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The Black Broadcasters Committee of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) figured to draw at least 1,000 of the 4,000 who attended NRB’s annual convention to a breakfast meeting addressed by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. But only about 125 people, most of them black, showed up to hear the 1984 presidential candidate.
The reason for the poor attendance was a prayer breakfast for Israel that had been scheduled for the same time as the Jackson speech. The Israel breakfast highlighted former United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. It is not officially a part of the NRB convention, but for the past five years has been held in conjunction with it. The breakfast, promoted heavily by NRB participants, features well-known television preachers and congressmen.
Tickets for the Jackson breakfast meeting sold for $20 each. Because of the poor attendance, black broadcasters had to take up a collection to cover expenses. A few of their spokesmen made veiled references to the “circumstances” that had put them in a financial bind and caused them embarrassment.
Clay Evans, NRB board member and newly elected chairman of the Black National Religious Broadcasters, said he would meet with NRB executive director Ben Armstrong to express disappointment at the lack of support the breakfast received. Armstrong and NRB president Robert A. Cook were among the handful of whites to hear Jackson speak.
“Schedule conflicts are inevitable,” Armstrong told reporters afterward. He said his organization was “absolutely thrilled to have Jesse Jackson with us. It’s the first time we’ve been able to get a person of his magnitude, and he gave a stirring address.”
Armstrong was criticized hotly at a preconvention board meeting for inviting Jackson, whose outspoken liberal views on foreign policy and social issues make him unacceptable to some NRB members. But black broadcasters said Jackson was their first choice for an NRB event. An NRB board member who did not wish to be identified said Evans upheld Jackson’s integrity as a pastor. Jackson serves as a copastor at the Chicago church pastored by Evans.
In his address, Jackson urged listeners to “put prophecy over profits and popularity.” He also defended his controversial visits to Cuba and Syria, explaining how he persuaded Cuban leader Fidel Castro to attend a Baptist service, Castro’s first church service in 30 years.
Jackson said he told Syrian president Hafez Assad the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. He said he challenged the Arab leader to act in the best tradition of his country by setting the captive (then hostage) Robert Goodman free.
The controversy over Jackson’s appearance raised deeper questions about the nature of NRB and its annual convention. Some board members and participants believe the convention has become too politicized. Said one board member, “I am really concerned that we not become the National Republican Broadcasters.… It scares me that people have to think along the same lines on every issue in order to be welcome.”
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William J. Bennett, secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, sees the American educational system in the center of the controversy surrounding the proper place of religion in public life. He has been challenged by those who maintain that religion has no place in public schools. In an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Bennett outlined his positions on the critical issues related to this debate.
You have said you are seeking to initiate a national debate about the place of religious belief in our society. How is that debate progressing?
The debate on the place of religion in American society has been going on for more than 200 years. I’m pleased with my contribution. It is a matter of historical fact that the values we associate with our political tradition are fundamentally related to the deepest and most important teachings in the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to acknowledge that, particularly in the area of education.
Why are public schools at the center of this debate?
Many interpret the First Amendment and conventional wisdom about the separation of church and state to mean that public schools should avoid religion altogether. That is warranted neither by the Constitution nor by our history. Part of the function of schools is to transmit a grasp of our political and moral culture. Students cannot gain that grasp without understanding the important place of religious beliefs in the development of our society. People don’t stop being Christians or Jews when they enter the classroom, nor should they.
Then you support an amendment for prayer in schools.
I support the administration’s proposed amendment, which neither requires nor prohibits prayer. Again, I think in many circumstances to pray is natural. After all, the President of the United States can write a letter to the children in Christa McAuliffe’s class saying that we must trust in God and God’s will, but a teacher at Concord High School can’t say the same thing. That’s strange. And it’s also new. Twenty years ago people would have been shocked. If you examine the June 6, 1944, newspapers you’ll find on one side of a page the announcement of Allied troops landing in Normandy and on the other a prayer led by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This was not an attempt to baptize everyone. It was an attempt to speak in a common voice for people who at a critical moment of national history wanted to look beyond themselves.
Could you apply this to the tragedy of the space shuttle?
In many places it would have been the most natural and obvious thing to say to a group of children, “May we bow our heads to pray.” It would have been natural for a teacher to have read the Twenty-third Psalm. In most communities in America, this would not have been offensive. Where it was offensive, provisions could have been made for students not to participate. But we are a religious people. It seems awkward to deny people—simply because they are in public schools—the opportunity to express themselves in a way they have found fitting for a very long time.
Do you blame the absence of values and the lax discipline in schools today on the fact that religion has been somewhat scrubbed from the agenda?
Not directly. The literature of the late sixties and early seventies put forth the view that there is no such thing as right or wrong, that we cannot pass judgment on anything, and there is nothing one generation can pass on to the next. This kind of values neutrality, embraced by many teachers, led to the ethical relativism that is at the root of the value crisis in public schools.
Some say Christians are wrong to abandon public schools and set up parallel institutions. Do you agree?
In this country, people are free to set up their own schools. I would like to see Christians going to public schools because nothing is more important than restoring our schools to a position of public trust and confidence. Those who care for public schools should not give up on them, because it is where most of our children will go.
You have expressed concern that a lot of public school textbooks have excised God completely. Is your department trying to change this?
Not to the extent some would like. We do not and should not set curriculum. We do try to call attention to possible deficiencies. It’s a problem when our textbooks do not acknowledge the central place of religion in the lives of Americans. Can one understand important historical figures like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King without understanding how their religious traditions influenced them?
You support the concept of school vouchers. Can you explain how this concept would work if the Reagan administration bill now under consideration would pass?
The current voucher proposal would be connected to our Chapter I program, one of the largest federal programs in education. It does not call for new money. We already have $3.5 billion earmarked for some five million economically and educationally disadvantaged students. Instead of it going directly to schools, parents would have the option to ask for a voucher, entitling them to an average of $630 in remedial educational services per child. Parents could shop around. If they are not happy with where their children are going, they could enroll them in another school, private or public.
Critics say this is just one more nail in the coffin of public schools, that it enables public funds to support religious institutions.
These funds are intended for children who need them no matter where they go to school. Under the proposed plan, children who go to private or parochial schools would not receive aid they didn’t receive before. But it would give parents a choice. We expect most parents to look first to public schools. If they aren’t satisfied with what they find, many will look to private schools. And that’s fine. Why should it matter whether a child goes to public or private school, provided the child gets the best education available? This may cause problems for bad public schools. It may cause problems for bad private schools. But there should be problems with schools that don’t educate.
How can churches and religious organizations contribute to the debate over the place of religion in schools?
We know that children who go to church or synagogue do better in school than children who don’t. And strong family values correlate highly with academic achievement. Our research suggests that for many young people, religious belief is the ultimate source of these values. Churches must make it plain that children educated in church schools are part of the public. The public should be served in government-supported as well as private schools. Also, people associated with church-related institutions should never oppose the existence of the public school, which is a great invention with a very good track record. It has had some difficulty recently, but I think it can get back on its feet.
As a Catholic, you must find it unusual to be tagged “Secretary of Evangelism,” a phrase some of your critics have coined. How do you respond?
To be in public life in a free country is like being a duck in a shooting gallery. And that’s okay. Rhetorical excess is part of what some people do for a living. It’s odd to be considered “secretary of evangelism.” I know myself how untrue it is. I’m sort of average religious. I don’t go to church as often as I should. I’ve become like most Americans. But I know myself. I know what I think, and I know what I believe. I’m willing to suffer a little. To engage in these educational issues is worth it.
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Brian Bird
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A rapidly changing youth culture has presented unique challenges to parachurch ministries.
When America gave birth to the Peace Corps in the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy charged his first wave of service recruits with a simple task: “Work yourselves out of a job.” The concept soon became a philosophical imperative for humanitarian workers overseas. As the reasoning went, there would be no need for external assistance once the needy were taught to fend for themselves.
For some evangelicals, this idea sounded familiar. Two decades earlier, budding parachurch youth ministries such as The Navigators, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and Youth for Christ trumpeted the same philosophy as they carved a niche in the evangelical world.
Their goal was to model effective techniques in youth evangelism at a time when the church was doing little to reach its young people with the message of Christ. The leaders of parachurch agencies emerged as spokesmen for the evangelical community, and their ministries experienced exponential growth.
But times have changed. Today, the widespread perception among church leaders is that youth ministries in many local congregations have endured an awkward adolescence and matured into effective vehicles through which to communicate Christ. This is attributable in part to the example of the parachurch.
Some have suggested that the parachurch has outgrown its usefulness, that the movement has succeeded to some extent in “working itself out of a job.”
Of the five largest U.S.-based parachurch youth ministries, only two—Campus Crusade for Christ and The Navigators—have avoided significant declines in ministry sites and student participation over the last decade. Inter-Varsity has closed more than 100 campus programs in recent years.
Last year Group, a magazine for youth workers, quoted a former Youth for Christ regional director and several youth pastors as voicing disenchantment with the traditional parachurch mode of operation. The article suggested that current structures and philosophies of contemporary campus ministries are obsolete.
Several parachurch leaders have since said the article misrepresented their ministries at many points. Taylor University President Jay Kesler, who served 12 years as president of Youth for Christ, said that the secularization of America’s youth, not obsolete forms of ministry, is the major reason some groups have experienced a decline in numbers.
Parachurch spokesmen generally acknowledge great gains in congregational youth work. But they say local churches alone may never be able to evangelize successfully in an increasingly secular society. Said Kesler, “The sad fact is that there are more unchurched young people today than there were 30 years ago.”
Kesler said today’s youth “have no memory of a Christian context, and church youth ministry isn’t crossing that chasm. A mission field has grown up right under our noses.… We are going to have to pursue this new mission field with the same abandon that foreign mission societies have historically pursued their evangelistic goals. That kind of incarnational outreach has seldom been produced from the local pews.”
Parachurch ministries have been hampered by a rapidly changing youth culture. Said Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship President Gordon MacDonald, “Traditionally, parachurch ministry has been able to respond to [cultural] changes almost immediately. Perhaps the changes are coming too fast now.”
Youth culture is far less homogeneous today than it was 25 years ago, when a large percentage of youth rallied behind a common antiwar protest. “It wasn’t unusual for us to get 300 kids out to a Friday night meeting during that period,” said Tim Gibson, a former area director for Young Life. Gibson said young people today comprise a variety of “interest groups” from “preppies to punks to athletes to computer ‘whizzes.’ It’s much more difficult to have an across-the-board program that will appeal to them all.”
“We’re not able to get to the point quite as quickly in our evangelical efforts,” said Roger Fleming, assistant to the U.S. Director of Navigators. “We have to back up the educational process and slowly try to engage the students in an acceptance of a Christian world view.”
Les Mazon, assistant pastor for youth ministry at Whittier Area Baptist Fellowship in Whittier, California, said that “kids nowadays are suffering from The Day After effect. They’re trying to soak up as much of life as they can because they don’t believe they have a future. A mindset like that requires approaches you wouldn’t have dreamed of using before.”
Youth for Christ Acting President Dick Wynn observed that youth used to be drawn to “small group Bible study and interaction. The kids wanted to participate.” But today, he said, “there seems to be a renewed attraction for group-oriented entertainment. So we’re finding a … return to our old breakaway formula incorporating a stand-up communicator and some entertainment.”
Wynn noted that last fall’s Youth Congress ’85, cosponsored by his organization and Campus Crusade for Christ, was Youth for Christ’s first attempt at staging a national conference since its Capital Teen Convention in 1962. Youth Congress ’85 drew 15,000 high school students to Washington, D.C.
Another way parachurch ministries have adjusted is by retooling their club formats, decreasing the emphasis on director-student dialogue, and offering more opportunities for peer interaction.
Despite the odds, some parachurch ministries are expanding. Youth for Christ has initiated an experimental program on 164 junior high campuses. It has added 172 new Campus Life clubs (high school ministries) in the last two years. The group has also established Youth Guidance affiliates in 80 cities to work with youth in the juvenile justice system. Also, both Youth for Christ and Young Life have increased their outreach to urban areas.
Parachurch leaders say they continue to be troubled by a long-standing perception that they struggle with local churches for superiority in territory and programs. “We want to be an arm of the local church,” said Steve Sellers, associate national campus director for Campus Crusade. “It was never, nor will it ever be, our intention to compete.… One of the prerequisites for every staff person is an active involvement in a local church.”
Sellers said Campus Crusade’s goal is to have an outreach on all 3,200 colleges in America by the year 2000. Plans call for lay people from local churches to staff a large percentage of these programs. Youth for Christ reports a surge in lay volunteer support in recent years. In 1985, some 6,600 volunteers worked alongside 970 full-time staff in the Campus Life program.
Gibson, formerly of Young Life, said that “the church has always needed a prophetic voice, and that’s the role parachurch organizations can play. I don’t think it was ever a question of working ourselves out of a job. Rather, I’d like to think of it as an issue of the parachurch groups continuously giving themselves away to the church.”
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Randy Frame
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Movement opponents maintain that providing contraceptives to teens might cause more pregnancies than it prevents.
Nineteen-year-old Patricia Suggs is one of an estimated five million unmarried teenagers in this country who engage in sex. But unlike most of these teenagers, she can obtain contraceptives free of charge at the high school she attends.
That high school is DuSable High School, located in a black community on Chicago’s South Side, not far from the largest public housing project in the world. The project is home to about 28,000 people. About 90 percent of the residents are women and their children, many of whom were not wanted. Patricia said that three of every five of her female school friends have had at least one child.
The problem of unwanted pregnancies is viewed as a major link in the chain of poverty among black urban poor. Consequently, a major goal of the school-based clinic that opened last year at DuSable is to address this problem by informing students of their options, one of which is birth control. The clinics also provide students a variety of medical and psychological care.
Since the first school-based clinic opened in St. Paul, Minnesota, 12 years ago, the idea has taken root. Today, there are 43 such clinics in operation across the country with an additional 70 being set up. They are financed by both public and private money. DuSable, however, is only one of ten high schools where students can obtain contraceptives on campus.
Many prolife and profamily organizations find this trend disturbing. A spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee said supporters of the school clinic movement include proabortion organizations like Planned Parenthood. The Support Center for School-Based Clinics, established last year, is associated with the Washington, D.C.-based Population Institute, which favors legalized abortion. Groups opposing abortion contend that an eventual goal of the clinic movement is to expand services to include abortion services.
The Chicago-based Pro-Life/Pro-Family Coalition, which consists of 12 black, South Side ministers and their congregations, has retained an attorney to file suit against the Chicago Board of Education. “The business of schools is to teach students the basics in academics,” said coalition president Hiram Crawford, pastor of the independent Israel Methodist Community Church. “I strongly resent that they would even consider passing out contraceptives in public schools.” He maintains that abstinence is not presented as an option and that this violates Illinois law.
Administrators of the DuSable clinic say they uphold abstinence as “the only method that is 100 percent effective.” But detractors say it is impossible to impress this on students while at the same time making the less-effective options readily available.
Patricia Suggs said that when she came to the clinic, “I was never told, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t have sex.’ … They tell you the pros and cons of it more than distracting you.” She adds, “You can’t ban somebody from doing it. You can’t really stop nature.”
Nancy Czerwiec, a former school teacher and a member of several prolife and profamily groups, says educators treat sex differently from other moral issues. “They preach against smoking, drinking, drugs, and stealing.… [Yet] they refuse to say no to sex. If a student gets drunk, we don’t give him a pill for his hangover and say, ‘Now you don’t have to worry about your problem.’ ”
Louise McCurry, full-time nurse practioner at DuSable, said teen sexual activity is a fact of life. She attributes this to commercials, movies, and the media, all of which contribute to a society in which it is “cool to have sex before 12,” and “being sexually attractive and fitting into your Calvin Kleins is the norm.” Said McCurry, “Birth control is an insurance policy, pure and simple. It’s an opportunity for these children to … make a life for themselves.”
Clinical assistant Brenda Holmes said she opposes sex outside marriage on moral grounds. But she added, “That’s not the real world.” Addressing the opposition from antiabortion groups, Holmes said the clinic will never offer abortion services. “That’s where I really put my foot down. If you have already conceived something, it’s too late. It’s a human life.” Holmes said she suspects the abortion rate for pregnant teens is higher in Chicago’s white suburbs than it is in the community around DuSable.
Crawford maintains the availability of contraceptives encourages fornication. Indeed, Patricia Suggs said that she would not consider having sex without birth control. “I’m not one who would take that risk,” she said. “I want to go to college.” Nurse practitioner McCurry said, however, that most teens are sexually active for about a year before they seek birth control. She concludes that contraceptives do not encourage promiscuity.
Do Clinics Accomplish Their Purpose?
A major issue in the debate over school-based clinics is whether they succeed in eliminating unwanted pregnancies. DuSable administrators say that 300 of its 1,000 female students got pregnant in the year before the clinic began operating. In the first half of the current school year, according to Holmes, only 35 pregnancies have been recorded. Clinic supporters also claim that the St. Paul school system has reduced the number of teen pregnancies by 66 percent.
However, critics question these numbers. Before the DuSable clinic was launched, no records of pregnancies were kept. Laura Devon, information officer for the Ounce of Prevention, which funds the clinic, said the 300 number is an estimate drawn from census figures and from interviews of school personnel.
Paulette Anderson, an assistant pastor at Crawford’s church and a candidate for state representative, attended a national conference on school-based clinics held last fall in Chicago. She said it was revealed that pregnancy had increased at some schools where contraceptives are dispensed. She said clinic supporters openly wondered why.
There is also substantial disagreement over how much community support the DuSable clinic has. Defenders say most of the opposition comes from outsiders who cannot appreciate the problems of urban living.
“Casual sex was a prerequisite for project life,” wrote free-lance journalist Ron Tate in the Chicago Tribune. He is one of few DuSable graduates to have launched a promising career. “For many boys,” he continues, “to be sexually active was to be considered a man. For some girls, engaging in sex meant having a baby, an opportunity to alleviate loneliness, while at the same time possessing something they could call their own.” Urban reality, McCurry noted, also includes a high incidence of rape and incest.
Clinic detractors say there is community opposition to the dispensing of contraceptives. They say the opposition is hesitant to voice a protest because the clinic has been widely touted as an object of community pride. About 70 percent of the parents of DuSable students signed permission slips for their children to receive health care at the clinic. However, the parents’ choice was to sign or not to sign a blanket form; they could not deny permission for their children to receive contraceptives without denying them access to all the other health services offered by the clinic.
Arguably, the major point of disagreement over school-based clinics is the morality of premarital sex. Where clinic literature advocates abstinence, it does so for practical, not moral, reasons.
Anderson said that at the conference she attended, the virtue of chastity was ridiculed as being outdated. She said, “God knew what he was doing when he set down moral laws forbidding premarital sex.” She said that even if pregnancy were not an issue, sex outside of committed marriage leads to “emotional instability and low self-esteem.”
Anderson maintains the school-based clinic movement, sincere as its supporters may be, ends up doing more harm to teens than good. She quotes a biblical proverb: “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”
RANDY FRAME
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Christianity TodayMarch 7, 1986
Classic and contemporary excerpts
Leaving God Under A Bench
In 1307 a crack Dominican administrator named Meister Eckhart was elected provincial of his order in the newly formed province of Saxony … home to 50 houses of friars and 9 convents of nuns; and the new provincial, later named vicar general, would spend the rest of his life steeped in the administrative and political duties attendant on his post. But Eckhart was also a keenly spiritual fellow, hardly content to leave his spiritual life behind in the chapel before heading off to the office each day. Those who did, he suggested in a sermon given at the time, “are behaving no differently than if they took God, wrapped a coat around his head, and shoved him under a bench.”
—Dan Mintie, “It’s Not Easy to Be a Christian Boss,” U.S. Catholic (Dec. 1985)
Damaging Criticism
A man who is continually criticized becomes good for nothing, the effect of criticism knocks all the gumption and power out of him.
—Oswald Chambers, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount
Pity Vs. Self-Pity
The attractiveness of pity and the ugliness of self-pity are unarguable. Yet we live in a society in which self-pity far exceeds pity. The excessively popular genre of literature, the celebrity autobiography, that smothers us in self-pitying subjectivism is the unpleasant evidence that we may be the most self-pitying populace in all of human history. Feeling sorry for yourself has been developed into an art form. The whining and sniveling that wiser generations ridiculed with satire is given best-seller status among us.
—Eugene Peterson, Earth and Altar
Lord, Is It I?
As murder storywriters assume, and as most of us learn in experience, we have in us capacities for fury, fear, envy, greed, conceit, callousness, and hate which, given the right provocation, could make killers out of us all—baby-batterers or Bluebeards, professional thugs or amateur hit men. G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown explained his method of detection by saying, “You see, it was I who killed all those people”—in the sense that he looked within himself to find the mentality that would produce the crime he was investigating, and did in fact discover it there. Chesterton lets him moralize:
“No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away … till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”
Brown, though fictitious, states fact. When the fathomless wells of rage and hatred in the normal human heart are tapped, the results are fearful. “There but for the grace of God go I.” Only restraining and renewing grace enables anyone to keep the sixth commandment.
—J. I. Packer, I Want to Be a Christian
Turning Song To “Twitter”
A man had a fine canary whose song was unusually beautiful. During the summer, it seemed a shame to keep the bird inside the house all the time. So the owner placed the cage in a nearby tree for the bird to enjoy the sunshine and the fresh air.
Many sparrows frequented the tree and were attracted to the cage. At first the canary was frightened, but soon enjoyed his companions. But gradually and almost imperceptibly he lost the sweetness of the song. By the end of the summer his “singing” was little more than the twitter of the sparrows. Spending his summer in the wrong environment caused the canary to lose his finest song.
—Jerry Lock, Church Music World (Nov./Dec. 1985)
If God Be For Us …
Do not weigh highly who may be for you or against you. But take thought and care that God be with you in everything you do. Have a good conscience, and God will defend you well.
—Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
Well Said?
Consider this paradox: Almost everything that is publicly said these days is recorded. Almost nothing of what is said is worth remembering.
—Ted Koppel, on receiving the “Broadcaster of the Year Award,” Harper’s (Jan. 1986).
Forgetting What Lies Behind …
If you’ve done the best you can—if you have done what you have to do—there is no use worrying about it, because nothing can change it, and to be in a position of leadership … you have to give thought to what’s going to happen the next day and you have to be fresh for … what you have to do the next day. What you’re going to do is more important than what you have done.
—The Words of Harry S. Truman, selected by Robert J. Donovan
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Books
John K. Testerman
A small-town physician makes mistakes and deals with his guilt.
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Healing the Wounds: A Physician Looks at His Work, by David Hilfiker, M.D. (Pantheon, 1985, 209 pp.; $14.95, doth). Reviewed by John K. Testerman, M.D., Ph.D., a biologist and family physician who practices in Glendale Heights, Illinois.
It is one o’clock in the morning at a tiny rural hospital in Minnesota. David Hilfiker, family practitioner, one of only four doctors in a county larger than the state of Rhode Island, has just been called to the emergency room to see Mr. Murphy, who is having a severe heart attack. It is unsafe to send him on the two-hour ambulance ride to the nearest cardiologist, so Dr. Hilfiker will have to do his best right here. But his best is not good enough. Six hours later Mr. Murphy goes into cardiac arrest and dies.
Facing Mrs. Murphy with the news, he can see the reproach in her eyes: Shouldn’t you have tried to send him to Duluth? Couldn’t you have done more?
Emotionally numb and physically exhausted, Hilfiker realizes he has an office full of patients waiting, four hospital patients still to be seen, and he hasn’t yet showered and shaved. There is no time to deal with the feelings of personal failure and guilt that will overwhelm him during the next few days.
Also reviewed in this section
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman
The Mystery of Marriage: As Iron Sharpens Iron, by Mike Mason
Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture, by Jaroslav Pelikan
The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity; Satan: The Early Christian Tradition; andLucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages, by Jeffrey Burton Russell
The Authentic Jesus: The Certainty of Christ in a Skeptical World, by John Stott
A Calvin Reader: Reflections on Living, edited by William F. Keesecker
Africa: A Season for Hope, edited by W. Dayton Roberts
China: The Church’s Long March, by David H. Adeney
In Search Of Perfection
Healing the Wounds tells the story of what it is like to be human—yet expected (by yourself and others) to meet everyone’s needs and to exhibit godlike perfection in dealing with life-and-death questions. Physicians like the author, pastors, counselors, and believers who try to love their neighbors as themselves—anyone who feels called to help others—can contract an acute case of perfectionism and inappropriate guilt. Hilfiker’s story is thus instructive for us all.
In the first half of the book, Hilfiker examines the stresses built into the nature of any doctor’s work. He writes: “The impossibly broad range of knowledge necessary to daily practice (from taking care of heart attacks to delivering babies), the everpresent uncertainty in diagnosis and treatment, and the ubiquitous possibility of making life-threatening mistakes are brutal emotional facts of the doctor’s life.”
But the built-in stresses are not all. Hilfiker shows how physicians inevitably develop coping mechanisms that become stresses in their own right and interfere with patient care.
One such response is clinical detachment, or the emotional distancing from an emotionally charged situation. This detachment is indispensable for making rapid, accurate decisions in an emergency. Yet the doctor is expected to be warm, empathic, and compassionate in one crisis after another. It seemed to Hilfiker that the only way to deal with this emotional roller-coaster was to harden himself to it. But the result was detachment from the very people he was trying to help.
Another area of deep frustration was being caught between the desire to serve and the constraints of an inflexible office schedule. A patient with unexpectedly complex needs forced him to choose between putting the patient off or having a waiting room full of angry patients. The need to be “efficient” tended to depersonalize his relationships with both patients and staff.
Money is another way doctors cope with stress and distance themselves from patients and staff. Hilfiker bases his discussion on the controversial assumption that “a high salary is incompatible with a career of service.” He argues that a doctor who makes more money than his patients or his staff will be unable to understand the life situations of his patients and will lose a sense of collegiality with the nurses. He suggests cutting doctors’ salaries in half to make their services more affordable. True, cutting his $40,000 salary in half would enable him to cut his office charges by 22.5 percent. But since doctors’ fees average only 19 percent of total medical expenses, this would result in a less than 5 percent saving on his patients’ medical bills.
Dr. Hilfiker’s days turned into a procession of great needs running up against limited time, energy, and emotional resources. He was unable to find a personally acceptable way of defining the limits of his response, and swung back and forth between the extremes of brutal efficiency and openness to meeting every need. Part of the problem was in his expectations: “Early in my career,” he writes, “I was heady with the prestige and power that came from the feeling that I would be able to fulfill everyone’s expectations.” The realities of practice crushingly brought home to him the impossibility of his dream.
This book is really not so much about the stresses of medicine as it is one man’s inability to cope constructively with them. Most doctors have compulsive personalities and therefore suffer from self-doubt, inappropriate guilt, have difficulty setting limits, and an exaggerated sense of responsibility for events beyond their control. Hilfiker had a bad case. He was overwhelmed with self-doubt and guilt when a patient died. He felt guilty when he had to leave a patient who was medically stable, but frightened, to sprint down the hall to a patient who had just stopped breathing. He felt guilty when a full waiting room kept him from spending all the time he wanted with a troubled patient. He felt uncomfortable asking for payment and guilty about his $40,000 annual salary. Basically, he felt guilty because he was not God.
The Disabled Healer
With no specialists to back him up, having to work the emergency room on the weekends, and doing his own deliveries, there was no time to develop perspective and coping skills. Hilfiker’s emotional responses to the stresses of practice finally destroyed his ability to practice. He became so conscientious that the healer himself became disabled. Ironically, by trying to meet all needs he ended up meeting none, and he left his practice in 1982.
However, God did not forget David Hilfiker. He called him to service in a place that uniquely suited his skills and temperament—two free church-sponsored clinics for the homeless and unemployed in Washington, D.C., at an annual salary of $26,000 (still not low enough for Hilfiker; it was more than twice what the receptionists made).
This is not just David Hilfiker’s story. It is the story of how any person in a helping profession faces conflicting pressures, and how the responses that we develop to cope with these pressures become problems in their own right. Hilfiker’s dilemmas will be recognized by any idealistic person who undertakes to minister to human needs and runs up against the limitations of his finiteness and sinfulness—and that includes Christians.
CHRISTIANITY TODAY TALKS TO Dr. David Hilfiker
Healing the Wounds contains hints of David Hilfiker’s Christian faith and of his association with Washington, D.C.’s small, but highly committed, Church of the Savior. Associate Editor David Neff called Dr. Hilfiker to find out more.
Does practicing medicine with a group of Christians who are committed to servanthood help you cope with the stresses of being a physician?
Very much. It is one of the things that makes work here possible—whereas it wasn’t before.
I’m just coming to understand that in traditional American, Western culture, the posture of servanthood often seems just plain stupid—like you’re being taken advantage of, like you really haven’t thought things through, like you’re not using the strength and resources that you have. In those moments, when you know you look silly, it is important to remember that Jesus was crucified for us in a posture of servanthood, and that we are called to be like him.
How do your clinic’s staff worship times affect staff relationships?
First, when we are in worship, we are in a circle. The worshipers are all peers, so it helps bring down the hierarchical relationships in the staff.
Second, and even more important, worship—by reminding us that our work is an expression of our faith—teaches us that results are less important than obedience.
How does your personal faith help you cope?
It’s difficult to separate my personal faith from my faith as a member of the Christian community—largely because of the pragmatic ways that we support each other.
But our faith helps me cope. Feeling guilty and impotent is one of the inevitable results of trying to be faithful. And our faith helps me see those feelings, not as a part of my disobedience, but as a part of my obedience.
And I’ve learned that results are a distant second to obedience. God is in charge of the results; it’s my responsibility to be obedient.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman (Viking, 1985, 184 pp.; $15.95, cloth). Reviewed by Reed Jolley, pastor of Santa Barbara Community Church, Santa Barbara, California.
Neil Postman is concerned that entertainment has become the American way of life. And in Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book for “culture watchers and worriers,” he examines the effect television in particular has had on our society: Serious discourse, politics, religion, sports, education, news, and commerce have all been transformed by our insatiable thirst for amusement.
Postman, who is professor of communication arts and sciences at New York University, contends that different forms of media favor particular kinds of content. He laments that in our time the medium of typography has given way to the medium of television. The written word encourages rationality and analysis. A typographical society is a society of coherence, dialogue, and interaction with ideas. Television, on the other hand, encourages passivity, irrelevance, and impotence.
Postman faults television because it is a “present-centered” medium. Everything is presented without a past or future. Consider, for example, the sterile refrain of television newscasters: “And now … this.” Regardless of the weight of the news story (murder, poverty, warfare, the Academy Awards), the newscaster erases our thoughts and moves on to an advertisement for Burger King. The average news story lasts 45 seconds, and the average length of a camera shot on network television is 3.5 seconds. Inappropriate juxtapositions and brief coverage damage our sense of the world as a serious place. Postman quotes television personality Bill Moyers, who thinks that his medium is producing a generation of “agitated amnesiacs” who know everything about the past 24 hours but nothing of their real history.
An Excerpt
Offer People What They Want
“The executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters Association sums up what he calls the unwritten law of all television preachers: ‘You can get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want.’
… This is an unusual religious credo. There is no great religious leader—from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther—who offered people what they want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to offering people what they need. It is ‘user friendly.’ It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language or stringent demands. As a consequence, what is preached on television is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled with good cheer. They celebrate affluence. Their featured players become celebrities. Though their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or rather, because their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.
… Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”
Oxymoron
Postman devotes the second half of his book to arguing that “serious television” is a contradiction in terms. Due to the power of the medium and its inexorable bond to visual images, television speaks in only one voice—the voice of entertainment. Whether the program is religious, political, or educational, the viewer is encouraged merely to watch. The golden rules of programming (even for educational television) are: (1) “Thou shalt have no prerequisites,” (2) “Thou shalt induce no perplexity,” and (3) “Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues of Egypt.”
Television tries to portray itself as a serious enterprise, but “what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information as entertainment.” Postman, therefore, has little difficulty with “The A-Team” and “Cheers,” but he is deeply concerned about “60 Minutes” and “Sesame Street.”
The author, who is a member of the Commission on Theology, Education and the Electronic Media of the National Council of Churches, is particularly troubled by the way television presents religion. He does not criticize Schuller, Swaggart, and Falwell much for what they say and do, because it is not the weaknesses of television preachers, “but the weaknesses of the medium in which they work” that is “the enemy of religious experience.” Television presents religion, like everything else, as entertainment, and strips it of everything that makes it historic, profound, and sacred: “There is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”
Postman knows that Americans will not stop watching television. Therefore the solution is found in how we watch. To watch television habitually with mindless inattention is the greatest danger. To analyze the medium, being aware of its inherent limitations and world view, is a sufficient if not perfect solution.
In the end, Postman’s analysis of American culture shows that Aldous Huxley may have been a better prophet than George Orwell. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, there were “those who would ban books.” But in Huxley’s Brave New World, the population would be so distracted by trivia that “there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” Our love for information technology has destroyed our rational capabilities. Concludes Postman: “When a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk, culture death is a clear possibility.”
The Mystery of Marriage: As Iron Sharpens Iron, by Mike Mason (Multnomah, 1985, 185 pp.; $10.95, cloth). Reviewed by David Neff.
One should normally avoid a book whose dust jacket proclaims it to be “an inevitable classic.” But Mike Mason’s The Mystery of Marriage may be just that. It is at least what J. I. Packer’s foreword called it—“a crackerjack.” There is definitely a prize in this package.
It all began on the Masons’ honeymoon. They stopped at a Trappist monastery where Mike knew the guest-master. “The stillness clamored, echoed all over the building like shouts,” writes Mason. “It was reflecting my heart, echoing back to me my own confusion.”
Mason’s confusion was his own peculiar brand of bridegroom’s panic. All men secretly doubt their wisdom when they become engaged and again when they are married. Christian men sometimes doubt that it was God’s will. Mason, however, thought he should perhaps have been a monk.
At the end of the long, treed lane that led from the monastery to the main road, Mason’s questions were settled. A vision of two hawks dancing and diving together in the air told him he did not belong in the cloister, that he would have to work out in marriage the deep conflict he felt “between a yearning for solitude and a yearning for companionship.” Marriage is, Mason says, “an invasion of privacy. No one has ever been married without being surprised, and usually alarmed, at the sheer intensity of this invasion.”
An Excerpt
The Wager
“Marriage is to human relations what monotheism is to theology. It is a decision to put all the eggs in one basket, to go for broke, to bet all of the marbles. Is there any abandonment more pure, more supreme, more radically self-abnegating than that of putting one’s entire faith in just one God, the Lord of all, in such a way as to allow that faith to have a searching impact on every corner of one’s life? On the level of human relations, there is only one act of trust which can begin to approach this one, and that is the decision to believe in one other person, and to believe so robustly as to be ready to squander one’s whole life on them.”
Pain
Mason, an Anglican lay preacher and former Regent College student, has worked on this conflict in a manner opposite to that of our society of self-realization. Instead of the grammar of gratification, we find the language of urban renewal: “A thirty-year-old man is like a densely populated city: nothing new can be built, in its heart, without something else being torn down. So I began to be demolished.”
Mason paints a painful picture of marriage: Love “is our solar plexus.” Yet the pain he portrays is not foreign to us. As we involuntarily suck in our breath when we see a movie idol take it on the chin, so we resonate with his descriptions of his demolition and rebuilding.
Marriage is not all masochism for Mason. He trumpets its glory as well: Eve was not just Adam’s alter ego, she was his “alter id”; love is not just “the way we practice for the world to come: it is the world to come”; and sex is not just sex, it is “sacred ground … where men may turn themselves into animals as effortlessly as a magician waves a wand, or else may begin to be transformed into the children of God.” Yet when the trumpets fall silent, Mason’s leitmotif sounds clear: Marriage is hard work, but its rewards are sweet.
Mason’s divine vision keeps his book from clenched-jaw stoicism. He gave up his dream of the monastery for the daylight realities of marriage, but he did not abandon his call: “Holy matrimony, like other holy orders, was never intended as a comfort station for lazy people. On the contrary, it is a systematic program of deliberate and thoroughgoing self-sacrifice. A man’s home is not his castle so much as his monastery.” The divine intent and the experience of the divine presence in marriage are always in sight.
The most curious omission from this meditation on marriage is children. They appear only once in Mason’s message, as “the human race’s only satisfactory means of hurling an insult at death.” Yet, if Mason experienced marriage as an education in the art of sacrifice and an invasion of privacy, we can only speculate what parenthood will mean—perhaps Pearl Harbor.
Mason’s meditative style is a parade of metaphors—some are mere pasteboard similes, some brooding archetypes, others palpable realities. The result is an alternation of tedium and lyricism. Yet the sheer richness of the imagery compels one to keep reading, searching for the next spark to ignite fresh thoughts.
Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture, by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale, 1985, xvi + 270 pp.; $19.95, cloth). Reviewed by Paul Merritt Bassett, professor of the history of Christianity, Nazarene Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri.
Jaroslav Pelikan has given us another superb book. This time, rather than looking into “what the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the word of God,” as he has been doing in his masterful historical theology, The Christian Tradition, Pelikan studies history at large to see how humankind, Christian or not, has perceived Jesus of Nazareth. He reports on 18 cultural “images” developed in the last two millenia.
Among the images developed within the boundaries of historic orthodoxy are those that present Jesus as “The Light of the Gentiles,” “The King of Kings,” “The Cosmic Christ,” “Christ Crucified,” and “The Mirror of the Eternal.”
Four other images that have their sources in orthodoxy have taken what contemporary evangelical Christians would think were mildly eccentric or even aberrant forms. Jesus as “The Monk Who Rules the World,” “The Bridegroom of the Soul,” “The Teacher of Common Sense,” and “The Poet of the Spirit”—these images were nurtured by monasticism, mysticism, the Enlightenment, and Idealism-Romanticism respectively.
And one image has often generated greater devotion outside the faith than within it: Jesus as “The Liberator.”
Birth Of An Image
Pelikan, who is Sterling Professor of History and William Clyde DeVane Lecturer at Yale, helps us see how these images, each so different from the others, have come into view and how each has both shaped and been shaped by culture. He does this by discussing the persons and cultural factors that gave birth, or at least clear form, to the image. Then he works with the image’s immediate cultural influence—both sacred and secular literature and art, economics, politics, and other elements that together constitute a culture.
For instance, Pelikan anchors his discussion of the image of Jesus as “King of Kings” in Pilate’s question: “So you are a king?” He proceeds to outline early Christian attitudes toward civil government as they were affected by their commitment to the sovereignty of Christ and their citizenship in the heavenly kingdom. He then turns to the new situation created when heads of civil administrations, beginning with Constantine, confessed Christ. Their confessions were profoundly influenced by the image of Jesus as “King of Kings.” And through their confessions, this image revolutionized the image of earthly rulership.
Another example: Pelikan’s treatment of the image of Jesus as “Christ Crucified.” He begins with words and experiences from Paul, the Gospel of John, Isaiah 53, Tertullian, Julian the Apostate, novelist Nicholas Monsarrat, and composer Gustav Mahler—all to point to the pervasive influence of the Cross in human culture. He considers its power as the ultimate symbol of ultimate power. Helena, mother of Constantine; Popes Leo I and Gregory I; church historians Socrates and Eusebius; theologians John of Damascus and Rabanus Maurus, Abelard and Anselm, Athanasius and Aulen; the musician J. S. Bach; and poets Fortunatus and Abbot Odo of Cluny—all speak again, in their very diverse ways, of the wisdom and allure, the might and the release wrapped up in the crucifixion of Jesus. Superstition and credulity mingle with praise and brilliant theological reflection in this image. And Pelikan has captured it stunningly.
Common Sense
The Enlightenment’s image of Jesus as “The Teacher of Common Sense” irritates evangelicals. As Pelikan says, “It was either too much or too little—or perhaps both.” But Pelikan notes what often gets overlooked: the religious intention of many of those who helped to create this image was to “rescue” Jesus from what they thought to be the wreckage of orthodoxy and to save him as the moral guru of the new world of rational and natural religion. Pelikan has no interest here in either excusing or condemning the cast of characters. He simply shows how Tindal, Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Reimarus and Lessing, D. F. Strauss, Priestly and Jefferson, with varying degrees of reverence and appreciation, transmuted the biblical record to make it square with their understanding of the universe. At most, Jesus was made the great example of humanity; at the very least, he stood among the world’s great moralists. That image is still with us.
Any of these three discussions alone is worth the price of the book for thoughtful lay people and pastors who know that effective Christian witness entails understanding the religious images already at work in people’s hearts and minds. Pelikan generally refrains from explicit comment on how the images affect our time. Yet, he writes with our time in mind, and his images—even those at considerable chronological or emotional distance—evoke long thoughts about the here and now.
Christians and non-Christians alike can appreciate this work as a study in cultural history. But much more profoundly and importantly, the book transports us to Caesarea Philippi and compels us to ask again Jesus’ question: “But who do you say that I am?”
The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Cornell University Press, 1977, 276 pp.; $27.50, cloth); Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Cornell University Press, 1981, 258 pp.; $27.50, cloth); and Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 1984, 356 pp.; $24.95, cloth); by Jeffrey Burton Russell. Reviewed by Richard Kenneth Emmerson, professor of English, Walla Walla College.
“Real, absolute, tangible evil demands our consideration. It threatens every one of us and all of us together. We avoid examining it at our grave peril.”
Thus insisting on the significance and seriousness of his subject, Jeffrey Burton Russell begins Lucifer, the third volume in his history of the concept of evil from antiquity to the modern world.
Like The Devil and Satan, Lucifer is marked by its author’s forthright personal concern with the persistence and formidable power of evil. Throughout his latest volume, Russell grapples with various attempts to explain the existence of evil in a world created by an omniscient and omnipotent God of love. He writes “as a human being as well as a historian,” explaining in his preface that “it would be presumptuous and futile to deal with so fundamental a problem as evil without confronting it personally.” Such intellectual and personal honesty characterizes all three volumes, making them unusually refreshing as works of scholarship—and particularly relevant for contemporary Christians.
Denial
Russell is most concerned that even though the twentieth century has witnessed countless manifestations of evil, an increasingly secular society trivializes the Devil or denies his existence. Addressing this modern attitude in all three volumes, Russell brackets the detailed history with introductory and concluding chapters in which he writes not so much as a historian but as a contemporary Christian.
In Lucifer, for example, he counters both secular rationalists and Christian theologians who ridicule, or are embarrassed by, belief in the Devil. Against those who consider “belief in the Devil outdated and superstitious,” he contends that it is more important to ask whether an idea is true than whether it is fashionable, and that as long as a belief “fits into a coherent world view” it is not superstitious.
Russell particularly challenges theologians who wish to purify Christianity of its belief in the Devil and who “blandly excise from Scripture and tradition any element they find embarrassing or unpopular.” Such theology slights history, for “belief in the Devil has always been part and parcel of Christianity, firmly rooted in the New Testament, in tradition, and in virtually all Christian thinkers up into very modern times,” so that “the burden of proof lies on those seeking to remove the Devil from Christianity.”
He further charges some contemporary theologians with evading or trivializing evil and warns that “any religion that does not come to terms with evil is not worthy of attention.”
Mixed Blessing
Russell’s concern that his subject be taken seriously not only as history—that is, as a way to understand an important aspect of our religious and intellectual heritage—but also as it applies to the contemporary human situation and theological debate, is a mixed blessing.
On the one hand, it infuses these volumes with a powerful sense of urgency. Russell makes his purpose clear: “A work of scholarship should be more than an exercise. In writing, the writer should himself change; and his best hope is that, in reading, the reader may change also.” I applaud his awareness of a large audience beyond the specialists and his desire to affect his readers.
On the other hand, the personal element makes for a somewhat eccentric history and occasionally even affects the objectivity of the historical account. Particularly troublesome is Russell’s tendency in Lucifer to move too quickly from describing a particular medieval attempt to explain the problem of evil into a personal critique of its assumptions and shortcomings. Such critiques may mislead the general reader into discounting the medieval position before giving it a fair hearing.
Nevertheless, one must admire the breadth, balance, and lucidity of these volumes and their author’s erudition and commitment to this task. No one knows the subject better, nor is more qualified to write its history. An eminent medievalist, Russell studied at Berkeley and Emory and is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of nine books, including general histories of medieval civilization and Christian thought, and specialized studies of medieval religious dissent, heresy, and witchcraft. These reflect a rare talent that combines thorough scholarly research with the teacher’s knack of synthesizing and explaining.
The Devil is the best example of Russell’s ability to make sense of a wide range of material. Satan is the most specialized, least varied, and most difficult of the volumes because of its strict chronological and sometimes repetitious treatment of theologians from the apostolic fathers to Augustine. Yet it is an important book for understanding the essence of the Christian concept of evil, and at least its concluding chapter on Augustine should be required reading for all Christians.
As a medievalist, I find Lucifer the most interesting. Tackling a series of issues central to Christian theology and reflecting an impressive command of a wide range of sources, Russell traces the medieval concept of evil as it developed from monastic through scholastic and nominalist theology. Like the earlier volumes, Lucifer is generously illustrated with art work depicting the Devil.
History Of Perceptions
Russell’s concern with the popular as well as the intellectual perceptions of evil exemplifies his “history of concepts” approach. This approach goes beyond traditional intellectual history by defining a concept to include “the affective as well as the analytical” and “unconscious patterns as well as conscious constructions.” Because these may be reflected in art, poetry, hagiography, folklore, and mythology, as well as in sacred texts and philosophical treatises, Russell takes account of a wealth of information often ignored in traditional histories of theology.
The object is to create a history of perceptions of the Devil, because that is all that can be objectively verified. As Russell proclaims in Lucifer, “The Devil is what the history of his concept is. Nothing else about him can be known.” Whereas empirical observation seems impossible, and many will question appeals to Scripture, ecclesiastic authority, logical argument, or personal experience, “everyone ought to be able to agree on the historical definition of the Devil.” Russell acknowledges that many will disagree concerning specific details, but what really matters is the large issue: the necessity of understanding the figure of the Devil—the personification of evil—if we are to think seriously about the problem of evil. These three volumes are invaluable contributions toward that understanding.
Book Briefs
The Authentic Jesus: The Certainty of Christ in a Skeptical World, by John Stott (IVP, 1985, 96 pp.; $2.95, paper).
According to John Stott, much of today’s skepticism can be traced to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which “attempted to replace revelation by reason, dogma by enquiry, God by nature, and priest by scientist.” Stott, director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity and well-known Christian apologist, here responds to doubters who water down key biblical doctrines because of their supposed incompatibility with modern thought.
In the clearly reasoned, concise prose that is his trademark, Stott argues that the Gospels are reliable; that Jesus was born of a virgin, is both man and God, and was raised bodily from the dead; and that Christian evangelism is necessary and important.
Although The Authentic Jesus sets forth basic Christian teachings, it is not primarily evangelistic. Rather, it is a book for believers who need reassurance that their faith is not irrational, as well as for would-be believers who find straight Christian doctrine incredible. Using an Enlightenment method—rational discourse—to combat Enlightenment limitations and denials, Stott not only gives reasons for his hope, but shows that the stumbling blocks are the very cornerstones of Christianity.
A Calvin Reader: Reflections on Living, William F. Keesecker, editor (Westminster, 1985, 144 pp.; $9.95, paper).
How does a busy pastor of a large urban Presbyterian church order his life? By daily Scripture reading, of course—but also by reading daily at least 15 pages of Calvin’s works. That is what William Keesecker, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Oklahoma City and past moderator of the general assembly of the former United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., has done through his long ministry.
Now he has selected and edited an anthology of Calvin’s thoughts—succulent tidbits for searching hearts.
After an introduction by John H. Leith of Union Theological Seminary (Va.), the book begins with excerpts from the Reformer’s tracts and letters that give us insight into his personal life as well as the commitment and philosophy that motivated his writing.
A meaty chapter containing some of the Genevan’s edifying comments on personal and corporate prayer is followed by approximately 100 pages of topical excerpts (Abraham to Zeal) from a broad spectrum of the Calvin corpus—a treasure house of spiritual wisdom and commentary from one of the Christian church’s greatest minds.
The wisdom of the past is a guide to the future, and for laity and pastors alike, this new anthology will give spiritual direction for life and ministry. Not just the Reformed, but Christians of all traditions will benefit from it.
Africa: A Season for Hope, W. Dayton Roberts, editor (Regal, 1985, 100 pp.; $5.95, paper), and China: The Church’s Long March, by David H. Adeney (Regal, 1985, 250 pp.; $7.95, paper).
Despite fund-raising efforts by Western rock bands, African famine persists. Africa: A Season for Hope (copublished with World Vision International) details the reasons—unwise government policies, lack of farmer incentives, depressed market prices, poor resource management, and inadequate transportation.
The book is an updated summary of World Vision’s 1983 task force, which interviewed 70 African leaders and international agency personnel. The result includes a realistic look at relief and development projects, some of which have been more successful than others.
China: The Church’s Long March (copublished with Overseas Missionary Fellowship) is a much more personal book. In August 1978, after an absence of 28 years, veteran missionary David Adeney returned to mainland China. Six additional visits followed, most recently in 1985. Adeney has blended his personal observations with reports of other China observers to produce a moving, yet densely factual, account of the life of Chinese Christians—which is being transformed at breakneck speed under the banner of Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations.
Regal plans to copublish a series of books with organizations whose personnel work in the various regions of the world. Africa and China are the initial volumes. Future titles include Afghanistan, Middle East, and Lebanon: The Roots of Conflict.
Book briefs by LaVonne Neff, special projects editor at Youth for Christ; John E. Wagner, an attorney in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and David Neff, CHRISTIANITY TODAY associate editor.
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Testing God’s new creation in two Japanese prison camps.
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On an airplane high above Colorado, I finished reading Lang-don Gilkey’s Shantung Compound, an account of the selfish absurdities of some 1,400 merchants, missionaries, engineers, and their families, interned in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. Seat reclining, stomach warm with chicken teriyaki, my mind began to play. Of course I would not be so selfish as those internees. Why, what if a hijacker materialized in the aisle, right now? As an earnest Christian, I would naturally volunteer as a hostage in return for the other passengers’ safety. Possibly I would be shot, but (my imagination was at full gallop) most likely there would be successful, if tense, negotiations. And thereafter, a self-effacing interview with Dan Rather—
The man in the seat next to me was working a crossword puzzle with a stubby pencil that clearly would soon rub too blunt. What if this stranger requested the use of my Pentel mechanical pencil, its inexhaustible lead never more than half a millimeter thick, and that very moment annotating Shantung Compound?
Ego sinking in the mists of the evaporating daydream, I saw myself with clarity. In fantasy, I was prepared to offer my life. In reality, I concocted excuses to spare the lending of my $2 pencil.
Rationalizations are meant to hide unappealing truths from ourselves or others. I picture myself to be what I am not and can limberly blame others or my environment for my lapses. There may be consolation in the fact that, in this, I am no different from anyone since Adam, who said, “The woman you gave me for a companion.”
People are self-interested, and they rationalize about it. But the Bible clearly indicates that Christians are different—allegedly a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17) who, like Jesus, look first to the needs of others (Phil. 2:4).
I say “allegedly,” for considering the tattered history of Christians past and present (myself included), I wonder: Are we really different? Did Christ die and rise from death to any effect?
Laboratories Of The Soul
Gilkey’s Shantung Compound (Harper & Row, 1966) and a more recent but similar book are appropriate shovels for digging into this question. Empire of the Sun (Simon and Schuster, 1984) is an autobiographical novel by science fiction writer J. G. Ballard. Like Gilkey, Ballard survived internment in a Japanese prison camp for non-Chinese civilians living in China.
At the time, Ballard was the adolescent son of a British merchant; Gilkey, an American in his twenties, was a teacher and budding theologian. In their separate camps (Gilkey’s Weihsien, and Ballard’s Lunghua), these writers saw human nature and society reduced to a size manageable for study. Weihsien and Lunghua were laboratories of the soul. Life there, writes Gilkey, “was almost normal, and yet intensely difficult, very near to our usual crises and problems, and yet precarious in the extreme.” Unlike victims in German death camps, these internees were not routinely tortured and killed. “In our internment camp,” Gilkey notes, “we were secure and comfortable enough to accomplish in large part the creation and maintenance of a small civilization.…”
Gardens were planted. Space-saving devices and clever heating ovens were built. Idled college professors offered lectures on everything from the construction of the pyramids to the weaponry of World War I. The “Lunghua Players” produced Macbeth and The Pirates of Penzance. Weihsien had a “more than passable symphonette of some twenty-two pieces, whose last concert included a full performance (minus violins and tuba) of Mozart’s Concerto in D Minor.”
Yet, to resume Gilkey’s description, “our life was sufficiently close to the margin of survival to reveal the vast difficulties of [building and maintaining a society].… Had our life been more secure, the basic problems of our human lot might not have manifested themselves so clearly.” In these camps men and women were put under pressure, and under pressure revealed their true characters.
There is one more thing to note: Many of those men and women were priests, nuns, and Protestant missionaries—in a word, Christians.
Tripwires
Space, food, and security were basic scarcities that, like tripwires connected to the heart, provoked people to expose their underlying concerns and motivations.
At Lunghua, families were squeezed into the residence halls of a former college. And at Weihsien, about 1,500 men, women, and children were packed into 61 buildings in an area roughly the size of two football fields. In Gilkey’s dormitory, each man had 18 inches between his bed and those on either side.
Food, too, was scarce. At Lunghua: rice, water, and weevils (intentionally consumed for their protein). At Weihsien: potatoes, meat, bread, and sometimes cakes—but rarely enough to quell a nagging hunger. Gilkey and his fellow internees noticed that sexual fantasies were supplanted by imaginings of sweets and sumptuous banquets.
Security was the third scarcity. Although no internees were ordinarily tortured or killed, they never knew what would happen if, say, the Japanese met crushing military defeats. And if the captors did not attack, disease might. Cholera, malaria, and dysentery laid low weakened internees, and medical supplies and treatment were too limited to assure recovery.
The scarcities of space, food, and security created circumstances in which “no one feigns virtue any longer,” Gilkey observes, “and few aspire to it, for it hurts rather than pays to be good.…”
Creative Self-Interest
Since it did not pay to be good, selfishness fractured even the simplest human relationships. At Weihsien, this happened with Red Cross parcels.
These treasures—containing butter, Spam, cheese, chocolate, sugar, coffee, cigarettes—were first delivered from the American Red Cross in July 1944. American internees shared so that probably every person in the camp (composed of at least four nationalities) got a treat. American generosity was the talk of the compound.
Then another shipment arrived with about 1,500 parcels, seven to eight for every American internee. Or so the Americans calculated. The other internees estimated there was one parcel for each person in camp. The next day, seven Americans petitioned the Japanese commandant, insisting that the parcels be turned over to the American community to distribute the wealth as it chose. In response, the commandant impounded the parcels for leisure to ponder his decision.
Americans remained the talk of the camp. Bitter parents told their expectant children that “the Americans had taken away Santa.”
American self-interest was sometimes straightforward: Yankees contended that the parcels belonged to them. Others presented more sophisticated arguments: An attorney insisted it wasn’t a matter of how many parcels he got. “With me it’s the legal principle that counts.” The parcels were sent by Americans, and so were undeniably American property, the lawyer contended. To preserve principle, the Americans should be “faithful executors” to the donors who sent the food.
That was fancy footwork, but Christians were not to be outdone. One conservative missionary was exercised from a “moral” point of view. If the commandant ordered distribution of the parcels, Americans would lose the free choice to share, and so an opportunity to act morally. “We will share, but not on order from the enemy,” proclaimed this debater, guessing that each American would give away at least two of his seven packages.
Days later, into this shambles of community, a decision descended from Tokyo. One parcel would be given to each internee; the 100 extra, “previously assigned to the Americans,” would be sent to other camps. Thus everyone, Americans especially, ended up with less dearly needed food than if the parcels had been peacefully divided.
Ironic Armor
The missionary who insisted that the parcels be an opportunity for morality was not unique. Gilkey records many other occasions of pious rationalization. Among them was Mrs. White, whose family occupied two rooms, and who promised to consider prayerfully Gilkey’s request that her two teenage sons move into a dormitory with other teenagers. The next day, Mrs. White’s prayerful resolution was that her and her husband’s first moral responsibility to the camp was to “keep a real American home for our two boys.” So the boys should not go to the dormitory, and the family—coincidentally, of course—should continue to occupy two rooms.
“Granted that home and family are important to everyone,” Gilkey rejoined, “how about the ‘real American home’ of the couple living next door to you, the ones living with two boys in their one room?”
Mrs. White strenuously agreed, “I know—aren’t those Japanese just too wicked for words?”
Gilkey approached a missionary with the same request. This man offered a carefully reasoned reply. “I am asked a good bit by the other missionaries to preach in our church services,” he said. “It is for their sakes, and for that of the camp as a whole, that we need a little extra space in which I can have quiet to think out these sermons.”
The sad irony of these incidents is that Christians, no less than others, are self-interested. If anything, the Christian’s self-interest is at an advantage: he can protect it in the armor of divine sanction.
Looking around him in the camp, Gilkey concluded: “I had learned that men need to be moral, that is, responsibly concerned with their neighbors’ welfare as well as their own, if human community was to be at all possible; equally evident, however, men did not or even could not so overcome their own self-concern to be thus responsible to their neighbor.… And I began to wonder if … man [was] left with a crippling self-contradiction which he could not himself resolve.”
The apostle Paul’s cry echoes across the centuries: “When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
There is, fortunately, more to be said about the Christians of Lunghua and Weihsien.
Wearied Saints
Empire of the Sun includes a fascinating and telling scene: Two missionary widows, Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour, emerge from the hospital, carting a dead body to a small, bizarre cemetery of shallow graves, some with protruding arms and feet.
Young Jim noticed that the women, “although wearied,” handled the corpse “with the same care they had shown when he was alive.” Jim wondered, “Was he still alive for these two Christian widows?”
His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim in part respected devout Christians merely “for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual.” But this was not the boy’s only reason for respect: “Those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour and Dr. Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out correct.”
Moments later, Jim talked to Dr. Ransome, a man who “was curiously reluctant to discuss religious topics …, although he himself went to church services on Sunday morning.” Jim reflected on the man’s ingenuity and industry. He labored to exhaustion in the hospital, but his concern for others was ceaseless. Whenever the doctor was “resting,” he melted candles and immersed squares of old cloth in the wax. Cooled, these wax panels replaced broken window panes. Hours of this work kept out freezing winter winds, but few prisoners thanked their benefactor. “Still,” as Jim observed, “Dr. Ransome was not interested in their gratitude.”
Dr. Ransome’s counterpart in Gilkey’s book is Eric Liddell, the Olympic runner portrayed in the film Chariots of Fire. A missionary when imprisoned at Weihsien, Liddell was especially effective in his efforts with restive teenagers, many of whom had resorted to what Gilkey “could only term sexual orgies.”
Rather than unworkable curfews or other strictures, Liddell and other missionaries devised an evening program of entertainment, supervising dances, playing games, and offering science or language lessons. Passing the game room, Gilkey would see “as often as not Eric … bent over a chessboard or a model boat, or directing some sort of square dance—absorbed, warm, and interested, pouring all of himself into this effort to capture the minds and imaginations of those penned-up youths.” This man, “overflowing with good humor and love of life,” impressed Gilkey as the closest to a saint of any man or woman he had known. When Liddell died suddenly of a brain tumor, “the entire camp, especially its youth, was stunned for days.”
The Christians’ willingness to take on repellent though necessary chores surfaced early. Upon arrival, the nearly 2,000 internees found one latrine for women and three for men. Within days, the johns were unspeakably filthy. Nuns and priests, assisted by a few Protestant missionaries, finally tied cloths around their faces, borrowed boots and mops, and waded in.
As the years of internment proceeded, the missionaries and Catholic religious were often found assisting the elderly, or doing the laundry and watching the children of sick parents. The distinction these men and women earned was evident in the oft-heard comment, “No one but a missionary would have taken on that job!”
At Weihsien as at Lunghua, there were signs of a “new creation.” Certainly it was not only Christians who sacrificed nobly, but Gilkey noticed an other-interest that was a “quality seemingly unique to the missionary group.” In his estimation, “if there were any evidences of the grace of God observable on the surface of our camp existence, they were to be found here.”
Tales Of Hope
Ballard’s and Gilkey’s stories are hopeful. Christians have been different; they can overcome self-interest—certainly not permanently and finally, but consistently and significantly. It may repay us to dwell on the Christians who most consistently evidenced a “new creation.” Their stories say something about self-discipline, character, and the Christian’s resources in overcoming self.
When pressure revealed true character, one group showed a consistent ability to rise above self: the “professionally” religious—priests, monks, nuns, and missionaries. These people were accustomed to daily prayers, routine study of the Scriptures, and living without luxury. As a result, “camp existence with its discomforts, its hard labor, its demand for cheerfulness and a cooperative spirit was merely a continuation of the life to which they were already committed.…”
Men and women who were already self-disciplined best passed the tests of Lunghua and Weihsien. This jibes with the Christian expectation that character does not just happen, but is consciously developed. The camps are reminders that character may be conspicuous in crises, but it is built day-to-day amidst ordinary undertakings. The camps underline the importance of spiritual disciplines (such as fasting, almsgiving, and corporate worship) that help draw us away from ourselves.
But important as self-discipline is, the stories of Lunghua and Weihsien show that character ultimately comes from outside people. In Gilkey’s judgment, “The rare power of selflessness, what we call true ‘morality’ or ‘virtue,’ arises only when a life finds its ultimate devotion to lie beyond itself, thus allowing that person in times of crisis to forget his own concerns and to be free to love and help his neighbor.”
The experiences of the camp intimate that resources—especially the basics, food, space, and security—are a key to the character of people. Some who were prominent professionals and socialites before the camps showed much less character once they were hungry, crowded, and insecure. Their character, such as it was, apparently depended on three square meals a day, plenty of private space, and an assurance they would have them all tomorrow.
The Christians who overcame self-interest were no less hungry, crowded, or insecure. But they depended on a resource other than food, space, or physical security. To the degree they overcame self-interest, they were dependent on the God who is “rich enough for the need of all who invoke him” (Rom. 10:12, NEB).
We can summarize their attitudes and behavior in biblical terms. By giving up self to Christ, they gained all things in him (1 Cor. 3:22–23). And since they could never be separated from Christ (Rom. 8:32), nothing could ultimately threaten their resources. So freed, they set their minds on God’s kingdom, peace, and justice, trusting that all necessary things would come to them as well (Matt. 6:33–34).
Interestingly, Christ promised resources that correspond to the scarcities of the camps. He offered himself as living bread and wine (food), promised room in his father’s house (space), and insisted anxiety could end in trust of the same father (security).
These “resources,” of course, are to be understood in a spiritual sense. Yet they are real and manifest visible results. As Gilkey wrote after the hardships of Weihsien, “To be aware of our contingency, of the mortality of all we love and value, and yet to love life and act creatively in it, requires a deeply rooted sense of the ultimate goodness and meaningfulness of life.” Such goodness and meaningfulness, perhaps, might be found in a father who cares for us more than we do for our own children. This is a goodness and meaningfulness detected only in grace, with a Christian vision.
The Christian vision does not deny the corruption and dismal limits of self. It knows, furthermore, that suffering and death are inescapable, that life is difficult. But the Christian vision sees further to know that living is “not a matter of a greater demand, but of a greater supply, a bigger gospel, a broader grasp of what grace wants to do and already has done by calling persons to return to be God’s children” (John Howard Yoder).
And so we Christians are a “new creation,” the strange people who find life in the limits the world flees, who surrender to something beyond ourselves. We are, finally, the people who live by surprise and “out of control”—by the surprising gifts of God and in his control.
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Must a moral society tolerate the burgeoning market for perversion?
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Last May the U.S. attorney general empaneled a commission of prominent citizens to decide whether the pornography industry, ever hustling to satisfy a jaded clientele, had finally sunk beyond the depths of public tolerance, thereby inviting more governmental controls. In question was the flagrant perversion of an “entertainment” specializing in abuse—its magazines and films devoted to group sex, oral sex, anal sex, gay and lesbian sex, sex with pregnant women, sex with crippled women, bestiality, incest, and sadomasochism. And as to the extent of that abuse, Catharine MacKinnon, a prominent feminist opponent of pornography, testified: “Women are bound, battered, tortured, humiliated.… For every act you see in the visual materials, a woman had to be tied or cut or burned or gagged or whipped or chained.…”
To the commission’s public hearings, held last year in large cities across the country, came a remarkable procession of people with something to say about the subject. There were people who spoke for prostitutes, nudists, and Baptists. There were child molesters, molested children, detectives, FBI agents, postal inspectors, angry community activists, angrier feminists, sociologists, psychologists, sexologists, the surgeon general, the Senate chaplain, and six U.S. senators.
Above all, there were the pornographers themselves—publishers of “soft-porn” as well as the most unimaginable perversions—who came to patiently explain why obscenity must have its place in the sun, lest the country go to ruin.
The “Justification” Of Porn
Why must a moral society tolerate the burgeoning market for perversion? Indeed, who says it must? And on what grounds? What, in fact, are the strongest intellectual arguments foisted upon the public by the exponents of pornography, and what is an effective Christian response?
A few organizations occasionally defend pornographic interests, but most keep quiet. There are two organizations, however, that do press the case thoroughly and assiduously in whatever forum is available. They are the Playboy Foundation, a subsidiary of the magazine, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The ACLU’s goals are self-evident from its name, but its peculiar views of church-state separation have made it anathema to many evangelicals. The organization tirelessly sues to erase most forms of Christian expression in public places, while at the same time it defends the rights of the pornography industry to promote its messages as it chooses.
As for the Playboy Foundation, its flagship publication is tame when compared to its perverted progeny. But the philosophy underlying its advice columns and commentary is clear: “morality” is relative—anything goes that is mutually pleasurable between persons. Moreover, Playboy defends even the vilest obscenity on First Amendment grounds, claiming that censorship is a worse evil than any harm pornography causes.
Not surprisingly, Playboy and the ACLU are allied. Carol Pitchersky, associate director of the ACLU, told the American Bar Association Journal, “We have a very good working relationship with the Playboy Foundation. Not only does it contribute money but foundation leaders are involved in the organization in other important ways.” Burton Joseph, the foundation’s chairman, is on the Illinois ACLU board and has been on the national board. Christie Hefner (daughter of Hugh), president of Playboy Enterprises, is also on the Illinois ACLU board and belongs to the national ACLU President’s Committee. And according to Joseph, the Playboy Foundation has contributed about $150,000 to the ACLU.
Joseph, and Barry Lynn, the Washington, D.C., legislative counsel of the ACLU, both testified against obscenity laws at pornography commission hearings last year. Between them they made the most complete defense of pornography available today. Here is a summary of their major arguments:
• The nation’s vitality depends on free expression and debate of all ideas, so that the best ideas will prevail.
• Definitions of obscenity are impossible to formulate and apply fairly at local levels because tastes vary.
• The most common effect of pornography is the stimulation of fantasies. It is dangerous and futile for government to attempt to control the private thoughts of its citizens.
• Once society accepts the premise that it can control contemptible images, there is no stopping the regulatory process. Censorship can be, and has been, used to censor highly literary works.
• Even if it can be shown that pornography incites some people to violent behavior—and it has not been conclusively shown—broad intrusions into First Amendment rights are still unjustified.
• Censorship is an attempt to impose religious values on society. Censorship cannot be enforced, and therefore it demeans the law.
• Legal remedies already exist to protect people from actual sexual abuse, whether or not it is incited by pornography.
That Dark Word “Censorship”
These, then, are the main struts undergirding the “publish as you please” point of view. The heart of the argument, however, is that dark word “censorship”—and it is a potent tool for shaping the opinion of the undecided. After all, who, in a free society, can favor censorship? The very idea conjures up images of jackboots, book burnings, and governmental oppression.
The simple fact, however, is that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared in decision after decision that obscenity is not protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment (obscenity, essentially, is pornography that is so morally debased as to be unlawful). This was clearly established in the 1957 Roth v. United States decision, in which the Court majority wrote that all ideas having even the slightest social importance have full First Amendment protection, but “implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without social importance.”
In nine major federal and Supreme Court decisions since then, that principle has been reaffirmed. In what is, perhaps, the most important of them, the 1973 Miller v. California decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger strongly restated the principle: “This much has been categorically settled by the court, that obscene material is unprotected by the First Amendment.”
(When they cry censorship, then, obscenity merchants are shouting into the legal wind. The wonder is that so many people unfamilar with the law hear them and believe they have no choice but to endure the onslaught.)
Although the Supreme Court has spoken clearly, enforcement problems do arise at local levels when prosecutors are unwilling (or not encouraged) to enforce the applicable state laws, or when those state laws are not drawn in accordance with the standards of the Miller decision. Nonetheless, the legal principles are so clear that when Christians oppose pornography they need not fear they are forcing their religious views on anyone. All they need do is insist that the law of the land be enforced.
How Much Is Too Much?
History shows it is patently false to say that if society actively works to control offensive ideas and images, the censor will never be satisfied. In fact, a look into our own past shows the opposite to be true.
In the last century, Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, could destroy 50 tons of pornographic books and 3.9 million photographs; but today, such roundhouse rebellion has disappeared. There are occasional back-country book burnings, but they are disjointed and insular.
Fifty years ago, Massachusetts could ban the works of Theodore Dreiser and D. H. Lawrence; but today, An American Tragedy and Lady Chatterly’s Lover are plainly safe. So are other important works once in the dock, such as those of William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and James Joyce. Thus, no case can be made that suppression of any literature will ultimately threaten all literature. (A much plainer case can be made that unsuppressed obscenity breeds ever-more poisonous strains, given the evidence of the last ten years.)
It is questionable whether even the harsh censorship of sexually explicit literature in the nineteenth century ever diminished the free expression of ideas. Chief Justice Burger, citing a range of scholarly works on American thought, concluded in his Miller opinion that even when antiobscenity campaigns raged, there was no dampening of social discourse. Burger said:
“There is no evidence, empirical or historical, that the stern 19th century American censorship of public distribution and display of material relating to sex … in any way limited or affected serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific ideas. On the contrary, it is beyond any question that the era following Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt was an ‘extraordinarily vigorous period,’ not just in economics and politics, but in belles lettres, and in the ‘outlying fields of social and political philosophies.’ ”
Moreover, the Supreme Court has drawn the boundaries of obscenity so narrowly and precisely that no overcharged prosecutor can, today, remove legitimate literature for long. One of the three guidelines in the 1973 Miller decision limited the scope of obscenity to very graphic depictions. The Court even gave two examples of what this includes:
“Patently offensive representations of ultimate sex acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated. Patently offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions, and lewd exhibition of the genitals.”
The Court added two other safeguards: first, that the average person applying local community standards finds that the work on the whole must appeal to the prurient interest, and, second, that the work, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Significantly, when pornographers cry censorship, they are not joined by the mainstream publishing community. Townsend Hoopes is president of the American Association of Publishers, whose 300 members publish 85 percent of all general and educational books in the United States. In his testimony before the pornography commission, Hoopes said the Court’s definition of obscenity is so limited that it is no threat to the association’s members. He expressed concern over the exuberance of some local prosecutions, but he broadly endorsed the Supreme Court’s obscenity rulings.
And the American Newspaper Publishers Association, which represents the bulk of daily newspaper production in the United States, furiously defends any First Amendment breach it finds, but it did not even appear at the hearings. Newspaper publishers generally have not considered obscenity laws a First Amendment threat. (Local newspaper columnists and editorial writers sometimes do so, however, but not newspaper managements.)
The Human Tragedy
Because they so firmly attach themselves to the First Amendment, the spokesmen for the pornography industry are able to turn the argument away from the most devastating consequence of pornography—the physical and psychological abuse it causes people who are trapped by it, either as victims or victimizers. Astonishing evidence only now is emerging that shows the destructive attitudes toward sexuality and family life, and the brutal physical damage that pornography engenders, particularly to children and women.
Psychiatrists, psychologists, and other sexual abuse therapists described to the pornography commission case after doleful case, from city after city, of children who have stumbled upon parental caches of pornography and tried out what they saw—often with lasting physical harm to genitals, sometimes actual pregnancies, and often enduring psychological consequences. Parents, and sometimes children themselves, have come forward to recount lengthy episodes of child molestation. And battered women have told of spouses who forced them to imitate perverted sexual acts depicted in pornographic magazines, to the point of broken marriages.
But these are anecdotes, and it is critical to know whether they are isolated cases or symptomatic of a large-scale problem that requires a moral society to act decisively to protect its innocent. In answer to this pivotal question, systematic, scientifically sound studies are now offering conclusions that corroborate the anecdotal evidence. Here are some examples:
• Last year Victor Cline, a University of Utah psychologist, conducted for the U.S. Justice Department a pilot study of children who were customers of a New York dial-a-porn service. He interviewed 14 children, 11 boys and 3 girls, all about junior high age. (He located many other children, but parents would not allow them to participate in the study.) Cline found that without exception, the children had become “addicted” to hearing about explicit adult sex by phone. In several cases, the children made more than 300 telephone calls before parents received enormous phone bills and ended the practice. In one case, a distraught mother found no way at all to prevent her child from making the calls. The results of Cline’s small sample were so consistent that he believes it is valid to project a significant problem.
• One of the country’s preeminent researchers, psychologist Edward Donnerstein of the University of Wisconsin, conducted a careful study of the effects of pornographic violence (mutilation, rape, sexual murder, etc.) on men’s attitudes toward women. He found that a heavy diet of sexually violent movies (even R-rated movies) desensitizes men toward violence and makes them trivialize rape.
• Another preeminent researcher in the field, psychologist Dolf Zillman of the University of Indiana, studied the effect on viewers of nonviolent pornographic movies, featuring the common themes of fellatio, cunnilingus, intercourse in all conceivable positions, and group sex. He found that massive consumption of this creates strong appetites for ever-more bizarre forms of pornography. He also found that men begin to view women as insatiably sexual playthings; that men become more aggressive toward women; and that they begin to view rape as a trivial offense—something that all women secretly desire. “There can be no doubt,” he concluded, “that pornography, as a form of primarily male entertainment, promotes the victimization of women.”
(Because of the reputations of Zillman and Donnerstein, and their independent, yet similar conclusions, their findings are generally regarded as serious evidence of systematic attitude changes brought about by pornography. In the face of this, spokesmen for the pornography industry still maintain there is no proof pornography causes violence, even though it may change attitudes.) at the University of Pennsylvania, has been working with victims of sexual assault at Boston City Hospital since 1972. She edited a major book on child sexual assault in 1978 and was awarded a federal grant to study child pornography. She told the pornography commission that in her study of child sex rings, she found that adult pornography is used by child molesters to convince children that deviant sex acts are normal, and to break down their resistance.
• Judith Reisman, a researcher at American University, recently completed an exhaustive study in which she and her researchers analyzed the extent to which sex involving children was presented in every photograph and cartoon in every issue of the three most widely circulated pornographic magazines, Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. She found that from the first issue of Playboy in 1954, children in cartoons (or photographs of adults dressed to suggest older children) have appeared in sexual contact with adults, and the frequency and intensity of these contacts has increased through the years. Reisman reported that the dominant impression was that adult/child sex is glamorous, “thereby enhancing the impression that such activities are harmless.” In all, her team counted 6,004 images linking children with sex, or an average of 8.2 times in each issue of Playboy, 6.4 times in each issue of Penthouse, and 14.1 times in each issue of Hustler.
• The Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI Academy studied the histories of 36 men who had committed sexual killings. The study found that more than half had highly developed rape fantasies before they killed; and that visual sexual stimuli, such as pornography or voyeurism, were an important factor in developing the fantasies.
• The academy also studied the records of 157 cases of suspected “autoerotic” deaths. These are instances in which people accidentally asphyxiate themselves while trying to reduce oxygen to the brain, believing this heightens sexual arousal. Most of the deaths occurred by hanging. In 44 of these cases, police files mentioned the presence of commercial pornography at the scene (its absence did not necessarily prove it played no part). One wife volunteered that she found her husband’s body next to one of his bondage magazines, opened to his favorite picture. She said he often tried to replicate every knot in it. The average age of the 157 deceased was 26.5. Four of the deceased were children and 37 were teenagers.
What Christians Can Do
Obscenity laws are unlike most other laws. Their interpretation is meant to be flexible. This gives local citizens the opportunity to decide for themselves what their community standards are, within bounds. The challenge facing these same citizens, however, is to avoid having those critical standards shaped for them due to their own apathy and inactivity.
Most states already have enforceable obscenity laws, but in some communities the public does not pressure prosecutors to use them. (For example, the same state law ignored in New York City has resulted in the closing of most pornographic outlets in the state’s second largest city, Buffalo.) In other communities, judges assess fines so small that police officials lose heart. All of these problems have been solved in various places by committed people (many times pastors) willing to take upon themselves the responsibility to see that laws are enforced, either by present politicians or by new ones.
Experience has shown how much impact people can have. There are no “adult” bookstores in Atlanta, and Hustler magazine, generally available at most newsstands, is not sold anywhere in that city. Neither is explicit pornography, including Hustler, available in Cincinnati. The Playboy channel has been removed in Virginia Beach, Virginia (see “Pornbusting in Virginia Beach”), and hard-core videos are no longer available for rental in Williamson County, Texas, just north of Austin. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, some 2,000 volunteers took turns picketing for nearly two years before a new prosecutor was elected and the last pornographic outlet was closed. These are a few examples of the scattered victories that are beginning to be won by people who are demanding simply that laws be enforced.
Four organizations have been leading the way in providing information to citizens, advice to prosecutors, and in organizing local antiobscenity campaigns. They are the Citizens for Decency through Law, Morality in Media, the National Federation for Decency, and the National Christian Association. In 1983 these groups coalesced under one coordinating framework, called the National Coalition Against Pornography, led by a Presbyterian pastor, Jerry Kirk. (A good overview of the pornography problem and the most effective strategies being used against it are available in Kirk’s book, The Mind Polluters, published last year by Thomas Nelson.)
The coalition is beginning to enlist Christian denominations that have never before considered pornography to be a serious concern. Executives from 26 denominations (Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox) attended the coalition’s most recent national conference.
The evidence continues to build that pornography is harmful—in its degrading depictions of women, its destructive attitudes towards sex and moral health, and in the physical and psychological damage it inflicts upon children and adolescents. All citizens, and Christians in particular, must begin to share the responsibility for curbing this damage, a responsibility that a few are now bearing by themselves.
Pornbusting in Virginia Beach: “God got mad”
A newspaper reporter, disgusted by the snatches of movies he saw originating on the Playboy cable channel, approached a pastors’ group about the problem. “You have to do something,” he said. And it was then that the Reverend Frederick H. “Fritz” Stegemann felt a tug at the edge of his conscience: “I knew it was my turn in the barrel.”
In February 1984, Stegemann, pastor of the Open Door Chapel in Virginia Beach, Virginia, half-heartedly launched a letter-writing campaign. Stegemann admits it failed dismally because he knew nothing about the programming the channel offered. “I don’t subscribe to Playboy, and most Christians don’t. I was not aware of how horribly bad it was.” Then some newspaper headlines caught Stegemann’s attention.
“I started to notice reports of rape, assault, and incest in the paper,” he said. He was especially alarmed to learn that there were 60 reported cases of rape in 1983 in Virginia Beach, and 127 in 1984—a 112 percent increase. Stegemann wondered whether a connection exists between pornography and violent crime, and he learned that in cities where pornography is readily available there tends to be an increased rate of sexual crime and violence.
He was further disturbed by reports of the effects of pornography in the lives of some of the people he counseled. One 40-year-old woman came to him saying her husband ignored her and she feared her marriage would break up. She discovered that her husband stayed up night after night to watch Playboy movies and had no interest in normal sexual relations.
A city councilman told Stegemann hearings were scheduled to discuss a rate increase for Cox Cable’s 112,000 area subscribers. Setting aside his earlier disappointment, Stegemann prepared for another battle. An antipornography group in Memphis sent him a 90-minute videocassette tape of Playboy film clips, and he took it to his friend Paul A. Sciortino, the commonwealth’s attorney for the region.
But the city council paid scant attention to him. And Sciortino refused to watch the tape, telling his friend the Virginia obscenity law was too vague to use in prosecuting a cable television case. “There is nothing we can do,” Sciortino said.
Feeling he had struck out again, Stegemann asked God for wisdom, and received an answer: “Contact all the pastors in this city.”
He recruited 15 parishioners to spend two days calling every clergyman in town. “There was no pressure put on [the clergymen] to join an army to march on city hall,” Stegemann said. “We just asked if they would pray about an effort to rid this city of the pornography channel.”
His telephone volunteers heard the same response over and over: “We’re with you 100 percent.” Three of the pastors contacted volunteered a list of 80 pastors, representing 50,000 churchgoers, and presented the names to the city council.
At the packed public hearing on January 7, Stegemann and his supporters tried their best to persuade city leaders that Playboy did not belong among the cable listings in Virginia Beach. But the rate increase passed, nevertheless.
At this point, Stegemann believes, “God got mad. He heard his pastors in this city standing together against this sin, this filth and garbage, and God honored that. God as much as said to me, ‘You’ve done your part. Leave the rest up to me.’ ”
“The rest” included the uncovering of phenomenal profit making by Cox Cable. Consequently, the rate increase was reconsidered and denied. But with its continuation of the Playboy Channel, the broadcaster’s reputation was now doubly on the line. Stegemann took his videotape of the Playboy movies back to Paul Sciortino’s office and convinced him to watch it. What he saw on Stegemann’s tape convinced him that the channel might be violating Virginia’s obscenity statute after all.
With unanimous endorsement from the city council, Sciortino planned an investigation. He bought ten blank video cassette tapes and began recording the Playboy Channel every evening from 8 P.M. to 1 A.M. for ten days. He and a team of lawyers viewed all 50 hours of programming. “We knew that most of what they show would not be found to be objectionable under our obscenity statute,” Sciortino said. The exception was the “Hot Spot,” a movie shown each night from 11:30 P.M. to 1 A.M.
Those movies featured sex acts throughout, at intervals of every four to six minutes, including heterosexual, homosexual, and group encounters. Most had no discernible plot, acording to Sciortino. He and his lawyers watched these movies a second time, logging the frequency of sex acts in each film. They found one out of the ten films viewed that did not cross over the boundaries fixed by Virginia law, which says an appeal to prurient interest in sex must be the dominant theme of a film in its entirety for it to be considered pornographic.
Against the other nine, Sciortino drafted indictments, and the case went to a grand jury. They returned with seven indictments, saying two of the films were not pornographic because one had literary merit and the other showed only one nude figure at a time.
The grand jury set a trial date, charging Cox Cable with a Class 1 misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of $7,000. No indictment was entered against the Playboy Channel itself, which is based in Chicago. In response, Cox Cable dropped Playboy from its lineup on February 27, 1985. Because of Cox’s good-will gesture, Sciortino said, “We accepted their olive branch and dropped the charges. Our goal was the removal of the channel, and the channel was off the air.”
Today, there is no trace of an organization left from the efforts of the 80 pastors, and Stegemann believes that is the way it should be. “If it happened again, we would stand together again.”
BETH SPRING
A Disrespecter of Persons
The following is adapted from testimony presented to the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. Linking the use of pornography with aberrant behavior, it is typical of many stories the commission heard.
I came from an abusive background but had no exposure to pornography. In fact, my parents were very strict about the issue of sex and sexuality.
In 1972, the year we first met, Tom introduced me to pornography. He brought to my attention the variety of magazines available as “resource material.” He treated this information as normal, and so I began to read.
We discussed some of the techniques described in the magazines, and eventually Tom began to experiment with tying me up for sexual purposes. I found this very frightening and thought something was wrong with me because I was not receptive. Tom’s approach was that I’d “get used to it.” For the next 11 years I would wonder what was wrong with me sexually.
In the fall of 1975 I found out Tom was having sex with many of our friends. Each one of them had been told she was the “one” in his life, aside from me. During this time I felt rejected. I felt even more that I had a personality flaw or that something else was wrong with me. Why else would a husband bed with so many unattractive women?… Tom swore he did not use prostitutes, but he [admitted he] did fantasize quite a bit with magazines. I thought: [Why can] my husband have sex with magazines but not with me?
Once in this sexual dry spell, Tom tried to get me to have sex with one of my friends (his lover). I was so dead inside that all I could do was watch the two of them and feel disgust and contempt for myself because I had allowed my marriage to get to this point.
In 1981 we moved back to Houston, after Tom could no longer function in his job. I thought at the time that his boss was mean to him and that he was overworked. Now I know that he could no longer partake in the daily and hourly use of pornographic magazines, theaters, and shops because he had to account for his time.
The years 1981–82 were also the beginning of our financial downfall. Money had disappeared mysteriously over the years. Tom would not let me have access to our finances. I thought he was telling the truth when he said he liked to pay the bills and keep the records.… [But, in fact, much] of our joint income was spent on sex in porno houses, porno magazines at $10 per copy, and the hotel rooms and movie theaters that he frequented.
I lost the home I had worked so hard for and the ability to buy another because my husband would rather spend time having sex with a magazine than work to pay the mortgage and other bills. More publicity about the negative effects of pornography would have certainly opened my eyes sooner, and those bills would have been paid. Instead, our money was spent on something that cripples the mind and body. It warps a person’s perception of himself and others.
There was an enormous void spiritually. I have learned how important spirituality is. Pornography and spirituality do not coexist. If a person is spiritually aware, he has respect for himself and others. Pornography sells and feeds off of disrespect for self and others.
It has been two-and-a-half years since I divorced my husband. I am a single parent who has a lovely child. I am afraid of relationships with men, but like to believe I’ll find someone to love and trust, and who will feel the same about me.
Tom is getting ready to remarry, and I am not upset or jealous of his bride-to-be. I would love to tell her about Tom, but I know she wouldn’t believe me.
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Despite its disastrous effects, the use of cocaine is skyrocketing.
Youngsters with loving, caring parents, who live in nice homes in wonderful neighborhoods, are almost as likely to become involved in drug use as those from deprived backgrounds.
—Dr. Thomas Gleaton, director of a drug-abuse resource group
A new popularity is fast making cocaine the nightmare of the ’80s, one from which Christian parents are not exempt. A 1970 study of the students at Arizona State University showed that only 2.5 percent had tried cocaine. Yet a 1984 nationwide study found that among high school graduates aged 22 to 26, the percentage had jumped to 33. Five thousand new users are now entering the market for cocaine daily, and that number is increasing with terrifying speed.
Is cocaine a harmless (if illegal) drug occasionally sniffed by high society over the punch bowl? Not anymore. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that there are 22 million cocaine users in the U.S.
The effect? The Benjamin Rush Center, a hospital in Syracuse, New York, with a drug addiction program, reported almost no admissions for cocaine treatment during the 1970s. Today 40 percent of its beds are taken by addicts.
Addicts? To cocaine? We know of addiction to alcohol, and to heroin. Yet most experts believe cocaine is more addictive than even heroin.
On occasion, the immediate results of cocaine are remarkable. Some users describe the result in early stages of its use as the most pleasurable and exciting experience they have ever known. One said it was equivalent to a thousand orgasms. Some who have poor social relationships suddenly feel everyone loves them. Students fearing academic demands find release. And a psychopharmacologist at UCLA’s School of Medicine, Ronald K. Siegel, notes that cocaine often attracts highly motivated, very goal-oriented students. If in the ’60s hallucinogens were associated with countercultural dropouts, today some students are using cocaine to help them succeed in their studies.
Unfortunately, that is only step one.
From 1976 to 1981, cocaine addicts seeking admission to government clinics rose 600 percent. Psychologist Mark Gold of Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, estimates that fully one-quarter of those who experiment with cocaine eventually become addicts.
The slide downward has a physical side. Those who “snort” cocaine may find the cartilage of the nose destroyed. Those who inhale it find it destroys the elasticity of the lung passages, and produces sores. It can produce loss of appetite and arrhythmic heartbeat. Crystals of cocaine can form under the skin. Death is often the result of the continued use, since cocaine overstimulates the nervous system, and, taken with alcohol or other drugs, can be especially dangerous. The Drug Abuse Warning Network reports that from 1981 through 1985, cocaine deaths increased by 324 percent.
Psychological effects may involve wild mood swings and extreme paranoia. The cocaine depression after the high leads many to more and more frequent use.
Price is one reason for the sudden interest in cocaine. High tech procedures for producing the crystalline form (“rock”), combined with highly organized operations for smuggling a drug far less conspicuous than bales of marijuana, have cut the price to about $10 a fix (dosage). Instead of spending $20 on a movie, soft drinks, popcorn, and candy, a couple may “do two lines of coke.” A high school student with a part-time job can make enough money to get started. Yet in time, expenses of $ 1,000 per day are not unusual. This drives many to become dealers, selling the drug to others.
The rapid rise in the use of cocaine, and the disastrous results, mean a problem of monumental proportions is developing.
If a father called you or me for help because his son was in the midst of an epileptic-like cocaine seizure, what would we do? Of course, we would call a doctor and seek assistance from a drug-abuse program. And since the use of cocaine often arises from poor personal relationships or a sense of failure, we can assure the son that we do not cut him off for his actions.
We can link him up with young people, perhaps Christian, who have overcome the habit and can aid him in a support group. Many say such groups are the most valuable tool they have found. A realistic Bible study group can help here, too.
When the disciples were confronted by the child who, possessed by a demon, threw himself into the fire, they despaired of helping; but Christ said, “This kind can come out only by prayer” (Mark 9:29). We, too, can pray (and fast) for the deliverance of those we love.
Very likely the father, and perhaps we too, feel overwhelmed, seeing our prayer life as insufficient to provide much help at such a time. But as we pray, we can believe that, although we do not know how to pray as we ought, the Holy Spirit intercedes with groans too deep for words (Rom. 8:26).
Further, we can make sure that members of our church know the consequences of cocaine. This drug carries the image of being a safe and satisfactory part of high-society life. We need to debunk such a frightful misunderstanding. Accurate information is available from such sources as 1–800-COCAINE, a national information and referral service, and from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Also, the appeal of cocaine to some well-motivated high school and college students suggests that we must have a clear view of our own values. We may find that we strive to succeed for reasons that will not hold up before Christ’s scrutiny.
Do our children and those we teach and influence see us engaging in business practices and in personal schedules that suggest a succeed-at-any-cost philosophy? Motives are more caught than taught, and we can never turn off our influence. A look inward may be in order.
As Christians we are committed to a realistic view of life. Goals are obtainable. Life at times will be gruelling, but victory is worth the risk. We must share love with our children and all whom we wish to protect. We must provide examples of recreational “escapes” from reality that will leave us not debilitated, but better able than ever to carry on our work.
Such homely Christian virtues are our best antidote against involvement with all destructive drugs—including cocaine.
KENNETH S. KANTZER AND PAUL FROMER
Texbooks Flunk Exam
Are public school textbooks biased? Are they censored?
The answer to both questions is yes, and the nature of the bias is clear: Religion and traditional family values have been excluded.
This is the conclusion several colleagues and I reached after a recent careful examination of 60 representative social studies textbooks, in a project funded by a grant from the National Institute of Education.
In grades one through four, the texts introduced the child to U.S. society—to family life, community activities, ordinary economic transactions, and some history. None contained one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life. For example, not one word referred to any child or adult who prayed, or who went to church or temple.
The family was often mentioned, but the idea that marriage is the foundation of the family was never presented. The words “marriage,” “wedding,” “husband,” “wife,” did not occur once. Nowhere was it suggested that being a mother or homemaker was a worthy and important role for a woman.
The fifth-grade U.S. history texts included modest coverage of religion in colonial America and at the early Southwest missions; however, the treatment of the past 100 years was so devoid of reference to religion as to give the impression that it has ceased to exist in America. The sixth-grade books dealt with world history or world culture, and they neglected, to the point of serious distortion, Jewish and Christian contributions.
High school books covering U.S. history were also studied, and none came close to adequately presenting the major religious events of the past 100 years. For example, there was not one reference to a prominent preacher such as Billy Graham or Norman Vincent Peale. Most disturbing was the constant omission of references to the large role that religion has always played in America.
Taken together, these results make it clear that public school textbooks commonly exclude the history, heritage, beliefs, and values of millions of Americans. This is a serious injustice. More serious, the minds of many children are being coerced against the will of their parents.
What should be done? Obviously our textbooks must be changed to present a more truthful picture of America’s past and present. In part, this change can be accomplished by parents, PTA’s, and others challenging the inadequate books now being used. Equally important, however, is the need for publishers to respond with better textbooks. It even seems appropriate to challenge Christian publishers to produce such books, and not only for Christian schools, but for public schools as well. The country has a long-term need for new textbooks that more accurately reflect the true content of our country’s history and values.
Nevertheless, even with such texts, in the public schools as they are now constituted, a fair presentation of all traditions important in American life is possible only at a shallow level. So parents should have greater freedom to choose their child’s school. This would not only help create new and more competitive schools—it would also support new publishers and more varied textbooks. We must finally recognize that the very pluralism of American life requires pluralism in American schools.
PAUL C. VITZ
Dr. Vitz is a professor of psychology at New York University
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All who work for the firm identified on an envelope I once received as “God & Son Inc., Doing Business for 2,000 years with Sinners Like You” receive regular in-service training. A few months ago, God gave me a refresher course on patience. I flunked it.
Patience means living out the belief that God orders everything for the spiritual good of his children. Patience does not just grin and bear things, stoic-like, but accepts them cheerfully as therapeutic workouts planned by a heavenly trainer who is resolved to get you up to full fitness.
Patience, therefore, treats each situation as a new opportunity to honor God in a way that would otherwise not be possible, and acts accordingly. Patience breasts each wave of pressure as it rolls in, rejoicing to prove that God can keep one from losing his or her footing. And patience belongs to the ninefold fruit of the Spirit, which is the sanctifying profile Jesus set for his disciples.
As a Calvinist, I have a strong doctrine of providence; and as a devotional instructor, I often deal with sanctification. So I had taken it for granted that patience was something I was good at. (You always fancy yourself good at that of which you know the theory.) But look at what happened.
I was committed to being in England after Christmas, but a memorial service for a long-time friend required my presence there just before the holiday. Thus, for the first time ever, I had to be away from home at Christmas. Self-pity and grumbling. At Chicago I learned that an unscheduled stop would delay the London flight two-and-a-half hours, so I had to call ahead and change arrangements. Resentment. The plane had no ground heating, so at both Chicago and Detroit we boarded into 8 degrees of frost—the same temperature as outside. Cold contempt—emotionally cold, I mean—and prideful pleasure that it wasn’t Britain’s or Canada’s national airline that was doing this to me.
Organization in Britain seemed sloppy, and British Rail did badly. Cynical gloom. A phone call from Vancouver contained a hurtful personal criticism. Seething anger, which kept me awake all night. I flew out of Heathrow full of hard thoughts about my travel agent for not booking me on another airline, where the mileage would have been credited to me under one of the half-dozen bonus schemes to which I belong. Petty greed.
Poor performance? Very poor indeed. (Didn’t I tell you I flunked the course?)
Two things made my lapses of temper especially disgraceful. First, the trip was marked by all sorts of blessings—a new friendship, old friendships renewed, an evangelistic opening that I had prayed and waited ten years for, and more. Finding that God is with me should have banished all bitterness of the kind that I was indulging. Where should I ever want to be, save in the place of God’s appointment?
Second, I know the theory of patience so well. The Murphy’s Law aspect of life is set out in detail by my favorite biblical author in Ecclesiastes; and Romans 8:28 has been a key text in my teaching for years. My moods were a series of sins against knowledge, outwardly dissembled, inwardly cherished. Hypocrisy. However, the Father and the Son still do business with sinners like me, and as I left Britain, “I mercy sought, and mercy found.” “I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’; then thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin” (Ps. 32:5).
On the way back from England, the film provided by the airline was a movie I had long wanted to see, but the sound channel was not working. Another of the entertainment channels offered Verdi’s La Traviata complete, but after the first hour it clicked back to the beginning, so that I only heard the first act—three times. Now, at baggage claim in Miami, I find one of my bags kicked in. Suspicion rises to certainty: I am being made to repeat the course I flunked.
Maybe I can do better this time round. Pride? Self-confidence? We’ll see.
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