Page 5691 – Christianity Today (2024)

As our plane circled London, waiting for its turn to come down, I peered out the window at houses, houses, houses. Big houses with landscaped gardens, little houses all alike with squares of green, farms, estates, castles, cottages. I thought of a little old house built 177 years ago we had looked through recently. Its four rooms were on three floors connected by solid stone stairways. How many generations had walked up and down those stairs? How many toddlers had learned to climb them? How many elderly people had helped themselves up the steps with a cane or come carefully down clutching the iron railings? How many births and deaths had taken place within these walls?

There is a charm about ivy-covered stone walls, about the richness of old glass, that cannot be copied in mass production, but it isn’t just the workmanship that gives old houses an atmosphere; it is the thought that as we walk about for a short time, or actually settle in to live within the old walls, we are a part of a long stream of people who have done the same. How many more generations will sleep sheltered by these walls, will eat at this same solid oak table, will swing this door open on its iron hinges, will sit under this same tree, when I am no longer here? Wood, brick, stone, iron, and even growing trees are more “lasting” than our bodies. Although I can master these walls—can paint them or cut a doorway through them or even tear them down—still my substance is more frail than theirs.

We were given a wonderful book of pictures and text showing some of the great variety of authentic old Swiss chalets. The giver translated for us a German inscription on one of the chalets, “Wohnhaus,” in St. Peter, Graubunden. In this area the old builders carved or painted Bible verses or words of wisdom to be read by all passersby, and this is the inscription on “Wohnhaus”: “I have built a protection for my body. This will soon be used by someone else. Help, Jesus, that your spirit drives me to build what stays with me forever. One thing though stays secure: God and his word will never perish.” Dear old builder who hammered your nails so well, who built with beauty as well as sturdiness, your chalet indeed protected your body for a short period of time and has protected many others since then. And your words still tell the passerby of a far more lasting building, an eternal one.

It is in God’s Word that we look for a balance of outlook when we are distressed by the frailty of human life as we see it evidenced in funerals or hospitals. In his Word we learn that what we see with our eyes is not final; we are to be permanently renovated! When our bodies are raised from the dead, the renovation, which will have taken place in the twinkling of an eye, will far outdo any costly human restoration of ancient buildings. Our bodies are to be like Christ’s glorious body, and will last forever and ever.

The Bible shows us continually God’s promises to provide us with all we need. A place to dwell, a house, is one of the things included in “Seek ye first the kingdom of God … and all these things shall be added unto you.” We can pray about the right house, and see God’s leading, time after time.

Come to Hebrews 3:3, 4: “For this man was counted worthy of more glory than Moses, inasmuch as he who hath builded the house hath more honor than the house. For every house is builded by some man: but he that built all things is God.” The Lord himself is said to be “our dwelling place” (Ps. 90:1). And we are to remember that God is preparing a place for us that may be beyond our power to imagine but can be understood in a measure by what we experience in lovely houses here. “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:1, 2). These dwelling places will not outlast our new bodies, because those bodies will be everlasting bodies that cannot be spoiled by war, or accident, or disease. That Swiss-German builder and we will be able to enjoy the “prepared place” without wondering when we will have to leave it, for we will be home forever.

The staid, conservative Roman Catholic Church of the nineteenth century is no more. It has been rocked by one confrontation after another. Recently it has experienced a shaking of the foundations on which its moral teaching rests, and the cause is a book on sex.

Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought, a product of the Catholic Theological Society of America, was written by a five-member committee after two years of study and meditation. Its major theses challenge the accepted teachings of the church for centuries, and it is quite likely to keep the Vatican lights burning late at night as the moral theologians of the Curia wrestle with its implications.

Several preliminary observations are in order. First: the Catholic Church has never really been monolithic. There has never been total unanimity on all questions. The infallibility of the pope, the immaculate conception of Mary, and Mary’s assumption into heaven are examples of church teachings that have never set well with some of the faithful.

Second: expressed opinions radically different from those of the hierarchy have often been minority views that were repudiated by the vast majority. This caution is important, for the book in question could be only a flash in the pan. However, in view of the source, it may be more than that. Moreover, the people who hold these views are likely to infiltrate academia and convince their colleagues and students over a period of time.

Third: Human Sexuality is a derivative of the contemporary scene. Christians everywhere have been forced to give attention to sexual matters because of revolutionary changes in the mores of American and European society. There is a battle going on, and it is steadily intensifying. It directly involves forms of sexual behavior that have always existed beneath the surface, though on a far smaller scale than now.

Fourth: this new book may gain more credence than it deserves because it encompasses not only questions of interest to all Christians of every stripe but also less important sexual questions about which Christians have disagreed for many years—such things as birth control and masturbation. The average reader may be inclined to buy all of the package or none of it. But discernment is called for; some of the sexual items are not of the same order of importance as others.

The book does deal with important sexual questions that cannot be divorced from one’s basic presuppositions. From its earliest days the Judaeo-Christian faith has rested on the acceptance of absolutes, not only in matters of faith and belief but also in matters of life and conduct. Granted, so far as Christianity is concerned, there are some things that are culturally conditioned. Whether to do or refrain from doing these things must be decided in the specific situation. The Apostle Paul teaches this clearly when he discusses the question of meat offered to idols. He states that he can eat meat that has been offered to idols without scruple; but if it offends a brother who is of weaker faith or stricter conscience, he will surrender his liberty for the sake of the brother’s faith.

The authors of Human Sexuality apparently assume that all principles of sexual behavior are situational. That is why an early critic said of the book that “no kind of sexual behavior is flatly excluded as morally irresponsible.” The door is open to a justification of hom*osexuality, fornication, adultery, and cohabitation for retirees whose Social Security benefits would be lessened if they married. Undoubtedly this is why Archbishop Bernadin, head of the American Catholic hierarchy, is reported by Marjorie Hyer of the Washington Post to have “rejected the basic premises of [the] report.”

The authors of the book do not see one fact clearly: the prohibitions of Scripture were never intended to take away good things from God’s creatures. God created a moral universe governed by the principle that those who break the laws of God shall themselves be broken. Let there be no mistake about it: some matters of sexual conduct are forever forbidden in Scripture, and all the contrary sociological findings in the world will never validate them. Fornication, adultery, and hom*osexuality are intrinsically contrary to the divine will. The prohibitions against them are neither culturally conditioned nor situationally founded, and whether people like or dislike them is immaterial. Human beings must accept the moral universe as it is, not as they wish it were. And this universe is so ordered that no one can break its laws without suffering consequences here or hereafter.

The Proposed New Soviet Constitution

Soviet policy statements invariably debut as paradigms of pretense, and the Kremlin’s latest attempt at a constitution is a notable example. One wonders why, if Soviet leaders believe so intensely that their system is superior, they continue to shroud it in misleading rhetoric. Why not just come right out and say that their ideology subordinates individual interests to those of the group? Why equivocate about Communism’s materialistic priorities? Why all the verbiage about human rights that everyone knows the present leaders have no intention of granting? Who is kidding whom?

Many of the “provisions” and “guarantees” in the new 13,000-word charter, due to be considered by the Supreme Soviet in the fall, are copied from the 1936 “Stalinist” constitution that this one is intended to replace. The problem is that the drafters are also the interpreters. There is no objective enforcement. Feeling that there is no higher accountability, the framers wax generous. Here are key passages:

“Article 49. Every citizen shall have the right to submit proposals for improving the activity of state agencies and to criticize shortcomings in their work. Officials shall be obliged to examine such proposals and requests, to reply to them and take due action. Persecution for criticism shall be prohibited.”

“Article 50. In conformity with the interests of the working people and for the purpose of strengthening the socialist system, citizens shall be guaranteed freedom of speech, press, assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations, abilities training, education, and with due account for the need of society.”

“Article 52. Freedom of conscience, that is, the right to profess any religion and perform religious rites or not to profess any religion, and to conduct atheistic propaganda, shall be recognized for all citizens. Incitement of hostility and hatred on religious grounds shall be prohibited.”

It is very easy, of course, to detect the qualifiers that punctuate the promises and thus form a dialectic. The document explicitly asserts that “the state shall control the measure of labor and consumption in accordance with the principle ‘From each according to his ability and to each according to his work.’” Once that is established, everything else is anti-climactic and really somewhat superfluous.

The lesson for the West is to avoid emulation by refusing to adopt as government policy that which government as such cannot ultimately produce. Vive la différence!

Mud For Clarity

Sometimes the impression gets abroad that international relations would be much improved if it were not for some cantankerous Americans. They muddy the waters by expecting all other countries to behave like their own, the story goes. But we think the accusation may be misplaced.

There are some Christians in Norway, for example, who are concerned about their country’s relations with the rest of the world. In regard to proposed aid to Mozambique, the Mission to Iron Curtain Countries organization suggested that the foreign minister of Norway first determine the state of human rights and religious freedom in that Marxist-controlled land. The mission gave him this list of questions to ask: (1) “Are the Christians [in that country] granted the religious liberty which is guaranteed in [their] constitution? (2) Can Bibles be imported and sold freely? (3) Are those who want to baptize their children allowed to do so? (4) Can missionary work be carried out without restriction? (5) Are there still Christians in prisons and camps for re-education and forced labor?”

Perhaps the (U.S.) Methodist Board of Global Ministries should ask these questions about China. A recent resolution of the board asked for diplomatic ties with that country. Or the National Council of Churches could ask the questions about Cuba. The NCC board recently asked for diplomatic relations with Castro and an end to the blockade.

The questions would muddy the waters, but those accused of asking could say they are Norwegian questions and not of American origin.

Unrestrained Stewardship

The Apostle Paul, missionary extraordinary, took a trip to Rome, but it was a trip arranged and paid for by the Roman government. As a prisoner he was not free to choose his destination or his means of reaching it. While the record shows that he paid some of his expenses in Rome, he certainly could not compel the authorities to let him roam the countryside freely as an evangelist.

Despite the restrictions, Paul used his time in Rome profitably. The last paragraphs of Acts (28:17–31) describe his stewardship of this prison period. Since he could not leave the place of his confinement, he quickly invited an audience to come to him (v. 17). Taking advantage of the unusual situation, he skillfully led them to ask him more about his Christian faith (v. 22). When they came back for more, he spoke so interestingly that they stayed all day (v. 23). Some who heard him were “convinced” of the truth of the Gospel (v. 24).

Paul carried on this significant ministry for two years. Through the ages many Christians have been encouraged by his example to preach while in jail or in other difficult circ*mstances. Too few, then and now, have followed his larger example of using fully whatever opportunities God has given them.

Music’s my life, and everyday I live it, and it’s a good life too. Everything I want to say through the music it gets through ya.”

The words of this Billy Preston song reflect the attitude of many young people today. Music carries social norms and values and is the source of emotional and spiritual inspiration. In times of stress or depression during the troubled adolescent years, the radio often carries the message of hope for another day. It tells a teen-ager he’s not alone. It helps him escape into a trouble-free world of fantasy. Music gives identity to those who fear they have none. Perhaps this accounts for the multi-billion-dollar music industry, whose success depends on how well it serves the trends and thoughts of the youth market. And trendy it is; the only thing greater than the speed with which the trends change is the pressure to embrace each one.

The music of today differs from that of 1970. The reflective concerts of the late sixties and early seventies are nearly gone. Bob Dylan, Neil Young, John Lennon, and others who sang about the sins of the military-industrialist complex have been replaced by large bands of look-alike, choreographed singers whose lyrics are of a night at the disco.

In 1972 Bob Dylan commented on the contemporary music scene: “The frenzied masses of screaming teen-agers are following the frenzied masses of screaming guitar players.” But even that would be considered outmoded in some circles today. Dylan has shown the truth of the question asked by the Tower of Power in the song “What Is Hip?”: “You’re in a hip trip, maybe hipper than hip,/But what is hip? What’s hip today may become passé.”

The songs of the early seventies were songs about meaning and values. They considered questions of self-worth and social awareness. The change away from this is mentioned in a review of “Radio Ethiopia,” an album by up-and-coming rock vocalist Patti Smith, in Gig magazine:

“‘Radio Ethiopia’ is a strong album, an attempt to resurrect the half-dead corpse of rock and roll. But it’s also demanding, and although I admire it enormously, I know I won’t listen to it much. It should have been released the same year as ‘Disraeli Gears’ and ‘Between the Buttons’ [late sixties]. But Patti wasn’t playing music then, and now her album’s intensity makes it an isolated product, looking for kindred spirits among the dead.

“To make music as powerful as ‘Radio Ethiopia’ when the whole force of society is trying to push performers back into a mold, is a triumph of energy and will-power. Can she who speaks the truth tear down the tower of Babel?” (January, 1977, p. 60).

In the same issue Gig interviewed Ray Davies, songwriter and lead singer of the Kinks:

“Values. Maybe that’s what Ray Davies is all about, what sets him apart from the few good lyricists in rock. He has consistently stood up for an ethic, a standard of quality and a morality which is gradually falling by the wayside in an over mechanized world: ‘I’m a twentieth-century man but I don’t want to be here’” (p. 56). The Kinks hit their peak in the mid-to late-sixties and have recently tried to make a comeback, but with little success.

What is the most popular music today? As a young girl on American Bandstand’s Rate-A-Record said, “the smooth disco sound is what everybody is listening to now.” The disco sound has its roots in rhythm and blues. Simple, repeated rhythm patterns and strong bass lines are complemented by easy guitar and/or keyboard riffs. The aim of this basically black-oriented sound is to create a mood and rhythm for dancing. Some white bands, such as Wild Cherry, have adapted themselves to it. They call their music “electrified funk.” Other performers have been revitalized through disco music. The Bee Gees from England enjoyed a measure of popularity in the sixties but have made good use of the present trends:

“After half a decade in the phantom zone of worn-out pop groups, the Bee Gees have rebounded mightily in the last two years with a stunning string of five hit singles and two platinum albums strong on disco flavoring. And now 1977 promises to be the hottest year in their entire 20 year career” (Circus, January 31, 1977, p. 19).

Another comeback performer is Leo Sayer. His latest album was produced by Richard Perry, who claims he abhors the disco sound: “It is one monotonous driving beat. It’s as if the human race is a bunch of cattle that’s got to be given a beat to move to.” An accurate description. Just as accurate, however, is the Rolling Stone review of that album. It contains a classic statement of today’s Top 40 music: “The hit, ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,’ one of five Sayer collaborations, typifies the album’s spirit of goofy disco-pop which has as its goal fun, not edification.”

The “fun, not edification” theme is repeated in a review of a recent song by the Sylvers, a black disco group. “For instance [in] ‘I took my baby to the pizza parlor,’ a whole song turns around those eight words. No bass riff, no vocal harmonies, just the astonishing unlikelihood of the unabashedly commonplace. The instant you heard those words, you laughed—and the song was a hit.”

In addition to the disco sound there are the new hard rockers who have inherited the tradition of the still present Rolling Stones, The Who, and other such British rock groups. The primary examples are Kiss, Aerosmith, Peter Frampton, Queen (the most popular band in England, just having taken that spot from Led Zeppelin), and the new American group, Boston. Although the musical style is different, the theme is the same. It is indeed for “fun, not edification.” Its strength lies not in socially redeeming commentary but in hard, driving rhythm. Love is the subject of music today—love won, lost, dreamed of, actual, right, wrong, ad infinitum, ad absurdum.

The music of the contemporary secular market has failed or perhaps refused to say anything substantial about real life. Christian music now has an opportunity that it has not had before. Christians have the message that can change lives, but to reach today’s young people it must be presented in a way that will catch their attention.

Eric Schabacker owned a prosperous recording studio in the secular market before becoming a Christian. He now produces “Artists Alive,” a Christian concert recorded for radio broadcast. Schabacker understands the influence and the potential of music:

“‘Artists Alive’ presents the gospel of Christ Jesus through contemporary music at the same time giving Jesus Music exposure in markets where it is little known. The best way, as fishers of men, is to use the right bait. The bait or vehicle, is contemporary music. What we’re trying to do is present contemporary Christian music to both Christian and secular markets” (Harmony, November-December, 1976, p. 8).

Music can be a powerful force for evangelism. Look at Maranatha! Music of Costa Mesa, California, Word in Waco, Texas, NewPax records owned by Gary Paxton, and numerous other smaller organizations. The best-known Christian artist is Andrae Crouch. In 1976, 70 per cent of his albums were sold through secular outlets. The trend toward greater exposure is extremely advantageous for Christian music. The leading chronicle of the music industry, Billboard, said, “Exhibiting more diversity, promise, and commercial acumen than ever before, religious music is on the verge of making dramatic inroads into secular music and revolutionary changes within the framework of gospel music.”

More than ever before, Christian musicians, producers, studio owners, distributors, and promoters are marshaling all their talent and knowledge to bring the Gospel to young people. Through this music young rockers will be reached and changed by the reality of the Rock of Ages, or as Larry Norman put it in a song, “the rock that doesn’t roll.”

James M. Pennington is a divinity student at Melodyland School of Theology, Anaheim, California.

Many of the books on world religions that are being published in the United States are blatantly inaccurate or deceptively superficial. They continue to convey impressions of such non-existent entities as the “Eastern Mind” or the “Indian Mind” or the “Buddhist Mind.” Writers on the various religions of the world also tend to portray “Hinduism” or “Buddhism,” for example, as monolithic entities that happen to agree with the author’s own outlook, which often may be included under twentieth-century scientism or mysticism. The uninformed reader then may take the author’s religious stance as true of all “Hindus” or all “Buddhists.” In this survey I will give my choices—i.e., those of one historian of Asian religions—of works that ought to be read by those who want reasonably accurate portrayals of non-Christian religions.

There are two large texts that I consider the best one-volume introductions to the religions of the world. The first is by one author, John B. Noss: Man’s Religions (Macmillan, 1974). Now in its fifth edition, it is still going strong. The second has the advantage of being written by various experts who handle their specialties: Religion and Man, edited by W. Richard Comstock (Harper & Row, 1971). Both are reliable beginnings in the field.

A recent well-publicized book is an aesthetically pleasing (more than 250 photographs) work by Walter Kaufmann entitled Religions in Four Dimensions: Existential, Aesthetic, Historical, Comparative (Reader’s Digest, distributed by Crowell, 1976). Historical elements are often astutely interpreted, but with the author’s explicit emphasis on the “existential,” “aesthetic,” and “comparative,” one finds a subtle critique of the religions on the basis of a twentieth-century, Western, atheistic, Jewish, humanistic standpoint.

RELIGION IN INDIA By far the best introduction to the religions of India is the relevant section by Robert D. Baird in Religion and Man. It and the sections on China and Japan have been printed in a paperback volume, Indian and Far Eastern Religious Traditions, by Robert D. Baird and Alfred Bloom (Harper & Row, 1972). The section on India contains a wealth of material, and the author attempts to present the religions objectively. Regrettably, the China and Japan sections, though less technical, are unduly colored by Bloom’s world view.

Libraries should have the five-volume work by S. N. Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy (Cambridge, 1922–69), which is unequaled in scholarship by any other introduction to Indian philosophy. The quickest way into the texts of India is through Radhakrishnan and Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (Princeton, 1957), though the introductions to the texts at times tell one more about Radhakrishnan’s thought than that of the texts themselves. Special studies abound, but one must be cautious in taking the views of members of any one Hindu group as if they were representative of the whole Hindu tradition. I have had them approach me with erroneous claims for their books (“This is the most important text in Hinduism,” or “This is the first English translation of this text”). The most popular Indian text in the West is probably the Bhagavad Gita. Translations abound, but some even change literal meanings of the Gita to their opposites! The most literal translation and the most beautiful according to Sanskritists is Franklin Edgerton, The Bhagavad Gita (Harvard, 1972).

RELIGION IN CHINA The religions of China have been harder to grasp because a number of Chinese scholars, influenced by nineteenth-century rationalism, believed that there were no religions in China, just philosophies. However, C. K. Yang in Religion in Chinese Society (University of California, 1970) has successfully disagreed with this position in a book that surveys Chinese religion with a functionalist sociological analysis. Fung Yu-Lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (Free Press, 1966), is still a good paperback introduction to traditional Chinese thought. For a very readable survey see H. G. Creel, Chinese Thought From Confucius to Mao Tse-tung (New American Library, 1971). A recent introduction that relies heavily upon Yang’s work is the small paperback by Laurence G. Thompson, Chinese Religion: An Introduction (second edition, Dickenson, 1975). Libraries will want to have the classic two-volume history of Chinese thought on which Fung Yu-Lan’s Short History is based, A History of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, 1952).

Translations of Chinese texts sell well on the American scene as do those of Indian religious texts. Most are translated in terms of modern, Western interpretations, especially the I Ching and the Tao-te-ching. Starting with Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, 1963), is advisable. His annotated bibliography can lead one into good translations of other texts. Another good but different source book is by Laurence G. Thompson, The Chinese Way in Religion (Dickenson, 1973). Its emphasis is on many of the texts that Chan ignores probably because he thought them less philosophically significant.

For religion in the People’s Republic of China, a valuable documentary history is Donald E. MacInnis, Religious Policy and Practice in Communist China (Macmillan, 1972). The thought of the late Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung can be probed through the collection of “philosophical essays” in Four Essays on Philosophy (Foreign Languages Press, 1968). Remember when reading Mao that his earlier works were made to conform to his latest opinions, though they kept their original date.

RELIGION IN JAPAN Japanese religions have often been overshadowed in scholarship by Chinese religions but have recently become more popular in the West. The most complete and up-to-date account of Japanese religion in one volume is Joseph M. Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese History (Columbia University, 1968). A smaller but also thorough account is H. Byron Earhart, Japanese Religion: Unity and Diversity (second edition, Dickenson, 1974). On Japanese folk religion, Ichiro Hori, Folk Religion in Japan (University of Chicago, 1974), is a perceptive historical study.

The best-known Japanese religion in the West is probably Zen, popularized here by Allan Watts and D. T. Suzuki. Watts is superficial in his work and more mystical than historical. Suzuki promulgated a type of Zen (Rinzai) that was less popular in Japan than other schools of thought, yet more popular in the West. The standard handbook is the reprint of Charles Eliot, Japanese Buddhism (Barnes and Noble, 1967). For an introduction to Japanese texts, begin with the first volume of Sources of Japanese Tradition, edited by William Theodore de-Bary (Columbia University, 1958), or with H. Byron Earhart, Religion in the Japanese Experience: Sources and Interpretations (Dickenson, 1973).

The modern Japanese religious scene is accurately surveyed in a good introduction to the so-called new religions, H. Neill McFarland, The Rush Hour of the Gods (Harper & Row, 1970).

RELIGION IN AFRICA This field of study has exploded in the last few years. Quite a bit of what is written by African writers attempts to show that African religions are as good as any other, yet interprets them in terms of other religions, not regarding them as they have traditionally regarded themselves. A good one-volume survey of the elements of religion in Africa is Benjamin C. Ray, African Religions: Symbol, Ritual, and Community (Prentice-Hall, 1976). Ray interprets the possible polytheistic elements in psychological terms, however. For the variety of religion among the peoples of Africa, one might read the technical collection of essays by anthropologists edited by Daryll Forde, African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples (Oxford, 1954).

Many studies of the religions of individual African peoples are available, but they are quite uneven in value. Ray’s bibliography would be helpful here. Written texts are absent in this tradition, but Aylward Shorter’s study of African prayers—Prayer in the Religious Traditions of Africa (Oxford, 1975)—is quite revealing. Modern developments involve revolution and the reaction to Islam and Christianity. See Robert I. Rotberg, editor, Rebellion in Black Africa (Oxford, 1971), and R. C. Mitchell and H. W. Turner, Bibliography of Modern African Religious Movements (Northwestern University, 1967).

ISLAM The classic introduction to Islam is still H. A. R. Gibb’s work, Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey (New American Library, 1953), even though its title is rejected by Muslims because they do not worship Muhammad. Another good introduction is Alfred Guillaume, Islam (Penguin, 1956). A contemporary Muslim, Fazlur Rahman, also has written an introduction that is interesting because one can see how a modern Muslim thinker interprets and reinterprets his tradition: Islam (Doubleday, 1967). For a sympathetic yet scholarly treatment of Muhammad’s controversial life, read W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman (Oxford, 1961). The importance of Islamic thought for the understanding of the history of Christian philosophy needs to be emphasized. The best introduction to Islamic philosophy is Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (Columbia University, 1970).

Anthologies of Muslim texts continue to be disappointing in their scope. Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (Harper & Row, 1973), a two-volume paperback set edited by Bernard Lewis, is more cultural than theological. An older collection of writings in the so-called Sunni or “orthodox” tradition is Islam: Muhammad and His Religion, edited by Arthur Jeffery (Bobbs-Merrill, 1958). Translations of the Qur’an (or Koran) abound even though the Sunnis discourage its translation from Arabic. The standard translation is still that of A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (Macmillan, 1964). The rise in interest in mystical experience has brought Islamic mysticism (Sufism) to the fore. Idres Shah has become a modern popularizer of the movement, declaring it the essence of Islam and all other religions. A valuable introduction is A. J. Arberry, Sufism, An Account of the Mystics of Islam (Harper & Row, 1963). No recent work deals carefully with modern Islam. Still valuable is Wilfred C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (Harper & Row, 1959). On modern Islamic thought, three thinkers are featured in Sheila McDonough, The Authority of the Past: A Study of Three Muslim Modernists (Scholars Press, 1970).

POST-BIBLICAL JUDAISM Histories of Jewish thought are abundant. A thorough study is Julius Guttman, Philosophies of Judaism (Schocken, 1973). A study with an emphasis upon Jewish rational traditions is Jacob Neusner, The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism (second edition, Dickenson, 1970). The classic history of the Jews is Max Margolis and Alexander Marx, A History of the Jewish People (Atheneum, 1927), though also valuable and more up to date is the revised edition of Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews From Earliest Times Through the Six Day War (Schocken, 1970).

Rabbinic Judaism is surveyed in George Foot Moore’s classic work, now in a two-volume paperback edition, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era (Harvard University, 1927–30). Moore’s work has been surpassed, however, by recent scholarship. His “normative Judaism” portrays a unity where there was diversity. Probably better is Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (Schocken, 1961), a readable, sympathetic, yet accurate account. Still the best introduction to medieval Jewish thought is Isaac Husik, A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy (Harper & Row, 1940), which needs to be supplemented with Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken, 1961). Scholem has shown that the mystical element has existed throughout the history of Judaism.

The best way to get into the rabbinic writings is through C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (Schocken, 1974). The comments on the text enable one to see how an “Orthodox Jew” (Loewe) and a leader of English Reform Judaism (Montefiore) interpret the tradition. Volumes III and IV of B’nai B’rith’s Great Book Series offer the quickest introduction to modern Jewish thought. The third volume is an introduction by Simon Noveck to twentieth-century thinkers, Great Jewish Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, and the fourth is an anthology of their writings edited by Noveck, Contemporary Jewish Thought: A Reader (both B’nai B’rith, 1963). Volume two of this paperback series fills the gap between medieval and contemporary thinkers: Great Jewish Personalities of Modern Times, also edited by Noveck (1959).

COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS Whether a book that compares other religions with one’s own is satisfactory or not depends upon how one defines one’s own position. Those who deny particularity to Christianity would like Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (Columbia University, 1963). Tillich’s approach is analyzed as follows by the Cambridge philosopher of religion H. D. Lewis:

“This is where I think contemporary Christian apologists fall into such grievous error. For in seeking, in appallingly short-sighted ways, to come to terms with prevailing fashions of thought, they have shown themselves willing, even anxious, to dispense with the element of particularity in distinctively Christian claims. Subjecting the faith to a vague attenuation, in the hope of making it acceptable to agnostics and atheists, baptizing much of it to undiluted humanist terms, they have also, in many instances, treated the alleged particularity of Christian affirmations as provisional and of limited significance. The supreme example of this is Paul Tillich, who, not content with extreme evasiveness and obscurity in the course of being all things to all men, unbelievers included, has latterly shown himself equally anxious to be all things to all religions” (H. D. Lewis and Robert L. Slater, The Study of Religions, Penguin, 1966, p. 207). Lewis goes so far as to claim two pages later that Tillich’s place is among Hindus and not Christians.

Much error has been presented in the name of comparative religions by both universalists and particularists. One wonders if the universalists have not been more guilty because they often ignore obvious differences in order to bring everyone into the Kingdom. Christians ought to read a collection of writings by modern Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims in which they present their views of Christianity, Christianity: Some Non-Christian Appraisals, edited by David W. McKain (Greenwood reprint, 1976). A distinguished scholar and one of the best-known American historians of religion, Mircea Eliade, has attempted in many works to compare religions under the guise of history but in terms of the element of the sacred, so as to present a trans-historical “structure” of the sacred that he sees fulfilled in the symbols of Christianity. For his “evidence” see his Patterns in Comparative Religion (New American Library, 1958). For a quick introduction to his procedure read his Images and Symbols (Sheed, 1969). The greatest expert in comparative religions and especially the mystical in religions is R. C. Zaehner. Conservative evangelicals would probably prefer Stephen Neill, Christian Faith and Other Faiths (second edition, Oxford, 1970), or J. N. D. Anderson, Christianity and Comparative Religion (InterVarsity, 1971). Anderson has an interesting interpretation of the first two chapters of Romans. Most Christians, however, after learning about other religions, will probably join me in being dissatisfied with these comparative attempts.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

Eldridge Cleaver is remembered by most people as a hell-bent revolutionary of the turbulent 1960s. A descendent of Baptist preachers in Arkansas but the product of a broken home in Los Angeles, he spent years in California jails for crimes of violence. His best-selling “Soul on Ice. (1966) was written in prison. In 1967 he became a leader of the Black Panthers. A few days after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April, 1968, he was wounded in a shoot-out with Oakland police. He fled to Canada, and over the next seven years he traveled in Cuba and other Communist countries, living in Algeria and then France as a political refugee. In France in 1975 he turned to the Bible during a period of depression and underwent a conversion experience. He returned to America to face trial in connection with the Oakland shoot-out. Various Christians, including a former Black Panther, ministered to him in jail. He was released last summer on $100,000 bail, raised by Christian businessmen. The following interview was conducted by James S. Tinney, a journalism teacher at Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Question. What is your attitude toward the black church?

Answer. I am much more open and understanding of the black church now. In the past I tended to write it off—including the whole tradition of the black church—as a handmaiden of the slave masters. James Cone decisively criticizes the black church, and my attitude came out of that same approach. Now I am thrilled with the history of the black church and its stability. I feel awed by how magnificent it is. It would be easy to criticize it, but I don’t feel it would be helpful.

Q. Some people within the black community have wondered why you seem more involved with white Christian groups than with black Christian groups. Are you being used by white Christians?

A. I have just taken advantage of whatever witness opportunities have come along. It is true that I have been given invitations to speak to a larger number of white gatherings than black ones, but every audience to which I’ve spoken has had some blacks present. This has to do with the attitude many black people took toward me when I came back to the States. Some of my former friends and associates in the black community have called me an FBI or CIA agent. They’ve even asked black people not to help me. When I was in jail, one bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church came to see me, and we had some good fellowship. But he was unique. He wasn’t from California. Other black ministers here wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole. Many white preachers, though, came to see me. I know that a lot of the black preachers didn’t support me because they were confused or didn’t have adequate information, but there were some who wanted me to bite the dust, so to speak.

Q. What do you think about liberation theology, as espoused by certain Latin American and by certain black theologians?

A. I can fully support their aspirations and social concerns. But I have some grave reservations about how they use the struggle for liberation as a point of reference for determining theological truth. I’m not a theologian, but I’ve read that they use the tradition of struggle as coequal to the Scriptures. That concerns me.

Q. Has your conversion influenced your political views?

A. Yes. But I don’t want to put Christianity into the political arena as some want to do. I prefer to think in the traditional terms of separation of church and state.

Q. Do you agree with evangelicals who combine religious conservatism with political radicalism or socialism?

A. That depends on how far they push their socialism. I part ways with them when it gets involved with Marxist-Leninist ideology. There is a contradiction between the teachings of Jesus Christ and Marxist-Leninist ideology. Socialism is in part based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. I find no conflict between the two until you get to revolutionary ideology. I’ve decided that we need a completely rational approach to change. The last thing we need is a class war. I oppose Marxist-Leninism for two reasons: the methodology of the class war, and such ideological goals as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is dictatorship under the name of democratic centralism.

Q. Do you think the social problems in this country are tied to race rather than class? Or is it something else?

A. We’ve got to get away from these narrow identifications and start with certain fundamentals. Black Americans are American citizens. They aren’t going back to Africa and they aren’t going to settle into separate states. When my life began to focus on Jesus, a lot of other things began to fall into place, including my whole idea of national identity. I see a fence-straddling mentality among many blacks. They say, “We might opt for colonization in Africa or for separate states, and we might become integrated into American society.” This ambivalence paralyzes us and keeps our goals out of focus. My approach now is to go into the system. We must acknowledge and embrace American institutions as our institutions and move to improve them—to enlarge and enhance their effectiveness.

Q. What role then do you give to non-electoral forms of political protest and change? Should the activities of black Americans be limited to working within electoral procedures?

A. We are schooled in agitation, demonstration, and protest. In fact, we’ve been involved in these things so long that they’ve become second nature. Some even think it is our only modus operandi. Black Christians may utilize any or all of these at a particular time. But the major way to redress grievances is through the political arena. I’m not ruling out protest, but it’s more important to work together. We have a lot of people, and numbers count in politics.

Q. Since becoming a Christian have you participated in the charismatic movement?

A. I’m still getting to know what’s going on in the Christian family. I’ve read lots of books and Bible lessons on the positive side of the charismatic experience, and I’ve read an almost equal number of books on its dangers. I’m beginning to understand how all this relates to the gifts of the Spirit, but I’m not ready to make a statement on the movement. I have many charismatic friends. And I have many anti-charismatic friends. I’m still naïve enough to believe that Jesus is for everybody. It is us and not Jesus who make these distinctions.

Q. What are some problems you’ve had with Christians?

A. There are some Christians who need to be more concerned with encouraging new Christians, instead of putting banana peels under their feet. Some people don’t want to accept me into the family of the church. A white preacher, for instance, said I should go to jail even if I am innocent in order to set a good example. That threw me for a loop. A lot of people are going around with their own home-baked theologies.

Q. What can be done to reach young blacks with the Gospel?

A. We must talk a language they can understand, relevant and contemporary and yet full of the truth of Christianity. We have to strike a balance. For example, I started using the “Four Spiritual Laws” as compiled by Campus Crusade for Christ, but I soon realized they could not communicate to black people. So I’ve been trying to adapt them.

Q. What about blacks who have been attracted to other forms of religion such as Islam?

A. I’ve been very intrigued by their open-mindedness. Some blacks used to be members of the Black Muslims, but when Malcolm X and the Muslims split, they went with Malcolm or to other groups such as the Hanafis. After the Black Panthers fell apart, some who used to be Panthers went into the Muslim groups. These people are seeking the truth. They want stability. We have an opportunity to pull people out of those dead-end organizations. Too many Christians don’t think that’s possible. I do.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

If one were vouchsafed in a dream to listen in on two voices, and he heard the following fragments—“Who am I?” “… my self-concept,” “… identity crisis,” “… self-awareness”—uttered repeatedly, and then were asked to guess from this little scrap of data, what century he was listening in on, he would not have much trouble deciding. It will probably not have been Aeschylus and Herodotus talking, nor Aquinas and Siger of Brabant, nor even Alexander Pope and Dr. Arbuthnot. His first guess would be, “Those were voices from the twentieth century.”

How can he tell? Why would he not guess fifth century B.C. Athens, or thirteenth century Paris, or eighteenth century London? Because, he would tell us, he was assuming that the voices were typical of their era, and those remarks belong to the twentieth century.

And he will have been correct, of course. No other century or culture of which we have any records has ever been so galvanized by the particular notion that underlies those remarks. No Icelandic saga, no Hebrew psalm, no Navajo legend, no Latin georgic, no Russian novel, has anyone talking quite like that.

The point here is, those fragments are straws in an enormous wind. You can tell a great deal about what is occupying people in a given era by listening to what they say. And you do not have to read very far in the annals or poetry, say, of Greece, or the Middle Ages, or the Enlightenment, before you pick up some notions as to what big questions were at work in their imaginations. If you find people consulting oracles you will conclude (correctly) that they thought it was terribly important to find out what the gods wanted them to do. Again, if you find them confessing their sins to a priest, you will conclude (correctly) that they thought it was terribly important to behave themselves in a way that would bear the scrutiny of some divine tribunal. Or again, if you find them briskly dismantling erstwhile superstitions in the name of Reason, you may safely infer that they trust this faculty.

Our own time is especially marked by the tormented pursuit of the question Who Am I? To say “especially marked” is to understate it: say rather hag-ridden, or bedevilled. We seek the answer earnestly, assiduously, nay desperately. There is hardly a single exchange of co*cktail-party chat which in its own blithe way does not assume this vast, laborious quest as being the natural occupation of us all. “My dear, my shrink told me.…” “Oh, she’s very insecure.” “I have this thing about my self-image.” “He’s going to take a year off from seminary to try and find himself.”

But it is not only in random chat that we hear the news of this pursuit. The whole enterprise of art in our century bears loud witness to it. The sole burden of poetry, theater, cinema, painting, and fiction in our time is that somewhere in there we lost ourselves and hence must grope pathetically for any straw of affirmation that may float by in the dark. From Eliot’s The Waste Land, through the theater of Ionesco, Pinter, Beckett, and Albee, the films of Bunuel, Truffaut, Robbe-Grillet, and Bergman, the painting of the Dadaists, the Bauhaus, the surrealists, and the ilk of Warhol, to the novels of Faulkner, Camus, Vonnegut, and Saul Bellow, we have sent up flares signaling “Help! What are we?” (We hesitate even to make the cautious affirmation implicit in the question “who are we?”)

What does it all spring from? From two assumptions, really: first, that it is in fact our business to look into this question of our identity; and second, that somewhere in there the quarry has got lost.

To take the second one first: everyone’s identity has got lost somewhere. That is the assumption. Who am I? we ask, and can find neither an answer nor any sage who can tell us where to look. To be sure, we attempt it: you can stop at a thousand roadside palmists in Florida and find solace; or you can consult the stars in the afternoon paper in the hope that the Archer or the Crab will help; or you can sign in with a guru of one sort or another, or join a group that will nudge you along towards an answer by getting you to sit in a circle with them, or breathe with them, or take off your clothes, or dance with them, or work through your hang-ups with them. People used to be told to go on an ocean voyage when they were at the end of their tether, the notion being not so much that they find out who they were as that they simmer down and let the salt and the spray and the breeze freshen them up. There was a more remote time when people turned for help to soothsayers, priests, or sibyls, since these practitioners are adept at peering into the darkness where the god lurks and it was the god who knew the answer they wanted. Now we turn to other practitioners who are adept at peering into the darkness where our identity lurks, since that is what we seek rather than the god.

Where was it lost, this thing that we pursue with such zeal? Is it not a naked contradiction for us to be asserting that such a thing as our identity can even be in doubt? Surely (a visitor from another planet might protest) you can’t mean what you are saying—that you aren’t sure who you are? You’re you, clearly. What is it you want to know?

Ah, yes, we would have to explain wearily, but there’s more to it than that. These shells by means of which we present ourselves to you are mere carapaces. You think this is what we are, but if you were to poke into us a bit you would find that what is in there has only a very tenuous connection with what you see. In fact, we are almost afraid to raise the question, but a horrible doubt flits by now and again as to whether there is anything in there at all. We’ve tried poking, and whatever it is in there feels more and more like less and less. Most disquieting.

But how, our interlocutor might pursue, did this state of affairs come about? I have never yet met creatures who weren’t sure who they were. Most creatures aren’t especially interested, much less puzzled, by the fact that they are, leave alone who they are. Dogs appear to have no problems on this level, and nothing we hear of angels indicates anything like it. But here you all are, paralyzed by the question. How did it all come about?

What would we say? It would be extremely difficult to rake back through history and locate the spot where the question Who am I pushed its way to center stage. We could probably find it somewhere after the Renaissance—somewhere in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, no doubt—when, having exiled the gods, we had nothing left to contemplate but ourselves.

But whether Adam knew any such curiosity would be impossible to guess, although given the perfectly harmonious nature of Eden, it may be doubted whether any disjuncture at all had been introduced into the blissful wholeness of his being whereby he might have been disposed to ask who he was. A certain distance is necessary between the asker of any question and the thing asked about, so that when we find an entity (a man) asking about himself, we have found an entity with a fissure running through the fabric of his being. An “asking self” stands on one side and peers across the fissure at the “asked-about self.” One way of imagining the perfection and integrity of Adam’s being is to say that he enjoyed, like God in whose image he had been made, an undivided wholeness (the Persons of the Trinity aren’t divisions) totally free from any perplexing and paralyzing question about itself. It may further be wondered whether self-consciousness was not introduced at the Fall, when we made a grab for varieties of knowledge that turned out to be too much for us. (Perhaps it was one of the flies in Pandora’s box, too.) Whatever may be the truth here, it is most interesting to note that in the picture of Eden in the Bible, there is not one rag of suggestion that Adam’s consciousness was ever turned toward himself. Two things are presented to him, neither of them himself. There is the earth, and he is told to subdue it and fill it and rule it, and to receive its bounty. And there is Eve. She is brought to him and immediately his attention is focused on this other. His eyes look at her and he bears witness of her in his first recorded words. She is the form of humanity made for the eyes of the man to contemplate, and vice-versa. There were no mirrors in Eden, and the myth of Narcissus may suggest something frightening and important about that.

But of course all this is conjecture. We can only make of Eden what we can from the sparse narrative. It is perhaps worth wondering about.

If we look through ancient history, we find that the question Who art Thou is much more lively than the question Who am I. Men seem to be troubled by the gods, who keep addressing them and presenting themselves to them and asking things of them. The Old Testament bears witness to this, too. Who art Thou, Lord? Alas, I am undone, I have seen the Lord. Where shall I hide from Thy presence? I will not let thee go except thou bless me. The main thing seems to be to come to terms, not with oneself but with what is required of one. There is, before very long, a whole Law, imposed by fiat from outside, describing in effect exactly how things will be, and demanding acquiescence on pain of death. Here is what we are to give our attention to. No one is asked for input. No one’s convenience or comfort is considered. And there is not a syllable’s worth of recognition given to any problems someone might have over discovering who he is.

That makes it sound grim beyond belief, but if we step back and look at the human phenomenon and how salvation came to it, some such picture emerges. It is all very alien to our gentle ways of thinking, and much too peremptory. God ought to have begun on a much more conciliatory note. He ought to have sat down with us and listened to us. We could have rapped with him about our hang-ups. We could have worked through our problems.

But alas, there it all is, this daunting set of absolutes, imposed on us from the top, and not a whisper in there allowing me time or room to discover myself first.

Or is it quite so grim? Put that way, it is daunting indeed. But then it turns out that the giver of that high Law is no capricious and maleficent deity tormenting his creatures as wanton boys torment flies. He is Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai, Jehovah-nissi, the God of Abraham, even, it turns out, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—Jesus Christ who loved to call himself the Son of Man. One of us. Immanuel.

Ah. Now there is relief. The picture, surely, has changed. The demands will be relaxed. He knows our frame. He was in all points tempted as we are. He is afflicted in all our afflictions. Perhaps he will help us out of our dilemma. Perhaps, being the Word of God, he will speak comfort to us, and affirm us in our sorrowful quest for ourselves. What does he say?

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Deny yourself. Follow me. Be kind. Be faithful. Blessed are the pure in heart, and the merciful, and those who mourn, and the peacemakers …

Yes. Yes of course. All that. But is there a word about my self-image? Can you tell me how to come to terms with myself? After all, I must find out who I am before I can do anything else.

Must you? To him that overcometh will I give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. Your identity, perhaps, is a great treasure, precious beyond your wildest imaginings, kept for you by the great Custodian of souls to be given to you at the Last Day when all things are made whole.

Some such picture as the above would seem to be indicated in the biblical emphasis. There is a curious lack of any suggestion that our business is to find out who we are. And, if we object that we have to work through our problems before we can set about disposing ourselves rightly vis-à-vis God and our neighbor, we find that the language of both testaments lacks what we might call any “problem-orientation.” We are not addressed, either by Yahweh from Sinai, or by the Son of Man from Olivet, as primarily creatures with problems. The cues given in the law and the prophets and the Gospel and the epistles seem, oddly enough for us men who live in the epoch of the quest for identity and self-realization, to point us right away from that focus, right away from much attention on ourselves as objects of our curiosity. Even the very injunctions to repent, or to keep our hearts with all diligence, or to examine ourselves, carry no suggestion that this self-examination is by way of discovering something there (myself) which will be the proper object for my attention. It is to be a clearing away of rubble and impediment so that I can get on with the business at hand, which is that I be delivered eventually from all forms of egoism, and that I learn that my real freedom and personhood will be discovered, lo and behold, not in looking for it, but in learning to love God and my neighbor. It takes the combined efforts of the Law, the prophets, the Gospel, and the epistles, to help me in this enterprise, but there it is.

There is an obvious objection to this hasty line of thought, of course. It would go something like this: surely you aren’t going to string together a few maxims from the Bible, and set them suddenly over against the entire, gargantuan preoccupation of our whole epoch? After all, this is the era of behavioral sciences. They are the sovereign disciplines in our century. Here we are, this late in history, only now uncovering the whole unhappy complex of things deep in our insides that poison the well for us, and you tell us to drop all that—the whole enterprise—and pick up a few scraps of Scripture and get on with it. That, surely, is bibliomancy. What about the whole burgeoning area of counselling? The industrialized, computerized, management-oriented, profit-obsessed, materialistic, rationalistic modern era has brutalized people; nay, worse, it has depersonalized them wholly, and is stamping them out in stereotypes like nuts and bolts from a press, when all the time their humanity cries out piteously for some recognition and attestation and liberation. And you want them to deny themselves. Fie.

This raises at once the question of the sense in which biblical categories are perennially valid. Do Christ’s words to us all need to be recast for this new age of ours, so remote from his early, simple world? Or again, should our understanding of his words be revised so that we hear in his apparently peremptory and harsh maxims some entirely fresh note, unheard by the Fathers, the Reformers, the Pietists, and the rest of our predecessors? Or again, is it a false problem altogether: is there no tension between these biblical suggestions that our great task is certainly not that of finding out who we are and our own earnest pursuit of this very thing?

Sooner or later it comes down, for any one of us, to how we understand these biblical cues for our own health, and how we are going to help the people who come to us struggling with what are called identity crises and other awful burdens laid on them by the cruelties of life. We can’t just quote “Deny yourself” at them and wave them away. How shall we bear faithful witness to the biblical vision of liberty and health and wholeness lying in a direction straight away from ourselves (for the motion of Charity is forever outwards) and at the same time patiently and mercifully help them along towards some capacity even to begin to perceive, then to grasp, this great and bracing and taxing self-forgetting bliss that they were made for?

It is a sticky question. For, as long as the Word of God lasts, there is no alternative vision of bliss possible, nor any new definition of freedom. We have no warrant to suggest alternatives. The saints are the ones who have won through to that glorious state of affairs—despite whatever frightful personal limitations they staggered along under—where giving equals receiving, and self-forgetfulness equals, lo, self-discovery. The white stone is given, not sought. If that name engraved on that stone is not our identity, then what is it?

Perhaps it is a question of our realizing two things: first, that like so many other thunderous achievements of modern civilization, this acute self-consciousness and self-scrutiny that has been laid on us by the sciences of the last 100 years may be a burden beyond our capacity to manage. Our ids may be there, so to speak, but they may be none of our business, just as the fruit in Eden was there but was not healthy for us to chew on.

Secondly, finding ourselves willy-nilly in such a situation, we may be obliged to use tools never before necessary in human history, the tools of psychological analysis and so forth, to help extricate us from the prison of our own building. But we shall have to remember that they are, precisely, tools, like forceps or scalpels, which may be called in to excise or gouge in order to relieve a terrible condition; but they are not part of the living thing itself; they are not bone and sinew and nerve. Or, to change the metaphor slightly, the scrutiny of ourselves may be like a drug or a purgative, swallowed not as food and nourishment, but in order to assist us as quickly as possible back to health, which is that state of affairs in which our own insides are working quietly and efficiently so that we can get on with the job. The Law and the Gospel may be like old prescriptions, stowed on a high shelf from earlier days. Perhaps the medicine they prescribe—confession (with its corollary of forgiveness), and obedience (with its corollary of freedom)—are more useful than we think. If a patient is so debilitated that he cannot swallow even these nostrums, then of course we must help him with all the secondary skills at our disposal. But sooner or later we will be wanting to get him to the point where he can take these, for then he will be en route to health.

But what of the original question, Who am I? The Christian vision would not be able to see it as the crucial question for us mortal men and women. We seem to have been obliged to affirm a paradox, namely that we get to Point A (real selfhood) by heading towards Point Z (self-forgetfulness—the sort of thing enjoined on us in the Law and the Gospels). Whoever we are, these identities of ours are in the keeping of a faithful and able Custodian, and they will be given to us one day. Our task now is to participate in the ripening of those identities by following the cues, not by pawing into the safe.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

More than orange juice flows from the Florida sunshine tree these days when Anita Bryant is around. Politics, lobbying, protest marches: she’s involved in all of these under the name of Save Our Children, Incorporated. Bryant asked Dade County, Florida, to repeal its ordinance guaranteeing the civil rights of hom*osexuals (i.e., banning discrimination against them in employment and housing). Such an ordinance, she claims, threatens our children, our homes, our way of life. hom*osexuality is an abomination, declares Bryant. The voters of Dade County supported her; in June they repealed the ordinance.

Just what do Christians believe about hom*osexuality? What does the Bible say about it? Do we have answers for those who argue that Scripture speaks quietly about a gay life-style? Can it be argued that Paul condemns promiscuity, not hom*osexuality per se? After all, we are told, Jesus never mentioned hom*osexuality.

The Bible is frank about sexuality. We find no euphemisms or vague sentimentality there. In Genesis we learn that the human body is one of God’s good creations. Specifically, God shaped male (Hebrew, zakar) and female (Hebrew, neqevah). We find no mention of a third or fourth type of human sexual being. God created a biological difference out of which the other contours and polarities of maleness and femaleness emerge. He deliberately created male and female. This sexual difference is not an arbitrary or culturally conditioned convention, as some gay liberationists claim.

The fall affected every aspect of human life, including the sexual. Marriage is continually threatened by adultery (Gen. 12:17; 26:10), by incest (Gen. 19:36), by rape (Gen. 34:2), and by prostitution (Gen. 38:15 f.). The story of Sodom and Gomorrah vividly depicts hom*osexual lust linked with murderous hostility (Gen. 19:5 f.). These passages remind us of the fragility of sexual life in a perverse and often aggressive human society.

The Mosaic Law crystallized the creation order into precise, explicit forms. God’s commandments originate and terminate in the great indicative and imperative of biblical faith: “I am the LORD your God.… You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2, 3). God gives us his interpretation of the goal of human life, day by day, season by season, task by task, relationship by relationship. And his verdict upon hom*osexual activity is inescapably clear: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Lev. 18:22), and, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them” (Lev. 20:13). hom*osexuality violates the basic sexual structure God created, and he rigorously condemns it. In the instructions about punishment we find no qualifications about motivation or contributing factors, such as we do with rape (Deut. 22:23–29) or killing (Deut. 19:4–13). The act of hom*osexual love-making (“to lie with,” Hebrew, shakar eth), like bestial*ty (Lev. 18:23), has no excuse.

But what about the New Covenant? Hasn’t the harshness of the Old Testament law been superseded by the law of Christ, the law of love? Christ stopped the stoning of the woman caught in the act of adultery (John 8:1–11). And he softened the Pharisees’ too rigorous application of the law. Didn’t he bring in an age of grace rather than law, tolerance rather than severity?

While there might be some validity to that view (though not as popularly understood), it is nonetheless true that Christ in many ways strengthened the force of the law. He showed how God’s judgment extended into the far recesses of our secret imaginations: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27, 28). Jesus never intended to dispense with the Mosaic Law (Matt. 5:17); he wanted rather to clarify and extend its radical demands for perfection.

Paul’s writings give us in detail God’s mind on a wide range of ethical issues. In Romans one Paul talks about hom*osexual desire and activity and denounces it as “shameful lust” (Rom. 1:26, NIV). He characterizes hom*osexuality as abandoning “natural relations,” that is, the normal and normative heterosexual responses and behavior. The phrase “natural relation” (Greek, fusike chresis) refers directly to God’s creation order, nature (Greek, fusis), here meaning the way he intends man and woman to relate sexually.

Today some people assert that what Paul castigates here is hom*osexual promiscuity, not hom*osexual activity per se, and that God can tolerate hom*osexual monogamy just as easily as he can commend heterosexual monogamy. Is this exegetical proposal valid?

Paul certainly had in mind the entire range of hom*osexual practice in Greco-Roman culture. He would have known how Greeks and Romans justified this aberration to themselves. Plato in the Symposium and other writers of the classic Attic period had commended certain kinds of hom*osexuality. Certainly Paul would have told the Romans if any hom*osexual behavior were approved. He does this with other ethical issues: he carefully distinguishes a proper from a false use of meat offered to idols, he contrasts worthy and insufficient grounds for divorce or separation, he explains the difference between a good and bad use of the law and between genuine exhortation and uncalled-for rebuking. How would it be possible for Paul, who knew of the philosophically justified hom*osexual practice of the time, not to distinguish that from the “unnatural relations” he speaks of in Romans 1:26 if he intended such a distinction? And Paul criticizes not only the act of hom*osexual love-making but the “sinful desires of their hearts” and the “lust” that “inflamed” them. Just to have a hom*osexual desire, then, is sinful. Further, is it likely that Paul would overthrow the entire weight of Old Testament teaching on this subject, which had Jesus’ indirect but nevertheless forceful backing?

Paul in First Corinthians 6:9 again condemns all hom*osexual activity without qualification: “Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor hom*osexuals … will inherit the kingdom of God.” Two Greek words are translated here by the one English word “hom*osexuals”: malakio, probably meaning the passive “female” partner in a relationship (NIV says “male prostitute,” for which malakos was used, but this may be constricting its meaning a bit), and arsenokoitai, meaning the active “male” partner (though it may have a more general meaning). These words were applied to any and every continuous hom*osexual engagement by the Greek authors, whether a monogamously permanent or a promiscuous one. Paul used these terms knowing precisely what he meant and how he would be interpreted. The attempt to avoid the force of his unambiguous intention is a pathetic piece of modern rationalistic evasion.

The current debate over hom*osexuality is complicated by the voices of psychologists who are often in strident conflict. Although Freud saw hom*osexuality as a definite psychosis that could be cured, there is currently no consensus about either the abnormality or the possibility of a cure for exclusive hom*osexuals. Here are some voices in favor of updating Freud: “Opinion among British psychiatrists has moved away from the traditional view that hom*osexuality is a disorder” (R. E. Barr and S. V. Catts, “Psychiatric Opinion and hom*osexuality,” Journal of hom*osexuality, Winter, 1974/75, p. 213). “The authors of this book are not in favor of continuing to regard such behavior as psychopathological” (G. C. Davison and J. M. Neale, Abnormal Psychology, 1974, p. 239). On the other hand, among diehard Freudians and Skinnerian behaviorists, hom*osexuality continues to be considered a serious dysfunctional illness or behavior pattern.

Although there is strife, it seems evident that the dominant opinion (amplified by a militant gay movement) is the one expressed by the highly regarded Dr. Thomas Chalmers of Detroit, Michigan. He asserts, as a result of his clinical investigations:

1. hom*osexuals are no more neurotic or psychotic than heterosexuals.

2. hom*osexuality is not a mental illness.

3. The only real distinction between hom*osexuals and heterosexuals is a non-voluntary sexual orientation resulting from a complex set of learning factors.

4. A lasting change of sexual orientation is improbable if not impossible.

5. The vast majority of males fall somewhere on a graded scale between hom*osexual and heterosexual and are therefore ambisexual in varying degrees of intensity.

Notice that Chalmers admits that hom*osexual behavior is learned. And what has been learned can, with God’s help, be unlearned.

Christian psychologist Ted R. Evans contested the approval granted hom*osexuality by the psychological establishment in an article for the Journal of Psychology and Theology (Spring, 1965) entitled “hom*osexuality: Christian Ethics and Psychological Research.” Evans, a psychology fellow at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of UCLA, states what to most non-Christian psychologists must seem a gross absurdity: “hom*osexual activity is in rebellion against God.” Evans cites research that in his opinion shows that there is no evidence whatever of any genetic or hormonal causes for hom*osexuality. hom*osexuality, he says, is a “socially learned process” that can develop in a boy when the mother is frustrated and allies with the son against the father, the mother wanted a daughter, or the boy is rejected by girls in his peer group. hom*osexual feelings cannot be condemned, he adds, though hom*osexual activity should be. Evans concluded that it is possible, however difficult, to change one’s predominant sexual response pattern.

Evans felt free to make the kind of moral judgment that Chalmers, under the influence of non-Christian presuppositions, is loathe to make. He concurs with Chalmers in denying organic origins for hom*osexual behavior. What seems to be at issue between them is the criterion of abnormality and the hope for a lasting change of behavior. It is no good for Chalmers to claim that hom*osexuals are no more neurotic or psychotic than heterosexuals, because it is precisely hom*osexual behavior that Evans, the Bible, and all of Christian tradition call abnormal, unnatural, and sinful. Nor does Chalmers’s skepticism about a cure threaten the case. Jay Adams and others give evidence of changed hom*osexuals.

Our society is going through a period of profound cultural unrest and open moral degeneration. The bill for hom*osexual rights introduced by Congressman Edward Koch (D-N. Y.) and the case of Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine are just two examples. Sadomasoch*stic and other p*rnographic literature infests our city streets. The propaganda for a hom*osexual life-style is part of this moral unrest.

The Christian Church must renew its dedication to uphold God’s high standards of purity, to feel compassion for men and women trapped by their own sins, and to go out into our society with a message of hope and salvation in Christ. Like Jesus did we should go where sinners are and there bring God’s judgment and healing grace. hom*osexuals are not freaks or strange creatures in a world of straights. They are human beings, made in God’s image, people to whom God’s message comes in exactly the same way it comes to all of us. hom*osexuals must not be left with a stern word of condemnation from a distant and repulsed body of people called the Church; instead they must be faced with a Church, with Christians, with a God who reaches out to bless even through condemnation.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

You Can Smell When You Can’t Say a Word

“Patricia French Cosmetics, created especially for Christian women.…”

Those words caught my eye, riveted my attention, in the midst of other ads for old books, folding tables, safes, and a fundraising dinner on a two-page spread in a Christian magazine. Or maybe it was the blonde, bare-shouldered woman in the ad.

What are “cosmetics created especially for Christian women”?

Maybe mud packs from the River Jordan.

Or Howfirma foundation cream, Whiter-Than-Snow cleansing cream, Charisma moisturizer.

Total Joy deodorant.

Skinner astringent.

My Salvation perfume.

Myrrh cologne.

Fuller’s soap (99 44/100 per cent pure).

Thou perfume.

Ephesians five-two-seven wrinkle cream.

Stick-on plastic fingernails, with the Four Spiritual Laws imprinted thereon. (Thumbnail in contrasting ivy green.)

Barefoot cool stick-on plastic toenails, with the Four Spiritual Laws imprinted thereon. (Big toe: choice of Pat Boone’s, Andrae Crouch’s, or Tom Netherton’s photograph, all in living color.)

Come to think of it, I may be on the wrong track completely. Maybe these cosmetics have a special quality, something that sets Christian woman apart. Maybe if a non-Christian uses them, she’ll turn ugly, or her toenails will fall off.

That would be helpful. Then we could tell Christian women from non-Christian women by smelling them or looking at their toes.

EUTYCHUS VIII

Beware of Philosophy

Many years of frustration received an outlet through Norman Geisler’s article (“Philosophy: The Roots of Vain Deceit,” May 20) on the relationship between evangelicalism’s problems with inerrancy and her relative ignorance of philosophy. The article was excellent. It should be made to be a “forced reading requirement” for the tenure of all evangelical seminary professors. Graduating as I did from one of the evangelical bastions of the East, I have had firsthand experience of the dangers of ignorance, especially in the biblical departments where professors rejected “Aristotelian” thought forms as culture bound. The problem, of course, was that they accepted the “unculture” bound models of existentialism!

RICHARD E. KNODEL, JR.

Church of the Living Word

Volant, Pa.

Can Dr. Geisler state the philosophical credentials for propositional truth? If so, then … let him do it. If he can’t, then maybe it is he and his colleagues … of whom we should beware lest they spoil us through their lack of philosophy.

S. BOWEN MATTHEWS

Wilmington, Del.

If Professor Geisler would improve the quality of evangelical philosophizing, he should try harder to avoid the criticisms he delivers against others. In particular: (1) He implies that anyone with proper philosophical training will be able to divorce Kant’s idealism from Plato’s idealism and attribute modern theological difficulties to Kant and not to Plato. Historians of philosophy, however, have consistently emphasized the unbroken line connecting Plato and Kant. I myself delved into the linkage as represented by the ineffable neo-Platonic mystical tradition (see my Cross and Crucible, Nijhoff). Merely an examination of the index references to Plato in H. J. Paton’s monumental Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience will prove instructive—if only to show that Geisler is not much of a Kant specialist. (2) Geisler implies that I regard Wittgenstein as the philosophical savior of evangelicalism. Hardly. I have made entirely plain in my writings that Wittgenstein was no Christian, and I never suggested that he himself believed there could in fact be a “book on ethics that would destroy all the other books in the world.” As far as we know, Wittgenstein died an unbeliever who did not see how anything transcendental could in principle pass verificational tests. But I maintained—and I continue to maintain—(1) that Incarnational Christian faith can speak epistemologically to the very issues Wittgenstein thought insoluble, and (2) that Wittgenstein saw, far more clearly than most thinkers in the history of philosophy (including Geisler’s anachronistic Thomists), the limits of metaphysical inquiry apart from Incarnation. Feigl was right that “philosophy [in the sense of traditional metaphysics] is the disease of which analysis [the analytical techniques of which Wittgenstein was father] should be the cure.” … I received my degree with honors in philosophy (and Phi Beta Kappa) at Cornell, with E. A. Burtt … as my mentor, and I will always consider the experience most valuable. But, quite frankly, having observed at fairly close hand the effects of speculative philosophical studies on evangelical students—and the frequent neutralizing of keen apologetic minds in the process—I will be forgiven for suggesting that history, science, and the law (with their hardheaded concern for concrete facts) offer a better route to a solid evangelical world view and a proper perspective on the inerrant Scriptures than what Geisler practices philosophically.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

Strasbourg, France

Geisler’s reconstruction of the philosophic problems underlying questions of inerrancy remind me of Francis Schaeffer’s endless circles each representing yet another philosophic construction destroying the former and claiming a brief reality of its own only to be done in by yet another. Geisler does not quite agree with Montgomery’s circle so he crosses it out and tries for one of his own.… By the time we’re through, each philosopher will get his chance to bear the blame for our “inerrancy problem.” Are we now to add this litany of philosophical errors to our confession …?

LERON HEATH

Valley Community Church

Pleasanton, Calif.

It was a fascinating article yet almost alarming. The unstated implication, as I read it, is that evangelical Christianity must produce one (or more) official secular philosophies, which must then be confessed in order truly to be a “Bible-believing Christian.” This would be the death of intellectually respectable evangelical Christianity, in my mind.

RUBIN L. LUETHE

Church of the Epiphany

Chehalis, Wash.

Geisler concludes by urging us to refute Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard and to heed C. S. Lewis. How does Geisler answer Dr. Paul Holmer’s highly acclaimed book C. S. Lewis: The Shape of His Life and Thought, which indicates that Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Lewis fit together perfectly to provide us with the most adequate of Christian philosophies? I can’t locate a real analysis of Holmer’s book anywhere, just high praise. I don’t know how to evaluate his unusual view of Lewis’s epistemology. Many of us who are concerned about philosophy lack the education to handle it. Help, please!

KATHRYN LINDSKOOG

Orange, Calif.

The Well-Churched Inner City

There is so much in Keith Phillips’s article (“No Salt in the City,” May 20) that needs to be said—shouted from the housetop. If an earthquake would strike us here, on the South Side of Chicago, help would pour in. But when arson makes us look like a bombed-out city, we are left with the scars.

I don’t know where Mr. Phillips came to his figure of 95 per cent of the people living in the inner city being unchurched. That is where he is way off base. If there is a native, indigenous industry in the inner city, it is churches. Old streets of retail establishments become streets of storefront churches, liquor stores, bars, beauty shops and record stores. On any block that is commercial there will be from four to six churches or more. Then, of course, all of the churches left by fleeing whites have new names and readymade congregations who have moved in and established themselves. None but flourishing congregations can buy such buildings and maintain them. If being churched is it—or for that matter being evangelically churched—then the inner cities should be havens of righteousness. Sears and Chicken Unlimited cannot cut the mustard here, but new churches spring up and flourish. We mainline churches on the other hand have severe problems of survival.

CLYDE M. ALLISON

Emerald Avenue Presbyterian Church

Chicago, Ill.

Perhaps the Key

Klaus Bockmuhl’s article “Is There a Christian ‘Life-style’?” (May 20) contains probably the most profound idea concerning Christian sanctification: listening to God to act on his initiative. The article focused on John 5:30 … but let me also add the oft-quoted Revelation 3:20 as well as John 14:10. Perhaps “listening to God” is the key to mending the breach between charismatics and evangelicals.

GERALD J. ROTHAUSER

Director

RothLion Productions

Indianapolis, Ind.

Beginning in this issue John R. W. Stott will appear as a columnist in the first issue of each month. He has been the rector of All Souls Church in London, chaplain to the Queen of England, a chief architect of the Lausanne Declaration, and a contributing editor to CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He is the author of many books. He currently is engaged in a worldwide itinerant ministry of great importance. We welcome his column, “Cornerstone,” to our pages.

Dr. C. Darby Fulton, who served for a short time on our staff, died recently at the age of eighty-four. He was a colleague and friend of L. Nelson Bell, co-founder of CT. Dr. Fulton was born of missionary parents and was the head of the overseas missionary agency of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. for many years. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.

A widely discussed theological issue in many parts of Asia today is the role of inter-religious dialogue in Christian witness to people of other faiths. Christians in Asia live amid an overwhelming majority of members of other religions. In India, for example, a Christian is surrounded by forty-nine non-Christians, including forty-one Hindus and six Muslims. The question of his attitude toward other faiths is not just an academic one.

The two extremes among traditional attitudes toward dialogue are the syncretistic and the polemical. The syncretistic approach holds that Truth is manifold and inexhaustible, and that the various religions explore different dimensions of it. Dialogue is a common exploration of Truth in its manifold expressions by people of different faiths. The view of the syncretists is basically the same as that of Mahatma Gandhi, who said, “The soul of religion is one, but it is encased in a multitude of forms.… Truth is the exclusive property of no single scripture.” In this approach, no revelation of God is normative, and there never can be any certainty about our knowledge of God.

In the polemical approach to dialogue, the goal of the Christian is to defend Christianity as the one true religion. Dialogue takes place at the conceptual and intellectual level. Those who approach it with this attitude often fail to acknowledge that Christianity, as a religion, reflects certain shortcomings and failures just as any human system does, and should come under the judgment of God to the extent that it is not a faithful custodian of the Gospel of Christ. In polemics, one may win the argument but still lose the partner in the dialogue to whom one is attemping to witness for Christ.

Other views of dialogue in Asia, and particularly in India, include the following:

First, dialogue based on the view that the Christian faith fulfills the basic aspirations and longings for God expressed in other religions. This is what we might call Farquhar’s “Crown of Hinduism” approach. The scriptures of other religions are often equated with the Old Testament as representing unfulfilled hopes of man or “the promise,” to all of which the New Testament becomes the “fulfillment.” Therefore, in the Holy Communion service portions from non-Christian scriptures are occasionally read along with the Old Testament lesson before the New Testament reading.

Second, dialogue that seeks to help participants understand the values in other religions and to bring these values to fruition in contemporary life. Influential exponents of dialogue such as P. D. Devanandan and K. M. Panikkar emphasize the importance of viewing other living faiths from the standpoint of the people belonging to them, and of helping people see their faiths in the context of modern secularism. A Hindu must be helped to have an adequate world view and the right concepts of history and society. Dialogue should help him see the inner working of Hinduism in the light of the Christian concept of history and the world, and thereby realize the need and relevance of the incarnation of Christ. Dialogue should see all people as belonging to one new “community” in Christ. It should provide a common religious and theological basis for this “newness,” which is seen only in Christ’s incarnation.

Third, dialogue that finds the concerns of modern secularism and the process of humanization intimately related to what should be the central concern of all religions. The importance of this was developed by M. M. Thomas, one of the most influential theologians of Asia today. Christ alone provides the ultimate meaning and destiny of man and society. The process of humanization is central to the Gospel of salvation in Christ, and he is already at work in the forces that change traditional religious concepts and world views. In a dialogue, the contributions of each religion to the concept of man and society must be studied, in the attempt to gain a deeper understanding of our common humanity.

Fourth, dialogue at the intimately personal and spiritual level, instead of the traditional level of doctrines. This approach is represented particularly in works such as that of Swami Abhishiktananda, who spoke of the Hindu-Christian meeting point as being primarily in “the cave of the heart,” that is, in the interior spiritual experiences of man. Dialogue should be the meeting not of two religious systems but rather of two individuals who yearn for God as he deals with them and makes himself known in different ways.

Fifth, dialogue at the level of the common search of people of all faiths for a human community in a pluralistic society. Renewed importance has been given in recent dialogue to the corporate life of people of different faiths and their social relationships. This is evidenced, for example, in the high priority the World Council of Churches has given, in its debate on “Seeking Community,” to the study of the nature of the community Christians are to seek as they live among their neighbors of other faiths. An international consultation on “Dialogue in Community” was planned this past April in Thailand to clarify some of the issues involved.

For a Christian, dialogue is not enough. Partners of a dialogue come together as two human beings who share in the fall of man and the need for God’s grace. The revelation of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ belong to both; they are not the exclusive property of either. But if one of them has not heard the Gospel directly and personally, he needs to hear it proclaimed in no uncertain terms.

The Gospel is not man-made. It cannot be accommodated to any system, nor can it be modified, nor is it to be debated. It demands a response with commitment. Every person has a right to hear it, and true dialogue should lead to one’s confrontation of its claims.

The All India Congress on Mission and Evangelization, held last January, repudiated an approach to dialogue as a common search for Truth or as a reciprocity of witness based on the idea that God’s revelations in all religions are complementary to one another. The congress statement, “The Devlali Letter,” asserted, “Inter-religious dialogue based on genuine respect for each other can remove misunderstandings, underline common values and concerns, and serve as a preparation of evangelism. Dialogue cannot be an end in itself as the Gospel is not a negotiable theory of salvation, but rather a message to be proclaimed with certainty and authority.”