in the Gospels with hallucinations, with psychic phenomena or survival in the Spiritualist sense” (p. 159). He further remarks: “What emerges from the records is that various disciples did see somebody, a real living person. Their experiences were not subjective” (p. 173).

Finally, what rules out the theory of hallucinations is the fact that the disciples were thoroughly dejected at the death of Christ and were not, despite Christ’s predictions, expecting a resurrection of their leader. H. E. W. Turner remarks:

The disciples to whom they [the women] finally report do not believe for joy. There is here no avid clutching at any straw. Something quite unexpected had happened, rather than something longed for having failed to occur [Jesus, Master and Lord, 1960, p. 368].

III. Easter As History

A. An Existential Concept?

It has become common in circles that find the supernatural aspects of the Resurrection incredible to place an existential interpretation on the Easter event. According to Bultmann’s thinking, “Jesus ist auferstanden ins Kerygma”—Jesus arose in the faith and the preaching of the disciples. For Emil Brunner the Resurrection is not an event that “can be fitted into the succession of historical events”; it is a fact only if it has taken place “for us.” Karl Barth is more positive though still ambiguous in affirming that the Resurrection is a real event though inaccessible to historical investigation. Barth denies any connection between the appearances of Christ listed in First Corinthians 15 and the Resurrection, for if these should be brought within the context of history, the Resurrection “must share in its obscurity and error and essential questionableness.”

In a recent conference held at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Professor Samuel Sandmel of Hebrew Union College made the following suggestion to Christians:

I think, if I understand right, the issue about the resurrection which has preoccupied us this afternoon stems from the fact that what was once readily credible is in our environment not credible.… If I were a Christian, I think I would not be dismayed by the idea of resurrection. I think I would [find simple prose] that would say: Here is a message that has to do with man’s potential perfection.… I would not let this array of values suffer because one element—in view of the present environment—has to be interpreted allegorically or be divested of its pristine meaning and given a different meaning. The world too badly needs Christianity at its best [D. G. Miller and D. Y. Hadidian, editors, Jesus and Man’s Hope, 1971, p. 324],

B. A Historical Question?

It is certainly not to be denied that there must be a personal decision for the Resurrection to be meaningful to us as individuals, and that the Resurrection of Christ transcends ordinary history in its significance. But what is at issue is whether the Resurrection of Christ is rooted in history as an objective event or is simply a creation of the subjective faith of the disciples.

Some demur that to make the Resurrection a question of historical research would be to assume that God’s ways are open to our observation. But is not this indeed a distinctive feature of God’s revelation as recorded in both the Old and the New Testament? Others object that since historical judgments can never achieve absolute certainty, they should not be the basis of our faith.

To this fallacious argument Peter Carnley replies:

The important thing is that it is not legitimate to argue that faith cannot be based on any historical judgments or must be totally independent of historical research and autonomous, because no historical judgment is ever justifiably claimed with certainty [S. W. Sykes and J. P. Clayton, editors, Christ, Faith and History, 1972, p. 189],

That is, historians deal not in certainties but in probabilities, but this does not render historical investigation without value for the question of the Resurrection. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association, Kenneth Scott Latourette concluded with these words:

The historian, be he Christian or non-Christian, may not know whether God will fully triumph within history. He cannot conclusively demonstrate the validity of the Christian understanding of history. Yet he can establish a strong probability for the dependability of its insights [“The Christian Understanding of History,” The American Historical Review, LIV (1949), 276].

As J. C. O’Neill has argued:

It will immediately be clear that in asserting that the resurrection is an historical question I have not been asserting that an historian as historian can establish that Jesus rose from the dead. The historian in this case can only show whether or not the evidence makes it at all plausible to assert that Jesus rose from the dead [Sykes and Clayton, op. cit., p. 217].

[To be continued.]

In this issue John Huffman has a word on what we can learn from Watergate; Editor-at-large Edwin Yamauchi begins a two-part substantive article on the resurrection; Norman Hope asks whether Nicodemus was a coward; and Associate Editor Harold Brown tackles the question, “When does the portrayal of evil become participation in it?”

As a former professor of missions I find the article by Donald Hoke and the lead editorial, both on the upcoming Lausanne congress, and also the charts of North American missionary outreach in another editorial, right in rhythm with my own heartbeat. I believe with all my mind and heart that the primary business of the Church and every Christian is to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every creature. And we can do it, no matter how dark and difficult the day, if we are willing to go, give, and pray. My prayer is: “God, awaken your Church and send your people to the ends of the earth with the Gospel.”

In company with eighty intrepid fellow believers, I saw the old year out and the new year in at Bach’s church in Leipzig, East Germany. (Correction: the German Democratic Republic, since the latest official policy is to emphasize the existence of this separate state, now a member of the United Nations, and no longer to favor expressions suggesting a divided Germany that will one day be reunited. So passes the Bismarkian ideal of a unified Germany.) This was my eighth sojourn in the DDR, and my visits have spanned a decade. I know the geography of Luther country, from Eisenach and the Wartburg Castle to Eislcben and Wittenberg, better than the geography of the Chicago suburbs, and have several dear friends who are citizens of that most rigid of all Eastern-bloc nations.

What continues to amaze me most about American evangelicals’ attitudes toward Communist lands is a recurring naivete. Example: before the current trip I received letters from more than one well-meaning person asking if I could smuggle in Bibles that they would supply, since “the Scriptures are not allowed by the Marxists.” In point of fact, there is absolutely no prohibition of Bible-reading or Bible ownership in the DDR, and attractive, inexpensive editions of the Bible in several German translations can be purchased.

To be sure, there is pressure against the Church and against the Gospel, but it is much more subtle than the burning of Bibles. Proselytizing is quite definitely discouraged, and a Billy Graham campaign would be inconceivable. What constitutes proselytizing, however, varies widely according to the severity of current state policy, which is cumbersomely administered in a top-heavy bureaucracy.

Generally, personal evangelism can be carried on with no negative repercussions. The Church cannot “meddle in politics,” which means, in practice, that it is encouraged to speak a good word for Angela Davis and company but must under no circ*mstances criticize Marxist theory or practice. This is a direct blow to the prophetic function of the Church, but it has at least one positive virtue: clergy are obliged to preach from the Bible instead of reading inflammatory manifestos that may or may not have anything to do with the Gospel!

Most unfortunately, young people are subjected to Marxist-atheistic indoctrination in the public schools (no private or parochial schools are allowed); and efforts are made to provide secular substitutes for the rites of the Church (“dedications” that ape baptism and confirmation). The idea is that if the young people give up Christianity, the Church will die without the necessity of messy purges.

However, as always, the anti-Christic opposition displays its fundamental weakness of arrogant overconfidence. Church attendance is admittedly low in the DDR, but not particularly lower than it is in western Europe—and those who do attend are hardly doing so to gain social status. Some East German pastors regard the current situation as a blessing, since it has rid the Church of dead wood and hangers-on. Moreover, the theology from the pulpit is almost always orthodox and biblical these days: theological liberalism is a luxury that no church in crisis, with its back to the wall, can afford.

The most dangerous aspect of the American evangelical stereotype of the religious situation in Marxist lands is that it sees the East as black and the West as white, much as in an old Western movie the bad guys (in black hats) were clearly distinguished from the good guys (in white hats). The Eastern-bloc countries are supposed to be the materialistic, atheistic ones, as opposed to “God-fearing” America and its allies. This, of course, is nonsense, and the nature of the nonsense can be well seen by two parallel illustrations, one from East and one from West.

On returning home from the DDR, I found in my mail the 1974 New Year’s greeting card from the regime’s Zentralantiquariat (Centralized Antiquarian Book Dealer), from which I have bought a number of ancient theological tomes. This year the card displayed an attractive woodcut of a window partially open to the morning sun, accompanied by a quotation from Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, author of Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage, whose last years (1948–56) were spent in East Berlin as director of The Berliner Ensemble. I translate:

Pleasures: The first glance out of the window in the morning. The rediscovery of an old book. Snow. The changing seasons. The newspaper. One’s dog. The dialectic. Showers and swimming. Classical music. Comfy shoes. Modern music. Travels. Singing. Friendship.

Materialistic? Not in the narrow sense of the term, for genuinely human values are emphasized. But tragically secular, for the limits of the world establish the limits of Brecht’s list.

In reality, a newspaper reminds one that Koheleth was right after all: there is nothing new under the sun, and the human experience apart from God is vexation, not pleasure. Even François Villon read the deeper message of the snow—its terrible fragility, mirroring the terrible fragility of human life: “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” One’s beloved dog dies, never to return. The dialectic, as a formal principle, can more readily lead to Orwell’s 1984 than to the classless society. And what good is the sun of a new year if increasing entropy will eventually bring the universe to heat-death? Without the Sun of righteousness, all is vanity.

The same mail brought the latest issue of the New Yorker, and one of its cartoons shows a middle-class, middle-age American husband lecturing to his wife in their living room. He points to a blackboard where he has written the following sequence: “Mortgage paid. Solvent. Fully insured. Kids OK—on their own. We have our health. We have each other. Total: HAPPINESS.” Says his wife: “Would you run through that once again, please, Walter?” But no matter how many times Walter runs through it, it comes out the same: a secularism, divorced from eternity, differing in no significant way from Brecht’s conception of happiness.

We might as well admit it. East side and West side are committed to secularistc goals, and all around the town childish human beings are singing ring-around-the-rosy while London bridge is falling down. The trouble comes from satisfaction with earthly cities and objectives when we ought to be seeking “the better City, that is the heavenly one, which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”

To strike deeper than pleasure and happiness to true joy, one must learn the lesson taught in Neander’s great chorale hymn, which we sang in Bach’s church in Leipzig as the chimes rang in a new year of grace: “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation! O my soul, praise Him, for He is thy Health and Salvation!”