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Evangelical leaders try to reconcile reports of thriving churches with accounts of repression.
Evangelical leaders from the United States and Nicaragua met over the summer in both countries, attempting to clarify conflicting reports about religious freedom under the rule of the Sandinistas. Confusion about Nicaragua has resulted from appeals to U.S. churches from both supporters and opponents of the Marxist government there.
The Reagan administration supports counterrevolutionaries, or “contras,” who are fighting to overthrow the Sandinistas. Administration officials—aided by Nicaraguan opposition leaders who live in the United States, as well as by church-related research organizations such as the Institute for Religion and Democracy—have asked the church to support Reagan’s position.
Mainline Protestant groups, including the National Council of Churches, oppose U.S. policy and say the Nicaraguans are capable of making their own political choices without outside interference. Evangelicals have found themselves caught in the middle. They have tried to reconcile reports of thriving churches, increased literacy, and other improvements with equally compelling accounts of repression, censorship, and manipulation of Christians by the Nicaraguan government.
A group of seven U.S. evangelicals, representing the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), visited Nicaragua earlier this year. Led by NAE executive director Billy A. Melvin, they met with leaders of an independent evangelical pastors’ fellowship known by its acronym CNPEN (The National Council of Evangelical Pastors). They also met with Gustavo Parajon, head of an evangelical relief and development agency called CEPAD (Evangelical Committee for Aid and Development), which works closely with the Sandinistas. In July, NAE hosted CNPEN’s leader, Felix Rosales, at meetings in Washington, D.C.; Wheaton, Illinois; and Los Angeles. Rosales, a former Baptist pastor, coordinates a team of six Nicaraguan evangelists called Voice of Salvation.
CNPEN has received little notice in the American press or from mainline churches, which have channeled support to Nicaragua through CEPAD. CEPAD coalesced after an earthquake devastated the capital city of Managua in 1972. It is a cooperative social service organization that involves most of Nicaragua’s Protestant denominations. In 1981, CEPAD formed CNPEN as a fellowship of pastors. The group conducts workshops and retreats for pastoral training. More than 600 Nicaraguan pastors participate in CNPEN, according to Rosales.
Political Nonalignment
CNPEN has resisted entreaties from the Sandinistas to become politicized, and it is no longer closely associated with CEPAD. “Times in our country are giving us a tremendous challenge,” Rosales said. “We have pressures from the left and right. [Both sides] want pastors to be identified with political matters, but we have maintained our identity as the church of Jesus Christ because we want to win the whole country for Jesus Christ.”
CNPEN’s refusal to take sides has hampered its request for legal incorporation. Until it is incorporated, CNPEN technically is prevented from owning property or meeting in public buildings.
“As a pastoral council we don’t really exist in the eyes of the government,” Rosales said, “but here we are, and the government knows it. We’re not given to putting out reports condemning anyone. The politicians don’t understand this type of identity.
“We are praying and fasting continually—not praying that the government falls, but that God would bless the government so there can be progress and people can live in peace,” Rosales told U.S. church leaders.
The NAE’s Melvin described the church in Nicaragua as “hurting and suffering, primarily because of the economic situation that is commonplace in the country.” Shortages of basic supplies persist, and inflation approaches 300 percent.
The NAE representatives who accompanied Melvin to Nicaragua earlier this year included J. Philip Hogan, Guy Nees, and Norman Wetther, missions executives for the Assemblies of God, Church of the Nazarene, and the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society, respectively, NAE’s president, Robert McIntyre, and two World Relief Corporation staff members, Tom Willey and Tom Hawk, also traveled with the group.
They were received enthusiastically by local congregations as they were whisked from one church to another for brief appearances on a Sunday morning. “The first church I went to was packed out,” Melvin said, “with 500 to 600 people and people at every window looking in.” He said he observed no direct evidence of religious persecution but was troubled by indications that liberation theology is firmly entrenched in circles where church and government interact.
Several of NAE’s 45 member denominations have churches in Nicaragua, totaling between 1,000 and 1,500 congregations. The Assemblies of God is the largest Protestant church there, with 679 churches and church branches in 1984. The number of Assemblies of God congregations has doubled since 1978, the year before the Sandinistas toppled dictator Anastasio Somoza in a revolution.
The church’s growth at the grassroots has been matched by increasing tension with the government. The interpreter for the NAE delegation, David Spencer, an Assemblies of God missionary in Panama, flew into Nicaragua before the NAE group arrived. Spencer was detained several days by airport officials and released only after Hogan, the Assemblies missions executive, saw him being held. Hogan asked CEPAD representatives who met the NAE group at the airport to request that Spencer be allowed to leave with the other Americans. CEPAD representatives regularly greet visiting churchmen at the airport and help them clear customs quickly.
The Assemblies of God continues to work with CEPAD, but the denomination’s superintendent in Nicaragua resigned his position as vice-president with the evangelical group. G. Edward Nelson, the Assemblies’ secretary of foreign missions relations, said the denomination brought home its full-time missionaries from Nicaragua in 1978. “We emphasize that our position always has been apolitical,” he said. “[Church members there] resist identifying with the Sandinistas but still obey the laws.”
Credibility Gap
There are indications that Sandinista popularity is eroding, due to severe economic hardship and an unpopular military draft that is draining Nicaraguan families of their young men. Sandinista officials blame their nation’s difficulties on U.S. intervention and have appealed through churches for an end to the harassment. They have attempted to generate alarm in their own country by announcing that the United States is planning an invasion.
Rosales said the Sandinistas warned of an invasion in early July. At about 3 A.M. on July 4, he said, Nicaraguan tanks surrounded Managua, and soldiers pounded on doors. But the government has cried wolf so often, he said, that few paid attention. He overheard two women joking about it in the marketplace the day before, saying they looked forward to selling their wares in U.S. dollars “after the invasion.”
A similar credibility gap appears to exist between the Sandinistas and Nicaraguan churches. The country’s predominantly Catholic population shows scant interest in the Sandinista-approved Catholic “people’s church,” which advocates a mix of Christianity and Marxism. It is distinct from the Catholic church most Nicaraguans adhere to, led by Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo. Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in the New York Times Magazine that the people’s church teaches that the Christian’s first duty is a commitment to the revolution, and sin is equated with “unjust capitalist social structures.”
The people’s church, according to Llosa, is an elitist entity that has little in common with the mass of churchgoers who “do not practice the reflective, intellectualized, critical religion that the people’s church espouses. On the contrary, theirs is a simple, intuitive, disciplined, and ritualized faith.”
The traditional Catholic hierarchy, led by Obando y Bravo, has stood firm against Sandinista attempts to dictate to the church. “The church’s frontal attack against Marxism,” Llosa says, “perhaps even more than the economic crisis or external pressures, … has been a moderating influence on the regime.”
Evangelicals in Nicaragua agree that all churches there have a critical role to play. Many believe their independence from the government will help hold it accountable to the people it purports to serve. “The government can’t give itself the luxury of turning evangelical pastors against it,” one observer said. As long as that tension between church and state is maintained, Nicaraguans of all faiths believe their nation will fend off any attempt at totalitarian rule.
Deaths
Robert L. Constable, 77, retired executive vice-president and general manager of Moody Bible Institute, former director of Moody Press; July 6, in Dallas, of cancer.
Stanley S. Kresge, 85, former chairman of the Kresge Company and the K Mart Corporation, United Methodist layman, who gave $500 million in gifts to various charities and institutions around the world through the Kresge Foundation; June 30, of a heart attack.
J. D. Grey, 77, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, former president of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, and for 35 years pastor of First Baptist Church in New Orleans; July 26, in New Orleans, after a long illness.
James C. Sams, 74, president of the 3.5 million-member National Baptist Convention of America, for 17 years president of the Florida Progressive Baptist Convention, and a pastor for 32 years; July 20, in Jacksonville, Florida.
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Three Christian Congressmen examine their party’s purpose and direction.
Democrats, still smarting from their near shutout in last year’s presidential election, are reassessing their party’s future. There is widespread talk of the need for change, with few apologists for the status quo. U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) said in a recent speech, “We cannot afford to blame the voters. For the critical question is not what they failed to see, but what we failed to show.”
Elected Democratic office holders who also are evangelical Christians have a particular set of concerns they hope to communicate to the party leadership. Three of those office holders agreed to talk with CHRISTIANITY TODAY about how their faith influences their approach to politics.
Congressmen Don Bonker, Tony Hall, and Bill Nelson represent Washington State, Ohio, and Florida respectively. They span a wide range of political opinion, from Nelson’s southern conservatism on defense issues to Hall’s advocacy on behalf of the hungry to Bonker’s liberal outlook on human rights abroad and environmental issues.
Bonker, elected in 1974, chairs a Democratic task force on trade, a bipartisan study group on exports, and a subcommittee on international economic policy. He breaks ranks with traditional liberals on economic matters, noting that welfare programs provide only marginal help.
Hall is from a district encompassing southwest Ohio. He has emphasized human rights abroad and care for the poor at home during his four terms in Congress. Frustrated that a total of eight standing committees have jurisdiction over hunger issues, he fought successfully for the establishment of a select committee on hunger in the House of Representatives.
Nelson represents the Florida district that includes Orlando with its multiple tourist attractions, as well as the Kennedy Space Flight Center with its related high-technology and defense industries. He chairs the House Science and Technology Space Subcommittee. He is the most conservative of the three men interviewed, elected in 1978 as an advocate of more military spending, a balanced federal budget, and strict disclosure laws for political candidates.
How do you assess the shape your party is in today?
Bonker: At the state and local levels, the Democratic party is holding its own. It’s numerically dominant in more states. We do less well at the national level because the perception of our party’s leadership has not been the best. Until we have someone in the White House who can lead effectively and articulate Democratic party positions, we will continue to have problems.
Nelson: The image of the leadership—specifically (Speaker of the House) Thomas “Tip” O’Neill—just doesn’t fit with what America looks for today in a leader. O’Neill’s frame of reference is from another generation and another philosophy. That has made it difficult for Democrats from conservative or moderate districts. Second, the activists in the Democratic party, who basically are left of center, have formed the image of the party. That is not representative of the Democratic party in the South or in much of the Sun Belt.
Bonker: Nor the West.
Hall: Nor in the Midwest.
What about the Democratic party’s underlying political philosophy? Should government promote a common public virtue or simply manage competing interests?
Hall: Government cannot solve all the problems. As Christians, we need to acknowledge that there is nothing more basic in Scripture than what we are to do for the poor, the hungry, the elderly, the widow. It is the second-most talked about theme in the Bible. The Democratic party has always had a reputation of concern for the downtrodden. That is basic to our party, and it ought to be basic to government.
Bonker: Tony’s absolutely correct, but we shouldn’t let those concerns obscure our commitment to realistic and pragmatic leadership that is able to deal effectively with domestic and international problems. The Democratic party has been made up of the “grand coalition”: farmers, small business, labor, various ethnic groups, environmentalists, teachers, senior citizens. We must learn to speak directly to these voters and not filter our message through groups that claim to speak for them. We should not be held hostage by any single group.
Hall: We need to be a party that steps out and says, “This is what we stand for.” I want the Democratic party to be one that is way out in front, not saying, “We’ve got to do this because special interests like it.” We should do it because we think it’s right.
What reasons would you give a Christian in your district for becoming active in the Democratic party?
Nelson: The political stability of this country is built on a strong two-party system. If we start organizing political parties according to ideology, with conservatives in one party and all the liberals in another, what will happen is fragmentation. We’ll have the centrist party, the progressives, the ultra-left, the ultra-right. Each party needs to operate as a broad umbrella, under which all different political philosophies can gather. Therefore, I would tell a person in my district, “We need conservatives and moderates in the Democratic party because we need a viable party, and we will only do so if we can keep it in the mainstream.”
Bonker: Christian involvement is necessary to keep the Democratic leadership accountable to the values, and supportive of the issues that are important to evangelicals. If Christians do all their work in one party, and that party is not in power, they’re not going to have much influence on policy. The Christian community would be much stronger if it were perceived as being more bipartisan.
Hall: The Democratic party includes lots of Christians, lots of Jewish people, lots of poor people, lots of wealthy people. If Christians want to have an impact, they need to be involved in the two-party system. What would be the reason for Christians to join only the Republican party? If they did that, they would be missing out on a large segment of the American people. Christians are to be mindful of the needs of others and have an impact on everyone, not just on one particular group of people.
A common perception left over from the last election is that Republicans generally welcome religious influence in public policy making, while Democrats prefer to keep it out of the public square.
Bonker: My perception is that Washington-based conservative groups have been actively recruiting evangelicals to the GOP based on a political agenda that they find very appealing. I believe that well-intentioned evangelicals are, in this manner, being manipulated politically. These conservative groups have successfully brought about a major political realignment, notably in the Bible-belt South.
Nelson: I’m not offended by religious lobbyists. For a good airing of the issues, we need input on all sides. What concerns me is when groups say their position is God’s position on a host of issues—issues that one would strain to find mentioned in the Bible.
Hall: The only person on the campaign trail last year who talked about Jesus Christ was Jesse Jackson. He had great courage in talking about the issues and in the same breath talking about Jesus. Democrats for the most part did not try to distance themselves from him.
Many evangelical voters were influenced in the last national election by the parties’ positions on moral issues, including abortion and gay rights. Are these issues going to be reassessed by Democrats?
Bonker: The Democrats have not handled the abortion issue well at all. We are concerned about many issues, of which abortion is one. There is no consensus in either party on the abortion issue, but the Republicans by and large are on the right side according to evangelicals. Regrettably, the Democrats come up short on questions of personal morality. There are important moral and religious issues, but I think people who have only abortion or pornography on their political agenda ignore much about what the Bible says our priorities ought to be.
Nelson: It is very important to me that the Democrats be perceived to be what the majority of Democrats are in this country, and that is people who favor a strong national defense, people who are God fearing, people who want prayer in their homes and generally want prayer in public schools. The way we have to change that is to change the perception of the national Democratic party.
Hall: The danger is that the Democratic party might think it has to capture the high ground morally just for the sake of its image. We should be more concerned with doing what is moral rather than trying to appear moral. If we believe that something is absolutely right, we should not be afraid to take a stand, regardless of what our polls show.
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A Chinese church leader tells Americans that his country is allowing increased religious freedom.
As if opening another window to the West, Bishop K. H. Ting Guangxun and several dozen other church leaders in the People’s Republic of China hosted some 50 non-Chinese Christians at a recent five-day symposium on the church in China.
Ting (sometimes spelled Ding) told his visitors—most of them Americans—that Christians are finding increased freedom in the “new China” under the Communist government of Deng Xiaoping. He added that Chinese Christians are helping the country achieve its socialist goals.
The visitors who were asked to speak at the symposium were overwhelmingly from the evangelical-conservative camp, said participant Werner Burklin, executive director of the International Conference on Itinerant Evangelists to be held next year in Amsterdam. Former astronaut James Irwin, of the High Flight Foundation, spoke about his Christian faith; and Sam Wolgemuth, president emeritus of Youth for Christ International, spoke on prayer. United Methodist leader Joseph B. Kennedy, head of the U.S. China Education Foundation and one of the symposium’s organizers, presented a Western view of the Chinese church. Others gave summaries of church growth and missionary work around the world.
Ting, president of the China Christian Council and head of the Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), China’s officially recognized Protestant body, described life in China under Communist rule. He restricted his comments to the period following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the end of the infamous Cultural Revolution, during which Christians were harshly persecuted. Since 1979, when the government initiated a series of reforms, Ting said, “a growing church [has had] … the freedom to worship, propagate its faith, educate its youth, live in Christian homes, [and] publish journals, books, and Bibles.”
Other Chinese church leaders joined Ting in briefing their guests on conditions in China. One reported that 1.6 million Bibles have been printed in China since 1980. He said the Bibles are distributed through churches and the China Christian Council offices, and are available to all believers, including members of the many so-called house churches that are not aligned with the TSPM. The church leader said that a new agreement with the United Bible Societies soon will see the arrival of new printing equipment and the printing of “several hundred thousand Bibles and 500,000 New Testaments, new hymn-books, new catechisms, a collection of sermons, and books for lay training.”
The portrayal of church life in modern-day China painted by Ting and his colleagues did not square with reports of religious persecution widely publicized in the West. Some of the symposium participants came with deep suspicions about the nature of the TSPM’s relationship to the Chinese government. Ting acknowledged that violations of believers’ rights may occur in some parts of China. But he insisted that freedom of religion is protected by law, and that the TSPM is not under government control or direction.
He said China’s 1979 constitution, which changed the priorities of the Communist party, deemphasized the propagation of atheism and protected religious freedom for those who choose to believe. Since then, he said, nearly 3,500 churches have reopened, with new churches opening at the rate of at least one a day. He also told of “tens of thousands of meeting points,” or house churches, that are surfacing around the country.
Ting estimated China’s Protestant population at between three and four million, up from 700,000 in 1949. The Catholic population is roughly equal to the Protestant population, he said, with Muslims numbering 20 million and Buddhists 100 million. But he urged caution, saying “no one really knows how many believers there are.” He dismissed as exaggeration such estimates as 40 to 50 million Christians, suggesting that some in the West may be circulating those figures in an attempt to drive a wedge in the public’s mind between the organized church and the house-church movement. Westerners need to know that it is hard to be a Christian in China, Ting said, “and that we emphasize quality, not quantity.”
The Chinese participants said they welcome gifts of Bibles brought in by tourists and other visitors. But they warned that large-scale Bible smuggling can harm the church’s credibility. They also lamented the lack of communication between Christian broadcasters in the West and church leaders in China.
The Communist party’s priority today, commented one TSPM leader, is to build a strong modern society by promoting the “united front,” a cooperative effort involving all groups, secular and religious. The government no longer views the Christian faith as a threat, he said, and it realizes that Christians are honest workers.
Ting said Chinese Christians fear that their country’s government could again fall into the hands of hard-line ultra-leftists. He indicated that Christians are praying for deliverance from such a calamity. Yet in the repressive days of the Cultural Revolution, he said, “we learned to respect and love the Bible more, because most of them were burned.”
Burklin, one of the Westerners who participated in the symposium, was born in China to missionary parents and lived there for 18 years before Mao’s army forced his family out of the country. He said he was surprised to see the Chinese participants “carrying Bibles, lecturing from Bibles, and reading from Bibles.” He said he sensed “a strong evangelical spirit among all those who attended. They came across as men and women without guile.… My prejudices softened after meeting Bishop Ting. I was overwhelmed by his humility, his spirit, and by his spiritual insight.”
It was Burklin’s fifth visit to China within the past four years. “There are signs of a strong, healthy church in China,” he said. He noted that evangelists were numbered among the pastors, seminary professors, and other Chinese participants at the symposium. He said there was strong support among church leaders for a preaching visit by evangelist Billy Graham. (Ting issued an official invitation to Graham last year. The evangelist is “awaiting the right time and circumstances” to make a definite decision, according to an aide.)
As a result of their experience, Burklin and Wolgemuth drafted an 11-point statement addressed to believers outside China. It calls on Christians to help, not criticize, the church in China, and to undergird it with love, concern, and prayer. It exhorts Christian broadcasters to evaluate their programming in light of the needs in China and to listen to the advice of the country’s Christian leaders. It also urges evangelical leaders to explore ways in which they might enter into “co-laborship” with their Chinese counterparts in such areas as the provision of books for 12 new seminaries; the possible exchange of gospel music teams; and evangelism, without violating the Chinese church’s indigenous principles.
The paper concludes by expressing appreciation for the clear biblical teaching provided by Chinese symposium participants, which included a strong emphasis on the Atonement, the Resurrection, and the need for personal conversion.
Judge Dismisses A Case Against Pastor Who Refused To Break A Confidence
A Florida judge last month dismissed a case that centered on a minister’s right to maintain the confidentiality of a counseling session.
The dismissal freed Nazarene pastor John Mellish of a jail sentence for contempt of court. The sentence was imposed last year after he refused to testify against a man who was suspected of child abuse (CT, Oct. 5, 1984, p. 80). A 1976 state law required Florida pastors to divulge information about suspected child abuse.
The case stemmed from a counseling session that Mellish had with Earl Sands, a former police officer. Sands was arrested in August 1984 and indicted on charges of sexual battery of a child. Mellish, who was subpoenaed by the state prosecutor’s office, refused to testify against Sands.
In September Mellish received a 60-day jail sentence for contempt of court. The pastor spent a night in jail before he was released on bond.
The American Civil Liberties Union provided an attorney to defend the pastor, and Mellish appealed his contempt conviction to the Fourth District Court of Appeals in West Palm Beach, Florida. In the meantime, Sands pleaded guilty to charges of raping a young girl and was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Appellate court judges refused to rule on Mellish’s case because of a law passed earlier this year by the Florida legislature. That law, which takes effect next month, makes clergymen immune from having to report any confession they hear regarding child abuse. The 1976 state law exempted ministers from reporting all suspected crimes except child abuse.
The new law was not made retroactive. However, the appellate court returned Mellish’s case to Broward County Circuit Court Judge Harry Hinckley, asking him to rule on a motion to vacate the contempt sentence. Hinckley said he still felt that Mellish was guilty, but because of the new law and Sands’s guilty plea, he vacated Mellish’s sentence.
JULIA DUIN in Florida
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The convention showed what 15,000 high school students, two youth organizations, and scores of churches have in common.
Amid much hoopla, more than 15,000 Christian high school students and youth leaders converged on Washington, D.C., hoping to “ignite our world.” The convention, called Youth Congress ’85, was cosponsored by the high school ministries of Youth for Christ (YFC) and Campus Crusade for Christ. It was intended to give kids a spiritual shot in the arm and a strategy for on-campus evangelism.
Testimonies were punctuated with resounding applause. Hard-driving musical praise brought delegates to their feet—stomping and clapping. Sermons triggered the kinetic response of an old-fashioned tent meeting.
But Youth Congress organizers had higher aims than merely sizzling student emotion. They wanted to fire up students and youth leaders to influence their world for Jesus Christ, with the goal of establishing a ministry to students in every high school in the country.
Seminars at the convention focused on practical areas of consistent Christian living, offering ideas and tools for personal evangelism. To put those ideas into action, students took to the streets to gain initial exposure to witnessing. Some 6,000 of the teenagers marched through downtown Washington, witnessing and feeding the poor. Others shared their faith in a park through music, drama, and personal evangelism. Some surveyed area residents on their religious beliefs, while others visited refugees in nearby Virginia.
It took two years to frame the logistics of the mass gathering, to hammer out themes, to agree on speakers, to secure top Christian music acts, and to write a new edition of “The Four Spiritual Laws” evangelism tract. (The Youth Congress version, used in outreach efforts during the week, featured five principles, reworked diagrams, and a different title. It carried the imprint of both YFC and Campus Crusade for Christ.)
Like the tract, nearly everything about Youth Congress ’85 was marked with collaboration. As much as being an evangelistic strategy session, it was to be a display of Christian unity. The convention lineup was carefully balanced: one-third YFC people, one-third Campus Crusade people, and one-third representatives of local churches.
The convention’s general sessions were programmed for the television age, complete with sophisticated sound and lighting systems and huge video screens. Christian music celebrities, man-on-the-street style interviews, music videos, and, of course, sermons, all found their way into the programming. In the end, what mattered most was not so much a Christian rock singer shouting “Oh yeah, you really need a Savior … RIGHT NOW,” but author Rebecca Manley Pippert quietly urging the 15,000 delegates, “You are called to be compassionate more than you are called to be cool.”
Inner-city youth worker Buster Soaries told the students, “We’re here to talk about courageous faith.… Courageous faith is, ‘Though I stand alone, I’ll stand. Though I pray alone, I’ll pray. God is with me.’ ”
Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, warned about “yuppie-ism,” the tendency of Christians to adopt their values from American culture. “If you turn on the television [to view most Christian broadcasting],” he said, “you will see that the message is, ‘Come to God because he can give you more blessings, more wealth, more success, more happiness.’
“No,” Colson thundered. “We don’t go to Christianity because it makes us feel good. We go to Christianity because Jesus Christ was laid to rest in a tomb. But he rose out of that tomb, and he conquered death, and he lives today!” When he finished speaking, 15,000 teenagers rose to their feet in ovation.
At the closing rally on the Washington Mall, popular Christian speaker Josh McDowell told the crowd: “We need young people who are going to follow Jesus and let the crowd follow them.… Will you make a difference in your world?”
“Yes!” the delegates screamed.
“Will you make a difference in your world?” McDowell repeated. Again the affirmation swept across the Washington Mall.
It will take time to assess the convention’s impact. But Youth Congress organizers are optimistic. Said YFC president Jay Kesler: “We cannot ask adolescents to grasp everything that a middle-aged person would grasp. But, to the best of their ability, I think these kids grasped that the Christian faith [means] giving all you know of yourself to all you know of God.”
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Three books in talk about American apathy in the face of the Holocaust.
May 12, 1945. Russian troops smash their way into Berlin, capital of Hitler’s annihilated Third Reich, hoping to capture der Führer himself, the one-time paperhanger who has plunged the world into a blood bath of violence, horror, and cruelty. But he and his mistress have committed suicide and been cremated by fanatical followers. The Nazi nightmare is over.
Forty years later, the Holocaust seems like a terrifying dream, a Kafka-like melodrama that could not have occurred—though in soul-freezing fact it did.
What was the reaction of the civilized, nominally Christianized world with its humanitarian and religious ideals to Hitler’s massive policy of genocide? In particular, what was the U.S. reaction? At first, incredulity: Oh, maybe certain restrictions are being imposed on ethnic groups, primarily the Jews. But don’t forget that most Communists are Jews, and Hitler is simply fighting the Bolshevik menace.
As the facts became known, however, the general reaction was initial shock, temporary concern, and then apathy. Anyone inclined to doubt the widespread indifference of most Americans should examine three impressive and well-documented books: Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Overlook Press, 1985 reprint of 1966 edition); Robert W. Ross, So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews (Univ. of Minn. Press, 1980); and most recently, David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (Pantheon Books, 1984).
Indictment
These authors rehearse in detail our shameful failure as a nation to play our self-defined role of global good Samaritan. They tell how we, like unprotesting bystanders, averted our eyes from whatever may have been happening across the Atlantic.
Unquestionably in our republic, with its supposedly unprejudiced freedom and justice for all, there flowed an ugly undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Some Americans applauded the Nazi pogrom. When the Christian Century spoke out against the persecution of the Jews, Richard Nelson of Mount Vernon, New York, castigated its editors in a letter headed, “Nothing Will Save Us But a Pogrom.” He charged that the Century, selling out Christians in order to acquire Jewish dollars, was carrying on “an hysterical campaign of nauseous bathos which would be credit to a Hearst paper.… Before we see the Hitler flare-up end, it would not surprise me to have it reach America and have the blessing of the very men who have been damning Hitler now.… The Jew backs up before violence only. He will not change, or control himself, without it.”
Such anti-Semitism was abetted by a rabid antialienism and pronativism that infested even the upper echelons of our federal government. Rigid immigration laws and quotas were retained despite the repeated pleas to admit human beings who without a place to flee would die agonizingly.
An atypical, yet revealing, diatribe was mailed to Samuel Dickstein, chairman of the House Immigration Committee. The writer charged that Mr. F. D. Rosenblatt, as he sneeringly called the President, had been scheming to make the U.S.A. a home for undesirable Semites but he “fortunately died before his lousy plan could be carried out with you and your tribe.… We don’t propose to stand idly by and have that bunch of parasite[s] pushed down our throats over here. We fought to preserve America for Americans and our children and not for a bunch of refujews.”
To be sure, rank-and-file citizens, to say nothing of our moral and spiritual leaders, were by no means as hateful as that. Yet the record is plain: The majority of our opinion shapers, educators, industrialists, and public officials did little or nothing to implement the proposals made by desperate individuals and frantic groups to stop the slaughter.
Expert Witness
In order to highlight our nation’s moral failure, let us ask the three authors, who together bring this formidable indictment, about the responses of five different entities: the government, the President, American Jews, non-Jews, and the churches.
1. What was the reaction of our government as the predicament of the Jews held in Hitler’s power became known beyond dispute? Arthur Morse quotes the secret document that was submitted to President Roosevelt in January 1944 by Henry Morgenthau, then secretary of the treasury. It flatly avers that State Department officials “have not only failed to use the Governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this Governmental machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews. They have not only failed to cooperate with private organizations in the efforts of these organizations to work out individual programs of their own, but have taken steps designed to prevent these programs from being put into effect. They not only have failed to facilitate the obtaining of information concerning Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe but in their official capacity have gone so far as to surreptitiously attempt to stop the obtaining of information concerning the murder of the Jewish population of Europe.” Six days after receiving that document the President announced the establishment of the War Refugee Board, which labored valiantly to help European Jews.
As for Congress, Wyman tells us that “Except for a weak and insignificant resolution condemning Nazi mass murder, [it] took no official action concerning the Holocaust.”
And Morse writes of our government: “Failure to protest was the first in a long series of refusals to respond in any manner. The moribund immigration policy of the U.S., and America’s failure to reassert its traditional defense of humanity, combined to produce total apathy.”
2. What was the reaction of President Roosevelt personally, a humanitarian greatly admired as a champion of the underdog? Morse quotes the words of Mrs. Roosevelt: “Franklin frequently refrained from supporting causes in which he believed, because of political realities.” Morse remarks that though Mr. Roosevelt could not at first come to the physical defense of the Jews, his “failure to come to their moral defense was something else.” Wyman adds this negative judgment: one-time Congressman Emanuel Celler alleged years after the war that, instead of igniting “some spark of courageous leadership,” our President had been “silent, indifferent and insensitive to the plight of the Jews.”
3. What was the reaction of American Jewry to the Nazi program? Ross cites an article that appeared in Opinion, a Jewish monthly: “More painful than the world’s silence is the failure of American Jewry and the American Jewish leadership to do anything themselves or to compel government action in behalf of the victims.… Even national Jewish organizations charged with the task of overseas relief did not do all that could have been done nor all that should have been done! Ultimately and in the final analysis the guilt for the death of five million Jews rests upon all of American Israel. If American Jews had really been deeply aroused, our public officials would have been compelled to initiate real rescue work.” Unfortunately, as Wyman explains, American Jews were sadly ineffectual because of “their failure to create a united Jewish movement and … lack of sustained effort.… Along with the lack of unity, American Jewry’s efforts for rescue were handicapped by a crisis in leadership.… And an additional problem was the inability of American Jewish leaders to break out of a business-as-usual pattern. Too few schedules were rearranged. Vacations were seldom sacrificed. Too few projects of lesser significance were put aside. In brief, there was, a Zionist spokesman afterward lamented, no ‘unquenchable sense of urgency.’ ”
4. What was the reaction of America’s non-Jewish population? Similar to the Jewish community, it was business as usual—only far more so. Here is Wyman’s description of how people lived in the U.S. while Jews were dying in Germany: “Another obstacle to American concern for the European Jews was the preoccupation of most people with the war and with their personal affairs. Public opinion research disclosed that typical Americans, still acutely aware of the Great Depression, were mainly concerned about their jobs and their job chances after the war. They also worried about their boys and men away from home. And they gave a lot of attention to such questions as to how to spend and save and when they could drive their cars for fun again.” These personal matters crowded out even headline issues, except for the progress of the war.
5. But what about the reaction of Christians? Did churches bearing the name of Jesus arise in righteous wrath and obey the biblical injunction to “speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute” (Prov. 31:8)? Wyman’s reply: “America’s Christian churches were almost inert in the face of the Holocaust and nearly silent too. No major denomination spoke out on the issue. Few of the many Christian publications cried out for aid to the Jews. Few even reported the news of extermination except infrequently and incidentally.… At the heart of Christianity is the commitment to help the helpless. Yet, for the most part, America’s Christian churches looked away while the European Jews perished.”
One exception, whom Ross applauds, was the editor of the Hebrew Christian Alliance Quarterly. He turned the cold print of its Winter 1943 issue into a passionate cry for action: “What do these revelations of German atrocities do to you? Are you sick at heart? Are you indignant? You should be. Too long have we Christians been silent. Our voices of protest should have been heard long before this has happened. We are our brother’s keeper and we are duty bound to help the helpless and to pray for them, to feed and clothe them. AND TO DEFEND THEM IF NECESSARY. We are not asking for revenge. We call for the defeat of Hitler and his philosophy.”
Of course, there were hundreds of thousands of Americans, Christians and Jews alike, who prayed fervently, gave money and time sacrificially, and used every resource they had to help. But by and large, America’s response was silence, apathy, inaction, and insofar as war conditions allowed, life as usual, business as usual, and church as usual, too. Sermons rarely referred to the anguish of the Jews except, among evangelicals, as Hitler’s program was interpreted as the fulfillment of prophecy, an oblique proof of the Bible’s truth.
Self-Interrogation
The furnaces of death-camp crematories were extinguished in 1945. Places like Dachau are morbid points of interest for tourists. But 40 years later, have we forgotten the lessons that, it was assumed, had been indelibly etched upon our collective psyche?
Some of us were adults then. What was our reaction? Were we motivated to any sustained action? What are we doing when we hear of genocide, of peoples afflicted, persecuted, and oppressed? Have we succumbed to compassion fatigue?
Do we have a more realistic view of human nature, the abysmal depths of evil to which it can sink? Are we aware that intelligence, education, scholarship, science, religion, and even Christian faith provide no guarantee against the future perpetration of such atrocities?
Do we in God’s name denounce the very first manifestations of racism in jokes, slurs, and stereotypes?
Are we alert to tendencies in our society that, if unchecked, may pave the way for the rise of a freedom-destroying dictatorship?
Is our patriotism a blind chauvinism? Grateful to God for this free and peaceful democracy we inhabit, are we its critical lovers and loving critics? Do we understand the danger of nationalistic self-righteousness, which can keep us from perceiving that our government’s policies, made by egocentric mortals, may be wickedly hard-hearted, short-sighted, and wrong-headed?
Do we refuse to render unquestioning obedience to any human authority? Are we prepared to be part of a lonely minority undergoing ostracism and, if necessary, death in order to stand for moral principles and biblical imperatives?
In the face of monstrous inequity entrenched in powerful institutions, do we give up the battle? Or do we stubbornly continue to do what we can?
In keeping with Paul’s instruction to Timothy, are we praying daily for “rulers and kings and those in authority,” beseeching the merciful Lover of all mankind to restrain the growth of secular ideologies that can become modern Molochs?
Do we hope to avoid historical amnesia by praying with Rudyard Kipling, “Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, / Lest we forget, lest we forget”?
Sunday Morning Live!
Worship Is a Verb, by Robert E. Webber (Word Books, Inc., 1985, 224 pp.; $12.95). Reviewed by Ben Patterson, pastor of Irvine Presbyterian Church, Irvine, California.
Let me speak my piece before I let Robert Webber speak his. Consider these two scenes: an ancient Canaanite consorts with a sacred prostitute; a Hebrew sings psalms in the temple. What is the essential difference between these two forms of worship?
Consider again: a Greek in first-century Ephesus attends a bacchanal; a few blocks away, a gathering of Christians breaks bread and shares a cup in thanksgiving to remember their Lord’s death and to experience his presence among them. What sets these worship services apart?
The essential difference may well be that for the pagan, worship is an experience, a noun, while for the man or woman of the Bible, worship is action, a verb.
True, pagan worship is, by definition, the worship of false gods. But you don’t have to worship false gods to be pagan. You can worship the true and living God in a pagan manner. That happens when worship is seen as a noun and not a verb.
Moreover, pagan worship can be extraordinarily debased and licentious. But it does not have to be prurient to be pagan. Pagan worship can be aesthetically uplifting and morally high minded but still be pagan insofar as it is an experience and not an action.
Webber’s Turn
Now that I’ve let off steam, let’s listen to Webber. This Wheaton college theology professor has written a book on the subject of worship entitled—you guessed it—Worship Is a Verb. Buy it right now. Read it. Then, if you are not a pastor, promise yours that you will double your pledge if he does. Or promise him that you will at least think about it if he does.
If you are a pastor, give it to your worship committee to read, or to your staff. Follow its guidelines scrupulously as you pray for a movement of the Spirit of God in your congregation. Our Lord said the Spirit blows where and when he wills, so there is no worship technique that will, ipso facto, bring revival. But I am convinced that if we learn to worship God along the lines Webber recommends, the Holy Spirit will find our sails spread wide when he does blow.
Webber’s thesis is this: worship is something we do, not something that is done to us. In worship, God’s people sing to God, pray to God, listen to God, praise God, and give thanks to God. Webber organizes these activities of worship around four themes or motifs: worship celebrates Christ; in worship God speaks and acts; in worship we respond to God and each other; and all creation joins in worship. The thread running through them all is the active role we are to play in the worship of God. Worship is not an experience we have in the presence of God, Webber insists throughout, but the act of offering God our best when we are in his presence.
Pagan worship—even so-called Christian worship done paganly—always misses this crucial distinction. The pagan performs acts of worship in order to have the experience of transcendence, ecstasy, the numinous, or whatever. Worship has happened for the pagan when the experience is attained. If the experience can be had without the rigors of the acts, so much the better. If a crackerjack preacher or a first-class choir can give you goose bumps and a lump in your throat without any effort on your part, excellent! For the pagan, worship is a noun; his experience is the definition.
For the man or woman of the Bible, the acts of worship, of love and adoration, are the worship. If the experience accompanies them, wonderful. If not, it was still worship. One hopes the experience will come some other time. Biblical worship is a verb; God is the direct object.
Best Of The Bunch
Webber’s book stands out from the crowd of recent worship-renewal books because of the creative way the author interacts with the richness of the Christian worship tradition. We evangelicals have long acted as though we believed that God has done little or nothing since the death of the last apostle up to the present. That is worse than delusion; it is conceit. To discern and to appreciate what God is doing now we must discern and appreciate what God was doing in all the yesterdays of his people. That kind of reflection on the past will protect us from error and give a depth and theological integrity to the things we do in the present.
F. F. Bruce once commented that tradition is a good servant, but a terrible master. Webber’s proposals for worship renewal, while grounded in Christian tradition, are not slaves to it. He provides a dynamic framework within which the rich diversity of the body of Christ can find full freedom of expression in its worship. Groups as widely divergent as Bible fellowships and Presbyterian congregations, Pentecostals and Plymouth Brethren, can all use the principles Webber lays down and still remain true to their own identity.
Worship Is a Verb is not only rich in good worship theology, but it is filled with practical suggestions and examples of how the theology can become incarnate on Sunday morning. After each chapter dealing with one of Webber’s four worship motifs, there follows a corresponding chapter showing how it can be done. At the end of the book is a study guide with discussion questions for each chapter.
Kierkegaard described Christian worship as a performance in which God is the audience, the congregation is the performer, and those who stand up before the congregation (preachers, readers, choir, soloists) are the prompters. The popular mentality of evangelical Christians has the professional preachers and musicians (who should be prompters) playing the role of the performers and the congregation (who should be performers) playing the role of the audience. It is bad enough to have the prompters doing what the performer ought to be doing. But it is blasphemous for the performer to presume to play the part of the audience—for that is to presume to stand in the place that only God can occupy.
Most Christian congregations are functional blasphemers in that they come to Sunday morning worship as an audience. Webber’s book is a guide for the prompters who want to get their performers out of their seats and back on the stage.
God-Intoxicated Writers
An American Procession, by Alfred Kazin (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1984, 448 pp.; $18.95). Reviewed by Daniel Pawley, an assignment writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
How might one tour the Christian’s relationship to American literature and its theological foundations? The best current guidebook; Alfred Kazin’s An American Procession.
Kazin understands the theological roots of our literature. Like T. S. Eliot, who once condemned some of D. H. Lawrence’s ramblings because they came out of a mind “free from any restriction of tradition or institution,” Kazin suggests that literature does not arise in a theological vacuum. He consequently pays attention to authors’ Christian upbringings and develops a narrative with Christianity and the church as central themes.
“Build Your Own World.”
The characters in Kazin’s narrative are the writers themselves, and he begins in the 1830s with the enchanting Reverend Emerson resigning his pulpit with a farewell sermon on the Lord’s Supper. Kazin writes: “No one had ever been more truly born to the ministry than Emerson.… For nine successive generations in New England, Emersons had been ministers.” Once Emerson had made up his mind to vacate tradition, though, he turned from sermons to essays in which he developed his revolutionary theme of self-reliance. Boldly he wrote: “There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties.… Build therefore your own world.”
Literature does not so much establish culture as reflect it, and the sensitive mind reflects what is happening in a culture at a given time. In Emerson’s mind the church had lost its appeal to the educated classes. “History,” says Kazin, was replacing religion “as the first drama of human experience.… Freed from obedience to superstition, dogma, hierarchy, and Sunday routine, man … would find in himself all that men had ever meant by God.”
The self-reliance motif filtered down to the writers Kazin calls “Emerson’s children” and in some way shaped most American literature to come. No one emphasized the self, in all its arrogance, more than Walt Whitman: “One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person.” And for the hermit Thoreau, the self alone, with God’s creation, provided a basis for spirituality. Kazin writes: “For spiritual life Thoreau depended so much on his daily and hourly search of fields and streams that he sometimes felt he was wearing nature out even as it was wearing him out.”
However, the emphasis on self did not cancel the emphasis on God. Although Emerson was far from orthodox Christianity, Kazin describes him as “God-intoxicated,” a label that could have applied to Whitman and Thoreau as well. “Not God was dead but the church!” Kazin adds. These writers tried to be religious without adhering to the church—a fruitless undertaking, as history has shown.
Spirit Without Structure
Unrestrained by orthodoxy, the writers who followed seemed somehow trapped into producing out of the void: Spirit without structure. They reacted differently, though. Hawthorne, for instance, had a “strikingly uncooperative imagination,” says Kazin, and he recognized that it was a serious mistake to try to bury the heritage of orthodoxy. “The past contained the one secret they were always looking for.”
Hawthorne, moreover, chose to write about Puritan New England; about sin, a sovereign God, and individuals who lacked assurance of their salvation. He wrote about a “higher meaningfulness and moral purpose,” Kazin points out. Many of his stories developed a dark, penetrating psychology of sin’s effects; yet for all the blackness, much of Hawthorne’s work proved to be “more dramatic than any newly ‘liberated’ self rebelling against nineteenth-century convention.”
Melville, on the other hand, epitomized the wandering soul lost in the cultural void. Hawthorne said concisely of the bearded man with Spanish eyes: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”
Like others in Kazin’s procession, Melville had grown up with religion. His skepticism was fueled, Kazin suggests, in the South Seas where corrupt missionaries were uprooting native society. Kazin describes Melville as “the great American agonist, forever trying to recapture his belief.” His characters assumed the roles of orphan, castaway, and renegade from orthodox Christianity; an “anxiously searching mind that has lost his father in heaven.” Said Melville: “I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper and that we are the pieces.”
A Tale Of Backsliders
The torturously analytical Melville was probably the most violently unhappy of all those in the procession. But his inability to come to terms with his Christian heritage seemed a thread that tied him to most of the others. As literature expresses culture at large, one cannot help coming to view America and its literature as a tale of backslidden Christians: an entire nation unreconciled to its heritage, refusing to see that to be severed from the past means disaster.
Kazin develops this theme with different lapsed authors.
• Of Emily Dickinson: “Religion was the background of her life, but her quest for a living God was almost humorous.… God was an idea, not a person.”
• Of Mark Twain: “… even though he unwittingly kept to the determinism of his Presbyterian upbringing, he turned it into a grimly assertive denial of God’s grace and man’s possibility of salvation.”
• Of Stephen Crane: “… his father was a Methodist minister, his mother was a bulwark of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union … [but] Crane chose to be negative about whatever his class took as gospel—especially the Gospels.”
• Of Theodore Dreiser: “Dreiser had been scarred by … the rigidity of his German Catholic father, his Mennonite mother’s seeming helplessness … [and] he managed to die a member of the Communist Party.”
Microcosms
The individual lives in Kazin’s account provide microcosms of the entire procession. As Kazin points out, “Modernist literature would picture history exclusively as a Great Fall.” It seems as if each writer grew so fused to the skeptical, rebellious spirit of his time, that each author’s “fall” mirrored collapses in society itself.
Of Hemingway, for instance, Kazin asserts: “He knew that the public world was pushing him and everyone else toward an abyss.… His emotions were prophetic, his antennae were out to the truth. He knew that destruction is a god over our lives, that the fear of death shapes us, that without any belief in immortality there can be no expectation of justice, so that the whole ghastly century is beginning to look like one unending chain of murder and retribution.… There is no charity in his writing, … he portrayed us and the pitiless century into which we were born.”
On a more heartening level, Kazin draws attention to T. S. Eliot who, despite a catastrophic emotional breakdown, managed to convey greater feelings of hope than others of his era. The man who had once complained that as a Unitarian he had been reared “outside the Christian fold” seemed to be an honest seeker after God’s truth. Says Kazin: “Salvation was a distant hope, but for Eliot it was somehow more urgent than for anyone else of his generation.” Unfortunately, Kazin’s narrative terminates in 1930, and he does not report Eliot’s later conversion.
On The Outside, Looking In
Kazin identifies with his cast of characters when he says, “I tend in my own belief to be rather Emersonian,” and when he writes, “Emily Dickinson summed up … much of my argument when she wrote in a letter: ‘We thank thee, Father, for these strange minds that enamor us against thee.’ “Kazin described himself to CT as “a faithful Jew without being a particularly observant one.”
Perhaps his vantage point, a personal spirituality positioned outside the dominant religious tradition of our culture, contributes to a deeper understanding of writers who could neither believe nor ignore the Christian faith. He states: “A Jewish intellectual of my generation inevitably gets more education from the world around him than from his Jewish faith. Being an American, I’ve always been interested in the Christian faith without becoming a Christian myself. My interest in Christianity is entirely cultural and historical.”
Kazin’s book has been promoted as “the most important study of American literature in our time.” For those who practice the Christian faith, the book seems especially valuable. Kazin knows that theology is what has made our literature important, and that theological analysis remains the truest way to probe the soul of America.
A Church Musician’s Faithful Companion
Dictionary of Hymnology, by John Julian (Kregel Publications, new edition 1985, 2 vols., 1,306 pp.; $120). Reviewed by Richard Dinwiddie, music director of the Chicago Master Chorale.
Hymns historically have been one of the most significant means of proclaiming the Word. Luther’s critics charged that his hymns were more effective than his sermons.
Hymns can even propagate heresy. Fourth-century bishop John Chrysostom tried to counter the popular heretical hymns of the Arians with orthodox hymn sings—until he finally banished the Arian heretics altogether.
Hymn backgrounds and anecdotes enrich sermons and enhance the people’s understanding of their own music. Regrettably, although such stories affect our emotions, many are either apocryphal or so highly embellished that truth is buried in fancy.
Integrity
Enter the Rev. John Julian, D.D. (1838–1913), an English canon and vicar who wrote and translated many hymns. Julian recognized that the great power of hymns could be used with integrity only if the hymns were treated with respect, not only in their meanings, but also in their historical origins and significance.
In 1892, Julian published hymnology’s equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary under the title, Dictionary of Hymnology, Setting forth the Origin and History of Christian Hymns of all Ages and Nations, with special reference to those contained in the Hymn Books of English-speaking Countries. Not only is it the basic source in English of much hymnological information, but, even after nearly a century, it remains the only readily available source of much of that information.
The dictionary was a heroic objective, and Julian struggled heroically to achieve it. Producing this scholarly work to preserve the mass of hymnological information he saw in danger of being lost, he examined primary documents in many libraries and personally amassed a large quantity of documents. He was assisted by 44 other editors plus various contributors.
Julian revised the work and added a supplement in 1907. Dover Publications issued a two-volume reprint in 1957.
Now, after being out of print for several years, the 1907 revision has been reprinted by Kregel Publications in a high quality edition, with the text cleaned up and the type enlarged. The work will sell for $120, but Kregel is offering a special prepublication price through December 31.
Between The Covers
The 1,768-page dictionary includes 462 pages of indexes with a supplemental cross-index of 31 pages. There are over 15,000 entries, many written by Julian himself, including 30,000 first lines and references to over 400,000 hymns. Authors, translators, editors, first lines of hymns, categories, nationalities, and denominational groupings are listed alphabetically.
Since the dictionary focuses only on the hymn text, and not on the tunes, only writers are discussed.
Two of the most important authors are Isaac Watts (11 columns) and the prolific translator John Mason Neale (10 columns). By contrast, Luther rates only 2 columns.
Extensive articles treat hymns grouped by language origin. English, with 15 columns, would be expected. However, there are 20 columns on Greek hymnody, and 30 columns on Latin hymnody, the latter including an in-depth discussion of medieval musical notation. (The influence of the nineteenth-century Oxford movement, an Anglican attempt to return to the piety of the ancient church, accounts for the large quantity of hymns of Latin and Greek origin, all given in the original language.) There is even a 10-column discussion of Syriac hymnody!
Julian deals at length with important British hymnals such as the Sternhold and Hopkins “Old Version,” first published before 1549 during the reign of Henry VIII, and the Tate and Brady “New Version” of 1696. He also discusses Latin breviaries and the metrical psalters so popular in Britain, particularly in Scotland.
Denominations are generally found within nationalities, rather than under the denominational title. Three notable exceptions are Church of England hymnody, Unitarian hymnody, and Swedenborgian hymnody.
Julian lists what were considered the four most popular hymns in English-speaking countries at the time. These were, in order of their appearance, “Awake, My Soul,” by Thomas Ken; “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” by Isaac Watts; “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” by Charles Wesley; and “Rock of Ages,” by Augustus Toplady.
Julian’s approach to hymn discussion can be exceedingly thorough. Where else, for example, would you find the original Hebrew text of “The God of Abraham Praise,” or all 10 original stanzas of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” (listed under its original title, “Hark how all the welkin rings”)?
Two articles that strongly reflect the mindset of turn-of-the-century Victorian England are the extensive discussions of hymns considered appropriate for children and “temperance hymnody.”
Starting Point
Julian remains a good starting point for anyone who wants to know the real story behind a hymn, or to check other data. The book is excellent in indicating how hymns change and are massaged by editors. The quality of his original scholarship was such that he had to make less than half a page of corrections when he published the second edition 15 years later.
With all its good qualities, Julian’s dictionary still has some obvious weaknesses. The scholarship is three-quarters of a century old. It cuts off with the Victorian era. Gospel music is limited to being pretty well identified with the songs of Ira Sankey and Fanny Crosby.
Major religious poetic forms are given special attention, such as Latin antiphons and the important medieval sequences. However, in such articles the dated nature of the scholarship becomes apparent. The discussion on carols, for example, should basically be dismissed, for its premise is wrong. In 1935, Richard L. Greene firmly established the carol as primarily a literary form. But Thomas Helmore, who wrote the Julian article, reflects the subjective concepts of “carol” prevalent at the turn of the century. He defines the form primarily from the origin of the word carole, as music to accompany a dance, which the carol originally did, and he vainly tries to tie in Old Testament dance as part of the history of the carol.
Besides consulting Julian, ministers and church musicians should use some of the better hymnal companions, such as the Episcopal, Lutheran, and Southern Baptist ones, as well as Donald Hustad’s nondenominational volume. Scholarly biographies of hymn writers are another fine resource. Avoid the cotton-candy variety so popular with hymn storytellers a few years ago. Also explore the fine hymnal concordances that are beginning to appear. On American hymnody, the recent two-volume work by Christ-Janer, Hughes, and Smith, American Hymns: Old and New (Columbia Univ. Press), is a very accessible and scholarly contribution.
But John Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology is still the most comprehensive single work available in the field, and is a sine qua non for every preacher’s and church musician’s library.
- Holocaust
John R. Boyce with Christopher Lutes
A veterinarian confronts the ethics of animal experimentation.
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A veterinarian confronts the ethics of animal experimentation.
Until recently, animal experimentation in the United States stood virtually unchallenged. It was considered an essential tool in fighting disease. Few questioned its legitimacy; it sparked little controversy in the annals of medical ethics.
Today, however, the animal research laboratory is under increasing attack as a place of senseless cruelty, largely due to the efforts of the expanding animal rights movement. This movement, involving an estimated two million people worldwide, is gaining clout and credibility, with lobbies in Washington and support from some leading ethicists. And Christians—theologically liberal to conservative—are included among those who have taken up the animal rights banner.
As a Christian researcher, my training and experience has centered on the use of laboratory animals. When I was a young veterinary student, I was initiated into animal experimentation through practice surgery. My exposure later increased as I entered the military veterinary corps. There I experimented on animals—at times killing them—to better understand human and animal diseases. Since then I have earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and now teach in the veterinary school of a large midwestern university. My work focuses on the study of bacteria, but I still do some experiments using animals.
Watching the animal rights movement expand its impact and influence, I realized my lab was not safe from criticism. I felt a natural inclination to protect my territory. Yet, as a Christian, I knew I had to grapple with the ethical issues sparked by the movement. How should I, or any Christian, make sense out of this recent addition to the rights crusade?
A Potpourri Of Religious Views
To explore this question, and possibly to participate in some lively discussion, I attended a conference last summer titled “Religious Perspectives on the Use of Animals in Science.” At the conference, in London, I encountered a potpourri of religious views, including all the world’s major (and many not so major) religions. Each came quite ready to display its theological and philosophical wares on the topic of animal rights.
I hoped that the conference would offer a forum for discussion on the topic of science and religion, yet not a single scientist presented a defense of animal experimentation. In fact, to my knowledge, I was the only scientist in attendance who was actively engaged in animal research.
As the conference progressed, I realized that many of the speakers were skewing their arguments, selectively quoting Scripture, and generally mishandling the facts of animal experimentation. I was moved to speak out. Upon reaching a microphone set up for audience participation, I stated my credentials as a scientist and researcher.
That’s all it took. Boos from a handful of extremists squelched any spirit of dialogue. I was the enemy—the animal killer.
If all fellow attendees had demonstrated such open bias against research, I could have returned to my teaching position unchallenged—and also assured that animal rights people were not living in the realm of reality. But most spoke reasonably, and some spoke Christianly. And those in leadership seemed especially concerned that open communication play an important part in conference sessions. After in-depth discussions with several conference participants, I left with some tough ethical questions digging into my Christian sensitivity.
Animal Rights Advocates: What Is The Light That Guides?
Anyone concerned with the animal rights movement must first understand that those involved range from militant to moderate. The groups receiving the most media attention are the animal liberationists. They came to the fore last winter, claiming to have injected poison into Mars candy bars throughout Britain. Their claim proved to be a hoax, but they got their point across: Stop the senseless killing of animals.
While the more militant of these activists are largely located in England, they pop up now and again in the United States, spray painting telltale logos on the homes of researchers and breaking into research facilities to free laboratory animals. They bear such expressive names as Animal Liberation Front and Guardian Apes.
Obviously, these people are in the minority. Most involved in the movement are—albeit zealous—more prone toward moderation. Tom Regan, who chaired the London conference, is one leader from this more respectable side. While radically opposed to all animal research, his standing as a philosopher and intellectual has given the rights movement a greater hearing. Then there is Tufts University’s Andrew Rowan. His willingness to concede the need for some experimentation is gaining the ear of a growing number of otherwise skeptical scientists.
With most gains, however, there are subsequent losses. As the animal rights movement increases its “educational” campaign, the laboratory faces growing public scrutiny and skepticism. And it is the tactics of this campaign that I have found highly suspect.
Films—often used out of context by animal rights people—show horror stories, depicting the researcher as villain and sadist. The well-meaning scientist comes across as mad, taking part in the world’s most hideous torture of animals.
Rights activists also readily exploit human sentiment and emotion. To the person with a weak stomach or a love for pets, even normal laboratory situations can appear cruel. What average human being would not be moved by a picture of a dog with a tumor bulging from its side? The activist uses such scenes to tug at the heartstrings. “Oh, how pathetic!” the unsuspecting layman cries. No one explains that this animal may just be the link to finding a new treatment for cancer or another as yet incurable disease.
These are the methods of some animal rights activists. But as a Christian, I have been especially concerned about the theological and philosophical premises inherent in the movement. What is the light that guides?
The rights movement encompasses nearly every religious and nonreligious viewpoint known. Many adherents are simply compassionate people who love their pets and hate to think of any dog or cat being abused. Their thoughts are molded by sentiment, without much time spent on ethical and philosophical debate.
The leadership of the movement obviously does approach the subject with quite impressive philosophical paradigms. Yet at the core of their various perspectives is the assumption that animals have rights in much the same way humans have rights. Such a concept should immediately cause some uneasy feelings.
They would hold, for instance, that a researcher seeking to cure a human disease should be experimenting on humans, not animals. “Certainly,” says the animal rights person, “you can’t infringe on the rights of animals to deal with problems exclusive to the human species.”
From this standpoint, humans are no more important than animals. The Christian idea of human uniqueness is lost.
“It can no longer be maintained by anyone but a religious fanatic that man is the special darling of the whole universe,” argues ethics professor Peter Singer in Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, “or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.”
From here it is easy to move a step further away from the Christian religion and closer to Eastern pantheism. And that is exactly what some do. Veterinarian and philosopher Michael Fox favors an abandoning of a biblical concept of God in favor of religious ideas best mirrored in Taoism and Zen Buddhism.
Others are adamant that religion stay out of the discussion altogether. In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan dismisses the “appeal to a moral authority” as a valid method of answering moral questions. He states: “Whether there is a god (or gods) is a very controversial question, and to rest questions of right or wrong on what an alleged god says (or the gods say) is already to base morality on an intellectually unsettled foundation.” Beginning with this assumption, Regan concludes that harmful animal experimentation is never justified.
As the Christian faith is abandoned, humans and animals are brought closer together in worth. But a strange thing happens. Animals, at least certain animals, actually pass humans in value. Listen to Singer in his Practical Ethics: “Hence we should reject the doctrine that places the lives of members of our species above the lives of members of other species. Some members of other species are persons; some members of our own species are not.… So it seems that killing, say, a chimpanzee is worse than the killing of a gravely defective human, who is not a person.”
A Christian View Of The Animals
Such underlying philosophical themes are certainly repugnant to the Christian conscience. Yet, I as a Christian researcher—or any other Christian—should not walk away with nothing to offer but our rejection. The Christian faith provides an important perspective into the animal rights movement. It is a perspective that is rooted deeply in the creation account, in which all creatures have worth, but where humanity is a special, “crowning” creation.
Writing in the late forties after he had witnessed the near genocide of the Jews, C. S. Lewis expressed serious doubt about animal experimentation when it is not guided by Christian principles. “Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned,” says Lewis in a small pamphlet titled Vivisection, “then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men.”
Christians must draw their perspectives, their light, from the Scriptures. Specifics here, however, are not easily found. Few theologians have commented on the manner of humanity’s relationship to animals. (An intriguing exception is John Wesley’s sermon “The General Deliverance,” in which he argues that God “directs us to be tender to even the meaner creatures; to show mercy to these also.”)
But while the Scriptures may be void of specifics, they do offer some instructive insights. Consider the Gospel accounts. Jesus was far afield from the Eastern pantheism of many animal rights advocates. The Lord, for instance, did not espouse vegetarianism. As a matter of fact, he was known to cook a meal of fish for his disciples, and he readily turned a few fish into dinner for thousands. And, of course, Jesus and his chosen few followed the Passover tradition of eating lamb. Clearly nothing in the gospel record encourages a vegetarian diet. Killing for food cannot be seen as wrong in the Christian context.
On several occasions, Jesus compared and contrasted animal and human life—and in all cases human life was more highly valued. “Look at the birds of the air …” Jesus teaches in Matthew 6:26. “Are you not much more valuable than they?”
In other instances, he chides the Pharisees for placing animal welfare above human welfare. “You hypocrites!” he responds to those who criticized him for healing on the Sabbath. “Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, … be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?” (Luke 13:15–16, NIV).
Obviously, it cannot be inferred from all this that Jesus and his followers lacked compassion and concern for animals. To do so would be contrary to the spirit of not only the Christian faith, but of the Jewish faith and tradition as well.
“A righteous man cares for the needs of his animals,” writes the wise man in Proverbs (12:10). “Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest,” Moses tells the Israelites (Exod. 23:12).
The issues of animal research must come in line with a caring view toward all of creation. While God has given man dominion over animals, there is no carte blanche to open slaughter and abuse.
“Carefully designed experiments, where the justification is for human benefit, could be justified by the creation account,” says Robert Nelson of the ethics commission of the Christian Medical Society. “But when you say we have dominion to use animals in research—to use to what end? We need to look at the ends to which we’re using anything. Stewardship is an eyes-open recognition of what really needs to be done.”
Anglican theologian Andrew Linzey, who offered valuable Christian perspectives to the London conference, attacks any exploitation of animals. Scriptural dominion, he argues, does not mean man can simply look at animals as a utility with no regard for them as a creation of God.
Instead, Scriptural dominion implies responsible stewardship toward all the created order. After all, human beings are only temporary caretakers. God is the owner. Such a profound truth makes it imperative that a Christian’s actions are governed by God and his command to “not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain” (Deut. 25:4). In this light, some Christians of the seventeenth century (like Descartes) were grossly insensitive simply to state that animals were machines with no souls, condoning the dissection of live, unanesthetized animals for the study of anatomy. Dealing justly with animals is not an option to be casually dismissed: it is imperative.
From there it only follows that animal experimentation that is intentionally cruel is never justified. Further, experimentation that has a poor regard for proper stewardship must be carefully critiqued. Consider some cases in point.
One questionable situation is the heart transplant involving “Baby Fae.” Last fall this week-and-a-half-old girl suffered from a congenital heart condition. The doctors decided to transplant a baboon heart into the infant. After several days of struggling for life, she died. From the beginning, animal rights activists had dubbed the killing of the baboon a senseless act of murder. As ludicrous as that may sound, the situation is clouded by controversy. There is growing debate over whether the baboon had to be killed or if a donor human heart could not have, in fact, been found. Some scientists have suggested the baboon transplant was “unwise and injudicious.”
As for causing unneeded pain, certain practices within the cosmetic industry raise serious questions. In order to test whether a given cosmetic is safe, laboratories often place a product into an animal’s eye, sometimes injuring it. Consumer safety is important, but Christians may honestly wonder if the world really needs another mascara or eye shadow. Certainly the testing of unnecessary drugs and products at the expense of animals could be challenged from the Christian context.
Other areas of questionable research include using animals to test offensive military weapons and subjecting them to experiments where goals are not clearly defined. There is also misuse in many teaching situations. Often instructors use live animals when films and other teaching aids would suffice. Scientists also need not repeat experiments on animals, but they can use fast and efficient computer banks to learn and build from prior research.
A word of caution here. It is very easy to criticize work that is outside one’s own experience and expertise. I, for instance, tend to be very skeptical toward psychological experimentation on animals. To me, such research seems to be of questionable value in addressing human needs, and it is often cruel to the experimental animals. Yet I must tread softly. The rationale behind such experimentation is outside my own narrow field of veterinary medicine. I do not have the background to judge properly. So, too, the average Christian must respond prudently to any alleged abuse in animal research.
Conclusions
Human sickness is a consequence of a fallen world. In order to combat substantially the results of this sickness, modern medicine must use every justifiable means at its disposal. Without animal experimentation, medical knowledge of the causes and treatments of both animal and human diseases would still be in infant stages.
Further, to say that it is better to live with human suffering than to do experimentation is a serious misplacement of priorities. Some animal rights advocates have become callous to real human suffering, suggesting that diseases are only the result of foolish lifestyle choices. But that, of course, is not the case in many situations—such as that of a child with cystic fibrosis, bacterial meningitis, or leukemia.
While alternatives such as computer simulations and cell cultures should be used whenever possible, animals simply must be used in many cases so that cures may be found. It is essential, then, that Christians not fall into the “all or none” trap.
There is a middle ground. It is a perspective that stresses animal welfare instead of animal rights, and human compassion instead of animal liberation. This approach stands opposed to all misuse of animals in research. It also affirms that some sacrifice must be made to treat human suffering and need—the Christian’s chief concern.
As a researcher, then, I have a duty. Because of the Fall, all of “creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” I long for the time when the groaning—all suffering of every creature—will cease. Until that time, I must seek to deal with human disease in the best way I know how.
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Charles W. Colson
His 40-year struggle against slavery makes William Wilberforce a model of Christian persistence.
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His 40-year struggle against slavery makes William Wilberforce a model of Christian persistence.
London, October 25, 1787. It was still dark when the slight young man quickly pulled the dressing gown around his small, thin frame and sat at the worn oak desk in the second-floor library. As he adjusted the flame of his lamp, the warm light shone on his piercing blue eyes, upturned nose, and high wrinkling forehead—an agile face that reflected an inner turmoil as he eyed the jumble of pamphlets on his cluttered desk. They were all on the same subject: the horrors of the slave trade.
He ran his hand through his wavy hair and opened his well-worn Bible. He would begin this day, as was his custom, with a time of personal prayer and Scripture reading. But his thoughts kept returning to the pamphlets’ grisly accounts of human flesh being sold, like so much cattle, for the profit of his countrymen. Something inside him—that insistent conviction he had felt before—was telling him that all that had happened in his life had been for a purpose, preparing him to meet that barbaric evil head-on.
William Wilberforce was born in Hull in 1759, the only son of a prosperous merchant family. He was an average student at Cambridge, but his quick wit made him a favorite among his fellows, including William Pitt, who shared his interest in politics. Often the two young men spent their evenings in the gallery of the House of Commons, watching heated debates over the American war.
After graduation, Wilberforce ran as a conservative for a seat in Parliament from his home county. He was only 21, but the prominence of his family, his speaking ability, and a generous feast he sponsored for voters on election day carried the contest.
When he arrived in London, the city’s elegant private clubs and societies welcomed him; Wilberforce soon fell in step, happily concentrating on the pursuit of pleasure and political advancement.
He spent his evenings with friends, consuming enormous dinners accompanied by multiple bottles of wine followed, perhaps, by a play, dancing, or a night of gambling. His friendship with William Pitt and other young politicians flourished. Then, in early 1784, Pitt, though only 24, was elected prime minister. Inspired, Wilberforce took a big political gamble, surrendering his safe seat in Hull to stand for election in Yorkshire, the largest and most populous constituency in the country.
It was a grueling campaign, and the outcome uncertain, when Wilberforce addressed a large rally just prior to the election. James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s celebrated biographer, stood in the cold rain and watched Wilberforce, barely over five feet tall, prepare to address the wet, bored crowd.
“I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table,” Boswell wrote later, “but as I listened, he grew and grew, until the shrimp became a whale.”
Such was the power of the young parliamentarian’s oratory; he was elected from Yorkshire. And as an intimate of the prime minister, respected by both political parties, William Wilberforce seemed destined for power and prominence.
Amazing Grace
After the election, Wilberforce’s mother invited him on a tour of the Continent. Wilberforce agreed, then ran into his old schoolmaster from Hull, Isaac Milner, and spontaneously asked him to join the trip.
That vacation was to change his life.
Milner was eager to debate the quick young orator, though he could not match his skill. As their carriage ran over the rutted roads between Nice and the Swiss Alps, their lively discussion turned to religion. Wilberforce, who considered his flirtation with Methodists (as the religious enthusiasts of his day were known) a childish excess, treated the subject flippantly. Milner growled at his derisive wit, stared moodily out the carriage window, and declared, “I am no match for you … but if you really want to discuss these subjects seriously, I will gladly enter on them with you.”
Provoked by the older man’s remark, Wilberforce entered in, eventually agreeing to read the Scriptures daily.
As the summer session of Parliament got under way, Wilberforce returned to the whirl of the London social scene. But his diary reveals subtle changes in his tastes. One party, of the kind he routinely attended, was now described as “indecent”; his letters began to show concern for corruptions he had scarcely noticed before. The seeds of change had been planted.
That fall of 1785, as he and Milner returned to the Continent to continue their tour, Wilberforce was no longer frivolous. He pressed his companion about the Scriptures. The rest of the party, in fact, complained about their preoccupation as they studied a Greek New Testament on their coach between cities.
Wilberforce returned to London in early November 1785 faced with a decision he could no longer avoid. He knew the choice before him: on one hand, his own ambition, his friends, his achievements; on the other, a clear call from Jesus Christ.
On December 2, weary and in need of counsel, Wilberforce resolved to seek out a spiritual guide. He made a fascinating but unlikely choice: John Newton.
Son of a sailor, Newton had gone to sea at age 11, where he eventually deserted, was flogged, and exchanged to a slave ship. Later Newton himself became a slave on an island off the coast of Africa. Rescued by his father, he sailed on a slave ship and in 1750 was given command of his own slaver. Then, on a passage to the West Indies, Newton was converted to Jesus Christ, later expressing his wonder at the gift of salvation to “a wretch like me” in his famous hymn, “Amazing Grace.”
Though he cautioned Newton in a note to “remember that I must be in secret … the face of a member of Parliament is pretty well known,” Wilberforce called on Newton, now a preacher. He reassured him and, prophetically, told Wilberforce to follow Christ but not to abandon public office: “The Lord has raised you up to the good of his church and for the good of the nation.”
Wilberforce knew he had to share his new faith with his old friends. The responses were predictable: some thought his mind had snapped under the pressures of work; many were convinced his newfound belief would require him to retreat from public life. Still others were simply bewildered. But it was Pitt’s reaction that Wilberforce cared about most. He wrote to the prime minister, telling him that though he would remain his faithful friend, he could “no more be so much of a party man as before.”
Pitt’s understanding revealed the depth of his friendship; but after their first face-to-face discussion, their relationship would never again be the same. And, indeed, one of the great sorrows of Wilberforce’s life was that the friend he cared for most never accepted the God he loved more.
Two Great Objectives
On this foggy Sunday morning in 1787, as Wilberforce sat at his desk, he thought about his conversion: Had God seen fit to save him only for the eternal rescue of his own soul, or also to bring His light to the world around him? He could not be content with the comfort of life at Palace Yard or the stimulating debates in Parliament. True Christianity must go deeper. It must not only save but serve; it must bring God’s compassion to the oppressed, as well as oppose the oppressors.
His mind clicked, and he dipped his pen in the inkwell. “Almighty God has set before me two great objectives,” he wrote, his heart suddenly pumping with passion, “the abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” With those words, the offensive was launched for one of the epic struggles of modern history. God’s man, called to stand against the entrenched evils of his day: the self-indulgent hedonism of a society pockmarked by decadence and the trade that underwrote those excesses—the barbaric practice of trafficking in human flesh for private gain.
From his discussions with Thomas Clarkson (author of the pamphlets on Wilberforce’s desk) and others, Wilberforce knew the issue had to be faced head-on in Parliament. He wrote: “[S]o enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for the abolition. A trade founded in iniquity and carried on as this was, must be abolished, let the policy be what it might.”
Thus, throughout the wet fall of 1787, he worked late into the nights, joined by others who saw in the young politician the man God had raised up to champion their cause in Parliament.
But suddenly, in February of 1788, Wilberforce fell gravely ill. Doctors warned he could not last more than two weeks; in Yorkshire, the opposition party, cheered by such news, made plans to regain his seat in Parliament.
By March he was somewhat better, though not well enough to return to Parliament. He asked Pitt to introduce the issue of abolition in the House for him. Purely out of the warmth of their friendship, the prime minister agreed.
So in May of 1788, Pitt, lacking Wilberforce’s passion but faithfully citing his facts, moved a resolution binding the House to discuss the slave trade in the next session.
His motion provoked a lukewarm debate, followed by a vote to duly consider the matter. However, those with interest in the trade were not worried about a mere motion to discuss abolition. But then Sir William Dolben, a friend of Wilberforce, introduced a one-year experimental bill to regulate the number of slaves that could be transported per ship. The debates grew heated, with cries for reform.
Now sensing the threat, the West Indian bloc rose in opposition. Tales of cruelty in the slave trade were mere fictions, they said; it was the happiest day of an African’s life when he was shipped away from the barbarities of his homeland. The proposed measure, added Lord Penrhyn hysterically, would abolish the trade upon which “two-thirds of the commerce of this country depended.”
In response to such obstinate claims, Pitt himself grew passionate. Threatening to resign unless the bill was carried, he pushed Dolben’s regulation through both Houses in June of 1788.
The success of Dolben’s bill awakened the trade to the possibility of real danger. By the time a recovered Wilberforce returned to the scene, they were furious and ready to fight, and shocked that Christian politicians had the audacity to press for religiously based reforms in the political realm. “Humanity is a private feeling, not a public principle to act upon,” sniffed the Earl of Abington. Lord Melbourne angrily agreed: “Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade private life.”
Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that privatized faith—faith without action—meant nothing at all if they truly followed the God who mandated justice for the oppressed.
Wilberforce’s first parliamentary speech for abolition on May 12, 1789, shows the passion of his convictions, as well as his characteristic humility:
“When I consider the magnitude of the subject which I am to bring before the House—a subject, in which the interests, not of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole world, and of posterity, are involved … it is impossible for me not to feel both terrified and concerned at my own inadequacy to such a task. But … I march forward with a firmer step in the full assurance that my cause will bear me out … the total abolition of the slave trade.…
“I mean not to accuse anyone, but to take the shame upon myself, in common, indeed, with the whole Parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty—we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others.”
But the passionate advocacy of Wilberforce, Pitt, and others was not sufficient to deter the interests of commerce in the 1789 session. The West Indian traders and businessmen pressured the House of Commons, which voted not to decide.
“Let The Flame Be Fanned”
The House’s vote to postpone action spurred Wilberforce to gather exhaustive research. He and his coworkers spent nine and ten hours a day reading and abridging evidence; and in early 1791, he again filled the House of Commons with his thundering yet sensitive eloquence.
However, the slave traders were equally determined. One member argued:
“Abolition would instantly annihilate a trade, which annually employed upwards of 5,500 sailors, upwards of 160 ships, and whose exports amount to £800,000 sterling; and would undoubtedly bring the West India trade to decay, whose exports and imports amount to upwards of £6,000,000 sterling, and which give employment in upwards of 160,000 tons of additional shipping, and sailors in proportion.”
He paused, dramatically, and pointed up to the gallery, where a number of his slave-trading constituents watched approvingly, exclaiming brazenly, “These are my masters!”
Another member, citing the positive aspects of the trade, drew a chilling comparison: the slave trade “was not an amiable trade,” he admitted, “but neither was the trade of a butcher … and yet a mutton chop was, nevertheless, a very good thing.”
Incensed, Wilberforce and other abolitionists fought a bitter two-day battle; members shouted and harangued at one another as spectators and press watched the fray. By the time the votes were cast, in the terse summation of one observer, “Commerce clinked its purse,” and Wilberforce and his friends were again defeated.
After their loss in 1791, Wilberforce and his growing circle of Christian colleagues, grieved and angered by the unconscionable complacency of Parliament, met to consider their strategy.
They were a varied group, marked by a common devotion to Christ and to one another. They were, says one historian, “a unique phenomenon—this brotherhood of Christian politicians. There has never been anything like it since in British public life.”
In 1792, as it became apparent that the fight for abolition would be long, Henry Thornton, a member of Parliament and a wealthy banker, who brought managerial ability and a gift of administration to the diverse group, suggested to Wilberforce that they gather together at his home in Clapham, a village four miles south of Westminster—convenient to Parliament yet set apart.
Thornton had thought out his plan and believed that living and worshiping together would draw the brotherhood closer to God and to one another. His home, Battersea Rise, was a lively Queen Anne house on the grassy Clapham common; as friends came to live or visit, Thornton added extra wings. Eventually Battersea Rise had 34 bedrooms, as well as a large, airy library designed by Prime Minister Pitt. And it was here that they prepared themselves for the battles to come.
As the Clapham community analyzed their battle in 1792, they were painfully aware that many of their colleagues in Parliament were puppets—unable or unwilling to stand against the powerful economic forces of their day. Therefore, Wilberforce and his workers went to the people. In 1792 he wrote, “It is on the general impression and feeling of the nation we must rely … so let the flame be fanned.”
The abolitionists, accordingly, distributed thousands of pamphlets describing in detail the evils of slavery, spoke at public meetings, circulated petitions. They organized a boycott of slave-grown sugar, a tactic even Wilberforce thought could not work, but which gained a surprising following of some 300,000 across England.
Later in 1792, Wilberforce was able—incredibly—to bring 519 petitions for the total abolition of the slave trade, signed by thousands of British subjects, to the House of Commons. As their movement rode on a surging tide of public popularity, even the vested economic interests of the West Indian bloc could not ignore the abolitionists’ growing base of support. But again the slavers exercised their political muscle. The House moved that Wilberforce’s motion should be qualified by the word “gradually,” and it was thus carried. The slave traders had no real fear of a bill that could be indefinitely postponed by that simple yet powerful word.
Though Wilberforce was wounded at yet another defeat, he had a glimmer of new hope. For the first time, the House had voted for an abolition motion; with the force of the people behind the cause, it would only be a matter of time.
However, the events of the day soon reversed that hope. Across the English Channel, the fall of the Bastille in 1789 had heralded the people’s revolution in France. By 1792, all idealism vanished; the September Massacres had loosed a tide of bloodshed in which the mob and the guillotine ruled France.
In England, fear of similar revolution abounded; any type of public agitation for reform was suspiciously labeled as “Jacobinic,” after the extreme revolutionaries who fueled France’s Reign of Terror. This association, and ill-timed slave revolts in the West Indies, effectively turned back the tide of public activism for abolition.
The House of Commons, sensing this shift in the public mood, took the opportunity and rejected Wilberforce’s motion for further consideration of the abolition of the trade. The House of Lords’ attitude was summed up by the member who declared flatly, “All Abolitionists are Jacobins.”
The abolitionists’ success was quickly reversed; lampooned in popular cartoons and ridiculed by critics, Wilberforce could have no hope of success.
One can only imagine the grief and frustration he must have felt. Perhaps he went home late one night and sat at his old oak desk, staring into the flame of a single candle. “Should I give up?” he might have thought. He sighed, flipping through his Bible. A thin letter fell from between the pages.
Wilberforce stared at the shaky handwriting. Its writer was dead; in fact, this letter was probably the last he had ever written. Wilberforce had read and reread it dozens of times, but never had he needed its message so deeply: “My dear sir,” it began,
“Unless the Divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise, in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils, but if God be for you who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh, be not weary of well-doing.…”
The letter was signed, “Your affectionate servant, John Wesley”
“Be not weary of well-doing.” Wilberforce took a deep breath, carefully refolded the letter, and blew out the candle. He needed to get to bed—he had a long fight ahead of him.
Picture Perseverance
Wilberforce doggedly introduced motions for abolition each year: 1797, 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801. And the years passed with Wilberforce’s motions thwarted and sabotaged by political pressures, compromise, personal illness, and continuing war with France. By 1803, with the threat of imminent invasion by Napoleon’s armies, the question of abolition was put aside for the more immediate concern of national security.
Yet, during those long years of struggle, Wilberforce and his friends never lost sight of their equally pressing objective: the reformation of English life.
John Wesley’s indefatigable preaching over 50 years had produced a great revival a half-century earlier, with its effect still being felt in many areas, particularly among the poor. But many individuals within the Church of England were Christian in name only, with religion simply part of their cultural dress.
Wilberforce would not accept a perversion of Christianity that treated Christ as Savior but not Lord. Of church people he wrote: “If Christianity were disproved, their behavior would alter little as a result.” Thus, Sunday morning worship that did not manifest itself in daily holy living was hollow faith.
In the campaign against the slave trade, Wilberforce had seen the enormous impact that small pamphlets had in moving public attitudes. So he set out to collect on paper his deepening convictions about holy living. Taking advantage of a six-week recess late in 1796, he finished work on a book he had been formulating for years. The title told the story: A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity.
He completed it in early 1797. His publisher, skeptical about the sales potential of such a narrow religious book in the market of the day, greeted him with less-than-encouraging words: “You mean to put your name on the work?” Assured that Wilberforce did, the printer agreed on a cautious first run of 500 copies.
In a few days it was sold out. Reprinted again and again, by 1826, 15 editions had been published in England and 25 in America, with foreign editions in French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German. Republished in 1982, it remains a classic today (Real Christianity, Multnomah Press, 1982; edited by James Houston, foreword by Sen. Mark Hatfield).
Reflections on a Doer
William wilberforce’s A Practical View of … Real Christianity inspired me to reevaluate my own career. It led me to much-needed reflection and brought encouragement to my heart. The founder of the Clapham Society shows great understanding regarding obedience, humility, family love, legislative priorities, and many other areas of concern for the follower of Jesus Christ. Almost 200 years later, his insights are a beacon for biblical faith and action.
In the prologue to John’s Gospel we have clarified for us and for all time that the Word of Genesis became flesh and lived with us, full of grace and truth. This great light has never been darkened, giving us hope that in fact God became a man and humbled himself so we could not only know him personally, but have our lives transformed for his purposes. And the good news is that all of creation will one day be transformed into the new heaven and the new earth.
People, not power
One of the most compelling and encouraging characteristics I find in Wilberforce’s life was the early resolve to focus his legislative and personal agenda on building relationships. This took the place of power manipulation and legal machinations. In other words, he sought to continue the incarnation of the Word in loving acts of mercy, justice, and charity to those around him—even if they were his adversaries.
If Christians in political life cannot be witnesses in this most basic manifestation of the living Word on a day-to-day basis, then the whole concept of public service is a mockery. Christians reaching out in deed as well as word to touch the lives of the poor, the oppressed, the lonely, and the frightened, are the only expression in the flesh of the living Christ that many people are going to know. Wilberforce was certain, as I am, that social progress, if it is to be true, needs a biblical base.
In Chapter 6 of Real Christianity, Wilberforce outlines his presuppositions about public policy. He was convinced the Christian faith had direct relationship to the activities of the state. The servant nature of our faith is found clearly in his statement that “religion has generally tended to promote the temporal welfare of political communities.”
He was convinced that true Christianity was peculiarly and powerfully adapted “to promote the preservation and health of political communities.” Only with the model and teachings of Jesus Christ could the dreadful disease of selfishness be healed in all its different forms.
When people conform their corporate heart to the heart of Christ, deep caring resulting in sensitive institutions, laws, and civil order are the final gifts. Wilberforce believed that vital Christian faith “does not favor that vehement and inordinate ardor in the pursuit of temporal objects, which progresses toward acquisition of immense wealth, or of widely spread renown. Real Christianity does not propose to gratify the extravagant views of those mistaken politicians whose chief concern for their country is extended domination, the command of power, and unrivaled affluence.” Today, as then, those who rule are meant to rule with meekness. To be in a position of civil authority is to take seriously the obligations to and the cares of those we serve.
The very fact that Wilberforce has been rediscovered two centuries after his commitment to Christ and to the cause of justice is a sign that ideas are mere illusions until they take on the form of a living and loving person.
In other words, the definitive Word in Jesus Christ has a continuing expression in each believer’s words and deeds. Christ lived out his life through William Wilberforce, and he does today through each of us, whether in shops, homes, and factories, or in public life, offices, and schools.
William Wilberforce’s pinnacle contribution was to give us confidence of the assurance that “Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven” is a reality worth trusting.
Adapted from the preface to Real Christianity, by William Wilberforce, abridged and edited by James M. Houston.
In A Practical View, Wilberforce presented a clear biblical message of salvation and a call to Christians to holy living, as opposed to the insipid “religion” so commonly practiced.
Wilberforce minced no words: To enter the kingdom of God one must be born again. He wanted to impress his readers that “all men must be regenerated by the grace of God before they are fit to be inhabitants of heaven, before they are possessed of that holiness without which no man shall see the Lord.” The true Christian is distinguished not by his church attendance but by his likeness to the holy, righteous Christ.
One prominent reader, who skeptically picked up A Practical View and ended up being converted by it, said simply, “It led me to the Scriptures.” Countless thousands on two continents were similarly affected.
Wilberforce put into practice what he preached to others. Until his marriage in 1797, he regularly gave away a quarter of his income or more to the poor, to Christian schools, and to those in special need. He paid the bills of those in prison under the harsh debt laws of the day, releasing them to live productive lives; he helped with the pension for life given to Charles Wesley’s widow. And in 1801, when the war with France and bad harvests created widespread hunger, Wilberforce gave away £3,000 more than his income.
Since the group at Clapham were mostly political conservatives, it may seem ironic to some that they were constantly engaged in schemes to aid the oppressed. They organized the Society for the Education of Africans, the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, the Society for the Relief of Debtors (which over a five-year period obtained the release of 14,000 people from debtors’ prisons), to mention a few.
That these two efforts—reforms of manners and abolition of the slave trade—remained linked through the years demonstrates the extraordinary spiritual insight of the Clapham sect. They understood the crucial interdependence of social reforms and a true spiritual movement. To attack social injustice while the heart of a nation remains corrupt is futile; to seek to reform the heart of a nation while injustice is tolerated ignores the lordship of Christ.
The years of battle had welded Wilberforce and the Clapham brothers into a tight working unit. With five of them serving as members of Parliament, they exerted an increasingly strong moral pressure on the political arena of the day. Derisively labeled “the saints,” they bore the name gladly, considering their persecution a welcome reminder of their commitment not to political popularity, but to biblical justice and righteousness. James Boswell’s bit of snide verse shows the bitter abuse heaped on Wilberforce by his enemies:
Go, W—— with narrow skull,
Go home and preach away at Hull.
No longer in the Senate cackle
In strains that suit the tabernacle;
I hate your little wittling sneer,
Your pert and self-sufficient leer.
Mischief to trade sits on your lip.
Insects will gnaw the noblest ship.
Go, W——, begone, for shame,
Thou dwarf with big resounding name.
“God Can Turn The Hearts Of Men”
Wilberforce and his friends were undaunted as they prepared for the fight in Parliament in 1804. The climate had changed. The scare tactics of Jacobin association would no longer stick; and public sentiment for abolition was growing again.
Thus the House of Commons voted for Wilberforce’s bill by a decisive majority of 124 to 49; but victory was short-lived. The slave traders were better represented in the House of Lords, which adjourned the bill until the next session.
In 1805, the House of Commons reversed itself, voting against abolition, rejecting Wilberforce’s bill by seven votes. A well-meaning clerk took him aside. “Mr. Wilberforce,” he said kindly, “You ought not to expect to carry a measure of this kind—you and I have seen enough of life to know that people are not induced to act upon what affects their interests by any abstract arguments.” Wilberforce stared steely-eyed at the clerk. “Mr. Hatsell,” he replied, “I do expect to carry it, and what is more, I feel assured I shall carry it speedily.”
Nevertheless, Wilberforce went home in dismay, his heart torn by the notion of “abstract arguments” when thousands of men and brothers were suffering on the coasts of Africa. “I never felt so much on any parliamentary occasion,” he wrote in his diary. “I could not sleep after first waking at night. The poor blacks rushed into my mind, and the guilt of our wicked land.”
In 1806, Wilberforce went to Pitt to press for the cause. Pitt seemed sluggish; Wilberforce pushed harder, reminding him of old promises. Pitt finally agreed to sign a formal document for the cause, then delayed it for months. It was finally issued in September 1805; four months later Pitt was dead.
William Granville became prime minister. He and Foreign Secretary Fox were both strong abolitionists; and with their power behind it, the passing of Wilberforce’s bill appeared now only a matter of time.
After discussing the issue with Wilberforce, Granville reversed the pattern of the prior 20 years and introduced the bill into the House of Lords first, rather than the House of Commons. After a bitter and emotional month-long fight, at 4 A.M. on the morning of February 4, 1807, the bill passed.
It then went to the House of Commons.
On the night of its second reading, February 22, a soft snow fell outside the crowded chambers. Candles threw flickering shadows on the cream-colored walls. The long room was filled to capacity but unusually quiet. There was a sense that a moment in history had arrived. A force more powerful than kings and parliaments and slavers’ profits had triumphed; passions had been spent, and the moment was near that would mark the end of an epic 20-year struggle.
Wilberforce, who had eaten supper earlier with Lord Howich, who was to introduce the bill, took his usual place quietly. He had written in his diary that morning with guarded confidence, “God can turn the hearts of men,” but now, looking over the crowded room, he felt too aware of the defeats of the past to be certain of success.
Lord Howich, though an experienced speaker, opened the debate with a nervous, disjointed speech that reflected the tension in the chambers. Yet it did not matter; the opponents of abolition found they could do little to stem the decision about to be made.
One by one, members jumped to their feet to decry the evils of the slave trade and to praise the men who had worked so hard to end it. Speakers hailed Wilberforce and praised the abolitionists. Wilberforce, overcome, simply sat stunned. Waves of applause washed over him, and then as the debate came to its climax, Sir Samuel Romilly gave a passionate tribute to Wilberforce and his decades of labor, concluding, “when he should lay himself down on his bed, reflecting on the innumerable voices that would be raised in every quarter of the world to bless him; how much more pure and perfect felicity must he enjoy in the consciousness of having preserved so many millions of his fellow-creatures.”
Stirred by Romilly’s words, the entire House rose, the members cheering and applauding Wilberforce. Realizing that his long battle was coming to an end, Wilberforce sat bent in his chair, his head in his hands, unable even to acknowledge the deadening cheers, tears streaming down his face.
The battle was won. As one by one the members cast their votes for abolition, the motion was carried by the overwhelming majority of 283 to 16.
Late that night, as Wilberforce and his friends burst out of the stuffy chambers and onto the snow-covered street, they frolicked about like school boys, clapping one another on the back, their joy spilling over. Much later, at Wilberforce’s house, they crowded into the library, remembering the weary years of battle, rejoicing for their brothers on the African coast. Wilberforce, the most joyous of all, turned to the lined face of his old friend Henry Thornton. They had worked through years of illness, defeat, and ridicule for this moment. “Well, Henry,” Wilberforce said with joy in his bright eyes, “what do we abolish next?”
In the years that followed that night of triumph in 1807, a great spiritual movement swept across England like a fresh, cleansing breeze. With the outlawing of the slave trade came a growing movement toward total emancipation. Wilberforce continued as a leader of the cause in Parliament as well as working for reforms in the prisons, among the poor, and in the workplace. In poor health much of the time, he watched many of his friends die as the years rolled by; yet saw others raised up in their places. Though in the beginning of his crusade he was one of only three members of Parliament known to be committed Christians, by the end of his life more than 100 of his colleagues in the House of Commons and 100 members in the House of Lords shared that commitment. Thus, he could retire in 1825 knowing that God had raised up others to continue the fight.
On the night of July 26, 1833, the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery passed its second reading in the House of Commons, sounding the final death blow for slavery. Told the glad news, the old man, now sick and helpless in bed, raised himself on one bony elbow, then sank back, a quick smile crossing his lined face. “Thank God,” he said, “that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the abolition of slavery!”
By the following Sunday he was in a final coma, and early Monday morning, William Wilberforce went to be with the God he had served so faithfully.
More Than Granite Monuments
In the summer of 1978, my wife, Patty, and I were in London, where I was delivering a lecture series at All Souls Church. When I noticed a free evening in my schedule, I asked my hosts to arrange a visit to Clapham, the place where Wilberforce and the “saints” spent so much of their lives praying, planning, and preparing for their glorious crusade.
Though I was a relatively new Christian, Wilberforce had already become a model for my life. Having experienced the lure of politics, power, and position, I well understood the kind of inner struggles he must have endured. When he anguished over his decision to follow Christ, he wrestled with the most fearsome dragon: “Pride is my great stumbling block,” he wrote in his diary.
I wrestled with the same dragon that unforgettable night in August of 1973 when a friend shared with me how Christ, the living God, had changed his life. All at once, my achievements, success, and power seemed meaningless. For the first time in my 40 years I realized that deep down in me was the most awful sin; I longed to be forgiven and cleansed. But the dragon of pride fought fiercely before it was slain in a flood of tears.
Wilberforce’s life was also a magnificent inspiration for me in the ministry I had begun to prisoners. I was anxious to visit the hallowed ground where Wilberforce and his friends had lived and worked.
A friend drove us through busy streets, heading south from the center of London. Clapham, in Wilberforce’s time a peaceful village a few miles from the city, was long ago swallowed in the urban sprawl. We passed row after row of narrow, drab little houses, and eventually came to the top of a small hill. “There it is,” our friend exclaimed, pointing down a shabby street. “That’s where Henry Thornton’s house used to be!”
“Used to be?” I replied in disbelief. “Surely the Clapham sect’s homes have been preserved as historic sites!”
“No,” my friend shook his head. “Leveled long ago. People don’t even know the exact location.”
I was stunned and disappointed.
We drove several blocks to Clapham green and stopped at an old soot-stained Anglican church. Our host had phoned ahead, so the rector was waiting to greet us.
“Wilberforce once preached in this pulpit,” he announced proudly as he led me up a rickety flight of wooden steps to an ornately carved oak pulpit. For an instant I felt a twinge of excitement to stand where this slight, little man with his thundering voice had stood.
Painted in the center of a small stained glass window behind the altar was what the rector described as a “quite good likeness” of Wilberforce. I squinted, but could barely make it out. “Is that all there is?” I asked, my disappointment deepening. “Oh, no!” the rector replied, leading me to a side wall where a small brass plaque was mounted in honor of the Clapham “saints.” A pile of booklets about Wilberforce and his companions was stacked on a nearby table under a sign “50p apiece.” And that was it.
I will never forget the scene, nor my emotions, as we left that little parish church. The cool, misty air sent chills through me. “After all those men accomplished,” I mumbled, “surely more could have been done to honor their memory.”
As we walked past the rows of dreary houses lining Clapham green, my host cautioned, “Not a good area to walk at night.” It didn’t matter; I felt I had already been robbed, somehow cheated.
Suddenly I stopped and stared across the green. In my mind’s eye I began to see row upon row of black men and women walking right across the soft grass. I could hear the clanging of the chains as they fell from arms and legs.
Of course, of course, I thought. Clapham is just what Wilberforce and his brothers would want. No spires of granite or marble rising into the sky. No cold statues or lifeless buildings in their honor. Rather, the monument to Wilberforce and his friends is to be found in the freedom enjoyed by hundreds of millions of black people, liberated from bondage by a band of men who gave their all in following Christ.
Moreover, it was Wilberforce and his friends who financed the first missionaries. Now Christianity, once the religion of the people’s oppressors, is exploding across the African continent, growing faster than anywhere else in the world.
But the legacy of Wilberforce goes beyond even abolition and Africa. Taking a longer view of history, we can now see that he was a man standing in the gap at a crucial point in the history of Christendom—and the world. The eminent historian Will Durant once wrote that the great turning point of history was when “Christ met Caesar in the arena—and Christ won.” Well might he have added that 15 centuries later, Christ met vice and vested interest in Britain—and Christ won.
It was out of Wilberforce’s effort that a great spiritual movement in England came. Social reforms swept beyond abolition to clean up child labor abuses, poorhouses, prisons, to institute education and health care for the poor. Church attendance swelled. Evangelicalism flourished, and later in the century missionary movements sent Christians fanning across the globe.
A monument to Wilberforce? Yes, the monument is a living legacy, found not only in the lives of millions of free men and women, but in the spiritual heritage of Christians everywhere.
Wilberforce has left a special legacy for today’s Christians, caught up as so many are in the illusion that military might and political institutions are all-powerful. In the conclusion to his masterful book, A Practical View, Wilberforce wrote:
“I must confess equally boldly that my own solid hopes for the well-being of my country depend, not so much on her navies and armies, nor on the wisdom of her rulers, nor on the spirit of her people, as on the persuasion that she still contains many who love and obey the Gospel of Christ. I believe that their prayers may yet prevail.”
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Theology
Donald McCullough
Unfulfilled dreams are a fact of life.
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Unfulfilled dreams are a fact of life.
Popular wisdom tells us it is better to focus on the fact that a cup is half-full than that it is half-empty. Experience proves this most of the time: my body rolls out of bed more easily when I anticipate a productive day; my marriage works considerably better when I choose to congratulate my wife on the portion of the toast that is not burned.
Still, an important truth often gets sacrificed on the altar of optimism by the priests of positive thinking. The cup is half-full, but it is also half-empty. Why think about this negative side of things? Because spiritual maturity requires that we learn how to live with unfulfillment.
Few truths could be harder to learn in our culture. What makes unfulfillment about as difficult to swallow as cough syrup is the presence of a pervasive and pernicious influence, what we could call the false ideal of the full cup. The false ideal of the full cup ignores the empty half. It assumes all can and should be fullness and perfection. No such eschaton exists, in this life at least, but that matters not. Lies can powerfully direct lives.
The false ideal of the full cup affirms, as its doctrinal foundation, the belief that the most important goal in life is personal fulfillment and the pleasure that will come from it. From many pulpits this creed is proclaimed. The music we hear, the television we watch, the advertising we absorb, the magazines we read—all preach a gospel of self-fulfillment.
Perfect Marriage?
Consider marriage as one example. A girl dreams of having a husband, and her fantasy imagines a perfect one: tender and loving and always sensitive. Add to the picture a couple of kids who easily stand out as the cutest kids on the block, the brightest in school, and the best behaved in church. Life with this family will be lived in a beautiful house, the kind featured in Good Housekeeping.
Eventually the dreamer falls in love. Passions are intense; he seems so right. The premarital counseling, however useful for other mortals, offers little in her judgment, for she and her fiancé enjoy a relationship obviously made in heaven. By the time she discovers that he gets his undershirt dirty like everyone else, new dreams have emerged to sustain her.
She eagerly awaits the arrival of children, she budgets and saves for a new house, she cultivates a circle of friends. But then, usually somewhere in the midthirties, an inner change takes place. Depression sets in, and with it comes a vague restlessness, a nameless yearning. She still loves her husband and children. Nevertheless, she seems to have such emptiness within. Her dreams have come true—and that’s part of the problem. Reality never touches the false ideal. The husband has his difficult side, the children fight and fuss, and even a beautiful house can’t cure boredom. An indescribable hunger wells up from the deep recesses of her being, an intense loneliness overwhelms her.
The boy also has his dreams. Too many Playboy magazines have been read, perhaps, and the air-brushed perfection of centerfold beauty becomes his fantasy’s image of a future wife. And he dreams of success in his profession, of course, and the material security and social prestige accompanying it.
He eventually falls in love, and falling aptly describes it, as he trips over his passion and plunges into a swift current, the undertow pulling him beyond all reason and perspective. But what fun it is to be swept along by such emotional intensity!
A few years later, though, he looks at the woman next to him in bed. Clearly she isn’t a Playmate of the Month. He gets up, shaves, and leaves his comfortable suburban home for a job (once his work, now simply his job), which perhaps made him successful according to all outward signs but now bores him beyond the telling of it. And like a volcano he erupts, spewing feelings of longing and depression and even anger. Once again, a sufferer of the false ideal of the full cup.
Two Words
It starts with just two words, a brief phrase that grows, when nurtured in the soil of discontent, into a large problem. Here are the words: If only … If only I were making more money. Then … Then things would be different, the ideal would be achieved.
The surrounding culture forcefully affirms such thinking. The human potential movement readily relieves the conscience of any nagging guilt about selfishness, assuring us that we owe ourselves the very best. (How can we truly love others if we don’t love ourselves first? How can we be much good to anyone else unless we solve our own hang-ups?) And the managerial ethos of our times provides hope that where there is a will, as the saying goes, there is a way. A nearly idolatrous faith in technical solutions to difficult problems sends us hustling off to enrichment seminars and bookstores and training retreats to learn just the right method. Do you have a problem in your relationships? Well then, here’s what you do: this and then this and throw in a bit of this—presto! Perfect marriage, model kids, fulfilled life. Just like a Chevy rolling off the line in Detroit.
The truth is, we never reach the false ideal in this life. The cup from which we drink is also half-empty. Always. Christians and non-Christians alike live in a state of brokenness. Both human experience and Scripture confirm this.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow, in Motivation and Personality, theorized that in the hierarchy of human needs the need for “self-actualization” is the necessary final step for full development of the personality. “A musician must make music,” Maslow wrote, “an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature.”
Inevitable Disappointment
What Maslow correctly underscored, I think, is the restless need for fulfillment that stirs within us, and that perhaps propels certain individuals to relatively higher levels of achievement and relatively lower levels of discontent. But does anyone ever feel totally self-fulfilled? I doubt it. Certainly I have never met a person who experienced unambiguous peace, a sense that she has become all she was meant to be. And apart from our Lord, it is hard to think of historical figures who could have said as dying words, “It is accomplished!”
Alexander the Great conquered Persia, but broke down and wept because his troops were too exhausted to push on to India. Hugo Grotius, the father of modern international law, said at the last, “I have accomplished nothing worthwhile in my life.” John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States—not a Lincoln, perhaps, but a decent leader—wrote in his diary: “My life has been spent in vain and idle aspirations, and in ceaseless rejected prayers that something would be the result of my existence beneficial to my species.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote words that continue to delight and enrich our lives, and yet what did he write for his epitaph? “Here lies one who meant well, who tried a little, and failed much.” Cecil Rhodes opened up Africa and established an empire, but what were his dying words? “So little done, so much to do.”
So much for the high achievers, we might think. But what about us normal folks? Are not spiritually mature Christians, at least, exempt from this problem? After all, they possess the promise of a fulfilled life: the Spirit of God dwells in their hearts. Christians sometimes feel discontent, granted; but is that not because they have let slide the discipline of discipleship? Do they not simply need to pump up their pooped-out piety?
The apostle Paul, writing to believers in Rome, honestly faced the brokenness of human life. In the middle of his great theological affirmation of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, in the soaring eighth chapter of Romans, he recognized “the sufferings of this present time” (8:18). He was not thinking about minor irritations, mind you, but sufferings—deep hurts, unrelieved pains. And the problem extended beyond isolated individual cases. As Paul saw it, everything was affected by it. “The whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (8:22).
The tense of faith’s verbs makes a critical difference. When it has to do with complete victory over evil, when it has to do with the healing of all sickness, when it has to do with piecing together the broken fragments of life—we cannot honestly speak in the present tense, but only the future. We will have the full experience of God’s salvation (it is not in question!). But for the time being—well, the apostle himself writes: “[N]ot only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (8:23). Yes, we do have the Spirit of God, but only the first fruits of the Spirit’s presence. We live constantly with partial fulfillment: the cup is always half-empty. It is not simply that we think it would be nice to have more. No. We “groan inwardly.” Longing bursts forth from the depths; we live in hope, not in fulfillment.
Suffering Used By God
But the news is not all bad. The suffering in itself is not good; however, in the hands of a good God it can serve good ends.
First, it provides us with an opportunity for growth. When afflicted by unfulfillment you either get better or you get bitter. Those who have accomplished much in life, who seem to have lived so nobly, have often done so in spite of their hurts. Plato was hunchbacked. Demosthenes, the greatest orator of the ancient world, stuttered (the first time he tried to make a public speech, he was laughed off the rostrum). Homer was blind, as was Milton. Sir Walter Scott was paralyzed.
It will not do to think you have been dealt a particularly bad hand and therefore, “if only” things were different, everything would be rosy. Circumstances will never change that much. Wordsworth said that his greatest inspirations often came to him in the night, so he had to teach himself to write in the dark. We, too, have to learn to live in darkness.
And what we learn is more than how to get accustomed to the dark. We learn how to be obediently faithful; the muscles and tendons of our faith get toughened enough to stand in the storms of life. If Jesus, although he was the Son of God, “learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8), do we really think we can graduate into the presence of God without the lessons of suffering in the school of faith?
The God toward whom we grope, sometimes in the darkest of circumstances, already holds us and will not let go. Some things can only be learned by experience, and the experience of suffering teaches us the faithfulness of God. Paul wrote, “A thorn was given me in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7). Who knows what it was? Maybe no one but God ever knew; maybe it was too embarrassing to mention; maybe it was so well known he did not need to be specific. In any event, it made life hard. So Paul did what we ought always to do with thorny problems: he prayed. He asked for relief.
Once, twice, three times he banged on the door of heaven, but nothing happened. The thorn remained firmly buried in his flesh. Something else opened for him, though. He entered into a new understanding, a deeper faith. He learned that while there are many things you can do without, there is one thing you cannot do without, one thing that so transcends in importance everything else it can scarcely be compared.
The one thing he discovered, in the midst of his suffering and maybe only because of his suffering, was this: God’s grace is sufficient. Sufficient for what? He doesn’t say, and perhaps that is part of what he is saying. Just sufficient. Period. Enough to make it possible to endure. Enough to keep you going on the journey even though you have stumbled and bloodied your knees. Enough to keep you moving when all spiritual stamina is spent. Enough to keep your eyes on the distant horizon even though it is too dark to see much of anything.
And that peering into the future leads to the second way in which the pain of drinking from a half-empty cup can be put to good use by a good God: The suffering of the present generates hope. “We rejoice in our suffering,” Paul wrote, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us …” (Rom. 5:3–5). Unfulfillment makes us stretch forward and squint our eyes with expectation toward the time of fulfillment. Longing is a driving power, a restless energy pulling us forward into God’s future.
Bertrand Russell tried to describe his inner longing this way: “The center of me is always and eternally a terrible pain—a curious, wild pain—a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite, the beatific vision—God. I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found, but the love of it is my life; it’s like passionate love for a ghost. At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair; it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work; it fills every passion I have. It is the actual spring of life in me.”
The Christian Hope
The Christian’s hope is also often “a curious, wild pain,” but unlike Russell’s it has a specific object. We yearn not for a ghost, but for the God who became flesh, the God of our redemption, the God of the future who will consummate his loving purposes for creation. “Thy kingdom come,” we pray. Why? Because God’s reign has not yet come in fullness. We “groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23).
We need to discover what we really want. We mistakenly think we know: a new relationship that will fill our emptiness; a new job that will satisfy our restlessness; a new spiritual experience, more ecstatic than the last, that will transport us to the heights; another house or car or toy that will provide a more lasting escape. So we hustle about from one new thing to the next, always on the move, because nothing ever fills the void. C. S. Lewis somewhere said that we err not by desiring but by desiring too little. What we really seek, if only we knew it, is God. Our thirst can only be quenched with a full cup of his presence, with the pure, two-hundred-proof distillate of his love filled to the brim and overflowing.
If this life offers all the joy to be found, then by all means reach out and grab all you can and hold tightly to whatever happiness you have managed to find—and get used to the feeling of despair when it slips through your fingers. But if fulfillment rests with God, with One who transcends our life and times, then by God’s sufficient grace lift your eyes beyond the brokenness of the present, stretch your vision toward God’s future. Hope provides power for endurance; hope clears enough ground amidst the tangled undergrowth of our restless longing to give patience a place to take root. Hope helps us live with the reality of a half-empty cup.
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An interview by Barbara Thompson
Bread for the World’s Arthur Simon talks candidly about the politics of feeding the hungry.
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Bread for the World’s Arthur Simon talks candidly about the politics of feeding the hungry.
Every day another 40,000 children die of hunger and infection. At least one-tenth of the human race suffers from chronic malnutrition. Included in these figures are one hundred fifty million Africans—trapped in unrelenting famine.
Simultaneously, global military spending outweighs aid to developing countries twenty to one.
From these statistics, many conclude that the forces that move the world economy are beyond the influence of church groups and religious leaders. However, Bread for the World, a Christian citizens’ movement that attempts to make the needs of the hungry a priority in the halls of government, is working effectively to change “the politics of hunger.”
In 1974 Bread for the World began with a handful of Christians from a number of denominations. Today, the group is a respected and effective lobby with over 48,000 members. Working closely with church-related relief agencies, Bread for the World informs government leaders about hunger issues, and assists in formulating policy and drafting legislation.
Bread for the World’s support comes from both Republicans and Democrats, and they have contributed to the establishment of an emergency grain reserve for famine relief, the passage of the Hunger and Global Security Act, and the creation of theChild Survival Fund.
In this interview, Arthur Simon, founder and director of Bread for the World, addresses key issues surrounding world hunger. He is a graduate of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and has served as a pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for ten years.
The recent focus of organized efforts by the church to alleviate world hunger has been direct aid and development programs administered by Christian relief agencies. Why do you focus your efforts on government programs and public policy?
It’s not an either-or situation. To cope with problems of the magnitude of world hunger, both private assistance and government intervention are essential. We fully support church organizations giving direct aid, and they in turn encourage us to develop the public support necessary for a large governmental response.
While we may know how to be a neighbor to one person in need, when that one person becomes one million, the need is beyond the reach of individuals. Then the only effective way to express our love is through larger structures, and very often that means the government.
The famine in Africa is an example. When the crisis began there, it required a prompt response on a scale beyond the ability of private agencies. In 1984, we were able to work closely with organizations like World Vision and Catholic Relief Services to get a congressional appropriation for $150 million in emergency food aid, plus $16 million for transportation. Congress voted much higher levels of aid for 1985. The amounts are small relative to the need, but they make an enormous impact.
The common perception of government-to-government aid is that it is rendered largely ineffective by corruption and bureaucracy.
Corruption is a problem. But it’s not insurmountable. The tendency is to paint a black-or-white picture. Some say there are no problems at all, while others claim that there are so many problems that we might as well forget government aid altogether. Both views are simplistic and irresponsible.
On the whole, food does get through to the people who need it. There is ongoing monitoring of distribution, and in Africa much of the government’s assistance is actually channeled through private, church-related agencies.
Problems do not always stem from corruption and abuse. They are often a result of the extreme poverty of the countries involved, their lack of resources and management skills. These difficulties are sometimes complicated by the lack of understanding on the part of donor nations. For example, at times food piled up on the docks in Ethiopia, while millions of people were starving. Some attributed this to the malign intent of the Ethiopian government; but Ethiopia has a limited infrastructure and, whatever mistakes it was making, it needed assistance to transport and deliver this food.
In 1983, the United States government said there was no cause for alarm in Africa. At the same time, private relief agencies were saying the situation was out of control and getting worse. How do you account for this discrepancy?
I can’t account for it. We were receiving well-documented reports of an emerging tragedy, from World Vision and other agencies, and everyone was eager for the government to move quickly. (Part of the urgency felt by relief agencies is that most of the food they distribute is given to them from the government’s “Food for Peace” program. This is another vital, but little-known link between private agencies and the U.S. government.) In any event, we presented the case to Congress and the State Department, but assistance was slow in coming.
The general assumption, both within and without the U.S. government, was that our initial lack of response resulted from the presence in Ethiopia of a Marxist military dictatorship that was perceived as hostile to our national interests.
To what extent is food aid used as a political weapon?
Far too much. We tend to concentrate our food aid where security interests are a factor. Where governments are perceived as unfriendly, we don’t give assistance, or give it only reluctantly.
For instance, in 1984 when the African emergency food aid bill was before the Senate, there was enormous support from both Republicans and Democrats, and it was obvious the appropriation was going to sail through quickly. Then the Administration arranged for a rider to be attached to the bill, which included highly controversial aid to contras fighting the Nicaraguan government. The legislation was immediately bottled up. The delay went on for months, and because time was the critical factor, every day meant more lives lost.
There are many awful things we can say about the Ethiopian government, but thousands of people were starving to death as early as 1983, and we were doing nothing. Food is essential, and we contend that where people are devoid of the essentials, there are no moral grounds for withholding assistance. If there is reasonable assurance of getting supplies through to the people who need them, food aid should be given regardless of political interests.
What Can We Do to Feed the World’s Hungry?
While farmers in many parts of the world shake their heads over withered vegetable patches, the average American farmer raises enough crops to feed 75 people.
Certainly America could help a lot of hungry people by sending them food. The catch is that those hungry people would just need more food next year. And the next. And the next.
In the long run, hungry people need more than charity; they need dependable water supplies, training, farm implements, seeds, new hybrid breeds, animal stock, marketing networks, roads, and agronomists’ advice.
Cambodia
Genocide marked the Pol Pot regime, which began in 1975. Once the Pol Pot regime was overthrown, however, many refugees were willing to try to rebuild their lives in their own land. But they had lost their farming equipment and, more significantly, their seed supplies. They faced starvation if they went back.
In the spring of 1980, several Christian agencies decided to “capitalize” Cambodian farmers with rice seed. At the Thai border they gave a 66-pound bag of seed rice, along with a bag of table rice, to every Cambodian farmer who showed up. Some traveled as far as 120 miles to collect the supplies.
Reports that have filtered back from inside Cambodia indicate that very little of this rice has been stolen by unscrupulous officials. Giving Cambodian farmers seed meant they would be able to help themselves in the future.
More rice, more relatives
In Laos, during the 1950s, some Western agriculturalists introduced fertilizer to the local farmers. They welcomed it but didn’t use it, as the experts had planned, to increase their yield. Rather, they calculated how much fertilized land it would take to produce the same amount of rice as they had harvested before. Then they reduced the size of their planting.
“Why should I grow a bigger crop?” farmers in many countries ask. “It will just mean more relatives descending on me at harvest time.”
To maximize their effectiveness, visiting specialists should sit at the feet of resident experts—even nonliterates. Each has something to learn from the other.
Water tight
In many parts of the world where the development of water resources is essential, Christian organizations have helped communities dig shallow tube wells. These wells not only help agriculture: they will reduce communicable diseases by as much as 60 percent. Each well costs about $150. This is considerably cheaper than shipping in food every other year.
But wells are a mixed blessing. In Africa, too many deep wells have lowered the water table and increased the desert. Even shallow tube wells may pose problems. When the pumps break, as things inevitably do, the people don’t have the faintest idea how to fix them. The pumps rust. And the people have less water than ever.
Faced with such problems, development specialists hunt for “appropriate technology”—small, simple pieces of equipment that don’t require much expensive fossil fuel.
Bad aid
Some governments, having grown dependent on Western aid, now neglect developing their own agriculture. A flood of surplus food from the U.S. can so depress prices that it drives local farmers out of business. The next year, the country has less food than ever.
People can also become habituated to handouts. Bengalis used to rebuild quickly after disasters. But in 1970 a great cyclone flattened Bangladesh, and mammoth amounts of relief supplies poured in. Much of the Bengalis’ incentive to help themselves dwindled away. Now, in some regions, they wait for outside aid after calamity strikes.
But there are ways to give without making people dependent. Local people must be encouraged to plan, help finance, and participate in the physical work of rebuilding. Then charity can become a self-help incentive.
This takes time. But it preserves people’s dignity and their confidence that they can find solutions to their own problems in the future.
“The poor you have always with you,” Jesus said. In fact, Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy 15, which continues, “… the poor will never cease to be in the land: therefore I command you saying, ‘You shall freely open your hand.…”
What better way to open our hand than by helping people feed themselves?
MIRIAM ADENEY1Dr. Adeney teaches missions and anthropology at Seattle Pacific University and Regent College. This article is adapted from her book God’s Foreign Policy, ©1984 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.; used by permission.
Aside from our moral perspective as Christians, it is not in our national interest to use food as a political weapon. We do not endear ourselves to other nations in this way. If we withhold food from starving people in Ethiopia because we don’t like their government (and don’t like it for very good reasons), do we make Ethiopians more likely to tilt toward the West and an open society? Or do we only make them all the more determined to head in the opposite direction? No one can say for certain, and we should do what is right regardless of the consequences. But certainly there is a greater possibility that the country will eventually lean in our direction if we are perceived as people who have compassion for their starving citizens.
You have said, “There is no technical, financial, political, or moral reason why people should starve. What is lacking is political will.” Can you elaborate?
Hunger is not new. What is new (and this has been true only for a few decades) is that hunger is no longer necessary.
This has been confirmed by a number of studies. In 1974, a panel of over 1,500 scientists commissioned by President Ford participated in a six-volume study of world hunger. They concluded that our technology would allow us to overcome the worst features of hunger and malnutrition within a generation if there was the political willingness. That is, we have the means to eliminate hunger, but not the determination.
It is critical then that evangelicals involve themselves in public policy. As people who follow Jesus Christ, we have an opportunity to use one of God’s gifts to be responsive to the gospel—the gift of our citizenship. In our country, it’s not the people versus the government; it’s our government. The state is one of God’s vehicles for preserving and promoting human welfare, and through it Christians can help determine the priorities of our nation and our attitude toward hungry people.
There is no consensus among Christians about our national priorities. Many Christians feel that government money is better spent on a strong national defense than on food for hungry people overseas.
That’s right. And I’m among those who believe we must have a strong national defense. But security is much more than simply pouring billions of dollars into the military. A lot of the unrest in developing countries, which is exploited by governments hostile to our own, is a result of abject poverty and hunger. Surely one way to develop a more secure world is to respond to this need. Instead, our tendency is to wait for a crisis to develop and then rush in with a military solution to what is basically a social and economic problem.
Suppose 20 years ago in Central America we decided to relate to these countries primarily in terms of how we could work with them to eliminate poverty and hunger. (The Alliance for Progress set out in this direction, but that direction was soon abandoned.) Isn’t it possible that we would be in a much better situation there now? One that even in sheer economic terms would be much less costly for us?
It’s a question of what our legitimate security needs are. Certainly it’s debatable whether continuing the arms race, when we are already at levels of massive overkill, is a way to develop a more secure world. But in the last few years we’ve seen an enormous increase in military and security assistance and a relative decline in development aid. Many of these cuts have been in programs that have unusually good records in effectively delivering help to the poor.
Can you give an example?
Last year, the President and Congress substantially reduced our country’s pledge to the International Development Association, an organization that has been particularly successful working with the poorest of developing countries. Because other nations give in proportion to our own donation, by a single stroke of the pen, development assistance to poor countries was cut by $3 billion. This was an enormous blow at a critical moment, and the amount far exceeds the ability of private agencies to make up the difference. It’s another example of how, if we focus on private relief efforts and neglect public policy, we have a formula for failure.
What role do the governments of developing countries play in their own hunger problems?
Obviously their role is critical. In Africa, for example, even if the famine vanished overnight, there would still be grave problems. Food production there has been steadily declining for the last two decades. Part of the reason is harmful government policies. Unrest in these countries tends to be concentrated in urban areas, and there is a lot of pressure on the government to keep food prices low by subsidizing them. This takes incentive away from food producers.
Governments of developing countries need to begin paying more attention to small-scale farming, labor intensive methods, high yield seeds, and better use of land and fertilizers. Unfortunately, however, when governments fear for their existence, they tend to think short-range. Their situation is complicated by severe political and security problems, and we aggravate these problems by our emphasis on military assistance.
What relationship, if any, do you see between the agricultural policy of the United States and hunger overseas?
Fifty percent or more of the grain that is traded internationally comes from the United States, so our production and distribution are critical. This is particularly true in the area of food aid, where other countries respond in proportion to our own giving. If we take the lead, there is a strong positive impact; if we hold back, there is an equally strong negative impact.
At the same time, the agricultural success of the United States cannot be the primary solution to hunger in developing countries. It’s easy to assume that we should simply ship our surplus to the hungry, but the long-term effects would be disastrous. Governments would be encouraged to continue food subsidies, local farmers would lose incentive, and countries would become permanently dependent on food aid instead of moving toward self-sufficiency.
Food aid is justified only under two conditions: famine, where people are going to starve if they don’t get food right away, and food-for-work projects, where people are paid in food for undertaking land improvement projects like irrigation reservoirs. This way, food aid is used to encourage long-term agricultural development.
The crisis in Ethiopia has focused attention on famine relief, but many experts claim that what is needed is long-term planning. What relationship do you see between relief and long-range development?
We must have both simultaneously. African countries need help for the emergency at hand and assistance for long-term development. To the extent that our response to the famine is inadequate, we make it more difficult for countries to plan for the future. But as we help them out of the famine, we need to move toward a developmental mode as soon as possible. It’s a mistake to get stuck providing food assistance and to neglect long-term development.
In your experience, are donors as responsive to development needs as they are to short-term programs like famine relief?
No. Clearly we are creatures of the media, and hunger is a media event only when people are dying in large numbers. Even in the case of Ethiopia, there was no substantial response from our country until the networks began showing the tragedy in our living rooms. When we saw the famine in motion, then it became real.
But what the media reports is only the tip of the iceberg. The overwhelming reality of world hunger is chronic malnutrition. This engulfs hundreds of millions of people every day, but it never makes the evening news. So after a famine like the one in Africa has subsided, or the networks get tired of showing it, people assume that hunger isn’t a problem anymore.
We Christians also tend to be creatures of the media. But by virtue of our life together in Christ, we have good reason to buck the trend, to care about the suffering of others even when it is no longer popular. Throughout the Old and New Testaments, we are made aware of God’s overwhelming concern for the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, and we are told to “be imitators of God as beloved children.” We are called to show our love for God by loving our neighbor.
Surely the neighbor who stands most before us is the neighbor in need. So we Christians, of all people, should be globally aware and responsive to human misery, using whatever means are at our disposal to see that the world becomes a better place. This we do, not because we think we can usher in the kingdom of God, but because God’s love compels us to be people of love.
What effect do you think the pervasiveness of world hunger should have on individual lifestyles?
To my way of thinking, it is a question of stewardship rather than of lifestyle. How are we managing what God has entrusted to us? Is there a way that by living more simply we can make our lives count more fully for people shorn of life’s necessities?
“He Has Filled the Hungry with Good Things”
A biblical approach to poverty.
According to Scripture, how should we think about wealth and poverty?
Psalm 113 seems a good place to begin. It is an invitation to Yahweh’s servants, indeed to all people, to praise him, since he “is exalted over all the nations, his glory above the heavens.”
It continues: “Who is like the Lord our God, / the One who sits enthroned on high, / who stoops down to look / on the heavens and the earth? / He raises the poor from the dust / and lifts the needy from the ash heap; / he seats them with princes, / with the princes of their people. / He settles the barren woman in her home / as a happy mother of children” (vv. 5–9).
The psalmist is affirming something distinctive—indeed unique—about Yahweh, which enables him to ask the rhetorical question, “Who is like the Lord our God?” It is not just that he reigns on high; nor only that from these lofty heights he condescends to look far below to the heavens and the earth; nor even that on the distant earth he regards with compassion the depths of human misery, the poor discarded on the scrap heaps of life and trampled in the dust by their oppressors. It is more than all these things. It is that he actually exalts the wretched of the earth; he lifts them from the depths to the heights. For example, he takes pity on the barren woman (whose childlessness was regarded as a disgrace) and makes her a joyful mother. That is the kind of God he is. No other god is like him. For it is not primarily the wealthy and the famous with whom he delights to fraternize. It is characteristic of him to champion the poor, to rescue them from their misery, and to transform paupers into princes.
This affirmation is many times repeated in Scripture, usually with its corollary that the God who lifts up the humble also puts down the proud. This was Hannah’s theme when after years of childlessness her son was born:
“He raises the poor from the dust / and lifts the needy from the ash heap; / he seats them with princes / and has them inherit a throne of honor” (1 Sam. 2:8).
This too was the theme of the song which the Virgin Mary sang after learning that she (not some noble or wealthy woman) had been chosen to be the mother of God’s Messiah. God had looked upon her lowly state, she said; the Mighty One had done great things for her, for which she gave him thanks:
“He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; / he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. / He has brought down rulers from their thrones / but has lifted up the humble. / He has filled the hungry with good things / but has sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:51–52).
In Psalm 113, and in the experiences of Hannah and Mary, the same stark contrast is painted, although the vocabulary varies. The proud are abased and the humble exalted; the rich are impoverished and the poor enriched; the wellfed are sent away empty, and the hungry filled with good things; powerful rulers are toppled from their thrones, while the powerless and the oppressed are caused to reign like princes. “Who is like the Lord our God?” He is a topsy-turvy God. He turns the standards and values of the world upside-down.
Jesus himself is the greatest example of this. One of his favorite epigrams seems to have been that “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (e.g., Luke 18:14). He did not only enunciate this principle, however; he personally exhibited it. Having emptied himself of glory, he humbled himself even to the depths of the cross. “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place …” (Phil. 2:5–11).
JOHN R. W. STOTT
The Reverend Mr. Stott is director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. This article is adapted from Volume II, Involvement: Social and Sexual Relationships in the Modern World, copyright © 1984, 1985, by John R. W. Stott; published by Fleming H. Revell Company; used by permission.
I don’t think there is any legalistic answer to these questions, but every Christian should ask them and seek a biblical response. At Bread for the World, one way we respond as an organization is to base our salaries on need, rather than position. In my own life, I use the distinction between luxury and need. In all of our lives there are many inessential things, and perhaps by our doing without them, other people will be enabled to live.
Do you see any new directions for Bread for the World in coming years?
Our hope is that as Bread for the World grows larger, we will be in a better position to make hunger a major issue for members of Congress and the Administration. At present, it is far from being a central concern. I’m not just singling out our current leaders. In all administrations, the leadership has basically reflected the opinions of the population, instead of having led them.
We need dramatic intervention: perhaps a visionary president who would explain the gravity of world hunger to our population and make its elimination a major foreign-policy objective. My guess is that our nation would be unusually responsive if a president took three minutes in a State of the Union or inaugural address to say, “As the richest nation on earth, we have the opportunity and responsibility to enter into partnership with other countries to eliminate the scourge of world hunger.”
Of course, we can’t wait for this to happen. In the present we need to continue building a grassroots response to hunger, hoping that if will provide a context in which proper leadership can emerge. It is this kind of citizens’ movement that we are attempting to develop at Bread for the World.
Realistically speaking, Bread for the World, with 48,000 members, is small for a special-interest group. What kind of impact can you make?
We have seen over and over again how a handful of people can have an effect on public policy disproportionate to their number. You see, it’s not so much that Congress is hostile to hunger issues. It’s just that its members are saturated with issues and bills, 95 percent of which are never acted on. The question becomes, How do you get the attention of massively overworked legislators?
Most legislators would like to be on the side of the angels. They also want to be on the side of the voters. If they have to choose, they will often side with the voters; but if they sense the two sides coincide, they are often quite happy.
If Bread for the World simply developed positions and proposed legislation, it wouldn’t mean anything. We might be treated politely, but we would be ignored. But when senators and congressmen hear from voters in their districts and they are presented with a plausible plan of action at a technical level they can respect, then the result is often quite amazing.
For example, we were recently able to get $25 million appropriated for the establishment of a Child Survival Fund. The fund promotes four simple techniques: immunization, breast feeding, growth charts, and oral rehydration. Used together these techniques dramatically reduce infant and young child deaths, UNICEF has estimated that for every $100 spent, a child’s life is saved. If we divide 25 million by 100, this means that 250,000 kids are going to live just because of one year’s funding. These lives are no less precious to God than our own lives or the lives of our children.
Are there any significant lessons you have learned during the last ten years of your involvement with Bread for the World?
I’ve learned that when we give, we are not benefactors reaching down to victims, but human beings responding to the needs of other human beings. And this response does not have staying power when it is done out of guilt. Guilt is a very poor motivator. It tends to immobilize people, and as Christians, we are a people of grace. We’ve been set free through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ to serve others. If we are moved and nourished by God’s grace, then we will be able to stay with the struggle and not be discouraged when problems come.
I’ve also learned that when we start making our lives count for people who are hungry, we receive more than we can give. Recently I was in Mozambique, visiting a camp of 80,000 villagers who were living on the side of the road. They had been forced to abandon their villages some months earlier because the harvest had failed and people were dying. They came to the capital hoping to find food and work, but they were unable to find either. So they camped on the side of the road and foraged for food: grass, leaves, insects, whatever they could find. People continued to die, and although the government was able to give them tents, and a Catholic diocese gave them used clothing, no food rations were available.
I arrived after the first shipment of meager daily corn rations had come from World Vision. One of the workers commented on how much more lively the children seemed. There were still signs of malnutrition, kids with distended stomachs and diseased eyes. One old woman sat in the middle of the camp gazing into space and babbling. People said she had gone crazy because so many members of her family had died.
As we spent time there, the villagers became very friendly. Just before we left, some of the women and children formed a circle, and smiling and laughing, they did a folk dance for us. They sang in their tribal tongue and clapped their hands with joy. When we asked what they were singing, the answer both startled and touched us. “We have food, we have clothes, we have everything.” Our giving was so meager, and their lives were still so desperate. But in their gratefulness and contentment, these villagers shared with us one of the most precious gifts human beings can give—the gift of themselves.
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Where is Pope John Paul II taking the Roman Catholic Church?
On October 16, John Paul II will celebrate his seventh anniversary as Pope and spiritual head of 750 million Roman Catholics spread around the world. At the time of his election, he was 58 years old. Now he is a strong and vigorous 65; and if he lives as long as most of his last nine predecessors, he will remain Pope well past the year 2000.
This son of a Polish army captain and a German-speaking Lithuanian schoolteacher has proved to be the most popular pope of this century. Already his firm hand has reversed the direction in which the Roman church was headed when he came to power. In the two decades that may well remain to him, what new directions may we expect of this powerful leader who is determined not to let things drift?
One thing we may say for sure: he will not restore the Roman church to its narrow isolation and rigid conservatism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Vatican II settled that. And Pope John Paul II not only helped formulate that new face of Catholicism, but time and again since becoming Pope, he has reaffirmed his commitment to its basic principles.
Has this Pope, then, joined the new wave of radical Catholicism set to modernize the Roman church and bring it into line with the twentieth century? By no means! Anyone who knew him as bishop of Kraków or as Polish Cardinal Wojtyla knows better. Like Churchill, who opined that he was not about to preside over the dismemberment of the British empire, John Paul II is determined not to sit idly by and watch the disintegration of the Catholic church. And this is just what he thinks would be the end of the road if the Catholic revisionists had their way.
With a faith forged in the hot battle against communism that fought the Polish church at every turn, he came to believe that only a confident church, tightly organized, rigorously disciplined, and united in the essential doctrines and traditional piety, can survive.
His goal, therefore, is to forge a united church, renewed spiritually, updated just enough to survive in a world of twentieth-century science, psychology, sociology, and biblical criticism, yet basically traditional in its adherence to Roman Catholic theology and morals. To John Paul II, that is the only church that can stand up to a militant atheistic communism or to an equally materialistic and hedonistic Western society.
On a far deeper level, moreover, that is the kind of church God has called the successor of Saint Peter to build. Consequently, the Pope sees himself as a man under orders. It is a matter of duty and obedience, and John Paul II is nothing if not a man of deep convictions and a sharp sense of duty.
Laying It On The Line
It is no accident that one of the new Pope’s first moves was to revive the Sacred Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith—formerly known as the Inquisition. Immediately charges were pressed against a French Dominican and then against the outstanding theologian of the Dutch church, Father Edward Schillebeeckx. Hans Küng was quickly stripped of his post as teacher of Catholic theology at the University of Tübingen. A number of lesser voices under deep suspicion for departures from orthodoxy were likewise called to account. Theologians, John Paul II declared, were not to go tooting off on their own to explore new ideas, but were to confine their efforts to the explication of the doctrine and morals set forth by the magisterium of the Catholic church—the teaching authority of the church’s hierarchy. He soon called the Dutch bishops to Rome, and among other things forbade them to engage in common communion with Protestants. He gave strong support to Opus Dei—an organization that seeks to preserve the most conservative aspects of traditional Roman Catholicism. Ecumenical dialogue, he declared, is not to be entered into with any “thought that the church renounces certain truth raised to the status of dogmas by the Magisterium or the infallibility of that papal Magisterium.”
While encouraging dialogue as a sacred duty of the church, he explained that “the church, in fact, uses the method of dialogue in order the better to lead people … to conversion.… We must relinquish our own subjective views and seek the truth where it is to be found, namely in the Divine Word itself, and in the authentic interpretation of that Word provided by the Magisterium of the church” (Apostolic Exhortation on Reconciliation and Penance). On October 16, 1979, he reissued Paul VI’s Credimus, which had incorporated the Nicene Creed with some additions such as papal infallibility and a rigorous slate of Mariology. All this he enjoined upon the church, urging it “to stay closer to a content that must remain intact.” In his messages, Pope John Paul II has again and again reiterated his strong theological commitment to transubstantiation, the adoration of the Sacrament, the ministerial priesthood, the supreme jurisdiction of the pope, propitiatory value of the Eucharist, and masses for the dead—and he has included them in lists of dogmas that “cannot be altered.” In ethics he has everywhere stressed his opposition to sexual relations outside marriage, homosexual practice, divorce on any grounds, and abortion from the moment of conception on.
Regarding Ecumenism
It is not surprising, therefore, that many Protestant leaders, especially many Anglicans, have expressed dismay at what they deem an insurmountable setback to ecumenical progress. They feel that they have been demoted from “separated brethren” to “kissing cousins,” and their dream of a worldwide united church fades farther into the distance.
Given his strong conservative leanings, it is not surprising that Pope John Paul II himself has shifted his ecumenical interests primarily to the Eastern Orthodox churches. However, union at a certain level within the World Council of Churches is possible. In that body no denomination needs to give up its distinctives. Nor would the Roman Catholic Church need to approve the doctrine of the more liberal denominations, but only accept those denominations as brethren in the faith.
John Paul II’s vigorous conservatism in theology and ethics has slowed down the ecumenical movement. But it is not at all inconceivable that the Roman church might yet join forces with the World Council by the year 2000. In this way John Paul could carry the witness of his church to the major Christian bodies and dialogue in good faith (albeit Roman style).
Toward Evangelicalism
How does all this affect evangelicals? It will strengthen the impetus to conservatism in the World Council of Churches, even if Rome does not join it, for the ecumenical movement knows that extreme liberal theology and ethics will only deter such union.
John Paul II’s personal appeal to evangelicals cannot be denied. Despite his Mariology, his adamant opposition to contraception, to all divorce on any grounds, his emphasis on priestly celibacy, his teaching on the role of women (which sometimes comes across as though the only legitimate place of women is in the home), and his strong clericalism, their enthusiasm has not been dimmed. Their appreciation is based on his strong support of certain fundamental doctrines of biblical faith; his willingness to discipline the most blatant opponents of evangelical faith; his biblical emphasis in which his messages are invariably sprinkled with scriptural teaching; his strong commitment to the family, to a biblical sexual ethics, and to prolife positions; his insistence upon justice and true freedom of religion everywhere; and his bold stand for the priority of the Christian message over political involvement. All these endear him to the hearts of evangelicals.
Yet evangelicals cannot blind themselves to other facets of this attractive Pope. He is, when all is said and done, a traditional Roman Catholic in doctrine and ethics. Like his predecessors—only with more enthusiasm and greater skills of communication—he stands for all those things that have, since the days of Luther and before, divided a biblically rooted evangelicalism from a Roman Catholicism based partly on biblical revelation and partly on human tradition. Grace alone, Christ alone, faith alone, Scripture alone—these great truths lie at the heart of evangelicalism and cannot be gotten around.
When John Paul II says, “It would therefore be foolish, as well as presumptuous, … to claim to receive forgiveness while doing without the sacrament of penance” (Apostolic Exhortation on Reconciliation and Penance), the evangelical remembers: “Whosoever believeth in him.” When the Pope says; “Mary is the source of our faith and our hope” (Homily at Mass at Cap de la Madeleine Shrine), the evangelical responds: “My faith and my hope are in Christ.” And when he declares that the magisterium of the Roman church is where we are to look for answers to all our questions about doctrine and life, the evangelical responds: “Search the Scripture,” for it is “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.”
When he tells us that the Roman bishops are infallible in their interpretation of Scripture and that we are justified by faith plus works of love, the evangelical replies that the bishops cannot be infallible for that is precisely what Scripture teaches is false. We are not justified by our good works. When he tells us that the pope infallibly interprets both Scripture and the apostles, and that they teach that the Virgin Mary was bodily translated to heaven, we marvel and reply that we can see all too clearly that Scripture and the genuine tradition of the apostles teach no such thing.
True, Rome has changed, and Pope John Paul II has moved many things in it toward the good. But on many other vital matters that affect the souls of men and their relationship to God, Rome is still Rome, and Pope John Paul II is simply its most effective voice.
- More fromKenneth S. Kantzer
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