Page 5331 – Christianity Today (2024)

The Gospels depict Jesus as having spent a surprising amount of time healing people. Although, like the author of Job before him, he specifically rejected the theory that sickness was God's way of getting even with sinners (John 9:1-3), he nonetheless seems to have suggested a connection between sickness and sin, almost to have seen sin as a kind of sickness. "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick," he said. "I came not to call the righteous but sinners." (Mark 2:17)

This is entirely compatible, of course, with the Hebrew view of man as a psychosomatic unity, an indivisible amalgam of body and soul whereby if either goes wrong, the other is affected. It is significant also that the Greek verb sozo was used in Jesus' day to mean both to save and to heal, and soter could signify either savior or physician.

Ever since the time of Jesus, healing has been part of the Christian tradition. In this century it has usually been associated with religious quackery or the lunatic fringe, but as the psychosomatic dimension of disease has come to be taken more and more seriously by medical science it has regained some of its former respectability. How nice for God to have this support at last.

Jesus is reported to have made the blind see and the lame walk, and over the centuries countless miraculous healings have been claimed in his name. For those who prefer not to believe in them, a number of approaches are possible, among them:

1. The idea of miracles is an offence both to man's reason and to his dignity. Thus, a priori, miracles don't happen.

2. Unless there is objective medical evidence to substantiate the claim that a miraculous healing has happened, you can assume it hasn't.

3. If the medical authorities agree that a healing is inexplicable in terms of present scientific knowledge, you can simply ascribe this to the deficiencies of present scientific knowledge.

4. If an otherwise intelligent and honest human being is convinced, despite all arguments to the contrary, that it is God who has healed him you can assume that his sickness, like its cure, was purely psychological. Whatever that means.

5. The crutches piled high at Lourdes and elsewhere are a monument to human humbug and credulity.

If your approach to this kind of healing is less ideological and more empirical, you can always give it a try. Pray for it. If it's somebody else's healing you're praying for, you can try at the same time laying your hands on him as Jesus sometimes did. If his sickness involves his body as well as his soul, then God may be able to use your inept hands as well as your inept faith to heal him. If you feel like a fool as you are doing this, don't let it throw you. You are a fool of course. … If your prayer isn't answered, this may mean more about you and your prayer than it does about God. Don't try too hard to feel religious, to generate some healing power of your own. Think of yourself rather (if you have to think of yourself at all) as a rather small-gauge, clogged-up pipe that a little of God's power may be able to filter through if you can just stay loose enough. Tell the one you're praying for to stay loose too.

If God doesn't seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe he's giving you something else.

— Frederick Buechner

Pawlet, Vermont

Prom Wishful Hunting, Harper and Row Publishers, pages 35-37. 1973 Frederick Buechner- Used by permission.

Copyright © 1985 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Special emphases and upgraded recruitment portend growth for Christian colleges.

According to a new survey of college enrollment released last December by six higher education groups, college enrollment held its own in 1984, contrary to all the predictions that significant declines would take place.

There were two main reasons for the predictions of a decline.

First was a projected decrease in the number of traditionally college-age students in the nation’s total population. According to Oscar T. Lenning, vice-president for academic affairs and academic dean at Roberts Wesleyan College, Rochester, New York, that decrease is as high as 40 percent or more in some parts of the country. In 1984 the number of students in high school nationwide declined by 5.3 percent.

Second, the costs of a college education, particularly in the private sector of higher education, have been spiraling. The cost of a four-year program in a private liberal arts college today can easily amount to more than $40,000. John L. Glancy, director of university relations at Seattle Pacific University in Washington, notes that “from 1980 to 1983 family income rose 20 percent, but private college costs rose 40 percent during the same period.”

But the predictions of decline did not come true. Why?

The reason is that, knowing the facts of a declining pool of students and spiraling costs, colleges have upgraded their recruitment efforts by attracting large numbers of older students. As a result, though the number of full-time, first-time freshmen in the 18-to 24-year-old category declined by 2.85 percent (according to a report in the Dec. 20, 1984, issue of USA Today), total enrollment is up by 0.65 percent at public universities and colleges and down only 0.88 percent at private institutions of higher education. Though public two-year junior and community college enrollment declined 2.19 percent, older college graduates swelled the ranks of graduate schools with an 8.9 percent increase in enrollment.

In addition, the signs of future enrollment are especially promising for evangelical colleges. Enrollment in evangelical secondary schools has increased notably—at a rate one official calls “nothing short of phenomenal.”

It is still too soon to say what impact this increasing enrollment will have on future enrollments in evangelical Christian colleges, but all signs are that large numbers of those students will eventually enroll in Christian colleges, thus increasing their student pool.

The Christian College Today And Tomorrow

Ronald G. Johnson, who is vice-president of Malone College, Canton, Ohio, a Christian liberal arts college affiliated with the Evangelical Friends Church-Eastern Region, points out that the evangelical Christian college as we know it is a relatively recent development and largely an American phenomenon. “Many of today’s evangelical Christian colleges can trace their roots to the Bible college movement of late nineteenth-century America or to church or denominational academies,” he notes.

“It is true that many of the oldest private colleges and universities in this country were once Christian and even evangelical, but I would argue that both the circ*mstances of their founding and the later demise of their Christian emphasis place them in a different category from the evangelical Christian colleges of today,” Johnson says. Today’s evangelical colleges, by and large, have maintained close ties to their supporting denomination or other sponsoring evangelical bodies.

Johnson is also impressed by the numbers of graduates of Christian colleges who are now actively involved in the leadership of the burgeoning evangelical churches of the country. “When I look over the congregations of our churches and see Malone graduates, I am impressed. I once remember counting—during the time of meditation, not during the sermon!—those on the platform and in the choir of Canton First Friends Church who were Malone graduates, faculty, or staff. I was pleasantly surprised to find that more than two-thirds of the folks fell into one of those three categories.”

He sees the strength of evangelical Christian schools in four areas: smallness, mission, integrated instructional program, and an unusually dedicated faculty. Though smallness is not unique to the evangelical college, small classes and increased opportunities for student and faculty interrelationships are a distinct advantage. “For example,” Johnson says, “the chance of becoming a student leader on a campus of 500 is obviously much greater than on a campus of 50,000.”

Even Christians sometimes think that Christian higher education is biased and therefore inhibits freedom of inquiry. That is not so, according to Malone’s vice-president. “A secularist might argue that Christian higher education, with Christ at its center and its belief that all truth is God’s truth, is biased. The fallacy in this argument is that it fails to recognize that everyone, whether he realizes it or not, brings a bias to education. A secular humanist, a Communist, or an agnostic each interprets the world through a particular bias. In a Christian college a student will be introduced to both secular and orthodox Christian thought. It is then the function of students and professors to recognize the secular thought that is Christian and that which is not. In a secular system, essentially only secular thought is explored, and there is no outside reference point by which to evaluate the ideas.”

The buzz words of higher education for the eighties and nineties are “integration of curriculum,” “value added,” and “global awareness.” Because Christian colleges have been working for years to integrate Christian faith and the truth of the various disciplines, Johnson feels, “Christian higher education is in the lead and can show the way.”

Christian College Innovations

How distinctive are evangelical Christian colleges in the United States, and how are they facing the unique problems of the last decade-and-a-half of the twentieth century? The 67 members of the Christian College Coalition, an organization of leading evangelical Christian colleges and universities, were asked about the distinctives and futures of their institutions. Thirty-three academic deans, vice-presidents, or their designated representives replied. Their carefully nuanced answers reveal that the leadership of the evangelical college is in the hands of those whose Christian commitment and administrative expertise have melded in an ideal way.

Distinctives Of Some Leading Evangelical Colleges

The college deans listed a wide variety of distinctives. The following is not intended as a comprehensive catalog but as indication of the diversity among evangelical schools.

Robert Baptista, dean of Trinity College in the northern Chicago suburb of Deerfield, wrote, “My conviction is that you could interchange the college names in most current advertisem*nts for Christian colleges and no one would ever know the difference. I will skip over the usual observations about Trinity College, therefore, and suggest what makes us different.”

One thing that makes Trinity College distinctive is its employment opportunities for students. “Our location in the affluent North Shore of Chicago offers abundant employment opportunities for Trinity students. Each year the students’ employment office receives over 3,500 requests for a wide variety of part-time employment opportunities. I know of no Christian college that has more work opportunities available to students in the surrounding neighborhood.”

Robert B. Fischer, provost and senior vice-president of Biola University, saw the uniqueness of his institution in its total program. “Each baccalaureate program includes a 30-unit program in biblical studies and theology, a general education program, and a major selected from the 24 that are offered. Fourteen master’s degree programs and five doctoral programs are provided. While each single feature of this university may be found in isolation or in some form elsewhere, Biola University is uniquely distinctive in that the entire campus and all of the students are enriched by the full resources of the baccalaureate and postbaccalaureate work of the four schools, the School of Arts, Sciences, and Professions, the School of Intercultural Studies and World Missions, the Rosemead School of Psychology, and the Talbot Theological Seminary and School of Theology.”

Jean B. Kim, academic dean of Eastern College, St. Davids, Pennsylvania, saw that school’s “open evangelicalism” as its distinctive characteristic. “Eastern College has in common with other evangelical schools a firm commitment to the lordship of Christ. We feel that we accept and encourage student and faculty diversity in the expression of this commitment, perhaps to a greater extent than some other evangelical colleges.” This openness is expressed in its doctrinal statement as well. Though all faculty members annually sign a doctrinal statement that includes belief that the Bible is “inspired of God and is of supreme and final authority in faith and life,” non-Baptist faculty members are not required to subscribe to the statement regarding the preference of water baptism.

One of the distinctives of North Park College, Chicago, Illinois, according to vice-president and dean Quentin D. Nelson, is that it “is one of very few evangelical colleges to be located in an urban center, thus being able to take advantage of the rich cultural and educational resources available for its curriculum, as well as abundant clinical sites for nursing, teaching, and other programs such as internships.”

John L. Glancy, director of university relations at Seattle Pacific University, singled out its size as one of its distinctives. “Seattle Pacific is one of the largest evangelical Christian colleges in America. Total undergraduate and graduate enrollment is 2,869. We serve over 18,000 students through the state per year in a continuing education program called SPIRAL, and our summer session is heavily promoted and well attended, with 1984 enrollment at 2,925, eclipsing enrollment for any one quarter during the regular academic year. Graduate and nongraduate degree seekers make up the majority of the students.”

In a day when many liberal arts colleges pride themselves on their refusal to succumb to the call of “vocationalism,” Stanley A. Clark, dean of academic affairs at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, is proud of the unique twist his institution has given to the question. “We offer a Christian liberal arts perspective on some decidedly vocational programs, such as agriculture, computer science, teacher education, social work, and business/accounting. We have also linked ourselves with top-quality study programs elsewhere, such as environmental biology through the AuSable Trails Institute in Michigan and the American Studies Program in Washington, D.C. Our cooperation with the six-member Associated Colleges of Central Kansas enables us to offer full majors in special education and computer science.”

One of the most interesting replies came from Oscar T. Lenning (vice-president for academic affairs and academic dean at Roberts Wesleyan College, Rochester, New York). During the first year of a new administration, Roberts Wesleyan obtained a large five-year grant from the federal government that allowed it to develop a unique learning center. Other unusual features of the school include a new VAX-750 central computer and sophisticated peripherals solely for instructional use that give the college a “state-of-the-art computing capability.” There is also a new general education program, six new academic majors, a market research capability, an increased donor research and public relations capability (that last spring resulted in an award for promotional excellence for the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education), and an innovative career planning and placement program that now includes an interactive computer information system. In addition, the team introduced a number of other creative pilot projects with the support of an enthusiastic faculty willing to make necessary changes.

As a result, the school has already seen enrollment increase from 600 to 700 students, despite the fact that it has tightened its admissions standards markedly.

Important Religious And Philosophical Beliefs

Several college deans spoke of the theological distinctiveness of their institutions. Don Grant, vice-president of academic affairs at Azusa (Calif.) Pacific University emphasized that “we are a distinctively Christian university, drawing from a rich heritage of Wesleyan, evangelical Christian commitment.

Zenas J. Bicket, academic dean of Evangel College, Springfield, Missouri, noted that the Assemblies of God college “provides a liberal arts education for mainstream Pentecostal youth.” Similarly, Southern California College, Costa Mesa, California, lists its Pentecostal emphasis as a distinctive. “The college is known for its commitment to evangelical theology and charismatic experience,” according to academic dean Lewis Wilson.

John N. Oswalt, president of Asbury College, Asbury, Kentucky, wrote, “Among those colleges that would emphasize Wesleyan-Arminian beliefs with an emphasis upon Christian holiness, Asbury is the only independent school. All others are denominationally affiliated.”

Richard C. Detweiler, president of Eastern Mennonite College and Seminary, Harrisonburg, Virginia, commented that “with roots that reach back into the 450-year-old Mennonite heritage, the college is responsible to the Mennonite church to provide a liberal arts education from an Anabaptist perspective.”

Martha Stout, director of public relations at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts, noted that Gordon was founded as a missionary training institute with a particular burden for the Belgian Congo. Though she admits that the liberal arts college of today has expanded its mission, “Gordon has never lost its moorings; we remain globally aware.”

Problems Facing The Evangelical College In The Future

The academic leaders of these Christian colleges saw a number of problems facing the orthodox Christian institution of higher education in the remaining years of the present century.

John Oswalt of Asbury College commented, “On the one side are the pocketbook issues. Will evangelicals be willing and able to pay for the kind of education in which we have said for many years that we believed fervently? Or will our colleges become upper-middle class and lower-upper class finishing schools? A second issue is whether we will become captive to an upwardly mobile affluent segment of society and lose our capacity to speak to the needs of the age from a clearly biblical perspective. As a whole, evangelicalism today is becoming increasingly blurred on the issue of Scripture and scriptural ethics.”

Don Grant of Azusa Pacific University focused on the pressures to stray from the Christian college’s statement of mission and purpose, and either to cut quality for economic reasons or face the possibility of pricing itself out of existence.

Kenneth W. Shipps, dean of faculty at Barrington (R.I.) College, saw as the central problem “the lack of preparation for incoming students in writing, math, and scriptural understanding.”

Karl E. Keefer, vice-president of academic affairs at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, saw the major issues as how to maintain commitment to an uncompromising allegiance to biblical standards of faith and life in the face of an increasingly secularized society, how to maintain a solid liberal arts curriculum in the face of the trend toward the tyranny of technology, and how to maintain enrollment in the face of demographic decline in the pool of available students.

Richard Gross, president of Gordon College, feels that “though strong colleges like Gordon, Calvin, Wheaton, and Westmont will endure, a number of smaller Christian colleges with declining enrollments will soon fall.” The challenge to the strong colleges, however, is whether they are going to be content with “merely holding abstract philosophic discussions within their academic enclaves,” or whether they will “risk taking public stands on a whole range of pressing social and ethical issues, thereby providing intellectual, moral, and spiritual leadership for our constituents and the larger church.”

A different problem was the focus of the remarks of David G. Ondercin, vice-president of academic affairs at Northwestern College in Roseville, Minnesota. “We need to be ever vigilant in the protection of our rights under the law from the encroachment of federal law and bureaucracy. As an institution we do not accept state or federal monies and therefore enjoy freedoms and benefits many other institutions may not.”

In a similar vein, John L. Glancy of Seattle Pacific University saw government regulations as a major issue facing the Christian school. “Currently we are involved in more than one legal challenge to our policy of reserving the right to hire Christian employees. Should these lawsuits that are being brought about by certain applicants rule in their favor, all Christian organizations, not only Christian colleges, would be affected by the ruling,” Glancy observed.

Oscar Lenning of Roberts Wesleyan College mentioned that though studies show that the liberal arts or general education graduate is more effective and more successful over time than the professionally trained graduate, job supervisors who do the hiring still seem primarily concerned with vocational preparation. “The issue is ‘How can we communicate effectively to companies and those supervisors the results of such studies that point out the shortsightedness of these hiring practices?’”

Stanley Clark of Tabor College noted another pressure. “A major issue facing us is competition with community colleges that forces us to consider the extent to which we, too, should become brokers of educational services rather than a legitimate liberal arts college.”

Quo Vadis?

Will these schools, which are representative of hundreds of other Christian colleges all over the nation, survive the challenges of the coming years? No one, of course, can say for certain.

If these leaders and their comrades in constructive administration at similar Christian colleges can continue to offer distinctive programs and creative teaching emphases, if they can keep their Christian convictions from being only on the doctrinal tablets of stone and instead buried deep within the hearts and minds of faculty members and students alike, the Christian college should continue to make a major and increasing impact on American life.

A pastorale thriller in which pacifism confronts violence.

Paramount Pictures, directed by Peter Weir; rated R.

As a pastorale thriller, Witness is a deliberate contradiction in terms: a tale of murder and corruption set in a rural pacifist community. Throughout the film, similar juxtapositions of opposites are calculated to achieve an atmosphere of tension as two incompatible societies circle each other in wary curiosity. The resulting sensation is delightfully disorienting—a constant subversion of our expectations—as the ethical and social conflicts of the plot work themselves out in ways alien to modern twentieth-century logic.

The basic story is simple. With his widowed mother, a young Amish boy is visiting the city for the first time when he witnesses a murder. Investigating the crime, Detective John Book (Harrison Ford) discovers the killers are among his own colleagues in the police department and flees with the boy to hide out in an Amish community in Pennsylvania. A rather standard Hollywood concept thus becomes an instant metaphor for the differences between concepts of violent law enforcement and theological pacifism: active participation or hopeful neglect.

For each side, it is a question of involvement. The Amish believe the path to righteousness entails withdrawal from all entanglements with modernity. Detective Book, on the other hand, follows the broad path of punitive justice and revenge. Both traditions ultimately contribute to each other’s redemption, defeating sin in vastly different ways. But it is obvious from the start that this modern man has brought a plague upon their houses, and any collaboration can only be temporary. “Come out from among them and touch not the evil thing,” a bearded patriarch sternly warns his grandson.

The amount of separation required to preserve spiritual purity has always been a concern within the church. The Amish maintain their religious heritage at the expense of Christ’s command, “Go ye into all the world.” Yet the obvious piety of this simple group remains impressive.

Equally apparent is the damage done to the church at large after centuries of entanglement with the cares of this world. Witness makes a powerful case against advanced technology as an impediment to our sense of community—our “oneness.” In one magnificent sequence, neighbors from miles around gather for a barn raising. The skills required to build the structure in a single day are learned from childhood, and the ability for a single community to live and work together in such perfect harmony is acquired through generations of mutual support. The obvious point here is that in a modern society we no longer need each other so profoundly. We have become separated by industrial specialization and by our tools of convenience, and we no longer require the help of our neighbors for the basics of life.

Modern technology has set us adrift, creating countless islands of self-supporting individuals unattached to the living body of Christ. The Amish have succeeded in eliminating the distractions of modern living that keep us perpetually alienated from each other—and from ourselves as well, for contemplation, too, has become a lost art. Modern sensory overload has distracted us from the simplicity of basic human needs.

In answer, Witness reveals how surprisingly sensuous a simple wheatfield can be, or how lovely the face of another human being can be by the light of a gas lamp. Here is a sensuality sanctified by the Creator—near to that which is essential in our nature.

¹Mr. Cheney, who lives in Torrance, California, is a film editor for a major studio.

Thomas Fuller was a seventeenth-century pastor and, in the judgment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the “most sensible … great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men.” Fuller took the royalist side in England’s civil war and yet maintained wide popularity. His witty preaching in London on the Strand at the Chapel of Saint Mary drew overflow audiences. A selection of Fuller’s writings are included in Sherwood Wirt’s Spiritual Disciplines (Crossway, 1983). Most of the following are taken from Fuller’s Good Thoughts in Bad Times, published during England’s “bloodiest era.” (Archaisms have been altered or deleted.)

A Harsh Voice

Lord, my voice by nature is harsh and out of tune, and it is hopeless to lavish any art on it to make it better. Can my singing of psalms be pleasing to your ears when it is so unpleasant to my own? Yet though I cannot sing with the nightingale, or chirp with the blackbird, I would rather chatter with the swallow—even croak with the raven—than be altogether silent. Had you given me a better voice, I would have praised you with a better voice. Now what my music lacks in sweetness, let it have in sense, singing praises with understanding. Create in me a new heart in which to make melody, and I will be contented with my old voice, until in due time, being admitted into the choir of heaven, I have another more harmonious voice given to me.

Good Divinity

Lord, I confess that when in my writing I have occasion to insert the phrase “God willing,” I can barely prevent myself from putting it in a parenthesis, as if it may as well be left out as put in. But indeed, without these words all the rest is nothing. From now on, then, I will write those words fully and fairly, without any parenthesis. Let critics censure it for bad grammar: I am sure it is good divinity.

Fathers And Sons

Lord, I find the genealogy of my Savior strangely checkered with four remarkable changes in four immediate generations.

1. Rehoboam begat Abia; that is, a bad father begat a bad son.

2. Abia begat Asa; that is, a bad father a good son.

3. Asa begat Jehosophat; that is, a good father a good son.

4. Jehosophat begat Joram; that is, a good father a bad son.

I see, Lord, from this, that my father’s piety cannot be handed on; that is bad news for me. But I also see that actual impiety is not always hereditary; that is good news for my son.

The Best Chapter In The Bible

Lord, I discover a laziness in my soul. When I am to read a chapter in the Bible, before I begin, I look where it ends. And if it does not end on the same side, I cannot keep my hands from turning over the page, to measure the length of the text on the other side. If it swells to many verses, I begin to grudge. Surely my heart is not right. Were I truly hungry for heavenly food, I would not complain of more meat. Scourge, Lord, this laziness from my soul, make the reading of your Word not a penance, but a pleasure to me. Teach me that as among many heaps of gold, all being equally pure, that one that is biggest is the best, and so I may esteem as the best chapter in the Bible the one that is longest.

A False Witch

King James desired to discover those who falsely pretended to be possessed with a devil. A maid pretended such a possession, and for more color, when the first verses of the Gospel of Saint John were read in her hearing, she would fall into strange fits of fuming and foaming, to the amazement of the beholders. But the king ordered one of his chaplains to read the same in the original, and the same maid (apparently possessed with an English devil who understood not a word of Greek) was tame and quiet. I know a quarrelsome parish in which, if the minister in his pulpit had but spoken the word “kingdom,” the people would have been ready to throw him out. But as for “realm,” the same word in French, he might safely use it in his sermons as often as he pleased. Ignorance generally inflames, but sometimes by happenstance it abates men’s malice.

Pronouncing The Prayer

I saw a mother threatening to punish her little child for not pronouncing correctly the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” The child tried as much as it could to utter it, trying to change its “tepasses” to “trespasses.” Alas! The confluence of the hard consonants were a block to the child’s tongue. Therefore if the mother had punished defect in the child for default, she deserved to have been punished herself; and deserved it even more than the child, because what the child could not pronounce the parents do not practice. Oh, how lispingly and imperfectly we perform the close of this petition: “As we forgive them that trespass against us.” It is well if, like the child, we try our hardest, though falling short in the exact observance.

God’s Revolution: The Witness of Eberhard Arnold, edited by the Hutterian Society of Brothers and John Howard Yoder (Paulist Press, 1984, 224 pp.; $8.95, pb)

Occasionally we are confronted by saints who challenge us to an uncompromising spirituality. The founders of the great monastic orders during the late Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages were Christians of this sort. So were many of the Anabaptists of the Reformation era.

These heroic Christians took seriously the New Testament suggestions that the Christian life is one of war with the world, the flesh, and the Devil. Accordingly, they formed communities in which they renounced the world, denied the flesh, and sought a communal spirituality against which the gates of hell could not prevail.

God’s Revolution is a collection of fragments from the messages of one twentieth-century adherent to this age-old call to kingdom living, Eberhard Arnold (1883–1935), who in 1920 founded the Bruderhof community in Germany. And it is a labor of love. Indeed, a preface by Malcolm Muggeridge and an introduction by John Howard Yoder indicate the respect that the spirituality of Arnold and his communities attract to this day.

Arnold became convinced by the necessity of a radically antiworldly Christianity and eventually affiliated his community with the Hutterian brethren, a historic Anabaptist group. As John Howard Yoder’s introduction indicates, Arnold’s piety grew out of pietist roots similar to those that fostered much of American fundamentalism and its evangelical successors. In fact, Arnold’s early spiritual heritage was shaped by the Student Christian Movement (SCM) that originated in Dwight L. Moody’s revivals. The SCM called for a “deepening Christian life”—a theme that Arnold took as a central goal in his own life.

As did the turn-of-the-century holiness and Keswick movements in America and England, Arnold emphasized that being born again was not enough, but only a first step toward giving oneself entirely to Christ and to living in his kingdom. And again like these movements and the related dispensationalism of the times, Arnold viewed the so-called Christian nations as serving Satan. He carried these themes further, however, than did most of his English-speaking counterparts. Living with Christ as king at the center of our lives, he insisted, should be done by the church communally. The gathered church was thus the manifestation of the kingdom on earth. This view necessitated separation from conventional churches.

This radical view of Christ’s kingdom as truly alien from the kingdoms of the world also involved a condemnation of all political involvement. Arnold condemned all violence—whether wars, exploitation of the poor, abortion, concentration camps, or driving cars at agreeable (but deadly) speeds. And since Arnold and his community condemned all governments as agencies of “the Beast” of Revelation, his was among the earliest of Christian groups prophetically to identify the true character of Hitler’s Germany and also one of the first groups to suffer for noncooperation with the Nazis. “We need suffering,” Arnold wrote, however. “The more we suffer and become aware of our own wretchedness, the more we realize that Jesus is our only foothold.”

An Excerpt

“The theological nonsense that came out of there [at Tübingen University] was almost unbearable. A pious young woman (a theology student) stood up and said, ‘Jesus said, I have not come to bring peace, but the sword’ (Matt. 10:34). I answered, ‘I am very much surprised to hear these words in this context. I don’t understand what you mean. Jesus is talking about the relationship between a daughter-in-law who wants to follow Him and her mother-in-law who has not chosen the way of discipleship. Are you trying to say that Jesus meant the daughter-in-law should kill her mother-in-law?’ ”

—Report about lecture at Tübingen; Rhön Bruderhof, February 22, 1933

In answer to the accusation that withdrawing from the world was not socially responsible, Arnold stressed that the central calling of the church is to be a model community—a light for the world to see. “The communal church,” he said, “has to represent here and now the charter of the Kingdom to come.” Arnold’s views are not presented in this collection as sustained arguments, but rather as a series of excerpts from his homilies. They are not likely, therefore, by themselves to win over persons from other traditions who do not think that Scriptures demand that the church should separate itself so radically from the world or who stress doctrines of grace more than Arnold does here. Readers from such traditions should nonetheless be challenged by Arnold’s rigorous biblical piety. Those convinced that churches should be full-fledged separated communities will find him inspiring.

Reviewed by George M. Marsden, professor of history at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Tracking God In His Cosmos

The Cosmic Adventure, by John F. Haught (Paulist Press, 1984, 224 pp.; $6.95, pb)

According to Catholic theologian John Haught, the apparent chasm between faith and reason would not seem so great if the proponents of scientific materialism—the belief in a spiritless, mindless universe—would but pay attention to recent discoveries in their own disciplines. Thus the premise of his new book, The Cosmic Adventure: Science, Religion, and the Quest for Purpose.

Mingling Roman Catholicism and process theology with an engaging use of illustrations, Haught aptly brings his complex thesis to life—while tackling the scientific community head-on.

High on Haught’s list of insistent materialists are biologists and others in related life sciences (the very fields of inquiry in which Christian values are increasingly challenged by genetic engineering and “quality of life” considerations). In their efforts to reduce life to random chemical reactions, these scientists, Haught believes, look to the genetic encoding of DNA molecules in every human cell. But, he says, their discoveries are their undoing. What matters about DNA molecules is the sequence in which the code appears, and that is extraneous to the chemistry of life. “ ‘Chance’ appears to be the scribbler, eraser, and communicator,” he writes, and as a result biologists risk “trailing off into mystification.”

To make his point, Haught compares DNA encoding to letters on a printed page. Something apart from the chemical interaction of ink and paper causes meaning to emerge from a book’s pages, he says. An author depends on the chemistry of ink and paper to get his message across, but he would rightly feel insulted if the reader believed a chemical analysis would yield all that there was to learn from his book.

Haught, 41, teaches theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He wrote Adventure out of a concern for people caught between world views—uncomfortable with the rigid dogmatism that prevails in scientific circles yet dissatisfied with religion that oversimplifies and minimizes the evidence science has amassed. “There are a lot of intelligent people out there looking for an alternative,” he told CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Haught is not completely comfortable with process theology as a bridge between scientific and religious thought, but he defends it nevertheless as a philosophical framework ideally suited to the modern mind. “If a person hasn’t been caught by the spirit of evolutionary theory or modern physics, that person will be less likely to understand process theology. So in many respects it’s a theology that is oriented toward a specific type of intellectual mind—a consciousness steeped in modern scientific theory.”

Process theology took shape when Alfred North Whitehead came to the United States from England at age 63. His father was an Anglican pastor, but Whitehead counted himself an agnostic. When he lost a son in World War I, tragedy forced him to consider matters of life and death. Haught says Whitehead “tried to conceive of the cosmos in such a way that there’s no absolute perishing. He began to see the necessity of positing the existence of God to explain very basic things—creation, the creative lure for humans. Little by little, the idea of God came back as an indispensable ingredient in his philosophy.” Thus, to the process theologian, God is intimately involved with every occurrence in the universe, and that alone gives it meaning. He becomes a “universal recipient”—different in nature from the changeless God of historic Christian understanding. Instead of “I Am Who I Am,” God “will be who he will be.”

Haught defines God as “the source of order and novelty” and says sin is “unnecessary disorder or unnecessary monotony.” Man is separated from God to the extent to which he fails to maximize God-given opportunities and becomes “converted” by “opening out to a wider vision.” Process theology does not personify evil because, Haught says, “trying to condense the world’s evil is a trivialization.”

From Whitehead, Haught borrows an argument that reduces scientific materialism to an absurd conundrum. Materialists believe evolution occurred at random, resulting in man and his advanced capacity to think. Therefore, man is “continuous with nature.” Yet, at the same time, scientific materialism separates mind from nature, saying the human mind is the highest form of consciousness, capable of independently and objectively perceiving the world around it.

This is dualism, and Haught terms it “incoherent” as well as arrogant. The materialist view depends on faith of a different stripe, because there is no evidence that the human mind occupies the most sophisticated level of intelligence the universe can muster.

Haught points out that hierarchies of intelligence abound—from petunias to puppies to people—and there is reason to suspect a still higher level that can “get its mind around us” while remaining imperceptible to our senses.

This is where religious faith enters in, which Haught defines as “the kind of knowing whereby we … leave ourselves open to being grasped by a more encompassing field of influence.” The Christian version of faith, Haught says, offers the believer a means of knowing about, and basking in, the sustaining care of God. Jesus Christ models a harmonizing, aesthetic approach to life, rather than a dry ethic. Haught speculates about whether the church’s job of building the body of Christ might lead the way for “a deeper incarnation of God in the cosmos.”

Despite its significant differences with historic Christianity (among other things, its undeniable universalism), Cosmic Adventure reaches out in a direction many evangelicals fear to tread. Namely, it takes on secularist thought at its highest intellectual levels. Indeed, Haught beams his message toward a questioning, often hostile, community of scientists. He tries to explain the reality of God in the midst of scientific theory and discovery.

That the secular press has given Haught’s effort more than passing attention should act as a call to evangelical intellectuals to address more critically and astutely the questions of the cosmos from their unique vantage point of knowing its Creator. As it has from the beginning, the world wants an answer.

BETH SPRING

U.S. Rep. Paul Henry is cautious about siding with any Republican special-interest group.

Paul B. Henry, serving his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives, brings to Washington a thoughtful assessment of evangelical engagement in public affairs. He learned how faith relates to politics from his father, Carl F. H. Henry, one of evangelicalism’s foremost authorities.

The younger Henry, 42, is a Wheaton (Ill.) College graduate and former professor of political science at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A Republican, he represents Michigan’s fifth district, which includes Grand Rapids. He served in Michigan’s state house for two terms and was a state senator in 1983 and 1984. In an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Henry explained what he hopes to accomplish in Congress, and voiced a note of caution for evangelicals who delve into politics.

What are your priorities as a newly elected congressman?

Priorities are defined to a large extent by your district. Michigan has been ravaged by unemployment and economic dislocation, so obviously one of the priorities I have is the whole economic climate of my state. When we talk about economic growth, which has been phenomenal in this country in the last couple of years, my concern is for my congressional district to share in it. The Grand Rapids area is much more balanced economically than most of Michigan, so it has not suffered as seriously, and its long-range outlook is good. But its infrastructure is threatened. That is a transcending concern.

Also, I’ve been heavily involved in education issues, coming from a family of educators and having been a professor. I’m former chairman of the education committee in the Michigan State Senate, so I was involved in a number of bills trying to strengthen accountability in primary and secondary education, and in higher education as well. I did succeed in getting on the Education and Labor Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. My second committee is Science and Technology. That committee deals with natural-resource and environmental issues, which I’ve been leading at the state level too.

Have you been involved with the question of values in education?

Values are at the heart of everything, and to say you could have value-free education or “neutral” politics is mistaken. The whole difficulty rests in our culture, where, because of our diversity and our constitutional separation of church and state, we have become almost incapable as a public of engaging in rational, thoughtful discussion of the issues. So the rhetoric tends to escape meaningful dialogue.

Many times people use the separational language to mask an agnostic or relativistic view. A countervailing moralism from both Left and Right simplistically baptizes certain interests with a moral appeal. The question of values in education is really difficult, because as we become increasingly pluralistic as a society, and as we have moved away from Judeo-Christian foundations that were the assumed values of American public education, then it is hard to have any purpose or coherence in public education. But you can’t simply blame the educational enterprise. It’s a broader fact of our culture and our society.

What is your assessment of the Conservative Opportunity Society, in which many conservative Republican members of Congress are involved?

I tend not to get involved in ideological or special-interest groups within the party, particularly during the first few months when you want to take care not to get branded one way or the other. I’ll try to get the lay of the map and keep cordial relations with all at this point.

You’ve had some previous experience in Washington.

That’s right. I was administrative assistant to former Congressman John Anderson years back, and then director of the Republican House conference staff. So at least I knew my way around the building.

Do you have a position on the President’sprayer amendment, which he has mentioned in several recent speeches?

I have very serious concerns about the whole concept of spoken prayer in public schools, and I think there is tremendous public confusion out there on that issue. I think it’s a symbolic issue, and that symbolism tends to obfuscate the problems.

My son attends a junior high school in Grand Rapids. Some 250 kids—including Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists—attend that school. Spoken prayers may mean a state-written prayer that is religiously neutral. It will not be a prayer in Jesus’ name. People assume it will be a Judeo-Christian prayer, but it won’t. It will be a prayer offered in the name of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, and maybe throw in Martin Luther King. Or it’s going to be a Christian prayer on Monday, a Jewish prayer on Tuesday, a Hindu prayer on Wednesday. What would we really be teaching our children? I understand the President’s concern and the public’s frustration. Polling in my district shows overwhelming support for it. But I think we could also show overwhelming confusion as to what is at issue.

Would you explain how being the son of Carl Henry influenced your decision to go into politics?

My father was one of the evangelical leaders years ago who bewailed the attrition of evangelical influence in the public sector, so I was raised in an environment where this kind of thing was discussed. One of the first books he wrote was The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. I think he would define that book as a populist tract.

It is important to understand that our calling as Christians doesn’t stop at certain areas of life. On the other hand, I’d be the first one to caution against the suggestion that people of Christian conviction have some kind of inherent infallibility in matters political. If anything is needed now, particularly in the evangelical community, it’s a call for caution and also for humility—a recognition that one of the fundamental Christian virtues is humility.

As we seek justice and mercy, as we seek Christian accountability or Christian values in society, we need to be sure that we are not doing some of the same things others are doing—masking greed under the banner of the Cross. I think the real danger at this point in the evangelical community is not the mistaken notion that Christians ought not to be involved—we’re coming through that. Now the danger lies in how we’re being involved and whether we’re listening and following, as it were, the promptings of the Spirit, or simply manipulating religious symbols.

Was the Religious Right involved in your campaign in Michigan?

No. In my primary, the local Moral Majority chapter sent out a letter opposing me, in support of someone who was making overt appeals to their issues. Some of that is due to tremendous amounts of misunderstanding. There are people out there speaking for the broad evangelical Protestant community who in fact are pretty far removed from it. My district would be somewhat different as well because of the strong presence of confessional Protestantism, with the Christian Reformed Church, the Reformed Church in America, and Lutheran denominations. And, too, the Catholic church has a very strong relationship to evangelical Protestant churches in my part of the state, and for that reason it tempers much of what I would call the sectarian fringes of evangelical Protestantism.

What is your sense of President Reagan and his impact on the country?

It has been profound. It sounds almost corny to say, but there has been a rebirth of American spirit. You can’t deny it. It’s been good and helpful. We’re through the morose period of self-flagellation. Reagan has an ability to bring people together, and will try more forcefully to bring in the minorities who feel they’ve been passed by these last few years. It’s important that he do that, and I think he understands that and is genuinely concerned about it.

On his economic policies, by and large, I’ve been strongly supportive. I have also agreed with much of his program of military modernization, although not the full extent of it. And I think there’s going to be some drawing in of the reins this year. I tend to be somewhat more moderate than he is on issues such as environmental policy and on some of the social questions.

What about abortion?

I support the right to life, so there is no difference between us on that.

A Conservative Jewish Group Opposes A Baptist Congregation In West Jerusalem

The Narkis Street Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in west Jerusalem, has been the target of ongoing extremist opposition in Israel.

A grenade explosion damaged the church seven years ago. In 1982, a fire that authorities suspect was set intentionally destroyed the church’s meeting place. Since then, the congregation has been worshiping in a tentlike structure. Windows in the church office frequently are broken, and slogans have been spray painted on the property several times.

Earlier this year, a conservative Jewish organization called Yad Lachim organized a protest against the Narkis Street church. The demonstration was prompted by the church’s plans to rebuild its meeting place; a regional planning and development council is considering final approval of the plans. The rebuilding plans prompted one unnamed ultraconservative Orthodox Jewish leader to tell the Jerusalem Post that his political party will withdraw from the municipal coalition if approval is granted.

Extremist activity against Christians in Israel “seems to be increasing,” said Isam Ballenger, Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board director for Europe and the Middle East. “And their influence over others in Israel may be increasing, and this is alarming.”

Ballenger said the recent demonstration against the Narkis Street church was promoted throughout Jerusalem with posters that misrepresented the church’s pastor, Robert Lindsey, a Southern Baptist representative in Israel since 1944. Approximately 100 people, including women and children, participated in the protest.

One demonstrator was quoted as declaring over a loudspeaker, “This is just the beginning of making trouble in this area.” Among the slogans on the protesters’ signs were “Get Out, Get Out” and “There is no room in this neighborhood for a congregational church and center which is missionary.”

Lindsey said Yad Lachim is not representative of all Israelis. “We have had opposition expressed against us by ultraconservative religious people from time to time,” he said. “But we also have had many expressions of encouragement by neighbors and friends who consider our church to be a very positive part of the neighborhood.”

Ballenger said he believes Yad Lachim was involved in generating negative press accounts last fall against other congregations in Israel, including one in Ashkelon with which Southern Baptist representatives James and Elizabeth Smith work. The Smiths said they were accused of “poisoning innocent young people with our religious beliefs and baptizing them into Gentile Christianity.”

BAPTIST PRESS

U.S. Government Sets Guidelines For Gene Therapy On Humans

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently issued the first national guidelines for genetic therapy on human beings. The rules set forth ethical and scientific criteria for medical experimentation involving the transplanting of human genes for the purpose of curing conditions caused by genetic defects.

A 15-member team of scientists, lawyers, ethicists, and public policy specialists contributed to the guidelines. After public comment is incorporated and the rules are finalized, they will constitute the government’s most explicit policy statement on this controversial issue.

Several research teams are known to be considering gene therapy. The NIH guidelines are intended to ensure that the possible benefits of such therapy outweigh the potential dangers. In its document, NIH addresses only somatic (as opposed to reproductive) cell therapy. Somatic cell therapy, in theory, affects only the body cells.

It is generally conceded, however, that such therapy could inadvertently affect reproductive cells, or the human “germline.” That would result in the passing of altered genetic information to future generations.

Jeremy Rifkin, of the Foundation for Economic Trends, says there are too many unknowns to justify any type of genetic therapy. It was Rifkin who in 1983 organized a diverse coalition of religious leaders to oppose germline genetic therapy.

“My concern is that we haven’t taken a searching look at whether somatic therapy might have some impact on the germline of future generations,” Rifkin said. “There is the possibility of many tremendous benefits. That’s pretty well established. But I’ve seen very little talk about potential problems. That makes me nervous, because it suggests we’re going into this with rose-colored glasses.”

The NIH guidelines generally ask for documentation that proposed treatment will be efficient and safe for everyone involved. NIH encourages experimentation on primates, and asks for proof that the treatment is not likely to affect the germline of the patient.

NORTH AMERICAN SCENE

A dozen antiabortion protesters who kneeled in prayer on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building have been sentenced to a day in jail and fined $ 10. The U.S. attorney who arranged the plea-bargained sentence has not prosecuted any of the nearly 500 demonstrators who have engaged in civil disobedience at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. Both groups have protested the U.S. attorney’s “double standard.”

A Pennsylvania obstetrician who aborted a 32-week-old fetus is facing charges of infanticide and abortion after viability. Testimony given during a preliminary hearing failed to convince a Philadelphia municipal court judge that the fetus was live-born. As a result, murder and involuntary manslaughter charges against Dr. Joseph Melnick were dropped. Prosecutors say they believe Melnick is the first Pennsylvania physician to face a criminal trial in connection with an abortion.

Five men who invaded a Lutheran church in McCandless, Pennsylvania, over a labor dispute have been sentenced to six months in jail. The jailed men join nine others, including the church’s pastor and his wife, who are serving jail terms in a fight involving labor activists and rebel clergy against Pittsburgh’s major corporations and the district Lutheran synod. As part of a group called Denominational Ministry Strategy, the activists have used confrontational tactics to attract attention to the area’s unemployed.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has urged the states to pass stricter laws and regulations for day-care centers to help prevent child abuse.HHS offered guidelines and urged states to coordinate regulations with parents and local communities. The guidelines call for unannounced visits by parents to day-care centers, intensive screening of day-care center employees, and stricter rules on reporting cases of suspected abuse.

The J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust has given nearly $1 million to four organizations to help relieve hunger in Ethiopia. Grants totaling $935,000 have been awarded to Africare, Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran World Relief, and Oxfam America. The grants will provide food supplements, blankets, cooking utensils, emergency shelter, medicine, and grain storage facilities, among other famine relief aid. More than 25 percent of the grant monies will be used for follow-up development activities in Ethiopia.

The Virginia Supreme Court has ordered a hom*osexual man to surrender custody of his 10-year-old daughter. The court ruled that the man had continuously exposed the child to an “immoral and illicit relationship” with his partner. The court gave the girl’s mother sole custody of her daughter and directed the father not to visit the girl with his partner present. This decision reversed an earlier ruling. In 1983, a county circuit court judge decided to allow the 33-year-old man to retain custody of his daughter.

Personalia

The Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission has given its Christian Service Award to U.S. Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Oreg.). The award recognizes the senator’s “commitment to peace and humanitarian causes.” In 1982, Hatfield helped lead a campaign in Congress for a nuclear weapons freeze. He also has led congressional battles against world hunger, and repeatedly stresses the importance of human rights in American foreign policy.

John O. Humbert has been nominated to succeed Kenneth L. Teegarden as chief executive of the 1.1-million-member Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). If elected this August by the Disciples’ General Assembly, Humbert will become general minister and president of the denomination. He has 28 years of pastoral experience and served as Teegarden’s deputy for the past eight years. Teegarden will retire in August.

Senior Citizens Chide Oral Roberts Over His Fund Appeals

Oral Roberts is not the first, but he is the latest American evangelist to encounter friction for fund-raising tactics in Canada. Bernard Richard, executive director of the New Brunswick Senior Citizens Federation, has charged that Roberts’s appeals for money “take advantage of the sensitivity of seniors and prey on them at a time in their lives when they are most susceptible.”

On behalf of the federation, Richard filed a complaint with local and provincial police and with the Better Business Bureau in Moncton, where his organization is based. Richard cited a letter signed by the Tulsa-based evangelist Roberts and received in January by an elderly resident of St. Stephen, New Brunswick. A handwritten heading across the top of the letter read “33 predictions for you in 1985.”

In the three-page, mass-produced appeal, Roberts stated that through “the gift of prophecy,” he had been told that recipients could expect “creative miracles for things seemingly dead in your body, your spirit, your mind, and your finances to come alive again.”

Then came a warning: “If you neglect to pay attention to what He [God] is especially saying to you, then Satan will take advantage and hit you with bad things and you will wish that 1985 had never come.”

In the letter, Roberts urged recipients to write for a printed copy of the 33 predictions and to send along a “seed faith gift,” which, he said, would help them get a “hundred-fold return.” He said the predictions would reveal, among other things, “how to avoid terrible new diseases that are coming upon people because of stress over world conditions.”

Susan Edgett, general manager of the Moncton Better Business Bureau, said her office had received several complaints about letters from American evangelists, most of them involving Roberts or Rex Humbard. Edgett said the bureau’s role is limited to alerting people to pressure tactics and advising them not to feel intimidated.

One woman who received a letter from Roberts contacted the St. Croix Courier, a weekly newspaper in St. Stephen. According to Kay Fischer of the newspaper’s staff, the woman had hurt her back in a fall and was concerned that her accident was one of the “bad things” forecast by Roberts.

A spokesperson at the national office of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association of Canada said she was aware of the New Brunswick complaint and of press reports about it. She said, however, that the Toronto office had received no direct complaints from those who had received the appeal letters.

Canadian media reports in recent months have also cited public complaints regarding the fund-raising tactics of TV evangelist Humbard (CT, Sept. 21, 1984, p.70) and International Christian Aid president Joe Bass.

LESLIE K. TARR

Federal Agencies Criticized For Producing And Distributing Sermons

Two federal agencies have come under fire after government employees distributed at public expense a speech and two sermons containing references to Christian beliefs and the United States as a “Christian nation.”

Civil liberties groups and various religious leaders condemned the actions of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). Some of the government officials involved conceded that the mailings were inappropriate, but they defended the sermons as being merely informational.

A speech sent out by a DOE official in Denver contained a controversial paragraph asking, “How can these things be happening in America—this land of freedom, this Christian nation? What has happened to our Christian system of values? The change from ‘one nation under God’ to a nation without God didn’t happen overnight. But Christians are just now waking up to the fact that godlessness is controlling every aspect of our so-called ‘democratic and free’ society—it controls our entertainment, our news, and even the education of our children.”

In letters to the postmaster general and to an education department official in Washington, D.C., U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) questioned the intent of the speech, originally intended for Christian school administrators. “Is it official policy of DOE to promote or establish a Christian nation?…” Schroeder wrote. “[The speech] calls for the reestablishment of a ‘Christian nation’ and notes, with some nostalgia, that several states used to have ‘actual state religions.’”

The author of the speech, Robert Billings, a former Moral Majority official who works for DOE in Washington, defended the speech. “The problem is that the people who are complaining have never read the speech and are basing their judgments on inaccurate news stories,” he said. Billings said he wrote the speech before he joined the Reagan administration in 1981. He added that he has not delivered it since then, and has not encouraged other government officials to use it.

The 12-page speech was mailed out by Thomas G. Tancredo, DOE’s liaison for a six-state region headquartered in Denver. The speech was accompanied by a cover letter that began, “We see more and more signs of governmental intervention into the areas of parental responsibility which have, for centuries, been held inviolate.”

An aide to Schroeder called such language the “grossest form of hypocrisy.” He said the “essential point [of the speech] was that we ought to have a state religion,” which the aide said would mean complete usurpation of parental responsibility in education.

Thomas G. Moore, DOE’s public affairs director, said education department lawyers are investigating whether the mailing violated any laws. He conceded that the mailing showed a “lack of discretion.” However, he added, since Christian schools are DOE’s “fastest-growing educational constituency,” it was legitimate for the Denver official to want to provide them with information of interest.

“I’m afraid the intention of the militant secularists who have turned this minor event into a major story is to pit Christian against Jew to further their own agenda …,” Moore said. “[The speech] was appealing for a return to traditional Judeo-Christian values in public life and in the schools.” However, he conceded that use of the term ‘Christian nation’ “perhaps showed insensitivity to the Jewish community.”

In a separate incident, a division of HHS was criticized for producing and distributing two sermons, written for use by ministers to promote adoption. One of the sermons read: “Let us open our minds and hearts to our Christian and community responsibility and restore these children to their rightful place within the family.”

“We had the best of intentions, but it was an inappropriate vehicle to use,” said Enid Borden, public affairs director for the Office of Human Development Services, the division of HHS responsible for the unusual project. Borden said the agency was “overzealous” in its effort to place children with special needs for adoption.

Bill Acosta, a Human Development Services regional representative in Dallas, wrote the sermons. Some 500 copies were sent to child welfare agencies, accompanying a regular informational memorandum.

JARYL STRONG

Committee Says Two Churches Should Suspend Merger Talks

After six years of preliminary church-union talks, ecumenists in two mainline Protestant denominations say their members are not ready for “a binding commitment to become one church.”

A joint committee of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ (UCC) has dropped the idea of union negotiations for the foreseeable future. Instead, the committee called for a less rigorous “ecumenical partnership” that would provide opportunities for joint worship, mission, and theological study.

The 1.7 million-member UCC, headquartered in New York City, was formed in 1957 by a union of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church. The 1.1 million-member Disciples of Christ, based in Indianapolis, started on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century as a movement opposed to denominational sectarianism. Both the Disciples and the UCC have been strong advocates of Christian unity.

The 20-member joint committee’s final report and recommendations, issued earlier this year, will go to the top governing bodies of the two denominations for adoption this summer. Major elements of the recommendation for ecumenical partnership include:

• Asking all institutions and units of the two denominations to begin coordinated planning and, when possible, joint staffing in various areas of ministry.

• Encouraging all decision-making bodies in both churches to add representatives from the partner church.

• Making proposals for achieving “full communion” between the two churches, including “mutual recognition of baptism, full eucharistic fellowship, the mutual recognition of members and ordained ministers” and “common decision-making.”

Robert Welsh, deputy ecumenical officer for the Disciples of Christ, said the proposal “struck a good middle ground” between discontinuing conversations between the two churches and entering formal union negotiations. “The UCC wouldn’t buy more, but the Disciples wouldn’t buy less,” he said.

Though some in both denominations have opposed formal union talks, the most vigorous and organized opposition has been mounted in the UCC. James Gilliom, a UCC representative on the joint committee, said the panel discovered “that the majority of people were looking for some other form of unity than the merger model, which is perceived to be too costly.”

The committee report said some of the obstacles to union “related to structural, bureaucratic and personal issues as well as polity and power concerns internal to both denominations.”

RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE

New U.S. Education Secretary Favors Traditional Values In Public Schools

Debate about the scope and content of public education has intensified in recent years. Christian parents and educators are alarmed about lax discipline, “values-free” curriculum, and marginal—if any—emphasis on national and personal ideals that shape students’ notions of their identity and worth. The recent appointment of William J. Bennett as secretary of the U.S. Department of Education promises to invigorate national discussion and involve Christians more deeply in public education.

Bennett is a Catholic who attended a Jesuit high school in Washington, D.C. Since 1981 he has chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities, a grant-giving, independent federal agency. The favored choice of conservative leaders in Washington, Bennett was unanimously confirmed last month by the Senate. He supports parental involvement in local school matters and tuition tax credits for parents of private school students. In addition, he wants to see the classics of history and literature, including the Bible, restored to prominence in the classroom.

At a news conference outlining his goals for the department, Bennett cited Gallup poll findings that indicate what parents expect from schools. “We Americans in overwhelming numbers said, ‘teach our children math and English and history; teach them how to speak and write and count correctly; and help them develop a reliable standard of right and wrong.’” Bennett drew the ire of some prominent members of the education establishment by criticizing innovations in public schools. If his son were of school age, he said, “I would take a very close look at what my son was being asked to study, because there are a lot of things in schools that in my judgment don’t belong there.”

Spokesmen for the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Association of School Administrators responded, saying Bennett should not “impose his views” on parents or on local school boards. The NEA opposes merit pay and competency tests for teachers, while Bennett supports them. They are at odds as well over affirmative action, with Bennett refusing to grant special treatment to anyone based on race.

Bennett’s major statement of educational philosophy was published in November. “The time is right for constructive reform of American education,” he wrote. “Most of our college graduates remain shortchanged in the humanities—history, literature, philosophy, and the ideals and practices of the past that have shaped the society they enter.”

The big questions, in other words, are not being answered and may cease to be asked if education takes on an ideological cast or becomes thoroughly career oriented. “The humanities tell us how men and women of our own and other civilizations have grappled with life’s enduring, fundamental questions.…” Bennett wrote. “As a result of the ways in which these questions have been answered, civilizations have emerged, nations have developed, wars have been fought, and people have lived contentedly or miserably.”

How Bennett and the department he heads will translate those convictions into federal policy remains to be seen. Some initiatives already are in the works, according to deputy undersecretary Gary Bauer. “We want to have some influence on the decision-making process that goes on in the corporate headquarters of textbook publishers,” Bauer said. “Publishers have been very responsive in the last 10 years to a variety of special-interest groups, except those that embrace traditional values.”

In a speech to textbook publishers last fall, Bauer emphasized the importance of conveying “values that sustain a free democratic society.” He said curriculum based on “values clarification” teaches young people that “nothing is good or bad, nothing right or wrong, nothing better or worse, all only different and equally valid. That’s not what most parents mean when they say values. I believe there are few issues that play a bigger role in undermining public support for education than parents’ shocked realization that many textbooks used in our schools undermine the values parents are trying to teach at home.”

However, Bauer said he recognizes that the U.S. Department of Education must proceed with caution. “With the President’s philosophy being what it is, we don’t want to develop curriculum here in Washington. Someday the other guys are going to come back in, and we would all shudder at what they develop.”

Bennett’s leadership is likely to take shape in terms of emphasis and tone, rather than a specific agenda designed to reorder public schools. At his first news conference, he said reform and renewal in education “is principally the American people’s work, not the federal government’s. We in Washington can comment, provide intellectual resources, and, when appropriate, limited fiscal resources.… The moral environment of the school is more important than new buildings, equipment, class size, or expenditures.”

That approach is welcomed by Forrest Turpen, executive director of the Christian Educators Association International. “We want excellence in education, and obviously that starts with values,” Turpen said. “Bennett is on target with his concern for moral values. When they come first, academics will fall into place.”

Turpen’s organization includes 2,000 parents, public school teachers, and public school administrators who are Christians. He said Gallup polls show there are 500,000 Christian public school teachers in America.

The Christian Educators Association International is helping to organize a Christian Congress on Excellence in Public Education, scheduled for August in Kansas City, Missouri. The congress is designed to explore ways to influence public education. It will train Christian public school teachers to work with school administrators on issues involving values. In addition, it will urge pastors and other church leaders to support Christians who work in public education.

Of the approximately 55 million school-age children in America, Turpen said 90 percent attend public schools. The remaining 5 million attend private schools, including 2 million in evangelical Christian schools. Turpen said his chief goal is to provide alternatives to parents who do not opt for private education. Misdirected aspects of public education can be redeemed, he said, and the presence of sympathetic leadership in Washington will help.

BETH SPRING

WORLD SCENE

A 50-percent increase in the Christian population of the Nonkon district of Mali last year may be attributed to the Christian witness of famine relief workers. According to the Gospel Missionary Union (GMU), recipients of aid in the drought-plagued region were impressed by the distribution of food to both Christians and non-Christians by GMU, World Vision, and the Southern Baptist Convention.

An $18 million Scripture distribution campaign in Brazil has helped encourage a government official to approve a similar effort in Ecuador. The country’s vice-president has agreed to allow 2.5 million New Testaments to be distributed in public schools and universities across the nation during the next two years. The project will involve representatives of several Christian denominations in South America, and the World Home Bible League of South Holland, Illinois.

A Swedish government agency has recommended maximum two-year prison sentences for victims of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) who have sexual relations with nonsufferers. Sweden’s National Public Safety Board said prevention by law is the only effective way to stop the disease from spreading. Eight Swedish citizens have died of the disease, thought to be spread through sexual contact and blood transfusions.

A multi-billion-dollar government program to relocate millions of people to Indonesia’s less-populated islands could give Christians on the island of Irian Jaya a major opportunity for outreach among Muslims.

The resettlement project gained impetus last year with the Indonesian government’s announcement of a stepped-up, five-year program. Families willing to leave their overcrowded homelands for the rugged frontiers of the nation’s less-developed islands receive about five acres of land, a house, seed, and enough food to last until their first harvest. The resulting influx of homesteaders is forcing changes on Indonesia’s frontier areas. Perhaps nowhere do those changes promise to be more radical than in predominantly Christian Irian Jaya, a jungle-covered province three times the size of the densely populated Indonesian island of Java.

“Prior to last April, they were bringing them [homesteaders] in only a few at a time,” said Ronald Hill, chairman of the Irian Jaya field of The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM). “Now they are bringing in 250 Javanese people at a time on three or four flights per week.”

Some observers say the transmigration project is an attempt to Islamize Irian Jaya and other islands that have substantial Christian or animist populations. While many Christians in Irian Jaya view the influx of settlers with trepidation, others say it is a rare opportunity to evangelize a group that otherwise would be difficult to reach.

“We are seeing this as one of the greatest challenges of the Christian church, because the church had not been able to go before to minister in Java …,” Hill said. “Now the Lord is bringing … two million Muslim people into an area where we can minister to them. We want to prepare the church in Irian Jaya in every way, helping them to know how to work with these people.”

The Irian church already has begun to minister among the transmigrants, Hill said, experiencing “response greater than we had anticipated.” Many of the transmigrants are nominal Muslims. In the midst of uprooting their lives from all that is familiar and stable, they are more open to the gospel than they might be otherwise, Hill said.

A group of missionaries and national leaders has formed a committee to develop strategies for outreach and to prepare Christians to take advantage of ministry opportunities among their new neighbors. More than 53,000 people are living in transmigrant villages in Irian Jaya, according to figures released by Indonesia’s Provincial Transmigration Office. Another 700,000 are expected to be placed in seven coastal counties of Irian Jaya within the next five years. In addition to the transmigrants, business people, opportunists, farmers, and traders are pouring into the province. Eventually, the settlers are expected to outnumber the native Irian population.

For the Irianese, many of whom have hoped to gain independence from Indonesia, the prospect of having their homelands “taken over” by outsiders is not a pleasant one. The black-skinned Melanesian Irianese often have been looked down upon as uncivilized savages by the lighter-skinned Javanese, who are of predominantly Malay ancestry. Many Irianese say they could become second-class citizens in their own country.

The Indonesian government is trying to encourage the intermarriage of the two groups in order eventually to form a hom*ogeneous Indonesian population. Some observers say the government encourages intermarriage in the hope that Christianity will be absorbed into the Muslim faith. About 85 percent of Irian Jaya’s population claim to be Christian, making it Indonesia’s most Christianized province. Only a few of the native Irians are Muslims.

Nationwide, Indonesia boasts the largest Muslim population in the world. The country’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the government is under pressure from Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia and from Muslim countries in the Middle East. Both groups would like to see Indonesia become a Muslim state governed by Islamic law.

Although only 5 percent of Indonesia’s population are Christian, Christianity is spreading in nearly every province. In animist North Sumatra, 10,000 members of the Karos tribe have turned to Christianity in the last few years. The Methodist Church of Indonesia has been at the center of this revival, which has seen mass baptisms, including the baptism of 3,000 last month. Even in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital and an Islamic stronghold, Christianity is growing through a house-church movement.

Said Don Richardson, director of the Institute of Tribal Peoples Studies, “More Muslims have turned to Christ in Indonesia since 1965 than in all other Muslim countries since Islam began.”

With the death of Harold John Ockenga, Christianity has lost one of the handful of men most responsible for giving shape and credibility to the modern evangelical movement. In a 1947 convocation address at Fuller Theological Seminary, Ockenga coined the term “the new evangelicalism.” He succumbed to cancer on February 8 at his home in Hamilton, Massachusetts, at the age of 79.

In his commitment of service to major evangelical organizations, Ockenga was virtually without peer. “He probably served on more boards than any other evangelical of our time,” said theologian Carl F. H. Henry.

To name a few of his many accomplishments, Ockenga was the first president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, which he co-founded. He served as chairman of the board throughout CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s first 25 years, and as president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, where he was president emeritus until his death.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY advisory editor Kenneth Kantzer says that it was as a churchman that Ockenga made unique contributions to the evangelical cause. “He became the trusted counselor of other leaders, who sought his guidance and spiritual wisdom,” Kantzer said. “The church of Christ will sorely miss his great leadership from which it has profited greatly over the last 50 years.”

Ockenga left his greatest legacy with Boston’s historic Park Street Church, a citadel of Christian orthodoxy in New England. He was pastor there from 1936 to 1969. His emphasis on powerful preaching, church renewal, and world evangelization helped make Park Street a much-emulated model of evangelical witness.

“I don’t think I know of anyone who was quite as visionary as Dr. Ockenga,” said Paul Toms, who has pastored the church since Ockenga’s departure. “And yet this vision was accompanied by a very practical, down-to-earth approach.” Toms said Park Street has continued and built upon the traditions Ockenga established, noting that the church gives more than $800,000 annually to support world missions.

Toms is one of many Christian leaders who served as assistant pastor under Ockenga and regarded him as a mentor. Others include Gleason Archer, language professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Chris Lyons, who is the pastor of the 1,200-member Wheaton (Ill.) Bible Church.

It was Ockenga who convinced Archer that Christianity is intellectually defensible, thus steering him away from a career in law and toward the ministry. “His was a mind set aglow by the love and knowledge of God,” Archer said. Ockenga’s reasoned messages attracted students from prestigious universities such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In a great university city like Boston,” Lyons said, “it was freely admitted that Harold Ockenga had one of the greatest intellects.”

Ockenga’s dream in the 1940s to bring revival to New England was at first frustrated by Boston-area pastors who did not share his enthusiasm for a young, unknown evangelist named Billy Graham. But Ockenga persisted and succeeded in bringing Graham to Boston for a series of meetings early in 1950. Because of a continued need for additional space, the location of the meetings had to be changed from Park Street Church to the 6,000-seat Mechanics Hall auditorium, then to the Opera House, and finally to the Boston Garden. On January 16, 25,000 people flooded the huge sports arena and the streets outside; more than 1,000 made decisions for Christ. Many of them ended up at Park Street Church.

Carl Henry called Ockenga “one of the pioneers for evangelical impact when New England was largely a barren, liberal, and Unitarian field.” But Ockenga’s influence extended far beyond New England. In the 1930s, he and J. Elwin Wright criss-crossed the country to drum up support for what was to become the NAE. Ockenga insisted that evangelicals maintain a non-antagonistic stance toward the National (then it was Federal) Council of Churches (NCC). This led to a falling out with Carl McIntire, who pulled away to form the fundamentalist American Council of Churches, which has remained antagonistic toward the NCC.

In 1944, Ockenga passed up the opportunity to become full-time executive secretary of NAE. He said there was too much unfinished business at Park Street. That was not the only attempt to lure Ockenga away from his beloved church. In 1954, he announced that he was leaving Park Street to become full-time president at Fuller Theological Seminary, which he had served as president-in-absentia since 1947. In addition to the presidency, Ockenga was offered the chance to begin a television ministry with the seminary’s backing.

But parishioners at Park Street called a special meeting and voted that his resignation be reconsidered. That expression of loyalty and love sent Ockenga into a period of prayer and fasting, and he eventually changed his mind. Had he accepted Fuller’s offer, Carl Henry assures that “Ockenga would have become the ‘Fulton Sheen’ of American Prostestantism.”

Ockenga was a superb administrator and fund raiser. (Park Street donated more than $260,000 in three years to help get CHRISTIANITY TODAY off the ground.) But he always maintained that preaching was the heart and soul of his success in the ministry.

“The sermon is a message from God,” he wrote in a 1958 article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. “It should be born in prayer, or devotion, or Bible study, or in the fire of human experience.”

During his 33 years at Park Street Church, Ockenga delivered an average of four sermons per week. He appealed primarily to the intellect, not to emotions. He had a thorough command of biblical themes and was a brilliant apologist. All of his sermons were carefully written out, but he never used notes. He typically spent hours memorizing sermon outlines and texts.

Clyde Taylor, NAE secretary of public affairs from 1944 to 1974, said Ockenga was at his best when he was in the pulpit or at the podium. Taylor recalled a conference on church-and-state affairs held 35 years ago at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. “One of the principal speakers had to cancel,” Taylor remembers. “I knew Harold John was in town. I called him, and with less than two hours’ notice he gave one of the most terrific addresses I’ve ever heard on church and state. He used the Reformation as an illustration and reeled off facts like he’d just finished reading the textbook yesterday.”

Taylor credited Ockenga with giving “the whole evangelical movement respectability and intellectual credibility.” Current NAE executive director Billy Melvin crystallized the sentiments of the many who knew Harold Ockenga: “To Audrey [Ockenga’s wife], the family and friends, we send our deepest sympathy and Christian love, rejoicing in the confidence that ‘to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.’ ”

Harold John Ockenga: A Man Who Walked with God

Billy Graham remembers a trusted counselor.

The following article was adapted from a eulogy delivered by Billy Graham at the funeral service of Harold Ockenga.

I’m going to take a verse of Scripture out of its context to describe Harold Ockenga. Genesis 6:4 says there were giants on the earth in those days. I first came in contact with Harold among some of those spiritual giants when I was a student at Wheaton [Ill.] College. The first National Association of Evangelicals convention was being held, and he was elected president. There he was … young, brilliant. I’d never heard such an address as he gave. He used as his text, if I remember correctly, 1 Thessalonians, the first chapter. He talked on that passage of Scripture and stirred all of us to a new unity.

He was a giant among giants of his generation. He was a giant intellectually. I’ll never forget when I came to Boston in 1949 to speak at the Park Street Church on New Year’s Eve. The place was filled, and there were hundreds of people in the streets. Later, Harold and I toured New England together. We went to every state, every major city, and every major university from Harvard to Brown.

When we went to speak at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], there were 10,000 students in the audience, and I was scared to death. I said, “Harold, would you stand up and use all the big words you can think of? Let them know at least one of us knows something!”

Harold stood up, and I couldn’t tell you what he said. I don’t know whether it was Greek or Hebrew or Latin, but it was something. I’ll never forget that introduction. When I got up, they said, “Well, boy, he must be something to have an introducer like that!”

I remember one day Harold was praying for revival. (He was always a revivalist and an evangelist at heart.) As I went into his study that day, I heard somebody crying, but I couldn’t find anyone. I found Harold under the rug in humility before the Lord in prayer. And I thought to myself, “Well, if he needs to pray like that, what about me?”

He was a spiritual giant. He could open the Scriptures almost anywhere without a note and just get up and speak. He was a giant in every way that I can think of describing a man of God. And you can sum it up by saying that he was a man who walked with God, who was a friend of God, and who showed us how to be a Christian at all times.

We give glory and praise, not to him, but to Christ. And we can see today that there’s a joy in the air. This is not just a service for a person who has died. This is a person who has graduated and is now with our Lord Jesus Christ. His family understands that, and Harold’s wife, Audrey, understands that. And this comforts her. Of course, it’s right to have some tears. We do grieve, but not as those who have no hope.

We give praise and glory and honor today for the life and ministry of Harold John Ockenga. Nobody outside of my family influenced me more than he did. I never made a major decision without first calling and asking his advice and counsel. We served on several boards together, we founded several things together, and I thank God for his friendship and for his life.

Harold John Ockenga: The Park Street Prophet

Former CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor Harold Lindsell remembers a fellow pilgrim.

Harold John Ockenga and I co-la-bored in significant endeavors that marked what I like to call the golden age of evangelicalism in the United States.

Harold was an unusual and attractive person whose mystique and charisma were obvious from the moment anyone met him. Many people regarded him with a sense of awe, for he seemed to reign from Olympian heights. But once his reserve was penetrated, one found him to be a congenial, down-to-earth, delightful man who was warm and tenderhearted. The students in the first class at Fuller Theological Seminary passed along an apocryphal story about how they rose at six in the morning, turned to the East where Harold lived as in-absentia president of the institution, and bowed down three times.

He was a man without guile. He was open, forthright, and sensitive, yet commanding. He was a puritan whose life was blameless. He and his wife, Audrey, formed a united team. Their loyalty and devotion to each other stood the test of time.

Harold was the co-founder (with Charles E. Fuller) of Fuller Theological Seminary. I was his first lieutenant for most of the 17 years I spent at the seminary. Later, I was editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY; Harold was the magazine’s chairman of the board.

In 1969 Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary came into being as a result of the combined labors of Harold, Billy Graham, J. Howard Pew, and others. Harold assumed the presidency of the school from its inception until he retired in 1979. I was chairman of the board of the institution and worked closely with him during that period. His monumental contribution to the work of the seminary cannot be overestimated.

Harold was an extraordinary churchman. His beloved Park Street Church was the focus of some of the finest years of his ministry. For more than three decades, he proclaimed the gospel there in the power of the Holy Spirit. His annual missionary conferences were known around the world.

As a pulpiteer, Harold had no peer. He never used notes. He had instant recall and was able to command an array of factual knowledge that staggered my imagination. His sermons and addresses were meaty, organized, and moving. His audiences hung on to every word. At a time when other downtown churches were closing their doors, his church on Brimstone Corner prospered.

The resurgence of evangelical faith in New England was in a large measure due to the work and ministry of Harold and Billy Graham, who came to Boston for evangelistic outreach that began at Park Street. The outreach eventually made a lasting impact on all of New England. When the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was formed, Harold became a board member and remained on the board until his death.

I saw Harold a week before he died. He was lying in bed at home, attended by his wife. When I entered his room, I realized this dear friend was close to death. He had been operated on for cancer 18 months earlier.

He had suffered a stroke, which made it difficult for him to speak. His body was shrunken, but his eyes were alert. We prayed together for the last time. We had prayed together many times before, but this was the most precious prayer time of them all. I knew I would see him no more in this life—but I will see him again in a resurrection body. How do I know this? I know it because the Word of God says so, and this is the sure Word Harold believed without mental reservation. It is the sure Word he preached all the days of his pilgrim journey.

An interview with NEA president Mary Futrell.

A personable, articulate spokesperson for the nation’s largest teachers’ union, Mary Futrell was elected to her two-year term as NEA president in 1983. She recently consented to discuss NEA policy and procedure with CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Her edited remarks follow.

You once said, “Let us hear our adversaries, but let us not be deflected by their hollow words as we pursue excellence for all.” Many of your adversaries, however, are saying that the poor quality of education in America, confirmed by the 1983 Report on Education, is at least partially due to the lack of direction and overpoliticizing of your organization. How do you respond to that?

I would respond by saying that the National Education Association has been a leading advocate for quality education in this country since its founding in 1857. And while we do indeed support political action and collective bargaining, we have never lost sight of our primary objective: quality education for all children regardless of economic, religious, or ethnic background.

Yet the NEA has been widely criticized for its involvement in such decidedly noneducational issues as abortion and a verifiable nuclear freeze. Why does NEA feel compelled to address such explosive issues at the risk of weakening its overriding objective of quality education?

Schools are not isolated from the rest of society. And those issues just mentioned impact students and teachers. We are, therefore, very concerned about reproductive freedom. We are very concerned about peace and war; about equal rights, civil rights, human rights. The young people in our classrooms will eventually have to deal with these issues whether they want to or not.

Would you say the positions taken by the NEA on these issues are representative of the feelings of its constituency generally?

Yes. Our positions are drawn up and voted upon by the 7,000 delegates who attend the annual NEA representative assembly. It is the largest democratic body in the world. Delegates are elected by the members back home. They come to the assembly and deliberate the issues.

Obviously, we don’t have 100 percent agreement on each and every issue. But that’s what a democratic process is all about. You hear the pros and cons, but the majority rules.

But is there room and respect for political pluralism in the NEA? Some conservatives would say there isn’t.

And I would disagree. There is plenty of room for the pluralism you refer to, for that minority voice to be heard. But in a democratic society, the minority is not the group that rules. They do, however, have a voice; and I, for one, would stand up and fight for them to keep that voice. I would never support a position that would deny them the right to be heard or their right to bring issues forward.

But how strong or effective is that voice?

It’s very effective. Let me give you an example. When the issue of reproductive freedom was first brought to the floor, it came out as outright support of abortion. Many of our delegates didn’t like that. They wanted people to respect the rights of individuals to have reproductive freedom, but they did not want the NEA to be on record supporting abortion unequivocally. And so the wording of our resolution was changed—all because a small group of people got up and made themselves heard. I don’t know if they were moderates or conservatives, but they made themselves known.

That’s interesting. But isn’t reproductive freedom a euphemism for abortion on demand?

That’s not the way we perceive it. It’s up to the individual. If they want to have an abortion, that is their right. If they don’t want one, that is also their right. We’re not saying we support abortion. People interpret it that way, but that is not our interpretation.

What effect has your unabashed identification with the Democratic party had on the NEA?

We believe very strongly that education is a bipartisan issue and have worked very hard to make sure that the NEA is a bipartisan organization. I must confess, though, it has been difficult keeping the Republican avenue open. Many of our members report having a great deal of difficulty getting involved in their local or state Republican party and being accepted as active members.

Are there programs like tuition tax credits where the NEA would be willing to compromise its opposition in order to gain the ear of the current administration?

I must honestly say that we would not be willing to compromise our opposition to tuition tax credits. We believe, number one, that the public schools are already underfunded, especially at the federal level, where this administration has cut funding by 25 percent. We are told there is a rising tide of mediocrity in the classroom and yet are also told not to expect any more assistance from the federal government. It is ironic that at a time when we are told there are no new dollars to be had, the administration is trying to set up a program advocating tuition tax credits or vouchers for private and/or parochial schools.

But as I have listened to this administration, I have heard many areas where we, in fact, agree. They talk about improving discipline in the schools, more emphasis on the basics, more homework, better training for teachers. They talk about getting rid of drug abuse in the schools. So do we. Therefore, I think we can work with the administration in these areas.

How would you assess your relationship with the religious community?

The relationship between the NEA and the religious community is not as hostile as many people would like to think it is. We work together in many instances, and we will continue to work together whenever we can.

I would venture to say that the overwhelming majority of our members are not only religious, but practice their religion. They are in the choir, on the board of trustees, teach Sunday school, and so on. I am a practicing Baptist and have been all my life. But I work with the Jewish community. I work with the fundamental Baptist community. I work with the Methodists. In short, I work with whomever is willing to work with me.

There are, of course, areas of disagreement—school prayer for one. But let me say that the NEA is not opposed to individual prayer in school. What we oppose is group-led prayer in the school, which is unconstitutional. Can Johnny say a prayer before a test? Absolutely. Can Jane say grace before eating lunch? Absolutely. Do we ever try to stop the basketball team or the football team from saying a prayer before a game? No, we don’t.

But you have to realize that when we look at the makeup of our individual classrooms, we see different nationalities and different religions. There is, therefore, no one religion that should be imposed on such a captive audience.

And yet you stood up against nearly all religious groups in your opposition to equal access legislation.

Our concern with the original bill was that it would open up schools not only to religious groups but to all groups. Once you say equal access, you have to make provisions for all groups. Our children, then, would have been exposed to all kinds of groups, extremists at both ends of the spectrum.

But I do believe that we worked with the legislators and were able to modify, with the formation of guidelines, the final bill to our satisfaction.

Is there any way the NEA can build a better bridge between itself and the religious community?

As I said, we do work very closely with the religious community on a variety of issues, especially those dealing with civil rights. We don’t ask people to endorse our entire agenda. Where we can work together, we need to work together. Where we disagree, we disagree. But we will do so in such a way that we don’t simply split and never work together again.

Why do you think private education is on the upswing?

According to all the information I have seen, private and/or parochial schools have not achieved any more support than they have had all along, which is about 10, maybe 11, percent of the student population. As a matter of fact, back in the late sixties, I believe it was up to about 13 to 15 percent.

There will always be parents who send their children to private schools regardless of the condition of public schools. But I think those parents who do this on the assumption that all public schools are bad are often basing their decision on what they have seen, read, or heard second- or thirdhand. That is not to say the schools are perfect; but I believe we are turning the public schools around. I think they are better than they have been in a long time, and I think they will be better than they have ever been because of the efforts of a large group of people.

Does competition from private schools force public schools to improve their quality of education?

No. I think a lot Americans fail to realize that when the educational system started in this country it started as a private school system. And to a large degree, that school system was a religious one. Yet the general public moved away from private to public education to insure that each and every child in this country could, in fact, get an education. The public schools have to open their doors to everyone. We cannot turn away any child. If there is competition, it’s between public schools in the same school system.

Many people send their children to private schools because they feel that those in the public schools are prejudiced against their particular religious viewpoint. Do you see the public schools as being secular to the point where teachers are prejudiced against Christian viewpoints?

That’s a tough question. My personal answer would be no. And one of the resolutions we have is to teach children to respect all kinds of religions, cultures, and points of view. But I also have to admit that the public schools are not sectarian, and that was the way they were established. Moreover, I look at the Constitution, which says we shall not have group-led prayer. So, based upon the way that the schools have always been structured, and based on the way that the Supreme Court has dealt with the public schools, we are not advocates of sectarian religion in the schools.

Is the NEA forfeiting classroom excellence for its own political agenda?

It was supposed to be just another question-and-answer period with just another special interest group. And so as the congressional candidate returned from this hundredth “give and take,” his staff members at campaign headquarters hardly noticed—that is, until Tom began shaking his head and repeating the frustrated refrain of “boy oh boy.”

I looked up (as would any good press secretary) and asked the obvious, “What’s wrong?”

“Those teachers!” he said incredulously, reviewing first in his own mind, and then with me, the interrogation of the night.

He had been seated in a chair facing a semicircle of 10 or 12 other chairs, in which sat his questioners—members of the Illinois Education Association, the statewide clone of the larger National Education Association (NEA). The arrangement worked for both intimacy and intimidation. After the usual amenities, the political inquisition began.

“Where do you stand on abortion?” asked the first questioner. Tom, seeking the Republican congressional nomination in his district, was an outspoken proponent of life and responded with his unabashedly prolife logic. It was the first of an evening of “wrong answers.”

As the questioning progressed, it became readily apparent to Tom that the real concerns of his questioners were more social and political than educational. And with that realization, and the distinct sense that he was the proverbial sheep among some very hungry wolves, he challenged the group’s sense of political pluralism, begged their apologies, and returned to friendlier territory.

Teacher Power

I later learned that Tom’s experience was probably more the rule than the exception. And that what he had participated in is repeated across the United States by local and statewide affiliates of what many observers call the strongest lobby and special interest group in American politics today: the 1.7 million-member National Education Association.

Organized in 1857 “to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching, and to promote the cause of public education in the United States,” the NEA, whose membership includes four out of every five public school teachers in the country, has long since added extracurricular political activities to its school-house agenda. “We feel we have a professional responsibility, as well as a responsibility as citizens, to make sure that those candidates seeking office deal with education,” NEA president Mary Futrell told CHRISTIANITY TODAY in an exclusive interview. “And we feel an obligation to work for those candidates as well.”

And work they do. Their first presidential endorsem*nt resulted, they say, in the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. Their victory percentage in congressional races since 1972 is truly impressive, union hype notwithstanding. In 1984 alone, NEA-endorsed congressional candidates won 237 out of the 330 races in which the association was directly involved.

Complementing the work of these ready-made election “foot soldiers” are the ongoing NEA lobbying efforts. The association has legislative “contact teams” in every congressional district, quickly reachable through a network of 14,000 local affiliates. Lawmakers tend to listen to these lobbying teams because they are the very same committees that, every two years, interview candidates like Tom for the union’s endorsem*nts and campaign contributions.

According to the Congressional Quarterly,NEA lobbying efforts have prevented the Reagan administration from cutting federal aid to education as sharply as it wanted and dismantling the NEA’s highly prized Department of Education. Moreover, NEA lobbyists helped make the proposed tuition tax credits for parents of private school students an issue too hot for many in Congress to touch—at least during an election year.

Instruction Or Indoctrination?

But NEA’s political muscle has not been flexed in educational areas alone. Indeed, it has made its presence felt in a number of decidedly noneducational, or marginally educational, issues. The implications of this expanding involvement make the NEA something other than the usual single-issue special interest group and, therefore, of unusual concern to liberals and conservatives alike. Writes Chester Finn, a professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University: “It [NEA] becomes infinitely more consequential when we consider that their members also wield what is left of the moral power and intellectual authority that virtually all the world’s civilizations have ceded to those in whose trust they place the education of the young.”

Politically speaking, the NEA opposes U.S. involvement in Central America, actively supports passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (it temporarily banned its decision-making assembly from meeting in states where ERA had not passed), and supports a complete and immediate halt in the nuclear arms race.

The union has become especially outspoken on this latter point since the defeat of ERA in 1982. Among its efforts on behalf of the nuclear freeze was the formation in that year of a group called Citizens Against Nuclear War. Promising “educational and advocacy materials,” and attempting to put arms control high on the agendas of groups that have not traditionally made it a strong concern, Citizens is currently under the direction of Karen Mulhauser, the former head of the Abortion Rights Action League.

More laden with controversy was the publication in 1983 of junior-high curriculum designed to acquaint students with the “power of nuclear weapons, the consequences of their use, and most importantly, the options available to resolve conflicts among nations by means other than nuclear war.” According to the curriculum introduction, it was not “intended to advance specific political positions.” However, critics on both the Left and the Right saw the profreeze arguments otherwise. Stated a Washington Post editorial: “[It] is not teaching in any normally accepted—or acceptable—sense. It is political indoctrination.” Said a piqued Ronald Reagan: the curriculum seems “to be more aimed at frightening and brainwashing American schoolchildren than … stimulating balanced, intelligent debate.”

Showing its political hand has not exactly helped NEA in its pronouncements that quality education is its number one priority. Scott Thompson of the National Association of Secondary Schools was quoted by Newsweek as saying that “the NEA has misused its charter, its position, and its place to become a boisterous, partisan advocacy group” that has “damaged public education.”

Of a more immediate concern is how NEA’s all-out support of Walter Mondale will be (to the tune of nearly one million volunteers) will affect public education in the early days of a second Reagan administration. “We are willing to sit down and work with this administration,” Futrell said. “I just hope the administration willing to be as open as we are.”

Political maneuverings notwithstanding, however, the real bone of contention for a growing number of individuals—including large numbers of Christians—is the way NEA policy deals with moral and values-laden issues from a decidedly secularist framework. The result has been a firestorm of criticism and counterattack that may be just the opening act of a morality play destined for a long “in-class” run.

Whose Morality?

On close inspection it becomes readily apparent that NEA’s philosophical moorings are set deep into the shifting sands of secular relativism. The disturbing effects of such a foundation can be seen in the association’s positions regarding both hom*osexuality and abortion.

While not having an official statement regarding hom*osexuality, the NEA has resolutions decrying the loss of an individual’s civil rights based on “sexual orientation.” Specifically, a 1983 resolution states: “The [NEA] is committed to the achievement of a totally integrated society and calls upon Americans to eliminate by statute and practice barriers of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, handicap, marital status, and economic status.…”

More enlightening, perhaps, is a criticism of preteen romance novels under joint study by the NEA and the Council on Interracial Books for Children. The overall objective of the study was to “eliminate bias” from children’s books. Interesting, however, was a bias seemingly against the portrayal of heterosexual love. As reported upon by Commentary in one of the briefer articles in the final report, a self-professed lesbian observed that “No romance novel ever gave me the slightest hint that girls (and women) could, and did, stay together.… Fortunately, I eventually escaped from the entrapment of these novels. I am concerned that the adolescent years of those who may be gay or lesbian and are now reading these ‘happiness package’ novels will be made far more difficult than necessary.”

Less subtle is NEA’s support of abortion on demand and its insistence upon teachers and students alike having access to family planning programs and facilities. While insisting that it does not support abortion (see accompanying interview) but “reproductive freedom” (the terminology used in NEA resolutions on this subject), such subtleties are apparently lost on members and parents alike.

As of this writing, three public school teachers are taking NEA to task for its prochoice stand by refusing to pay their union dues. They eventually hope to set a national precedent and force the NEA out of politics completely. “We’re not so foolish to believe that somewhere along the line this is going to have an impact on other teachers,” one of the litigants said. “We just want to see the NEA get back into the union business.”

Indeed, the dichotomy between NEA’s leftist political orientation and the more centrist leanings of its constituency seem destined for a showdown. “The internal structure of the association is very fragile,” says Connaught Marshner, executive vice-president of the Washington-based Free Congress Foundation. “Confrontation from within would most definitely bring significant—and much-needed—changes.”

According to the Commentary article quoted earlier, upward of 70 percent of NEA members claim to be outright conservatives or leaning that way. Such a statistic alone verifies the conclusion of Vanderbilt’s Finn that the NEA has “lost (or jettisoned) its anchor and is drifting rapidly into some well-charted but exceedingly dangerous waters. And probably carrying more than a few teachers and pupils with it.”

Future Lesson Plans

That the NEA must come to grips with its self-professed nonsectarianism seems a foregone conclusion. The moral and ethical makeup of generations to come may truly be at stake. Such was the warning of a Thanksgiving Statement issued last year and signed by 27 prominent scholars, educators, and citizens, including Urie Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University, who said: “Apart from the family, the school is the fundamental institution where our children learn to be human and acquire the unique values of our democratic society. The evidence indicates that schools are now doing a poor job of transmitting such skills and values to our children and adolescents.”

Just how effective Christians from within the NEA can be in reinstilling traditional attitudes into its hierarchy remains to be seen. President Futrell believes unequivocally that so-called traditionalists do indeed have a voice to be reckoned with. When asked by CT about the impact of that voice, she responded that “they [conservatives] can send me personal letters, they can write to the board, and they can lobby our board, our executive committee, or our representative assembly. The minority has a right to be heard—but it is the majority which prevails.”

Of course, most are less than content with their minority status. Out of frustration, some are taking up the offensive by heading for (or starting) private schools. Still others are intent on digging in and fighting.

“The NEA benefits from the public’s perception that it is little more than a quiet collection of teachers with no agenda save better schools,” the Free Congress’s Marshner says. “If Christians would just challenge the decision-making body during its annual assembly and wage a few floor fights, the media would pick it up and the perception would begin to change.

“The key, however, is organization—and persistence.”

Another key to any long-term change may ultimately rest—not surprisingly—with the parents of children in public schools. Consensus on this fact is nearly unanimous, even within the NEA. “We strongly encourage parents to be actively involved in the support of their children,” Futrell told CHRISTIANITY TODAY, “and I think that support is stronger at the local level where parents know the schools, know the teachers, and know the administrators. You need to see what’s going on in the schools, you need to work with the teachers and then school boards in order to make sure the schools are reflecting and doing the kinds of things you believe need to be done.”

Perhaps ironically, Futrell’s statement may be the one solution offering any immediate or future hope for reclaiming the moral void created by her association in the name of nonsectarian education. For the Christian who feels caught in the crossfire, it offers the one sure call to action—a call once again to be salt in a situation desperately in need of flavoring.