Page 5831 – Christianity Today (2024)

Let Bygones Be Bygones?

In the wake of Leonid Brezhnev’s visit to the United States, a large question demands attention: Has the Soviet Union discarded some of the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism, or are Brezhnev and company assuming an expediency role temporarily until such time as they can once again perform as true heirs of Marx and Lenin?

Regarding “present-day society,” i.e., capitalistic society, Lenin said: “… we must make it our business to stimulate in the minds of those who are dissatisfied only with [particular] … conditions the idea that the whole political system is worthless” (Lenin, Selected Works, 1943, II, 103). “… In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false …” (ibid., VII, 130). “… For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property, but only its annihilation …” (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 1955, I, 110).

According to Lenin it is legitimate to use “all sorts of strategems, manoeuvres and illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges …” (Selected Works, II, 62). “… Loyalty to the ideas of Communism must be combined with the ability to make all the necessary practical compromises, to ‘tack,’ to make agreements, zigzags, retreats and so on to accelerate … the inevitable friction, quarrels, conflicts and complete disintegration …” (ibid., X, 138).

The Communist Manifesto says: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution” (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, I, 65). “A Marxist,” says Lenin, “is one who extends the acceptance of the class struggle to the acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Lenin, Selected Works, VII, 33). And Stalin in his book The Foundation of Leninism (Moscow, 1953, p. 51) says: “… The dictatorship of the proletariat is the rule—unrestricted and based on force—of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.…”

These few quotations from the founding fathers of Communism need to be weighed against the agreements signed by Brezhnev and his televised speech to the American people. It is quite clear that either Brezhnev is an arch deceiver and a very dangerous enemy of the whole civilized world, or Soviet Communism has renounced in fact if not by statement the cardinal principles that underlie Marxism-Leninism.

We would like to think, and indeed we pray, that the Soviet Communists have really changed their thinking and that their actions are a literal repudiation of Marxism even if they cannot say this for the record. Time alone will give us the answer to this question. The Chinese have consistently accused the Soviets of betraying Marxist principles, and we know from experience that people often pay lip service to beliefs that they no longer take seriously.

While we wait to see if the leopard has changed his spots, we had better not let down our guard. We should be prepared for the possibility that Brezhnev may be using all of this as a strategem until the time comes to make the kill.

We should not expect more of Brezhnev than we expect and often do not get from Christian leaders. Need we remind ourselves that New England Congregationalism was decimated in the Unitarian defection of the nineteenth century, when hundreds of trinitarian churches were subverted and stolen by apostates. Moreover, every great denomination has in it ministers who do not believe their historic creeds and who yet remain in their pulpits to subvert and to destroy what their ordination vows bind them to support. If these deceivers were ethical they would give up their churches and their seminary chairs.

The United States is gambling that Brezhnev is sincere and is telling the truth. If he isn’t, there will be no enduring peace in our time.

Help That Isn’T

In decisions handed down last month, the U. S. Supreme Court seems to have upheld quite firmly the principle that prohibits direct appropriation of public funds for parochial education at the elementary and secondary levels. This is a principle that has served well the interests of the American people, both religious and nonreligious. The churches of the United States have certainly been none the worse for it; indeed, there is reason to think their prosperity has stemmed at least in part from their having to depend entirely upon private financial undergirding (unlike churches in many other countries that are subsidized in one way or another by the government).

With the cost of education rising so rapidly, there is a great temptation for churches to appeal to the government for help. Such aid could temporarily ease cash-flow problems, but the long-term effects in church-state entanglements would do far more harm than good.

These latest court rulings struck down several parochaid programs in New York and Pennsylvania, including those that provided tax benefits and tuition reimbursem*nt for parents of parochial school children. The rulings represent an especially gratifying victory for Glenn Archer and C. Stanley Lowell of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who have labored diligently for more than a generation.

Little Things

Several months ago, handicapped people from many parts of the United States descended on Washington to air grievances and to demand more consideration from social planners. The government took little official notice of their mini-march at the time, but within the last few weeks there has been action that they will welcome. As streets are rebuilt atop the national capital’s forthcoming subway, curbs are being beveled at pedestrian crossings, making wheelchair travel much easier. Curbs are also being altered in front of large buildings, and ramps erected where there are steps. These are the sort of things that should have been done long ago. Why do they require street demonstrations to initiate? Perhaps if the churches of America had shown the way in their own architecture, progress would have come sooner.

Sauce For The Goose

For a year now many Jews have been exercised about Key 73 and its program of “calling our continent to Christ.” To the extent that they fear Key 73 will put Jews under pressure to conform to Christianity, we have tried to reassure them, reiterating our conviction that the Gospel should be freely and clearly proclaimed, but not aggressively “sold” and certainly not imposed by force. But to the extent that they object to the very principle that Jews, as well as Gentiles, must be converted and believe the Gospel of Jesus the Messiah, we can only reply, lovingly but firmly, that conversion to Christ is of the essence of biblical Christianity, and that to object to the possibility of conversion is to deny both the religious freedom of the individual and the nature of Christianity itself.

Now we learn that the Central Conference of American Rabbis, representing Reform (i.e., the most liberal branch) Judaism, is sharpening its policies on mixed marriages, and demanding as a minimum that children of a mixed marriage be brought up as Jews and that efforts be made to convert the non-Jewish spouse. If even the most liberal Jews feel obliged to try to convert a non-Jewish spouse and to require a Jewish upbringing for children—a situation that necessarily involves a certain amount of emotional pressure—they ought to recognize the right of Christians to appeal to them.

Returned POW: How We Overcame

When one is dying from starvation, a bowl of sewer greens is a gift from God. Before every meal during my captivity, I offered a prayer of thanks. In the past, when others prayed my mind wandered over the day’s events or simply waited impatiently for the prayer to end. But in prison, grace was not a routine endured out of habit, guilt, or pressure. To thank God for life seemed the natural thing to do.

During those long periods of enforced reflection, it became so much easier to separate the important from the trivial, the worthwhile from the waste. For example, in the past, I usually worked or played hard on Sundays and had no time for church. For years Phyllis encouraged me to join the family at church. She never nagged or scolded—she just kept hoping. But I was too busy, too preoccupied, to spend one or two short hours a week thinking about the really important things.

Now the sights and sounds and smells of death were all around me. My hunger for spiritual food soon outdid my hunger for a steak. Now I wanted to know about that part of me that will never die. Now I wanted to talk about God and Christ and the church. But in Heartbreak solitary confinement there was no pastor, no Sunday-school teacher, no Bible, no hymn-book, no community of believers to guide and sustain me. I had completely neglected the spiritual dimension of my life. It took prison to show me how empty life is without God, and so I had to go back in my memory to those Sunday-school days in the Nogales Avenue Baptist Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma. If I couldn’t have a Bible and hymn-book, I would try to rebuild them in my mind.

I tried desperately to recall snatches of Scripture, sermons, the gospel choruses from childhood, and the hymns we sang in church. The first three dozen songs were relatively easy. Every day I’d try to recall another verse or a new song. One night there was a huge thunderstorm—it was the season of the monsoon rains—and a bolt of lightning knocked out the lights and plunged the entire prison into darkness. I had been going over hymn tunes in my mind and stopped to lie down and sleep when the rains began to fall. The darkened prison echoed with wave after wave of water. Suddenly, I was humming my thirty-seventh song, one I had entirely forgotten since childhood.

Showers of blessings,

Showers of blessing we need!

Mercy drops round us are falling,

But for the showers we plead.

I no sooner had recalled those words than another song popped into my mind, the theme song of a radio program my mother listened to when I was just a kid.

Heavenly sunshine, heavenly sunshine

Flooding my soul with glory divine.

Heavenly sunshine, heavenly sunshine.

Hallelujah! Jesus is mine!

Most of my fellow prisoners were struggling like me to rediscover faith, to reconstruct workable value systems. Harry Jenkins lived in a cell nearby during much of my captivity. Often we would use those priceless seconds of communication in a day to help one another recall Scripture verses and stories.

One day I heard him whistle. When the cell block was clear, I waited for his communication, thinking it to be some important news. “I got a new one,” he said. “I don’t know where it comes from or why I remember it, but it’s a story about Ruth and Naomi.” He then went on to tell that ancient story of Ruth following Naomi into a hostile new land and finding God’s presence and protection there. Harry’s urgent news was two thousand years old. It may not seem important to prison life, but we lived off that story for days, rebuilding it, thinking about what it meant, and applying God’s ancient words to our predicament.

Everyone knew the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-Third Psalm, but the camp favorite verse that everyone recalled first and quoted most often is found in the Book of John, third chapter, sixteenth verse: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” With Harry’s help I even reconstructed the seventeenth and eighteenth verses: “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

How I struggled to recall those Scriptures and hymns! I had spent my first eighteen years in a Southern Baptist Sunday school, and I was amazed at how much I could recall; regrettably, I had not seen then the importance of memorizing verses from the Bible or learning gospel songs. Now, when I needed them, it was too late. I never dreamed that I would spend almost seven years (five of them in solitary confinement) in a prison in North Vietnam or that thinking about one memorized verse could have made a whole day bearable. One portion of a verse I did remember was, “Thy word have I hid in my heart.” How often I wished I had really worked to hide God’s Word in my heart. I put my mind to work. Every day I planned to accomplish certain tasks. I woke early, did my physical exercises, cleaned up as best I could, then began a period of devotional prayer and meditation. I would pray, hum hymns silently, quote Scripture, and think about what the verses meant to me.

Remember, we weren’t playing games. The enemy knew that the best way to break a man’s resistance was to crush his spirit in a lonely cell. In other wars, some of our POWs after solitary confinement lay down in a fetal position and died. All this talk of Scripture and hymns may seem boring to some, but it was the way we conquered our enemy and overcame the power of death around us.—From In the Presence of Mine Enemies by Howard and Phyllis Rutledge with Mel and Lyla White. Copyright © 1973 by Fleming H. Revell Company. Used by permission.

The ‘Principle’ Of Relativity

For years some supposedly “enlightened” members of our society have ridiculed “fundamentalists,” “traditionalists,” and “obscurantists” who believe in moral absolutes. Everything depends on the circ*mstances, they say: the time, the place, the people involved, and so on. But now that the United States Supreme Court—wisely, we believe—has ruled that producers and promoters of p*rnography do not enjoy an absolute right to make and market their wares but must be subject to the (relative!) community standards of decency and taste, there is suddenly a great hue and cry about the “absolute” principle of freedom of speech. How strange it is that people who have spent so much energy telling us there are no absolutes suddenly feel themselves threatened by a little relativism in the wrong place! An absolute, it seems, has crept in unawares and is not so outrageous after all.

Christians are committed to the principle that there are moral absolutes, although we know that our human institutions, both secular and religious, will never be able to exemplify them perfectly. The Supreme Court’s decision—although certainly not made on a religious basis—allows communities in America to restrict some of the grosser forms of exploitation of human sexuality through p*rnography. It would seem that local governments are being given authority to evaluate the relative merits of certain forms of entertainment and weigh them against possible social harm they may cause. What could be more reasonable to a moral relativist? Coming from the quarters it does, the uproar about the violated “absolute” of free expression sounds more contrived than convincing.

Feast Or Famine?

In his June 13 allocution on inflation, President Nixon stated, inter alia: “One of the major reasons for the rise in food prices at home is that there is now an unprecedented demand abroad.… In allocating the products of America’s farms … we must put the American consumer first. Therefore, I have decided that a new system for export controls on food products is needed.”

The President refrained from mentioning the fact—perhaps irrelevant to his major concern—that one big reason foreigners are buying more is that two official devaluations and continuing deterioration of the U. S. dollar enable foreign countries to purchase more of our food for the same expenditure of their money. Somewhat more relevant to the domestic situation is a second fact, which the President also left unmentioned: since foreign purchasers tend to spurn many of our industrial products, unless we sell them more, not less, food, we will have drastically less foreign exchange with which to pay for the imports we have come to expect, and in some cases to need. But over and above the problem created by foreigners who are able to buy more and more food from us (for less and less money) there is the problem faced by those nations that have no food and no money.

Americans everywhere—including the staff of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, we hasten to admit—grumble at the price of beef. But Americans are consuming per capita twice as much beef as they did in 1953 (today, over one hundred pounds a year, or over four ounces per person per day), and in 1953 Americans were by no means underfed. Moreover, in 1930 Americans spent 23.4 per cent of their incomes on food. Until recently the figure was 15.7 per cent.

Despite all the grumbling, in the industrialized nations of the West we eat far more than we need; overindulgence in food and drink, combined with a lack of physical activity, condemns millions of Americans to a sluggish and unhealthy existence. But there are countries, indeed, whole subcontinents, where hardly the barest minimum of food necessary to sustain life is available, and where there are no funds to purchase it from abroad. Maharashtra State in India has been in the midst of a terrible drought and famine, and even the onset of the monsoon will not bring immediate relief, as too many destitute farmers have forsaken their lands. In West Africa, an even more acute crisis has developed.

Americans are troubled—and justly so—at the increasingly bad image of the United States in the world at large: that of an affluent, self-indulgent, and fundamentally corrupt society. Of course, much in this stereotype is false and inaccurate. But defending the righteousness of America’s actions or pointing out that others are as bad or worse will not impress many in the world at large.

In his concluding peroration, President Nixon declared: “We are the best-clothed, best-fed, best-housed people in the world.” If that is true, and evidently it is, what justification—other than selfishness, or, more tactfully, enlightened self-interest—can we offer for continuing to “put the American consumer first”? One of the most familiar mandates in the Bible is the command to feed the hungry. Only a few Americans are hungry in the true meaning of the word—and some of those, because they are trying to reduce. But much of the rest of the world is hungry. The rest of the world certainly will not respect America for taking stern measures intended only to protect its current affluence.

This is a time for America and its leaders to look beyond their own immediate concerns, and create a new priority: not feeding the well-fed with quality meats, but feeding the hungry of the world. If the world is too big a challenge, then take a smaller portion of it. There will be problems of all kinds, of course—administrative, economic, and political. But if the attempt is made, they will be the problems of obedience, rather than of selfishness. And America will show that it has given thought to the prophet Micah’s warning: “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Christians And Others

To what extent should Christians be associated with the practices of other religions? The most common reply among our readers would probably be, “Not at all.” But the question merits some reflection.

The Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians firmly asserts that Christians are not to participate in the religious ceremonies of others (10:14–22). But what about attending religious weddings or funerals of adherents of other faiths? Or, for that matter, attending such ceremonies in professing Christian bodies that one deems heretical? What about visiting a Hindu or Mormon temple, a Buddhist shrine, a Muslim mosque? (Many North Americans are not aware of the perplexity that Christians in other lands may feel when their visiting co-religionists seemingly honor non-Christian religions by their tourist practices.) And to what extent, if any, can a Christian read about or observe occult and psychic phenomena without seeming to endorse some form of paganism?

After making his strong statement warning Christians to stay clear of religious entanglements, Paul immediately writes against an overly rigoristic application of this command. Much of the meat that people in Corinth ate had been, however perfunctorily, offered to idols before being sold. Paul says that when one buys from a butcher or goes to a non-believer’s for dinner, he is not to raise questions about whether the food has been through some pagan ceremony. Eat it and enjoy it, he says (10:25–27). Paul distinguishes between participation in pagan worship and incidental contact, in a nonreligious setting, with pagan cultural practices.

Quakers traditionally tried to avoid paganism more rigorously than other evangelicals. For example, they refused to speak of days of the Sun and the Moon and of the gods Saturn and Thor, using instead First Day, Second Day, and so on. It is hard to imagine that Paul would be as rigorous on this point.

Of course, Christians differ on what is a religious and what is a secular observance. Ancestor honor (or worship; the choice of terms is crucial) in China, emperor worship (or is it patriotism?) in Japan—these are but two major examples from our own time. Missionaries to China who lambasted anything they considered compromise with idolatrous cultural patterns by Chinese were offended when these same Chinese questioned the missionaries’ celebration of Christmas. Jehovah’s Witnesses say that saluting one’s national flag is idolatry. Orthodox Christians disagree, though undoubtedly the distinction between proper patriotism and idolatry of one’s country is not always so clearly made as it should be.

Though Christians cannot construct hard and fast rules as to which contacts with other religions are forbidden and which are permitted, they should be aware of the problem, sensitive to the feelings of their fellow Christians (10:23), and constantly open to God for light to distinguish, as Paul did, between communion with what is false and participation in secular practices that happen to have pagan antecedents.

In 1909 Reinhold Seeberg, a professor at the University of Berlin, wrote in his book Revelation and Inspiration:

The last few decades have witnessed the overthrow of a time-old wall, which for centuries had surrounded and protected the city of Protestant Christendom. Crumbling stones were removed, one after another; other stones were thereby loosened and fell out, until considerable portions of the bulwark gave way and all prospect of restoration was seen to be impracticable. It was resolved to remove the wall; some set to work with sighs, others with joy.

The wall to which I refer was the Verbal Inspiration of the Bible, the conviction that every word of Holy Scripture was given by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to the authors of the Old and New Testaments. It has disappeared as if in one night. No theologian of any repute now upholds it; it is no longer taught in the schools … [Harper, 1909].

If the learned professor were alive today he would learn to his chagrin that there are literally millions of evangelicals who believe that the Bible is the verbally inspired and infallible word of God. There are theologians of repute who believe this and there are numbers of schools in which it is taught.

Of course, there were in 1909 and there are today people who once believed the Bible to be infallible but have surrendered this viewpoint. Some of them take this stand regretfully, some take it arrogantly, and some delight in destroying what they believe to be a mere shibboleth.

Beyond a denial of biblical infallibility (which sometimes takes the form of believing that the Bible is trustworthy in its revelational parts but erroneous in non-revelational matters such as science and history), there are those who attribute fallibility to Jesus Christ. Albert Schweitzer in his book Out of My Life and Thought says: “Many people are shocked on learning that the historical Jesus must be accepted as ‘capable of error’ because the supernatural Kingdom of God, the manifestation of which He announced, did not appear.… He would … have set His face against those who would have liked to attribute to Him a divine infallibility.” Those who hold such a view must have the prescience to determine when Jesus spoke the truth and when he didn’t. But if as Seeberg said in 1909 the Bible was not verbally inspired, then there is no way of determining whether anything in the Bible is true. To build the Christian Church on such a foundation is not only hazardous but stupid.

We have had some interesting correspondence with people who would not buy what Seeberg and Schweitzer were selling. They believe the Bible to be the trustworthy Word of God. But then they go on to accept views that contradict this basic premise. One illustration will suffice.

One highly placed evangelical argues that there are two writers of Isaiah (some say three and some say four), though evangelicals have always accepted the unity of Isaiah. He asks, What difference does it make if we believe there were two Isaiahs so long as we believe that all of Isaiah is the Word of God? That’s a good question and deserves a satisfactory answer.

In John 12:37–41 Jesus quotes from Isaiah 53:1. He identifies the writer as “the prophet Isaiah,” although what he quotes is from the latter part of Isaiah and therefore, according to the two-Isaiah theory, was written by someone other than the Isaiah who wrote chapters 1–39. No exegete can deny from the Greek rendering that Jesus was speaking of the prophet Isaiah himself and was claiming that these were the words Isaiah wrote.

And so the answer to the question, What difference does it make who wrote it if you believe it is the Word of God?, is this: Either Jesus told a deliberate lie, or he was ignorant of the fact that Isaiah didn’t write what he quoted, or he accommodated himself to those who accepted the Isaianic tradition even though he knew better. In other words, this becomes a Christological problem in which Jesus is or is not making an accurate attribution, whatever the reason may be.

Now we think that Jesus’ affirmation that Isaiah was the author of chapter 53 is to be believed, and that the scholars who deny it are not to be believed. We will take the word of Jesus over that of Schweitzer or some other scholar. We should quickly add that even apart from the testimony of Jesus, for every scholarly argument in favor of the plurality of Isaiahs there is an argument against it. So in this matter no one is faced only with a choice between Jesus and some scholar; the choice is between one set of arguments that deny the authority and reliability of Jesus and another set that are consistent with his authority and reliability. It does make a difference whether there was one Isaiah or two. And it won’t wash to say, “I believe there were two Isaiahs, but I also believe that all of Isaiah is the inspired and trustworthy Word of God.”

Among evangelicals today there is a raging battle about the infallibility or inerrancy of the Bible. This is true in the denominations, large and small, and in some so-called evangelical colleges and theological seminaries. The wall has crumbled in some places and is crumbling in others. We would like to reassert that CHRISTIANITY TODAY (and there are three Ph.D.s on the editorial staff) still affirms without hesitation or apology, as it has for seventeen years, that the Bible is the infallible, trustworthy Word of God, the only rule of faith and practice.

Waiting For The Answer

The subject of a television interview program responded with mistaken grace to one question by admitting, “I really don’t know the answer to that.”

Looks of horror swept across the faces of the panel of questioners at this heresy: an expert without an answer!

They immediately began to press him for an answer, any answer—a guess. The expert finally weakened and gave a qualified guess—the accuracy of which could be neither challenged nor corroborated—and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

A question no one could answer once arose in a Bible-study group I was attending. Before the next meeting I researched the question (that’s not to suggest I’m always so diligent). However, at the next session I found that the question was no longer important to anyone.

We are an impatient generation. Like little children we want the answer now. It matters less that the answer be right than that there be an answer.

That’s why we love experts so. They save us the trouble of laborious effort to discover the truth. They have immediate answers. If the answers turn out to be wrong, we simply adjust ourselves and head off in another direction.

It seems to me that the answer “I don’t know” is an honorable one. “I don’t know but I’ll try to find out” is even better. Unfortunately, by the time one has the truth the forum may have disappeared. The newspaper reporter may be long gone by the time the politician has the facts to answer his question. The television interview program will have a new victim next week. Most viewers will hardly remember who was on the program last week, much less want to hear the results of his research. Even the Bible-study group may have a different constituency next week.

He who gives an answer carries the day—even if the answer is wrong.

In Acts Luke comments that the Jews of Berea were more noble than those of Thessalonica simply because they listened to Paul’s preaching and took time daily to examine the Scriptures to see if these things were so.

We need to be like the Berean Jews, seeking not just answers but truth—and willing to wait for it.

EUTYCHUS V

HAPPENING

The perceptive and prophetic article by Senator Mark Hatfield (“The Vulnerability of Leadership”) in your June 22 issue merits renewal of my subscription. (Such were not my intentions.…) Senator Hatfield has donned the prophet’s mantle at a time when the Church has, for the most part, discarded it, and stands mute in an allegiance to the state that rightfully belongs only to God. [His] warning needs to be taken seriously: “For the more one gains power, whether in business, economics, government, or religion, the greater the temptation to believe that he stands beyond the scope of transcendent judgment.” It has happened before; it is happening now; it can happen again.

WILLARD STARK

Lutheran Church of Our Savior

Bethany, Okla.

I hasten to commend you for the lead editorial (“The Christian as Patriot”) and for Senator Hatfield’s article. If evangelical Christians had been writing, speaking, and acting out the content of these two articles over the years, their value as total citizens to the nation would have been more evident.

EDWARD MCCLURG

Seattle, Wash.

My personal thanks to you and to Senator Hatfield.… We have been missing this note in our national life far too long and are grateful to you and Senator Hatfield for supplying it. Perhaps we may still be led to repent and it may not be too late.

BOYD NELSON

Elkhart, Ind.

During the present time, leaders seem to be more vulnerable in some respects than in the past. Instant communication of the media makes possible instant reactions of the masses to everyday crises. As a result, the leaders experience pressures unknown in the past. It is imperative, therefore, that they go to the Lord in individual repentance first, as Senator Hatfield suggests, and in corporate repentance using Second Chronicles 7:14 as a guide. CHRISTIANITY TODAY is to be commended for printing this timely and scholarly article.

MRS. CLARENCE LLOYD

Maryville, Mo.

BIBLE BRIDGE-BUILDING

I am writing to express my pleasure at your publication of the article “The Text of the New Testament and Modern Translations” by Gordon D. Fee (June 22). It is a mark of the maturity of your faith that an article such as this is published in a magazine founded on the belief that the Bible is the revealed Word of God.… One of the values of Dr. Fee’s article is that it insists upon the relativity of each of the various responsible translations and versions of the Bible, while at the same time maintaining the usefulness of all of them. Too much ink has been spilled in arguments over words, or in esoteric philosophical disputes regarding the accuracy or authenticity of this or that manuscript, version, or translation of the Bible. The important thing, for Christians, must remain the truth John (and his Lord) tried to communicate so many years ago: the ultimate worth of the Scriptures lies not in themselves but in their witness to the living relationship established between God and man through Jesus Christ and the Spirit of Truth.

Whatever may have been his intentions in writing, I take Dr. Fee’s article to be a helpful contribution, from the conservative evangelical standpoint, to the building of bridges of understanding between evangelicals who believe in biblical inerrancy and some of the rest of us Christians who do not. At the same time, some evangelical readers of his article may be led to temper somewhat their uninformed arrogance in proclaiming the inflexible righteousness of their particular views on doctrine, as these views are derived from particular interpretations of isolated Bible words, phrases, or propositions. A mature understanding of the difficulties of handling fairly the biblical materials will lead an honest student to a healthy humility. This, in turn, may lead to increased mutual sympathy, and ultimately to fuller fellowship between committed Christians of differing views.

PHILIP J. WEILER

United Presbyterian Church

Crookston, Minn.

COMFORTING SENSE

Thank you for the piece on original sin (Eutychus and His Kin, “There Ain’t No Good in Men,” June 22). I remember the great joy of relief and the praises I sang on that day, not so long ago, when I discovered on my own (at least, my Help was not visible to my eyes) that sweet doctrine!

I had never accepted the bullwhip use of it on my or any other’s back. That is, as being held to accountability for my born state of un- or im-perfection. But because I was an eager and ignorant pagan sincerely seeking a better estate, I was beginning to get a crackle-glaze of psychosomatic tremors (from which I shall likely never wholly recover until I am beyond the Wall of the World) from the combined exhortations (canned and face-to-face) of the Self and Collective Reformists, Christian Scientist, Jehovah’s Witness, Herbert W. Armstrong-ist, Socialist, Communist, and, to say the truth now, most of what goes under the heading of Christianity in these parlous times.

I knew, all too intimately, that I wasn’t good! On the other hand, I had a deep tap root of intuition, a huge distrust of all Reformists. But my makeup is such that I mistrust judging when I don’t know what it is I am judging.

So, self-inflicted by all the going “pernicious nonsense” about “human perfectibility,” you may imagine how, like a bird free of the Pharisees, I sang and danced (literally) for joy of the doctrine—I knew the fact too cruelly well! Me reform that? So now I fly like a bird, but a wounded bird. So thanks to Eutychus for comfort and good sense.

MRS. LOWELL GREGORY

Arlington, Tex.

FOR GENEROSITY

There is nothing in our recent history to justify the characterization of Reverend William S. Coffin as the “longtime opponent of the Yale Christian Fellowship” (News, “American Baptists: Piety Revisited,” June 22). In the last few years of significant growth of our fellowship, we have had little but cooperation and encouragement from the Chaplains’ Office. And while I suspect that at times Mr. Coffin has let his “generosity outstrip his judgment” in his dealings with us, there is certainly something to be said for generosity.

SCOTT T. O’BRIEN

Past President

Yale Christian Fellowship

New Haven, Conn.

FOR WHOM TO MOURN

It was with more than passing interest I read your news item (Religion in Transit, June 8) about the torture murder by Satan worshipers in Daytona Beach. The victim was our oldest son. While we miss him, we do not mourn him, because he had accepted Christ as his Saviour. We are told in Romans 8:35–37, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?… We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.… In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” We do mourn for the young people who have fallen prey to the wiles of Satan, although we have been warned about this sort of activity in First Timothy 4:1 (“Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of dreams”). Who will take to them the good news of First John 1:9—“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness”?

MRS. ROBERT L. COCHRAN

Fresno, Calif.

BEYOND FACTIONS AND CLICHÉS

John Warwick Montgomery spent too much spleen on religion reporters (Current Religious Thought, June 8), characterizing those of us reporting church and synagogue in the secular press as a monolithic group delighting in the agonies of a church whose members no longer agree.

First, anyone reading CHRISTIANITY TODAY or other journals on religion would know that the professional group, Religion Newswriters Association, is as heterogeneous as Bill Willoughby of the Washington Star-News and Les Kinsolving of that and other syndicated papers. Second, the Missouri Synod is a good story because some vital, not simply important, issues are involved, as we try to report. Third, church/synagogue conventions do not elicit yawns from either reporters who choose to report them or editors and publishers who pay them to do so. And last, your correspondent is so partisan—in a story where either side is difficult to pin down and report with any balance—that he falls into the trap of executing the bearer of news because it is bad.

Rather than take the tack he did in his attack on reporters of religion … he might have read more widely and found how many reporters work to describe the LCMS factions beyond the clichés and labels. He uses them with greater facility than we do, while attributing this to others. This is just one of the complex stories many of us will try to report this year and next. It appeals to us because two men of integrity and wit, J. A. O. Preus and John Tietjen, are speaking for historic views and contemporary anxieties.

BEN L. KAUFMAN

Religion Reporter

The Cincinnati Enquirer

Cincinnati, Ohio

WHAT EFFECTS?

With regard to William Kornfield’s article, “The Early-Date Genesis Man” (June 8), it is regrettable that due consideration has not been given to what effects the biblical flood might have had. Given the possible effects of this flood upon the total nature of our world, one must raise the question of why so little, if any, consideration of this flood when trying to bring the Bible and science together. The dating methods themselves may have given the most misleading information presented in this article due to no consideration of the flood.

W. A. SCHREMP, JR.

Sterling Heights, Mich.

Plaudits on William Kornfield’s long-overdue article. As an evangelical and an anthropologist myself, I view it as a healthy sign when such emotionally charged topics as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man can be discussed in the forum of a Christian magazine. Skeletal evidence of human remains 50,000 years old in association with cultural artefacts are so numerous that they can’t be swept under the rug.…

Kornfield, however, opens up a real bag of worms. It is no trick in making Adam a Neanderthal (who was a hunter), but the trick is getting Cain and Abel out of the cave to becoming an agriculturist and a shepherd respectively (Genesis 4). Using evidence from Shanidar Cave in Iraq (Solecki, 1963), layer D shows Neanderthal skeletal remains at 44,000 B.C. whereas layer B1 reveals the first signs of animal and plant domestication and is dated at 8600 B.C. In fact, full-fledged farming and herding are more precisely dated at such typesites as Jarmo and Ali Kosh at 7000 B.C. (Braidwood, 1967; Wright, Jr., 1967). If Cain and Abel are the legitimate children of Neanderthal Adam, we have a real problem if our purpose is to reconcile Scripture and scientific theory. Other problems, as severe as this one, abound in many of the accounts recorded in Genesis 4–11 as they are compared with the archeological record. This is no news to anyone who has taken the time to critically study the data, which are now fairly well systematized by archeologists working in the Near East.

The answer to this perplexing set of problems is obviously not in attempting to reconcile scientific theory with Scripture. Kornfield hints at what many feel to be the key to understanding the early chapters of Genesis: the “mind-set” of those who recorded this primeval history. Using a different literacy genre than ours, and possessing a different linguistic world-view (Whorf, 1941; Hoijer, 1951), it is only to be expected that the account would be written far different than if a modern-day archeologist wrote it. But this in no way makes it any less the revealed Word of God, the Word given by the Holy Spirit, who stands above both ancient and modern versions of science.

GARTH D. LUDWIG

Hope Lutheran Church

Upper St. Clair, Pa.

IN AGREEMENT

In your article “Demythologizing the Indonesian Revival (March 2) by Ed Plowman, he included a statement Dr. Pearl Englund had made about me, Frank Selan—Mel Tari’s brother-in-law. Dr. Englund made it sound like I disagreed with the story in Mel’s book about Jesus multiplying the food, that Mel had exaggerated the truth. According to her story, Jesus did not miraculously create new food, but merely satisfied us with the little food we have had. Actually these are two different stories, and both are true. The Lord had done this miracle many times in many different ways. I have never met or talked with Dr. Englund; furthermore, I’m in full agreement with everything Mel said in Like A Mighty Wind. I have seen the Holy Spirit do some tremendous things in my life and the lives of many others, like changing water into wine, enabling us to walk safely on the deep river, raising dead people to life, healing thousands of people, especially “the greatest miracle of all,” sinners redeemed and changed daily into the image of Christ. So, I’ll be the last person on earth to discredit the work of the Holy Spirit in my country. I can never go along with the “unbelieving Christians” who try to water down or explain away His precious and wonderful power.

FRANZ SELAN

Jayapuna, Irian Jaya, Indonesia

FROM SPARK TO TORCH

To Dr. Brown, associate editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, high commendation for the live spark he strikes in his review of The Dust of Death by Os Guinness (June 8). His position is well taken in referring to the author’s offered cures for evils in modern culture as “a mixture of pious generalizations and trivial illustrations” and in his plea for further followthrough. This special emphasis by our foremost evangelical periodical on the much over-looked need for more practical, in-depth, Christ-centered guidelines for solving today’s problems is indeed heartening. May this tiny spark grow to many blazing torches.

CHARLES W. JAMISON

Santa Barbara, Calif.

GLOWING EMBERS?

The news story “Revival Afterglow” in your May 11 issue was, to say the least, an unfortunate reflection on revival. While I personally am not conversant with all the facts of the Abbotsford church, I do not believe revival was responsible for the split. More careful research will undoubtedly reveal that carnality rather than revival is usually the cause of splits.… Revival is not an afterglow, like the dying embers of a once brightly burning fire; it is a present reality in the life of a believer who is walking in obedience to Jesus Christ his Lord and Master.

L. R. HAMM

Hillsdale Alliance Church

Regina, Saskatchewan

DEVOTED

I like the article on the Institute of Basic Youth Conflicts (“Bill Gothard’s Institute,” May 25). I think that Bill Gothard intends to do good, but his approach is so absolutist and authoritative that he ends up doing a great deal of harm.… A professor at Moody Bible Institute told me of two Jewish young people who after attending Gothard’s institute, left Bible college because their Jewish parents could not approve of their attending Moody. What scares me the most is the absolute devotion that the people have who attend the institute. There is something positively gnostic about their attitude.

Corte Madera, Calif.

MOISHE ROSEN

SOME NEWS OPINIONS

Under the heading of “News” you cover the event in the British Isles known as SPRE-E ’73 (May 25). However, in this news article, two opinions are expressed in the closing paragraphs.… In each case “one evangelical minister” expresses some negative viewpoint of this event.…

May I suggest that these two paragraphs might equally have been written as follows (with a slight amendment of the budget—for accuracy’s sake!):

As for expenditures, a SPRE-E budget of £348,000 ($870,000) (all but £168,000 of it to come from delegates’ registration and accommodation fees) has raised some eyebrows. “Nevertheless,” says the Reverend David Bubbers, Vicar of Emmanuel Church, Northwood, “the size of the budget should be looked at in the light of the number of participants it is hoped to involve.… The argument that the income of missionary societies will be put at risk assumes that the Christian public is already giving up to the New Testament hilt. Is such an assumption justified?”

The major complaint heard, however, is that planners have imposed SPRE-E ’73 upon British evangelicals without seeking any consultation or advice outside the Graham organization’s inner circle. Rowlandson answers this complaint by saying that consultation was in fact sought “so far as the limited time allowed.” The Reverend Ronald Goulding, secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, says: “There will be a great number of young people who will respond to this irrespective of whether the clergy do or do not, and I believe that only good can come from it. You can be quite sure that we will do all we can in helping towards the success of this great Christian adventure.”

In rewriting these paragraphs, I have named those who have made the statements alleged to them. I believe that this permits a proper assessment of what they say and, at the same time, allows the reader to assess the credence and the weight “behind the argument.” At the same time, it expresses a positive approach which is, surely, the New Testament approach.

M. L. ROWLANDSON

General Director

SPRE-E 73

London, England

For one who was there, the Billy Graham Crusade in Korea, May 30–June 3, may well have been the spiritual high of a lifetime. More than three million people gathered in the five-day Seoul crusade, and a hundred thousand stood to make decisions for Christ, something that had to be seen to be believed. Add to this the additional million and a half that we associate evangelists were privileged to address and you will begin to realize the magnitude of what was going on. The final June 3 meeting in the Plaza at Seoul, at which 1.1 million were present, was surely the largest crowd ever assembled to hear the Gospel preached.

What brought it all about? An analysis reveals many factors. Korea is a distinctive nation. It has been called the Israel of the Far East, and its people the Irish of the Orient. Confucianism has provided Korea’s cultural and ethical basis for the last two thousand years, as it has for China. In the sixth century A.D. Buddhism swept through the country, and it remains today nominally the strongest religion in Korea. Christianity stands second in numbers, though in vigor and influence it easily surpasses Buddhism. With all the sects and peripheral cults included, Christians make up 13 per cent of the population, with evangelicals prominent among them.

Half of the Korean evangelicals are Presbyterians; they are followed by Methodists, Holiness groups, Baptists, Pentecostals, and Anglicans. While the institutional church in many other lands is either at a standstill or back-pedaling, evangelical churches in Korea are among the fastest growing in the world, currently doubling in numbers each decade despite their strict membership requirements. (Many churches, Dr. Samuel Moffett told us, do not receive an applicant until he has led someone else to Christ.) The most effective publicity Graham received was not the generous press coverage but by word of mouth.

Recent population growth was a major factor in the magnitude of the crusade. In Korea there are 350 people to the square mile, fourteen times as many as in the United States, even though 80 per cent of the country is mountainous. Twenty years ago, at the end of the Korean War, Seoul had only a million people, but now it has exploded into the eighth-largest city in the world, with 6.1 million people. Many of these are from North Korea, from which five million refugees fled. I spoke on the concluding Sunday morning to 11,000 in (and around) the largest Presbyterian church in the world, Young Nak, the bulk of whose charter membership is made up of North Koreans. Their stories of valor amid surrounding martyrdom could fill a spellbinding book. They have a saying: “Christians are like nails: the more one hits them, the farther in one drives them.”

A Methodist superintendent minister told me that 10 per cent of the average congregation of any evangelical denomination attends five o’clock prayer meetings every morning. In Taegu, where I conducted a seven-day crusade, a reported 27,000 gathered on a Sunday afternoon during prayer time—all of them praying audibly at once.

There was undoubtedly an economic factor to the crusade story in a country that has an amazing 14 per cent annual growth of its GNP. Korea was 80 per cent rural, but now urban dwellers have surged into a narrow lead in the population of the country. Current wages in Seoul are about fifteen cents an hour, which sounds minimal, but with the labor force working up to seventy-two hours per week, it is enough for food, housing, and clothing better than what the Koreans have known in the past. Not many have cars, but bicycles, motorcycles, buses, trains, and even planes are seen packed in sardine style. There are cameras and transistor radios everywhere, though television is still a luxury item. The people are mobile and very receptive to public gatherings.

Politically the time was ripe. Although President Park is not even nominally Christian, he has said, “One man, one religion,” and he reckons that the best bulwark against Communism is personal religion. Consequently, the former army general’s word made the huge Plaza (the site where a government installation is to stand) available at nominal cost to the crusade.

Additionally, there is no anti-Americanism in the Republic of Korea. Dr. Stan Wilson, veteran Presbyterian statesman there, told us that there is scarcely a Korean over thirty-five who has not seen the body of a North American killed while defending Korean freedom.

Billy Graham is a familiar figure to Koreans, for he came to them in the middle of a cold winter during the Korean War. The people have not forgotten that Ruth Graham was educated in Korea and that Billy visited their battlefields, preached in their packed if bombed-out churches, and commiserated with them in the streets.

In his preaching, Graham stuck to the Word of God, with emphasis on parables and pictorial language that reflected the land, to which the people feel such an attachment. When it came time for the invitation, there simply was no way to invite inquirers to come forward. There were no aisles, and the people were closely packed. Graham asked those wishing to make decisions for Christ to stand up, and in each segment of the Plaza there were many counselors.

The six of us associate evangelists, conducting crusades in the seven smaller provincial centers, preached as often as five times a day. For example, Lee Fisher preached to 500 prostitutes, Sherwood Wirt to a thousand factory workers, Howard Jones to Buddhist seminarians, and Grady Wilson to 60,000 high-schoolers. At universities we addressed 2,500–4,000 students at a time. Perhaps the most receptive audiences were those in the army meetings. There on a hillside in flawless formation would be 2,200 Korean soldiers; evangelicals in the Korean army have doubled in numbers in the last three years—from 15 to 30 per cent.

Korean pastor Billy Kim, who interpreted for Graham, challenged the whole North American contingent at a breakfast meeting. After thanking us in a most moving way for coming to Korea, he looked searchingly around at us and chided: “We Koreans don’t care if you can preach! And we don’t care if you can sing! And we don’t even care about your cameras [turning around and pointing at a World Wide Pictures cameraman plying his trade]. What we want to know here in Korea is, ‘Do you love us?’” Most of us became misty-eyed as we thought of First Corinthians 13. Now, back at home, I can still see those shining faces, part of the two billion people of Asia, and hear a voice from that land of lovable people crying: “Come over … and help us.” I, for one, can hardly wait to go back!

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

The Children of God continue to attain notoriety for their unconventional practices. Recently the media have carried stories about efforts of opponents of COG to help members leave the group. Opponents see the sect as diabolically evil; COG members see themselves as the only remnant faithful to Jesus Christ in these evil end times, and they have supporters outside the group.

What is the truth about COG? How can observers come to such diametrically opposite views of the subject? The explanation, we believe, lies in the fact that COG leaders speak out of both sides of their mouths; one of their statements will contradict another. This is not because it is impossible to coordinate all statements emanating from a group scattered around the world. Rather, it is because the Children of God deliberately set out to deceive outsiders about their true nature. We ourselves have been recipients of what COG calls the “Selah treatment”: sweet-talk given to visitors to COG colonies in an effort to convince them that the organization is harmless.

Recently a number of “Mo Letters”—missives written by COG’s unchallenged ruler, David Berg (alias Moses), to members of the group—have come into our possession. A comparison of what Mo tells his followers in these epistles with what he and they say to outsiders makes perfectly clear COG’s efforts to deceive. This article is devoted to documenting these deceptions.

Recently COG sent out to its mailing list an intriguing “Open Letter to Our Friends” written by Berg. He admits the pressing need for outside support. He also concedes that some statements emanating from COG have discouraged such vital support. However, he excuses himself by attributing the offending statement to his subordinates—the first crack in the solid front presented by COG leadership to the outside world. Declaring that Christians do not have to agree totally on all minor doctrines to work together, he asserts his “personal policy” of “tolerance and broadmindedness” and blames any misunderstanding on remarks by “sincerely zealous, but sometimes sadly unwise, lesser leaders.” He then proceeds to deny certain teachings ascribed to him.

Unfortunately, other writings of his contradict his denials. For instance, Berg categorically denies the “flagrantly defiant and erroneous slogan with which I have never had anything to do whatsoever,” namely, “My family, my family—right or wrong, my family!” What Berg actually said, in his Mo Letter “There Are No Neutrals” was, “You’re either for us or you’re against us … ‘My country, my country, right or wrong, my country.’” Is there a substantive difference between these statements, one of which Berg made and the other of which he denies? Or did Berg just forget what he had said earlier? (If so, he does not read his “Mo Letters” as religiously as do his followers, whom he tells to read the same way they read the Bible.) Or is he consciously trying to deceive? Or is there some other alternative?

Berg also asserts that he is “diametrically opposed to the dangerous, erroneous and false teaching … of which I myself have often been very falsely accused” and which he ascribes to “an incorrigible few” of his subordinates “who have disregarded many reproofs,” namely, “That it’s alright [sic] to lie, cheat, steal, and perhaps even commit violence in the name of Jesus as long as it’s good for the cause.” He declares that he never taught this and that it can be found “in absolutely no Mo letter in existence,” and he challenges followers “to prove in writing that I have ever indicated such a thing.…” Berg professes shock that some COGs said on a national telecast in Canada “that they were so loyal to Moses and so obedient that even if he told them to kill their parents, they would do so!” He declares, “I have never even suggested such unquestioning, blind and implicit obedience!”

First, it is strange that followers in a rigidly authoritarian sect would so flagrantly misrepresent the man whom they revere as God’s anointed prophet for the last days and on whose word they have given up everything. Second, numbers of COGs and ex-COGs have reiterated what was said on the Canadian telecast about total obedience to Berg, even to the point of killing on command. One ex-COG testified on NBC’s “Chronolog” program in the summer of 1972:

I was taught in the Children of God I would have to commit adultery, theft, and murder during the last seven years of the world because of the fact that we would be under cover, and there would be things like this that would have to be done in order to sustain our group.

Numerous newspapers have reported COG members were asked if they would kill (their parents or national leaders, for example) if their elder ordered them to do so. Invariably the answer was yes. It is clear that an affirmative answer to this presumably hypothetical question was expected if they wanted to retain their good standing.

And while Berg claims that nothing in the “Mo Letters” supports the teaching of such implicit obedience, the hard evidence indicates otherwise. The “Revolutionary Contract,” which all new members must sign, declares that “instant obedience is imperative.” It elaborates: “You must obey: implicitly, quickly and without question your officers in the Lord, if you wish to remain a member of this Team.…” Elsewhere Berg instructs, “… obedience is not enough.… To ‘submit yourself’ means put your whole body, soul and spirit into complete subjection to the spirit of God in your leader.” Lest one might find “the spirit of God in your leader” an escape clause for Berg, we cite another statement in a “Mo Letter”:

The Bible talks about obeying your parents in the Lord (which is your leadership, not your ungodly fleshly parents). It says obey them in all things, even if they are wrong! If a leader tells you to do something wrong you are justified before God for obeying leadership.…

Now, which is the more valid reading of these statements—the members’ declaration that they would obey every order of their superiors in COG, even one to kill, or Berg’s argument that he never taught blind, implicit obedience?

In his “Open Letter” Berg also denies that he “ever claimed that the final Kingdom of Christ has already arrived on earth.” What he did say was, “We agree with 95% of the radical revolutionaries’ goals, but their goal of utopia, they cannot reach, while we have reached it already.… We are practicing the only pure form of communism …” (“The Rise of the Reactionary Right”).

Nor are Berg’s denials in his recent “Open Letter” the only examples of the deception running through COG’s operation. Berg has instructed his lieutenants to say that he is no longer actively in control of COG. So on NBC’s “Chronolog” program, Berg’s son “Hosea” dutifully declared that his father “does not take an active part in our COG activities.” As if Berg’s recent “Open Letter” were not in itself enough to give the lie to this announcement, several “Mo Letters” verify his active leadership. In “General Letter on Various Business,” designed only for overseers to read, Berg gives detailed instructions to leaders in various places; discussions of money predominate. For instance: they are “never to discuss your finances with outsiders, at least not the specifics, such as Ben’s inheritance.…” Berg sends checks to various leaders, according to this epistle. In it he also instructs his immediate subordinates whom to appoint as overall overseer for the United States. He scolds those in charge of absorbing Linda Meissner’s Jesus People’s Army of the Pacific Northwest for moving too fast and kicking recalcitrant kids off the property before COG had legal ownership of it, since that move left the COG leaders open to trespassing charges. He adds, “I wonder if you would have been so ready to run them out of the building, if you’d known this?” When Berg wrote an emergency letter to send all COGs home for the holidays in late 1971, he threatened elders who did not comply with removal from office. All the members went home.

A flyer designed for outsiders, entitled “What the Children of God Really Believe,” says, “Nothing is kept hidden or secret about their way of life.…” Why, then, the “Selah treatment”? Also, why the following in Mo’s “Pointers for Leaders”: “Don’t tell people more than you have to, to accomplish the needed purpose”?

Berg evidences a paranoid desire for secrecy concerning his own whereabouts. His “Pointers for Leaders” warns, “Always protect your leader’s security! (For example, don’t broad-cast their whereabouts on shortwave!) Remember—it’s a small world, and they’re always out to get the leaders!” Berg coaches his followers on how to answer probing questions about his identity: “‘Who is Moses?’—I can’t really tell you! ‘Is he so-and-so?’—I really don’t know—He’s never really told us, and even if he had, he wouldn’t want us to tell.… ‘Is he really your leader?’—Jesus Christ is my leader!” (“Public Relations”). While elders say they do not know their leader’s identity, COG has recently published some of the more innocuous “Mo Letters” as a book entitled LettersFrom a Shepherd, the cover of which lists the author as “David Brandt Berg, also known as Moses.” The strategy shifts to fit the situation.

In “Public Relations” Berg gives his subordinates detailed instructions on how to handle reporters. He tells them not to cooperate with any media that publish hostile stories, but to promise scoops to reporters who treat them kindly, suggesting that the elders “could even furnish them with a few harmless ones [“Mo Letters”] like ‘Diamonds of Dust,’ if they would promise to continue to treat them fairly!” He then provides a list of typical questions and the prescribed answers, along with a demonstration of how to go on the offensive in an interview, speak with conviction, and badger the reporter. After intricate examples of how to deceive reporters, he asserts, “Honesty is usually the best policy in dealing with the Press,” then two paragraphs later explicates his ideal of honesty: “… you can just stall, evade, or lead them off on another track.…” He continues: “Give them a good story. Try not to be negative in knocking the system, its churches, etc.—even public education!… It’s OK to talk like this to each other, but not to outsiders!” Further, “Don’t use what they call ‘bad language’ and four letter words within their hearing!”

MORNING PRAYERS

“… and he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints … and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints …” (Revelation 8:3, 4).

From this sunrise angle

the chipped cup rim

shapes coffee mist to an ellipse

holding the morning odor

in brief order to the eye

before my nostrils inhale

and make its rising incense

a part of morning adoration

to the Holy God who can

make me a hale fellow.

EUGENE H. PETERSON

What goes for managing the news applies also to what is variously called “procuring” or “spoiling Egypt.” Since COG members do not hold paying jobs, they must try to get free food from local merchants. The colony member assigned to this task is called the procurer. He is given specific instructions on his appearance, dress, and manner: neat haircut, coat and tie, clean, conservative shirt, no jeans or far-out pants and shirts, shoes shined, teeth brushed, mouthwash used. “Don’t be afraid to put on a camouflage to put on the system” (“Procuring”). In many localities procurers represent the group by some name other than “Children of God,” lest COG’s bad publicity inhibit their efforts. Procurers say that the group are Bible-college students, that the ministry is taking young people off drugs and training them in “a certain trade to teach the young people how to become productive members in society” (“Procuring”). Never mind that one of COG’s main teachings is that it is sinful to hold a job in society. Procurers show pictures of their work, but they are selective, as per Berg’s advice: for example, “… lay off the dancing, you’re a Bible oriented group …” (“Procuring”).

The Children of God have had some success in their efforts to recruit from other Jesus-people groups, whom they consider “compromisers.” Again, deception is part and parcel of their method of operating. When Linda Meissner joined COG, she brought with her an underground newspaper re-christened “New Improved Truth.” It quotes establishment newspaper stories on COG, but wherever the name “Children of God” appeared in the original, it is blocked out and a substitution like “Jesus Revolution” or “Jesus Freaks” appears in its place. Nowhere is the paper declared to belong to COG. The mild “Mo Letters” carried in it are ascribed cryptically to M. L. In “Other Sheep” Berg, reacting to published criticism of COG, scolds his subordinates for their excessive exclusivism, which detracts from the effort to bring other Jesus people into COG. Of course, they learned their exclusivism from Berg himself, and what he calls for is not a change of beliefs but only one of tactics. The idea is to avoid doctrinal arguments and condemnations, telling recruits the “heavy stuff” about COG’s view of Bible prophecy only after they are safely within COG’s fold. “You could even read them the lighter Mo Letters designed for babes and the general public!” Another thing Berg would not want prospects to know is that “it may be the Lord’s Will to take otherwise less desirable mothers or fathers, to get the children!—Kibbutzim do” (“Pointers for Leaders”). A strange statement coming from a man who prides himself and his group on being outcasts for whom established society has no use, the foolish and weak whom God is using to confound the wise and strong of this world.

The same deception is employed in dealing with parents of new members. COG leaders make a big point of their instructions that members are to write home weekly. However, we know from conversation with exmembers that this is not encouraged until converts are firmly in COG’s grasp. Further, “Public Relations” makes it clear that the main purpose of allowing members to write at all is to try to get money out of the parents for COG’s use. There is a second reason: to minimize bad publicity. In fact, since the holiday season of 1971, COG has taken to sending members home on occasion—again, for the same two reasons—a move Berg describes as “a masterful stroke of genius” (“by the Lord,” he adds) (“Public Relations”).

Parents who find out where their children are located and come to talk with them are often prevented from doing so. Although numerous cases can be documented, COG leaders publicly deny this. Yet Berg acknowledges this well-known fact in his “Public Relations” letter. However, the letter announces a shift in tactics because of the bad press that this practice incurred. It is necessary, he now says, to take a chance and let parents speak with their children, in private if they absolutely insist. This means risking “kidnapping” of the children by their parents, and so members receive detailed instructions about how to escape from parents and return to the colony.

Nevertheless, the old practice is still often in effect. An English newspaper, Sunday People, set up an experiment to see if COG dealt honestly with parents. A young reporter “joined” COG. The next day an older reporter, posing as his father, came seeking him. The elders denied that his “son” was there and denied even knowing him. While the “father” was being offered coffee, Bible verses, and a demonstration of love, the elders tried to get to the young reporter to let them hide him (Sunday People, Sept. 24, 1972, p. 4). When an English woman tried to retrieve her daughter, she was shoved by Berg’s wife, known in the group as “Mother Eve.” When the woman pressed charges over the incident, a COG elder warned her to drop the case and threatened: “If you don’t you will never see your daughter again.” Mother Eve subsequently fled the country.

One must understand the COG view of the older generation as a whole in order to understand this behavior. Adults are assumed to belong to the System, which manifests itself in government, jobs, schools, and (most evil of all) churches—all of which make up the Great whor* of Babylon. Duplicity is again the hallmark of COG operations. Berg speaks of the “goodwill visitations to local churches” in which COG engaged in the early days in southern California (“Survival”). Yet, referring to the same visits, he crows, “We thumbed our noses at the churches and the Establishment.” Berg’s letters regularly catalogue vitriolic diatribes against the church. Sample:

And the Church?—Ha!—The so-called church … is just an absolute ridiculous laugh!—A little holier-than-thou, do-gooder, social club and status symbol for the self-righteous, sanctimonious, Pharisaical, superannuated hypocrites!—a useless, ineffective, weak and ludicrous, dead and dying, paganistic hangover from the superstitious past! (“Survival”).

Berg writes to a potential donor about “as much as we love them [church people],” but elsewhere he calls them “these d—, fool, so-called Christians” and their churches “the moldy molds of the coffins of the dead”—hardly a place to which to pay good-will visits.

Parents are tarred with the same vitriolic brush. “The Revolutionary Contract” describes parents as “the rotten, decadent, decrepit, hypocritical, selfrighteous, inflexable [sic], affluent, selfsatisfied, proud, stubborn, disobedient, blind, bloodthirsty, Godless, dead, selfish, churchy, unchangeable older generation.” The “Mo Letter” “Who Are the Rebels?” blasts “this recent modern plastic, artificial man-made gadget-filled, money crazy, whor*mongering sex-mad—religiously hyprocritical society of the parents”; and the “God forsaking, Bible-hating, anti-Christ selfish peace-defying, law breaking, man killing parents of today.” Berg’s condemnation follows. “You, my dear parents, are the greatest rebels against God and His Word and His Ways.… To Hell with your devilish system. May God damn your unbelieving hearts.… God is going to destroy you and save us.…”

Though COG members early learn proof-texts for home-breaking for the sake of Christ, Berg publicly denies it: “To say that we try to separate ‘children’ from their loved ones is ridiculous! We have actually done more in most cases to bring them back together …” (“Survival”). Yet in the same passage Berg admits that in extreme cases, when parents have threatened or attempted violent action to reclaim their children, COG has sequestered the children—at their own request and for their own safety, he explains. Then comes the threat: “… we have been compelled in several cases to file criminal action and … have [been] … forced to prosecute them to protect ourselves and put a stop to their lies.… Don’t try to stop them [the children] or us!” (“Survival”). No wonder COG leaders value their privacy: “And with such insane parents on the loose, is it any wonder that the poor hounded leaders of some suffering Colonies prefer to be unseen, unknown, or at least out of the reach of such demented fiends …” (“Survival”). What is true for his lieutenants is even more applicable to the chief. He has good reason to prefer “to remain anonymous, and in the utmost seclusion for both my health and safety’s sake when there are such crazy people like those we’ve been describing running around with guns in their hands actually threatening to kill me if they can find me” (“Survival”).

It is always difficult to judge the mind of another man. But it is difficult to read and compare the various statements of David Berg and not conclude that they demonstrate a conscious pattern of deviousness. How this can be squared with the teachings of the Bible that Berg claims to venerate we do not know. If Berg were to confess that he had been mistaken and overzealous in his past pronouncements and to promise to shift from deceptiveness to high Christian ethics, that would be one thing. Until he does, he stands exposed as practicing an unconscionable duplicity.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

In the winter of A.D. 53–54, the apostle Paul and several of his associates departed from the city of Antioch and headed for the distant central highlands of Asia Minor. It was not the first time the Antioch Christians had said farewell to Paul, for this was his third missionary journey from their Syrian city. Eleven years before, he had gone out from Antioch on his first evangelistic tour with Barnabas and the young John Mark, and later he had traveled with Silas. Now he was accompanied by the half Jewish, half Asian-Greek Timothy and the Gentile Titus—strange foreign Christians who were themselves the products of Paul’s far-reaching missionary ministry.

The evangelistic party followed the Roman trade route from Antioch across Syria and Cilicia, five hundred miles or more into the upper country of the Province of Galatia. There they were joined by Gaius of Derbe, and they visited Timothy’s home area of Lystra and Iconium. Over the remainder of the winter they worked in Galatia and Phrygia to fortify the churches Paul had established on earlier journeys. Paul’s historian, Luke, wrote of that trip, “… he departed and went over all the country of Galatia and Phrygia in order, strengthening all the disciples” (Acts 18:23). On his previous visits to this region, Paul had gone to the Phrygian cities of Lystra, Iconium, and Derbe, so the mention of Galatia probably indicates that the gospel had spread northwardly since his last ministry in central Asia Minor.

As the spring of A.D. 54 arrived, they moved to the west and came to the town of Metropolis, where they reached an important fork in the busy Roman road. Behind them to the southeast lay Syria and Palestine, and far along the other road was the fertile Tigris-Euphrates Valley of Parthia and the even more remote land of India. From Metropolis Paul and his group followed the road into the heavily populated Province of Asia, where they descended through river valleys to the city of Ephesus—economic and religious capital of the province and the gateway to the wealth and the wisdom of the East. Located at the heart of a large Greek-speaking population and constantly visited by travelers from all over the Roman world, Ephesus was to become a strategic Christian center from which the gospel would spread far and wide over the empire and beyond.

The story of the apostle Paul’s evangelization of Ephesus and the whole Province of Asia is one of the most outstanding missionary accomplishments of history. If records were kept of all evangelistic triumphs, Paul’s victory at Ephesus would still remain unchallenged, for by the end of a brief two years “… all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks” (Acts 19:10).

Since the dawn of Christianity, the Church has been at its best when it has been the most militantly evangelistic. In those periods when it has made the greatest efforts to expand over the earth it has been refined by the most violent opposition. Such times of persecution have built into it a fierce dedication to take the gospel to every man at any necessary cost.

Unfortunately, the Church has never been able to maintain its most dedicated missionary enthusiasm over more than a few decades at a time. In contrast to its periods of greatness, the Church has been at its worst when it has failed to polarize public opinion about Jesus Christ, has retreated from the arena of open evangelism, and has closed itself behind the walls of its stained-glass sanctuaries.

Megalithic cathedrals, for all their aesthetic value, stand as sepulchral monuments to whole ages of religious feudalism, the crumbling remains of a sad era when the Church was reclusively introverted. Equally elaborate religious organizational structures have gathered about them their huddles of obedient serfs who ask only that the Church feed and protect them while they live and bury them securely when they die. Defensive Christianity places its priorities on visible symbols of power and invincibility, protected by its theological positions behind bulwarks of words, social orders, and claims to divine authority; while whole generations of unimpressed, uncommitted, and unevangelized people go by outside its unscalable walls.

The Church was never meant to be an impregnable fortress, out of reach of the common people. True, it was to be built on a rock, but it was to move out from its solid base of Christian security to proclaim the message of salvation to all men. It was not to be so much a depository of truth as a proclaimer of a heavenly message. It was not to be a far-off mountain hidden in clouds of mystery and religious awe, but an open plain made clear for all men in the light of divine revelation. The Church was to become an outgoing, proclaiming, evangelistic body of mutually loving brothers in Christ, dedicated thoroughly to the one all-consuming passion for the worldwide evangelization of the popular masses.

Jesus Christ commanded His Church to preach the gospel to every person in every ethnic society, but no generation of Christians has ever come close to fulfilling the Great Commission in its own times. Now, with the world’s population at nearly 4 billion and growing at the alarming rate of 70 million people annually, the likelihood of evangelizing the whole world seems increasingly remote, at least with present methods and attitudes.

One of the most illustrative descriptions of the demographic explosion is an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. In an awesome display of white human skulls mounted on black cloth, the population scientists have shown that in Christ’s day there were only about 300 million people on the earth. It was not until the first English settlers arrived in America, a millennium and a half later, that the earth’s population first reached 500 million. It was another three centuries before the population had grown to 1 billion for the first time. Then, caught in the trap of his own productivity, man doubled his number in the next one hundred years, and in 1930 reached the astounding figure of 2 billion people. From the early Depression until the opening of the Space Age, man then added another billion to the score between 1930 and 1960. The following ten years produced another half billion persons. By the year A.D. 2000, the world apparently will have some 6.5 billion inhabitants, and demographic and ecological experts are saying we will enter the Age of Famines.

It used to be that the prophets of doom were the sidewalk preachers, but now they are the scientists. The apocalyptic climax of history once preached only in revival meetings and supported somewhat extravagantly with claims of divine revelation now is declared by the scientists with charts and carefully researched prognostications. It has become obvious that if the Church is ever to evangelize the world it must greatly increase its level of missionary activity and establish a broader base of operations very quickly, or else be forever too late to fulfill the Great Commission.

The Church, however, has a terrible problem. By some quirk in the evangelical mind many churches appear to be satisfied or at least willing to settle for a token presence in each country rather than a serious attempt to fulfill the actual commands of Christ. They rejoice over a few sheaves of gathered grain, while ignoring the massive harvest still standing in the fields. Their magazines and sermons abound with tales of missionary heroes, great personal sacrifices, and inspirational reports, but they never tell the American people that by and large the Church is only establishing a token presence in each land rather than a pervading witness. They do not say that missionaries often fail to reach the major cultural groups because they spend most of their time working with the more impressionable ethnic minorities who are seeking to improve their social status. Seldom do American contributors learn that much of their money goes into establishing Western institutions and funding a great many busy but not evangelistic activities, such as hospitals, elementary schools, orphanages, and other charitable works that in today’s secular society can often be better sponsored by other agencies.

The Great Commission looms like a monolith above the religious horizon, challenging the Church to dedicate itself to the highest claims of the gospel. It must be understood that there is now no feasible way that the world can be reached by foreign missionaries alone; for even if the whole Church were suddenly to reverse its pattern of cultural isolation and make a serious attempt at total evangelization, we are already past the point of any possibility of making enough converts fast enough to evangelize the world by traditional missionary methods.

The only hope for the total evangelization of the world is to teach the Christian believers of each nation to evangelize their own people and to incite in each country the conditions in which spontaneous lay movements of church expansion may occur. In short, the Church must abandon its stained-glass sanctuaries and take the gospel out into the streets.

It has become clear to many who know the work of evangelical missionary ministry that the present degree of activity and accomplishments simply will not evangelize the world in this generation. There must be a radical change at every level of missionary endeavor if we are to take seriously the demands of the Great Commission.

For too long the work of foreign missionaries has been patterned after Western colonialism or else has built its methods on reactions to that historical period. Even the present emphasis on the establishing of indigenous churches came about as a corrective measure to offset the problems of paternalistic missionary methods. The Church ought to have been indigenously building upon the integrity of all believers from the very beginning, but so many activities were directed by foreigners and so many national believers were limited to unimportant and irresponsible tasks that some corrective measure became necessary. Therefore, there arose the emphasis on the indigenous-church principle that the national church should be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating.

As the plan has developed, however, there are certain problems. In many countries the evangelical churches have fulfilled the basic requirements of the indigenous-church plan, but still find themselves despairingly short of the total evangelization of their surrounding populations. It is also possible for a national church to be fully indigenous without being based on other New Testament principles. For example, the Chinese communists adopted the indigenous-church principle in their Three-Self Movement, which only led the evangelical churches astray from New Testament Christianity. The indigenization of the church is a necessary step in world evangelization, but it by no means includes all the needed factors for the fulfillment of the Great Commission.

It can safely be stated that no national church will prosper and grow at any realistic rate that is not founded on the indigenous-church principle, set down so aptly by Melvin L. Hodges (The Indigenous Church, Springfield, Missouri: Gospel Publishing House, 1953) and other missionary writers. The missionary is a transplanted example of the Christian life; it is only as the native people of a land, endemic to their society and autochthonal to their culture, become active proclaimers of the gospel that there can be any natural church growth. A national church overly dependent on missionary leadership is like a wig—it looks as though it grew, but it is totally incapable of growing of its own life.

The indigenous-church idea must not be seen as an end product of missions, but as a beginning base from which the real task of the Church may be accomplished. Much of the work of evangelical missions over the past decades has been that of repairing the serious mistakes of the previous hundred years. Now a fresh approach must be based on New Testament principles to make a serious attempt at fulfilling the Great Commission in our times.

What we need is a new matrix, a whole new way of looking at the missionary challenge. If our goal is to establish a token presence in each country, then we have already done quite well; but if the Great Commission demands that every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth have a fair opportunity to accept or reject the gospel of Jesus Christ, then we are lagging almost hopelessly behind.

In search of a workable plan for worldwide evangelization, we must go back to the New Testament and base our global ministry on apostolic patterns and standards. To do this, we turn to the Apostle Paul, who said, “I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting” (1 Tim. 1:16).

In the first century, the Apostle Paul provided both a prototype for the modern missionary and a working model for a practical method of total world evangelization. His methods were especially observable at Ephesus, where after two years in that focal city in the Province of Asia, “… all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks” (Acts 19:10). The sequence of events in Paul’s Ephesian campaign offers us an efficient plan that, if applied to the late twentieth century, could conceivably evangelize the world.

1. A Single Purpose: Underlying all evangelistic activities there must be a unified, cooperative agreement that the primary task of the Church is to fulfill the Great Commission. The Church will not have completed that original assignment until every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth shall have had a fair chance to understand the significance of the gospel, had an opportunity to accept or reject Jesus Christ as his Savior and Lord, and had the continued prospect of worshiping God in a community of Christian believers.

The primary purpose of Jesus Christ in the world must never become a secondary cause in His Church.

2. Preliminary Planning: Before missionary activities are initiated in a country, the mission board and the missionaries must thoroughly research the proposed field and choose strategic locations for their vital evangelistic centers. When a national church is involved, the same principle applies that all major moves should be part of a total plan. Particular care should be given to the patterns of social movement so that the natural flow of population will carry the gospel where the evangelists want it to go.

Evangelization on a worldwide scale requires preliminary planning and careful strategy. The planning is as critical as the execution in reaching the world for Christ.

3. Cooperative Teamwork: It is impossible for single individual efforts to reach the world for Christ. Missionaries must unite their activities into cooperative teamwork of interdependent ministries, setting aside all competitiveness with one another in favor of presenting a unified front to the real enemies of church growth.

The apostolic pattern of evangelism requires the teamwork of dedicated people laboring effectively toward a single predetermined goal.

4. A Basic Nucleus: Because the masses are irrational and respond only affirmatively or negatively to symbolic images, individual prospects should first be attracted to a basic nucleus of believers who represent in microcosm what the church is to be when it is grown. Nothing vital should be left out of the preparation of these first believers, for they should exhibit the whole spectrum of apostolic doctrine, religious experience, fundamental practices, and basic priorities.

Before an evangelist can take the gospel to the masses, he must first form a nucleus of properly oriented believers with whom the new converts may identify.

5. Mass Communications: One-to-one witnessing is certainly to be encouraged, but the Church will never reach the whole world without mass evangelism. Somehow the gospel must be communicated to large numbers of people to the point that it becomes an issue in the community. Mass evangelism is most effective when it is operated in a cycle of drawing prospective believers from the masses, assimilating them into the churches, and returning to the masses again for another group of prospects.

To evangelize large numbers of people, the missionary must somehow bring his message to the attention of the public and break down the masses into workable groups of favorable individual contacts.

6. Establish Congregations: The previous stages of the method are all aimed at preparation for the major task of establishing communities of Christian believers in thriving congregations. The Church of Jesus Christ exists in its entirety wherever it is manifested, beginning with two or three believers gathered together. It is in the very nature of the Christian experience to desire to join together in churches.

Effective mass evangelization always requires that the resulting converts be established in responsible Christian congregations.

7. Trained National Leaders: There will never be enough foreign missionaries to evangelize the whole earth. The only way the world can be reached is for the missionaries to teach the people of each country to evangelize their own people and to incite the conditions in which spontaneous lay movements of church expansion will occur. The teaching of pastors and other church leaders must be on a practical level that best trains them and motivates them for fervent service.

If church growth is to result from massive lay movements, it is essential that the people of each country be taught to pastor their own churches, lead their own evangelistic programs, and direct their own national organizations.

8. Maintain Momentum: The natural tendency of a movement is to grow by stages, the phases of rapid expansion coming farther and farther apart until growth becomes insignificant. The missionary cannot allow this to happen to his evangelistic movement, because his goal is total evangelization. He maintains momentum through a vision for continuous growth, the constant development of fresh leadership, a realistic method of financing his operations, and the application of the New Testament ministries of preaching, teaching, and believing for miracles.

The success of world missions is not to be measured against past accomplishments or present gains, but by the fulfillment of the total claims of the Great Commission and the response of the Church to plan and maintain a missionary vision.

9. Overcome Opposition: Sooner or later, an attempt at total world evangelization must come into life-or-death struggles with the other religions and philosophies of the planet. The Church must be sure to establish a strong base of believers and sympathizers before serious confrontations occur, otherwise it may find itself outnumbered and outmaneuvered. The Church must not purposely initiate a violent confrontation, neither should it return violence for violence. The Church cannot be stopped by opposition, for only social acceptance can control it.

When the growing Christian community becomes large enough to be a force in the society, its evangelistic action will provoke a responding counteraction from the major religions of the area. This often occurs when the economy and balance of power are most seriously affected.

10. A Missionary Church: Churches begun on sound missionary principles will themselves become missionary-minded congregations who will share in the concepts of world evangelization and cooperate in the cause. As national churches become increasingly evangelistic in their outlook and practice, missionaries can branch out into other supporting tasks to increase the depth of the evangelistic channel and expand the flow of new converts into the Church.

The only way the world can possibly be won for Christ is for every believer to be an evangelistic witness and for every church to become a center for missionary activity.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

Kathryn Kuhlman says she does not consider herself the best-known woman preacher in the world. But she is that. From a home base in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Miss Kuhlman has for more than twenty-five years led a ministry that has had increasing impact and respect. She is especially noted for the many thousands who have come to her great services broken in body and spirit and have gone away whole. Not since Aimee Semple McPherson has a woman religious figure been recognized and appreciated so far and wide.

To many, however, Miss Kuhlman remains something of a mystery. Some who try to understand her cannot. Many others who could will not—unless they are stricken with illness and given up by medical science.

This wide-ranging, exclusive interview with Miss Kuhlman is presented by Christianity Today to dispel some of the misunderstanding that has grown up around her, or at least to present a digest, in her own words, of how she answers questions put to her by both believers and unbelievers. Miss Kuhlman very graciously consented to respond at length to an extensive assortment of questions. What follows is an edited distillation of the exchange.

Question. Miss Kuhlman, you have increasingly represented the last great hope of the desperately ill. What is it like to have such an awesome role?

ANSWER. Helping people is the most rewarding thing in the world. You do not have to be a Kathryn Kuhlman to help people. Every Christian should have as his goal helping people. We were all born to serve.

Q. Your ministry is obviously very gratifying …

A. Last Christmas I got a card from a twelve-year-old girl. I put it at the top of the tree. Doctors had said she might not be living by Christmas. They had suggested a leg amputation because of cancer. She wrote on the card, “I am living to see this Christmas. I still have two good legs because God answered prayer, and you helped.” It was the greatest gift that I received.

Q. But does such a thrilling responsibility ever give you second thoughts about a healing ministry?

A. When I walk out on the platform and I realize that sitting there in the audience are people who have made a great sacrifice to come, and when I realize that for many it is their last hope … and remember something: Your question is probably asked in terms of physical healing. But spiritual healing is far greater. It may be somebody’s last call for spiritual healing. The physical healing is so very secondary. You can well afford to live and die with a sick body. It’s great to see an empty wheelchair, but the new birth is vastly more important. When I realize that there are people, and the destiny of their souls is at stake, that is the most awesome feeling. That’s when the great responsibility is really felt. And when the lights in the auditorium are turned out, I wonder whether I could have done a better job for the Lord. It is not a thrilling responsibility, but awesome, and sometimes so awesome I wish I had never been called to this part of the ministry.

Q. You have repeatedly said you do not regard yourself as a faith healer. Why?

A. I resent very much being called a faith healer, because I am not the healer. I have no healing virtue. I have no healing power. I have never healed anyone. I am absolutely dependent upon the power of the Holy Spirit. When I see a sick child, in a moment like that I sense in a special way how dependent I really am. And it’s just like that.

Q. Miss Kuhlman, you don’t bother to answer skeptics and critics. But would you grant that there are some Christians who have some honest, conscientious doubts about you and your ministry, and if so, do they deserve to know more about what you believe and how you operate than you normally state publicly?

A. I tell you the truth: I answer every question that is asked of me. I do not believe there is anyone in the religious field today who is more honest in answering questions than I am. That is the reason I am talking to you now. I bare my soul to you. I answer the believer and the unbeliever the best I know how. When it comes to answering skeptics, remember that Jesus told his critics in substance, If you do not believe my claims, then believe me for the very works’ sake. If the Lord himself returned in person and did the same works today that he did when he walked this earth, he would have more skeptics than he had when he was here the first time in the flesh. Spiritual things are only spiritually revealed. You cannot force human beings to believe something they do not want to believe. And so, when it comes to the scoffers I just leave them to God.

Q. Do you feel it fair to come under journalistic scrutiny from questioners who may not be entirely sympathetic with your ministry?

A. Sometimes it’s a little difficult for me. Take a reporter who comes into one of the great miracle services. He knows nothing about the power of God. He may be otherwise very intelligent, but it is quite unfair, really, to himself and to the servant of God. And so I leave them also in the hands of God. Recently, however, a reporter who attended a service we had in Tampa came backstage afterward and announced, “I came a skeptic, but I left a believer.”

Q. Was Aimee Semple McPherson any kind of model or inspiration to you?

A. No, because I never met her. But several years after Miss McPherson died, Maggie Hartner and I visited her grave. There we found a young man and a woman who was probably his mother viewing the monument erected to the memory of Miss McPherson. The woman was telling how her preaching had made Jesus so real. “I found Christ through her life,” the woman said. At this point Kathryn Kuhlman thought to herself that if after I am gone just one person can stand by my grave and say, “I found Christ because she preached the Gospel,” then I will not have lived in vain.

Q. How do you conceive your calling? How and when did you get it?

A. Oh, I could preach for hours and hours on that. It was simple. First there was my conversion at that little church in Concordia, Missouri. It was one Sunday morning. I was fourteen. It was my first introduction to the Holy Spirit. Holding the Methodist hymnal I began to shake. With great conviction I did the only thing I knew to do: I slipped out and walked down to the front pew, sat down in the corner, and wept. Not out of sorrow, but because of a great feeling that came upon me. Some spiritual experiences, there are just no words in the human vocabulary to describe them. But it was in that moment that I was born again. And I have never doubted my new-birth experience from that moment.

Q. And your call to the ministry?

A. It was as definite as my conversion. If everybody in the world told me that as a woman I have no right to preach the Gospel, it would have no effect upon me whatsoever, because my call to the ministry was as definite as my conversion.

Q. Where did you begin preaching?

A. In Idaho. Name any little town in that state, and I evangelized it. I would find any little country church that could not afford a preacher and get permission to hold services in it. The very first sermon I preached was Zaccheus up a tree, and God knows that if anyone was up a tree I certainly was. I remember the sixth sermon I preached—I honestly felt I had exhausted the Bible.

Q. In what church or denomination were you ordained?

A. I am a Baptist. I still belong to a Baptist church. I was ordained with the Evangelical Church Alliance in Joliet, Illinois, years and years ago when I went there for a meeting. They were the first to ordain me, and I have continued to hold papers with them.

Q. Are your books audited and your financial statements available?

A. They better be. Why, of course. Bless you, we have perhaps the greatest, finest auditors in the city of Pittsburgh, Snodgrass and Company.

Q. What is the purpose of the Kathryn Kuhlman Foundation?

A. Let me quote our charter: “The purposes generally shall be to foster, promote and sponsor radio-television programs and broadcasts of a religious nature which will tend to further the Christian religion, foster Christian fellowship among people, and help interpret Christianity to the world, and to engage in such other religious, charitable, or educational activities as the board of trustees shall determine.” And by the grace of God, we’re trying to do a good job. When I stand in his glorious presence, my first words will be, “I tried. I made mistakes, I’m sorry, but I tried.”

Q. How effective has your TV ministry been? What has been the response in numbers of letters?

A. I can only tell you that the most unlikely people stop me on the street and say, “I wouldn’t miss your telecast for anything in the world.” I’m thrilled when I get into a cab … and seldom do I ever get into a cab but what, on hearing my voice, the cab driver will say, “Oh-oh, I know that voice—my wife and I watch you on television all the time.” The response is great, but unlike most other religious telecasts because we do not offer any giveaways. People write in only because they are hungry for the Lord. Financially, the telecasts do not pay for themselves. The greatest combination is television and radio. Through radio we teach. Together they form a combination that is unbeatable.

Q. What is the role and place of speaking in tongues and what is its relation to justification and sanctification? Is it a sign or the sign of the Spirit’s control?

A. What you want to know is whether or not I believe in speaking in tongues.

Q. No, we already know that you do.

A. I have to believe there is such a thing as speaking in an unknown tongue, because I believe in the Bible. One just cannot take out what one does not find agreeable. We’re in an hour of great deception. If it were possible, the very elect would be deceived. In our services everything is done according to God’s Word. There is no fanaticism. We believe in speaking in tongues because the Bible teaches it. Everything that happened on the day of Pentecost should be happening in every church in the world in this very hour. These things are natural, not unnatural. Now we have Pentecostal Catholic priests and Pentecostal Baptist and Lutheran ministers and so on. But remember, speaking in an unknown tongue has nothing to do whatsoever with one’s experience of justification. It is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul! If you have accepted Christ in the forgiveness of sins, whether you have ever spoken in an unknown tongue or not, you will stand in the wonderful presence of the great high priest, your Christ and your redeemer. The baptism of the Spirit is given for one purpose only: power for service. The greatest evidence of having been filled with the Holy Spirit is the power in an individual’s life after this experience. You may speak in tongues every hour on the hour, but if your life is not measuring up with the power of the Holy Ghost, then I would not give you much for your experience of speaking in an unknown tongue. And it’s just like that.

Q. How do you regard your relation to the institutional church? What role and importance do you personally assign to the institutional church?

A. Practically every Friday I have a miracle service in the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, one of the most influential in the nation. The service begins around 9:30 and runs until about 1:30. They come, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, every denomination, people from around the world. Everyone forgets his denominational ties; we worship together from the common ground of Calvary. And this should be happening in every church in the United States. I have had a very close tie to the institutional church for as long as I can remember. But if our churches are to remain influential, they must open their eyes and realize the day in which we are living. The Church must do something about the Holy Spirit. I beg of you to please understand the great opportunity. This could be the finest hour for the Church. The Church must realize we are still living in the day of Pentecost. It must not say, We will accept only a portion of God’s Word and forget the rest. I say to every minister: Don’t be afraid of the power of the Holy Spirit. The last thing Jesus did before leaving this earth was to give the Church the Holy Spirit. If the Church refuses, the Holy Spirit will carry on this work outside the Church. But it should not be. We’re on the threshold of the greatest spiritual awakening. Revival is here.

Q. What do you think of the Jesus movement?

A. Everybody should know by now what I think about it. Don’t underestimate the power of our young people today. Of course, there are weaknesses. But let’s not judge the whole bushel by one or two bad apples. I believe this is the last generation before the second coming of Jesus Christ. When Scripture spoke of the last day of outpouring, it spoke of young men and young women. You will not be able to stop this great spiritual wave because it is of God.

Q. How have you overcome the disreputable cloud in which faith healers operate? Has the self-confessed hypocrisy of Marjoe affected you or your ministry in any way?

A. I have not overcome anything because I do not put myself in a class with faith healers. It’s only the news media that have put me in that class. As I said before, I am not a faith healer. I have not been given anything special. What I have is something that any Christian could have if he would pay the price of full surrender and yieldedness. I am absolutely dependent on the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am dependent on the power of the Holy Spirit in exactly the same way that Jesus was when he was here in the flesh and walked this earth. He was dependent on the Holy Spirit, for the manifestation of the power of the Holy Spirit in his ministry. That was the reason that before Jesus ever came in the form of flesh he offered himself through the Holy Spirit to be given. Jesus gave to his Church the gift of power, the power to see miracles performed. And when it comes to faith, I have seen miracles performed where there was no manifestation of faith whatsoever. The persons admitted they did not believe. They were awed when they realized they had been healed. We have lost sight of the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you and I have any faith, it is not something we have worked up. The Bible says that Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith. Our faith is a gift. A faith healer? No, I merely remind you how big God really is.

Q. How about Marjoe?

A. That film has not affected our ministry one bit. I declined to serve on a panel with him. God’s Word does not need to be defended. Oh sure, when I was younger I used to fight at the drop of a hat. I started out in the ministry as a teen-ager defending my wonderful Jesus. (Remember, I have red hair.) After years of experience, I found out that he needs no defense. He will defend himself. As for the Holy Spirit, all we have to do is be faithful to preaching the Word, and he will defend me.

Q. What is your definition of a miracle? How unusual must a phenomenon be to warrant such a designation?

A. Well, what a miracle may mean to you may not mean the same thing to me. I remember a little boy who recognized me on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles and proceeded to tell me how a miracle had once happened to him: he found a quarter when he needed money. To someone else it may be the healing of cancer. Sometimes the supernatural happens, contradicting all known scientific laws. I believe that every birth is a miracle. Do you understand what I mean?

Q. Not really, because the question asked for your definition of a miracle, and you’ve just told us to pick and choose. We gather, however, that you feel miracles to be relative, that this is perhaps more of a semantic problem, inasmuch as “supernatural” is not a biblical term and scientific laws are not divinely inspired. Something is “supernatural” only because someone down the line put a boundary on the term “natural.” But let’s go on. What do you mean by “coming under the power”? What is the biblical criterion for such an experience?

A. I call it “coming under the power” because I do not know what else to call it. I only know that I have nothing to do with it. Two questions I am going to ask the Master when I get home to glory. First, why wasn’t everyone healed (I don’t know why)? And then I want him to explain, regarding the manifestation of the power of God, the “slaying power” of the Holy Spirit. I do not understand it. The biblical criterion is the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus. All of a sudden he found himself flat on the ground. He didn’t have someone to catch him, either. At least we have ushers.

Q. Do you have many healings from drugs, youth or adult?

A. Yes. Both alike. There have been those healed from drugs just sitting in the audience, without hands being laid on them. That, my friends, is God’s power.

Q. To what extent do you take medication yourself? When should one pray for healing, and when should he seek medicine or conventional therapy?

A. I thank my God for his keeping power. I believe that the fact he keeps me in good health without medication is as great a miracle as though I had been healed from some disease. If you do not have the faith to be healed, then go and see the best physician there is. God heals in more than one way. We work very closely with the medical profession. All healing is divine, but God does not always heal in the same way.

Q. Do you find that being a woman hinders your work in any way?

A. [Laughter] I don’t know, because I don’t know what it would have been like had I been a man. When unpleasant things happen, I just act like it never happened. Let me bare my soul: I do not believe I was God’s first choice in this ministry. Or even his second or third. This is really a man’s job. I work hard, seventeen hours a day. I can outwork five men put together. I get little sleep. I stand at the pulpit four and a half hours at a time without sitting down once, and I can still leave the stage as refreshed as when I walked on. I have given myself completely to the Holy Spirit, and he gives me sustenance. God’s first choices were men. Someplace men failed. I was just stupid enough to say, Take nothing and use it. And he has been doing just that.

Q. Why aren’t there more women preachers?

A. You will just have to ask God. I don’t know. [Laughter] I really don’t know, but I wouldn’t wish this job on any woman, I’ll tell you that. If you think it’s easy, try it.

Q. What do you think of women’s lib?

A. You want to know something? Women’s lib won’t like to hear what I have to say. I’d give anything if I could just be a good housewife, a good cook. Oh, I’d like to be a good cook. I’d like to have about twelve children. It would be so nice to have a man bring in the pay check. I would just love to have a man boss me. It might not last long. But for a little while it would just be great. When it comes to women’s lib, I am still as old-fashioned as the Word of God. I still think the husband should be the head of the family. I know how it was at our house: If Papa said it, it was just as though God had said it. We never had any women’s lib, but we had a mighty happy family. Papa did the work, and Mama ran Papa without Papa knowing it, and it was a beautiful situation.

Q. What do you think of the current physical-fitness kick—health spas, natural foods, dieting, and so on?

A. Let me think about this one a minute.… I see people every day that I think should diet. People write to me about some things, and ask me to pray, when I think they could answer their own prayer. If you’re too fat, do something about it. I believe in doing everything you can to keep in good health. You cannot go out and do everything that is contrary to good health and then look up and ask God to heal your body. He has given us a brain. He has given certain laws. And if we live contrary to these laws, we can expect poor health. We need a baptism of old-fashioned common sense.

Q. How do you feel about abortion?

A. I could never have an abortion and live with myself. There are some things that can be legislated, but an individual still has to live with himself.

Q. What was your purpose in seeing the Pope? What was said between you?

A. It was a beautiful experience. I had received word that if I were ever in Rome I was to send word where I was staying. I did, and an invitation came to the hotel. It could not have happened perhaps even five years ago. I’m Protestant. I am a woman minister. But we were just two human beings. The same purpose. Both love humanity, both wanting to help humanity. As I was announced and came walking toward him, he reached both hands out to me, and then when I came very near he took both of my hands in his hands and looked me directly in the face and said, “You are doing an admirable work.” He repeated the words. I thanked him. I told him I was trying to do the work of our Lord, too. He said he wanted me to know I had his constant prayers and his blessing. The day has come that we need to forget a lot of the differences that are dividing us. If you are a Roman Catholic and born again, cleansed by the blood of Christ, then you’re my brother or sister in the Lord.

Q. What is your interpretation of James 5:14? Do you use oil? Do you regard yourself as an elder?

A. What is prescribed in this verse should be taking place in every church in the world today. Every pastor prays for the sick in his church, but if God ever did raise them up he would get the shock of his life! A lot of our praying is just a form. Why don’t we get back to the Word of God? Anointing oil is the symbol of the Holy Spirit. I do not consider myself an elder. But I have every right to use oil if I wish to anoint with oil because it is the symbol of the Holy Spirit. In our services people are healed just sitting there in the presence of the Holy Spirit, even without the anointing with oil.

Q. How do you interpret Paul’s and Peter’s apparent injunction against women’s speech in First Timothy 2:11 and 12?

A. Oh, this is a good one. Kinda looks like they didn’t believe in women’s lib. But if it were contrary to the will of God that women should preach, Paul certainly would have reprimanded Philip, in whose home Paul visited, for Philip had four daughters who were preachers. Now that’s a house full of preachers, let me tell you.

Q. Isn’t that an argument from silence?

A. All right, but take a look at Acts 2, talking about the last days: “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” I believe the reason Paul said what he did about women needing to be silent was because in the synagogues of that day women would sit in the balcony and would talk so loudly that the speaker could not be heard. Maybe John’s wife or Saul’s wife would call down and say, “Did I turn off the stove?” Or if they were voting, Elizabeth would call down and say, “Abe, say no. You know I don’t like him.” So Paul said, Let the woman be quiet. That did not mean they were inferior. The Bible teaches that both men and women have their proper places, each with responsibility. The man is the head of the house. That does not mean he is a tyrant. We all know there are differences, and thank God there are differences. But women are not lesser. Some of the great leaders of Hebrew history were women. Personally, I admire Golda Meir. What Golda wants, Golda gets; yet she is sensitive. There are some things that men naturally do and some that women do, but it was Christianity that freed the women from their subservient role. I could never see how women could reject Christ, because he gave dignity to women. I’m still glad I am a woman.

Q. Do you feel that all sick people should come to you? Could they just believe on their own?

A. Of course. They do not have to come to me. I have nothing to do with these healings. Don’t reach out to try to touch Kathryn Kuhlman. Reach out and touch Jesus. You come to these services because there is a oneness and a spirit, and when you join thousands who are in prayer it is so much easier to pray and to believe God. But keep your eyes on Jesus, wherever you are. You can be healed in your own home just as easily as in a miracle service.

Q. What is your comment to Christians who come to your meetings and go away without having been healed?

A. I have no comment whatsoever, because whether or not that one was healed was in the hands of God. At no time was it my responsibility. But I’m human, and you’ll never know how I hurt on the inside when I see those who came in wheelchairs being pushed into the street again. You’ll never know the ache, the suffering I feel, but the answer I must leave with God. But while I was in Kansas City, the Star, a newspaper of great strength, sent a New York-trained, marvelous, lovely reporter whom I got to know. The last night I was there she came to my dressing room, and I told her how grateful I was for the healings but that I wept for the others. Three weeks later I received a personal letter from her telling me that she had had a friend in that last service, an attorney dying of cancer, brought in a stretcher. She told me that he died within a week after that, but that the attorney’s wife related how he had felt that the service was the greatest thing that happened to him. He was not healed, but he accepted Christ for the forgiveness of sins in that service, and death was easy. The reporter reminded me not to weep but to remember this incident. No, I do not know why all are not healed physically, but all can be healed spiritually, and that’s the greatest miracle any human being can know.

Q. Do you think there is any correlation between your ministry of healing and such phenomena as ESP?

A. I’ll be frank: I know nothing about ESP. I have never studied it. I have always felt I had enough to do to study the Bible, and I just lean completely upon the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit.

Q. How do you understand the apparent desire of Jesus and the disciples not to publicize certain healings?

A. I do not know what was in the mind of Jesus. One day I’ll ask him, and I’ll let you know.

Q. Is there healing in the atonement? That is, did Christ die to relieve us of our physical as well as spiritual infirmities?

A. Jesus died for the whole man, body, soul and spirit. God would be unjust had he done otherwise. In the first Passover, the blood was sprinkled, but the flesh of the lamb was to be eaten. We tend to forget about the flesh. What about the bread in communion? It should mean a beautiful miracle service. Partaking of the bread has nothing to do with the soul. The whole man was included in the atonement. In Isaiah we read, “By his stripes we are healed.” I do not believe that anyone can receive a physical healing without also receiving a spiritual healing. The two go hand in hand.

Q. What is your concept of illness?

A. How best can I answer that? Well, maybe by telling you about the little boy who ate too many green apples and who came to his mother complaining of illness. She said, “Oh, honey, it’s all in your mind. You just think you are sick.” Whereupon the boy replied, “But Mama, I have inside information. I’m sick.” When a little boy goes vomiting all over the place, having eaten too many green apples, I’m telling you something: it isn’t just his imagination. It is not just a mental attitude. That kid is sick. I know why the question is asked. Because so very often there are those who like to say that healings are psychosomatic, that it’s all in the mind. The healing of cancer could not be psychosomatic. Nor the lengthening of a limb, or the giving of sight to an eye. Let’s just stop trying to close our eyes to the power of God. Let’s accept God for what he really is. Let’s accept God and his Word at face value. You may not need a miracle today, but there may come a time when you will need that miracle. Accept God’s promises at face value.

Q. To what extent is individual health related to social or cosmic health? Do you feel our social “mind set” has much to do with the physical health of individuals?

A. Most important … all these questions are, they’re right down to where we live. The greatest enemy that an individual can take into his life is fear. It’s just like that. If you are able to conquer that enemy of fear, you have gone a long way to bringing health to a physical body. Life is not built for negative achievements. It’s built for positive contribution, for outgoing love. You can never get rid of your own troubles unless you take upon yourself the troubles of others. When you find yourself oppressed by melancholy, the best thing to do is to go out and find something kind to do to somebody else. For when you dig a man out of trouble, the hole which is left is the grave where you bury your own troubles. Go out and do something that nobody but a Christian would do, and it isn’t long before you forget about your own problems. That is where the mind enters into it. I believe one can talk himself into being sick. It’s amazing how a little pain will increase when you talk about it, dwell on it. The best medicine in the world is hard work. We’ve got pills for everything. We’re pilled to death these days. Sometimes I wish we could put faith in capsules. Remember, the miracle starts from within. You exercise outgoing love, and all the healing resources of the universe will be behind you.

Q. How do you regard faith?

A. Faith is that quality or power by which the things desired become the things possessed. This is the nearest to a definition of faith attempted by the inspired Word of God. It’s almost like trying to define energy in one comprehensive statement. Or try to define an atom: you can’t. So it is with faith. But we know what faith is not. A common error is to confuse faith with presumption. That’s a danger. Faith is more than belief, than confidence, than trust. Above all, it is never boastful, nor contrary to the Word of God. Faith can be received only as it is imparted by God himself. The most common ailment among those who come to our services and write in for prayer is cancer. If I have any faith in praying for the healing of that cancer, that faith is definitely a gift from God. Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith. You cannot work it up. You can believe a promise, yet not have the faith to appropriate that promise. Belief is a mental quality, and when we try to believe ourselves into an experience we are getting into a metaphysical realm, and there is a difference. Faith as imparted by God to the heart is spiritual. It is with the heart that man believes unto righteousness. But heart belief is faith or at any rate opens the door of communication between us and the Lord whereby a divine imparted faith becomes possible. Jesus told his believing disciples that if they had just a little faith they could move mountains.

Q. Why do so few people have the gift of healing?

A. Let’s not just take one gift. Let’s get the overall picture of what Paul is saying in First Corinthians twelve. The gifts are essential to the functioning of the Church. The early Church was founded on the supernatural gifts, and we need to get back to the supernatural. Where we find the Holy Spirit we find the supernatural. Should one argue that the gifts were merely to usher in the present dispensation, and not for today, consider Peter: “The promise is to … many afar off.…” We are to desire the gifts that we may serve God better. Love is most important. Why limit your question to the gift of healing? Why are there so few who have been given the gift of wisdom, the gift of knowledge, and so on? And there are far more gifts than those named in First Corinthians twelve. God knows who he can trust with gifts. Some would misuse them.

Q. Do you feel you have the gift of healing? What gift do you have?

A. I would never say that I have ever received any gift. I am leery of folks who boast of this or that gift. The greatest of the Christian graces is humility. All that I know is that I have yielded my body to Him to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and anything that the Holy Spirit has given me, any results there might be in this life of mine, is not Kathryn Kuhlman. It’s the Holy Spirit; it’s what the Holy Spirit does through a yielded vessel. That is one thing I am so afraid of: I am afraid lest I grieve the Holy Spirit, for when the Holy Spirit is lifted from me I am the most ordinary person that ever lived.

Q. Is anxiety the cause of most illness?

A. I have already told you that the most common ailment people come to me with is cancer. Now everyone knows that cancer is not psychosomatic. It could not be. If so, we would not be spending billions for cancer research. We have had healings of cancer; therefore those healed by God were not merely psychosomatic. I admit very freely there are those who are neurotic, who need to be healed mentally and spiritually, who come for physical healing. But these three aspects are all parts of one person. Man was made to be mastered by a higher power, and if you don’t yield you will be mastered by things and circ*mstances. If you are mastered by the will of God, you will not be defeated in the hour of trial. When we are defeated, we soon find ourselves sick in mind and body.

Q. How much knowledge do you have of medicine and therapeutic science?

A. Practically none. That’s why I have doctors on the platform. One doctor who came to our service wondered how I could take the healings of arthritis so lightly. He regarded them as the greatest miracles, because as a physician he knew there was no cure. I often ask physicians to talk with those who have been healed.

Q. What do you regard as the ultimate goal of your ministry?

A. My purpose is the salvation of souls. Divine healing is secondary to the transformation of a life.

Q. Do you have anything special you would like to say to “Christianity Today” readers?

A. Just one thing. Believe God to the point of action, remembering always that the only limit to the power of God lies within you as an individual. And to the Church may I say: No nation is greater or stronger than its spiritual forces, and the Church today has a great responsibility.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

The summer season brings a slight variation in our issue dates. Publishing twenty-five issues a year leaves us two two extra weeks to use for staff vacations. The next issue will be dated three weeks from this one, August 10, and the following one three weeks later, August 31. After that we will resume the normal two-week cycle.

Our staff meets every morning to read the Bible, sing, and pray. Recently there have been a number of special requests for prayer for loved ones in our staff families and among our contributors and friends who have been seriously ill. We have seen God answer prayer in a special way, and we have rejoiced in his goodness.

The many friends and admirers of our beloved editor-at-large Addison H. Leitch will want to remember him in prayer; he is seriously ill with cancer.

Our co-founder and executive editor L. Nelson Bell just finished his term of service as moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. He too needs prayer, for he is suffering from several infirmities that give him considerable pain.

At a recent meeting of the CHRISTIANITY TODAY Board of Directors we were able to report that God is blessing and that great progress has been made in the last two years. Our Canon Press is getting geared up for production, and we have great expectations for it.

Of the changes that in our decade mark the world into which God sends his eternal Gospel, three appear particularly vital to me.

First, the most important development is that all nations and continents really are growing together into one world, what Marshall McLuhan has called the “global village.” This is the product of technological, economic, political, and ideological factors. The fast communication offered by jet planes and by television and the delicate economic and ideological interrelation among all continents have developed a global consciousness. This growing together has nourished two emphases: emancipation and reintegration.

a. On the one hand, the ideals of enlightenment, freedom, equality, and brotherhood have made our generation very sensitive to all attempts to control and exploit other people. Afro-Asian nationalism has swept away Western colonialism. Through the world wars and the Viet Nam war, Western prestige has suffered heavy blows. In some countries there is an unconcealed hatred against America, which also switches over to anti-Christian feelings. Afro-Asian nationalism also expresses itself in the resurgence of ancient non-Christian religions or their transformation into syncretistic new religions with strong ideological undercurrents.

Within Christianity this nationalistic reaction is shown in the younger churches’ quest for autonomy and self-realization. Often this makes the situation of Western missionaries delicate.

b. On the other hand, former independence more and more gives way to interdependence or even huge mergers into centralized systems. More and more tasks are tackled in world-wide dimensions and structures. This also applies to churches and missions, many of which not only have been joined to ecumenical bodies but also transfer more and more brain power to these organizations in order to receive central direction.

A second major development in our time is that a new dimension has reached our consciousness: the futurological. People have become tremendously alive to the great possibilities that the future holds. The old dreams about a paradise on earth seem to be achievable by our technological means. But equally obvious is the opposite possibility: that this very technology, might spoil our earth and hasten the end of mankind.

This ambiguous vision has inspired scientists, politicians, philosophers, and theologians to present comprehensive, future-oriented schemes. They propose how mankind through united efforts and a common vision will be able to cope with these enormous tasks and avert the menace of a collective, self-destruction.

Sometimes these proposals constitute new ideologically motivated claims of ruling the world. But sometimes leading men earnestly press for dialogue and cooperation. They hope to find a world formula acceptable to all that will open up the way to a new humanity, united in justice, peace, and constant development toward greater happiness. These contacts are based upon mutual respect for one another’s ways of thinking. Usually this also leads to the demand to refrain from attempting to convert others to one’s own views. The new ideal is dialogue and mutual spiritual participation. This view evidences itself in the formation of new worldwide inter-faith organizations like the Conference of Religion for Peace, which now has a bureau at the United Nations headquarters.

A third important development in our world is man-oriented tendency. Man’s welfare, liberation, dignity, and rights are the central concerns. There is a strong trend of emancipation in this: all laws and social conventions that seem to limit equality and self-realization by means of an external norm and alien will are swept away. Two worldwide waves, the anti-authoritarian and the sexualist ones, must be seen against this background.

Even the great religions, including Christianity, more and more present themselves as basically concerned with pleading the case of man. They promise him liberation and true identity. This new interest in man also serves as the motive for an integration of all religions and even ideologies.

If we try to interpret this anthropocentric trend biblically, we reach a dialectical answer that leaves us rather uneasy. We may rejoice over man’s growing sensibility toward the needs of his underprivileged fellow man, especially if this involves readiness to repent and to sacrifice. Many churches and missions do, indeed, witness a growing readiness especially within the young generation to work to foster development, communication, and liberation.

But on the other hand this humanitarian motivation often emerges in connection with a strange shutting out of the religious awareness, i.e., respect and love for God. It is true that we witness a strong resurgence of religiosity, a new interest in mysticism and rituals. (This could be added to my list here as a fourth feature of our time.) But this religiosity does not really break the spell of man’s self-centeredness; rather, it promises him a deeper self-realization. Zen meditation and group dynamic experiences are the two typical forms of expressions, but even some aspects of the so-called charismatic renewal could be mentioned in this connection. In all these cases man misses his transcendental counterpart. Therefore he misses his protecting limitations and his true destination. And so he becomes subject to his untamed instincts, desires, and fears. Humanity without divinity turns into bestial*ty.

There is also an eschatological notion of a final emergence of an uncontrolled human self-centeredness that loses its God-given norms. It finally aims at dethroning God and enthroning as deified world ruler that person whom St. Paul calls the lawless one (2 Thess. 2:8). This must be connected with Christ’s description of the last time, which will be marked by the great apostasy: “And because lawlessness is multiplied, most men’s love will grow cold” (Matt. 24:12).

But now it is most essential to note that Jesus, just after he has said this, goes on to refer to the task of world mission, which must and which will progress until his coming again: “And this Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14).

As long as we are not forcibly prevented, our mission has to proceed until the last human being still unreached by the good news will have the chance to meet his true Lord and Saviour.

‘Black Preacher Day’

The black preacher received his due when several hundred persons, both black and white, gathered at Boston’s Music Hall on a recent weekend to celebrate the officially proclaimed “Black Preacher Day,” perhaps the first such commemoration of the black ministry.

Sponsored by the National Center of Afro-American Artists, the celebration featured dinner in the kitchens of numerous black churches across the city, tours of black churches, conversations with black pastors, and dramas depicting the history of famous black ministers. There were bands, gospel choirs, dances, stage productions, and even a fashion show. All events in some way depicted the theme or life-styles of the black clergy.

The whole affair was an amalgam of conservative and liberal clergy life-styles, and praise was given to both the black revivalists and social activists. Special attention was called to the lives of Black Muslim Elijah Muhammad, civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., self-help capitalist Leon Sullivan, politician Adam Clayton Powell, and even revolutionary Nat Turner—all ministers in their day.

Perhaps because historically the black church was, in the words of organizers, “the source of much laughter and gaiety, a training ground for actors, singers, orators and artists,” it was the new breed of black actors and artists who decided to sponsor the event, not a church organization. That made the event all the more significant. And no one seemed to complain about the prices, ranging from $12.50 to $50 as admission to one or all events.

JAMES S. TINNEY

Key 73: Going And Growing

Despite severe financial problems on the national level, Key 73 is alive and well and growing in hundreds of communities. In fact, said national director Ted Raedeke, the lack of money may have been a blessing in disguise, forcing local congregations to work out their own programs. “I think many of [the congregations] were sitting back waiting to see what we’d do for them,” said Raedeke. “They soon found we couldn’t do much.”

With responsibility for the success of the year-long effort resting with local churches—a goal Raedeke sought from the beginning—the program is as varied as the number of participants. Among events scheduled during the summer and fall months are: home Bible studies and prayer meetings, evangelistic blitzes, community-wide crusades, local television and film efforts, Scripture distribution campaigns, fairground booths, marches for Christ, concert programs, telephone surveys, and Christian art festivals. In addition, youth rallies are scheduled for thirty-two cities including Philadelphia (July 1–7); Morgantown, Pennsylvania, where Jesus 73 is expected to attract 10,000 or more (Aug. 9–11); Detroit (Aug. 5–11); Kansas City (July 27–29); Eugene, Oregon (July 28); and Houston, where planners of a joint Lutheran youth gathering expect 18,000 (Aug. 4–8). Typical of many rallies already held was a three-and-a-half hour one in the small town of Manassas, Virginia, featuring Washington Redskin’s football star Charlie Harraway and a returned POW, Sergeant David Harker. It drew more than 300 from six denominations.

Scripture distribution and religion surveys are proving the most popular local projects. In Danbury, Connecticut, more than 15,000 Scriptures were distributed by seven churches, including Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Assembly of God, Baptist, Christian, Nazarene, and AME Zion. Roman Catholic churches in Missouri (a third of the nation’s Catholic dioceses are participating in Key 73) conducted surveys. In Zelienople, Pennsylvania, a group of churches polled their community by telephone to find out why residents weren’t attending church. Nearly 100,000 Scripture portions were distributed in Nashville, Tennessee.

Most Scripture-distribution materials come from the American Bible Society. To date, the society reports that 27.9 million Scripture portions have been distributed under the Key 73 banner. The number includes more than ten million copies of a booklet containing Luke and Acts. (The ten-millionth copy was presented to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.) More than 1.5 million New Testaments were distributed also.

Raedeke, while acknowledging disappointment that the national office couldn’t use mass media to give Key 73 “high visibility,” is nonetheless pleased at the variations on local themes. Many churches are setting up Key 73 booths at state and county fairs. At the Florida state fair, 200 teens hired for grounds-cleaning and tickettaking wore sweat shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Christ is the Key.” At a New England Key 73 strategy seminar, one pastor told of his church’s unique Key 73 ministry—a booth at the city dump. As the pastor told it, church members noticed that the dump was extremely busy on Saturday mornings. Believing they should be where the people are, they opened a booth from which church young people dispensed hot chocolate and Key 73 tracts.

In New Orleans, every Christian denomination was represented in a march for Christ through the downtown area. More than 5,000 marched, with 1,500 gathering at St. Louis Catholic Cathedral for a Key 73 service. As participants left the cathedral, they sang Jesus songs. Organizers say 172 city churches were represented. In the meantime, the Women’s Great Commission Prayer Crusade (headed by Campus Crusade’s first lady, Vonette Bright) held two dozen well attended prayer rallies in the first six months of 1973.

And, as local churches get more involved, the national financial picture has brightened somewhat, said Raedeke. A special mailing has started to bring in money from churches and individuals. In the meantime, Key 73 financing is being helped by sales of the organization’s Congregational Resource Book (150,000 of the $3 books have been sold; Raedeke hopes sales will reach 200,000.)

BARRIE DOYLE

Katie Hanley: Under God’S Spell

In the off-Broadway production of the hit musical Godspell, singer Katie Hanley prayed three things: “To see Christ more clearly, love him more dearly, follow him more nearly day by day.” In the film version—a much more serious production, according to Miss Hanley and this critic—her song-prayer has deepened from the simple “Day by Day” to the richer meaning of “By My Side.” As she told Associated Press religion writer George W. Cornell in a recent interview, the film “all at once is not just a silly, light show, but starts to sum up the basic message of Jesus and the sacrifices he made for us. Singing of him, we want to follow him.”

The change in songs reflects a deeper change within the singer’s spiritual life, she told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Coming out of the San Francisco hippie scene, she became a Christian three years ago through the witness of her sister, Marsha Hoover, now a senior at the University of Utah and active in Campus Crusade for Christ. But, says Miss Hanley, “I had no real power of the Holy Spirit to take advantage of the witnessing opportunities that singing ‘Day by Day’ [probably the most popular song in the musical] gave me.”

Seven months ago, however, she received “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” which she associates with speaking in tongues. “I received it in child-like innocence,” she recalls, “not really knowing exactly what it was.” Since then, she explains, Christ’s love and power are more evident in her life. “I now realize that Jesus really was God; that prayer, the Bible, and miracles are real. It’s a real thing to me. It’s a matter of growth in faith and knowing Jesus.”

Her professional life, too, has shifted emphasis. She signed a contract with Logos International Publishing Company of Plainfield, New Jersey, and plans to do an album for them. No projection date or final plans have been made, but she says it will probably be a mix of secular and sacred songs, an update of some old hymns, all “sweet, beautiful melodies.”

“God used Stephen Schwartz, a non-Christian, to write some simple, beautiful melodies for Godspell,” says Miss Hanley, and it’s there that she finds the show’s power. “God can use Godspell to bring people to him.” A great many Catholics came to see the musical, she says, and “those people got so excited about the joy of following Jesus.” “Some people have never considered that following him could lead to a joy-filled life,” she adds.

Her first major appearance for her Lord came last summer at Explo 72, which her sister had told her about a month earlier. She got in touch with Crusade, sent a tape of “Day by Day,” and about a week later was scheduled on the program and booked on a flight to Dallas. The enthusiasm of Explo “bowled me over a little, but I was so glad to know there were so many young Christians around.” Her lack of Christian friends in New York made it difficult at times to maintain her friendship with Jesus, she says. “Explo had a little bit of the football atmosphere about it, but when Bill Bright said ‘Let’s pray,’ the Cotton Bowl became filled with quiet, worshipful reverence,” she recalls, and that impressed her.

The singer gets some negative criticism from fundamentalists who consider Godspell blasphemous. “I try to explain to them what the show means with its symbolism and child-like innocence,” she says. But, she adds, a cast’s attitude can at times make Godspell blasphemous. The original casts didn’t do this, she thinks, but the various productions around the country often make the show a religious “Laugh-In.”

Now that she has become a charismatic and is attending the First Christian Assembly Church in Plainfield, she’s “waiting for God to strengthen and lead me. I’m just waiting. I’m out of the world now, and here in Plainfield God is taking the world out of me.”

CHERYL FORBES

Hot And Humorous

“Ridiculous!” That was the reply—amid laughter—by Hebrew-Christian evangelist Louis Kaplan, 57, of Phoenix, Arizona, to a Jewish Post report that JULY 6, 1973 he and his wife Chira have been sending $6,000 a month to Israel for the “Jews for Jesus” movement. Kaplan said their involvement has been through his Jewish Voice Broadcast (JVB), which is aired on fifty stations internationally and last year sent sixteen young people to Jerusalem to open up an evangelical youth center. The Post charge was contained in an article reflecting on the hot Jewish-Christian evangelism controversy in Israel (see March 30 issue, page 38).

The evangelist claimed that the activities of his group have been grossly exaggerated because of the desire of radical religious elements, led by Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League, to gain a voice in the next Israeli election.

The young missionaries, all but two now back in the States, were financed by JVB’s contributors at $50 per month each plus room and board. (Kaplan emphasizes that his group is not to be confused with what he calls the “false Children of God sect” in Israel.) Despite threats and beatings from radical Orthodox Jews, alleged Kaplan, the group distributed thousands of Bibles and tracts and persuaded forty persons in Jerusalem to become followers of Jesus.

A few months ago, the group received a note threatening that the JVB youth center would be burnt down if the evangelists refused to leave. “In sympathy with the frightened Jewish landlord, we left and moved to another location,” explained Kaplan, who has visited Israel six times (once to appear before the Ministry for Religious Affairs to clarify JVB’s intentions).

“I want to emphasize that our ministry has never been hindered by the Israeli government,” said Kaplan. What about rumors floating in Jewish circles that Egypt is supporting JVB? “Nonsense,” he chuckled, pointing to the incongruity of funding by Muslims.

CINDY SCHAIBLE

Religion In Transit

Reaction was mixed to a $10,000 campaign by the American Board of Missions to the Jews to place “smiling Jews for Jesus” ads in thirty campus papers. Some refused to run it, Stanford accompanied it with a written apology to any offended by it, and at one Southern California college 7,000 of the 8,000 copies of the school’s newspaper were stolen.

With the recent death of a ninety-six-year-old “eldress,” the ranks of the Shakers—America’s best-known communal religious group—were reduced to thirteen, all women, in two communes. Organized in 1787, the group at its peak had 2,400 members in fifty-eight communes. The sect considers its first leader, Ann Lee, to be the female counterpart of Jesus Christ.

An organization to promote world evangelism through missionary efforts of Third World churches was launched in a meeting attended by sixty-five at Fuller Seminary School of World Mission. Afericasia (for Africa, Latin America, and Asia) Mission Advance Fellowship, led by Third World evangelicals, will organize a communication network, set up training and research centers, and offer other support.

Jewish scholars will contribute to “Shalom Curriculum,” a joint Christian-education project of six major Protestant denominations (Disciples of Christ, Episcopal Church, Southern Presbyterians, Reformed Church in America, United Church of Christ, and United Presbyterians).

A woman, Mrs. J. J. Chesney, was elected vice-president of Canada’s most influential synagogue, Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. The post is regarded as the prelude to the congregation’s highest office, and the prospect of a female president in a key synagogue is creating a stir in Toronto Jewish circles. It would be the first time that a woman ever occupied that position in a Canadian synagogue.

CONTACT Teleministries, a coordinating and accrediting body, says it now has fifty affiliated crisis hot-line centers operating around the clock and responding to nearly 500,000 calls for help a year.

The Slavic Gospel Association and the David C. Cook Foundation have jointly produced a new youth program utilizing tape recordings that tell the story of Christian young people behind the Iron Curtain.

There is unprecedented openness and response to evangelical literature in Canada. That was the consensus at the second annual Canadian regional meeting of the Christian Booksellers Association, attended by 200 dealers and publishers’ representatives at Niagara Falls, Ontario.

The 30,000-member Evangelical Congregational Church in a special session elected H. D. Wittmaier as bishop to succeed Paul K. Cressman, who died last December.

The current principal of Spurgeon’s College, London, G. R. Beasley-Murray, an evangelical, will move to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, as professor of New Testament.

A Gallup Poll shows that 74 per cent of the British public believe in God and 18 per cent believe in the devil—a 3 per cent decline in each case from 1968 figures.

Legislation to end public display of p*rnography is coming soon for Britain. Prime Minister Edward Heath promised the tough stand in response to a million-plus signature petition presented as part of the evangelical Festival of Light campaign.

Official figures show that 126,777 legal abortions were performed in England and Wales last year—12 per cent of them on women from other countries, primarily West Germany.

More than 200 million Bibles and Scripture portions were distributed around the world last year, more than half of them in the United States, according to an American Bible Society report. Donations for getting out the literature (including 5.5 million Bibles and 14.2 million Testaments) came from 1.6 million individuals and seventy denominations and agencies.