Page 5630 – Christianity Today (2024)

MARVELLA BAYH, 46, wife of U. S. Senator Birch Bayh, whose professed faith and tireless campaign against cancer provided encouragement to many American women; she had selected Christian rebirth as the theme for her memorial service, which was attended by political and religious leaders, including Oral Roberts; April 24, in Bethesda, Maryland, after an eight-year battle with cancer.

NORMAN S. MARSHALL, 86; commissioned as an officer in the Salvation Army at age 22, he rose within its ranks to become the denomination’s national leader in the United States, from 1957 to 1963; April 26, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, after a long illness.

FRED RENICH, 62, former director of Missionary Internship, one-time missionary to China, and a leader of family workshops; May 8, in Montrose, Pennsylvania.

O. Eugene Pickett was named president of the Unitarian Universalist Association to fill the unexpired term of Paul Carnes, who died of cancer in March. For twelve years, from 1962 to 1974, Pickett was pastor of the denomination’s largest congregation, a 1,000-member church in Atlanta.

Carl E. Armerding, 43, has been named principal (chief executive) of Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. A faculty member since the school’s inception in 1969, and a CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor at large, Armerding succeeds James M. Houston, who has been appointed chancellor.

Abe C. Van Der Puy next month becomes the new “Voice of Missions” for the weekly missionary radio program of “Back to the Bible” broadcast. Van Der Puy, who will continue as president of World Radio Missionary Fellowship (which operates station HCJB), replaces the retiring “Voice of Missions” for twenty-eight years, G. Christian Weiss.

Agostino Casaroli, 64, Italian archbishop who specializes in Eastern Europe study, was selected by Pope John Paul II as Acting Secretary of State. Observers link Casaroli’s appointment to efforts of the Roman Catholic Church and its Polish Pope to improve conditions for Catholics living within Communist systems.

When Mozambique President Samora Machel announced an all-out confrontation between his government and the nation’s churches on May 1, political observers in this southern African state were not surprised. Ever since Machel’s Frelimo guerrilla movement formally took control of the government from Portuguese colonials on June 25, 1975, ties between this avowedly Marxist administration and the churches have ranged from bad to disastrous.

Now, following Machel’s address in the capital of Maputo, church and state relations are worse than ever. Machel scathingly denounced the Christian churches in his country, “in particular the Catholic church,” dubbing some of its bishops as “agents of imperialism.” The “enemy,” he charged, was trying to subvert the ongoing revolution in Mozambique.

The churches’ insistence on proseletizing and their alleged efforts to turn people against socialism also were cited by the mission-educated leader as reasons for the church and state showdown.

It is ironic that Catholics have been singled out for attack: many in the Catholic hierarchy had, in varying degrees, backed the Frelimo independence fight. Priests in Mozambique openly embraced the Frelimo cause, while the late Pope Paul VI once welcomed a senior group of the movement’s leaders—including Frelimo vice-president Marcelino dos Santos—to a meeting in Rome.

But the church won little sympathy or recognition from the Machel government after independence in mid-1975. Church schools and mission hospitals were closed, and the approximately 1.5 million Catholics and 500,000 other Christians became subject to increasing government harassment.

Government hostilities against the church subsided after the initial spate of attacks following independence. But late last year Frelimo-Catholic ties in particular turned sour when the Vatican representative in Maputo, who had been attending a clergymen’s meeting in Lichinga, was detained for three days. Last December the Catholic leadership sent Machel a list of criticisms: they demanded an end to “arbitrary detentions,” described nationalization programs as a “source of dissatisfaction,” and rejected the policy of sending students to Cuba “without their parents knowing it.”

Machel responded on both ideological and practical fronts. The government newspaper Noticias ran a series of articles attacking Catholics in particular for their alleged past collaboration with the Portuguese colonialists. In various parts of the country, churches were closed, religious services were banned, and missions activities were restricted.

The situation deteriorated to the extent that Pope John Paul II asked Catholics in late March to pray for the Mozambique church. (Machel’s May Day speech also forbade persons under age eighteen to be involved with the churches and curbed all building of churches.)

Observers cite several reasons for Machel’s hostility towards the churches. A former Maputo resident, who now writes about Mozambique affairs, says that Machel’s staunch Marxism places him in bitter opposition to the church—even though Machel, like many in the Frelimo leadership, received his education in mission schools. The nation’s one million Muslims also have suffered; the government has closed all mosques and has curtailed the Muslims’ normal religious activities.

But political factors also may influence Machel, say Mozambique watchers. It is argued that recent successes by anti-Frelimo guerrilla groups have forced Machel to seek a scapegoat for his domestic troubles. The chief resistance group, Resistencia Nacional Mocambicana, destroyed a fuel depot at the port of Beira in March, causing much embarassment for Machel. Popular unrest over food and commodity shortages in a faltering economy, as well as opposition to the government policy of collectivism, are given as other possible reasons for the president’s virulence towards the church.

Zimbabwe-Rhodesia

A Temperate Regime Heartens the Church

White-ruled Rhodesia becomes black-ruled Zimbabwe-Rhodesia with white participation. Salisbury journalist Pius Wakatama provides an African Christian perspective on the turmoil behind the transition.

Rhodesia came to the attention of the world on November 11, 1965, when its racial supremacist government under the premiership of Ian Smith unilaterally declared the colonial territory independent from Britain. The declaration was aimed at stopping moves by the British towards handing the self-governing colony over to black nationalists.

In an ineffectual attempt to stop the rebellion the British went to the United Nations and asked the world body to institute economic sanctions against the rebellious colony. In response, member nations, including the U. S., severed their economic and diplomatic relations with Rhodesia. Simultaneously black nationalists, who until then were reluctant to use force, resorted to an armed guerrilla war, which is still raging.

In retaliation, the white Rhodesian government imprisoned all leading nationalists, among them Joshua Nkomo (now based in Zambia); and Robert Mugabe (now based in Mozambique). Their organizations—Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African National Peoples Union and Ndabaningi Sithole’s Zimbabwe African National Union—were banned, thus leaving the black population with no political leadership or direction.

After several abortive attempts to reach a settlement with the rebel regime, the British in 1971 finally worked out a formula acceptable to Smith. Called the Smith-Home Proposals, they had been worked out by Smith and Sir Alec Douglas Home, then British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary.

A condition put on the agreement by the British, however, was that the constitutional formula would have to be acceptable to the country of Rhodesia as a whole. They therefore proposed establishment of a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Pierce to test public opinion about the proposals.

With all the nationalist leaders behind bars, the African masses had no leadership to advise them on the merits and defects of the proposals for a settlement. Faced with this situation members of the two banned parties, who had previously clashed violently with each other, decided to bury the hatchet to meet the crisis. They believed the British hoped to legalize the Smith regime by making only cosmetic changes.

These men sought for someone to mobilize the people against the Smith-Home agreement. They needed a man who was of national stature: politically astute but with no previous history of political allegiance. The man of the moment needed to be respected and acceptable to members of both banned organizations.

After considering a number of names it was unanimously decided that such a man was fifty-four-year-old, American educated, Abel Tendekai Muzorewa, leader of the 55,000-member United Methodist Church. When approached and called upon to lead the people, the bishop did not immediately reply, but spent three weeks in meditation and prayer. After this period, he accepted the call to lead the hurriedly formed umbrella organization, called the African National Council.

It was thus that the diminutive Methodist prelate was reluctantly thrust upon the Rhodesian political stage. After accepting the challenge, he immediately set about to organize and mobilize the people to reject the proposals worked out in the Smith-Home proposal.

The ANC was not completely alone in this task, for the Christian Council of Rhodesia had published a pamphlet showing some of the shortcomings of the proposals. This did not set a precedent, because Rhodesian black and white Christians had become well known for protesting against the unjust and racist laws of successive governments.

The government had already banned Bishop Muzorewa from African reservations for fear he would incite the people against the government. He and five other church leaders had strongly and publicly renounced the Land Tenure Act that divided the country into white and black areas. In his sermons he often spoke out against government injustices.

When the ANC was formed it was jokingly referred to as the “ecclesiastical party” because of the many church lead-party” because of the many church leaders and pastors in its hierarchy. The executive alone was composed of not less than six Christian ministers.

When the Pierce Commission came to Rhodesia to test black opinion they were faced with a massive rejection of the proposals, even in the most primitive and remote areas. The British government had to withdraw.

As the guerrilla war escalated and took a severe toll on both blacks and whites, the need for some form of accommodation became urgent. On March 3, 1978, Muzorewa, representing the United African National Council, Smith representing the white Zimbabwe United Peoples Organization, and Ndabaningi Sithole representing the internal faction of ZANU, worked out constitutional proposals acceptable to each of them as a basis for a settlement.

Despite opposition from the international community and the externally-based nationalists, one-man one-vote elections were held under the new agreement. Despite the war situation, 65 percent of the voting population turned out to vote. Muzorewa emerged the victor, (see May 25 issue, page 51), charged with leading the first black government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, the country’s new name according to the March 3 agreement.

In 1973 Muzorewa was awarded the United Nations Peace Prize. Friends and foes alike respect him for his humility and unquestioned integrity. On several occasions he has attributed his source of strength to prayer. Each morning before the day’s business he spends half an hour in prayer and meditation.

In his book, Rise Up and Walk, Muzorewa recounts the events leading to his becoming a Christian. He says, “At one revival meeting Rev. Josia Chimbadzwa preached a stirring sermon and invited those who wished to meet Christ in a new way to come forward. Although I had been brought up in a devout Christian home, I made that morning my own commitment to follow Christ as my Savior.… I realized that I was a sinner, but that God loves me and forgives me.”

As prime minister, Bishop Muzorewa is faced with a formidable task. In an interview after the results of the elections were announced he said that the issues before him are “to effect a cease-fire, to create peace, securing the lifting of sanctions and gaining international recognition.”

Mission Improbable

Effecting a cease-fire will not be an easy task. The two externally-based and Communist-backed black leaders refused to participate in or to recognize the elections. Both Nkomo and Mugabe have vowed to continue fighting and win Zimbabwe “through the barrel of the gun.” They accuse Muzorewa and those participating in forming the new black government of being puppets and traitors. They criticize the provision in the new constitution for twenty-eight parliamentary seats reserved for whites, and entrenched clauses that protect the rights of minorities. They have several hundred guerrillas fighting the security forces. As in any conflict of this kind, civilians suffer the heaviest casualties. An average of twenty people die every day.

Since the agreement, however, there have been encouraging signs. The bishop has successfully persuaded some guerrillas to lay down their arms and to participate in the democratic process now established. Those who have come back tell of “killer squads” of guerrillas sent to kill those who decide to heed Muzorewa’s call for total amnesty.

The bishop, however, stresses that the majority rule program needs to be implemented quickly so that more guerrillas can see that what they are fighting for has in fact been achieved.

His strategy is to reach the “boys” who are actually fighting, the majority of whom have no personal political ambitions. Persuading Nkomo and Mugabe to come home is next to impossible for two reasons. Both Nkomo and Mugabe will not serve under a government which they, themselves, do not lead. This is demonstrated by the fact that the front line states harboring their guerrillas have totally failed to forge unity between the two. Their joint name of Patriotic Front is a unity on paper only. In fact, their two 1 “armies” have been known to fight each other within Rhodesia. A recent effort by the Organization of African Unity and the front line states to unify the two groups ended in total failure because neither of them is willing to serve under the other.

The second reason is that the guerrillas are largely armed and funded by Communist countries who seem now to control them. One can’t imagine either Russia or China allowing their proteges to accept a compromise which does not give them dominance and which will leave the mineral-rich country in the western sphere of influence.

A majority in the U.S. Congress is pressing for the lifting of sanctions. Many members of Congress see it as ludicrous that their government refuses to recognize the one-man one-vote elections, observed and deemed to be fair by American observers, while it recognizes one-man dictatorships elsewhere in Africa.

The new Tory government in Britain has made it clear that it would treat the government of the new Zimbabwe-Rhodesia sympathetically. The UANC believes that a number of small countries will recognize the new government soon and that others will follow suit.

Recognition by the UN is not expected any time soon because of the dominance of the OAU and the Communist influence in that body. The OAU officially recognizes only the Patriotic Front of Nkomo and Mugabe as truly representing the people of Zimbabwe. The attitude of those in the new government is, “So what. We can survive as a nation without the OAU or the UN.”

Most Christian leaders are happy with the turn of events. In an interview with this writer, the Rhodesia field chairman of TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission), Wilfred Strom, expressed his satisfaction. Strom has been a missionary in Rhodesia for twenty-five years. He said, “These new black leaders are pragmatic and have the interest of the people at heart. They will not make needless and ruthless changes. One is amazed with the moderation of Bishop Muzorewa’s men. After the abuse they have suffered at the hands of the whites they would be justified if they were bitter, but they are not. These are men who acknowledge God. Under them many doors will be opened for evangelism.

“I feel there are good prospects for the unhindered growth of the church. However, many things will have to change in our own approach. We will see more leadership being exercised by Africans both in the churches and missions.”

Asked whether mission stations closed by the war will be opened, Strom said that this was unlikely, as the mission would adopt a different strategy. He sees the mission station approach as outdated. Since the beginning of the war TEAM has had to close eight mission stations, including a hospital, several clinics, and schools. One high school was closed after guerrillas murdered the African church pastor and the school boarding master.

A leading black evangelical leader, Phineas Dube, associate director of Scripture Union, hailed the bishop’s victory as a good thing. He said, “The fact that our political leader is a born-again man who seeks to do God’s will makes a big difference. Of course, all will not be smooth sailing. There are still the negotiations with the British and the external leaders. The war will still go on for a while but we are in a better position now than we have ever been.”

South African Assembly

Helping Unthinkable Relationships Happen?

SACLA sounds like just another acronym, but it represents anything but the routine. The South African Christian Leadership Assembly, to be held in Pretoria, July 5–15, is an event unprecedented in the country’s history—and one that could play a key role in helping to shape South Africa’s future.

This is the view of some of South Africa’s leading Christians, such as evangelist Michael Cassidy. SACLA could bring together as many as 10,000 Christians, from a wide range of racial, linguistic, cultural, and denominational backgrounds; Cassidy, 42, says the event will “provide an unprecedented opportunity for almost unthinkable relationships to be established, out of which almost anything could come—and it may turn the tide of history in these parts.”

Besides its size, the assembly is especially significant because of the readiness of Christians from all parts of South Africa’s theological and ecclesiastical spectrum to give SACLA their support. Five main constituencies of the South African Church will be represented:

• the Afrikaans churches;

• the evangelicals (mainly English-speaking);

• the mainline denominations, many with large black memberships, linked to the South Africa Council of Churches;

• the Interdenominational African Ministers Association of South Africa; and

• the Pentecostal churches and the Renewal movement.

SACLA will consist of a number of parallel conferences that cater to specific groups of Christians. The first of these will draw together leaders from business, the professions, politics, and other such fields. The other four conferences are for leaders in local churches (ministers and up to ten delegates from the congregations), college ministries, high school groups, and church youth programs. While there will be some overlap in the sessions of the five groups, delegates will spend most of their time in separate “conferences” exploring the assembly theme: “To discover together what it means to be faithful and effective witnesses to Jesus as Lord in South Africa today.”

Although most plenary sessions will be led by South Africans, there will also be addresses by several foreign speakers, including Bolivia’s Bruno Frigoli, Orlando Costas from Costa Rica, Festo Kivengere from Uganda, Cecil Kerr from Northern Ireland, and Ron Sider from the U.S.

SACLA grew from the experience of eighty South Africans who attended the Pan African Christian Leadership Assembly (PACLA) in Nairobi, Kenya, in December 1976. Their experience of reconciliation at this meeting spurred them toward initiating a similar event back home. Cassidy describes SACLA as “a God-given vehicle through which South African Christians of all persuasions, races and backgrounds can come together not only to find each other but to discover in fellowship what it means to be faithful witnesses to our Lord in South Africa in these tumultuous times.”

David Bosch, a University of South Africa theologian, notes that SACLA will not solve in ten days what the church has failed to solve in scores of years. But he and the others involved in organizing SACLA see the assembly as a catalyst through which God can work.

GORDON JACKSON

A Word For The Wetbacks

The NCC also grabbed some headlines with its action in regard to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II). A White House official had called San Antonio the first day of the conference informing NCC officials that a Soviet-U.S. agreement on SALT II would be signed that day. The board unanimously endorsed the SALT II treaty and voted to take out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, which published a joint statement signed by twenty Soviet and U.S. (mostly NCC) churchmen, “Choose Life.” The statement, which indicated support for SALT II and nuclear disarmament, was presented to Governing Board members by several NCC officials that had attended the disarmament conference in March in Geneva, Switzerland.

One other publicized action by the Governing Board involved passage of a resolution in support of amnesty for all illegal aliens now in the United States. This was the board’s solution to the problem of undocumented and “overstayed” persons in the United States, most of whom enter from Mexico at the estimated rate of eight hundred thousand per year.

Newspaper stands in the city displayed red posters with banner headlines, “Churches Back Illegal Alien Amnesty”—certainly good reading in San Antonio where thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants live or pass through.

Several speakers described the illegal alien problem while at nearby Trinity College (United Presbyterian) during a luncheon that also included a tour of a major solar energy project at the school. Eunice de Velez, NCC staff official, called illegal aliens “children of need”—persons forced to flee subsistence living conditions in their own countries, who allegedly are harassed and deprived of their basic human rights by U.S. authorities.

An NCC study committee presented a 1200-word report that criticized U.S. churches for preaching ecumenism, but not practicing it (see box). Paul Crow, chief ecumenical officer of the United Church of Christ and author of part one of the report, “Foundations for Ecumenical Commitment,” wrote that, “while all Christians are called into one redemptive body, we are far from being generally one in Christ.”

Crow blamed denominationalism and “sectarianism” for blocking full Christian unity. He said the NCC needed to be transformed from a “cooperative agency” to a “communion of communions.”

In other action, the board:

• Called for a week of prayer and action in which denominations and local churches throughout the world write three letters in support of black South Africans—one letter to a local parish church in South Africa, one to the South African Council of Churches, and another to their own national governments.

• Declared that the April elections in Rhodesia did not represent a transfer of power “from the white minority to the black majority,” and that the U.S. government should withhold diplomatic recognition of the new government and continue economic sanctions against it.

• Criticized the U.S. criminal justice system as doing “more to perpetuate violence and conflict than to halt them,” and called for numerous reforms in the system. This proposed policy statement passed its first reading.

JOHN MAUST

Lifestyle Consultation

Keeping it Simple Takes ‘Smarts’

Just a short way down the Boardwalk from one of the country’s largest gambling casinos in Atlantic City, 102 evangelicals gathered in Ventnor, New Jersey, to consider trimming back their living patterns in order to share their resources with the poor. The late April U.S. Congress on the Simple Lifestyle for Evangelism and Justice, an outgrowth of the Lausanne Congress, was sponsored by the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization and the World Evangelical Fellowship.

The affair—a warmup for the international consultation on lifestyle scheduled for London in March 1980—brought together those seriously considering, or already practicing, simpler living. Invitations went to a diverse list including Americans and internationals from varied backgrounds.

Ronald Sider, Eastern Theological Seminary professor, coordinator—along with Horace Fenton, former Latin America Mission executive—called the interaction “above my expectations.” “We have seen an exciting affirmation by evangelicals that biblical evangelism is inseparable from a commitment to the poor and to justice.”

In an atmosphere refreshingly free of resolutions and declarations, guidelines surfaced. Most participants shared the attitude of Art Gish of New Covenant Fellowship, Athens, Ohio: “Although we believe there is no one particular form of lifestyle intended for all Christians, we do feel the urgency for the lifestyle of all Christians to take the particular form God intends for them.” A consensus definition of simple lifestyle never emerged.

It was recognized that the “simple lifestyle” emphasis could become a new legalism. Gish cautioned, “Whenever we put lifestyle concerns in the center of our lives the result is works-righteousness and legalism. Our lifestyle should express that our focus is Jesus and his kingdom.”

Participants also noted that the simple lifestyle is impossible to live in isolation. Relatives, peers, and professional colleagues apply pressure to conform to the consuming society. One wife commented, “Our parents think our children are being deprived and try to make it up to them by giving an abundance of gifts.”

William Pannell, Fuller Theological Seminary professor, set the tone in the keynote address, reminding that lifestyle grows out of one’s view of Christ and his total mission. “How much longer can we preach Christ with integrity, when we are so privileged? For the Third World, the issue today isn’t evangelism, it’s survival.”

“Scripture never condemns wealth. Rather it must be coupled with God’s grace. We must be stewards not proprietors of our wealth,” the former coeditor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Frank Gaebelein, pointed out as he challenged the consultees to “give until required to give up something.”

Creativity abounds in the families trying to simplify their living patterns. One young mother told of the initial negative reaction of her children to lentil patties: “Now they ask for seconds and thirds.” Another described activities in which the children discovered how wealthy they were: “One day we counted our sweaters and another our windows, discussing how many people do not have any sweaters, or windows in their homes.”

Michael E. Haynes, minister of Twelfth Baptist Church, Boston, added a sobering comment regarding black churches. “By and large, like black people in this country, they have always practiced the simple lifestyle. We have been too limited in opportunity to do otherwise.”

Attorney David Pullen of Houghton, New York, explaining that legal assistance is given where there is money, told of establishing a legal aid clinic with the excess funds from his practice. Howard Dahl, Fargo, North Dakota, manufacturer, is using surplus company profits to develop a small, easy-to-maintain-and-operate farm tractor for use in developing countries.

Lou Fischer, president of Gino’s fast-food chain, shared changes made in his style of living after being confronted with the poor in Lima, Peru: “I’ve sold the shore house, fly coach, and drive a Chevy.”

A simplified style of living calls for commitment, stewardship, a support group, identification with the poor, and vulnerability. “Simplification of our lives must always flow out of unconditional commitment to the risen Jesus as Lord and Savior,” Sider concluded. “When God came to share his plan of salvation, he took on the flesh of a poor oppressed Jew. Effective biblical evangelism in a hungry world necessarily shares in that kind of costly vulnerability.”

LOIS. M. OTTAWAY

Church Construction

Single-Sunday Finance: Its Unbeatable Terms

The First Presbyterian Church (UPCUSA) in Centralia, Washington, ordered a $225,000 miracle in April, and its 275 members say God responded within dollars of their request. The resulting impact on this timber products town of 11,000 has been “absolutely incredible,” says pastor Ronald Rice. “Everywhere you go, people are talking about it.”

The congregation announced in advance that $225,000 needed for church remodeling and additions—due to a corroding boiler, a deteriorating church annex, and a poor fire inspection rating—would be raised in a single offering on “Miracle Sunday,” April 8. As a “step of faith” the church announced in a front page article in the local newspaper their expectation that God would provide.

The congregation had voted 94–4 on this plan of financing to avoid borrowing the money. Rice had considered the idea ever since attending a seminar five years earlier, which planted an awareness that “Borrowing is the easy way out.… By so doing, you deny the congregation the opportunity to see God perform a miracle. And that was the theme we went on.”

There were other reasons for not borrowing. At current rates, interest payments would nearly equal the loan principal, and church officials noted that only half of a donor’s dollar would thus go for the church’s work. Neither did the church want to diminish existing giving programs because of a building project. More than a third of the church budget goes to missions, said Rice.

As the idea for “Miracle Sunday” evolved, other local churches expressed interest and prayer support, as did former members and friends of the church around the country.

Rice told the local Daily Chronicle, “We are convinced that the amount of money that comes in … will be adequate and sufficient for the project.… We have no ‘Plan B.’”

A packed church greeted Miracle Sunday. Some persons cried, others shouted for joy, when the total of the gifts was announced as $210,874—a figure that would reach roughly $225,000 with two known gifts that had not yet arrived. Final counting would reveal a total of $229,000: $48,000 in cash, $34,000 in real estate and properties, and the remainder in pledges to be paid by October 1 when construction is expected to be finished. Rice said the church had no idea in advance how much money would be given. Some envelopes came from “people we didn’t even know.” All this was in addition to the regular Sunday offering, which totalled a near record $3,200.

North American Scene

Canadian Baptists have begun a series of evangelistic crusades nationwide that will culminate in July 1980 at Toronto with the meeting of the Baptist World Alliance. C. Ronald Goulding, evangelism coordinator for the Alliance, is the speaker at preparatory rallies to be held in five regional centers this year.

The Shroud of Turin so far appears authentic according to American scientists who spent two weeks last fall in Turin, Italy, performing scientific tests on this cloth that some believe wrapped Christ’s crucified body. Kenneth Stevenson of New Orleans, scientific team spokesman, said that preliminary findings indicate that the man’s image is totally on the surface of the cloth—not painted on it or stained—and that the cloth probably originated in the Jerusalem area within a 200-year span of Christ’s period. Other tests, said Stevenson, suggest that the image was formed by some unknown thermal or radiant-energy occurrence.

Clergy in the United States do not believe their salaries will keep up with inflation and that ministers will become more aggressively involved in their own salary negotiations. These were among findings of a survey of pastors, seminarians, and church administrators, taken by Ministers Life, a Minneapolis-based life insurance company. The 700 respondents (more than half of them from Texas and Minnesota but representing every state) also believed that clergy specialization and part-time ministries will increase, and that pastors and their families will be more unwilling to relocate.

Evangelical Publications

Young Editors and Unused Clout

The placard banner behind the speaker’s podium at the Evangelical Press Association convention in Nashville tilted suddenly. And as outgoing EPA president Eleanor Burr began her farewell remarks, the banner, bearing the EPA convention theme, “A Certain Sound,” thumped to the floor.

That may have been the most resounding statement at the thirty-first annual EPA gathering last month. The most “certain sound” at the meeting might have been the Gospel music—Nashville style: EPA delegates benefited by receiving complimentary albums from such convention entertainers as Doug Oldham and Jeannie C. Riley. Perhaps most discussion among delegates followed an address by Forrest J. Boyd, former radio network newsman and president of International Media Service. Boyd called for greater influence by evangelicals at all levels within the mass media. Boyd said that evangelicals “have clout,” and to an extent have used it in political and other realms, but that “we’ve forgotten the news media.”

Boyd also suggested the need for an evangelical news magazine, and some of the delegates speculated afterward about the logistics of beginning such a venture. They tempered their enthusiasm, however, by remembering similar previous ventures that failed financially.

The Banner, denominational organ of the Christian Reformed Church, won the top Periodical of the Year award. The judges panel also named winners in a number of divisional categories. Awards of exellence went to Moody Monthly, general; Impact, missionary; Good News, organizational; Youth and Christian Education Leadership, Christian education; Youth Illustrated, Sunday school take-home; and Dash, youth. CHRISTIANITY TODAY was runner-up in the general periodical category.

Robert Myers, a former managing editor of curriculum with David C. Cook and now the editor of The Arete Journal, a new publication for evangelical educators, was elected to a two-year term as EPA president. His constituency includes more than 230 member periodicals that serve a cumulative total of 20 million readers. Veteran EPA delegates observed the large number of young editors at the conference—attributing the youthful influx to a communications vocations boom in the media overall.

This Nashville conference was “more inspiration than issue-oriented,” said Myers. He said the EPA conference next spring in Chicago will focus more on building editorial skills.

But a lack of issue confrontation at the EPA gathering last month frustrated several delegates. One Wheaton, Illinois, editor was tired of conferences in which “we just preach to ourselves.”

Another delegate, who left gasoline-starved Pasadena, California, to come to the Nashville conference said the writers and editors should have studied ways to deal with immediate future problems—energy and the continuing paper shortage:

“If you don’t have gas and if you don’t have paper, you won’t have a magazine.”

JOHN MAUST

Roman Catholics

Reshaping the Mass for the Mass Media

Some religious programming now on television would “serve the Eucharist like a TV dinner,” said a witness at one of four public hearings sponsored by the Communications Committee of the United States Catholic Conference. “The electronic church is no church at all,” complained another.

At the spring meeting in Chicago last month of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, about 250 bishops heard these and other comments during a 30-minute presentation showing filmed portions of the hearings on communications media. Not all opinions about the planned Catholic media campaign were unfavorable: one witness said that Catholics need “their own Billy Graham” in the communications media.

But the number of pro and con positions on whether the Catholic church should make greater use of mass media may indicate the ambiguous status of the present so-called Catholic Communication Campaigns. The NCCB earlier authorized a national collection for communications; most dioceses received the special offering May 27, with $7 million expected nationwide.

Half of that amount will go toward programs on the national level, and the other half will be divided among the dioceses. The church hierarchy enlisted the advice of mass media professionals on how and where that money should be spent, and also sought input from individual church members—thus explaining the public hearings that were held in four U.S. cities and attended by 140 witnesses.

The net effect may be one of confusion, despite enthusiasm for the project in some Roman Catholic circles. A myriad of options are open to the church, as revealed in the communications presentation at the bishops’ conference. These options range from “starting a syndicated series on television to explain Catholic doctrine,” to investing in “one really important dramatic television show,” to branching into radio, cassette, magazine, cable television, and other projects.

This diversity of options provoked criticism of the mass media campaign: some dioceses complained about donating to a project without knowing specifically how or where the money would be spent.

Joseph R. Crowley, auxiliary bishop of the Fort Wayne-South Bend (Indiana) diocese and communication committee chairman, acknowledged that “it will be hard to please everyone.” His own priority for communications media outreach would be television: “We [Roman Catholics] have to get more of a presence on television.… It is such a compelling force in shaping the thinking of people today.”

He anticipated a “modest and small” television campaign. Some observers say the project will be small by necessity anyway—that the expected $7 million offering will buy little, considering the high cost of communications promotions.

“But no one was harmed at Three Mile Island,” argued one delegate. “Yet …” a voice finished from across the room.

So went the debate, for and against nuclear energy, at the National Council of Churches Governing Board meeting last month in San Antonio, Texas. In the end, however, the “anti-nuke” faction won. The NCC’s policy-making body adopted an eleven-page statement, “The Ethical Implications of Energy Production and Use,” which had as its most controversial recommendation a U.S. national energy policy “which will not need to utilize nuclear fission.”

The board’s antinuclear stand was only a small segment of a comprehensive policy that was designed according to “an ethic of ecological justice.” The NCC Committee on Energy Policy, which drafted the policy statement over a three-year period, also called for energy conservation projects, development of new energy technologies that use renewable resources, and international sharing of resources and energy technologies. But the nuclear issue attracted the greatest attention, especially in the wake of the recent nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.

The day before the three-day meeting began the NCC executive committee had voted to waive a first reading of the statement—meaning that board approval of the statement at the spring meeting would establish it as NCC policy. (Ordinarily, policy statements are presented for first and second readings at successive board meetings.) And, in anticipation of the nuclear debate, the board twice changed its agenda to allow more time for the energy policy debate.

The protracted energy debate left many of the 173 registered delegates—nearly half of them newly elected and attending their first biennial Governing Board meeting—either burned out or warm around the clerical collar. But they finally adopted the policy statement by an overwhelming vote—120–26—as if glad to close the issue.

Prior to the final vote, George McGonigle, an Episcopalian from Houston, cautioned the board members against adopting the policy just for the sake of adopting a policy: “Uncertainty is no sin if it has its foundation in faith.” But a subsequent argument by United Methodist official George Outen may have swayed the board members. Outen, a member of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, wanted an energy policy that took a hard antinuclear stand, one like earlier NCC policy statements “that have caused us to sweat blood and shed tears.” Outen then quoted the late Martin Luther King, Jr., who had once said, “Too often the church has been a taillight, rather than a headlamp.”

Despite passage of the policy statement not everyone was sure that it meant to support a policy “which will not need to utilize nuclear fission.” Energy committee chairman Joel Thompson, Church of the Brethren associate general secretary, who with NCC staff members Chris Cowap and Katherine Seelman, was the primary author of the statement, denied calling for an immediate shutdown of nuclear plants. Thompson, who said he was selected by the NCC Division of Church and Society to become committee chairman because of his ability “to keep dialogue going,” instead advocated a gradual decrease in nuclear dependence. (A Connecticut board member had expressed concern since nuclear reactors provide 50 percent of that state’s electricity.)

NCC president M. William Howard said at a press conference that the policy was a signal “to immediately move to take significant steps toward elimination of dependence on nuclear energy.” (Seventy-two nuclear reactors produce an estimated 12 percent of all electricity in the United States.) Howard noted that starting a new nuclear plant at this time would violate the policy statement.

Claire Randall, NCC general secretary, said that industry officials had lobbied board members prior to the meeting in efforts to dilute the antinuclear position. Most vocal supporters of the continued use of nuclear power were John W. Simpson, a United Presbyterian from Pittsburgh, and Olaf H. Scott, an Antiochian Orthodox clergyman from Charleston, West Virginia. Simpson began the first of his many from-the-floor arguments for nuclear energy by listing his professional credits, including past president of the American Nuclear Society and designer of nuclear powered rockets and submarines.

Scott, a nuclear engineer before his clergy role, had presented to the board an alternative policy statement that likewise built a case for the ethical approach to energy policy. However, his guidelines allowed “using any current energy sources—such as coal and nuclear power—with the utmost sensitivity to the health and environmental requirements of the sustainability of man and nature.”

Unity Bid Grows from Grassroots Diversity

An NCC study panel has just presented its 1200-word report, “Foundations for Ecumenical Commitment,” and Governing Board members gathered in small groups to discuss it. In one such group the debate ranged from ecumenism to the purpose of the NCC itself. An outsider would have been impressed by the diversity of opinions in the group, and any visions of a single NCC stereotype might have been shattered.

“Why are we spending so much time talking about ecumenism—this seems like the committed preaching to the committed,” questioned one delegate.

A board member from Texas speculated, “The average person in the pew could care less about the NCC.” Another Texas board member argued at least the nuclear energy industry notices the NCC. He said two company officials had approached him prior to the conference seeking a dilution of the antinuclear statement.

Dorothy Duke, an Episcopalian from nearby New Braunfels, said the NCC “had become a political group” that did not have Christ as its center. As a result, some members had become alienated, she said. In response, Ruth Prudente, a United Methodist from New York, argued that, “If we can’t speak to political matters, then what is the church?… Jesus Christ was a political figure.”

Real ecumenical movement is taking place in the small interdenominational groups on the local level, said Theodore C. Carlstrom, a Palo Alto, California, lawyer of the Lutheran Church in America. He said the charismatic movement and groups such as Bible Study Fellowship are bringing people together across denominational lines.

An NCC staff member described membership changes in the NCC Governing Board. He said there is a continuing trend toward more women, minorities, and youth. “Board members are more independent than they used to be,” he said.

The NCC also is interested in what nonmembers think. It sent out listening teams to thirteen regional cities during the past two years to find out the concerns of local church members and their awareness of the NCC. Claire Randall, NCC general secretary, found “an abysmal ignorance of the NCC.” She said that church members lack interest in any national program or ecumenical movement.

Group leader Dorothy Berry, who is active in ecumenical programs in Kansas, said many people are scared by the NCC as a kind of “super church.” Ecumenism to her does not imply a structural merger: “Merger implies that somebody’s got to win and somebody’s got to lose.”

What Has Faith To Do With Psychology?

The Human Puzzle: Psychological Research and Christian Belief by David G. Myers (Harper & Row, 278 pp., $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Lewis Rambo, assistant professor of religion and psychology, San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, California.

Among evangelicals, psychology is enjoying a remarkable popularity. Manifestations of this interest are to be seen in the large number of psychological books found in Christian bookstores, the growth of the Christian Association for Psychological studies (CAPS), the establishment of doctoral programs in psychology in association with Georgia State University and with Fuller and Talbot seminaries as well as countless masters programs, and the well-received Journal of Psychology and Theology. Now comes this book as the first in a series to be published by Harper & Row in association with CAPS under the editorship of Craig W. Ellison of Simpson College.

The book is an excellent beginning for the series. This joint venture is a sign of the anticipated large market for such books and a symbol of the growing respectability and sophistication of the emerging religion and psychology movement among evangelicals.

The Human Puzzle follows two other recent and valuable books—Malcolm Jeeves’s Psychology and Christianity (InterVarsity) and Gary Collins’s The Rebuilding of Psychology (Tyndale House). Jeeves contends that psychology and theology are, each in its own way, valuable and viable modes of knowledge. They are distinct perspectives that do not contradict one another but are complementary explanations of the same phenomenon. Collins, by contrast, advocates the renovation of the science of psychology by the implementation of the assumptions, values, and perspectives of a conservative interpretation of the Bible. Myers, who teaches at Hope College, does not, like Jeeves, urge a complete separation of the fields, nor does he follow Collins in the transformation of psychology by evangelical theology. Myers believes that the fields are separate in the sense that they are different in terms of methods, assumptions, and goals. Nevertheless, there are many points at which the fields merge, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing. Myers is much more willing to live with the complexities of the relationship between psychology and theology and, furthermore, he is interested in seeing the interaction as a genuine dialogue.

The Human Puzzle focuses on four major issues: the relationship of the mind and body, the interaction of action and attitudes, the nature of superstition and prayer, and the problem of freedom and determinism. In order to foster dialogue, the book is structured with two chapters on each theme with one of the chapters reporting on psychological research relevant to the topic and another chapter examining theological reflection on the same subject. Thus, there is an interplay of the perspectives with the hope of highlighting the parallels, but not ignoring the conflicts between psychology and theology.

Before exploring these themes, Myers briefly discusses the nature of science as a human enterprise permeated with values and not as the perfect, objective view of reality as it is sometimes idealized to be. Rather, science is a fallible, but important, means by which to understand, predict, and control nature. Hence, though not perfect, science is an illuminating perspective on reality. The “demythologizing” of science is important to Christians because of the assertions of many contemporary philosophers and scientists that science is the only avenue to valid knowledge. Myers works on the assumption that all truth is God’s truth and that science is a systematic and fruitful way to learn about God’s creation.

The relationship of the mind and body is the first set of issues examined by Myers. He surveys some fascinating research that shows the intimate connection between the human capacities for consciousness, imagination, and rationality and their neurological, physiological, and chemical bases in the body. Myers delineates the biblical view of humans as a unity of mind, body, and spirit. Indeed, he argues that among biblical writers mind, body, and spirit are generally synonomous terms. Hence, any split of mind and body is the result of the infusion of Greek philosophy and not Hebrew and Christian understanding. Myers sees in this modern psychological research a confirmation of the original biblical point of view.

Attitudes and action are the second focus of concern. Myers tells about some research which demonstrates that attitudes are often generated as a result of action, rather than the normally expected view that attitudes generate action. According to Myers there is a complex interplay between attitudes and actions, with each implicating, informing, and infusing one another. Thus, one of the implications to be drawn is that religious education should combine cognitive understanding with religious rituals in order to confirm the believer in ways of living as well as ways of believing.

The third set of themes examines superstition and prayer. Prayer, for some Christians, is like a superstition says Myers. Research shows that people often see a cause and effect relationship between events that are merely coincidently related. This tendency encourages Christians to use prayer as a fulfillment of personal desires. Christians need to be aware of this proclivity and avoid it by a better understanding of prayer. That purpose, according to Myers, is to foster humility, submission, and worship of God, not the gratification of petty wishes. Some may disagree with Myers, but surely most Christians are sensitive to the current distortions of prayer being advocated today.

The fourth issue discussed by Myers is the complex area of freedom and determinism. He draws upon the field of philosophy, theology, and science to articulate a position that combines belief in the absolute sovereignty of God simultaneously with belief in human moral responsibility. Myers admits that this combination is paradoxical in that, on the surface, there is a contradiction of terms. Nevertheless, he refuses to simplify the problems and acknowledges the complexity of the topic. He sees the paradox as resolved in a faith that trusts God for the ultimate solution. Pointing to the current discussion on the nature of light as both particles and waves, as a paradox with which scientists are willing to live, Myers avers that the freedom/determinism issue among Christians is likewise such a mystery. Resolution is achieved in humble submission to God in Christ, not through intellectual processes alone.

The Human Puzzle is a very well done book. Myers’s orientation as a researcher in the field of social psychology is evident in the extremely interesting illustrations he gives throughout the book. Myers admits to the complexity of the issues involved and is willing to live with many loose ends. He shows an openness to interdisciplinary perspectives and a desire to find an integration of the biblical witness and the modern scholarly disciplines. The book is also an excellent example of thorough documentation, clarity of exposition, humility in the expression of opinions and convictions, and flexibility in the interpretation of the proper relationship of psychology and theology. Myers advocates a delicate and sophisticated interplay of the two disciplines while at the same time affirming a strong commitment to the supremacy of the biblical revelation, but with an awareness of the possible distortions of our interpretation of the Bible. Psychology, when properly used, can not only help elucidate our misinterpretations but also expand our understanding of human nature and foster a way of life more in accordance with the biblical mandate.

Guides to Children’s Literature

With so many children’s books pouring off the presses, how can we separate the wheat from the chaff? And how can we encourage children to read the wheat?

Christian parents can find a lot of help in two books, both full of imaginative and practical ideas to whet young appetites. Both books also make numerous suggestions for correlating good literature with biblical teachings. Honey for a Child’s Heart by Gladys Hunt (Zondervan, 182 pp., $3.95 pb) was first released in 1969, but a revised edition was published last year. Nearly a third of the book is a classified and annotated listing of books that Mrs. Hunt thinks will still be superior reading ten years from now.

How to Grow a Young Reader by John and Kay Lindskoog (David C. Cook, 166 pp., $2.95 pb) was published last year. (Mrs. Lindskoog is well known for her books on C. S. Lewis.) Their book is even more bibliographical than Hunt’s, with fuller annotations for many of the titles. Hunt’s listings are grouped by age, while the Lindskoogs group by genre. Both books deserve wide circulation among parents and in churches, schools, and public libraries.

A third new book is for school and public libraries: Information Sources in Children’s Literature: A Practical Reference Guide for Children’s Librarians, Elementary School Teachers, and Students of Children’s Literature by Mary Meacham (Greenwood, 256 pp., $18.95). Experienced children’s librarians will already know most of the material, although even they may pick up a few new tips. But for the person just getting started in the field or assigned to set up a library for a school, this book should prove to be of great value.

EDITH TINDER

Three Guides To Prayer

Come, Pray With Me by Carolyn Rhea (Zondervan, 129 pp., $2.95 pb), Learning to Pray, by Carolyn and Bill Self (Word, 159 pp., $5.95), and Hush! Hush! It’s Time to Pray, But How? by Jill Briscoe (Zondervan, 160 pp., $3.95 pb) are reviewed by Cecil Murphey, pastor, Riverdale Presbyterian Church, Riverdale, Georgia.

Rhea treats an aspect of prayer that is often slighted, praying orally and praying with others. The author intends to teach people to verbalize prayer in the presence of others. The style is anecdotal, reminiscent of Rosalind Rinker, whom she frequently quotes. Believing that corporate prayer is one of the church’s serious weaknesses, Rhea has prepared an eight-session course. It is designed to lead a group step by step into praying with and for each other. The book is not merely about prayer in a formal, mid-week service, but it is for families, church school classes, or any situation where people want to pray together.

The Selfs offer a practical approach to conducting a twelve-session prayer workshop. The Lord’s Prayer forms the basis of the sessions with a daily devotional idea built around each of the six petitions. If you’re looking for a tool you can use to get people praying, this might be the book for you!

Briscoe also presents a workbook approach to prayer. Like the book by the Selfs it can be adapted for individual use. Briscoe lays out practical steps toward a more effective prayer life, interspersing personal reflections on how prayer became more meaningful for her.

All three of these books point in the same direction. All are well done and practical, but I give Rhea the edge.

What Is The Goal?

Toward Continuous Mission, by W. Douglas Smith (William Carey, 188 pp., $4.95 pb), is reviewed by Mike Shepherd, teacher, Institute Linguistico, Riberalta, Bolivia.

If you do not know what you are aiming at, you will probably hit it, goes the old saying. Unfortunately, too many Christian missions do not know, in specific terms, what they are aiming at. Two things are lacking: accurate information about the people to be reached with the gospel and clearly defined goals for reaching them.

This is the message of the author in this book based on his doctoral dissertation done at the Fuller School of World Mission. As in most writings from that school, the emphasis is on church growth planning. Smith’s analysis is focused on the work of Andes Evangelical Mission in Bolivia, but his workbook approach is readily transferable to other missions and places. He wants to teach us how to develop strategies for world evangelism, using all of the scientific tools at our disposal.

There are three steps in the strategy-producing process: “a critical reflection on contemporary trends” includes a charting of population growth and church growth; “theologizing of biblical priorities” is a presentation of the concept of “continuous mission; “strategizing for ethnic participation in continuous mission” targets specific groups in Bolivia.

Throughout the text the author points out the fact that God is active in missions and that we are to follow his lead. “A biblical strategy,” says Smith, “follows God’s initiative as he ripens each group for harvest.” Present trends in church growth—amply displayed in many graphs and charts—are taken to indicate God’s ripening activity. Because of the rapid church growth among the Aymara people of Bolivia, Smith considers them ripe for harvest, if Christians will only seize the opportunity for further growth.

The thrust, if not the exact approach, should be useful for many. Of course those with special interest in Bolivia will want a copy because it contains such a wealth of current information. It is a step-by-step breakdown of the evangelistic task in that country by a veteran American missionary. But those interested in other countries will find ideas for the kinds of questions to ask.

Of course, some could question the whole purpose of the book. Given the rise of nationalism in the Third World, how much planning can “gringos” do for churches in those countries? Better to suggest strategies to the nationals and encourage them in the work, rather than attempt to impose a plan. But surely this is what Smith is trying in Bolivia: suggestions. We can pray for success for nationals and missionaries—success in hitting the goals at which they aim.

I Was In Prison And You Visited Me

The Man Who Keeps Going to Jail, by John R. Erwin (David C. Cook, 171 pp., $6.95) is reviewed by J. de Vries, Jr., Protestant Chaplain, Centre Federal de Formation, St. Vincent de Paul, Quebec.

“I am convinced you will never make a satisfactory adjustment in life. You’ll probably spend your time in jail,” said the Indiana judge upon sentencing John R. Erwin to prison.

This book presents a dramatic and convincing illustration that no one is beyond rehabilitation. After spending years in foster homes, orphanages, and jail, John R. Erwin’s life took a U-turn upon his own conversion to Christ. This book describes the growth and maturation of a Cook County (Chicago) Jail chaplain.

With no home life and a totally negative self-evaluation so common to prisoners, what good could Erwin be to the world—much less to the cause of Christ? His aching loneliness was transformed by a realization of his worth and a new life. While attending Bible school he was introduced to a Cook County Jail ministry. Increasing identification and involvement with the “prison fraternity” led to his engagement as chaplain.

Would Erwin’s ministry be to “preach” to inmates, or should the immediate needs of the illiterate Cook County Jail residents be met first? The dilemma was resolved through Erwin’s realization that man first must also have bread in order to be able to receive the “Word of Life.” Erwin did what others thought impossible: he taught illiterate prisoners to read. His procedure, called Programmed Activities for Correctional Education (PACE), eventually drew national attention. His sharp insight into the thinking of the prisoner equipped him to relate more effectively as chaplain and “bringer of hope” in darkness. The PACE program has resulted in changed lives for many new members of Christ’s family. The total ministry to the needs of men in their fallen condition was the key to Erwin’s success. It is an illustration of costly grace in contrast with cheap grace.

The loneliness of prison leads many to experiment with religion. Erwin knows that with the right style or gimmicks, religious conversion can be manipulated among prisoners. He does not preach this “false Christianity,” rooted in illusionary feelings. His own conversion led him to a life of ofttimes exasperating service for the Lord among prisoners. After Christ transformed Erwin’s own life, he kept going to jail so that others could also find true and permanent freedom.

He Has Staying Power

The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, by Chad Walsh (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 269 pp., $10.95, $4.95 pb) is reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, editor at large, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Chad Walsh’s Apostle to the Skeptics was published in 1949 as the first book on C. S. Lewis. It proved to be the pioneering study of an oft-travelled trail. Since the Narnia Chronicles had not yet been printed at the time of Walsh’s first study, it is fitting that in this later evaluation of Lewis a whole chapter is devoted to Narnia. Walsh concentrates on the three in which Aslan plays the greatest part: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Magician’s Nephew, and The Last Battle.

The shape of Walsh’s first book came from his analysis of Lewis as primarily a religious writer—atheist turned Christian, who appealed intellectually to Christian and non-Christian alike. Here the literary qualities of Lewis are the focus of the book.

Walsh applies literary critical principles to the work of Lewis—his poetry, allegory, fantasy, and novel. Until recently, most people have merely surveyed and praised Lewis, looking for themes and images that make him a Christian writer. The question behind each of these chapters is, “What makes a good poem? Or science fiction story? Or novel?” Walsh analyzes Perelandra, Dymer, and The Pilgrim’s Regress from that perspective. And he does what few critics have dared to do. He points out Lewis’s failures, particularly with the poetry and allegories.

Lewis wanted to write epic poetry, but he was out of step, out of fashion with his time. T. S. Eliot, whose poetry Lewis disliked, shaped the genre for the early twentieth century. Lewis could not fit himself into that form. But, although his poetry was not great, his early collections received some good reviews and contain, at times, fine language.

Walsh begins with the poetry, and his chapter on it, “The Shape of His Sensibility,” is a first-rate example of Walsh’s critical skill. His love and knowledge of poetry shows in every felicitous sentence. (Walsh is not only a good critic, but also a fine poet himself.) Unlike many critics who twist the poetry out of shape and thus confuse a reader, Walsh helps you understand why one line or image is good, another is not. He doesn’t spoil the whole; he helps it with a little salt here, more pepper there. Literature could use more critics like him.

The most poignant chapter is “The Road Taken Too Late.” All readers of Lewis who have struggled with Till We Have Faces will appreciate Walsh’s study of it. Lewis loved the book, and was disappointed with its critical reception. It has always been a favorite of mine, and a disappointment that Lewis began to write thick stories late in life. (I think of the Narnia tales, as wonderful as they are, as thin, clear—a broth rather than a bisque.)

If only he had lived longer. That is the tone of the chapter. Just as Lewis made a lasting contribution to the genre of children’s literature, he, if he had lived to write more such novels, could have made a major contribution to that literary form. The book is rich, savory. Even several readings will not yield all it has to offer. Walsh sums up the force of the book: “It is the least typical of Lewis’s narratives and represents the surging breakthrough of an inwardness that Lewis had striven for years to suppress. Readers trained on Lewis’s more typical works are still wrestling with this book which only slowly but with overwhelming power reveals the secrets at the heart of the gods.” For that chapter alone, this book is worth buying.

Walsh wisely avoids making precise predictions about how long Lewis’s popularity will last (see the excerpt, “A Backward and Forward Look,” page 20, in this issue). Walsh has learned from having made such a prediction in an essay published shortly after Lewis died in 1963. Walsh was wrong, for Lewis did not suffer a decline in popularity then, nor has he since. The sales of his books, particularly his children’s stories, increase each year. He is a staple in all kinds of bookstores. He has even made prime-time television. “His work,” as Walsh writes, “seems to have staying power.” That is as fine a tribute as any author could want.

Critical Issues Of The Day

Theology and Mission edited by David J. Hesselgrave (Baker, 338 pp., $7.95 pb) is reviewed by Stanley N. Gundry, professor of theology, Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Illinois.

In March of 1976 the School of World Mission and Evangelism of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School sponsored a consultation on theology and mission. This book contains the papers and responses prepared for that occasion. In them academicians and executives interact on issues confronting the church in its worldwide mission.

Kenneth S. Kantzer and Paul D. Feinberg address aspects of charismatic theology and neo-Pentecostalism. Their discussion is judicious, balanced, and biblical. But neither essay can be expected to break the impasse over baptism in the Spirit or tongues speaking. Further, neither essay gives adequate attention to the variety of beliefs and practices contained in the spectrum covering the names Pentecostal, neo-Pentecostal, and charismatic. More attention needs to be given to the biblical nature of tongues and to the tendencies to exalt experience to the point that it supersedes Scripture or to make experience alone the basis of ecumenicity.

Norman R. Ericson and James O. Buswell III deal with the contextualization of theology. Ericson finds precedent for contextualization in the New Testament and on that basis discusses criteria for it. Buswell approaches this subject as an anthropologist. His treatment is most informative, but it raises more questions than it answers. Contextualization is both necessary and inevitable, but the issues raised are some of the most critical facing theologians and missiologists. How can the essence of Christianity be related without being relativized?

David F. Wells and Harold O. J. Brown come to grips with contemporary evangelism and Roman Catholicism. The recent changes and tensions with Catholicism are well known, but accurate descriptions of the true situation in that church are impossible. The new freedom Catholics enjoy, radical theologies, Roman Catholic charismatics and “evangelicals,” challenges to both ecclesiastical and scriptural authority, changes in the liturgy, the continuing existence of traditional Roman Catholicism—all of these conditions and more make the old dicta about dialogue with and evangelization of Catholics passé. The possibilities, tensions, and dangers of dialogue, cooperation, and evangelization are ably handled by Wells and Brown.

Walter L. Liefeld and Arthur P. Johnston consider the theology of the church growth movement. Both men express qualified appreciation of the movement, but they justifiably appeal for a deepening of the movement’s theological bases and for the subordination of the findings of the behavioral and social sciences to the evaluations of Scripture.

David J. Hesselgrave and Norman L. Geisler consider the possibilities of dialogue with non-Christian religions. Such possibility and desirability depend entirely on the meaning and goal of dialogue. The evangelical cannot compromise Christian tenets; but if dialogue is a method of pre-evangelism and proclamation, aiming to understand and to be understood by those with other worldviews, it is not only legitimate, it is biblical and necessary.

In the last major section Carl F. H. Henry and J. Herbert Kane address mission strategy and changing political situations. Henry focuses on major theological perspectives that relate to the Christian mission to the world. Kane concentrates on missionary dilemmas in the political complexities of today’s world.

The Trinity Consultation on Mission and Theology is a move in the right direction. Too long we academicians have “done our thing” in a way not sufficiently related to the issues our students will be facing in Christian mission. I suspect that unbeknown to many of us theologians and Bible scholars, the critical issues on the leading edge of theology and hermeneutics are being addressed in our absence by missiologists and the practitioners of mission. This collection of papers is a happy attempt to wed the two concerns.

However, I found it strange that only academicians presented the twelve major papers. Of these, I would judge that only four were really well acquainted with missiological issues by virtue of their professional orientation. Mission executives were relegated to the role of respondents. I know myself, and I think I know my colleagues in theology and Bible. We need to sit as students before we stand as teachers. We need to listen in on the missiological discussion before we begin to pronounce. I am not suggesting that the theologians made unduly dogmatic pronouncements. But I am suggesting that at this stage it might be more appropriate for the theologians to be the respondents to major papers read by missiologists and missionary leaders.

Trinity Consultation No. 1 deserves to be followed by Nos. 2, 3, and so on. These papers have their strengths and weaknesses. But they are a good introduction to those issues confronting the church in its worldwide mission.

Letting Paul Be Paul

Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free by F. F. Bruce (Eerdmans, 491 pp., $13.95) is reviewed by Paul Fowler, assistant professor of New Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi.

F. F. Bruce, who has long served as a professor of biblical studies at the University of Manchester, is one of the best-known evangelical biblical scholars. His mastery of the Jewish and Greco-Roman background of the New Testament and his excellent commentaries on Acts and many of the Pauline letters are widely recognized. Out of a lifetime of study, he has contributed yet another excellent volume for our learning. He seeks to embrace all of Paul’s life and thought in a single volume, combining history, exegesis, and theology.

The author’s clear purpose is to provide a framework for understanding Paul’s life and thought by situating the apostle in his historical context. The majority of the book reads like a historical narrative, both interesting and informative, impressing upon the reader the significance of history for interpreting Paul.

The title, Paul, Apostle of the Heart Set Free (American), or Paul, Apostle of the Free Spirit (British), directs us to what Bruce considers to be the major thrust of Paul’s mission and gospel. On the one hand, Bruce cautions: “I have not attempted to expound Paul’s teaching systematically but rather to treat its main themes in their historical context, as Paul himself had occasion to develop them in his letters.” On the other hand, it is evident throughout the book that the motivation and understanding of Paul’s mission and gospel are to be found in his appreciation of the new-found freedom in Christ.

“It is best to let Paul be Paul. And when we do that, we shall recognize in him the supreme libertarian, the great herald of Christian freedom.”

However, Bruce is careful not to allow room for antinomianism, nor to disparage the continuity between Old Testament Law and New Testament fulfillment. He simply views the essence of Paul’s life and thought as based upon the apostle’s joyful experience of freedom from Jewish legalism: “With his own exhilarating experience of spiritual freedom, he could not be content to see his converts going along happily as those for whom ‘rules are more comfortable to live with than principles.’ He longed to see them entering more fully into the liberty with which Christ had set them free instead of living like those Pharisees whom the Talmud assigns to the ‘tell-me-my-duty-and-I-will-do-it’ category.”

Four themes or lessons from Paul, Bruce concludes, still need to be emphasized today. True religion is not a matter of rules and regulations. In Christ men and women have come of age as the new humanity, and are responsible to live righteously as God’s children. People matter more than things, more than principles, more than causes. Unfair discrimination … is an offense against God and humanity alike.

Of course, with a book of this significance and size, one does not expect to be in agreement with everything. For instance, Bruce identifies Galatians 2 with the famine visit of Acts 11:27ff. Consequently, his chronological framework during this period of Paul’s life will not agree with those who connect Galatians 2 with the Jerusalem council visit of Acts 15. However, such disagreements do not affect the total presentation and effect of the book. Furthermore, such disagreements compel one to reexamine one’s own views in deference to Bruce’s meticulous scholarship and obvious command of all aspects of Pauline studies. One might wish that the pastoral Epistles had been used more extensively as a resource for the end of Paul’s life. Due to the controversial nature of the pastoral Epistles, Bruce apparently chose to limit their use.

Paul, Apostle of the Heart Set Free will serve admirably as a text for courses in Acts or Paul. It will provide a framework for understanding Paul’s life and thought, both for the student and for the informed Christian reader. It can be used effectively as a resource volume for teaching the Pauline Epistles and even for personal devotions. And it can serve to refresh and refine the views of scholars. In a day when Paul is declaimed as a misogynist and cold theologian, this book stands as a welcome corrective. F. F. Bruce has admirably accomplished his intention: “to share with others something of the rich reward which I myself have reaped from the study of Paul.”

How Christians Should Live

Discovering a Christian Life-Style, by D. George Vanderlip (Judson, 144 pp., $4.95 pb), Growing Toward Wholeness, by John A. Huffman, Jr. (Word, 96 pp., $4.95), The Ultimate Lifestyle, by Tim Timmons (Vision, 212 pp., $3.98 pb), The Happen Stance, by K. Neill Foster (Nelson, 166 pp., $2.95 pb), and The Pursuit of Holiness, by Jerry Bridges (NavPress, 158 pp., $2.25 pb) are reviewed by David Douglass, editorial consultant, Carol Stream, Illinois.

These five books, representative of a larger number of recent books on the same theme, reflect a fairly wide spectrum of theology, ethics, and readability. The books by Foster and Bridges are outstanding contributions in the area of Christian discipleship. Both are clearly written, straightforward, persuasive, and are in-depth studies.

Foster’s work deserves a more appropriate title. The author presents fourteen “weapons” the Christian can use to help him live more on the offensive in serving Christ; but he does not offer easy formulas or superficial success. Though Foster believes that all the gifts of the Spirit are valid for our day, he warns that they are given to be used as channels of service, not as evidences of spirituality, and that they are all subject to unspiritual misuse. One is impressed by the rare, but biblical, combinations of modesty and boldness, candidness and good taste, profundity and clarity that characterize the entire volume. It is valuable and refreshing reading.

Bridge’s book, in my judgment, is the most thoroughly biblical and balanced volume of the five. Its very title reflects the clear, continuous teaching of Scripture that God’s first and by far most important requirement of his children is holiness. The author stresses God’s nature and character as the primary motivators for our own holiness, and the Holy Spirit as the only sufficient power by which we may achieve it. Yet he avoids the common prescription (and presumption) of “Let God do it all.” “God has made provision for our holiness and he has also given us a responsibility for it” (p. 81).

Foster delves far deeper than the legalism-license issue and grapples with such important but generally unpopular concerns as “putting sin to death,” discipline, obedience, and the power of temptation. The overall thrust of the book is positive and encouraging. Likewise, Bridge’s reasoning and tone are appealing and compelling. The Pursuit of Holiness, just as The Happen Stance, has the ring of deep conviction and personal experience. It is well organized, clearly developed, carefully argued, and remarkably comprehensive for so short a treatment. In every way it is profitable reading.

Growing Toward Wholeness is a rather unoriginal but generally helpful collection of practical, spiritual, and moral advice. The book reads easily and is well illustrated. Though the author reflects a high view of Scripture, he stays pretty much in the shallows of its truth. An inordinate reliance on goal orientation principles and on other writers seriously weakens the book. In places it becomes little more than a catalog of illustrated truisms and formulas. It is worth reading—but not rereading.

The Ultimate Lifestyle is a potpourri of essays on apologetics, doctrine, and discipleship, loosely held together by alliterative and somewhat artificial outlines and headings. The author’s “three-fold challenge” is to the unbelieving naturalist, the non-Christian supernaturalist, and the Christian supernaturalist—an ambitious challenge! The various tangents onto which the writer ventures evidence a similar lack of focus. The essentially sound and helpful content is weakened still further by his penchant for the catchy, the cute, and the flippant. And though Timmons cannot be faulted in his basic theology, nevertheless, as the book title suggests, he is given to superlatives. His evangelical gusto becomes tiresome.

The least biblical volume is Vanderlip’s. It focuses almost exclusively on ethics, giving the greatest attention to social ethics. Of the three general approaches to ethics the author mentions (code morality, principle morality, and situation ethics), he unapologetically favors the last. Though “mature Christian decisions will involve a concern for all three, … we are called upon to make our ethical decisions in the light of the best knowledge available to us” (p. 27). “Because of the ever-changing circumstances of life, ethical decisions can never be determined with finality prior to the challenge of the moment” (p. 25). The guidelines the author “discovers” in the New Testament are, consequently, either authoritative or suggestive—as suits his purpose, or a given situation. The person looking for solid scriptural teaching need not bother with this book.

Devising economics as if people matter

Last month we considered the biblical doctrine of work and began to look at the growing numbers of the unemployed. Yet the problem of unemployment is not one of statistics but of people. In the Third World there is the threat to physical survival; in the West there is the psychological trauma. Industrial psychologists have likened the loss of a job to bereavement and have described its three stages. The first is shock. To be declared “redundant” (an awful word) is to receive a serious blow to one’s self-esteem. “I felt immediately degraded,” said one man, and thought to himself: “I’ve become a statistic. I’m unemployed.” The second stage is depression and pessimism. By now savings are eroded, if not exhausted, and the prospects of finding a job are increasingly bleak. People lapse into inertia. Said one: “What do I do all day? I stagnate.” The third stage is fatalism. In the case of the long-term unemployed, both hope and struggle decline. The spirit becomes bitter and broken. Such people are demoralized and dehumanized.

Further, the worldwide problem of unemployment is going to get worse. I have read a statement attributed to Robert McNamara, President of the World Bank, that “by the year 2,000 A.D. there will be 6 billion people unemployed.” What causes this galloping problem? It is partly that when developing nations have become industrially developed, the steel and ships and commodities they produce will compete with those of the West—and in many cases displace them. It is also partly that microelectronics (silicon chips) will shortly complete the industrial revolution. The experts say that computers will take over the running of factories, the plowing of fields by driverless tractors, and even the diagnosing of diseases. Economists do not seem able to tell us how the problems of inflation and unemployment can be solved simultaneously.

In the light of the biblical doctrine of work, what Christian response should we make to the contemporary problem of unemployment? I claim no expertise, but I venture to make three suggestions.

First, we must change our attitude toward the unemployed. The so-called Protestant Work Ethic has tended not only to encourage industry but also to despise those who are losers in the struggle to survive. Well, no doubt some are shirkers, but the great majority of unemployed people want to work and are victims of the system. We need more Christian compassion towards those who suffer the trauma of “redundancy.” I have recently learned that an unemployed male member of our church in London has stayed away for two whole years because he has feared that people will ask him what he is doing and, when they discover that he is not working, will make him feel a failure. Is not the failure rather ours that we have made him feel despised and rejected? It is not a stigma to be unemployed. Paul’s dictum “if anyone will not work, let him not eat” (2 Thess. 3:10) was addressed to the voluntary, not involuntary, unemployed; it condemns laziness not redundancy. So we need to understand, to welcome, to support, and to counsel the unemployed. Otherwise the very concept of the body of Christ becomes a sick joke.

Second, we must press for more job creation. Successive governments in Britain have done much, by methods of tax inducement, regional policies, retraining, and subsidies. But in areas of serious unemployment, Christians ought not to hesitate to lobby parliamentarians, local authorities, industrialists, employers, union officials, and others to create more employment opportunities. In England some churches and Christian organizations have themselves entered the job creation field. I have read, for example, of the Portrack Workshop in the North of England in which forty-five disabled people are making toys and remaking school desks.

Third, we must remember and act on the distinction between work and employment. What demoralizes people is not so much lack of employment (that they are not in a paid job) as lack of work (that they are not using their energies in service). I know, of course, that God intends us to earn our living, that the paycheck gives people self-respect, and that those receiving unemployment benefit feel themselves to be spongers even if they are in fact receiving their dues because they have contributed to a national insurance plan. Nevertheless, I reaffirm my point that, as a means to self-esteem, work significance is more important than work earnings. To employ people to dig holes and fill them up again gives them pay but not self-respect; to help them to work significantly gives them self-respect, even if the work is unpaid. Unemployed people can still use their time and energy creatively. This distinction will become increasingly important, because all of us will be engulfed in the coming social revolution. Many think that the only way to anything approaching full employment will be “work sharing.” That is, shorter hours with no overtime (perhaps a 35-hour, or even a 30-hour, week), longer holidays, and earlier retirement would spread the same employment opportunities over a larger number of employees. The net result will be that everybody has more leisure. But how will they spend it? God’s fourth commandment is not only to rest one day a week, but to work six days. How can people work six days on a 30-hour week?

We need to develop more opportunities for creative leisure, for this is an authentic form of “work” (even if unpaid) and a welcome relief from interminable hours of destructive television viewing. Do-it-yourself improvements to the home, servicing your own car, working with wood or metal, dressmaking, pottery, painting, sculpting or writing, and community service like prison visiting and sick visiting, working with mentally or physically handicapped people, teaching illiterates to read—these are a few examples, but the list could be greatly extended. Some will doubtless dismiss this as a middle-class reaction to the problem, which would be inappropriate for the so-called working classes, especially in cities and ghettoes. Maybe. Yet I would appeal to the biblical truths that mankind by creation is creative, that we cannot find ourselves or serve God if we are idle, and that we must find a creative outlet for our energies. Therefore, if people do not have facilities either to learn or to practice skills, and cannot find these facilities, should not the church pioneer by providing them?

It is only when we continue to spend whatever energies we have in some form of service that we can bring fulfillment to ourselves, blessing to others and glory to God.

John R. W. Stott is rector emeritus of All Souls Church, London, England.

The foolish things of Madeleine L’Engle.

Madeleine L’Engle is a prolific writer. Stories go through her head in much the same way songs did in Schubert’s. And it’s been that way since she was just a child. Whether traveling, working at the library of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, or at home in the Connecticut countryside, she cannot for long escape her work; a part of her mind is always writing. On a trip last fall to Illinois and Idaho, she had some ten lectures to give—and certainly no time to write. Yet, she brought her current manuscript with her. That in itself is enough to make her stand apart from the current crop of children’s book writers.

There are other differences. Her books are not deliberately simplified for a young audience. Adults who read her stories appreciate them as much as young people. Certainly, they could be marketed as adult fiction. That she won the Newbery Medal places her in the eyes of salesmen in the children’s book category. But you can find her writings in either the adult or children’s section in bookstores. Libraries seem to have equal difficulty deciding how to catalogue her: I have found the same book in three different sections of a local library.

She follows no set formula or pattern. Experimentation marks her books. Before death was popular in children’s books, she wrote about it (much to her publisher’s displeasure). And while drugs and rebellion may be in vogue, L’Engle writes about wholesome family life. She gives models in her books of what the Christian family can be. Religion may be out—but it’s in for her. As to the question of realism versus fantasy, she follows her own sense of which form to put with which story. She made her reputation as a writer of fiction, but if the subject calls for it, she can produce nonfiction. It is refreshing to read an author who writes out of conviction rather than from a desire to please the bookbuying public. Such writers will always find a market.

L’Engle is currently at work on a book of realism; most of her books—in spite of her reputation—fall into that category. But her latest book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet (published last fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is her third work of fantasy. The three books form a trilogy about the amazing Murry family, and the hero of the stories, Charles Wallace, who is gifted with unusual powers of perception. L’Engle says these three books contain her theology. If so, then Charles Wallace is the theologian. He understands the world of the spirit and can explain it to his sister, Meg. She is the student of spiritual things, and he, though much younger, the teacher.

The trilogy (which was never intended to be so, sometimes these things just happen with a writer) begins with A Wrinkle in Time (1962), continues in A Wind in the Door (1973), and concludes with Planet. (I do hope we will have more Charles Wallace stories in the future, though.) Each book focuses on a particular theme that is worked out in the plot. The struggle, as befits a story that contains the supernatural, is of cosmic proportions: good versus evil. Of course, all of L’Engle’s books, whether other worldly or not, deal with that conflict.

Supernatural characters appear in each book. In Wrinkle we find Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which; in Door, there’s a cherubim; and in Planet, a unicorn. These characters appear naturally, with little pretension and without calling great attention to the fact that they are supernatural. Such beings do exist, Christians believe. Why should we be so surprised? With another writer, a nonbeliever, perhaps, we might find the supernatural beings as rulers in the story, the prime movers in the universe. But not so with L’Engle. These characters are servants, just as much as Charles Wallace or Meg. And though not always stated, the person they serve is God. L’Engle gets that across through the smell of the story, if in no other way.

Each book progresses in the concepts it deals with: time, space, and then how time and space play on each other. It also progresses in the demands made on the participants in the tales. You might almost say that Meg, in particular, is commanded to grow. In Wrinkle, she loves her family and her friends; she cannot yet love her enemies. But to save her brother she must conquer hate with love. Since she cannot love the enemy, IT, who has her brother, she lets her love for her brother, which IT cannot overcome, dominate her mind.

In Door, if she cannot learn to love her enemies, then Charles Wallace, endangered by a disease, will die. The cherubim Blajeny, much as the Holy Spirit does for Christians, helps her do that.

Meg plays a lesser role in Planet. This time Charles Wallace is the active character, she the passive. She supports him with her love, but she must let go of him, and allow him to face the dangers without her presence. She has learned the final lesson of love, that of surrender and sacrifice.

Some people have criticized L’Engle’s books as having characters who are too good, too smart, too unbelievable. Each of them, though, has deep flaws: pride, lack of faith, distrust of others. But still they are used. Mrs. Who cites a Bible passage near the end of Wrinkle. I think it is a fitting summary of what L’Engle tries to teach in these books: “The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring “to nought things that are (1 Cor. 1:25–28).

Cheryl Forbes, editor at large, lives and works in Manhattan.

God’s Spirit will not always strive with man.

In one of his cryptic notes, Pascal writes: “the motions of grace; the hardness of heart; external circumstances.” Pascal is referring to the fact that men who are conscious of the call of God (“the motions of grace”) nevertheless resist because of “hardness of heart” and “external circumstances.”

Lord Clark has just published the second volume of his autobiography entitled The Other Half: A Self-Portrait. Sir Kenneth Clark (as he then was) became a household name around the world in connection with the highly successful televised series, “Civilization.” Lord Clark does not profess to be anything other than a liberal, secular humanist; but (as his documentaries reveal) he is not indifferent to the role of religion in the history of Western civilization.

There is an arresting passage in his autobiography in which he writes:

“I had a religious experience. It took place in the Church of San Lorenzo, but did not seem to be connected with the harmonious beauty of the architecture. I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before. This state of mind lasted for several minutes, and, wonderful though it was, posed an awkward problem in terms of action. My life was far from blameless: I would have to reform. My family would think I was going mad, and perhaps after all, it was a delusion for I was in every way unworthy of receiving such a flood of grace. Gradually the effect wore off and I made no effort to retain it. I think I was right: I was too deeply embedded in the world to change course. But that I had ‘felt the finger of God’ I am quite sure and, although the memory of this experience has faded, it still helps me to understand the joys of the saints.”

This passage is extraordinarily revealing. He acknowledges that he experienced “the motions of grace”; he also acknowledges that he deliberately hardened his heart by refusing to pay the price of obedience and amendment. As one reads that passage one cannot help but feel a sense of infinite sadness.

The Gospels tell the story of a young man who also experienced “the motions of grace.” With eager impatience, he asked what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replied: “You know the commandments: Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.” The young man replied that he had obediently kept all these commandments from his youth. Jesus, looking at him, loved him: there was something attractive about this fine, morally upright, eager young man and Jesus coveted him for the kingdom of God; he therefore told him frankly that there was one thing that he lacked: “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Jesus knew that this young man’s wealth was a fatal impediment to full surrender. To be a disciple, he would have to give it up. When he heard the conditions of discipleship spelled out, “his face fell and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions” (Mark 10:19, 21, 22).

This young man, like Lord Clark, was conscious of “the motions of grace,” but because of “hardness of heart” and “external circumstances,” he was unwilling to pay the price.

John Updike, that polished and accomplished novelist of American bourgeois society, quotes Pascal’s epigram in the frontispiece of his early novel, Rabbit Run. “Rabbit” is Harry Angstrom’s nickname; as a boy, he had been given the absurd nickname because of a nervous flutter of his nostrils. The improbable name had somehow become symbolic of his character. Harry was one of those people who attempt to solve the discontents of being human by running. Confronted with a situation he cannot handle, he turns and runs. When his wife has a baby he returns home; he makes a determined effort to be faithful. But things don’t work out well. There is a bitter scene, and Harry storms out of the house. His wife, humiliated and hurt, reverts to drink. Later in the day, in her drunken state, she tries to bathe the baby and drowns it.

Harry returns for the funeral. He feels silently accused; he cannot talk. Desperately, he turns and runs. The novel ends with Rabbit’s flight. “Out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”

At one point, Eccles, the Episcopalian minister, tries to help Harry to understand himself. The problem, as he sees it, is Harry’s determination to run from reality rather than to face it. “Harry,” he reflects, “has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the going through quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out. He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of a paradox.” Unable or unwilling to pay the price of authentic living, Harry, like a frightened animal, turns and runs. He experiences “the motions of grace” but because of “hardness of heart” and “external circumstances” those motions are once again resisted and tragically come to naught.

God’s Spirit will not always strive with man; there comes a time when those who harden their hearts will hear his voice no more. Lord Clark tells us that, for a brief period of time, he had a feeling of “being irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy,” of “a flood of grace,” of being touched “by the finger of God”; but he “made no effort to retain it.” He records that now “the memory of this experience has faded.” What is so inexpressibly sad is that, having tasted the heavenly gift, by his own will and volition, he turned his back on the promised land and did not choose to enter in.

In the words of Shakespeare: “There is a tide in the affairs of men,/Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; /Omitted, all the voyage of their life/Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

These are the alternatives: either a response in obedience to “the motions of grace” and the call of God, or “hardness of heart” and bondage to “external circumstances.” The choice is over to us.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

I love to read. But I have found it difficult to integrate my bookishness into the compelling routines of family life. I had made a grudging decision to abandon the attempt when, one evening, my nine-year-old son and his two sisters began cackling at the dinner table over the ridiculous name of his new classmate: Penelope. To sweeten the parental task of domesticating his manners, I found myself trying to tell him about Ulysses’ Penelope, who did and undid her weaving to stall importunate suitors. Everyone wanted to know more, and a children’s Odyssey from the library soon led us through many other adventures, even producing some tears at the death of Ulysses’ old dog. We had fallen, half unawares, upon our now treasured custom of family reading—reading aloud around the table after dinner.

Thanks to the legacy of his Italian father, my husband has always required the family to stay at the table for conversation after a meal. Thus it was already established that we owed the time between dinner and the littlest one’s bedtime to each other, and that no one need break at a dead run for the television as the last bite was being chewed. Family reading fit naturally into that period. Visiting friends of all ages quickly agree to take their turns as the book is passed around and each person is responsible for a few paragraphs. (The six-year-old, to the counterpoint of tormented sighs from her big brother, reads a small paragraph. She needs less help in sounding things out than we might expect.) Ricky’s insult to Penelope has proved to be one of those chance opportunities that God so often allows; we are daily learning the implications of this idea that we never conceived when we first began to read aloud.

In the nearly two years since we started, we have been through a satisfying variety of stories and books. Among the memorable ones were James Thurber’s “The Figgerin’ of Aunt Wilma” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”; a number of Sherlock Holmes stories; Tevye’s Daughters by Sholem Aleichem (the source of Fiddler on the Roof); The Wind in the Willows; and Swiss Family Robinson. We have read a children’s Bible story book and a number of poems from such sources as The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. We have delighted in the memoir of a North Dakota pioneer girlhood by an acquaintance, Lucy Johnston Sypher (The Edge of Nowhere, Atheneum © 1972); reading aloud was a special part of this engaging writer’s childhood. A recent discovery, recommended to us by another reading-aloud family, was The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois.

We decide informally what to read. Most often I, sometimes one of the others, will make a suggestion and get everyone’s reaction. Sometimes an experience, such as when we got the record of Fiddler on the Roof, makes the choice of a book natural and obvious. Choices are not imposed by fiat—a risk when a parent is on an intellectual hobbyhorse that the children cannot share (as in the story of a local newspaper columnist, who listened in unforgettable agony at the age of four while her father read Gibbon aloud for her edification). Nor do we read every night. Still, we don’t toss it aside lightly, since the child who whines, “Oh, do we have to?” may be the one who enjoys it most.

In conversation and in my own reading, I find that to confine reading aloud to the “bedtime story” of a very young child (we still have bedtime stories, too) is a foolish mistake for most families. When my husband or I mention our family reading to someone, he invariably exclaims delightedly that his family does the same thing—or that they would like to try it. An instructor of Russian literature at Harvard remembered reading Dickens aloud with her teen-age son and was glad of the reminder to start again. A young man who is training to be a children’s therapist has his wife, a professional storyteller, read fairy tales aloud to him—mostly because he likes them, but also because he never heard them as a child. His work with children would be severely limited without them. An executive we know likes to have his wife read aloud to him from the Bible, though neither is at present a believer.

It is possible that reading aloud, or at least reading with others, could do much to counteract the Christian’s tendency to relegate imaginative literature to “the world” and to confine his or her extra biblical reading to commentaries and testimonies. To me this practice, though I too have indulged in it, is so stultifying that it would be better to read the Bible only. There, at least, one does not lose sight of the importance of the imagination, and the power of language to depict what cannot be explicitly stated.

One of my students set out last winter to write a paper with the thesis that the reading of fantasies is a waste of time for a man preparing to be a pastor. He ended up writing his paper on the opposite side after he read C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce. Lewis said that practical knowledge was all very well when you set out to build or to operate a boat. But to him, fantasy was more helpful if the boat should start to sink. In Jesus’ earthly ministry, an imagined story or metaphor was nearly always the best way to express the inexpressible: “What is the kingdom of heaven like? To what shall I compare it?” It must have been in order to keep that especial childlike quality of their Lord’s imagination that several young Christian couples—no children present—recently read Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles together; or that Connecticut pastor had reading-aloud evenings at his church, one of which included the children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit.

When a friend suggested that I write about our family reading, I had a hazy impression that in times past families gathered of an evening to read aloud the newest blue-paper-covered installment of a Dickens novel. So I wandered through the libraries, finding here and there, particularly in memoirs of nineteenth-century life, the sort of evidence I was seeking. I had to shed my mental caricature of that whole age as one of a calcified prudery (lamb-chop pantaloons on piano legs lest someone think of the filthy word “leg” in mixed company).

Those much-maligned Victorians were at least worthy of our attention in that they sought entertainment from one another, playing instruments together or reading aloud. For them there was no choice on a long winter evening; for us it must be a matter of sometimes “living deliberately,” as Thoreau would phrase it. Our television sets, radios, record players, and tape decks can be a great blessing. But, even if used only to beam a Christian message to our ears, they can conspire to rob us of such scenes as this one remembered by Julia Ward Howe: “Oh for one hour in our old square dining room at South Boston with the bright wood fire burning and dear Chev reading aloud to me and the children” (Three Saints and a Sinner, Boston, 1956, p. 358).

Even in a life whose household chores would overwhelm and exhaust a modern family, reading aloud found its place, along with the recitation of memorized passages. A nineteenth-century Englishwoman, Mary Howitt, recalled how she and the other children laid their heads by turns on their mother’s knee as she spun flax (no longer a fashionable activity then for a gentlewoman—but this mother “lived deliberately”) and repeated to them “long portions of Thomson’s ‘Seasons,’ of which she was extremely fond, ‘Gray’s Elegy,’ passages from Cowper, and other long poems, all of a meditative and serious character. I can recall now the sound of her voice, mingled with the busy humming of the wheel, and it seems delightful” (The Echoing Green: Memories of Victorian Childhood, Youth, Viking, 1974, pp. 155–56). When Mary Howitt went to visit her cousins in America, friends and relations all joined in the necessary process of making woven carpet from rags; to keep “this homely but curious work” from being tedious, “some amusing book was read.”

The great writers whose work we have learned always to read silently sometimes betray their own reliance upon reading aloud. It appears to have been so obvious that it was taken for granted, and thus few have called attention to it. Jane Austen has her Emma read aloud to entertain a young portrait painter while he is working. Nathaniel Hawthorne read The Scarlet Letter aloud to his wife, Sophia, who cried into her sewing basket. (When he read The House of the Seven Gables, however, she was glad to be able to read the manuscript for herself afterward; being “eye-minded,” she said, she was able to see some things in the story that she could not hear. Eye-minded myself, I understand her feeling, but have found that being read aloud to is remarkably enriching, provided I get a chance to do some of the reading.)

In an earlier century, James Boswell read chapters of his great biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson to his friend Malone, the Shakespearean editor, in order to have his reactions and advice before publication. Closer to our own times, such treasured writers as Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others of their generation read aloud chapters from ongoing works in their informal weekly club, The Inklings.

The education of a Renaissance prince included reading aloud, if we can judge from a rare memoir about the young Dauphin who was to become Louis XIII. According to his doctor, Heroard, the Dauphin had learned to read by the age of four or five, but still had stories read to him: “Children were not the only ones to listen to these stories [“Renard the Fox,” “Dives and Lazarus”]: they were also told to adults at evening gatherings” (Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, 1962, pp. 72–3). The young prince was part of a society in which (whatever its other faults may have been) people’s amusements were seldom segregated by age. Everyone took part in most activities, from communal snowball fights to reading aloud.

When I was in college I used to see slogans pasted up in subways proclaiming that “The family that prays together stays together.” I see many Christian families that pray together, but do nothing together that engages heart and mind in the fascinating process of knowing others through intellectual delight, through turns of phrase, and moments of shared laughter or sympathy. The lack can force many an intelligent Christian into a dangerous state (what T. S. Eliot might have called a dissociation of sensibility), in which he concludes that he has to hide his real thoughts and feelings from others, from himself, and from God; and into a burial of talent that must bring the Lord Jesus great sorrow.

Reading aloud is only one way of resisting that danger; for me it was and is a vital one. I found myself the other day wishing that a small reading-discussion group to which I belong could read aloud together. I said nothing, only to find that the others were thinking the same thing; now, to my deep delight, the Bible itself is a mainstay of our reading. After all, that is how the children of Israel, very few of whom could have owned scrolls of the Law and the Prophets, heard God’s Word. It was read aloud to them on important occasions, and they remembered what they heard—a skill that modern children are more likely to exercise on television commercials. The early Christians read at their times of assembly the Gospels and the apostolic letters. Those who now live in places where Christianity is illegal and Bibles are contraband must do the same.

Reading aloud suggests that what is being read is precious. Perhaps that is a quality we need to recapture, in a deliberate and childlike way. We are inundated with printed matter; but to select something and share it is nonetheless to proclaim its rarity, its distinction. Isn’t that what the lovers of the old St. Nicholas magazine are remembering when they bemoan its loss? When whole families, all ages, gathered to hear the latest stories read aloud, “culture … had the increased value of all scarce commodities.” There are signs—declining verbal test scores are among them—that culture is becoming a scarce commodity again. Reading aloud is an excellent way to help extract it from the mire.

Sonnet XXII

Thrice holy, three times spoken, meant, and heard

By one voice speaking once, once only hearing,

One only multifold, all-meaning Word,

From out of time, in time and flesh appearing;

Separate, though inseparably one,

Thou who art not the Father, yet art God,

Thou who art Son of Man, though no man’s son;

Root of Jesse, Rock of Ages, Rod

Of Aaron blossoming in barren soil,

Whose petals blades are of a burning sword

Which strikes its deep wounds full of healing oil;

Servant of all, and universal Lord;

With literal metaphors we stumbling seek

To praise thee, strong first-born of all who speak.

DONALD T. WILLIAMS

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

For a review of the book. The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, See page 40.

He set the truth free in fantasy.

CS. Lewis is not a temporary phenomenon. His fame leaped the Atlantic around the middle of World War II. Today, more than a third of a century after the American edition of Screwtape, the sales of his books are running higher than ever. Meanwhile, he has acquired whole new audiences, such as the children who read and reread the Chronicles of Narnia.

This is clearly no transient reputation. In particular, one cannot explain and discuss Lewis as a shallow religious popularizer. If he were merely that, equivalent apologists would have taken his place by now. His books are read by sophisticated atheists as well as the simply pious—and the sophisticated pious.

It is not hard to enumerate the assets that Lewis brought with him when he set out to be a writer. First of all, intelligence. His mind, sharpened by lifelong training, was formidable in its power and precision. One can disagree with him to the point of fury, but not condescend. Coupled with the superb mind was solid erudition. He was master of classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature, so much at home in it that he could make use of its symbols and themes with unconscious ease and grace. Greek and Roman mythology and the legends of the Celts and Germanic peoples were as much a part of his literary frame of reference as the Bible. His books grew out of the collective memory of Western mankind.

Lewis brought to traditional mythology as much as he took from it. His vivid imagination could transport his mind to the floating islands of a distant planet, and from there he would evolve the Story of Paradise Retained. This absolute clarity of visual imagination is one of the main appeals of his more fantastic books. Anyone reading, say, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is given so distinct a picture of Aslan’s death that he could reproduce the scene on canvas with photographic detail.

Lewis’s intelligence and his imagination, taken together, are more than equal to the sum of the parts. In his fantasies one always senses barely beneath the surface a powerful mind controlling the movement of events. In the expository and argumentative books, when the tools of logic are at full strength, there are sudden epiphanies of “Joy,” so that the rules of reason are sweetened by fragrances from another land.

Lewis brought another asset to his writing. Conviction. There is something impressive and moving about a writer who genuinely believes in the world view he presents. Lewis’s adult Christianity was not for him an optional frame of reference. It was the core of his being. If he had lived in a country where martyrs still perish, he would have suffered the flames and never recanted. This can be called fanaticism, but so can every ultimate commitment. The content of Lewis’s conviction—traditional Christianity—may seem to many readers a misplaced loyalty, but when it is encountered as transmitted through his mind, it cannot be dismissed as superficial. And in ways his readers may not all consciously recognize, it gives strength to all that he wrote.

No matter what great use he makes of pagan mythology, Lewis’s central symbol system is biblical. The pagan gods must fit themselves in Jehovah’s universe. It is easy to observe how, about the time he wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress, he had come to view all experience through the eyes of the Christian faith and to express them through its symbols. The advantage of a traditional symbol is that it is always rooted in the eternal archetypes. Lewis’s older contemporary, William Butler Yeats, regretfully found he could not believe in Christian doctrine, and as a substitute devised his own mythology and metaphysics, writing his book, A Vision, to explain it. His system worked well for his own creative imagination, giving him “metaphors for poetry,” but most readers find something contrived about it. It does not resonate in the same way that Lewis’s symbols do. From a purely literary point of view of the most fortunate thing that ever happened to Lewis was his embrace of Christianity in his early thirties. He now had the symbols by which he could say anything he wanted to say.

Finally, to conclude this inventory of assets, there is Lewis’s style. It can be seen evolving from two sources in his boyhood writing. There is first of all the “Boxen” style—brisk and businesslike, not poetic, but capable of irony and wit. The other source is represented by “Bleheris,” with its euphemistic delight in fancy language and flowery turns of phrase. From the marriage of the two styles came the remarkably flexible and gracious style we have examined in a number of contexts. It is straight to the point, lean, free of inflated language and the technical jargon of the professions. At the same time, thanks particularly to the use of exact metaphors, it is capable of modulating into highly poetic effects—more poetic, in fact, than most of Lewis’s verse. It is a modest style, summoning the reader to go beyond the exact words and to retain in his memory not the words but what they point to.

The question now is twofold. First, what is distinct and individual about Lewis’s books, and secondly, how high a rank did he achieve as a writer? Will he be read for pleasure and profit a hundred years from now? Five hundred? All his books or only some? One can of course only speculate about this second question.

Lewis’s career as a published author began with two books of poetry, Spirits in Bondage and Dymer. He subsequently relegated verse to a corner of his life, making no serious attempt to bring out further books of poetry. Only after his death were two additional collections published.

His short poems frequently attempt to do in verse what he learned to accomplish equally well in prose. More problematical are the long narrative poems. Dymer is hopelessly confused and confusing, though with sections of brilliant writing. When it is compared with The Queen of Drum, the progress Lewis had made in a few years is startling. He was very close to becoming the modern Chaucer, though less tolerant of the foibles of daily existence. He backed away—perhaps as much because of public indifference as anything else.

One postscript on his poetry. It is strongly visual, turned outward, objective, far removed from the confessional tradition as represented, say, by Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Such objectivity, though Homer would have understood it, is rare in modern poetry and not greatly in demand. All Lewis’s qualities, handicaps today, could become assets if some vast psychic shift, a movement from subjectivity to objectivity, realigned the landscape of poetry. Lewis’s verse, including the short poems, might suddenly speak with a much stronger voice. But no signs of such a psychic mutation are visible.

I come now to his achievements as a literary scholar. Such work is rather like scientific research. When a new theory is established, the monograph in which the theory was first stated becomes less essential. Good literary scholarship is absorbed into ongoing research. Sometimes, of course, the original, classical statement of new literary insights may continue to be read because it is well written and historically important. One can foresee such a future for Lewis’s two major works in criticism and literary history: The Allegory of Love and the sixteenth-century volume (exclusive of dramatists) of The Oxford History of English Literature. In a more specialized way, Lewis’s studies of Milton and Spenser will continue to be useful handbooks, and An Experiment in Criticism will long remain a valuable challenge to more conventional theories of literary criticism.

Lewis was as much out of step in his criticism as in his poetry. At times, it is true, he talks like a New Critic, emphasizing the need to concentrate on the text itself and not become bogged down in biographical and historical details. But he seldom undertakes minute explications de texte. He also shows little interest in other modern critical approaches, such as the psychological or the archetypal. He is that type of scholar least in fashion—the appreciative critic, whose great gift is to whet a reader’s appetite for a particular book and to give him just enough practical guidance so he can find his way through it.

Few major reputations are based solely on criticism and literary history. Stubbornly and perhaps rightly, readers think of writing about writing as a secondary thing. There is nothing secondary about the next category of Lewis’s books—those dealing directly with religion, metaphysics, and ethics. The continuing popularity of these works, particularly Mere Christianity, is emphatic evidence that they speak to listening ears.

Perhaps part of the secret has been explored by Lewis in his doctrine of “great nouns” as contrasted with the “adjectival” role of mere literature (“Christianity and Literature,” in Rehabilitations). The overpowering effect of a book like Mere Christianity reflects the way it transcends itself and its author. The uncanny literary skill moves the reader’s thoughts beyond the gleaming metaphors and directs them to concepts and hopes that leave language behind. It is as though all the brilliant writing is designed to create clear windows of perception, so that the reader will look through the language and not at it. It is a kind of kenosis. Lewis withdraws himself so that he will not distract the reader from that which is visible through the clear panes of the writing. Any literary critic determined to concentrate on purely literary considerations constantly finds himself analyzing and debating the ideas and has to struggle against recalcitrant forces if he wants to keep his analysis on purely literary tracks.

Another source of power is Lewis’s ability to use Aristotle’s tools to maximum effect. Here a hypothetical shadow hangs over these books. Only the future will tell whether this kind of logic will continue to seem as much a part of the structure of the universe as it has long appeared to Western man. Ways of thought from the Far East—where Aristotle is a recent arrival—call into question traditional assumptions. Within the framework of Western philosophy other doubting questions are being raised. Some vast shift in sensibility, with a new kind of logic, may arise, negating at one stroke Lewis’s careful lines of reasoning. This would not necessarily mean that his argumentative books would lose all appeal. They might come to be enjoyed more as “poetry” than as “prose,” as literature rather than as ideas, and the great nouns would yield to adjectival delights. As Lewis pointed out in The Discarded Image, the poetic mind can still respond to medieval cosmology, though few schools of astronomy require their students to master it.

The solid core of Lewis’s achievement, however, consists of those more imaginative and mythological books in which his ability as a writer and his sensibility as a Christian are fruitfully wedded. These books are the space trilogy and Narnia, together with The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce. (Till We Have Faces is a special case, to be discussed later.) In these books he puts to work every talent he possesses and raises to a high literary level the serious fantasy. The schism between logic and romance is healed, and myth, fact, and truth are revealed as mere interim categories.

Lewis is not the first writer to attempt serious fantasy, but he is one of the most powerful, haunting, and successful. Endowed with a tremendously effective visual imagination, he creates other worlds, including that supernatural realm where Maleldil reigns supreme, to set in juxtaposition with our familiar Tellus. He makes of this genre a means of dramatizing the human condition and posing the everlasting questions. He converts fantasy into a presentation of philosophic and theological insights. In so doing, he poses a major question for literary critics, whose trade is analysis and evaluation: Can a book of one genre be usefully compared with one in another genre? Does it lead anywhere if you compare a sonnet and a haiku? An epic and a lyric? Grant for the sake of argument that Perelandra is as great an achievement of its kind as King Lear is of its kind, does it follow that the two works have equal standing in that select bookshelf displaying supreme literary achievements?

In theory, such could be the case. (Perhaps Dante achieved this triumph in his serious fantasy, The Divine Comedy.) But does Lewis accomplish this? Assume again that from a purely literary viewpoint Lear and Perelandra are literarily equal. But they are not humanly equal. The most lasting literature seems to tell us important and profound things about what it is to be a human being. Lewis’s fantasies deal more with representative types—the Christian quester, the whining mother, the cosmic egoist. We are rarely permitted a glimpse into those churning depths where the individual and individualized soul finds and explores its confused destiny. In theory, Lewis could explore these depths and stand beside Shakespeare. But there would be loss as well as gain; the pageantlike quality of his tales would lose their clarity; fantasy would evolve into something closer to the realistic novel. With his love of mythology and his unerring visual imagination, Lewis was wise to stick to his last and exploit his special strength and gift.

What does he do for us in his fantasies? He creates new worlds, and in creating them he sets Tellus in sharper relief. We see it almost for the first time as we compare it with Narnia, Mars, or Venus. Mere Christianity may become less compelling if the canons of logic change, but this would not cancel out the imaginative reality of Lewis’s worlds. Time can not destroy them. We now know that Venus has a temperature of 800° Fahrenheit, and that Mars is a nightmare of desert and monstrous volcanoes. No matter. Any reader of Lewis, by the magic of his vision, explores not the spheres of the astronomers, but the planets of the restless spirit. Meanwhile, he comes to understand his own provincial planet more precisely because it is not the only theater of Maleldil’s cosmic drama. Lewis’s particular way of relating imaginary worlds to our empirical world—through theology and mythology as well as actual voyages back and forth—is distinctive and gives him a central claim to being master of this literary form.

In The Pilgrim’s Regress we explore a parallel world of the spirit which illuminates the familiar world that cameras can photograph. In The Great Divorce the gray town, familiar here and now to us earthlings, is seen in contrast to the borderlands of heaven. In The Screwtape Letters we behold our world through demonic eyes and understand better each passing moment.

At any rate, these three books plus the trilogy and Narnia constitute the most distinctive achievements of Lewis’s visionary mind. They shape the reader’s consciousness to entertain thoughts of a dynamic cosmos in which supernatural dramas are acted out. These books take their places as a subdivision of the great mythologies that have supplied meaning to so many civilizations. Lewis is a myth adapter and a myth maker, expressing his mythology through the pageants enacted first in the theater of his own imagination and then on the stage of the reader’s mind.

I have so far said nothing about Till We Have Faces. Its differences from the fantasies are much more striking than the similarities. True, mythology plays a key role, but not the same role. The Venus symbolized by blood-stained Ungit is more like a psychological or spiritual force surging inside the individual than the gloriously objective Venus of Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. In Till We have Faces, Lewis turns to traditional mythology as a way of saying something about those depths of heart and soul that he had previously left alone. This book is not a fantasy. It is a realistic novel. It is closer in insight to Dostoevsky than to the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche from which the narrative springs. If Lewis had lived longer, he might have explored these depths further. It is another “might have been.”

As it is, the fantasies must be the centerpiece of his achievement. It is easy to point out their occasional defects and limitations. There is sometimes the playing for cheap effects as in the dunking of Weston, and some details of the N.I.C.E.’s downfall. Certain of the characters are close to straw men. The narrative is often interrupted by editorializing and sermonizing. But how petty this list seems. The clarity and majesty of Lewis’s vision, and the literary skill with which he expressed it, engulf the minor defects.

Lewis fits so oddly in our accustomed literary categories that it will be a long time before we can see him in proper perspective. But as we meanwhile read him, our spontaneous responses tell us much. In a world where the sacred groves are being felled to make way for airports, he conjures into existence other worlds corresponding to the intuitions of mankind’s mythological dreams. Choosing not to seek originality, he produces some of the most original books of the century. In him is combined the sophistication of an Oxford don and the primal visions of a shaman. The roots of his vision lie in the unconscious mind where we are still one with the caveman painting sacred pictures on the wall. Thus Lewis, far from being an escapist, is a writer who renews our contact with the ever-present but often ignored sources of our psychic life. His visionary books are destined to survive, as much in our collective memories as in the footnotes we dutifully add.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

God, the greatest storyteller.

Madeleine L’Engle won the prestigious Newbery award “for the most distinguished contribution to American Literature for children” in 1963 for A Wrinkle in Time, her first fantasy novel. Since then she has written two others, A Wind in the Door, and her latest novel, published last fall by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, A Swiftly Tilting Planet. The three books form a trilogy and, as she explains, contain much of her theology in story form (see Refiner’s Fire, page 30). Although she is known as a fantasy writer for children, most of her books have been written in the realistic genre, many of them for adults. She has also written, among her twenty-six published books, several works of nonfiction. (The Summer of the Great-grandmother, for example, is a moving portrayal of the death of her own mother. Anyone who has lost a parent, or who is losing one, should read that book.) L’Engle serves as librarian and writer in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. She lives with her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, in New York City. Many of her manuscripts and papers are housed in the Wade Collection, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, where she is a frequent speaker. Editor at large Cheryl Forbes interviewed her last fall. The following is an edited version of the transcript.

Question: When did you become a Christian?

Answer: Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

Possibly I was fortunate not to have had the usual formal religious background. My parents were Episcopalians, and so were theirs, and so on back. My father was ill during my childhood and young womanhood; he’d been gassed in the First World War. Mustard gas slowly and relentlessly eats away at a man’s lungs. He worked at night, writing until two or three in the morning No one got up in time to take me to Sunday school. Now I am convinced that was a great blessing. I wasn’t taught things I had to unlearn.

I don’t know why I always had a deep sense of the nearness of a personal God to whom I could talk. Perhaps part of it was the influence of a marvelous old English Roman Catholic woman, Mary O’Connell, who took care of me. Mrs. O. was a true Christian saint. Wherever she was, there was laughter and joy, the infallible signs of the presence of God. Yet, she had a terrible life. Her husband was a total alcoholic. She had to take her children’s Sunday coats with her to work; otherwise, her husband hocked them for booze. She quite often didn’t know where the money would be for the rent. In her later years she suffered with painful arthritis. But she always brought laughter with her. A close friend of mine says that a Christian is someone who’s met one. I met one, early.

Q: You indicate in your writing that at one point you were an atheist—or thought you were—and then you decided otherwise. How did that come about?

A: When I realized that I was trying to be a Christian with my mind only, trying to put Christianity in terms of provable facts. My husband left the theater when our children were little, and we moved to a little New England village. I was asked if I would teach Sunday school. I explained to the minister that I didn’t really believe in God, but I couldn’t live as though I didn’t believe in him. I found life intolerable without God, so I lived as though I believed in God. I asked him, “Is that enough for you?” I began teaching Sunday school. I learned a basic thing from my high school students: cosmic questions do not in mortal terms have mortal answers. We learn through analogy, through story. A distinguished writer friend of mine said that Jesus was not a theologian but God who told stories.

My father died when I was seventeen, my last year in high school. That Christmas I had a date with a sophisticated young man—or so I thought. He said that death was death and that was that. That we are our cerebral cortex. We think through it. When it’s gone, we’re gone. My outrage brought me an analogy. I’m extremely myopic. If I take off my glasses, there are no stars in the sky at night and all faces become vague little pink blurs. I said to him, “I can’t even see you without my glasses. Are they doing the seeing? No. I am. I’m seeing through them. My brain isn’t doing the thinking, I am. I’m thinking through it.” That’s analogy. Now, an analogy is never a provable fact. An analogy is something that opens the door or the window and gives us a glimpse of the truth that gives meaning to lives.

Q: Then, what about doctrine and theology?

A: I think that right doctrine is far more often taught in stories than in direct dogma. At least it works better for me that way. I’d like to go back a minute to something you asked about atheism. One of my sons-in-law is an English Anglican theologian priest. He has talked about being atheists for Christ’s sake. He means that Christians build up little gods, little temples of Baal. We begin to worship them. And we must tear them down, destroy them. The gods we erect are easier to worship than the Creator of the universe. They’re more comprehensible. The God I believe in is not comprehensible in finite, mortal terms. God is infinite, immortal, all-knowing. I have a point of view, you have a point of view. God has a point of view. But we don’t like having to depend on that which we cannot control, manipulate, dominate.

In a sense, praying and writing involve the same disciplines. When I sit down with an act of will, either before the typewriter or to pray, I have to let go of my control and listen. I listen to the story or I try to get beyond the words of prayer and listen to God. Ultimately when I hear, that is the gift, not my act of will, not my act of virtue. It is pure gift. I guess my favorite analogy for the difference between faith and works came from Rudolph Serkin. My husband and I heard him play Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata better than Beethoven could play it. When the last note faded away there wasn’t a sound. Then, slowly, like the ocean waves, the applause swelled. Later I realized that we had been present at a moment of transcendence, of transfiguration. What did Serkin have to do with that? He practices eight hours a day every day. I have to write every day whether I want to or not. I have to pray every day whether I want to or not. It’s not a matter of feeling like it, or waiting when I feel inspired, because both in work and in prayer, inspiration comes during rather than before.

Q: Are you saying that emotions don’t count, or that they only count after the fact?

A: That’s partly what I mean. When we work either with our intellects or with our emotions, that’s fragmented. When we’re really working well, we work with intuition and intellect together, with heart and with mind. This fragmentation is old. Paul talked about it in Romans. When mind and heart, or intellect and intuition, work together, it’s a gift. To sit down to work—whatever it may be—is an act of free will. But then you have to let go.

By and large, that’s a frightening thing. You’re moving into mystery, into dark waters. When I let go and move into what I call overdrive, any interruption jolts me as though I’ve been shoved through the sound barrier—back into a world that is less real.

Q: Which leads—emotion or intellect?

A: It really isn’t a thing of the cart and the horse, or one leading the other. It’s a question of true collaboration.

Q: How would you define love?

A: I’m learning that love is not an emotion. God is love, but God is not an emotion. We may not always feel love toward those who are close to us, but that doesn’t alter the fact of our love. Love is what we do. One of the great victories of the Enemy is to persuade us that love is a feeling.

Q: When did you marry?

A: I wasn’t married until I was twenty-seven. I think that was good. My husband was twenty-nine. He’s an actor, I’m a writer. We’ve been married for thirty-three years, which in our professions is surely unusual. I’d already had two books published. In the middle of my marriage, I didn’t have to say, I want to be a writer. I already was a writer. We knew we would have to divide the domestic chores.

Q: What about children?

A: I had seen other theater wives getting up at six in the morning with their babies and being exhausted when their husbands got home. That didn’t make much sense to me. Hugh would go to the theater at night, and I would put the baby to bed. When he got home, I woke the baby up and we had our evening together. Right from the start, neither of us was being dominant all the time or giving in all the time. It really was a collaboration.

Granted, we’ve had plenty of rough times. I don’t think any good long-term marriage comes free. But I think many marriages break up just on the point of pain when they might begin to grow. Why didn’t we break up? Why were we able to stay together? I don’t know. Hugh asked me not long ago, “What have we done to deserve this?” “Not one single, solitary thing,” I said. It was a sheer gift of grace and I’m grateful for it daily. Hugh has always been behind me in my work and I have been behind him in his.

Q: Aren’t you saying that you respect each other?

A: Yes. We also love each other. They can be two quite separate items. You can have two people who respect each other but the chemistry is missing. Or you can have a wild chemistry but no respect. Neither one is going to work very well. You really need both. I think we underestimate our pheromones, that is, our subconscious, intuitive sense of smell. In my relationship with my editor, for example, pheromones have to be right. Two editors can tell you exactly the same thing. One you’ll hear. The other you won’t. I think the same thing is true with preachers. Two preachers will say the same thing. One I’ll hear, the other I won’t. But, if we all had to hear everybody, what a cacophony there would be. In a sense, that also leads to our ways of approaching Christ. For me, my writing brings me to Christ.

Q: Let’s talk about the ten dry years. You’d had five books published. You must have thought you had it made. Then, nothing. What did you do? How did you feel?

A: I felt terrible. My husband had left the theater. We wanted more children. He thought it was unfair to bring more children into the world with two parents in totally precarious professions. Even with five books I wasn’t making enough royalties to support us.

We had gone through a perfectly terrible year. He’d had a number of jobs, but they’d taken him out of town. We were together two weeks out of the fifty-two. So, he left the theater forever, and during the nine years of forever, we lived in a 200-plus-year-old farm house. And, we bought a run-down general store and brought it back to life.

For the first time in my life I got involved with the institutional church. I found real Christian community. I was beginning to think more about why I couldn’t live without God, about why I had to have meaning to all of life. This affected my writing whether I wanted it to or not, or whether I knew it or not. Obviously, even in telling a story, what we’re thinking about is going to underlie the story.

It seemed ironic and unfair that just as I was turning closer to God, I couldn’t sell anything I wrote. Particularly, Meet the Austins. It was rejected for over two years because it begins with a death. At that time death was taboo in children’s literature. What I believed about the Christian family, about our responsibility to each other, about living and dying, was being denied. I wrote another regular novel and then I wrote A Wrinkle in Time. It was rejected and rejected. I would put the kids to bed, walk down the dirt road in front of the house, weep, and yell at God. I’d say, “God, why are you letting me have all of these rejection slips? You know it’s a good book. I wrote it for you.”

Q: You were writing. What were you reading?

A: I tried to read German theologians. I thought, if I have to believe the way they believe, I cannot be a Christian. I found them depressing, though their soporific sentences did help my insomnia. Then I discovered higher math—physics, which is easier than lower math. But higher math asks questions that don’t have simple answers. Reading Einstein and Eddington, for example, opened up a world where I could conceive of a loving God who really could note the fall of every sparrow and count the hairs on every head. A book that had enormous theological influence on me was The Limitations of Science. In writing Wrinkle I was writing about the universe in which I could love and be loved by a creating God. When it was finally accepted, the publisher told me it wouldn’t sell. The editors were indulging themselves. When it won the Newbery, everybody was shocked. If my prayers had been answered years earlier, the book might have dropped into a dark pool of oblivion.

Q: Would you have kept on writing indefinitely?

A: I hope I would have had faith in my work. But I’m not sure how much failure the human psyche can take. My agent was afraid that failure would kill my talent. In that decade I was protected by my worst faults—stubbornness, pigheadedness.

Q: That verse where Paul says God only sends us as much as we can bear seems pertinent here.

A: Yes. That verse has been important to me, though I sometimes ask, “God, why are you overestimating my capacity to this extent?” But, always, we’re given the strength that we need.

Q: Explain more fully your idea of freedom.

A: Freedom comes on the other side of work. If I want to play a Bach fugue, I must practice scales. If I hope for any transcendent experience in prayer, I have to have just done my ordinary, everyday prayers, which is the same thing as practicing my scales. I have to write every day. Freedom and discipline, rather than being antithetical, are complementary. Permissiveness, either from others toward you or toward yourself, ends up being restricting and crippling. If you choose to be a writer and a mother, you have to be incredibly disciplined. Otherwise you won’t manage. Discipline does not imprison you.

Q: What about failure? Fear of it can cripple even disciplined people.

A: We’ve got to be free to fail. As Christians we follow a man who in terms of the world failed. He listened to his mission, to where the Father told him to go. We seem to have lost sight of that. We live in a world that insists we be successes. If you’re not free to fail, you’ll never be anything but mediocre. You must try to do more than you can really do. Sometimes, you do do more than you can really do. That’s the marvel of it.

Q: Is writing difficult?

A: Yes and no, but basically no. I find getting started every day difficult. But once I’m started, in a sense I find it almost too easy. I love to do it. I’ve been doing it for so long. I’m convinced that every work has its own life, quite aside from the artist who serves it. Artists of all kinds are servants no matter what the discipline. We bear the work, we bring it to life.

Q: Why do you find the form of a children’s book compatible for what you want to say?

A: The fantasies are my theology. In a way, I’m going to say things in my new book, A Ring of Endless Light, that I said in Planet. People who can’t understand the earlier book may understand this one. But I couldn’t write Ring if I hadn’t first written Planet.

Theologically, I suppose that there is an openness and an aliveness to many young people that ceases in adulthood. Jesus said, “I thank thee Father of heaven and earth that you have revealed these things to children and hidden them from the wise.” Maybe I’m still trying to grow up myself.

Q: You enjoy reading children’s books, then?

A: Yes. I get bored with depressing novels about discontented women who end up discontented women at the end of the book.

Q: The act of honest work—would you call it a form of worship?

A: Yes. I’ve called it a form of prayer before, but I think prayer is largely worship. Prayer may be work. Adam worked in the garden. His work was his play. For me that’s true. I think the awful thing is that for many people their work is drudgery—neither a gift, nor a vocation. Hugh and I are both lucky that we do work we love.

Q: How do you redeem a situation like that?

A: I have a story about work. There was an old woman who ran one of the elevators at Columbia University, when it was an all male bastion. It was a menial job, but it was her vocation. Those students had to say “good morning” and “good evening.” If their clothes weren’t straight, she straightened them. When she died, the church couldn’t hold the people.

Q: Would you say that art is religious?

A: Whether artists are aware of it or not, art is always incarnational. True art is Christian. Sometimes I know that my work at its best keeps me from straying, keeps my faith intact. Someone once asked me if the fact that I was a Christian affected the way I work. I said no, but the way I work affects my Christianity.

Q: Are you a universalist?

A: No. I am a particular incarnationalist. I believe that we can understand cosmic questions only through particulars. I can understand God only through one specific particular, the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the ultimate particular, which gives me my understanding of the Creator and of the beauty of life. I believe that God loved us so much that he came to us as a human being, as one of us, to show us his love.

Q: Let’s talk further about the relationship between science and theology.

A: Einstein, for instance, was a theologian. He said that anyone who is not in awe at the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. We’ve lost our sense of awe and reverence in worship.

Q: I don’t think we know how to worship.

A: We don’t. At our best we must amuse the angels enormously. I read last summer that scientists are closer to the creationists now—that there does seem evidence for a beginning to the universe. This has upset other scientists. I don’t see why it should. Galileo upset the establishment enormously. Jesus upset the establishment. Galileo did nothing to change the nature of God. He only changed human thinking. That was threatening. We get things organized and we don’t want to rethink them.

We live in a Newtonian, Euclidian world. Your desk for all practical purposes has to be flat and firm. We know it’s a mass of swirling atoms. If we knew how we could put our fingers through it. But for you to work on it, it’s got to be Euclidian. Contemporary physics is really mystical. It accepts that time is a creature, created, that it has a beginning, that it has an end. Timelessness is, in fact, still a concept of time. Eternity and timelessness aren’t the same thing. The two words I like are kairos and chronos. We live in chronology. Kairos is eternity, which has nothing whatever to do with time. An artist is free to know kairos. The person who prays is free to know kairos. We are literally free from time.

Q: Time seems to be fluid, right?

A: Yes. Yes. It is fluid, it can expand. Sometimes I do more in a day than it’s possible to do. Another day I’ll work just as hard and I won’t get nearly as much done. The mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland says that he quarreled with time last May and ever since then time won’t do anything for him. Lewis Carroll was right. Time is a creature we can work with. Time can work against us or for us. Eternity, in which we will live ultimately, has nothing to do with time at all. It isn’t endless time. It isn’t time going on and on and on. It’s a quality that we don’t know, because we are in chronos. But we have these fleeting glimpses of kairos.

Q: Time is fluid. What about space?

A: They don’t exist without each other. Time exists only when there is matter in motion. If I knew how, I could close my eyes now and move to my star-watching rock in Connecticut.

Q: Perhaps when we dream, our concept of space is altered.

A: In the Bible, God often calls men when they’re sleeping.

Q:The Wind in the Door deals with space, right?

A: One of the whole points in the book is that to God there’s no difference between a farandole and a galaxy. Size is not what matters.

Q: In Wrinkle you dealt with time.

A: And in Planet I’m back to time.

Q: Well, there I think you’ve combined the two.

A: Yes, maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Time. Space. Time and space.

Q: The two have come together in an unusual way. Space is radically different when time changes.

A: Time and space acting on each other. After we first exploded the atom bomb here, many of the physicists who worked on that were converted. Pollock became an Episcopal priest. More and more, scientists are turning back to the church. That’s a wonderful thing. Science should help us enlarge our vision: never change it, never diminish it, but enlarge it.

Q: God doesn’t need protection?

A: No. And the establishment feels it must protect God.

Q: Yet God was always shattering images of himself. He did the unpredictable, as with Jonah.

A: We’ve built up an image of God—a comfortable God. It must be shattered.

Q: God shatters it by various means.

A: All kinds of means. Always particular means, like Galileo, for instance.

Q: Or your neighbor next door?

A: Yes, the greatest shattering of all being with Jesus.

Q: Because who would have thought that God would do such a thing?

A: Born in a stable. Born of a virgin. Died on a cross. Nothing that anybody had been brought up to expect. Totally, totally shattered.

Who Overcame Evil by Good

(After a homily by St. Amphilochius, 4th century)

They stretch Him

On a Cross to die—

Our Lord Who first

Stretched out the sky,

Whose countenance

The cherubim

Dare not gaze on …

They spat on Him

And gave Him gall to drink

Though He

Brings us wells

Of eternity.

He prays for them

“Father, forgive …”

For He was born

That all might live.

Round the sealed tomb

Of Him they’ve slain

They set a guard

In vain, in vain

Round Him

Creation can’t contain,

Who dies for us

to rise again.

M. WHITCOMB HESS

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.