Page 5117 – Christianity Today (2024)

SEMINARY EDUCATION

Denominational seminaries have become melting pots for students wanting more than doctrine.

Russ Barksdale, the singles minister of an 8,000-member Baptist church since 1984, is a card-carrying Southern Baptist. But from January 1985 to May 1986, he attended Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS), whose Presbyterian leanings differ with the finer points of Baptist theology.

Barksdale sought out RTS for two reasons: First, it was theologically conservative; and second, it offered him one thing no Southern Baptist seminary did at the time—a campus in the city where he lived and worked.

Moving Toward Diversity

Barksdale’s experience represents a trend in some denominational seminaries. While independent evangelical seminaries such as Fuller and Gordon-Conwell have always catered to a variety of doctrinal needs, seminaries with specific theological leanings and a hom*ogeneous faculty are emerging as student melting pots as well.

For instance, last year at Asbury Theological Seminary, where most of the faculty is from the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition, students from 49 non-Methodist denominations attended, forming 37 percent of the student population. At Eastern Baptist Seminary, 79 percent of the faculty shared the school’s American Baptist affiliation, compared to only 25 percent of the student population. And schools like RTS and Dallas Theological Seminary—which is dispensational and baptistic—also admit substantial groups of students from outside their traditions.

One result of such intermingling is seen at the denominational level. For example, approximately 40 percent of the ministers entering the United Methodist denomination are trained outside that body’s official seminaries.

Meeting Student Needs

Such pluralism in evangelical seminaries is often a matter of necessity rather than choice. Leon Pucala, executive director of the Association of Theological Seminaries in the United States and Canada (ATS), points out that some students have family or work responsibilities and cannot easily change their address to attend seminary. “A lot of these people are serving churches and would not be free to just pick up and move to a seminary.”

Other students, according to Asbury’s president, David McKenna, are more attracted to special features of a seminary rather than to denominational ties. Degrees other than the master of divinity, such as master of counseling and Christian education, are being added to meet the more defined needs of today’s churches and ministries. Says RTS president Luder Whitlock, by their nature, these programs attract a broad range of students because they are not offered at every denominational seminary.

The newer, more flexible programs began appearing in response to declining enrollments at seminaries. Their appeal, as well as the pressure for seminaries to maintain enrollments, contributes to the diversity among student populations.

Keeping The Creed

Seminary administrators admit this broad mix of students is challenging. Internally, the seminaries must maintain their creedal beliefs while addressing the needs of the students outside the seminary’s tradition.

Some, like McKenna, Whitlock, and Dallas Theological Seminary’s John Walvoord, say part of the answer lies in having different doctrinal expectations for the faculty than for students. At Dallas, for example, students are given more latitude than faculty. “We don’t question them on details,” said Walvoord. “But we hold our faculty to a more strict accounting because they are the examples for our students.” Earlier this year, three Dallas professors were asked to resign because of theological differences with the seminary (CT, Feb. 5, 1988, p. 52).

RTS’s Whitlock adds that with theological agreement among faculty, a pluralistic student environment can be a strength. “The mix really is a wonderful opportunity for the students,” said Whitlock. “It gives them an opportunity for firsthand exposure to other perspectives and cultures.”

Still, some denominations prefer students from theologically compatible seminaries. The Free Methodist Church, for example, strongly urges its ministerial candidates to attend either Western Theological Seminary or Asbury. Yet, according to Bishop Clyde E. Van Valin, there is a slight increase in candidates coming to the church from other seminaries. While the denomination plans to introduce a special curriculum for these students, “We prefer that our seminary students go to the seminaries we have affiliated with,” said Van Valin.

Russ Barksdale says the time spent outside his denomination was valuable, and suspects it is becoming so for a growing number of his contemporaries.

“I think my generation is trying to expose [itself] to all different kinds of approaches and theologies,” Barksdale said, “not necessarily to buy into them, but to help make us better pastors.”

By Joe Maxwell.

CIVIL UNREST

Every time another military leader takes charge in Haiti, there is hope that citizens in this country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, will have a freer, more prosperous life. This hope was born again last month as military General Prosper Avril seized power from fellow General Henri Namphy. It was Namphy who took over in 1986 after decades of dictatorship under the Duvalier family.

In January of this year, Namphy gave up power to a civilian-elected president. But he reclaimed control of the country in June, with the help of the general by whom he was ousted last month.

Following the most recent coup, Elliot Abrams, U.S. assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, implied there was little cause to hope for improvement. “You have one military group replacing another,” he told the New York Times. “There is no reason to believe that such a move is either harmful or beneficial to Haiti.”

However, Elmore Clyde, director of world missions for the Free Methodist Church, which has over 90 local church ministries representing some 11,000 Christians, said the church’s representative there reports a “general sense of relief” now that Namphy is gone. It is widely believed that attacks on churches precipitated the move against Namphy. In one incident, 9 were killed and more than 70 injured in a raid of a Catholic church at which dissident priests were celebrating Mass. Two additional Catholic churches were burned to the ground.

According to U.S. State Department officials, a violent band of vigilantes known as Tonton Macoutes was at least partly responsible for the violence against churches. According to various reports, there is reason to believe the attacks were carried out with Namphy’s approval.

Clyde said Catholic churches, because they are more active politically, are more likely to be attacked than Protestant churches, which rarely issue public proclamations. He said some Free Methodist pastors have taken strong stands against participation with any political or military faction.

People’S Revolt

In contrast to Haiti, most observers regard the revolt of recent months in Burma as a people’s revolution, free from ideological or military influence. For years, rebel forces, coming mainly from tribal minorities, have fought government troops in Burma’s remote areas. But the current protests have emerged from within the ranks of the 85 percent ethnic Burmese majority.

“It was a matter of people having had it up to their teeth with the gruelingly cruel economic situation,” said Alice Findlay, director of overseas missions for the American Baptist Church. She said Burma’s socialist government has forced farmers to sell a fixed amount of what they produce at a low cost to the government, making farming so unprofitable that many have quit trying.

“Burma has the capability of producing a great many things the rest of the world wants,” said Findlay. But she added that the government’s isolationist posture and strict economic control policies have destroyed prospects for economic growth.

College students have been at the forefront of the revolt. “They see no hope for the future,” Findlay observed. “People with college degrees are selling toothbrushes on the sidewalks to make a living. They feel at the end of their rope.”

The civil unrest has led the leaders of the country’s 180,000-member military to assume control. But it is widely believed that General U Ne Win, who stepped down in July, is still controlling the country from behind the scenes.

The military takeover was followed by widespread violence, including an incident in which several teenage schoolgirls were gunned down by soldiers. If the unrest continues, some expect widespread desertions from the government army.

According to Findlay, Christians in Burma, like everyone else, are suffering from lack of food, due to the breakdown in distribution and transportation systems. Churches have also been hurt by widespread demonetization of bank notes. “Some churches had been saving up for a new building or to host a convention that’s coming,” she said. “And suddenly, what they were saving is no longer money. It’s pretty sad.”

The church in Burma consists largely of congregations planted as a result of American Baptist missionary work. Baptists make up about 60 percent of the Christian community. Findlay said she had no way of knowing how many Christians have participated as individuals in the populist revolt. But she said that, officially, the church has been quiet, explaining it must walk gingerly because a high percentage of Christians come from the same tribal groups that have been engaging the government in military conflict.

Findlay said the church has received virtually total freedom in exchange for its silence on political matters, and that it has been carrying on an active ministry, especially in the area of evangelism. “The church views its role in the conflict as peacemaker,” said Findlay. “But Christians also have a deep desire for freedom.”

By Randy Frame.

North American Scene

TRENDS

Black And White Gap Grows

Median family income for white families in America grew last year, while black family income dropped, the Census Bureau recently reported. “The economic recovery is leaving many poor Americans behind,” said Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a private research group.

According to Census Bureau statistics, median family income for whites increased from $31,935 to $32,274. For blacks, median family income dipped from $18,247 to $18,098.

The poverty rate for blacks jumped from 31.1 percent to 33.1 percent last year, while dropping from 11 to 10.5 percent for whites. The government defines the poverty-level income as $11,611 for a family of four.

Of the overall increase in American family income, President Reagan’s spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, said the report shows “further evidence that the most effective means of improving the life of Americans is a strong, productive economy.”

MEDICAL ETHICS

Judge Bans Surrogacy

A Michigan judge upheld the constitutionality of a law banning women from serving as surrogate mothers for infertile couples. But the ruling leaves the door open for the practice to continue under certain conditions.

When the Michigan law first went into effect on September 1, it was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). However, the group agreed to drop its challenge when the state said it would only enforce the law if the contract required the surrogate mother to give up the baby. Thus, surrogacy contracts are still permissible as long as the mother does not have to decide on giving up the baby until after giving birth.

Both opponents and supporters of surrogacy claimed victory. Jeremy Rifkin, chairman of the National Coalition Against Surrogacy, said the decision would end commercial surrogacy operations, noting that few infertile couples would want to enter a contract that could not guarantee their receiving a child.

But an ACLU spokesman correctly noted that surrogacy contracts are still permissible in Michigan. Noel Keane, a Detroit-area attorney who runs a surrogacy service, said the ruling will not restrict his operations. He said contracts will provide for payments to be made to the mother after she has agreed to turn the baby over to the father and his wife.

PUBLIC HEALTH

Small Group At High Risk

As many as 700,000 young American men (ages 18–29) might have at least 10 sex partners a year, according to a survey released by the national Centers for Disease Control.

Their level of sexual activity puts them at a high risk of sexually transmitted disease, including aids. And according to William Darrow, an aids specialist at the centers, “millions of people” may be affected by this small group of men.

AIDS is spread chiefly through sexual contact or the sharing of hypodermic needles. hom*osexual men make up the largest group of aids patients in the United States, and heterosexuals with multiple sex partners are considered at increased risk for the disease.

On the positive side, however, the survey found that 60 percent of the respondents reported having only one sex partner in the previous year, and 22 reported no sex partners for the same time period.

TELEVANGELISM

Fewer Viewers

In the aftermath of scandal, Americans have switched television channels, according to the two leading viewer rating services, Arbitron and A.C. Nielsen, Inc.

Hardest hit are the scandalized television preachers themselves. In February, just before his admission of paying a prostitute to perform “p*rnographic acts,” Jimmy Swaggart was the top-ranked televangelist by both ratings services. Today, a 50 percent drop in viewers places him in the number-three spot. And from February 1986 to February 1988, the PTL broadcast, without Jim and Tammy Bakker, lost 51 percent of its audience.

During that same period, Oral Roberts posted a 39 percent loss in viewers, while Jerry Falwell lost 38 percent of Jones of “Feed the Children” his audience.

In fact, among the major television ministries, all but one have lost viewers over the past year. The lone exception was Larry Jones, of the Oklahoma City-based “Feed the Children” program, who moved into the top ten this year for the first time.

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

Briefly Noted

Sold: To Nebraska-based Selection Research, Inc., the Gallup Organization, the public-opinion research firm founded by Presbyterian layman George Gallup. Gallup’s sons, George, Jr., and Alec, will remain as cochairmen and directors of the company, which is based in Princeton, N.J.

Inaugurated: As the fourth president of Northeastern Bible College, James Bjornstad. Bjornstad has written extensively on cults and contemporary religious movements and has served as executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Christianity in Oakland, New Jersey.

Upheld: A decision to remove the Christian Aid Mission (CAM) from the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA); cam had requested reinstatement. Last month, ECFA expelled CAM for violations relating to board makeup and fund raising (ct, Oct. 7, 1988, p. 44).

NEWS

NATIONAL ELECTIONS

On the eve of a national election, evangelical leaders assess the candidates’ strategies.

The campaign for U.S. President moves into the eleventh hour this week, and the polls continue to show that neither George Bush nor Michael Dukakis is inspiring nationwide enthusiasm for his presidential candidacy. A recent survey suggested that one-third of each candidate’s supporters are still uncommitted enough to be persuaded to vote in the other direction.

In 1984, the last presidential election year, an overwhelming majority of evangelicals voted for Ronald Reagan. However, this year, many political pundits say the general public’s ambivalence about the two candidates is mirrored in the evangelical community. Late last month, CHRISTIANITY TODAY talked with evangelical observers from a variety of perspectives for their analysis of the election.

The Issues

Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson summarized a frustration expressed by many when he said the campaign has been “very dismal” with respect to substantive issues. “The candidates are doing things to get pictures taken for the network news without ever talking about issues,” the former Nixon aide said.

John Bernbaum, director of the Christian College Coalition’s American Studies Program, expressed similar concerns. “We’re all riding around in tanks and talking tough, but how are we going to address our enormous debt in light of our military spending? What about justice-related issues in the Third World? What about international relations? What about world hunger? Who in the world is talking about world hunger?”

In spite of the criticism, it has not been a campaign devoid of issues. Robert Dugan, director of the National Association of Evangelicals’ Office of Public Affairs, believes Bush is emphasizing traditional values along with his peace and prosperity theme. “At first this was received a bit skeptically in the evangelical community, but now I think … evangelicals are perceiving that Bush is sincere in such matters.” Dugan also thought Bush’s portrayal of Dukakis as an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) liberal was playing well in large portions of the evangelical community.

Dean Curry, chairman of the Political Science Department at Messiah College (Pa.), said Bush’s emphasis on “God and country” themes are “appealing to many evangelicals—a segment of the population that has always been sensitive about patriotic issues.” On the other hand, Curry said Dukakis’s emphasis on the poor also has some appeal to evangelicals “because he may be perceived as the more humane candidate.”

Colson called the Bush focus on Dukakis’s prison furlough program a “cheap political shot” that “thoughtful evangelicals might resent.” Said Colson, “Prison furloughs—which can always be abused—began in Massachusetts under a Republican government. Ronald Reagan began them in California, and the federal government had 7,000 of them last year under Reagan.”

For Stephen Monsma, professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University (Calif.), both candidates have gained favor among evangelicals with talk about economic management and fiscal responsibility. “Evangelicals naturally have a deep concern about budget issues. They are conscientious folks, used to paying their debts, so I think the deficit issue probably affects them more than other people,” he said.

How To Win

With neither candidate claiming a decisive lead, last-minute strategies could decide the election. For evangelicals, a pivotal issue is abortion. Dukakis supports a woman’s right to have an abortion, while Bush wants abortion outlawed. According to Curry, Dukakis might enhance support in this area if he could convince the evangelical community he would at least be willing “to listen to their concerns on this issue and other issues, and incorporate into his administration voices different than his own.”

Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) deputy director Diane Knippers suggested that since it is not likely Dukakis is going to change his position, “at least he could express some abhorrence for the massive slaughter of the unborn in this country.”

In addition to the abortion issue, several observers said Dukakis needs to make a more concerted effort to reach out to evangelicals. “His need is to show, even in some symbolic way, respect and understanding for evangelicals,” said Monsma. “Sometimes you get the sense that he views evangelicals as sort of red-neck persons whom he and his campaign are going to forget about because they don’t have anything in common,” Monsma said.

Forrest Boyd, president of the International Media Service radio news network, underscored the importance of this. “Under Reagan, the entire spectrum of evangelicals has had good access to the White House and had input into policy,” he said. “Evangelicals need to consider what kind of influence they may have once a new administration is in place.”

George McKinney, bishop of the Church of God in Christ, urged Dukakis to “listen more closely to what Jesse Jackson said throughout the primaries regarding a return to values that place quality of life for all people as a top priority.” McKinney said that if Dukakis “can convey more enthusisam for these concerns, the people who were stirred and moved by Jesse will go to the polls and support him.”

For Bush to tip the scales in his favor, many argued that he needs to appear more sincere. Knippers said Bush could increase Christian enthusiasm by being stronger on his prolife position. “He needs to sound more like he has thought about it and believes it.”

Association for Public Justice executive director Jim Skillen agreed. “If I were one of those single-issue evangelicals for whom the only concern was the prolife stance, I would want to see more from Bush on what he plans to do about it. I don’t have the impression that Bush will make the abortion issue the primary basis upon which he would nominate a Supreme Court justice.…”

Monsma said Bush could generate more evangelical support if he would show “a deeper sense of compassion” for the homeless and disadvantaged. “George Bush sometimes comes across as someone who is not going to make these things a priority in his administration,” he said.

And Boyd urged Bush to be very careful not to follow Jimmy Carter in making the mistake of “taking evangelical support for granted.” “What Bush very much needs not to do,” Boyd said, “is back off from some of his positions and give some kind of signal to evangelicals that his positions were only political stances he took to get their support.”

Who Will Win?

Most observers predict a photo finish. “I think it’s going to be decided in California, Illinois, and Ohio,” said Colson. “Whoever wins those states will win the presidency.”

Bernbaum predicted Dukakis will win “by an inch.” Citing the historical pattern that Americans “run out administrations at the end of eight years and bring in a new one,” Bernbaum said anxiety about long-range economic concerns and the desire for new blood will work in Dukakis’s favor.

Skillen and Knippers said the odds are with Bush because of current perceptions that things are going relatively well with the economy and the state of the world. Boyd and Dugan projected that Bush would have a lock on the electoral college votes.

But no one discounts a sudden shift during the final days of the campaign. “You can never underestimate the power of events,” said Boyd. Skillen noted that Dukakis still has time to “put something together.” He thinks a massive voting push by Jesse Jackson could swing things in Dukakis’s direction. Both Skillen and Dugan raised the possibility that things may be so close that this could be an election where the candidate who wins the presidency through electoral college votes may not be the man who wins the popular votes.

By Kim A. Lawton.

Classic and contemporary excerpts.

I love Jesus, but …

I love Jesus, but want to hold on to my own friends even when they do not lead me closer to Jesus. I love Jesus, but want to hold on to my own independence even when it brings me no real freedom. I love Jesus, but do not want to lose the respect of my professional colleagues even though their respect does not make me grow spiritually. I love Jesus, but do not want to give up my writing, travel, and speaking plans even when they are often more to my glory than God’s.

—Henri J. M. Nouwen, from his diary; in New Oxford Review (April 1987)

Life’s necessity

No one can live without delight and that is why a man deprived of spiritual joy goes over to carnal pleasures.

—Thomas Aquinas, quoted in The Wisdom of the Saints

Spectator spirituality

Whenever I attend yet another church spectator event, I am reminded of Tozer’s disdain and despair for “that strange thing—the program,” for “conventional religious chatter,” for our wholesale “pursuit of happiness, rather than holiness,” for our bondage to the conscience of people rather than bondage to God.

—Katie Wiebe in the Christian Leader (January 1987)

Nothing left

The Bible and Christian tradition … may console our spirits and help to organize the categories of our thought, but they have lost the power to reveal, to speak to us with a binding address. When all dogmas become myths, it is only a matter of time before all myths become fictions. And when all knowledge becomes application, eventually there is nothing left to apply.

—Roger Lundin in the Christian Century (May 18–25, 1988)

On holy ground

I am often more likely to sense God’s presence while engaging in a challenging conversation with a supposed non-believer than while sitting in a “required” prayer meeting; while walking the beach than while watching religious TV; and—most certainly—while talking with people who are searching with humility rather than with those who have arrived at complete certainty.

—G. Timothy Johnson in Covenant Companion (July 1988)

Perfectionism gone awry

If practiced to perfection, any virtue can become a vice. Prudence creates nigg*rdliness; honesty, cruelty; self-respect, vainglory; knowledge, condescension; justice, heartlessness; temperance, aridity; chastity, barrenness. In fact, there is no virtue that is not potentially an idol capable of reducing its worshipers to abject solemnity. Which is why the angels are so chary of perfectionism.

—F. Forrester Church in Entertaining Angels

No common voice

I can—just—come to imagine for myself that a man of more or less my own biological and social composition could have written “Hamlet” or “Lear” and gone home to lunch and found a normal answer to the question “How did it go today?” I cannot conceive of the author of the Speech Out of the Whirlwind in Job writing or dictating that text and dwelling within common existence and parlance.

—George Steiner, in a New Yorker review of “The Literary Guide to the Bible,” edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode

Man’s chief end

To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that He could reconcile Himself to our present impurities—no more than the beggar maid could wish that King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love man, could wish that man were such as to tolerate in his house the snapping, verminous, poluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our “happiness” is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.

—C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain

For most, the sermon is the only pastoral care they’ll get.

The importance ascribed to preaching rises and falls in the ongoing life of the church. We may now be living in a time of homiletical recession, marked by a lack of strong and visible models, and, for some clergy, by a preference for pastoral care over preaching. This is perhaps the result of demands made by what the sociologist authors of Habits of the Heart have identified as the prevailing “therapeutic culture” of contemporary American society.

Any clergy who are tempted to embrace the therapeutic preference, and any parishioners who willingly accede to it, would do well to remember an exchange between two laypersons reported in a recent volume on preaching. Said one, “Our minister’s sermons aren’t very good, but I forgive him that because, during a recent crisis in our family, he was immensely attentive and helpful.” Said the other, “I’m afraid I can’t overlook his homiletical shortcomings. My family and I have not needed his help in a crisis, and those sermons are the only pastoral care we get.”

The most direct classical warrant for Christian preaching was issued by the apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Romans: “… everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how are they to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?… So faith comes by hearing, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ” (10:13–14; 17).

Faith comes by hearing: That assertion marks a profound insight linking anthropology, history, theology, and ministry.

The Centrality Of Language

Take anthropology, the study of human culture. It is our complex capacity for the word that makes each of us human and marks us off from the dumb world around us. George Steiner has put the point with near-poetic force, in writing that language is “the defining mystery of man.… [I]n it his identity and historical presence are uniquely explicit. It is language that severs man from the signal codes, from the inarticulacies, from the silences that inhabit the greater part of being.”

What makes a human self unique among all of the forms of being is its capacity for a certain kind of transcendence—what Reinhold Niebuhr understood that ancient word spirit to mean. My selfhood subsists in my capacity to view my own existence as it were from the outside. To be a self is to be aware of my self being a self and to be aware of my awareness of being a self.

How do I achieve this quality of spirit? Only by occupying the vantage point of other selves, by understanding their attitude about me. And that attitude is expressed in sounds, signs, and gestures. I understand what the other’s attitude is only when I know what those things mean. Language is the system of symbolic communication, made up of sounds, signs, and gestures by which I am able to identify and enter into the experience of another.

When I internalize the experiences and meanings of another self, I not only learn something about the other; I also learn something about myself. When I am permitted to participate in the feelings, perceptions, and commitments of another person, the result is that I begin to identify, to clarify, to sort out my own feelings, perceptions, and commitments, whether for acceptance or rejection.

So, we are human because of a capacity for the word shaped by the gift of language. Man/woman is the being who is capable of being addressed, the animal who answers.

Sociologists Brigitte and Peter Berger call language “the fundamental institution of society,” partly because it is the first institution encountered by every human individual. We might think, say the Bergers, that we first encounter the family. But it is language—sounds, signs, gestures—that initially impinge upon consciousness, and only later does a child become aware of the social reality known as “the family.” Language is the fundamental social institution, not only because it is the first we meet, the Bergers tell us, but because it is the primary instrument of socialization and hence the institution upon which all other human institutions rest.

The Power Of Rhetoric

So much for anthropology. Now let’s look at history. We have had a relatively recent lesson, and a politically stunning one, in the power of language to shape perception, experience, and behavior. The election of Ronald Reagan to a second presidential term was, I am persuaded, almost entirely a rhetorical tour de force. Evidence for that judgment is found in the fact that many were moved to vote for him who disagreed with his specific policy positions, and that many—especially blacks and the poor—voted for him against their own self-interest.

Why was Ronald Reagan the “Teflon” President, to whom charges of misinformation and disinformation simply would not stick? It was because his rhetoric created a vision of the American character and experience with which many among us identify and would like to believe, and the rhetorical force of his telling has made it believable. It is a vision of America and Americans that is confident, endlessly optimistic, well-intentioned, prideful, militant and machismic, sentimental and anecdotal; a vision that appropriates—with its own distinctive interpretations and for its own ideological purposes—the “traditional” American values of love for country, family, and God.

Ronald Reagan announced that, in his second term, he intended to lead a “second American revolution.” However subsequent events have aborted that hope, Reagan was right in understanding the connection between rhetoric and revolution. Every genuine revolution is, in its very essence, a rhetorical tour de force. Every revolution requires—every revolutionary teaches—a new language. Revolution is never simply a matter of seizing the centers of physical power. That is unlikely to be possible in the first instance, or if possible, is unlikely to be sustained for very long unless there is some empowering vision, some new way of saying what our world is and who we are that is so compelling it moves men and women to risk and revolt.

Sigmund Freud created an intellectual and behavioral revolution when he gave us new names for the psychodynamic forces we had experienced but for which we had no adequate language. “Ego,” “id,” “superego,” “repression,” “sublimation,” “unconscious,” “infantile,” “Oedipal”: the seeds of revolution—of radically new perceptions, remedies, and permissions—were in those words.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels created an intellectual and political revolution when they gave new names to the structural and historical forces that had victimized masses of the world’s population; and naming those forces brought new power over them. “Dialectical materialism,” “ideology,” “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie,” “class struggle” and “classless society”: these were the really potent weapons, with bombs and machine guns only a subordinate level of armament.

History warns us against believing that there is any such thing as “mere rhetoric.” Ronald Reagan demonstrated again, if demonstration were needed, that rhetoric itself is a form of action—perhaps the most potent form. Because of the importance of language to our basic constitution as persons, there is for us no such thing as “innocent” language. All utterance matters and has consequences.

We are living in a period of history when there is insufficient understanding of the direct linkage between the quality of language and the condition of personhood, with the result that language carelessly used, or deliberately distorted, has humanly demeaning consequences.

When a billboard tells us that “Love is a loan from Fidelity Savings Bank,” that cheapening of language about love cheapens the experience of love and makes it more problematic. When airline policy requires bored attendants to tell us what a “pleasure” it has been serving us, that trivialization of language about pleasure trivializes the experience itself and makes it more problematic.

When the ordinary meanings of language disintegrate, the human society shaped by that language is imperiled. Said literary critic Kenneth Burke, “[I]n a bad time … one ought to have the decency to compose good sentences.” Indeed, in a bad time, the composing of good sentences is among the most direct, essential, and humane forms of historical action.

Faith By Hearing

Come now from anthropology and history to theology. Nothing I have said will surprise those who locate themselves within the biblical tradition. The importance of the word—so important, indeed, that it epitomizes the divine action—the formative and transformative power of the word, the critical importance of maintaining the integrity of the words we use: all that was in the biblical record long before anthropologists and historians came upon it.

Faith does come by hearing. The littleness or the largeness of our world view is given to us in the gift of language. No one can see in the world what his language will not permit him to say, as the philosopher Wittgenstein insisted. The ways in which we perceive reality, and our own places within reality, are formed by language. So the problem of being human is, in the most profound sense, a verbal problem: the problem of finding the language, or the languages, that will permit us to get into right relationship—effective, productive, creative, sustaining relationship—with the world within us and around us.

In order to live effectively, I need the words ordinary language gives me—words that convey a vast amount of information about myself and my world, that can put me reliably in touch with the phenomena of my daily existence. But more than information, I need meaning: a way of describing life so that it makes sense, a way of ordering and organizing the welter of impressions so that I can see life steadily and see it whole.

All of which is to say that, beyond the ordinary language that gives me location within what is seen, I need another language that links me to the unseen: faith language. Faith supplies the all-encompassing vision. It transcends each particular and draws all particulars together into a manageable, because meaningful, whole; it helps me to distinguish appearance from reality; and it centers and steadies my life journey. No merely descriptive language can bring about such a transformation; only faith language, invested with meaning and purpose, is powerful enough to evoke it.

Where am I to learn such a language? As with ordinary speech, I must receive it as a gift from those who already know it. To have faith is to receive a word spoken to my condition—a word that touches me where I hurt; that draws me to a recognition of myself and my world as they are, rather than as I might prefer to think they are; that reorders my life because it gives me a new point of reference; that gives me the energy that comes with new insight.

In the Christian tradition, Jesus Christ comes to me as the Word that is spoken to my condition. “Faith comes by hearing, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.”

When, as sometimes happens, we find faith hard to come by, or when we feel it slipping away, we may wonder why. One reason may be that we have attempted to substitute sight for hearing. That often happens to educated women and men especially. We ask to be shown, we want to be convinced by objective evidence. And when the evidence is objectively unconvincing, we say, “I just don’t see it!” But faith comes not when we are shown but when we are addressed. It comes not as a demonstration but as a demand.

Another reason for the elusiveness of faith may be that we have moved out of hearing distance. Faith can come only to those who are within hearing distance, which is to say, within the community where faith language is spoken, and who there dare to confess their need, to which the word of faith is heard as the answer.

The Good And Bad News For Ministry

What all of this comes to in the end, of course, is ministry, and there is some good news and some bad news in it. First the good news: Preaching matters fundamentally! Now the bad news: Preaching matters fundamentally!

The fundamental importance of preaching is good news to any preacher who has wondered whether or not it is worth the intellectual, spiritual, and rhetorical agony that must regularly be poured into it. It is bad news because the demand to speak a relevant word, week after week, to the real and compelling needs of a congregation is such desperately hard work from which many a preacher would gladly accept release. But it cannot be given in good conscience.

Furthermore, the fundamental importance of preaching is bad news because, as I have said, these do not appear to be great days for the American pulpit. Over the last two decades I have listened to sermons across the country, in small-town Kansas, Michigan, West Virginia, and Florida, in the metropolitan areas of Washington, D.C., Chicago, Kansas City, and Seattle—in many congregations in each place. And while I have heard, here and there, a remarkably good sermon, more often I have come away saying to myself, “What had all that to do with me?”

If there is a homiletical recession, we can identify some of the sources of it: the broad devaluation of language skills that sends even college graduates out lacking writing and speaking competence, and forces American business to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually teaching its managers to write a simple declarative sentence; the sin of graduate professional education, including the theological schools, in failing to take seriously enough the linguistic deficit students bring from the undergraduate experience; the conventional relegation of homiletics to second-class status in the seminaries; the widespread preference of the clergy for pastoral care, often at the expense of time for disciplined homiletical preparation; and increasing demands made on pastors for activity and visibility not only in the parish but in the community, further exhausting time for the reflection required for weekly utterance.

Whether we are preachers or lay auditors, we ought not to accept the diminution of human and gospel values that results from rhetorical inadequacy in the pulpit.

If it is true that language is “the defining mystery” of our humanhood, that the peculiarly human problem is a verbal problem, and that faith comes by hearing as the ordering and organizing word spoken to my condition, then there is no such thing as ineffective preaching. On those terms, all preaching has effect. The only question is what that effect will be, whether to strengthen and expand and confirm faith, or to diminish and limit it.

Whatever else resurgent fundamentalism may be, I believe it is at least partly a challenge to the mainstream American pulpit, which has failed to give men and women the clear and convincing faith-language they need to get on with their lives. Habits of the Heart, that important inquiry into the American character, has told us unequivocally that Americans today lack a language that is needed to make moral sense of their lives, with the result that there is an enormous amount of confusion both about personal relationships and social goods. We lack, say its authors, “a language to explain what seem to be the real commitments that define [our] lives, and to that extent the commitments themselves are precarious.”

The research of the Habits authors showed that the most widespread language used by Americans comes out of the “therapeutic culture.” It is the language they call “expressive individualism,” which urges each person to fashion his or her own private meaning and which, as a consequence, leaves that individual “suspended [in] terrifying isolation.” The message of these social-science researchers is that “it is a powerful cultural fiction that we not only can, but must, make up our deepest beliefs in the isolation of our private selves,” and that the crisis in the American character springs precisely from that fiction.

Renewing The Church

A great deal is being written and said these days about achieving a new vitality for the churches through the techniques of congregational growth and development, on the one hand, and the disciplines of spirituality, on the other. And there is no doubt that much good can come from improving organizational process and outreach, and from deeper habits of contemplation. One gets the impression, however—at least by omission—that it is possible to achieve these outward and inward dimensions of renewal without reference to the pulpit, casting the minister in the skilled role of corporate leader or of spiritual director, with scant attention to preaching.

I want to suggest another route to the outward and inward vivification of the churches, one that is rooted in a Renaissance-like and, as I believe, biblical awareness of the renewing potency of the word.

For the Renaissance man, words were units of energy. Through words man could assume forms and aspire to shapes and states otherwise beyond his reach. Words had this immense potency, this virtue, because they were derived from and were images of the Word, the Word of God that made us and that was God. Used properly, words could shape us in his image, and lead us to salvation. Through praise, in its largest sense, our words approach their source in the Word, and, therefore, we approach him.

If mainstream churches are to have anything to give to the unchurched, whom we seek to draw by the techniques of congregational development and outreach, or to have any effect on the superficial spirituality of many of the churched, there must be a renaissance of the pulpit—a recovery of what the first and sixteenth centuries knew, and of what fundamentalist evangelists to their credit seem not to have forgotten: that “faith comes by hearing, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.”

Lloyd J. Averill, a faculty member at the University of Washington, is adjunct professor of theology and preaching in the Northwest Theological Union, Seattle.

Genuine reality, like a live orchestra, cannot he reduced to mere bits of data.

Our era has erected a giant barricade against faith. Every society ever studied—with the notable exception of the post-Enlightenment West—has held to some kind of belief in an unseen world. But nowadays many people get up, eat, drive their cars, work, make phone calls, tend to their children, and go to bed without giving a single thought to the existence of an unseen world.

I imagine that even most Christians, if pressed, would confess to such doubts; they grow like mold in the dampness of our skeptical age. Ironically, it was while surrounded by earnest believers—at a Bible college, no less—that I found faith in an unseen world most difficult. Here was my problem: Actions regarded as “spiritual” by the believers on campus seemed utterly ordinary to me. If the unseen world really was making contact with the seen world, where were the scorch marks, the sure signs of a supernatural Presence?

Take the matter of prayer: The believers seemed to distort events to make everything look as if it were an answer to prayer. If an uncle sent an extra $50 to help with school bills, they would grin and shout and call a prayer meeting to thank God. They accepted these “answers to prayer” as final proof that God was out there listening to them. But I could always find another explanation. Perhaps the uncle had sent all his nephews $50 that month, and the prayers were merely coincidental. After all, I had an uncle who occasionally sent me gifts, though I never prayed for them. And what of these students’ many requests that went unanswered? Prayer, it seemed to me, involved nothing more than talking to the walls and an occasional, self-fulfilling prophecy.

As an experiment, I began mimicking “spiritual” behavior on campus. I prayed devoutly in prayer meetings, gave phony testimonies about my conversion, and filled my vocabulary with pious jargon. And it worked, confirming my doubts. I, the skeptic, soon passed for a veritable saint—just by following the prescribed formula. Could Christian experience be genuine if most of it could be convincingly reproduced by a skeptic?

I conducted this experiment as a result of my reading in the psychology of religion. Books such as The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, had persuaded me that religion was just a complex psychological reaction to the stresses of life. James examined the claim that the sincere Christian is a new creature formed out of new fabric. But, he concluded, “Converted men as a class are indistinguishable from natural men; some natural men even excel some converted men in their fruits; and no one ignorant of doctrinal theology could guess by mere every-day inspection of the ‘accidents’ of the two groups of persons before him that their substance differed as much as divine differs from human substance.” I, too, could see no unusual radiance, no distinguishing mark in the believers around me.

The Endurance Of The Natural

Thanks to the grace of God, I did not remain a skeptic. But in honesty, I must admit that even now, after two decades of rich and rewarding faith, I am vulnerable to doubt. Spiritual experience does not bear introspection easily; shine a spotlight on it and it vaporizes. If I probe my times of communion with God, I can usually uncover another, more natural explanation for what has taken place. There is no blinding difference between the natural and supernatural worlds, no gulf fixed with barbed wire separating the two.

I do not stop being a “natural” person when I pray: I get sleepy, lose concentration, and suffer the same frustrations and miscommunications while conversing with God that I do with other people. When I write on “spiritual” topics, I am not suddenly lifted heavenward by the muses; I still must sharpen pencils, cross out words, consult the dictionary, wad up and throw away countless false starts. Instances of “knowing God’s will” in my life have never been as straightforward as the examples I see in the life of a Moses or a Gideon. I have never heard the booming Voice from the whirlwind.

Why, then, do I believe in an unseen world? I have received great help in this struggle from the writings of C. S. Lewis. The theme of two worlds runs like a thread through most of his work—in the early writings, in letters to his friends, and in all his fiction, until it finally develops into a full-blown theory in an essay called “Transposition” (contained in the collection The Weight of Glory). Lewis defined the problem as, being “that of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which, it is claimed, are spiritual; the reappearance in what professes to be our supernatural life of all the same old elements which make up our natural life.” Most of what follows will simply expand on his ideas.

Looking Along The Beam

Lewis began his essay “Transposition” by referring to the curious phenomenon of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. How odd, he commented, that an undeniably “spiritual” event, the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, would express itself in the strange human phenomenon of speaking in another language. To the bystanders at Pentecost, it resembled drunkenness; to many “scientific” observers today, glossolalia resembles hysteria or a nervous disorder. How can such natural actions as the movement of vocal cords express the supernatural indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God?

Lewis suggested the analogy of a beam of light in a dark toolshed. When he first entered a shed, he saw a beam, and looked at the luminous band of brightness filled with floating specks of dust. But when he moved over to the beam and looked along it, he gained a very different perspective. Suddenly he saw not the beam, but rather, framed in the window of the shed, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside, and beyond that, 93 million miles away, the sun. Looking at the beam and looking along the beam are quite different.

Our century excels in techniques of looking at the beam, and “reductionism” is the word most commonly used to describe this process. We can “reduce” human behavior to neurotransmitters and enzymes, reduce butterflies to molecules of DNA, and reduce sunsets to particle-waves of light and energy. In its most extreme forms, reductionism sees religion as psychological projection, world history as evolutionary struggle, and thought itself as only the opening and shutting of billions of I/O computer gates in the brain.

This modern world, so skilled in looking at the beam from every angle, is a world hostile to “faith.” The reason all societies took for granted the existence of an unseen, supernatural world was that they had no other way of accounting for such marvels as a sunrise, an eclipse, and a thunderstorm. But now we can explain them, and much more. We can reduce most natural phenomena, and even most spiritual phenomena, to their component parts. As Lewis observed about glossolalia, even the most “supernatural” acts express themselves on this earth in “natural” ways.

From the theory of transposition, I draw these conclusions about living in such a world.

1. First, we must simply acknowledge the powerful force of reductionism. That force offers both a blessing and a curse. It blesses us with the ability to analyze earthquakes and thunderstorms and tornadoes, and thus defend ourselves against them. By looking at the beam, we have learned to fly—all the way to the moon and back—to tour the world while staring at a box in our living rooms, and to bring the sounds of orchestras to our ears as we jog along country lanes. By looking at the beam of human behavior, we can recognize chemical components and thus, through drugs, rescue people from severe depression and schizophrenia.

But reductionism has also brought a curse. Looking at the beam rather than along it, we risk the assumption that life consists of nothing more than its constituent parts. We will never again view the sunrise or moonrise with the same sense of awe and near worship that our “primitive” ancestors—or even the sixteenth-century poets—felt. And if we reduce behavior to merely hormones and chemistry, we lose all human mystery and free will and romance. The ideals of romantic love that have inspired artists and lovers through the centuries suddenly reduce to a matter of hormonal secretions.

Reductionism may exert undue influence over us unless we recognize it for what it is: a way of looking. It is not a true-or-false concept; it is a point of view that informs us about the parts of a thing, but not the whole.

Spiritual acts, for example, can be viewed from both a lower and a higher level. One does not supplant the other; it merely sees the same behavior differently (just as looking at a beam of light differs from looking along it). From the “lower” perspective, prayer is a person talking to himself (and glossolalia the same, only gibberish). The “higher” perspective presumes a spiritual reality is at work, with human prayer serving as a contact point between the seen and unseen worlds.

I can attend a Billy Graham rally as a curious spectator and make a point of selecting one person in the vast audience, theorizing on all the sociological and psychological factors that might entice this one woman to be receptive to Graham’s message. Her marriage is falling apart; she is looking for stability; she remembers the strength of a pious grandmother; the music takes her back to childhood church experiences. But those “natural” factors do not rule out the supernatural; to the contrary, they may be the means God chooses to prompt that person toward him. Perhaps the continuity between natural and supernatural is a continuity of design from the same Creator. That, at least, is the “higher” view of faith. The one point of view does not exclude the other; they are two ways of looking at the same event.

2. Oddly, the lower viewpoint may even seem superior to the higher. C. S. Lewis recalled that as a child he had first learned to appreciate orchestral music by listening to the single, undifferentiated sound produced by a primitive Gramophone. He could hear the melody, but not much else. Later, when he went to live concerts, he was greatly disappointed. A multitude of sounds came from many instruments playing different notes. He longed for “the real thing,” which, to his untrained ear, was the mongrel sound of the Gramophone. To him, the substitute seemed superior to the reality.

Similarly, a person raised on a steady diet of television might find real mountain hiking, complete with mosquitoes, shortness of breath, and annoying weather changes, inferior to the vicarious experience afforded by a National Geographic special.

More to the point, the lower viewpoint may seem superior in moral issues as well. The ideal of romantic love has inspired our greatest sonnets and novels and operas. But reductionists like Hugh Hefner now argue quite articulately that sex is superior when freed from the constraints of love and relationship. (Certainly Playboy has more visceral appeal than the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.) And secularists, dismissing religion as a crutch, extol the “braver” challenge of surviving in this world without an appeal to a higher Being.

3. The reality of the higher world is carried by the faculties of the lower world. The word “transposition” belongs to the vocabulary of music. A song can be transposed from one musical key into another. Or, more appropriate to the analogy, and broadening the term beyond its technical use, a symphony score written for 110 orchestral instruments can be transcribed, or “transposed,” into a version for the piano. Naturally, something will get lost in such a “transposition”: ten fingers striking piano keys cannot possibly reproduce all the aural nuances of an orchestra. Yet the transcriber, limited to the range of sounds made by those keys, must somehow convey the essence of the symphony through them.

C. S. Lewis cited a diary entry from Samuel Pepys regarding a rapturous musical concert. Pepys said the sound of the wind instruments was so sweet that it ravished him “and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife.…” Try to analyze the physiology of any emotional response, said Lewis. What happens in our bodies when we experience beauty, or pride, or love? To Pepys it was a ravishing feeling, and yet not unlike nausea. He felt a kick in the stomach, a flutter, a muscular contraction—the very same bodily reactions he might sense at a moment of illness.

Looked at from the lower point of view, our physical responses to joy and fear are almost identical. In each case the adrenal gland secretes the same hormone, and neurons in the digestive system fire off the same chemicals; but the brain interprets one message as joy and one as fear. At its lower levels, the human body has a limited vocabulary, just as a transcriber/transposer has a limited number of piano keys to express the sounds of a full orchestra.

And this is where reductionism shows its greatest weakness: If you look only “at the beam,” reducing human emotions to their most basic components (neurons and hormones), you might logically deduce that joy and fear are the same, when they are in fact near opposites. The human body has no nerve cells specially assigned to convey a sensation of pleasure—nature is never so lavish. All our experiences of pleasure come from “borrowed” nerve cells that also carry sensations of pain and touch and heat and cold.

A Way Of Life

The human brain offers a nearly perfect model of transposition. Although the brain represents the “higher” point of view within the body, there is no more isolated or helpless organ. It sits in a box of thick bone, utterly dependent on lower faculties for information about the world. The brain has never seen anything, or tasted anything, or felt anything. All messages sent to it arrive in the same coded form, our many sensory experiences reduced down to an electrical sequence of dots and dashes (— · —— ·· — ··· ——). The brain relies totally on these Morse code messages from the extremities, which it then assembles into meaning.

As I write, I am listening to Beethoven’s magnificent Ninth Symphony. What is that symphony but a series of codes transposed across time and technology? It began as a musical idea that Beethoven “heard” in his mind (an extraordinary mental feat, for the composer, by then totally deaf, had only memory to guide him and could not test his idea on musical instruments). Beethoven then transposed the symphony onto paper, using a series of codes known as musical notation.

More than a century later, an orchestra read those codes, interpreted them, and reassembled them into a glorious sound approximating what Beethoven must have “heard” in his mind. Recording engineers captured that orchestra’s sound as a series of magnetic impulses on a streaming tape, and a studio transposed that code into a more mechanical form, eventuating in the tiny ripples on my record album.

My turntable is now “reading” those ripples and amplifying the variations through loudspeakers. Molecular vibrations caused by those speakers reach my ears, setting into motion another series of mechanical acts: Tiny bones beat against my eardrums, transferring the vibrations through a viscous fluid on into Corti’s organ, where 25,000 sound receptor cells lie in wait. Once stimulated, the appropriate cells fire off their electrical message. Finally, those impulses, mere dots and dashes of code, reach my brain, where the cortical screen assembles them into a sound I recognize as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I experience pleasure, even joy, as I pause and listen to that great work of music—the joy being once again carried to me by “lower” faculties of my body.

Transposition is a way of life. All knowledge comes to us through a process of translating downward into code and then upward into meaning. I have just written three paragraphs on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. These were thoughts originating in my mind that I then transposed into words and typed into a computer, which recorded them in code on a magnetic disk. Eventually, my computer will transpose that magnetic code into a binary code, and a device called a modern will transpose the binary code into digital sounds that it will send over telephone wires to CHRISTIANITY TODAY. If I listen in as my modern transmits the three paragraphs on Beethoven, I will detect nothing but a cloud of static, yet I trust that the static will somehow contain my thoughts and words.

The publisher’s computer, receiving the digital sounds, will translate them back into magnetic codes stored on a disk. Eventually, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will retranslate those codes into words visible on a screen, and then transpose the words into patterned ink marks on paper—the very ink marks you are reading right now. To your trained eye, these blobs of ink on a page form letters and words that are conveyed to your eye cells and transposed into electrical impulses that your brain is assembling into some kind of meaning.

All communication, all knowledge, all sensory experience—all of life on this planet—relies on the process of transposition: Meaning travels “downward” into codes that can later be reassembled. We instinctively trust that process, believing that the lower codes really do carry something of the original meaning. I trust that the words I choose, and even the staticky transmissions of my modern, will carry my original thoughts about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

I look at a photograph, an image of the Rocky Mountains transposed to a small, flat, glossy sheet, and mentally relive a visit there. I scratch a magazine ad to smell a perfume sample, and the image of my wife, who wears that perfume, suddenly comes to mind. The lower carries something of the higher.

Transposition Of The Spirit

Should it surprise us, then, to find the same universal principle operating in the realm of the spirit?

I think back to the questions that occur to me at the moment of doubt: Why doesn’t God intervene and make himself obvious? Why doesn’t he speak aloud so I can hear him? I yearn for miracle, for the supernatural in its pure, unadulterated form.

I chose the word “unadulterated” deliberately, because it betrays a sentiment that lies at the heart of this issue. We moderns strive to separate natural from supernatural. The natural world that we can touch and smell and see and hear seems self-evident; the supernatural world, however, is another matter. There is nothing certain about it—it has no skin on it—and that bothers us. We want proof. We want the supernatural to enter the natural world in a way that retains the glow, that leaves scorch marks, that rattles the ear drums.

The God revealed in the Bible does not seem to share our desire. Whereas we cleave natural from supernatural, and seen from unseen, God seeks to bring the two together. His goal, one might say, is to rescue the “lower” world, to restore the natural realm of fallen creation to its original state, where spirit and matter dwelled together in harmony.

When we become Christians and thus establish contact with the unseen world, we are not mysteriously transported upward; we do not suddenly put on spacesuit bodies that remove us from the natural world (ever since the gnostics and Manichaeans, the church has consistently judged such notions heretical). Rather, our physical bodies reconnect with spiritual reality and we begin to listen to the code by which the unseen world transposes into this one. One might say our task is the very opposite of reductionism. We look for ways to re-enchant or “hallow” the world: to see in nature an engine of praise, to see in bread and wine a sacrament of grace, to see in human love a shadow of ideal Love.

Granted, we have a limited vocabulary for this higher realm. We speak to God as we would speak to another person; could anything be more ordinary, more “natural”? Prayer, proclaiming the gospel, meditation, fasting, offering a cup of cold water, visiting prisoners, the sacraments—these everyday acts, we are told, carry the “higher” meaning. They somehow express the unseen world.

Looked at from the lower, reductionist perspective, all spiritual acts have natural “explanations.” Prayer is mumbling in the void; a sinner repenting is contrived emotionalism; the Day of Pentecost is an outbreak of drunkenness. A skeptic might say that the natural faculties are an impoverished lot—if that’s all we have to express the exalted world beyond.

But faith, looking along the beam, sees such natural acts as hallowed carriers of the supernatural. From that perspective, the natural world is not impoverished, but graced with miracle. And the miracle of a natural world reclaimed reached a point of climax in the Grand Miracle, when the actual presence of God took up residence in a “natural” body exactly like ours: the Word transposed into flesh.

In one body, Christ brought the two worlds together, joining spirit and matter at long last, unifying creation in a way that had not been seen since Eden. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann puts it this way, in a sentence that merits much reflection: “Embodiment is the end of all God’s works.” And this is how the apostle Paul puts it:

“And he is the head of the body, the church.… For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col. 1:18–19, NIV).

When that Word-become-flesh ascended, he left behind his actual presence in the form of his body, the church. Our goodness becomes, literally, God’s goodness (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”). Our suffering becomes, in Paul’s words, “the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.” Our actions become Christ’s actions (“He who receives you receives me”). What happens to us, happens to him (“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” the voice from heaven asked, after Saul had been persecuting Christians). The two worlds, seen and unseen, merge in Christ, and we, as Paul kept insisting, are quite literally “in Christ.” Embodiment is the end of all God’s work, the goal of all creation.

To complete the analogy of spiritual transposition, I need search no further than the words of Paul, for the image he gives to describe Christ’s role in the world today is the same image I have used to illustrate transposition. Jesus Christ, said Paul, now serves as the head of the body. We know how a human head accomplishes its will: by translating orders downward in a code that the hands and eyes and mouth can understand. A healthy body is one that follows the will of the head. In that same way, the risen Christ accomplishes his will on earth, through us, the members of his body.

From below, we tend to think of miracle as an invasion, a breaking into the natural world with spectacular force, and we long for such signs. But from above, from God’s point of view, the real miracle is one of transposition: that human bodies can become vessels filled with Spirit, that ordinary human acts of charity and goodness can become nothing less than extensions of the incarnation of God on Earth.

Adapted from the book Disappointment with God, to be published by Zondervan Publishing House this fall.

Evangelical wins and losses during the Reagan years.

“Christians are everywhere, and we´re going to exert our influence in all walks of life. This is not a passing fad. We are here to stay.”

So said Jay Grimstead, founder of the Coalition on Revival, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., July 4, 1986. On a day resonant with patriotism and American tradition, Grimstead and the several score fellow-clergy and Christian leaders gathered with him had reason to sound upbeat about the evangelical impact upon America.

The signs, after all, were good. A well-loved, conservative President, untarred by major scandal or political disaster, was at the apogee of his popularity. Evangelical Christians, according to some counts, numbered close to 60 million Americans, many of them eager to support a popular Christian television broadcaster, Pat Robertson, in a possible run for the White House. By superficial criteria, the star of evangelical Christian influence was high in Washington’s political firmament.

Today, just two years later, any fair-minded observer is forced to admit that the star has sunk somewhat lower. There is, of course, still an evangelical presence in the city. Organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Legal Society, to mention but two closely involved in legal and legislative matters, keep working at the nuts and bolts of issues of Christian life and liberty. Youth With a Mission’s newly constituted National Christian Center, as well as long-established groups such as the Christian Embassy and Fellowship House, are vigorous in their efforts to salt the life of the nation’s capital with Christian witness.

But the sense of excitement and anticipation many evangelicals knew in the early days of the Reagan administration has clearly dimmed. Says Fred Barnes, senior editor of the New Republic and himself an evangelical: “Very little has been achieved. I would say that there is less of an evangelical presence now in Washington than when Reagan came into office.”

The judgment may be a severe one, and even premature—some of the seeds of the evangelical pursuit of influence upon the national life may not bear fruit for years. Still, the hopes of many conservative Christians that the Reagan administration would see the implementation of a proevangelical agenda of social issues have obviously not been borne out. The solid 56 percent of evangelicals who voted for Reagan in 1980, and the overwhelming 81 percent who reelected him in 1984, may be forgiven for asking what they got for their vote.

Is The White House At Fault?

One explanation is that the Reagan White House, however sympathetic in public and private towards evangelicals, never set its heart on pushing through a Christian social agenda. There was no determined administration effort to stem the abortion tide, much less to introduce a prolife amendment to the Constitution; no Reaganite effort to reinstitute prayer in public schools; and no startling progress at all, at the federal level, on p*rnography.

In part, one White House staff member has candidly admitted, this was because most of the President’s domestic policy advisers themselves simply had no philosophical commitment to these objectives. But perhaps there is now another, simpler explanation. Reagan’s frequently voiced proevangelical postures may have been founded less on spiritual conviction than on a sort of fuzzy amiability towards Christianity. How else does one account for his amused benignity towards astrology when knowledge of Nancy Reagan’s own dabblings in it became public?

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that evangelicals accomplished nothing in Washington in the Reagan era, and more wrong yet simply to blame evangelical failures on the White House.

James Reichley, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution and a respected observer of America’s conservative Christians, is struck by the resounding impact of evangelicals upon the 1980 and 1984 presidential races. “They have been voting the GOP down the line,” he says. “If they continue to do that, they could make the GOP the major party, something that hasn’t happened since the turn of the century.” Reichley admits that the evangelical electoral influence has been much less powerful in influencing the legislators on Capitol Hill.

Robert Dugan, director of the Washington Office of the National Association of Evangelicals, agrees, though he argues that the pro-GOP voting patterns of evangelicals in 1980 and 1984 were highly abnormal, since a breakdown of evangelicals by party affiliation gives the Democrats a 43 percent to 38 percent advantage over the GOP in this constituency.

But Dugan is proud of what he regards as evangelical success stories in the form of some significant proevangelical legislation accomplished during the Reagan era. He cites the 1984 Church Audit Procedures Act, which protects churches from IRS “fishing” expeditions, and a law that confirms the rights of high school students to have Christian activity on school property as examples of such legislation. He attributes these gains to persistent, quiet, but well-prepared argumentation by groups looking at the long range.

Another area of evangelical success that has received little attention has ironically emerged from the ultimately unsuccessful Pat Robertson campaign. Though Robertson took only a tiny handful of delegates to the Republican National Convention in August, his organization peppered—or perhaps salted—Republican state and local committees across the country with evangelicals, many of whom will stay in politics well into the next administration and beyond. Some will probably run for the Congress and Senate, perhaps with a level of political experience that Robertson himself did not have when he initiated his White House run.

Overall, though, these gains probably do not compensate for the disappointments. Eddy Mahe, Jr., a political consultant and former political director of the Republican National Committee, observes: “The evangelicals’ impact on Washington politics has been minimal. The things they have been disappointed with have greatly outnumbered the things they have been pleased with.”

Fundamental Problems

Several factors seemed to limit evangelical effectiveness. In Dugan’s opinion, one was the early overreliance by evangelicals on large organizations such as the Moral Majority. Such entities seemed powerful at the beginning of the Reagan administration, but turned out to have no real grassroots base and demonstrated very little clout in the nation as a whole. Barnes says, “These big groups were tarred as extreme and outside the pluralistic tradition of the country.” Reichley believes evangelicals were clumsy at lobbying on Capitol Hill and all too easily depicted by their opponents as either dangerous or incompetent.

That difficulty may well constitute an enduring image problem for evangelicals. Dugan admits that evangelical rhetoric has often been “overblown.” He cites the clumsy effort of Jerry Falwell to depict the Grove City Civil Rights legislation as portending government coercion of churches to accept hom*osexuals as leaders in the congregation.

For Fred Barnes, who emphatically subscribes to the key evangelical moral agenda items, the evangelical rhetoric has nevertheless too often been “shrill, legalistic, and narrowly sectarian.”

While this is true, it may be a symptom rather than a cause of the evangelical weaknesses during the Reagan years. Underlying the disappointments are more fundamental problems—moral, intellectual, theological, and spiritual. The Bakker and Swaggart scandals revealed a moral rottenness at the heart of some of the more visible and “successful” ministries.

If evangelicals are no different in personal behavior from those they describe as the unsaved, many ordinary Americans wonder what right they have to claim the moral high ground in national life.

Other thoughtful observers, who are not necessarily ill disposed towards evangelicals, have simply not comprehended such persistent evangelical quirks as vengeful, demonological attacks on the secular media; the histrionics of certain preachers; the widespread naïveté about the national political process; and the often angrily expressed impatience with it.

Sobering Realities

If the moral and intellectual weaknesses are clear to see, the theological and spiritual problems may be more serious and harder to cure.

Many evangelicals seem to have become deeply infected by the success-and-prosperity syndrome dominant in American culture. Others seek to avoid spiritual confrontation with a highly secularized culture by moving furtively within a ghettoized Christian subculture (Christian bookstores, radio, television, magazines, celebrities) that offers a measure of insulation from the “non-Christian” world. The kernel of evangelicals’ disappointment in the Reagan era may ultimately reside in the failure to be humble, to be patient, to learn the tentmaking skills of politics, to show forbearance—in general, to pay the price of personal holiness.

Grimstead himself seems sobered by his work on the Coalition on Revival. “What we need more than anything else is integrity and maturity,” he says. “It’s going to take a few years of rebuilding.” Barnes offers more down-to-earth advice: “Avoid pretending to speak for God on every political issue that comes up. Is there a biblical position on AWACS, on the START treaty?” Dugan, who has seen evangelicals come and go in Washington throughout the Reagan years, says that evangelicals “need to become students of the political process.… They need to move to greater sophistication with integrity and knowledge.”

Yes, all this, and one other thing: Work with less anger. If evangelicals could somehow lower their voices and remove the bitterness that so often invades their discourse, their audience—ordinary Americans—might remember more readily that the One to whom evangelicals claim allegiance came to this mixed-up world with a message of love.

David Aikman is a veteran Time magazine correspondent who has covered foreign affairs as well as the U.S. Department of State. He is currently at work on a novel of geopolitical intrigue.

Bully For The Bully Pulpit

Ronald Reagan’s advent overlapped with the rise of the “Religious Right,” which helped elect him. Thereby hangs a tale.

One of the remarkable facts of our time is that religious communities are deeply riven, not exactly over politics, but in a way that politics expresses vividly. During the sixties and seventies, the activity of the “Religious Left” (it is curious that this phrase is rarely used) was taken for granted. Clergymen and laymen of all faiths campaigned for a variety of “progressive” causes, summed up in the slogan “peace and social justice.” Some denominations even reformed themselves internally, as by ordaining women and avowed hom*osexuals, in keeping with the secular agenda of the Left.

But the rise of the Religious Right in 1980 came as a shock. Liberal pundits who had seen nothing amiss in the activism of the Religious Left contended flatly that this new activism on the Right was an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state. If a bishop denounced the Vietnam War, he was acting properly, even “prophetically”; if he denounced abortion on demand, he was “interfering” in secular affairs.

The political division within the churches seems to stem from a prior theological division.

Those who believe dogmatically—in the literal truth of revelation, in the efficacy of sacraments, in the active providence of God in daily events—tend to be politically conservative. Those who espouse liberal theologies tend to favor more permissive personal morality and more socialist-style government.

For many years, the dogmatic believers stayed aloof from politics, at least qua believers, out of a general feeling that the sacred and the secular were so remote from each other that the one had no particular “relevance,” to use the cant word, to the other. Meanwhile, the Religious Left was insisting on relevance. It transferred its concern from the afterlife, in which its faith was weak, to the political arena, where salvation was to be achieved. Utopia replaced heaven, and South Africa replaced hell.

Dogmatic believers have never accepted the salvific view of politics, which is why they were slow to get into the game. But the horrors of the modern state, ranging from abortion on demand to religious persecution, finally taught them the negative relevance of politics to religion. By 1980, this realization crystallized in the Religious Right and other forms of counteractivism.

The dogmatists (I don’t intend the word pejoratively, since I count myself among them) threw their lot in with Ronald Reagan, who in return has supported them and their causes far more than any other President. He opposed legal abortion, favored school prayer, advocated tax relief for private schools, put religious persecution on the human rights agenda, and welcomed a variety of religious leaders, from Jerry Falwell to Mother Teresa.

It may be objected that most of this is only symbolic. I agree, except that I wouldn’t belittle that symbolism. Reagan has used the bully pulpit of the presidency to reinforce the legitimacy of political participation by religious people. As a result, even their enemies no longer deny their right to play the game.

As the years go by, I think we will come to appreciate more fully what Reagan has done to enhance the status of religion in America and its civic life.

By Joseph Sobran, a syndicated national columnist and an editor of National Review magazine.

The Dangers Of Idol Gazing

The Reagan years have certainly bolstered a kind of religious rhetoric in our public life. The President and many of his colleagues have felt comfortable exhorting some (but by no means all) religious groups, and in turn those groups have responded with their own exhortations to the rest of us. Yet, one wonders whether we ought to confuse religious rhetoric (as given us by certain ministers and a particular President) with the spirit of Christianity (as it was evoked for us 2,000 years ago, and as it has been handed down for us through various institutions over the generations).

Here is what a woman (a wife, a mother, a person who works for a computer company) told me a year or so ago: “I think this President has gotten along just fine with our ministers, but I’m not even sure if he ever goes to church himself, and I’m not sure if he pays much attention to what our Lord said when he came here to be with us, and what he did when he lived here among us.

“I think it’s great that lots of our ministers love him, and if they feel glad he’s in the White House, that’s great, too. But to me, he’d be a great President if he got more and more of us to live like Christ did—among the poor, and the people who were suffering and unpopular. That’s the way religion and politics should meet—not a lot of talk, and White House visits, but a politician trying to follow in the steps of Jesus, living his way.

“And I don’t see the Reagans pushing us in that direction. They’ve welcomed the Christianity of certain important ministers and the Christianity of certain moral positions, and I’m glad for it, because I’d like to think I’m a Christian. But, you see, we should be careful about calling ourselves Christians, and saying someone is pro-Christian. You can begin to sound as full of yourself as can be.… You can lose sight of how Jesus lived, and you can try to have it both ways—Christian talk, and a life full of ‘idol gazing.’”

I asked her what she meant by “idol gazing.” So she patiently explained to me:

“I mean by that all the fads and tin gods we worship when we’re not worshiping God. I don’t think Reagan has helped us forget all the ‘idols’ and keep Jesus in the front of our thinking. Reagan has been a great friend of some of our outspoken Christian folks, and he’s said what a lot of Christians think on some questions; but has he inspired us to follow the lead of Jesus in our lives—the way we live them? I’m not convinced [he has].”

I share her doubts. I fear we have heard much religiously suggestive rhetoric—a nice feeling, given some of the agnostic, secular idolatries we have to endure constantly—but if the test of a particular presidency is the degree to which it has inspired in a people a Christian devotion that is lived (the works of mercy and charity the humble Jesus offered his fellow human beings), then I must share my informant friend’s caution, if not outright skepticism.

By Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard Medical School and the author of The Political Life of Children (Atlantic Monthly, 1986).

The Public Square Is Still Naked

The eight years of the Reagan presidency have seen a number of significant developments on the religion-and-society front in these United States: the full-blown emergence of evangelical Protestants from the cultural wilderness; the new visibility of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on a host of public-policy questions; the churnings within American Judaism on the question of the “naked public square”; and the continued erosion of mainline Protestantism as a culture-forming force in American public life.

Yet these changes were well under way prior to the 1980 election, and while the Reagan presidency may have given each of these geological shifts a particular piquancy, it simply can’t be maintained that the fact of a Reagan administration was the key variable in effecting the changes in question.

Nor can it be said that the administration has done much to clarify some of the most bitterly controverted issues on the religion-and-society agenda. The jurisprudence of the federal judiciary still seems to reflect Prof. Laurence Tribe’s famous (or infamous) definition of the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment: an “accommodation” of religious “interests” under the overarching constitutional imperative of “no establishment.” Perhaps this bizarre mindset will change over time, given Reagan administration appointments to the federal bench. But the administration itself has played a decidedly minor role in reshaping the public discourse on the imperative transition from “naked public square” to the “civil public square.”

Nor has the administration made much of a substantive contribution to creating a wiser public moral discourse on such first-principle questions as war and peace, abortion, reproductive technology, and euthanasia. Some modest and laudable initiatives at the policy level have been undertaken, ranging from the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy to revised Health and Human Services regulations on the care of handicapped newborns. But the public arena remains pretty much as before: deeply divided, awash in public moral emoting, but having very little evidence of genuinely public moral argument at hand.

It could, and should, be added that it is not primarily the responsibility of the federal government to chart the passage from naked public square to civil public square: from Alasdair MacIntyre’s “civil war by other means” to John Courtney Murray’s “creeds intelligibly in conflict.” That is a task for the institutions of our culture, and preeminently our religious institutions. But the administration could have exercised some leadership here by way of intellectual and rhetorical example. (And by “example,” I do not mean appearances by the President at the National Religious Broadcasters’ convention.)

Put it this way: The Reagan administration has not done a lot of damage to the argument over the relationship between religious conviction and American public life, and it has made some difference for the good. During the Reagan presidency, millions of American believers thought of themselves as something other than the quirky sectarians that the new class-dominated high culture continued to insist they were. But the naked public square remains to be clothed, and opportunities for advancing that urgent task have been missed.

As, I might add, I fully expect they will be under President Bush or President Dukakis. It is going to take some time, apparently, for our political leaders to catch up with the fact that modernization does not necessarily mean secularization in America.

By George Weigel, president of the James Madison Foundation and the author of Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy (Paulist Press, forthcoming).

Adapting To The Age Of Greed

The Reagan Revolution in religion leaves America feeling different, talking different, and acting pretty much as it did before.

As someone who opposed many of Reagan’s policies, and who found him to be personally “sincere but inauthentic” in matters of religion, I have to say that not much of what his administration did impinged on or altered “my” world.

For example, his support of a school prayer amendment was probably genuine and certainly inexpensive. He constantly talked about the need for prayer in schools, but never lifted a finger or risked a vote on an important issue to promote the cause. Reagan made few “born again” appointments, and most of those he did embarrassed the born again. He believes in, and gives encouragement for, development of a “Christian America,” (code named “Judeo-Christian”), but unless his judicial appointments effect changes over the long term, we are no closer to such a legal privileging of a tradition than we were in 1980.

Of course, the American climate is different than it was in 1980. The leaders of once-excluded groups, fundamentalists and Pentecostals and sometimes evangelicals (though Billy Graham blazed their trail 40 years ago), now have access to the White House and places of power as never before. But one must question whether they changed America as much as America changed them. Once somewhat ascetic, partly otherworldly, and disciplined, their best-known leaders now come across as adapted to the Age of Greed, worldly in their endorsem*nts and hedonistic ways (restrained by a few bounds, like those of marriage in the case of sexuality), and triumphalist. America is better at letting people “in” than leaving them “out” to sulk or engage in prophetic protest.

The Reagan Revolution was, then, more talk (or all talk) and represented little actual reorientation of national life. It was important (very important) for the ways it gave Americans means to express their hungers—for restored family life, neighborhood values, patriotism, affirmation of marriage, antipermissiveness, antirelativism—but, eight years later, we do not see concrete expressions to match the desires and claims.

Religion is more respectable than it was 20 years ago, more exploited by politicians, more ready to brag about its place under the republic’s sun. In all this something haunts, something one recalls from Montesquieu, who so influenced the nation’s founders two centuries ago: The way “to attack a religion is by favor, by the commodities of life, by the hope of wealth; not by what drives away, but by what makes one forget; not by what brings indignation, but by what makes men lukewarm, when other passions act on our souls, and those which religion inspires are silent.” The general rule “with regard to change in religion, invitations are stronger than penalties.”

And so it has been. Which leaves room as an agenda item for the 1990s the retrieval of some more sober, self-disciplined, exacting themes about which the older evangelicalisms knew better than did most of their heirs in our decade.

By Martin E. Marty, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, senior editor of The Christian Century, and author of Religion and Republic: The American Circ*mstance (Beacon, 1987).

The Cultural War Will Continue

My evaluation is premised on the proposition that politics is, in largest part, a function of culture, and at the heart of culture is religion. Politics is largely controlled by the available ideas in a society (culture), and the most powerful ideas are religious in character, if not in name. To be sure, each of these three factors significantly affects the others. The Reagan years changed the ways these forces relate to one another, and the change will last into the foreseeable future.

The Reagan political triumph was produced by a religio-cultural shift, and it also accelerated that shift. The shift was occasioned by resentment and alarm generated by what I have called the naked public square. Critically important developments were related to public disputes over school prayer and abortion. Decisions on these and other questions were perceived to be aimed at excluding religiously grounded morality from American public life. An elite paradigm of secularization ran into the reality of an incorrigibly religious society. The reassertion of that reality created the Reagan years, and was also strengthened by them.

The reassertion preceded the Reagan years and was crucial to the election of Jimmy Carter. But President Carter was soon perceived to have betrayed the promise of a greater role for popular morality, including religious morality. Whatever his personal beliefs or behavior, Ronald Reagan skillfully exploited a cultural insurgency motored by the social forces of religion.

The insurgency was notably expressed in the emergence of the “Religious Right” and the new public assertiveness of Roman Catholic leadership. These two groups had and have important agenda differences but are united in their attachment to cultural conservatism and their insistence upon the role of religion in helping to order our public life. The political triumph of the insurgency with Ronald Reagan gave many previously timorous Americans “permission” to go public with the moral claims they had earlier confined to the realm of the personal and private.

The insurgency continues, and is mightily aided by the collapsing self-confidence of secular, usually liberal, forces. That collapse is due to policy failures, but, more important, to the growing implausibility of its philosophical premises. To be sure, the proponents of the secular paradigm are entrenched in some of the most powerful and prestigious institutions of the society. They are entrenched and besieged.

I am like many, perhaps most, Americans in wanting to be religiously faithful, culturally conservative, politically liberal, and economically pragmatic. By 1972 the dominant forces in the Democratic party had redefined “politically liberal” in a manner hostile to cultural conservatism and indifferent to religion. Democrats do not win in national politics, because they have invited the perception that they are contemptuous of democratic morality—which in America is pervasively, if confusedly, religious. That is why the next President will likely be a Republican.

More important than the political outcome, however, is the phenomenon of which politics is a part. The phenomenon is the continuing Kulturkampf, a war over the definition of American culture—over the ideas by which we should order our life together.

By Richard John Neuhaus, director of the Rockford Institute Center on Religion and Society and author of The Naked Public Square (Eerdmans, 1984).

Ronald Reagan’S Albatross

More than 20 years before the rise of the Religious Right, a group of Christian soldiers established a model for achieving social change. Even if not the perfect model, it created an ideal of fairness, equality, and inclusiveness. This standard, which challenged both Republican and Democratic Presidents, dramatically conflicts with the narrow agenda of today’s political Christians, who wrap themselves so tightly around Ronald Reagan that it is difficult to know where their spirituality begins and their politics ends.

Contrasting the movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and that led by the Religious Right shows how far downhill we have come—from religious leaders transforming society to those attempting to co-opt the White House for their selfish ends. As a consequence, right-wing political Christians have become their own worst enemies. Thus their domestic platform, symbolized by a forced return of prayer to the nation’s schools, goes unfulfilled. If the Religious Right had borrowed a couple of verses from the black ministers—led civil rights movement, maybe their road would have been easier.

King’s civil rights movement was nonviolent, based on love. But where is the love among the Religious Right? Where is the compassion to carry out the basic Christian acts of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and loving our neighbors?

As many see it, the Religious Right touted a godless message—trumpeting war in Central America and cooperation with South Africa. What is Christian about fueling a Nicaraguan war that is claiming thousands of innocent lives and maiming thousands of others? Where is the sense of outrage as blood flows freely among the innocents of South Africa? If the Christian standard is “Thou shalt not kill,” why is it not applied evenly? Why is the sight of a dead black South African not as chilling as that of a dead contra?

With its heavy-handedness and intolerance, the Religious Right has left a bitter. For example, the Right’s concern for family could have won converts had it not seemed a scheme to cram narrow values down people’s throats. Sadly, the Religious Right fought civil rights issues that would work to provide economic support for families of the poor. And their silence on family issues as they affected the poor and minorities was deafening. No outrage could be found for families without homes, and those forced to pile up in tragic, dope-riddled heartbreak hotels.

Thus the legacy of Ronald Reagan and his albatross, the Religious Right, is bitterness, opening new wounds with minorities and the poor. If nothing else, the Reagan legacy teaches us how divided we can become when religious groups give politics a higher priority than the simple Christian ethics of loving our neighbors—including the brown, poor, and black ones—as ourselves.

By Barbara Reynolds, USA Today Inquiry page editor and the author of And Still We Rise: Interviews With Fifty Black Role Models (USA Today Books).

Christians who feel moved to protest need to ask some vital questions before they act.

Conservative Christians have been involved in several well-publicized protests of late. Last winter the Civil Rights Restoration Act raised the ire of those who thought it needlessly pitted civil rights against religious freedom. Concerned Christians’ response to the blasphemous script of The Last Temptation of Christ put it on the cover of Time. And in Atlanta, activists made headlines as they employed civil disobedience to protest the continued legal support for abortion.

Protest has been vigorous and vociferous as outspoken Christian leaders, who have access to television, radio, and the machinery of direct mail, have called for pickets, boycotts, and floods of phone calls. In the minds of individual Christians, this prime-time intensity has raised valid questions about the proper response to cultural and political acts deemed unhealthy when measured against Christian values. How should we make our objections heard by those who are insensitive to religious values? As one thoughtful person put it, “I want to make my voice heard, but I feel uncomfortable with some of the methods being used.”

How Best To Protest?

That we have a problem in trying to decide how to protest is in itself an indicator of our good fortune. We live in a country where Universal Studios has the right to make movies about the life of Christ—and we have the right to protest them. Not only that, but our protest can take scores of forms. If we were to look at a list of the possibilities, roughly arranged from passive to active, it might look like this: disagreeing passively and privately; dissenting in casual conversation; writing to newspapers, magazines, and involved officials; telephoning legislators and offending parties; observing a boycott; picketing; engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience; engaging in violent protest.

Most of us would probably agree that only the first and the last alternatives are inappropriate for those of us who live in a democracy. In a physically repressive totalitarian society, such as Stalinist Russia, passive, private disagreement might seem to be the only course of action. But in a democracy we are not forced into what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called “triplicity”: thinking one thing, saying another, and doing a third. In fact, our duties as citizens demand that we speak up when we see a clear moral danger to the social fabric.

We are left with a wide range of options. And this very freedom brings its own set of responsibilities. But how do we choose? How do I determine whether I will content myself with writing a letter to the editor or go to the expense and effort to take a bus to Atlanta in order to get arrested in front of an abortion clinic?

Factors

Anyone who feels moved to protest a wrong in our society needs to ask several questions.

How serious is the issue? If we take our faith seriously, many things should raise our eyebrows in holy consternation—everything from the dangers of wealth to abortion on demand. But not everything requires more than a prophetic Sunday morning sermon punctuated by congregational amens. Cultural trends vary in degree of threat to Christian values.

Seriousness can be measured three ways: How close to the theological core is this issue? Christ’s divinity is more important than one’s eschatology. How immediate is the threat? Fighting the minute-by-minute death dealing of abortion calls for different tactics than the dangers of materialism. What are the long-range implications? Some issues will be gone in a month, even if we don’t do anything. The more serious the issue, the more intense should be the protest.

How reasonable—and how clear—are the goals of the protest? Christians should never involve themselves in any action where they do not fully understand what they are trying to accomplish. Are we simply trying to raise public awareness? Change the law of the land? Bring pressure to bear on offending parties?

Two direct-mail packages, each calling for a boycott of The Last Temptation of Christ, tell me what to do—write letters, make telephone calls, put up posters, boycott the film. But neither says what the goal is, beyond “stopping this film.” In order to evaluate whether or not to get involved, I need to know more. “Bringing Christian values to bear on society” is a marvelous goal, but not specific enough for determining whether a specific action is appropriate.

How effective will the protest be? And what will be the side effects? If the goal of protests against The Last Temptation was to discourage people from seeing the movie, it failed. Universal reported that the movie attracted more viewers than any other film screened that opening weekend. Christian protest increased attendance at a movie that many secular film critics panned. Donald Wildmon, a leader of the protest, reportedly agreed that “there comes a point where the publicity becomes damaging.”

On the other hand, if the goals of the protest were to increase public awareness of the importance of Christ’s divinity to American Christians, the protest was a rousing success. How many sermons were preached on just that subject last month? How else could we have gotten Time and Newsweek to acknowledge so effectively the importance of the question?

But we must ask: Was helping expose so many viewers to an outrageously inaccurate picture of Christ worth the impact of reminding private and corporate America that for millions of American voters and consumers, Jesus Christ is central to their lives and they won’t sit idly by watching him defamed?

What will be the long-range consequences? There is nothing wrong with thinking strategically about Christian faith. In John 7, Jesus declines to attend the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem because “the right time has not yet come.” Yet a few days later he left for the feast. Somehow, “the right time” had come.

Similarly, Christian protest must be done in the right time, fitting the overall plan of Christian evangelism. We can win battles, yet lose the evangelistic war. Sometimes initially successful protest can have long-range effects that inhibit our witness. We must all admit that sometimes even we are embarrassed by the wild-eyed protester we see on the six o’clock news. It is legitimate to ask, “Will the public perception of what we are doing through this protest so poison people’s perceptions of Christians that the cause of Christ will be hurt?” If the answer, within a reasonable time frame, is yes, then we must rethink methods.

A Duty To Act

Even if the principles embodied in these questions are followed scrupulously, different opinions on how to proceed will exist. Some will still think abortion should be combatted on the sidewalks of Atlanta; others will think it should be fought in the cloakrooms of Congress; still others, on radio and television.

A variety of approaches may increase the overall effectiveness of our witness. We must maintain a spirit of openness when methods are negotiated. What is not negotiable is that Christian faith demands we stand up and be counted—and that we act in a manner that clearly reflects the love of Christ to a fallen world.

By Terry Muck.

This Old Hothouse

Chicken Little was right. Sort of.

While the sky isn’t falling, its ever-increasing carbon dioxide buildup has put speculation about Earth’s future back on page one. Fueled by the specter of a Greenhouse Effect (where natural and manmade gases trap solar heat in the Earth’s atmosphere) and the hottest summer in 50 years, pundits are predicting hotter and drier seasons over the next half-century, accompanied by a gradual melting of polar icecaps and a resulting rise in sea levels. The symbiotic relationship of national economies and the environment being what it is, such a hothouse scenario could ultimately mean worldwide famine and massive population shifts.

While apocalyptic predictions are always subject to debate (for example, U.S. News and World Report blamed this past summer’s drought not on carbon dioxide but bad luck), they are nevertheless fodder for responsible thinking about stewardship of resources and maintenance of planet Earth. It is the kind of thinking few of us—inside or outside the church—seem willing to undertake.

“What we need,” write the editors of The New Republic, “is a Jerry Brown [someone with a passion for ‘Spaceship Earth’] without the far-off look in his eyes” [someone who is in touch with reality]. Unfortunately, by this twofold criterion for environmental leadership, the church is still lost in space.

In the seventies, for example, the last time a major environmental tremor shook the globe, many within the church translated mile-long gas station lines and dollar-a-gallon fuel prices into signs of the times—the end times, that is, and prepared to be raptured. (So long, late great planet Earth!) Eschatology, not the environment, was the essence of many midseventies sermons.

Thirteen years later we have shifted away from end-times predilections to our own material well-being. Whether or not social security will be in place by the year 2030 is our future concern, not the encroaching deserts that could characterize our planet at that same time.

Before we are forced to look back at the sweltering summer and fall of 1988 as “the good ol’ days” environmentally speaking, the church needs first to address its responsibility for God’s creation from its pulpits, and then provide leadership by its example.

“It is not knowledge or lack of it that makes a difference, but concerned people,” writes physician and environmentalist Paul Brand. “[And] God still has a church that produces people who care.”

“Down the centuries,” says Brand, “there may be many generations of people who will bear my humanity, who will enjoy life, or who will suffer in proportion to the care I now take to preserve the good gift God has given us.”

It is time to redirect our far-off look once again—but this time to what kind of physical world we will bequeath those future generations.

By Harold B. Smith.

Les Lofquist is not feeling too well. In the visitor’s center of the Mormon Temple Square, he stares at a projector screen lowered a few seconds before by an automatic timer. The Mormons’ latest public relations film has begun. Les shifts in his royal-blue padded seat, color coordinated with the slate-gray carpet. From linear-drive magnetic circuit woofers comes the soft voice of a man with extremely straight, white teeth. He is talking about the purpose of life.

The film, Les is forced to admit, is slick. It is spit-shined and glowing: the perfect husband, holding the perfect wife’s hand, while their perfect child holds a perfect rose while floating in a rowboat on a perfect lake on a perfect morning.

That explains some of his queasiness. But there is a more disturbing fact. Lofquist has been reminded, once again, that the odds are stacked against his ministry.

Les Lofquist, as is his custom on Sundays, is preaching. His church is a converted day-care center. More precisely, when the cardboard sign is hung on Saturday night, the Love-N-Care preschool day-care center becomes the Roy Bible Church. There’s not much to it, really. A “He Lives” poster covers some smiley-faced snowmen; sheer drapes behind the portable pine pulpit shut down the Disney Parade—Goofy and Mickey and Donald—into a sufficiently reverent white; a wooden cross hangs on one wall; and a hundred or so standard-issue, dirt-brown folding chairs are spaced across the carpet.

On this particular Sunday, Lofquist is preaching to about 70 people. “How many times have you been nervous about your puny little effort for Jesus?” he asks. From a far wall, Freddy the clown, green hair and red ribbons, smiles unimpressed.

With glasses on his baby face, Lofquist looks innocent or quizzical. He has precise, thinning blond hair, and a frame that whispers of an athletic past. He appears to be a man who tilts toward safe. He and his wife, Miriam, have four beautiful children.

But, on closer inspection, there is something unsettling, offbeat. Maybe a look in the eyes, the way a strand or two of hair doesn’t behave, a catch in the smile hinting at a hidden capacity for surprise and boldness.

Raised in the sixties, the son of an independent Minneapolis businessman, Lofquist grew up with the uneasy and strange combination of popularity and conscience. He was the captain of his basketball team and got high grades.

But, for some inexplicable reason, he began to tilt at windmills. Glory (and Lofquist has always, in some sense, striven for it) became equated with the magnitude of the odds. In high school, swept along by the sixties movement, he gave up basketball to take a shot at world hunger.

He organized two marches to raise money. Although he raised a good deal, he lost a good deal: “After the last march, I sat down in a telephone booth we had rented and cried great, heaving sighs. I guess I finally realized that I didn’t have resources to buck those kinds of odds. What was my one teeny voice crying in the wilderness?”

For the next few months, Lofquist drifted toward despair. Then he found Jesus. That revived his sense of hope. And his sense of daring.

Outside of Roy, Utah, there is a twirling tomato. “That’s the only thing I knew about Roy,” Lofquist says. “It was a sign for Sacco’s fruit stand on the highway. I said I would never go to Roy.”

Utah, for that matter, didn’t initially send chills up and down his spine. But, says Lofquist, “in college, all I knew was that I wanted to go to the mission field. And I knew that I wanted that mission field to be a hard one.”

While attending college, Les married. Miriam is the daughter of a missionary to Mormons in Utah. Les spent two summers in Utah and was exposed to the “overwhelming need.” (He also learned that Miriam’s father, during the first few years of his ministry, had to pump gas to feed his family.)

During college and seminary at Grace Schools in Winona Lake, Indiana, Lofquist continued to achieve. He was, in every sense, a man with a future. Popular, bright, handsome—an almost sure bet one day to have pencils that read The Fastest-growing Church in Lincoln County and, Possibly, the Surrounding World.

But his penchant for the long shot got the best of him. Through a combination of events, he became pastor of a church in Roy, Utah. The rising star went to the place with the twirling tomato. He had spent eight-and-a-half years training to be a pastor. At the time, there were eight people in the church.

Lofquist estimates there are about 1.7 million Mormons in Utah, which amounts to about 80 percent of the state’s population. The Mormons have nearly absolute control in matters dealing with legislation and the press.

Appeal and authority are two key factors in the Mormon empire, Lofquist says. The Mormons are good at creating images to attract potential converts. “Mormonism,” Lofquist says, “is an all-American religion. They play off positive values—family, patriotism, the work ethic.”

The authority operates on fear of ex-communication. According to Mormon doctrine, families married in the temple are together for eternity. A spouse who leaves the church, then, is separating a family for all eternity. And leaving the church in Utah means social ostracism, loss of prestige and social community, and possibly loss of job.

Christianity that relies on the Bible as its sole authority is practically nonexistent. Lofquist estimates that in the Salt Lake City area, there are probably 15 good churches. In his area—about 40 miles south of Salt Lake—there are two fundamental churches with a combined membership of about 300. The area has a population of about 250,000.

Behind the pulpit of the Love-N-Care preschool day-care center—make that the Roy Bible Church—Les Lofquist, bathed in Da-Glo yellow, is apologizing again. He admits he often feels like a comical voice in the wilderness: with Donald and Mickey and Goofy and the green-haired clown—another fool in a fool’s parade. “I don’t get overwhelmed so much as I get embarrassed,” Lofquist says. “I mean, we have such a great God and our people are such great people—and what do we have to show for it? A converted day-care center.”

It doesn’t bother him so much, except when he picks up a Christian magazine, and some pastor is explaining the proper staff-to-laypeople ratio.

“There are standards that have been set up in the Christian community as to what success is,” Lofquist says. “A lot of that is based on numbers. You can’t measure success in Utah by numbers.”

He continues to talk, then there is a pause. It breaks the mood. Without question, there is something unexpected hidden behind the man’s smile.

By Rob Wilkins, a writer living in Winona Lake, Indiana.