Page 5883 – Christianity Today (2024)

Did it just “happen” that Jesus was killed at the time the Passover was being celebrated?

It was midnight long ago on the occasion of the first Passover in Egypt. Darkness brooded over the land. A people—those whom God would redeem from slavery and servitude—were to be delivered because of God’s command, because of their faith in and obedience to that command, and because of the death of a lamb.

They might not have understood the implications of what was to be done, but they did understand that a lamb was to be slain and its blood applied by faith and in obedience to God’s instructions, on the two doorposts and the lintel of their homes, and that because of this blood all in the house would be safe. (“And when I see the blood I will pass over you.”)

Suddenly throughout all the land of Egypt there went up a cry. Judgment and death came to every household except those that bore the sign of blood—where the slaying of a lamb had saved those who had believed.

Whether there were unbelieving and disobedient Israelites as well as Egyptians on that night of death and redemption, we do not know. But this we do know: When God’s judgment fell, those who had applied blood to the two doorposts and the lintel were safe. God had seen the blood and had passed over that house.

The Old Covenant passed and a new one took its place. But as in the Old, so in the New, blood was the symbol of cleaning and forgiveness.

Centuries had now intervened, and the annual celebration of the Passover feast had come once more. Jesus and his disciples had gathered in an upper room: “And when the hour came, he sat at a table, and the apostles with him. And he said to them, ‘I have earnestly desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer’.… And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, ‘Take this, and divide it among yourselves’.… And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body’” (Luke 22:14–20).

Jesus was God’s provision for a world of Satan’s slaves who were living in the darkness of spiritual ignorance and death. He was the Passover Lamb who would take away the sins of the world, who was to “open their eyes” that they might “turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God,” that they might “receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith” in him (Acts 26:18).

The last great Passover did not just happen. We read in Acts 2:23: “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”

The fact that many in our time ridicule the reality and merits of Christ’s blood shed on Calvary is an indication of how very far we have departed from the inescapable truths of the Bible.

In our damning sophistication, many churches no longer sing, “There Is Power in the Blood,” “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood,” and other hymns that stress that Jesus shed his precious blood as a Lamb without blemish. What folly to try to bypass the blood and its significance!

Take any good concordance and see what the New Testament says about the blood. The evidence is overwhelming that our redemption has been purchased by the blood shed at Calvary. Can it be that we have come to the time foretold when men are “holding the form of religion but denying the power of it” (2 Tim. 3:5)? Listen to these solemn words of warning: “A man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God and profaned [counted as an ordinary thing] the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:28, 29).

Just prior to this we read, “Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh … let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:19, 20, 23).

The blood atonement may not embrace all the implications of our Lord’s death on the Cross, but it is not an optional doctrine; it cannot be rejected without eternal loss. From that first Passover blood has had a great significance: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement by reason of the life” (Lev. 17:11).

Through the Bible like a scarlet thread—as it has been expressed—run references to the sacrificial Lamb and his cleansing blood:

“And when I see the blood, I will pass over you.”

“He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities … like a lamb that is led to the slaughter.… Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; he has put him to grief; he makes himself an offering for sin … he bore the sin of many.”

“Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.… And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

“For even Christ, our passover, is sacrificed for us.”

“And I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain … and they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals, for thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God.’”

“They have conquered … by the blood of the Lamb.”

“All who dwell on earth will worship it [the beast], every one whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain.”

“If any one has an ear, let him hear.… Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.”

Obsolete? “Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth … him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood.… Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all of the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so, Amen” (Rev. 1:5, 7, 8).

Obsolete? A mere joke?

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31).

This one thing I know: between this sinner and God’s judgment on sin there has been interposed, by faith, the blood of the Son of God. I know I am his, and I know I am safe!

MORE PLANE TALK

I now know there are ten readers of this column. That many good folk took the time to write and accuse me of dereliction of Christian responsibility because I let a drunk go out into the rain when he refused directions to gate twenty (“Plane Talk,” March 3 issue, page 32).

Therefore in the name of fairness I’ve revised the column, bringing into the account one of my esteemed readers:

The other night I was sitting in an airport lounge awaiting the arrival of my traveling companion. It had been raining for hours, and the rain was still coming down in sheets against the plate-glass window of the lounge.

I was just settling into my own thoughts when a red-faced drunk in rumpled clothes staggered in and asked a question of one of the baggage-handlers. Apparently not liking the answer, he shook his head and made his unsteady way toward me.

He stopped immediately in front of my seat, weaving back and forth on his feet. I prepared myself for a plea for financial assistance, but instead he asked, “Can you tell me where gate twenty is?”

I noticed he was clutching an airline ticket. Trying to be helpful I said, “Go through the door over there into the main terminal and you’ll see signs pointing to the different gates.”

“It don’t work that way,” he said with a frown, turning away abruptly with a swaying stagger toward the young woman sitting next to me.

“Where is gate twenty?” he demanded in a louder and more belligerent tone. Startled out of her magazine reading, the girl nevertheless immediately assessed the situation.

“Here, my dear brother,” she said, jumping to her feet, “I’ll show you the way to gate twenty.”

“Huh?”

“Let me take you by the arm.”

“Shay, whaz your game, sister? Leggo my arm.”

“Here, let me put this gospel tract in your pocket while we walk.”

“Hey, whadda ya doin’? Get outta my pocket. You tryin’ to roll me for my money?”

“I’m just showing Christian compassion by leading you to gate twenty.”

“How do I know you’re leading me to gate twenty. I an’t goin’ nowhere with you. Leggo my sleeve, lady. Help! Shom*one get this crazy lady away from me.”

“My dear friend, I’m just trying to help you. It’s for your own good.”

“I din’t ask for your help sho just sit down.”

“How can I sit still when I see á brother in need?”

“Well, I don’t need you so go ’way.”

“But, sir, I insist that you not miss your plane.”

“It’s my conshushushunal right to miss my plane if I want. Listen, lady, you got me so shook up I’m goin’ back to the bar to steady my nerves with another drink.”

Now, is everybody happy?

FROM TEARS TO LAUGHTER

My former pastor, David Yoost, introduced me to CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and I thank him for it. I have been challenged, entertained, educated, informed, and evangelized by your great articles and monthly features.

And the poetry—who selects the poetry? Seldom does it fail to speak to me in the most personal way. John Leax’s “After the Stroke” (March 17) is very moving. How wonderful it is that the Lord blesses some of his own with the gift of expression and then encourages them to share it.

From tears to laughter, reading “Sloven Power.” This also spoke to me; I am Sister Sloven! Thank you for a marvelous magazine.

(MRS.) GERALDINE SIEGFRIED

Akron, Ohio

WHICH VERSION?

Your mention of Which Bible? in “The Bible as a Whole” (Feb. 18), is rather puzzling, to say the least. I do not mind for a moment being put in a “Special Category” providing the “category” is accurate and not given to discrepancies and egregious misstatements. I searched the whole review several times to find a presentation of facts to prove the thesis of Which Bible? was wrong. I couldn’t find one. I did find that “the overwhelming majority of evangelical Bible scholars … would agree in regarding Which Bible? as basically wrong-headed in its approach and typical of a misguided apologetic that causes evangelicalism to be identified in many people’s minds with an unenlightened obscurantism”.… This “overwhelming majority of evangelical Bible scholars” in our day, I take it, accept the Bible as the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God in the original manuscripts. If they do, then they must believe that this Sovereign God has providentially preserved his Book all through the ages. This being the case, there is one question left—which version is nearest to the original autographs?

Which Bible? sets forth in nearly 300 pages clear, concise proof that the King James Version is that version. If there are those who can produce more proof, better proof that there is another version nearer to the originals, we welcomeit; but we are convinced they cannot produce it.

Wealthy Street Baptist Church

Grand Rapids, Mich.

• In the article, interested readers were referred for more information to J. Harold Greenlee’s Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism (Eerdmans, 160 pp., $3.50).—ED.

I must protest the false and unfair charges brought against Jay Green’s King James II Version of the Bible. It is false to say that this version is based on “an approach to textual matters that assumes for Erasmus a degree of accuracy impossible under the circ*mstances.” Why didn’t the authors of the article examine it with enough care to note the use of italics concerning textual questions (Johannine comma, etc.)? But it is a shame that for so many years evangelicals have uncritically accepted liberal theories of New Testament textual criticism through the influence of conservatives such as B. B. Warfield. Now that so many strictly Byzantine-type readings have been found in the early (non-Byzantine) papyrus manuscripts, evangelicals ought to be able to see that something is wrong and that they should not be following a Greek text that is bound to change considerably with every printing when the basis for it may be entirely wrong.

Whatever its faults, it is also unfair to say that “it is difficult to find any particular in which this version is an improvement over what it is designed to replace.” What Jay Green has tried to do is give in present-day vocabulary a version of the Word of God without resorting to paraphrase (even “faithful” paraphrase, which depends upon the correct exegesis of the text) or accepting doubtful textual “improvements.” No other version attempts to do this, and that is an important achievement.

Grand Rapids, Mich.

A USEFUL SORT

I just wanted to thank Dr. Tinder for his essay, “Books 1971: The History of Christianity” (Feb. 18), which I thoroughly enjoyed. It seems to me an exceedingly succinct and useful sort of survey.

Professor, Theology and Philosophy

Yale Divinity School

New Haven, Conn.

ALIVE AND WELL

In “English Church Merger” (News, Feb. 18), you state that 1,668 Congregational churches in England and Wales voted to merge with Presbyterians and form the United Reformed Church, while 465 voted against the merger. You did not tell the complete story. According to the British Weekly of January 21, 1972, there are some 700 Congregational churches remaining outside the proposed union.

On January 15, there was a meeting of leaders of the Congregational Association for the Continuance and Extension of Congregationalism. Plans were made to invite all non-uniting Congregational churches to a national rally in London the middle of May, to finalize the formation of a new organization which will probably be called the Congregational Federation.… So you see, Congregationalism is alive and well and living in Britain, as well as the United States and elsewhere.

Chairman, World Christian

Relations Commission

National Association of Congregational Christian Churches

Milwaukee, Wisc.

PRAISE FOR PREACHER BOB

After reading the news items on Better Entertainment Productions and the Ballad of Billie Blue in your March 3 issue, I would like to comment on this film and its executive director, Dr. Robert Plekker.

Dr. Plekker is a man committed to spreading the good news to as many as he can contact by whatever means he has available. He has been severely criticized by some churches for his latest use of the movie theaters to witness for Christ, but I know that the angels in heaven are rejoicing because of the souls given to the Lord by the use of this film.

Preacher Bob, as he is called in the film, shows Billie the way of salvation, and Billie becomes a Christian. This is not only an incident in a movie for Dr. Bob; he shows the same concern for all he meets in his everyday life. I feel it is a great privilege to know him as well as I do. If we were all as dedicated to spreading the word of God as this man, this world would be a much better place.

Jenison, Mich.

BUDGET CONCERN

I wholeheartedly agree with Editor-Publisher Harold Lindsell’s statement in his Editor’s Note for March 3 that the administration and Congress are being fiscally irresponsible in pushing the limit of the national debt to $400 billion. I also agree with Mr. Lindsell’s statement, “Nations cannot afford to adopt programs, however good, for which they cannot pay.” That is why I hope all evangelical Christians will support a $40 billion reduction in defense and war spending to bring our budget into balance.

Washington, D.C.

A LITTLE BARB

It was interesting recently to see the good coverage that was given to our Youth for Christ International convention in New York (“Youth for Christ: It’s a Young World,” Feb. 18). I could tell who Plowman had been talking to by the contents of the article.

The only thing that disturbed me about the article was the final line that several veteran men had resigned in the dispute over autonomy versus centralization. My challenge would be to name one. The Eastern Area vice-president resigned as of September 1 and is giving serious consideration to coming into our Wheaton office to direct our overseas ministry. His associate resigned, but not over that. Those are the only resignations I know of, and I’m on the inside. I just hope a little barb appearing in a responsible publication doesn’t shake the confidence of the public in our organization.

Vice-President, Northern States Area Youth for Christ International

West Des Moines, Iowa

Thanks for doing an excellent job reporting on the activities of Youth for Christ. It was comprehensive, fair, kind, and accurate. All of us are deeply grateful. Unquestionably it will do us a lot of good.… I have just come back from an extended time on the road. It was interesting to sense the influence of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Numbers of folks referred to the article and expressed appreciation for the way you handled it. So, I’m encouraged.

President

Youth for Christ International

Wheaton, Ill.

CONTINUING APPEAL

Michael Bourdeaux is reported to be opposed to Bible smuggling because some Bibles have been confiscated (“The War on Church Establishment,” March 3). This is somewhat like being opposed to the general practice of surgery because a patient dies.

Our Bible courier teams reported that in 1971 less than 1 per cent of the Bibles sent were confiscated. Complete confirmation of their safe delivery is received. Letters from Russia continue to appeal for Scriptures.

President

Underground Evangelism

Los Angeles, Calif.

If we are to work out an effective missionary strategy for mainland China, we need to understand the Chinese Communist mind from the biblical point of view. And to do this, we must first consider the biblical teaching about the mind.

According to the Bible, man was created in the image of God. If we use the categories of ancient thought and describe the mind in terms of intellect, will, and emotion, we see God’s image reflected in it as knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24). Man was to have dominion over the world, under God, as a prophet, king, and priest. Since the fall, the image has been corrupted. Man’s mind still functions as intellect, will, and emotion, but no longer exhibits true knowledge, righteousness, or holiness.

God’s cultural mandate to Adam in the Garden of Eden is “to dress it and to keep it” (Gen. 2:15). This twofold mandate represents both a progressive and a conservative principle in the human mind and reflects the twofold work of God in the creation and preservation of the world.

God reveals himself in the Bible as a triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Within the Godhead there are two relationships: the Father eternally begets the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. These two relationships are reflected in the world in God’s creative work and his providential direction of history. In the history of salvation we see both the work of Christ and that of the Spirit: justification and sanctification. Understanding these two relationships and principles will help us understand the Chinese mind, the Communist mind, and the Chinese Communist mind.

The Chinese Mind

The Bible teaches that the mind of fallen man is inadequate to know God truly through general revelation alone, and requires God’s special revelation in his Word; even this special revelation cannot be correctly understood apart from redemption in Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, although they are sinners, men retain many of God’s creation gifts, and through the action of common grace in nature and in history they are able to accomplish much. Thus the Chinese mind, in the light of God’s general revelation, was able to develop two of the highest forms of humanistic culture in Confucianism and Taoism.

Not knowing the true God, the Chinese mind conceives ultimate reality as the Absolute, Tai Chi, which can be known only through its two operating principles, Yin and Yang, the negative and the positive. The operation of these two basic principles in nature and in history is also called the Way, Tao, which maintains its harmony through all kinds of change and conflict. Thus the Chinese mind yearns for an ideal harmony and unity between man and nature, between mind and matter, between knowledge and action.

Looking for harmony and unity in the midst of changes, the Chinese mind along ago developed the idea of China the Beautiful and China as the Middle Kingdom, the center of the world. In its political manifestation, the one who truly knows the Way, the Tao, has the Mandate of Heaven and becomes the Son of Heaven, the Emperor, to rule over the Middle Kingdom and the Empire. Those who help the Emperor to rule are the spiritual sons of the Emperor, chuntzu or gentlemen. However, if an Emperor misrules his people and loses the Mandate of Heaven, another person may receive a new Mandate, rise up, and become the new Emperor, beginning another dynasty in the series of dynastic cycles.

This series was finally broken with the overthrow of the last dynasty in 1911. Before that, China had suffered a series of defeats by the Western powers and Japan, beginning with the Opium War in 1839. Since then the Chinese mind has had not only a superiority but also an inferiority complex. Without this basic understanding of the Chinese mind, one can hardly understand the Chinese Communist mind.

The Communist Mind

The Communist mind in the West is part of the development of the modern world as it has cut itself away from Christianity. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) made God into a limiting concept and a postulate instead of a personal being and the Creator of the world. Following Kant in the rejection of the Creator-creature distinction was G. F. W. Hegel (1770–1831), who replaced the personal God of Scripture with the Absolute Spirit. The world is not created, but is the self-fulfillment of this Spirit in history through a dialectical process. Karl Marx (1818–83) turned the dialectic of Hegel upside down and developed his so-called scientific and historical dialectical materialism, in which it is matter, not Spirit, that fulfills itself: material forces create all supposedly spiritual realities such as philosophy and religion.

Marx understands the basic nature of reality as purely material, manifesting itself through the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Through an evolutionary process, life evolved from matter and human beings evolved from animals. The determining factors in society and history are the material forces of economic production. Marx holds that at the beginning of human history there was a primitive classless society. Somehow men became selfish and turned property, originally held in common, into private property. As a result, human society has become divided into two or more classes that struggle to control property and government. The material basis of the society determines its superstructure. Class struggle is then the moving force of history which has gone through serfdom, feudalism, and capitalism and will usher in Communism as a higher form of classless society.

Marx predicted that the overthrow of capitalism and the Communist revolution would take place in the more advanced industrial nations. However, this did not happen, and Lenin reinterpreted Marxism, applying it to the world situation during World War I to bring about the Russian Revolution. Leninism has thus become a vital part of the Communist mind alongside Marxism. In fact, Marxism-Leninism is the foundation for the Chinese Communist mind, which applies Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese situation.

The Chinese Communist Mind And Mao’S Thought

1. The Russian Revolution and the formative years of the Chinese Communist mind (1917–24). Marxism-Leninism is a modern missionary movement in that it aims at world revolution and is a perversion of the Christian Gospel. Right after the Russian Revolution, Lenin organized the Third Communist International and sent representatives to China to help organize the Chinese Communist party. At the time of the Russian Revolution there was a new cultural movement going on in China under the influence of Hu Shih, a disciple of John Dewey. The two watchwords of this movement were science and democracy. However, soon the agents of the Third International won over Chen Tu-hsui of Peking University, who for some time was a close friend of Hu Shih in the new cultural movement. They also won over Li Ta-chao, a professor as well as the librarian at Peking University. Li gave Mao Tse-tung a job at the library in the fall of 1918. Chen and Li were the co-founders of the Chinese Communist party in 1921, and Mao was one of the founding members. In the formative years of the Chinese Communist mind, Li was more a nationalist and Chen an internationalist. Mao learned from them both and gradually developed his own understanding of Marxism and Leninism.

2. The United Front and Nationalist-Communist co-operation (1924–27). The Nationalist party was founded and reorganized several times under the leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Sun had overthrown the Manchu dynasty in 1911 but had yielded the presidency to the warlord Yuan Shih-kai, who later became emperor in Peking and died in 1916. This period of warlordism forced Sun to establish a rival republican government in Canton. Sun wanted to unify the nation in 1924, and he reorganized the Nationalist party to allow the Communists to join as individuals, creating in effect a Nationalist-Communist united front. But Lenin died early in 1924 and Sun died in the spring of 1925. The subsequent struggle for power in Russia and China changed the nature of this early United Front and affected the Chinese Communist mind. Li was killed by a warlord in Peking and Chen was purged by the party. Gradually Mao established a “Red Base” and developed his ideas of guerrilla warfare and revolution.

3. The revolutionary civil war and the Long March (1927–35). A year before the civil war broke out between Nationalists and Communists, Mao noticed that there was “right” and “left” opportunism within the Chinese Communist mind, and that the peasants were not being given due weight in the Chinese Revolution. In an article entitled “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” Mao asked: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of first importance to the revolution.… To distinguish real friends from real enemies, we must make a general analysis of the economic status of the various classes in Chinese society and of their respective attitudes towards the revolution.” From his analysis of these classes, Mao formulated the doctrine of the United Front to win friends and defeat enemies. The Communist party, the Red Army, and the United Front with non-Communist friends constitute the dynamics of revolution. However, Mao’s Red Army suffered a series of defeats and escaped final disaster only by fleeing Nationalist encirclement and trekking several thousand miles on the “Long March” in 1935. The Long March taught Mao and others the meaning of suffering. This further shaped the Chinese Communist mind, impressing it with the conviction that suffering and revolutionary experience are the marks of a true community.

4. The Second United Front and Mao’s early thought (1936–45). After the Long March, Mao settled in Yenan and began to work out the second United Front against the imminent invasion by Japan. The Sian Incident late in 1936 and the Japanese invasion in 1937 gave the second United Front a golden opportunity to attract the intellectuals, the youth, and many others. It also gave Mao time to formulate his thought in two most important articles, “On Practice” (July, 1937) and “On Contradiction” (August, 1937). These have become the foundation of his thought. Following Lenin, Mao insisted that practice is higher than theoretical knowledge and sought a unity of theory and practice in a practical theory. Mao also hinted at the distinction between antagonistic contradiction and non-antagonistic contradiction that developed fully in his later thought (1957). Mao employed the Marxist method to study Chinese history and wanted to “sum up our history from Confucius to Sun Yat-sen and take over this valuable legacy” (The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War, 1938). Gradually Mao came to aspire to the role of a new Chinese Confucius in the modern world.

5. The final revolutionary civil war and the People’s Republic of China (1945–49). Toward the end of World War II, Mao held the Seventh Party Congress. Liu Shao-chi, then Mao’s right-hand man, wrote the preamble of the party rules, stating: “The Chinese Communist party takes the theories of Marxism-Leninism and the unified thought of the practice of the Chinese Revolution, the thought of Mao Tse-tung, as the guideline for all of its actions.” This was the first time that the expression “thought of Mao” was used officially; it has since become a special term. With the victory over the Nationalist party and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao made his first trip to Russia and learned some hard lessons from Stalin. However, Mao and China were still too weak to break away from the “lean to one side” policy of close dependence on the Soviet Union. In fact, China was very soon trapped into the Korean War.

6. The Korean War and the First Five-Year Plan (1950–57). The Korean War greatly affected the infant People’s Republic and the Chinese Communist mind. China was at war with the United States and the United Nations. The problem of Taiwan, of U. S. recognition of China, and of Chinese admission to the United Nations remained insoluble for twenty years. On the other hand, Mao had to attempt a first Five-Year Plan based on the Russian model with emphasis on heavy industry and reliance on Russian aid. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization in 1956, Mao gradually rethought his relationship to Russia. In his second trip to Russia for the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution (1957), he declared that the East Wind would prevail against the West Wind, signaling the eventual break between China and Russia.

7. “Contradictions among the people” and the Great Leap Forward (1958–60). Being disappointed with the Russian model and having found many contradictions—i.e., antagonisms and conflicts—among the Chinese people even after a few years of Communist rule, Mao gave a long address in February, 1957, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.” Once more, Mao distinguished friends and enemies and pointed out that there were many non-antagonistic contradictions within the nation that could and should be resolved by peaceful means. Mao also wanted to outstrip Russia in accomplishing Communism. His methods included the establishment of communes of all kinds and the simultaneous rather than successive development of basic industries in the “Great Leap Forward” technology. Accusing the Russians of revisionism and of being on the road to a restoration of capitalism, Mao advocated permanent revolution. But the Great Leap Forward ended in partial failure, and Mao was forced to give up the chairmanship of the state to Liu Shao-chi in 1959.

8. Retreat and revisionism under Liu Shao-chi (1961–65). With the Sino-Russian split and the gradual schism within the Chinese Communist leadership, the Chinese Communist mind was divided between the revisionism of Liu and the radical thought of Mao. This split affected China’s development in the second decade of the People’s Republic and gave rise to much speculation about the future of China. In the meantime, Mao mapped out another strategy to recapture and reform the Chinese Communist mind.

9. Mao’s later thought and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–). The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is the natural and logical outcome of the idea of continuous, permanent revolution applied to the party and the people. It has both an ideological aspect and a power-struggle aspect. It used the Red Guards to overthrow Liu Shao-chi and others and make them participate in the revolutionary experience with sufferings and long marches and constant immersion in the Red Book of Mao’s Thought. It tries to transform the human nature with thought reform, discussion, criticism, and self-criticism. It is a thoroughly consistent form of humanism, teaching salvation by work. It also promotes the cult of Mao, making him the savior of China and eventually of the world.

10. The Chinese Communist mind after Mao’s death. Mao has been a sick, old man during the last few years. Is the Chinese Communist mind also sick? What will it be after his death? The world is intensely interested in these questions.

A Christian Evaluation

From the Christian viewpoint, man’s basic problem is that of his relation to God. As a non-Christian, Mao sees man’s basic problem in terms of his theory of contradiction. Actually the problem of contradiction is the problem of sin, of man’s disobedience to the will of God. Once man had disobeyed God, all kinds of contradiction resulted between God and man and among men. God’s solution to sin was to send to the world his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to atone for the sins of his people. Jesus as a man of sorrows learned “obedience by the things which he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). The suffering of Christ and his death and resurrection have solved the problem of sin and death for those who put their trust in him. Man is saved by grace alone, both in his justification and in his sanctification, i.e., in the new birth and in spiritual growth.

Mao’s distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions is a non-Christian way of trying to solve the problem of sin with human means. Mao wants to defeat China’s enemies and overcome the antagonistic contradictions by military revolution and wars of liberation and to resolve non-antagonistic contradictions among the people and their friends by thought reform in the continuous, permanent revolution. Mao realizes the seriousness of the non-antagonistic contradictions, which must be resolved through thought reform, criticism, and rational means. This means that to become a true and good Communist one has to overcome contradictions in a continuous process of “sanctification” so that one’s nature may finally be transformed according to the image and thought of Mao. Mao also believes that suffering is the key to the problem of human nature, and he would have all the people and friends participate in revolutionary experience and suffering. If the Chinese people are willing to suffer long enough, he believes, they will become qualified to lead the people of the world into the promised land of world communism.

Seen from the Christian point of view, the Chinese Communist mind and Mao’s thought constitute the most dangerous variety of humanism ever conceived. It is a very consistent system of the Anti-Christ, and it can be overcome only by Christ himself, through the grace of God.

Toward A Missionary Strategy

Western missionaries had the opportunity to preach the Gospel of Christ to the Chinese people long before there was any Chinese Communist mind or any thought of Mao. However, the Christian message did not penetrate China sufficiently to challenge the Chinese mind and its humanism. After China had suffered several defeats, it began to look for an ideology to help it recover from humiliation. There was an emptiness in the Chinese mind for more than a century. Satan used the Communist mind from the West to fill this empty and humiliated Chinese mind and to transform it into the Chinese Communist mind by means of Mao’s thought. It is the greatest disaster in the history of China, and, by its consequences, perhaps of the world.

Since Mao has ruled China for more than twenty years and has shaped the thought of 800 million people—a quarter of the total population of the world—into the Chinese Communist mind, the Christian Church must face this greatest of challenges squarely and seriously. To condemn Mao’s thought and the Chinese Communist mind without adequately understanding them is to shrink from Christian responsibility. To hope to reenter mainland China without sufficient preparation and training is wishful thinking. To hate the Chinese Communists simply because they are Communists is beneath the dignity of Jesus Christ and his Gospel. To love our enemies and pray for them and to be ready to encounter the Chinese Communist mind with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, even in suffering, should be our constant desire.

Non-Chinese Christians and Chinese Christians outside China should unite in a Christian united front to map out a sound and consistent missionary strategy for reopening China to the preaching of the Gospel. God permitted the door to be shut in China, and one day he will reopen it. God’s promise is that “he that hath the Key of David … openeth, and no man shutteth; shutteth, and no man openeth” (Rev. 3:7). Our task as God’s servants is to be faithful and obedient—obedient to his calling, discerning the time, and faithful unto death.

Paul Szto is pastor of Queens Christian Reformed Church in Jamaica, New York. He was born in China and attended Chekiang University. He has the Th.M. (Westminster Seminary) and the S.T.M. (Union Seminary).

’Twas the night before Thanksgiving

And all through the plane

Not a stewardess was smiling

Or serving champagne.

The reason: A man who had bought a ticket at the Portland, Oregon, International Airport under the name of Dan Cooper had boarded this Northwest Airlines plane, flashed a real or simulated bomb to a stewardess, and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes in exchange for the lives of those aboard.

In Seattle the skyjacker’s demands were met, and he allowed the passengers and two stewardesses to leave the plane. He then ordered the pilot to fly to Mexico—slowly, and at low altitude. Somewhere between Seattle and Reno he opened the rear door and parachuted out with the $200,000.

For several days law-enforcement agencies combed the foothills of Clark County, Washington, looking for signs of the elusive parachutist, but no trace of him was found.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this skyjacking escapade was the reaction of the American people. Instead of regarding “Dan Cooper” as an outlaw who had endangered the lives of scores of people in an effort to enrich himself, many people seemed to look at him as a kind of national hero—a modern version of Robin Hood who robbed the rich and kept it all for himself. According to an Associated Press dispatch on November 29, 1971, “most of those responding to questions hoped the daring hijacker would escape.”

A sociology professor at the University of Washington commented that the hijacker won public admiration because he pulled off “an awesome feat in the battle of man against the machine—one individual overcoming, for the time being anyway, technology, the corporation, the establishment, the system.”

A Seattle cab driver said: “The way I see it, anybody smart enough to take $200,000 just like that ought to make a clean getaway.”

A sailor stationed in Seattle said: “Technically, of course, he should be caught. But in a way, I’m glad he got away. I can’t help thinking: If I were going to do something like that, I wish I could do it as well as he did.”

A woman who lives in Woodland, Washington, where the FBI concentrated its manhunt, remarked: “He didn’t hurt anybody. And if he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him. Most people around here kind of hope he makes it.”

Riding the coattail of all the publicity, a Portland company marketed T-shirts glamorizing the piracy. One of the shirts pictured a suitcase of money parachuting from an airplane, with the caption “D. B. Cooper, Where Are You?” Another carried the slogan “Skyjacking, the Only Way to Fly,” and showed road signs pointing to Woodland with chase helicopters in the background.

All of this is indicative of a strange new mentality that is emerging in our nation. We are living in an age of permissiveness gone to seed—an age when Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, are idolized rather than condemned, an age when every man supposedly has a right to do his own thing, lawful or not.

In a sharply worded speech to a Law Enforcement Appreciation Day gathering last November, then Attorney General John Mitchell warned that we have spawned a “whole new type of criminal.” He offered as examples: (1) “criminals who believe they can commit crimes and avoid punishment through legal loopholes,” (2) “draft-dodgers in Canada who renounce their citizenship but believe they can return to the United States as though nothing had happened,” (3) “rioters who believe they can do violence and escape arrest,” (4) “revolutionaries who think they can commit murder and other crimes and stay out of jail by crying ‘political prisoner!’”

A few weeks later Howard Post echoed Mitchell’s charges in his syndicated comic strip “The Dropouts.” The first frame shows the little dropout standing outside the barred window of a jail talking to a tough-looking character inside. “What are you in for, Virgil?” asked the dropout.

“I am detained as a political prisoner,” came the reply, “merely because the chief and I do not share the same beliefs.”

“What do you believe in?” asked the dropout.

“Theft,” said the prisoner with a smile.

We are living in a world cut loose from its moorings and drifting in circles, a world in which evil men are called good and the “good guys” are called “pigs.” The Prophet Isaiah addressed himself to a generation much like our own. Speaking for God he warned: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

It is entirely possible for well-meaning Christians to be caught in the riptide of popular thinking. Not even evangelists and church leaders are immune to the subtle influences of permissive psychology. We may, if we are not careful, find ourselves sympathizing with some forms of evil and even looking upon them with half-hearted admiration. No matter how cleverly or dramatically a crime is committed, it is still a crime, and the Scriptures continue to admonish us to “abhor that which is evil.”

Richard N. Ady is minister of Central Church of Christ, Portland, Oregon, and teaches Bible at Columbia Christian College. He has the M.S. from Abilene Christian College.

This essay is written in the context of the current Consultation on Church Union and out of concern for what that project presumes.

The pursuit of Christian unity has been for many years a major passion of my life. I have striven by every possible means to promote the visible expression of Christian oneness, and of dynamic corporate action on the part of all people who profess commitment to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. This endeavor has crossed ecclesiastical boundaries, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic. It has confronted Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals, and Christian enterprises that are independent of any churchly control.

The most delicate question in one’s relationship with other Christians has always been, what is the Church? I have been saying since the thirties: Let the Church be the Church. But what is the Church? When is the Church truly the Church? I have written much on this subject, including a book published in the early sixties entitled Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal. In that volume I discussed the dramatic “Blake-Pike proposal” that gave birth to the Consultation on Church Union. During the past decade, revolutionary things have happened both in the Church and in the world that give still greater poignancy to my early critique of this particular approach to Christian unity.

There is a unity, let it be emphasized, that is native to the Church—that belongs to its essence. The Christian Church is the world community of all those for whom Jesus Christ is Lord. In loyalty to Christ this community is spiritually one across all boundaries of tradition, race, nation, culture, and organizational structure. Being such, the Church is called upon by its Lord to give visible expression to its essential oneness in him. All who rightly bear the name Christian, wherever they be around the globe, should visibly manifest, individually and corporately, love for one another and concern for the common faith, and should engage in activities related to the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ and to the pursuit of the Kingdom of God. In accord, however, with spiritual reality, Christian oneness need not and should not be identified with a single institutional structure; rather, oneness is a matter of collective commitment to Jesus Christ, the Gospel, and the Kingdom, and to the simultaneous manifestation of the rich human friendship that Christian commitment can and should engender.

From the perspective of these observations let me offer some reflections on the Consultation on Church Union.

I

I begin with the unwarranted assumptions upon which the COCU Plan of Union is founded.

1. It is assumed that ecclesiastical diversity is in itself a tragic evil, that it violates the concept and reality of Christian unity, and that it creates an erroneous impression of the true nature of the Church.

2. It is assumed that the essential and indispensable expression of Christian unity is organizational oneness, and that the Church’s mission can be fulfilled locally, nationally, and globally only by the formation of a single ecclesiastical structure. But historic fact is ignored: a church structure can be monolithically one while being spiritually sterile.

3. It is assumed that baptism, confirmation, and consequent church membership give people the automatic right to be designated Christian, without serious exploration of the reality and necessity of individual conversion, and of a conscious personal relationship to Jesus Christ as a living presence, whatever designation this relationship be given. These two substantive realities, commitment to Christ as Saviour and obedience to Christ as Lord, must be taken seriously in individual Christian living if the Church’s witness in the world is to be authentic and dynamic. For this reason intensive thought must be given to the dual dimension of the term reconciliation. In church circles there is a need to recall that God’s reconciliation to man in Christ does not automatically involve man’s reconciliation to God. A host of church people who bear the name Christian are not personally reconciled to God through faith in Christ. The New Testament concept of God-man reconciliation calls for a fresh study in depth.

4. It is assumed that conciliar unity and close cooperation in mission on the part of Christians across all boundaries—ethnic, ecclesiastical, geographical—fails to give adequate expression to the nature of the Church as the worldwide community of Christ.

Ii

Let us also look at COCU in the perspective of the contemporary situation and revolutionary change.

1. This Plan of Union fails to take cognizance of certain basic realities today, both secular and religious, that give a necessary perspective for a creative approach to church unity in our time. The Plan is excessively descriptive of the traditional ecclesiastical image, while being embarrassingly insensitive to the emergence of a new unpopular image of the Church, and to the current revolutionary situation in the world.

2. The revolutionary change in mood and activity now under way in church and society—very especially the youth movements—together with the radical problems that this change has created for Christian thought and life and for all church organizations, must be given serious consideration in any scheme of church union. There is little evidence in the Plan of Union, however, that this revolutionary situation is being given the status it merits.

3. It is important to bear in mind that the Christian groups now growing most rapidly in numbers and most dynamically contributing to the advancement of the Christian faith function outside the traditional church structures. Leaders of some of those groups, while continuing to be loyal members of their own denominations, devote their time and energy to the promotion of missionary enterprises not officially related to the churches to which they belong.

4. Serious thought must be given to the phenomenal change now taking place in the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world. The affirmation is being made in important circles in this great communion, “We Catholics must make Christians.” The basic issue is being raised, “What does it mean to be a Christian?” The time has come for this question to be seriously asked in Protestant churches. Can a person be a Protestant without being a Christian? How far does religious nominalism cloud and stymie consideration of the real issues in the churches of historical Protestantism?

5. The Plan ignores the revolutionary growth and challenge of the new charismatic movement, not only in the fast-growing Pentecostal churches but also within the membership, ministerial and lay, of the older Protestant denominations, and in the past few years among the clergy and laity of the Roman Catholic Church.

Iii

It is my judgment that what is most needed in Christendom today is not ecclesiastical union but evangelical renaissance.

What I mean by this is a rediscovery by the Church universal of the Christian Gospel in its four dimensions: as historical event, spiritual rebirth, evangelistic imperative, and social concern. This rediscovery would involve a dynamic confrontation of the human situation in all its facets—a confrontation which, in the light of the Crucified and Risen Christ as a historical and contemporary reality, and through the power of the Holy Spirit, would be a creative contribution to both the Church and the Kingdom.

Let me repeat what I have already suggested. The supreme need in the Church of our time is new men and women, persons committed to Jesus Christ and to the timeless values of the Church’s faith, who at the same time are dedicated to cooperating with fellow Christians in showing the present-day significance of those values. Whenever and wherever ecclesiastical union can make a dynamic and creative contribution to the Kingdom of God, let it be zealously pursued. This, however, is my conviction: Organizational oneness, whether in church, society, or state, is not the answer to the basic problems of the human community today.

What then is the answer? The answer is a fresh discovery of the abiding reality and relevance of Jesus Christ and the emergence of a worldwide fellowship born of the Holy Spirit.

John A. Mackay was president of Princeton Seminary for twenty-three years. He previously was a missionary in Peru, and he is an authority on Hispanic thought. He has been president of the World Presbyterian Alliance and moderator of the United Presbyterian General Assembly.

Down a side street off the Avenue of the Nations, a drama is being enacted that could drastically affect church life in many developing countries. The marquee carries the title, “Unity: The Price of Union.” The stage scenery locates the action in the Republic of Zaire (formerly Congo; pronounced Zah-ear’) from 1969 to the present. The leading actors, 1,600 black churchmen and 1,100 foreign missionaries, are supported by a Zairian cast estimated at five million, the largest Protestant community in the French-speaking world. Although ignored by many Christians, the drama has attracted a fascinated audience: supporters of more than forty missions of all varieties and sizes in Zaire; world leaders of the ecumenical and evangelical movements; influential churchmen of the Third World.

The onlooker will have difficulty following the complicated, fast-moving plot unless he knows some background. This goes back to 1902, when representatives of seven Protestant missions in (then) Congo first met to discuss common problems. These inter-mission conferences led to formation of the Congo Protestant Council (CPC) in 1928. At that time the fast-multiplying missions needed to coordinate their work and present a common front to active Roman Catholic opposition and to an often unsympathetic colonial regime.

Considering the divergence of national and denominational backgrounds, the CPC worked remarkably well. Only half jesting, some said this harmony resulted from the council’s being composed of conservative liberals and liberal conservatives. The CPC did in fact have a worldwide reputation for being theologically conservative. This was demonstrated in 1958, when the International Missionary Council considered merging with the World Council of Churches. Although it was a founding member of the IMC, the Congo Protestant Council voted against the merger and refused to join the WCC when the fusion did take place.

The CPC, though only a consultative body, encouraged some remarkable interdenominational projects still functioning today. One is a medical center financed and staffed by ten CPC members. Another is a teacher-training school run by eight denominations. A church publishing house is supported by twenty-two council churches and organizations.

Then in 1969 some national church leaders used these decades of doctrinal and practical unity as a platform for turning the council into an organically united church, the Church of Christ in Zaire (CCZ). There the drama begins.

Act One: Church Of Christ In Zaire

Scene One: Case For Union

Front stage and center, the leading spokesman for organic union was the Reverend Jean Bokeleale. Even before becoming CPC general secretary in 1968, Mr. Bokeleale, then forty-eight years old, was a well-known African leader in ecumenical circles. While chief executive of the 100,000-member Disciples of Christ Church in Zaire, he had been elected to both the Executive Committee and the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches.

During the 1969 CPC General Assembly, the first during his tenure as general secretary, Bokeleale forcefully presented the case for union. “We are a young nation,” he reasoned. “It is now that the Church must bring Christian influence to the country still in the formative stage. But we cannot do this while plagued by shameful divisions and quarrels among ourselves. We must be united if we are to be heard.”

The general secretary argued the case for unity from another angle: the political climate. A CPC news release summarized a lecture on this subject:

Pastor Bokeleale recalled the attitude of the new regime concerning tribalism and the philosophy of unity: one leader, one army, one police, one party, one union, one youth movement. From this came the conclusion of the lecturer, “There is only one Church, and our government recognizes only one.”

Bokeleale echoed accurately the sentiments of numerous political and religious leaders concerning organic church unity. In the opening session of that 1969 General Assembly, the personal representative of President Mobutu Sese Seko made a request to the delegates. “Could you during this forty-eighth session,” asked Minister of State Joseph N’Singa, “give place in your program to consider the unity of all Congolese in the spiritual realm, a unity indispensable in order to assure their immediate happiness and their prosperity?”

Approaching the case for organic union from another side, Bokeleale cited foreign missions as the source of Protestant divisions and quarrels. In a later press conference he stated, “The institutional Protestant mission in Zaire is the base and source of all these difficulties.” He was convinced that if Africans could get together without missionaries present, they would soon resolve all their differences.

In a theme to be developed and used repeatedly, the general secretary said missionaries before 1960 had worked for the unity of the church. Already in the mid-1950s they had begun using the title “Church of Christ in Congo.” Said Bokeleale, “The old-time missionaries obeyed the Word of God and did not want to impose the sin of divisions under which Western Christians suffered so much.”

Only after 1960, the year of national independence, according to Bokeleale, did some missionaries exploit the ignorance and naïveté of Africans. They encouraged the believers to think of themselves as Baptists or Presbyterians or Methodists—anything but members of the one Church of Christ in Congo. He concluded that the reason was clear: by dividing the Christians, this kind of missionary could continue the domination he had been able to exercise under the former colonial regime.

The general secretary went on to say that this policy of divide to dominate had political as well as religious consequences. To illustrate this, he spoke of a sight he remembered from the days of the Simba Rebellion. It was the headless corpse of a mother floating down the river with a baby still clutched in her arms. Then, addressing himself to the missionaries present at the General Assembly, Bokeleale said, “This is the result of the divisions and disunity you brought to our country.”

Before the 1969 CPC sessions adjourned, a large majority of delegates authorized the drafting of a constitution leading to organic union. Bokeleale had successfully mobilized the impatience of numerous African church leaders toward the denominational differences Western missions had brought to their country. He had expressed the disdain of many Christian countrymen toward the needless overlapping and multiplicity of missions in their land. Perhaps some of the delegates pondered on the similarity between the forty-four political parties in the nation before General Mobutu Sese Seko seized power and the forty-plus missions operating at the time of this General Assembly.

One observer wrote in the official journal, number 223, now called Zaire Church News:

The CPC Assembly was characterized by a restless energy that pressed hard against traditional guide lines, an energy which augurs for considerable change within Congo’s Protestant community in the decade ahead.

The biggest change was to take place in one year, not a decade.

Scene Two: “Miracle Of God”

The 1970 CPC annual meetings were held under the banner “All Things New.” The 119 delegates and observers from thirty churches and missions seemed determined to follow that slogan by focusing their attention immediately on the matter of organic union. Debate on the proposed constitution, drafted by Bokeleale and the CPC National Executive Committee, continued right up until the final afternoon of meetings. Then only one question remained: what to do with the constitution.

Several delegates urged that the matter be referred to the churches for study before voting took place a year later. This, they pointed out, was normal procedure since the CPC was a consultative body that could only pass along proposals for a vote by member associations.

The general secretary responded that this was not so. The CPC churches were present at the assembly through their delegates; the delegates’ votes were the votes of their churches. He did, however, advise the delegates to take the constitution back to their constituencies for a year’s study, and then vote the following year.

But when the question was finally called for at 3:00 A.M. of the following day, March 8, it was not a move to refer but a straight yes-or-no vote on the constitution itself. The delegates voted into official existence the Church of Christ in Zaire, the largest nation-wide organic union of churches in Africa and probably the most ecclesiastically inclusive “church” in the world. The vote was 32 for, 14 against, and 2 abstentions—just barely the two-thirds majority.

On the local level, the new church differed little from the former CPC. The constitution indicated clearly that the member groups would continue to operate under their own statutes, bylaws, and organization. In matters of internal administration such as electing officers, paying pastors, and operating institutions, the denominations would carry on as before.

The more significant changes took place on the national level. In changing from council to church, the national organization evolved from a service agency, existing to serve the churches, to an ecclesiastical organ whose parts were subordinate to an overall direction. The annual General Assembly, a consultative forum that prepared proposals for the churches to decide on, now became the Synod, an executive body whose decisions were binding on the member groups. The consolidation of power affected also the general secretary: instead of being merely a link between the churches and the government or international agencies, he became head of a united church, and invested with legal powers.

One other change—and later the most controversial—was incorporated into the constitution approved by the 1970 General Assembly. Member groups of the newly formed church were no longer to be called churches or denominations. They now became communautés, or sections, of the CCZ. The Presbyterians, for example, were now to be identified as the Presbyterian Section or “Community” of the Church of Christ in Zaire.

The General Assembly passed two other important resolutions. One concerned the dissolution of foreign missions as independent institutions in Zaire:

We solemnly declare that as of today all the mission associations cease to exist as autonomous institutions, either through merger with the national Christian community to which they gave birth, or else through the transfer of their legal charter to the aforenamed group.

The director of the CCZ secretariat commented later that this put an end to the missions that for ninety-two years had caused problems in Zaire by their divisions.

The second resolution concerned the CCZ’s relation to major theological groupings in the Protestant world:

—Agreeing that we want to guarantee the unity of the Church of Christ in Zaire, and

—Agreeing that the diverse religious movements overseas constitute a danger for the unity of our young church,

We solemnly declare that the Church of Christ in Zaire will adopt a policy of neutrality toward these foreign religious movements, namely the World Evangelical Fellowship and the World Council of Churches.

Mixed reaction from around the world greeted the formation of the Church of Christ in Zaire. Ecumenical leaders in Europe and North America generally expressed satisfaction; one called the event “a miracle of God in our times.” The Nigerian Council of Churches encouraged its members to follow the CCZ example. The World Council of Churches’ Executive Committee, meeting in Addis Ababa after the General Assembly, cited Bokeleale for his outstanding contribution toward church unity.

In 1971 the Christian Theological Seminary (Disciples of Christ) in America awarded him the Doctor of Divinity degree. The citation read in part, “He is actively concerned to develop African leadership … toward self-reliance and a more vigorous role in the worldwide ecumenical dialogue and fellowship.”

Some missionaries on the scene were unsure what effect the new union would have on the church, but they were willing to give it a try. An editorial in the official journal, number 227, read:

Some of us may have doubts and reservations, and we will need to warn and counsel concerning potential dangers, but the decisions should be made by the Africans. Then let us pray for the leaders … trusting the Holy Spirit to guide, inspire, correct, and make His will known to them.

Other missionaries and Zairian church leaders were openly suspicious of the direction the new church would take. They pointed out that although Mr. Bokeleale, now president of the CCZ, affirmed his non-alignment with the ecumenical movement, he continued to hold key positions in the World Council of Churches. “What difference does it make,” pointed out one missionary, “if the church stays out of the WCC only to become a carbon copy of ecumenical planning and action through the leadership of the church president?” Questions such as this prompted the CCZ press attaché to write an article in the nation’s largest newspaper condemning missionaries for acting like “enemy number one of the Church of Christ in Zaire.”

Bokeleale did not try to dispel such doubts by taking a neutral stand on some key issues dividing the ecumenical and evangelical movements. He openly ridiculed opposition to organic union. Addressing the National Press Club in Kinshasa, he said:

If the Church of Christ is divided, it is the West and the East who have cut it up because we read in the Gospel that those who crucified Christ did not cut up his body. The West especially has chopped up the body of Christ in such small pieces you need a microscope to see them.

In the same press conference, Bokeleale supported theological inclusiveness concerning essentially different church bodies:

In Zaire we have three recognized churches: Protestant, Catholic and Kimbanguist [an independent African church]. Even the existence of three branches of the same religion in Zaire, with opposing tendencies, is a sin, because Jesus Christ said clearly, “on this rock I will build my church.”

In further contradiction of the stated neutrality of the CCZ, some members of the permanent staff spoke openly of their desire to see the church in the WCC. Writing in a Belgian Protestant weekly after the 1970 General Assembly, the CCZ press attaché noted, “The CCZ is not a member of the World Council of Churches (at least not for the moment), and this to the great satisfaction of the fundamentalists” (italics added).

Act Two: Council Of Protestant Churches In Zaire

Scene One: Stirrings Of Dissent

Formation of the new united church caused several CPC member groups to withdraw from the organization. The first was the Norwegian Pentecostal Mission and its associated church in Zaire. This came as no surprise. Mission officials from Norway had attended the 1970 annual meetings and had warned that if the constitution were approved, they would pull out of the CPC. The delegates exchanged glances as they heard a Norwegian mission leader warn what an African church would do if things didn’t go right.

In August, six months after the CCZ was formed, mission leaders of several evangelical missions working in Zaire met in Chicago. After studying the new church organization, they prepared a statement, saying in part:

The theological and organizational issues growing out of the formation of the Church of Christ in Zaire are of the most serious nature.… It is hoped that very soon Zairian church leaders and missionaries of evangelical persuasion will be able to meet together with those of like precious faith to develop a positive evangelical program including the sponsoring of an evangelical office in Kinshasa.

News of this meeting reached Bokeleale. He immediately branded the Chicago meeting as the same kind of colonialism formerly practiced by Belgians when they sat in Brussels and decided on ways to dominate the Congo colony. A local newspaper headlined the story, “The Church of Christ in Zaire, Prey of the Chicago Imperialists!”

While these stirrings of dissent came from foreign missions, more serious opposition developed from church leaders within the nation. The strongest voice heard was that of Bishop John Wesley Shungu, head of the 80,000-member United Methodist Church of Zaire. In a letter written on May 15, Bishop Shungu informed the CCZ president that certain modifications had to be made in the new church constitution before the Methodists could join. He was especially opposed to the idea that the General Assembly, a consultative body, could make decisions binding on the churches. He wrote:

I am happy that the new constitution has been accepted by the General Assembly in view of being studied by the churches. But it is a great surprise to me that several members of your departments have begun to implement this new constitution before it has been approved by the churches. If you want to receive the cooperation of the churches in Zaire, you must listen to them and begin with them on the local level rather than from the top.

Bishop Shungu then outlined changes necessary in ten key clauses of the new constitution before the United Methodist Church would work with the CCZ. The changes in effect would have returned the newly created church to the function of the former council of churches. But Bokeleale refused to consider the changes. He insisted that the new church was God’s doing, not his. The Methodist Church then refused to join the CCZ. Scene Two: Alternative to Union

At the same time, an unexpected figure appeared in the drama: the Ministry of Justice. When Bishop Shungu requested of this government department an interpretation of religious liberty, he received an encouraging reply. Officials in the department offered to help the bishop and other dissatisfied church leaders set up a church organization more to their liking. The director of the justice minister’s cabinet told the Methodist leader, “We are here to help you form the kind of church government you want—provided it does not conflict with government regulations.”

Representatives of eight former CPC member churches and independent groups met in Kinshasa in January, 1971, to consult with one another. They returned a month later authorized by their churches to organize a council of churches.

When the CCZ president learned of their arrival, he first threatened to have them arrested as disturbers of the peace, but instead sent a delegation to Bishop Shungu asking him not to meet and form a new group. Bokeleale went to the inter-mission guest house where some delegates were staying and told the manager to refuse them lodging. Then, learning that the group was planning to meet in the adjoining interdenominational publishing house (in which Methodists are the largest shareholders), he sent word that the group should not meet there. When the director demurred, Bokeleale warned he could not be responsible for damage to the building by young people rioting against the trouble-making dissidents.

Bokeleale also met with Kinshasa-based missionaries to discuss the new development. One missionary asked why he saw such great danger in the formation of a new group that would probably stay small and ineffective. Bokeleale replied that such a question could be asked only by a Westerner, one who was used to shameful divisions at home and had imported those divisions into Zaire. “We have no right to permit you foreigners to come into our country and cut up the body of Christ into morsels. We cannot permit the Church to be divided.”

On February 16, 1971, eight church denominations formally organized as the Council of Protestant Churches in Zaire (CPCZ). Bishop Shungu explained that the new council was nothing more or less than a revival of the CPC, a consultative body to serve its member associations. The emphasis was to be on simplicity of structure and smallness of staff, he said. Wherever possible the new council would work with the CCZ to avoid duplication of effort.

Bishop Shungu explained the council’s attitude in a letter to the Minister of Interior:

Our new council works in harmony with the Protestant Office of Education as well as the Protestant Medical Office and Protestant Relief Agency and other organizations.… Since these are supported by all the Protestant churches of Zaire, and not only the CCZ, there is nothing to hinder us from working with them.

This desire for cooperation was not entirely reciprocated by the first annual synod of the CCZ later in that month of February. One recommendation of the medical report read: “That the Department treat all Protestant medical organizations without distinction as to membership in CCZ or not.” During the considerable debate following, one delegate said the clause should be dropped lest other groups be tempted to leave the united church. Bokeleale added, “We are here to serve man, and the purpose of the medical department is to serve all. But if you withdraw from the CCZ, you must pay the consequences of your action and go on to create your own system of services.” The recommendation was lost, but some measure of cooperation did develop between the two ecclesiastical groups.

Even while the new counsel was forming, CCZ members were beginning to have second thoughts about the kind of church they had formed. The constitution stated that the autonomy of individual groups would be respected. But little by little, local church leaders began to wonder.

The matter that raised most serious doubts was the change in status of member groups from full-fledged churches to smaller sections of the united church. The General Assembly of 1970 had approved the constitution, including this change. Some CCZ member groups even changed the wording of their stationery to read communauté instead of église. But no group made a similar modification in its incorporation articles; the CCZ members continued to consider themselves autonomous churches as they once were under the CPC arrangement.

Then came a letter from the Ministry of Justice to the CCZ president and member groups:

Considering your new structure whereby all the former Protestant churches becoming members of the Church of Christ in Zaire must now call themselves communities [sections], I have the honor … to ask you to invite the legal representatives of these communities to introduce as soon as possible their declaration to my Department concerning the change of appellation of their former associations.

Not one CCZ member group agreed to relinquish its legal identity as an autonomous church and become a subordinate section or “community” of the united church. The denominational leaders suspected the change in status as the first step toward losing local autonomy, incorporation, and even properties to the national organization. The president of the Lower Zaire church founded by a Swedish mission reasoned:

Simply changing a few words in our statutes may not seem very serious. But as I look ahead, I wonder what the end will be. If we agree to become just parts of the CCZ, the government could logically say that since the CCZ president is also legal representative of the church, our groups do not need their own legal representatives. We will then no longer be able to speak to the government for ourselves. The government’s next step could be a letter telling us to give up our legal status since we are covered by the CCZ’s incorporation papers. Once we have lost our legal status we cannot own properties or even a bank account. We will have lost everything.

This line of reasoning may not be far wrong. The director of religious affairs in the Ministry of Justice recently asked a visiting delegation of pastors from the Ubangi area, “Why did you form this united church? Now you no longer have your autonomy.” The president of the Mennonite Brethren denomination informed the Ministry of Justice of his group’s refusal to relinquish its identity as a church. He was told, “Either you stay in CCZ and become one section of it, or you remain a church and leave CCZ. You cannot be a church within a church.” The Mennonite Brethren withdrew.

There the curtain falls on Act Two. More will certainly follow in the drama still being enacted in Zaire. Act Three may belong to the government. On December 31, President Mobutu Sese Seko signed a law that, among other things, recognized the CCZ as the only Protestant church in Zaire. The Ministry of Justice has been preparing to explain the implications of the law, for the resulting situation was not immediately clear. On the performance observed thus far, however, a critical reviewer can make some evaluation.

A Critic’S Review

The drama being enacted comes under the category of modern tragedy. In the late sixties, church leaders and believers in Zaire seemed on the verge of an expression of unity wonderful and new in the Protestant world. Behind them were decades of working across denominational lines in spiritual harmony admired around the world. The common bonds of belief were essentially biblical and conservative. More recent in memory were horrible but triumphant and maturing years of suffering during the Simba Rebellion. President Mobutu Sese Seko’s remarkable efforts toward national unity and identity now stirred them to do “their own thing” within the church.

Some well-meaning church leaders and missionaries interpreted this deep sentiment as a mandate for organic church union. Through skillful legislative action they apparently achieved this union quickly and completely. But other equally Christian, equally sincere churchmen and missionaries objected to both the principle of organic union and the procedure of using a consultative assembly to impose decisions on member churches.

Then the scene turned ugly. Christian brother clashed with brother; charges of dictator drew counter-charges against agitators; angry attacks appeared in nationwide newspapers and letters to the government; the supporting cast of millions was pushed to one side or the other. And somewhere in the swirl of action, the decades of practical unity risked being trampled into the floor of the stage.

What would have happened back in 1969 if hard-pushing proponents of church union had heeded the editorial warning in the official CCZ journal, number 223: “It would be a tragic paradox if, in attempting to bring about organic union … the unity we already enjoy to a very large degree would be destroyed.”

The church story in Zaire is also a tragedy because what started as a question of church government became a more serious issue of religious freedom within the Protestant community. It was politically expedient to blame all opposition to organic union on mercenary white missionaries paid to keep Zairian believers divided and docile. But this did not solve the problem that other Protestant citizens of the nation had as much right to their preference of church organization as the united church leaders.

During the 1969 General Assembly, a delegate warned that a one-church system in the Protestant community might eventually threaten religious liberty. Another delegate responded, “Yes, we know. But at this critical time in our country, we must be willing to give up some freedoms.” Some Zairian Christians did not share this willing attitude. They chose rather to exercise their right to form an ecclesiastical structure more to their liking. For this they have come under attack by those determined that there be only one church.

The Zairian church drama is not without irony. Foreign missions are accused as the source of disunity and conflict in the nation’s Protestant church life. But division and dissension now exist on a nationwide scale. This was something the missionaries in their alleged penchant to divide did not accomplish. It was African leadership that created the split in the name of unity.

But it would be erroneous to conclude that Zairian Protestants are neatly divided into liberal and evangelical camps, or into any other convenient generalization. The great majority of Christians in both the united church and the council of churches are true followers of Jesus Christ in the biblical sense. The same is true of their leaders.

It would be equally wrong to conclude that progress achieved through decades of practical unity has been lost. Church leaders dispute the question of organic union. But born-again believers at the grassroots level of the church practice the wholesome, generous spiritual oneness they have always shown. They are doing intuitively what Francis A. Schaeffer said others learned only through bitter experience: “If division comes, Christians must not polarize.”

We hope and pray that the leading figures in the Zairian church drama will sort out their differences in a similar display of their essential oneness in Christ.

Robert L. Niklaus has been a missionary in Zaire with the Christian and Missionary Alliance since 1958. He is responsible for publications of an interdenominational publishing house in Kinshasa and has edited the CCZ’s journal. He has the B.S. (Nyack Missionary College) and the M.A. (Syracuse University School of Journalism).

Across the years John Mackay, president emeritus of Princeton Seminary, has been a strong advocate of Christian unity. In an essay in this issue, however, he poses some hard questions for the proponents of COCU. We note with interest that the United Church of Christ is questioning the whole concept of COCU, asking whether perhaps it should be scrapped entirely.

Robert Niklaus’s article on the drama of Zaire’s (Congo) Super-Church points up the perils to religious liberty that arise when determined churchmen seek to establish an ecclesiastical hegemony to which numerous other Christians are opposed. The deeply-implicated World Council of Churches may, in the long run, lose more than it could gain. The Zaire situation recalls the truth that a “man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

Paul Szto’s timely discussion of the Chinese Communist Mind merits wide reading; the Christian who wants to bring the Gospel to China must learn about the Chinese mentality and traditional factors that influence Chinese thinking. One of the requirements for effective evangelism of Red China is to see the Chinese as they see themselves, and to devise a pre-evangelism strategy that will help to open this closed door.

Novelist John Updike, in his poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” describes the lightheadedness that seems to infect normally sane persons when they contemplate the meaning of Christ’s resurrection. So “fuddled” are they by “the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent” that they arrive at views of the resurrection that destroy its entire significance. At the risk of tethering the Bambi in us, about to gambol through the flower-strewn meadows of spring delight, let us pause a moment to consider three varieties of endemic Easter irrationality.

Fuddlement No. 1: Jesus rose “spiritually.” Since the days of the old Fosdickian liberalism, the notion has gained currency that Jesus’ resurrection was really not bodily but spiritual. A more sophisticated variation on this theme was Paul Tillich’s. After noting that “the most primitive theory, and at the same time most beautifully expressed, is the physical one,” and after regarding both it and the “spiritualistic” and “psychological” interpretations as inadequate, Tillich sets forth his own “restitution theory”: “the ecstatic confirmation of the indestructible unity of the New Being and its bearer, Jesus of Nazareth.”

The insuperable problem with all such “theories” that downplay the physical facticity of the resurrection is that apart from the New Testament materials, no one can say anything significant about the resurrection, and these documents insist on a physical resurrection. The resurrected Jesus is expressly distinguished from a ghost and eats fish with his disciples (Luke 24); Thomas is shown the nail prints in Jesus’ hands and the wound in his side (John 20); etc., etc. To talk about the resurrection, described only in the New Testament documents, in a way inconsistent with their clear description is to talk nonsense. It was to counteract such muddled notions that Updike wrote his poem:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body.… Let us not mock God with metaphor analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.

Fuddlement No. 2: Jesus rose in “suprahistory.” As Updike has just suggested, another way of “mocking God” is by “transcendence.” That is to say, one can agree that the physical resurrection of Jesus “really happened,” but hold that it occurred in a transcendent realm—in Geschichte, not Historie (to use the terminology of Martin Kähler and the young Barth); in “suprahistory” or “metahistory,” not in the ordinary history subject to accepted canons of historical investigation.

On the surface, such an approach has much to commend it: you get your resurrection, but you don’t have to prove it (and, more important, no one can disprove it!). Unfortunately, however, this achieves a Pyrrhic victory, first class. What you lose is (1) the doctrine of justification (not so incidentally “the article by which the Church stands or falls,” according to the Reformers), since Christ was “raised again for our justification” (Rom. 4:25) and a resurrection outside our realm of historical need would do us no good; and (2) the genuine historicity of the event, since no criteria whatever exist for determining what is factual or unfactual in the cloud-cuckoo land of surprahistory. There is no way of knowing that poker games on Saturday night, much less resurrections on Easter morning, occur in a transcendent sphere subject to no historical testability.

Metahistory is evasion. Bultmann was right for once when he maintained, over against Barth, that if you are going to enter the sphere of geschichtliche resurrection, the only sensible thing to do is to engage in forthright demythologization. But, then, pace Bultmann, you must face the overwhelming primary-source testimony of eyewitnesses who unabashedly claim with Peter: “We have not followed cunningly devised fables [Gk. mythoi] when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

Fuddlement No. 3: Jesus rose in history but you can’t “prove” it. One might suppose that the documentary passage just cited would constitute, at least hypothetically, the kind of “proof” that is marshalled for any historical event. “No matter,” the orthodox presuppositionalists and pietists inform us. “You can’t ‘prove’ the resurrection. It’s a matter of proper starting point and faith. To deny this is to deny total depravity and the power of the Spirit.”

Recently our seminary campus was visited by a team of class three fuddlers from a certain Calvinist institution that shall remain nameless; they distributed their periodical, Synapse II, which featured an article entitled, “The Impropriety of Evidentially Arguing for the Resurrection.” How sad! In former times, when minstrels traveled from hearth to hearth they brought merriment and hope.

The fuddled reasoning here is, as a matter of fact, revealed by another and better traveler—St. Paul. On the Areopagus he presents Christ’s resurrection as the capstone of his case for the truth of the Gospel; in First Corinthians 15 he blends kerygma with apologia by offering a list of eyewitness testimonies to the evidential fact of the resurrection; and in his stand before Agrippa and Festus (Acts 26) he not only assumes that these sin-blinded sinners can evidentially arrive at the facticity of the resurrection (“Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead?”) but also appeals to a common ground of evidential knowledge (“The king knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely: for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him; for this thing was not done in a corner”).

How is it possible for Paul to do this, believing as he did in total depravity (Rom. 1–3) and in salvation through faith alone (Eph. 2:8, 9)? Simply because he recognized, as we all must, that sin did not make man non-human; and it is one of the defining characteristics of man that he is a thinking being who, by inductive and deductive processes, evaluates the data of the world to distinguish fact from fancy. Ironically, if man’s evidential reasoning were annulled by the fall, how would Adam have recognized God’s voice subsequently calling to him in the Garden, and how would the presuppositionalist distinguish the Bible he claims to start with a priori from Playboy magazine?

Christian faith is not blind faith or credulity; it is grounded in fact. To talk about a real but unprovable resurrection is as foolish as to talk about suprahistorical or spiritual resurrections. They are all cop-outs—sincere, certainly, but terribly harmful in an age longing to hear the meaningful affirmation, “He is risen!”

This Easter, let’s stop the fuddlement. Let’s go beyond A. H. Ackley’s “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart,” and proclaim to a lost society that Jesus lives in our hearts because he first of all rose in the very history in which we are embedded.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you …?—1 Cor. 6:19

When you sit down to your Easter ham dinner this year, your conscience may be a lot harder on you than it has been at previous holiday feasts. You’ll be obliged to wonder not only whether you are eating too much but whether you have chosen your foods wisely.

It has yet to be recognized in standard works on ethics, but there is growing awareness in affluent Western society of the moral dimension in what goes on the dining room table. Fasting and Lenten dieting have been going out of style somewhat. There has been a move toward better eating habits the year around. Devout Christian believers are realizing that they must look out for the “whole man,” and be good stewards of their own bodies. This involves the use of healthful physical as well as mental and spiritual food, and indeed, an understanding that there is some correlation between these aspects of a person’s well-being.

Behind the new food ethic consciousness is a growing demand for so-called natural foods. People are flocking to health-food stores and are trying to forsake processed foods. “Organically grown” foods, those cultivated without the use of pesticides or what are regarded as chemical, artificial fertilizers, are in great demand. Some foods are being touted as especially heathful, among them wheat germ, soybeans, honey, and sesame seeds.

A great new sensitivity has been developing among consumers toward additives used for coloring, flavoring, preserving, and otherwise conditioning food; some are known to be harmful to human health, and others are suspect. This is one phase of the much broader, widely discussed concern over human environment.

Younger men and women are spearheading the revolution in food consumption. Many are ecology-minded, eager to “live in harmony with nature.” The New York Times quoted a young woman who lives on a communal farm as saying, “I feel the earth is a very holy place.” She said she meditated during the planting season while others prayed, danced, and chanted in an effort to benefit the crops. “It’s a respect for life,” she said, “that goes right down to the radishes.”

Such an outlook stems from the influence of such Eastern religions as Zen Buddhism. Mainstream Christianity has heretofore paid little heed to what kind of food is good for the body, despite the Apostle Paul’s admonitions. This is probably attributable to the lack of any explicit teaching on food in the New Testament. The custom of eating ham for Easter is a dramatic repudiation of the old Hebrew stricture against pork.

In the Old Testament, of course, dietary laws were legion, and Orthodox Jews still have strict rules on foods. Rabbis continue to certify preparation on the spot.

Among today’s Christians, Seventh-day Adventists take the most pains in relating their faith to eating habits. They seek to avoid meat altogether on grounds that it is unhealthful over the long haul. Loma Linda Foods, owned by the denomination, carries a complete line of vegetarian dishes, including a number of meat substitutes. An Ohio firm that puts out similar products was sold by SDA businessmen to Miles Laboratories in 1970. An SDA publishing house reported it was deluged with orders for a new, five-volume cookbook, Vegetarian Cookery.

Interestingly enough, Seventh-day Adventists had much to do with the beginning of the processed breakfast-cereal industry during the nineteenth century. J. H. Kellogg started a health center in Battle Creek, Michigan, that promoted the value of grains as breakfast food. His brother, W. K., founded a company to market them. Both were Adventists for a time.

Another originator of breakfast cereals was Sylvester Graham, a temperance lecturer and food faddist who developed graham crackers; Encyclopedia Britannica says he “promised to save souls through the stomach.”

The New Testament speaks of fasting and gluttony, and records a major controversy over the eating of meat offered to idols. But there can be no proof-texting of theories on food morality because the principles given are broad. Christians now face the challenge of interpolating and relating the principles to modern data.

The Gospels record Jesus’ presence at a number of feasts, which suggests that eating should be seen as a pleasure and not merely a duty. Also obvious is that certain foods may be good for some people and not for others. Accumulation of knowledge places upon today’s Christian a responsibility that his spiritual ancestors did not have. It is a form of indirect suicide, for an example, for a person whose blood has a high cholesterol content to consume food that will aggravate the problem.

By the same token, a Christian might consider it a moral duty to take positive steps toward good health. One such step would be to strive for ample roughage in the diet, for some experts think the absence of it in our highly processed intake might be a cause of cancer.

Beverages such as tea, coffee, and alcohol warrant special ethical consideration. Many people still avoid alcohol, and some purists rule out all three, arguing that they are drugs rather than food because they directly affect a person’s behavior. Others argue that the benefits of their use outweigh the risks. There is currently a big boom in wine sales, which seems to run counter to the general trend to avoid eating or drinking things that might be harmful.

A number of considerations cloud the ethical picture in the realm of food. Not the least of these is that millions of people the world over have no choice of food—they do not have enough of any kind! Efforts to alleviate their conditions invariably run into political, economic, and even cultural snarls. But moral indifference still ranks number one.

Budget Diplomacy

If the recommendation of the Stewardship Committee of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) is approved, the National and World Councils of Churches will be conspicuously absent from the denomination’s 1973 general mission budget.

J. Gaston Williamson, committee chairman, said the recommendation is intended to make the mission budget “more appealing to many persons in the church.” He added that the committee suggests that individual churches and persons contribute to the two councils.

Meanwhile, the denomination will be absent—$322,000 worth—from the budget of one of its largest churches if that church’s local presbytery goes ahead with a proposed merger with a United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. presbytery. The Highland Park Presbyterian Church of Dallas is only one of 146 churches that have threatened such action.

Unbecoming

Trustees of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board expressed “deep regret” over “misunderstandings and ensuing difficulties” resulting from the withdrawal in late 1971 of 140,000 copies of Becoming, a youth training guide. Two articles and a photo showing two white girls and a black boy standing in a hallway were replaced with non-controversial material by board head James Sullivan and an aide. An editor resigned and many Southern Baptists voiced dismay at Sullivan’s action. The incident received national coverage, a situation that seemed to pain board members more than Sullivan’s decision.

At first, Sullivan said he acted because the material was “subject to misinterpretation.” But at the recent board meeting he declared, “Never once did we say take out black people. I would have preferred a round table with some adults in it. The two white girls had sneers. They were the problem.”

The board went on record encouraging staffers to speak out on Christian attitudes in race relations “without equivocation.”

Limbo In Limbo?

Columnist David Greye Perrey roiled the water with his “Let’s Stop Baptizing Babies” in U. S. Catholic. His point: “Very many” of the babies the Catholic Church is baptizing “are not turning out to be Christians, convinced and active disciples of Jesus the crucified.”

The paper went on to sample readership opinion concerning issues raised by Perrey. The results show a gap between personal and official belief among Catholics. Of those responding, 85 per cent disagreed with the statement, “I believe that a baby who dies unbaptized cannot go to heaven.”

“Good-bye limbo,” commented theologian Martin Marty in his newsletter, Context.

Memories, Good And Bad

Three historical churches, a seminary chapel, and a former parsonage have been added to the Interior Department’s National Register of Historic Landmarks. They are: the domed First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, erected in 1817 and the prototype for many nineteenth-century churches; the 1812-vintage Monumental Church in Richmond, Virginia; the Minor Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore, first (1806) U. S. Roman Catholic cathedral church; St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel, also built in 1806 in Baltimore, the first Neo-Gothic style church in the land; and a Natick, Massachusetts, house associated with Horatio Alger, Jr.

Alger spent his summers from 1866 until his death in 1899 at the house, the residence of his father, a Unitarian minister. Here he wrote many of the books that “indoctrinated a whole generation of American youth with the comforting value that virtue is always rewarded with wealth and honor,” said an Interior Department committee.

About the same time that the committee linked Alger to virtue, historian Richard Huber unearthed church records asserting that Alger was a hom*osexual who apparently preferred young boys. He was forced out as minister of a Brewster, Massachusetts, Unitarian church when his “gross immorality” with boys was uncovered, according to the records.

Alger quit the ministry, went to New York, and embarked on a writing career, producing more than one hundred books. The books urged millions of boys who read them to live clean and work hard if they wanted to achieve success.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Career Capstone

Noted church architect Pietro Belluschi, 73, was chosen to receive the 1972 Gold Medal award of the American Institute of Architects, the highest honor bestowed by the 24,000-member national professional society.

“His churches are known for their elegant spiritual feeling,” said the institute in announcing the honor at this month’s AIA national convention in Houston.

Belluschi’s Central Lutheran Church in Portland, Oregon, was named in 1956 by the AIA as one of the most significant buildings erected in the last 100 years in the United States. His most recent creation is St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in San Francisco, described by the institute as “the first to base its concept in the new liturgy of the Catholic Church, a cathedral as surely of its time as the great medieval cathedrals were of theirs.”

GLENN D. EVERETT

Stereotype Struggles

Some of the Bible’s most courageous women—Deborah, Rahab, and Esther—have disappeared from church-school curricula.

Diana Beach, in a recent issue of the National Council of Churches education bi-monthly Spectrum, claims that these women have been ignored and disregarded by the writers of Sunday-school material. Instead, only “passive, obedient, humble” women—“impoverished images of femininity”—are presented.

From Miss Beach’s research, the NCC’s Division of Christian Education has formulated a set of guidelines to prevent “sex role stereotypes.” As a start, writers and editors should avoid the use of “man” when “person” would say the same thing.

Artists and photographers must be careful how they picture girls and boys. Girls should be shown with their fathers, and women should be pictured in business and industry, not just in homes or schools, the guidelines suggest. Both men and women should be seen cooking and working in the yard. And children should be taught that it’s not only girls and women who cry.

Until the curriculum is revised, Miss Beach asked that sensitive parents and teachers compensate for the material’s weaknesses. “These stereotypes,” she insisted, “run counter to the teachings of Christ.”

Religion In Transit

Southern Baptists in Mississippi beamed a week-long series of twenty-two missions programs over a CBS television station as part of a regular missions conference.

The conservative Committee of Catholic Laymen Pro Ecclesia aims to combat alleged “harm” done to the Catholic Church by “anti-Catholic” thrusts of Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, and other media, including “what used to be called the ‘Catholic’ press.”

A new government report labels alcoholism the nation’s greatest drug problem, afflicting 9.6 million Americans and draining the economy of $15 billion a year. Of religious groups, Jews and Episcopalians have the most drinkers. Among nationality groups, the Irish lead in heavy drinkers.

Official Lutheran and Roman Catholic drafting committees are at work, hoping to come up with a common statement on the place of the papacy in the church.

Catholic students at Ball State University in Indiana spent their spring break “getting involved”—as inner-city tutors, as social workers in an Appalachian town, and as fix-up, paint-up specialists in a youth center.

A 500,000-copy press run of a new evangelistic tabloid is scheduled for next month, according to the Enquirer, a Canada-based newspaper that will publish it. It will be distributed quarterly in the United States and Canada.

Busing school children to achieve integration is a theological issue and may be the way to achieve God’s will, declared Florida Episcopal bishop James L. Duncan in a pastoral letter. It was also a hot campaign issue in the state’s primary.

The 800-member Los Angeles church for hom*osexuals pastored by professed hom*osexual Troy Perry has signed a contract to broadcast its Sunday-morning services.

International Students, Inc., has sold its Washington, D. C., headquarters and will move next month to Star Ranch near Colorado Springs, a facility purchased from Young Life.

New York Bible Society International has produced a tabloid newspaper for the street scene. Entitled Great News, it features contemporized passages from John’s Gospel with graphics. Already on the scene: more than 100 newspapers being published by grassroots Jesus people, with a total circulation well in excess of one million.

Personalia

The secretly consecrated Ukrainian Catholic archbishop Vasyl Velyshkowsky, 67, was released after serving a three-year prison term in the Ukraine for allegedly committing “ideological sabotage.” He was on his way to administer last rites when arrested. Earlier, he had been sentenced to death, then to a Siberian labor camp, as part of the Soviet government’s attempt to destroy the Ukrainian Catholic church.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is sending Cecil Shaw, Jr., 24, a black from Gary, Indiana, who has been blind since age 15, as a missionary to Buenos Aires.

World Scene

Golden anniversary celebrations under way: the Dominican Evangelical Church, with forty congregations and 8,000 members; the Evangelical Free Church of America’s mission work in the Ubangi area of Zaire, led by fifty-four missionaries; the Methodist Church in Poland, with 4,133 members in forty-five congregations.

Reports of persecution of Christians and expulsions of missionaries are flowing in from the East Malaysian state of Sabah, formerly known as British North Borneo. The powerful United Sabah Islamic Association is pressuring everyone to convert to Islam.

Roman Catholics now outnumber Protestants in Switzerland 3.1 million to 2.9 million for the first time since the Reformation, mostly because of immigrants with temporary work permits. Protestants are a 55 per cent majority of Swiss citizens.

Delegates to the Puerto Rican Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) annual assembly asked the United States to discontinue its ten-year-old trade embargo against Cuba. Pastor Josue Lopez of Guaynabo was elected president. His predecessor noted that youth work is booming among the 9,000 members of the church’s fifty-six congregations.

A Pain In Painesville

The big abortion sign on North State Street in Painesville, Ohio, is gone. The sign, just a block from St. Mary’s Catholic church and school, had been put up by a Michigan family-planning agency. A flurry of complaints from local citizens and pressure from the police brought it down.

In large letters was “Abortion.” Under it was a Michigan telephone number to call for abortion information, and at the upper right the sign said, “Male and female sterilization.”

The sign’s sponsor said a Michigan court had struck down a law prohibiting such signs in that state under freedom-of-speech provisions. While maintaining that he had the right to put up an abortion sign anywhere in the country, he admitted it pained him to find one had been placed so near a Catholic church.

Nigeria’s North-Central State announced it will take over all post-primary schools next month, a decision affecting nine Protestant and six Catholic high schools and teachers’ colleges. It is the third of the nation’s twelve states to take over all schools. Prayers and Bible instruction will continue; staffers will work for the government, which cited the “immense contributions” of the private agencies.

Noting the upsurge of spiritual interest and largely evangelical activity among Europe’s six million gypsies, a Vatican commission called for Catholic pastoral and missionary outreach to them.

The Vatican Council of the Laity has urged the Holy See to stop keeping Vatican and other church finances secret. The council’s report also suggests that a “cultural change” department be set up to help the hierarchy face up to changes and conflicts. The report, appealing for acceptance of a wide variety of opinions, says no one—not even the Church—has a monopoly on truth.

Poland annulled a ten-year-old law requiring the Catholic Church to make full financial disclosures. Tough taxation of church property will be eased. Polish bishops meanwhile urged the government to allow construction of more new churches.

Representatives of Carl McIntire’s International Council of Christian Churches and Christian immigrants from the Ukraine harassed Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad as he visited in New Zealand and Australia during church council meetings. A woman struck him with a crumpled poster. Australian Council of Churches head F. G. Engel charged that protestors were indulging in a witch hunt after they accused Nikodim of being a KGB agent.

The eighteen-month old Vatican agency promoting use of the Bible is surveying laity around the world to find out how it can “best assist the layman in the use of the Bible in his private life.”

Jesuit leaders have ordered their 31,700 members to help stem public criticism of Pope Paul in Catholic circles. The Pope has been under attack for alleged conservatism, too many speeches, and running the Vatican like a world government.

Prominent Church of England vicar Hugh Lorimer Rees lashed out against the “liturgical anarchy” of the growing house-church movement in England.

Approximately 1,000 Protestant churches are expected to take part in the Evangelism-in-Depth program in southern Chile next month.

It took only one hour to flood the eighteen-mile-long Buffalo Creek area with thick, slime-filled water, leaving more than 4,000 people homeless, 1,100 injured, and about 100 dead. From Shanghai President Nixon declared the hollow in West Virginia a national disaster area. This was the worst flood in the state’s history.

Churches along the valley suffered much damage. One worker in the area estimated that eight or more in the fourteen communities had been totally destroyed. Among these were St. James Baptist Church in Kistler, Mt. Olive Baptist Church in Craeholm, and the Free Will Baptist Church in Crown.

Baptists, Mennonites, Seventh-day Adventists, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army initiated relief work.

Brigadier Warren H. Fulton said the Salvation Army had experienced “a humbling amount of cooperation.” Local church members from ten denominations volunteered to sort clothing at Army headquarters in Charleston and deliver supplies to distribution centers; many offered financial aid. More than thirty church groups from six other states sent contributions.

In the first days after the flood, Fulton reported, the Salvation Army’s seven mobile kitchens served more than 17,000 meals a day. The meals service continued weeks later using two mobile kitchens. Now the Army has sixty tons of clothing and household items to distribute from four major centers.

Fulton also reported efforts to meet the people’s spiritual needs. The Reverend John Price, president of the West Virginia Council of Churches, told the American Bible Society in New York about the spiritual vacuum the flood had created. The Bible Society offered to send the Salvation Army 1,000 Bibles for house-to-house distribution.

Through husband-and-wife teams the Salvation Army hopes to distribute the Bibles and give spiritual and practical advice to the destitute families. Many of these people, Fulton explained, have never needed government help and are afraid to accept it. For those whose homes were completely destroyed, the government will be the main source of housing help.

The Reverend Thomas Whaley, directing the Southern Mission Project for the American Baptist Convention, is working about six miles south of the mouth of Buffalo Creek in Rum Creek. His staff of twenty-five volunteers distribute clothing and feed approximately forty families daily. They also truck supplies into the heart of the Buffalo Creek area.

A few days after the flood, Whaley unloaded 60,000 pounds of food, clothing, and blankets at the Accoville Methodist Church, which experienced only minor basem*nt flooding.

Whaley plans to organize West Virginia Baptist men to provide muscle and material to rebuild the area’s churches. Until this can be accomplished, American Baptists’ $30,000 mobile chapel will fill the spiritual gap.

Twenty-six students from Detroit arrived to help with reconstruction. The Mennonite Disaster Service, operating out of a telephone-less bus, brought carpenters from Mennonite churches in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to provide professional skill.

Evangelical ‘Hoopla’

Oral Roberts University set a new major college basketball record by closing its regular season with an average of 106.6 points per game. ORU’s 25–1 mark got it into the National Invitation Tournament, and six-foot-three guard Richie Fuqua had a chance to capture this year’s individual scoring championship. The AP’s final poll rated the Titans sixteenth in the nation. “Athletics is as much a part of our Christian witness as our TV shows,” said Roberts.

Among other independent evangelical schools that had an unusually good season were Seattle Pacific, which made it into the western finals of the NCAA’s college division, and Westmont, which won a place in the NAIA tournament. Belhaven (Southern Presbyterian) also competed in the NAIA tourney.

European Students: A Call To Revolution

Europe urgently needs revival—and it can happen now. Only if it happens will Europe be able to provide critically needed spiritual leadership in nations awakening to the Gospel throughout the entire southern hemisphere.

That message kept coming through at the sixteenth annual European Student Missionary Conference held this month at the European Bible Institute (EBI) in Lamorlaye, France. More than 500 delegates from twenty-seven Bible institutes and seminaries attended, plus hundreds of visitors. Thirty-two mission societies sent representatives and displays to the Urbana-like missions conference, sponsored by the European Student Missionary Association (ESMA).

Sessions were held in French and English, with translations in Italian, Dutch, and German. Among the speakers: Charles Guillot of Radio Evangile and France Youth for Christ in Strasbourg; Colin Grant, mission executive from Great Britain; “Brother Andrew” van der Bijl of Holland, well known for his exploits into Eastern Europe; Wycliffe Bible Translators’ European director David Bendor-Samuel; David Hodder, director of Christian Action by Radio and the Press, a Swiss organization; René Pache of Emmaus Bible Institute, Switzerland; and French Baptist Federation president Andre Tobois.

Round-table discussions centered on such topics as missions and ecumenism, serving God in Communist countries, and communicating the message. On the latter subject, Hodder told of growing possibilities—despite state monopolies—of using television to transmit the Gospel. (Many news shows in recent months have featured close-ups of young Christians.)

Mission leaders appealed for help, and in some cases the response was prompt. Four nurses volunteered for duty after a leader mentioned six vacancies.

The ESMA was organized in 1957 at EBI by students of three Bible institutes. There are now seventeen member schools with an average enrollment of fifty. Other applications are pending. ESMA rules decree that local chapters shall meet weekly for inspiration, prayer, and planning, and that members shall participate in service or outreach projects.

Wayne Detzler of Moorlands Bible College in England commented that the message of the conference was perhaps summed up in the words of Brother Andrew:

“All the doors in the world are open. There is not one country where one cannot witness for Jesus Christ. Ours is a revolution of love. The Communistic revolutionaries take lives. Christian revolutionaries give their lives. If we do not propagate the revolution of love, there will be an atheistic one.”

Next year’s conference will be held March 2–4 at Emmaus Bible Institute, St. Légier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland.

ROBERT J. CAMPBELL

Spain: A Vote For Freedom

One of the bitterest church fights in years ended with victory for Catholic liberals, presumably assuring steady increase of religious freedom for non-Catholics in Spain.

Spanish reform leader Vincente Cardinal Enrique y Tarancón won re-election as president of the bishops’ conference by a two-thirds majority vote. The once powerful conservative Marcelo Gonzalez Martin, primate of Spain, was impotent in his struggle with Tarancón. Even help from Vatican officials (a Vatican study critical of the reformers was leaked to the press in an apparent attempt to embarrass Tarancón and influence voting bishops) proved powerless; the cardinal received Pope Paul VI’s support.

The reforms, adopted last fall by an assembly of Spanish bishops and priests, will sever the church’s long-existing ties with Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s regime.

Church Membership: A Record

Theologically conservative denominations continue to show modest gains while the more liberal communions register slight declines. The 1972 Yearbook of American Churches, compiled by the National Council of Churches and published by Abingdon, reports a record total of 131,045,953 church members in the United States.

Among those with increases are the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Assemblies of God, Seventh-day Adventists, and the Church of the Nazarene. Included among the losers are the United Methodists, the Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church in America, United Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).