Page 5036 – Christianity Today (2024)

In much of the world, following Jesus still means being a candidate for martyrdom.

Take this test. True or false: (1) The bloody butchering of Christians stopped with Constantine. (2) Instruments of torture and death—thumbscrews, stakes, hanging ropes—are but relics of medieval intolerance. (3) Persecution of Christians has almost ended (except, perhaps, under Communist regimes).

If you answered true to any of the above, you’re wrong.

Hard figures are not easy to come by, but evidence is mounting that martyrdom is a painfully contemporary reality. In many countries, Christians pay a dear price for believing. Especially during Lent, when we recall Jesus’ prediction that he would “suffer many things … and be killed,” we do well to remember the persecuted. They have something vital to teach us about following Christ.

Consider these facts:

• In this century, an average of 300,000 Christians has been martyred each year, according to David Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia. Some claim Barrett’s number includes Christians killed for reasons other than faith, but even allowing for differences in the definition and the difficulties of reporting, the figure is remarkable. When Barrett’s documentation is released over the next couple of years, the impact could be stunning. Martyrdom, Barrett wants to show, is not an “outrageous exception, but a part of a surprisingly regular 2,000-year pattern where persecution and suffering are the normal lot of the body of Christ.”

• Because of increasing terrorism, says Jim Reap-some, editor of Evangelical Missions Quarterly, “missionaries are finding themselves in increasingly dangerous conditions.” Many mission organizations have been training missionaries in contingency procedures for use in kidnapings or attacks. Reapsome believes that the history of the church confirms that missionaries are bona fide “candidates for martyrdom.”

The church needs to keep this panorama of suffering in view for two reasons.

First, martyrs and persecuted believers vividly remind us of God’s triumphal power in the midst of harrowing circ*mstances. Just as Abel “died, but through faith … is still speaking” (Heb. 11:4), the suffering church, ancient and modern, witnesses to certainties that run deeper than life itself.

When Anabaptists were sentenced to death in the sixteenth century, authorities tried to keep them from proclaiming to the townspeople the faith that led them to the stake. Sometimes local officials used “tongue screws”—gruesome instruments that bored through the tongue and immobilized the mouth with iron plates. But the martyrs’ witness could not be silenced. Their quiet testimony moved onlookers, as well as believers in centuries since. If modern martyred and persecuted believers like the late Chet Bitterman and Cuban exile Armando Valladares are not forgotten, they can likewise inspire faith and courage.

Second, we must support persecuted believers with prayer. Remembering believers submerged in a ditch of human excrement or shocked relentlessly with cattle prods may make praying less soothing, but weekly corporate prayer, as well as daily individual prayer, should embrace fellow believers living in hostile countries like Albania, Turkey, or China.

Thinking about the suffering church is not pleasant, but it can be a tonic for the complacency that ails us. If we determine not to forget our persecuted friends in the faith, their witness can again become a potent factor in the church’s faith and the gospel’s spread.

By Timothy K. Jones.

When the Christianity Today Institute panel on the power of the Holy Spirit (see p. 24) met in a hotel near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, all of us anticipated a battle royal. After all, the church has fought over the topic for three centuries, and never more energetically than in our own lifetime. And we deliberately chose the panel members to represent opposite sides on the most crucial issues.

There was no battle. Instead of the brash bull tipping over heirloom china that some had expected the leader of the signs-and-wonders movement to be, John Wimber proved to be a kindly, jovial grandfather, more eager to listen and learn than to argue. The burden of the traditional and logical Calvinist, Jim Packer, was to warn against an aloof deistic view of God and to stress that the God of the Bible is immediately and powerfully active in the world and in the believer’s soul. The neat but rigid categories of dispensationalist Charles Ryrie really don’t rule out supernatural miracles here and now.

In that atmosphere of surprise, long-held feelings of suspicion evaporated with amazing rapidity. And that was good.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing essentially bad about doctrinal disagreements or theological battles. Biblical Christianity is committed to the infinite importance of truth and to the moral necessity of persuasion and even confrontation.

But this was good. Not that we agreed on all points when we were finished, because we didn’t. We still disagreed. But now we disagreed over real differences and not over what we thought someone else was saying. Moreover, we realized the things we really do disagree about are not nearly so important to us as the things we thought we disagreed about.

New Attitudes

The result of that meeting is that I have a different attitude toward my brother than I did before, because now I am convinced that he is going in the right direction—although he may slip on the ice and run the danger of breaking his leg. To the best of my knowledge, no one on that panel left the session without a greater appreciation of the other panel members and a deep gratitude to God, who is using them in their own way—mistaken though they may be at some point—to further his divine kingdom in this desperately needy world.

Even more important than this, each of us saw that we do not need to beat the air feverishly, seeking to combat doctrines that our brothers in fact do not hold. Energies and resources for the kingdom can thus be saved and employed in useful causes that advance the kingdom of God and bring great good to the human race.

And best of all, perhaps, this is the biblical way and, in fact, the only way for each of us to find the truth we all need. Most theological battles have been waged from a distance. And while face-to-face discussions are not always helpful (remember Luther and Zwingli’s impasse at Marburg), they are biblical. Now that we see more clearly what each of us really does believe, we can assist each other to see where we are departing from the teaching of Scripture, where we are misapplying its truths, and where these truths can be more accurately and effectively applied to the world of human needs.

The “body” of Christ is terribly important, and each member has much to contribute to the other. Of course, we knew this before the panel met, but now we know it experientially and practically. The experience makes us eager for more.

By Kenneth S. Kantzer.

Homosexual practice is a sin. That is not a pretty statement. In fact, in an age of Jell-O it has the cutting sharpness of a razor blade. But we feel that this is the witness of Scripture, and we want to be a people formed by God’s Word.

Without Scripture, a stand against hom*osexual expression could be dismissed as hom*ophobic fear, or even oppression of a minority. And these are indeed the rallying cries of two Lutheran churches in San Francisco. On January 21, Saint Francis Lutheran Church and First United Lutheran Church ordained two lesbians and one gay man, despite warnings from denominational heads of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) that there would be disciplinary action.

Currently a team is seeking to reconcile the churches with the denomination’s bylaws, which forbid the ordination of practicing hom*osexuals. One possible outcome is the expulsion of the churches from the denomination. A complicating factor is that the denomination is far from settled on the issue. There is a study in progress that is reassessing the church’s position, although that study is not due until 1993.

Grace For All

We do not urge disciplinary action because of a desire to return to the Old Testament practices (such as stoning hom*osexuals). At the Cross of Jesus Christ, all sinners (that is, all human beings) are now to be the recipients of love, mercy, and forgiveness. The church’s mission is to embrace the hom*osexual, just as it embraces all who struggle and are lost.

Nevertheless, the message sinners hear must be true to its source. And despite contemporary exegetical gymnastics, the scriptural verses dealing specifically with hom*osexuality plus the positive revelation of one man-one wife as the biblical ideal for sexual relations make it clear that hom*osexual practices are inconsistent with the pursuit of righteousness.

Therefore, confronted with the choice between what seems right according to the culture and what seems right according to Scripture, we urge the ELCA to emulate its forebear by standing firmly on the side of God’s Word and proclaiming, “Here we stand. We can do no other.”

By Michael G. Maudlin.

Bible comes with breakfast on sunny South Padre Island, Texas’s hottest spring-break resort.

It does, that is, for the students who can’t find a seat at one of the two restaurants in town that offer a 99-cent breakfast. So instead, they head over to Island Baptist Church to gobble down pancakes, Spam, orange juice, and French toast—for free. By 9:30 A.M. one especially balmy spring morning in this coastal resort town, 250 college students have dropped by.

“I was just driving down the road and saw their sign, so I thought they wanted me,” said Southwest Texas State University student Tom Fawcette. That morning, he got to listen to the contemporary Christian rock group Petra wailing over the loudspeakers. He also was handed a card with the plan of salvation on one side and a hotline number on the other.

He is one of at least 100,000 students from colleges and universities in the Midwest, Texas, and Canada who descend on this five-mile-long island each March. The island’s eastern edge, only a few blocks wide, abruptly ends with a line of hotels that overlook the whitest beaches in Texas. The hotels, boarding houses, and cottages, along with a glitzy mall constructed with tourists in mind, make the beach a popular destination amid south Texas’s drab terrain. In recent years, South Padre has rivaled Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach in Florida for fun, sun, and sin.

Waiting for the student hordes with open arms is Island Baptist. Each spring break, many of its 107 members, along with volunteers from around the state, put together one of the Southern Baptist Convention’s more offbeat outreaches. This particular morning, a contingent from the Texas Baptist Men disaster unit (no joke) was flipping pancakes at the grill. Helping out were students from Baptist Student Union (BSU) groups around the state. Last spring, 150 came. Their rewards were suntans and little sleep.

“A girl called us last night,” said Buddy Young, a BSU director at West Texas State University, “because a guy had passed out in her room and started throwing up. She didn’t even know who he was. His friends had gotten him drunk and left him there. We sobered him up, and we’ll be going back this afternoon to talk to him some more.”

The “we” includes BSU students involved in the church’s van service for spring-break students. Island Baptist prints up about 75,000 manila hotline cards to be distributed on the island. Even local bartenders give them out to students too drunk to walk back to their hotels.

Anyone can call the hotline, day or night, and be put in touch with an operator who will pass on the call for for a ride to one of five vans equipped with CB radios. These vans roam the town and pick up students too drunk to make it back safely to their hotels on their own. Before they leave the van, passengers will hear the gospel presented by two Baptist students stationed in the van for that purpose.

Reaction varies, but sometimes riders tell their compadres to shut up so they can listen. Church members estimate they picked up almost 8,000 during spring break last year.

“That’s their most important service, in my mind,” said Geri Wilson, communications manager for the South Padre Island Visitor and Convention Bureau. “They’re really helping people.”

No-Holds-Barred Evangelism

The Southern Baptists may be helping more people than they know, given the nature of the intoxicated college student. One of the country’s grisliest murders occurred less than an hour’s drive from South Padre last year when a group of bored “spring breakers” left the island on March 13 and drove across the border to the Mexican city of Matamoros. That night, a 21-year-old University of Texas premed student disappeared to become the fourteenth victim of an occult group. The discovery of Mark Kilroy’s body days later created headlines around the country.

Spring-break ministry is therefore more significant and serious than it might seem, says Island Baptist’s 29-year-old pastor, Charlie Arnold.

“Beach ministry just isn’t given much attention,” Arnold believes. “We talk about urban evangelism, downtown ministry, border ministry, and so on. But resort areas offer some significant advantages in ministering to people,” says this minister sporting a “Padre for Jesus” T-shirt, whose boyish face and wind-tossed brown hair make him look more puckish than preachy.

One of these advantages has to do with the leisure time and built-in boredom factor that hits “spring breakers” on about the fourth day. Then the students start wandering down to Matamoros—and the Southern Baptists start applying Arnold’s no-holds-barred evangelistic methods.

His Baptist student volunteers hang out at concerts and start up conversations in Port-a-Potti lines, elevators, and in hotel hot tubs. The last method was pioneered by a wheelchair-bound man who wanted to witness. His friends moved him from one hot tub to another in the luxury beach hotels, where he witnessed to his heart’s content.

No Locale Too Remote

Arnold’s “army” also crashes private parties. “We’ve had the parties’ hosts turn the music off and ask everyone to sit down and listen to what we were saying about Christ,” Arnold said. “And people got saved. We’ve had people pray in the middle of nightclub dance floors. People are searching for something. There’s something about the dynamics of a resort area that make people willing to talk to each other.”

Arnold takes that view so seriously he is studying resort evangelism at Luther Rice Seminary in Jacksonville, Florida. No locale is too remote for his evangelists. If crowds of students are floating out in the surf waiting for waves, Arnold sends Baptist surfers out to talk with them.

The action is even faster on the beach, where the Baptists staff “burnt-aid stations” and offer free water and aloe for red skins. An estimated 700 students a day patronize them, stepping around beer cans, p*rnographic sand drawings, fraternity flags, and boom boxes to get there.

That is no small task. Spring break on the beach looks like a cross between a massive “frat” party and Sodom and Gomorrah. Both sexes model avant-garde swimsuits, guzzle beer, and listen to the rantings of a local disc jockey broadcast at ear-splitting levels. Even students sitting a football-field length from the speakers have a hard time hearing each other.

“Some people have been praying with us [to accept Christ], and others have decided to wait,” said one BSU student who was dispensing aloe. “I think they’re more willing to tell us about God than we are to tell them. Almost no one has turned us down for conversation. They ask us about premarital sex and drinking.”

At the end of each week, Arnold stages a baptism at the most crowded part of the beach. By this time, jaded “spring breakers” are willing to hear something different. Each time a new convert arises, dripping, from the waves, the crowd lets out a cheer.

Five were baptized during spring break 1989 and another five students were converted after they asked what was happening. The church recorded 285 conversions that week. In 1988, when Arnold had more student helpers, 313 students committed their lives to the Lord—and that doesn’t include the conversions logged by workers from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and other Christian groups roaming the beaches.

Island Baptist sends the names of new Christians to the Southern Baptist church nearest their campus and to a local BSU representative. Arnold has three files of letters from grateful “spring breakers” who became Christians at South Padre. Those letters keep him going while he waits for his dreams of year-round evangelism to the island’s 1.2 million visitors to come true. They keep him going during weeks of unceasing work and little sleep. They keep him going with memories of students who came looking for enjoyment, found emptiness, encountered Christ, and left knowing him for eternity.

By Julia Duin, religion writer for the Houston Chronicle, and author of Purity Makes the Heart Grow Stronger (Servant).

Mickey Mouse and I are contemporaries. We came into the world at about the same time, a little more than a half-century ago.

I enjoyed Mickey and the Gang as much as any child, but the Mouse was never a part of the Christian nurture that I received from my parents. On the other hand, I never sensed that Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, and the other fantasy folk who inhabited the Enchanted Kingdom were incompatible with my Christian faith and values. I guess that is why I now find it so troubling to discover that Mickey has become a stubborn secularist rodent.

Oh, I was aware that after Walt’s death the Magic Kingdom had been transformed into an aggressive, multinational corporate conglomerate, which achieved phenomenal financial success when the new corporate honchos tossed aside the innocence of Walt’s G-rated family films to break box-office records with more “mature” movies, which, they admitted, would surely have made the Old Man’s moustache bristle. None of that, however, prepared me for the hard-core secularism of the new Mickey.

I first recognized Mickey’s secular world view last September when I received a letter on the Mouse’s stationery from Richard A. Nunis, the president of Walt Disney Attractions. Mr. Nunis wrote to me and other college presidents to solicit help in an ambitious Disney project to select the “Person of the Century.” We were asked to nominate in eight categories the top five people “who have had the greatest impact on the 20th Century.”

All through the nineties, persons attending EPCOT Center will be polled in this effort to identify the “Person of the Century.” Polling will also be done at other sites, presumably including the Disney theme parks in California, France, and Japan. Mr. Nunis confidently expects that one billion ballots will be cast.

The secularism was clear from the categories chosen, presumably the principal fields of endeavor worthy of notice: “government/military, science/medicine, education, literature, the arts, entertainment, business, and sports.” Granted, these categories represent major dimensions of public order, social life, and culture, but the list was incomplete. Why was there no category for the great spiritual leaders and religious figures of this century?

Perhaps in the Disney world view religion is not of sufficient significance in our lives—at least in this century—to merit recognition along with other areas of leadership and achievement. Or might they consider the spiritual aspect of human experience too private or too unverifiable to permit selection criteria to be developed? Was religion excluded because it has not in every instance been a source of good? Maybe the Disney people simply feared that religion was too “hot” a topic in the growing pluralism in our society.

I wrote promptly to Mr. Nunis to ask that his organization consider including spiritual leaders, arguing that no account of human experience in this century could be adequate without acknowledging the presence of faith.

With the widest ecumenical range possible, I offered Mr. Nunis a few nominees, including Mother Teresa and several popes, William Booth, Billy Graham, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Theodor Herzl, and even the Ayatollah Khomeini.

I am still waiting for a reply from the Disney organization. The balloting has begun, and there is no category for religion or spiritual leaders.

There may still be a course of action open to those who believe the category of spirituality cannot be so easily ignored. The sacred, after all, must pervade all of life. The ultimate refutation of Mickey’s secularism would be in the selection of a godly obedient servant of Christ as “person of the century” by virtue of his or her own indisputable achievement in one of Disney’s eight secular categories.

Apparently Mickey Mouse has gone secularist. He and his friends must now inhabit a “dis-enchanted” kingdom. But that secularism can be routed if we Christians live daily in a manner worthy of the God who has called us.

An Incongruous Reach

Ruth Tucker’s article “In Search of Respectability” (Feb. 5) was well written, timely, and helpful. Mormon friends have been seeking our participation in the Mormon-dominated Institute for Constitutional Education. We have not found peace of mind in doing so.

There is something incongruous about this reach for cooperation (respectability) on the part of a church that teaches its missionaries that “as far as all religious organizations now in existence are concerned, the presence or the absence of this [Melchizedek] priesthood establishes the divinity or the falsity of a proposed church” (Mormon Doctrine, p. 479, by the late Bruce McConkey).

Jim and Betty Truxton

Fullerton, Calif.

Faith Versus Works

John R. W. Stott wants to know why “if justification by grace alone through faith alone is now believed by both” Protestants and Catholics, the Catholic church hasn’t changed its beliefs and practices (“The Remaking of English Evangelicalism,” CT Institute, Feb. 5). Well, for one thing, while the ARCIC theologians did agree that salvation is by grace alone, they refrained from denouncing James 2:14–26, and agree with what C. S. Lewis said about faith in his Mere Christianity.

If Stott believes justification is by faith alone, does he denounce going to church, reading the Bible, and making an act of faith (or “accepting Christ”) as vain works that avail not? Or does he feel, at least in these situations, that “you see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by the works” (James 2:22)?

Don Schenk

Allentown, Pa.

Godly men like John Stott, Dick Lucas, and Jim Packer removed themselves from leadership opportunities by maintaining—in practice if not theology—the cessation of certain gifts of the Spirit. Younger evangelicals, such as the late David Watson, waited for them to lead the way, but when they would not, the mantle of leadership fell to others.

All over England there are evangelical-charismatics—what Peter Wagner calls the “Third Wave”—who are concerned with moral purity, doctrinal correctness, and equipping the saints. What they have not concluded is that Stott’s gifted style of expository preaching, nor his Reformed theology, are the only means of reaching those objectives.

George Mallone

Grace Vineyard

Arlington, Tex.

Error Mixed With Truth?

Your February 5 cover caught my eye: [“The Recent Truth About Seventh-day Adventism”] was a surprise to me. I turned to the article and read what I suppose the author submitted as the “gospel truth.”

I have been a Seventh-day Adventist for 34 years and did not find the author describing me or my church as fully as the title seems to imply. What I did find is error mixed with truth. He seems to be trying to refute a book written by his predecessor, with whom he disagrees.

Kenneth Samples’s version of what is happening in our church is just that. He cannot declare or undeclare that our church is a cult, evangelical, or anything else. He would be wiser to spend his time studying his Bible for the purpose of finding the truth therein for the saving of his own soul rather than trying to pronounce any verdict in the affairs of the Adventist church.

Esther Jones

Leominster, Mass.

Might as Well Face It

“First of all, you’ve got to want to change.”

For a second I thought I’d wandered into Al-Anon or some drug-counseling clinic. Hardly. I had checked myself into the Church Conference Rehabilitation Center. So when it came my turn, I stood up and confessed. “I, too, am addicted to church conferences.”

The center opened about three years after Key ’73. That’s when conferences went big time. Most people learned to walk away from a slick brochure, but a good share of us got hooked. We couldn’t even pass up a Sunday-school convention. It got so bad that one of those Christian psychologists quit the convention circuit and started this center.

The routine here is pretty simple. We meet in small groups to share our stories and admit we need help. In my group, one guy told how attending conferences had ruined his family relationships. Another fellow said attending conferences had disrupted his work in the local church. An older woman said she’d spent $6,382 dollars attending writers conferences, but had sold only one article. For $21.50.

Over lunch I ran into a man who had attended seven “world-hunger conferences” in the last year. “Bet you really get your friends involved in helping the hungry,” I remarked. “That’s the problem,” he said. “I recruit them to other hunger conferences.”

We’ve gotten lots of suggestions for avoiding conferences when we get out: Call a friend when you get the urge to send in your registration; listen to tapes of Tony Campolo; pray for deliverance; get rid of all your polyester sports coats.

I think I might make it. At our latest therapy session the director brought in current issues of a dozen or so Christian magazines. We paged through them, barely noticing those slick advertisem*nts announcing yet another conference on evangelism. Our leader praised us. He said he thought we were ready to go home, which is fine with me.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to stay away from my denomination’s annual conference this summer.

EUTYCHUS

Congratulations for publishing Kenneth R. Samples’s article. It is perceptive, accurate, and sympathetic. For a century and a half, SDAS have challenged the rest of Christendom in two areas: (1) Give one New Testament text that proves God has sanctified Sunday as the Christian Sabbath; (2) Give one Bible verse that proves soul or spirit can function without a body.

I endorse these challenges from Adventism. Let me now challenge the challengers: Give me, from the Bible and the Bible alone, proof about the doctrine of 1844 and the Investigative Judgment. I invite the SDA church to appoint a representative to discuss this topic with me over public media (at no cost to SDAS). I challenge the church leaders to deal with their presupposition that the Bible predicted Adventism’s rise in 1844 and that the Last Judgment then began. This presupposition undergirds much of the church’s work through It Is Written, The Voice of Prophecy, and The Quiet Hour.

With great affection for the SDA part of the Christian faith, I plead: If the 1844 Investigative Judgment teaching is important to you, defend it over the public media.

Desmond Ford

Good News Unlimited

Auburn, Calif.

Those Messianic Jews

I applaud Sam Nadler’s article [“Jewishness Is Not Legalism,” Speaking Out, Feb. 5]! I have always felt that Messianic Jews are perhaps the most whole and complete Christians of all.

I am upset with narrow, fundamentalist Christians who use legalism, even with other Christians—things such as “You’re not saved, unless you speak in tongues.” Cultural differences will always exist; and why shouldn’t they? They don’t hurt the basic premise of real Christianity. Christ came to overcome the law with love, which should be leading Christians, no matter what their culture.

Bunnie Corwith

Lake Forest, Ill.

What Constitutes “Rescue”?

Our lack of consistent thinking (and action) as evangelicals is evidenced in the news reported in your February 5 issue. On the one hand, tensions exist in the prolife community because “there is disagreement about the wisdom of the rescue strategy,” which is a nonviolent response to injustice. On the other hand, the human blockade by a Romanian congregation to protect Pastor Laszlo Tokes—which led to both bloodshed and freedom—is hailed as a moment of glory by evangelicals worldwide.

I live in Kettering, Ohio, a generally wholesome midwestern suburb, which hosts an abortionist who sticks scissors into the skulls of healthy, 24-week unborn children, and then sucks out their brains. That certainly is at least as abhorrent as churches being bulldozed and Bibles being turned into toilet paper, as happened in Romania. Yet, many local evangelicals turn their heads when “rescue” is mentioned.

Rev. James B. Futrell

Fairhaven Church of the C&MA

Dayton, Ohio

Hallmark Of Democracy?

I am both prolife and proeducation. It stretches neither my conscience nor my intellect to agree that Christians need to encourage their elected officials to act on behalf of the unborn [“They’d Rather Switch than Fight,” editorial by Lyn Cryderman, Feb. 5]. Likewise, agreeing “the value of a godly mind disciplined by academic rigor” creates joy rather than sorrow [“Thank God for British Imports,” editorial, same issue, by David Neff].

However, I find Cryderman’s prolife editorial founded on such loose, shallow assumptions that it is “off-putting,” as the British say, and thus detrimental to both the encouragement of prolife political policies and godly thinking in general. Its underlying assumption seems to be that any politician “of conscience” will naturally develop and promote policies agreeing with the minority point of view—which is, of course, the correct view. Also disturbing is the tacit assumption that our republican, representative form of government cannot be trusted to work for the common good. It seems to have escaped Cryderman’s notice that constituency opinion is the hallmark of democracy—and not political conscience. Also, recent political history reveals that several politicians known to invoke their consciences have been removed from office for behavior the majority would not countenance.

Perhaps someone could write an editorial suggesting ways for prolife Christians to take seriously their responsibility to work within the political system. It might be more effective than finding fault from a safe, external vantage point.

Rev. Irving W. Herrick

First Baptist Church

West Chicago, Ill.

We don’t elect government officials to vote with their consciences but to accurately represent their constituencies. Whether you morally agree or disagree, the fact remains that a large percentage of the American public favors legalized abortions.

Rev. Kal Bushman

Central Baptist Church

Knoxville, Tenn.

The Sin Of Racism

Bravo to Philip Yancey for “Confessions of a Racist” [Jan. 15]! He reminds us that much remains to be done in the area of civil rights. When he recalled watching Klansmen beating up blacks, I had to remind myself that the event was not in the Dark Ages but took place while I was growing up.

He also rightly reminds us that while Martin Luther King, Jr., was not perfect, neither is anyone else. In spite of our shortcomings, we must strive to work and do what is right—whether it is popular or not.

Kyle Bailey

Roseburg, Oreg.

Yancey’s references to King’s “genuineness of faith” and “centrality of Christian conviction” begs at least one fundamental question: Is the faith ascribed to Dr. King that faith to which evangelical Christians subscribe? If so, the evangelical Christian community would welcome such evidence.

L. M. Vogt

Edina, Minn.

Like Yancey, I was raised in the deep South in a Bible-preaching setting that was racist. Now that I pastor a racially integrated church, I struggle with why the adult believers who taught me as a child did not deal with the matter.

Rev. Dave McPherson

Maranatha Bible Church

River Ridge, La.

This issue marks the twenty-third time we have published a supplement under the auspices of the Christianity Today Institute. Founded in 1986 to provide a forum for addressing issues more deeply than is possible in the four to five pages we normally allot an article, the institute has brought together 130 scholars and church leaders to discuss everything from sex to redaction criticism.

The participants always go at it in a lively fashion, but no fists have ever been raised. So when we began planning this supplement on the Holy Spirit’s power (p. 24), we wondered if our injury-free record would hold.

Once again, our worries were put to rest almost from the moment our guests walked into the meeting room. Not only was the formal discussion congenial, but during meals and breaks, these Christian leaders with varying views of the Spirit’s power seemed more eager to learn than fight.

There was even some good humor. During a fairly tense discussion in which John Wimber claimed he occasionally saw words written on a person’s forehead, Stuart Briscoe covered his forehead and asked if John had seen anything during the meeting. And when an interpretation of Scripture was being debated, Charles Ryrie offered to provide everyone with the Ryrie Study Bible so they could understand it!

Perhaps the greatest statement about the Holy Spirit was made by the event itself. If our spiritual leaders can set aside the natural desire to be right, perhaps the rest of us can also enjoy the supernatural gift of harmony.

LYN CRYDERMAN, Senior Associate Editor

There’s a certain relish to be found in arguing with one’s ideological opponents; but it becomes awkward when you find yourself disagreeing with people you greatly admire and with whom you usually agree.

I have felt this awkwardness recently. First, with William F. Buckley; I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve disagreed with Bill in the quarter-century that we’ve been friends. Then with Milton Friedman, my economic guru during my years in politics. And with George Shultz, a much-respected colleague when we served together in the White House.

And day by day, it seems the momentum gathers. The issue, of course, is legalizing drugs. Proponents want them decriminalized and sold, like alcohol, under strict licensing.

From War To Commerce

Their arguments have a surface appeal: We are losing the war on drugs. True. We are losing the drug war—in spite of the fact that we’ve conducted costly and celebrated prosecutions like the “pizza connection” case. We’ve beefed up border patrols and police squads, spent billions, and even managed to bring narco-terrorist Manuel Noriega to the U.S. for trial.

These are impressive efforts. Yet cocaine, crack, and their ilk flow more freely than ever through American streets and into American veins. But does that mean we should surrender? We were losing World War II until the battle of Midway, but no one suggested handing the keys to the Pentagon over to the Japanese.

Legalization will drastically reduce crime. Perhaps it would put some organized crime out of business. But consider the fact that the vast majority of today’s offenders have drug histories. Can we assume that people stoned on illegal drugs would behave differently from people stoned on legal drugs?

Legalization will put the drug lords out of business. Now here’s an idea we all would love. But would legalization do that? The cartels would still control production and prices; and if, as proponents urge, drugs are sold under license and prohibited to minors, there would still be a healthy black market.

Alcohol and nicotine are legal and they kill more people than drugs do. True; drunk drivers kill 100,000 U.S. citizens a year, and smoking claims 350,000 lives. But does permitting two killers justify legitimizing a third, more lethal assassin?

Statistics tell us that of all users of alcohol, 10 percent become addicts. For cocaine it is 70 percent. Laboratory monkeys, allowed all the cocaine they want without threat of punishment (in other words, it was “legal”), self-administer the drug by pressing a feeder bar so obsessively that they forgo food, water, sleep, and sex. They just keep pressing the bar to get the white powder—until they die of exhaustion.

Prohibition didn’t work, either. Prohibition was not the result of Victorianera prudes trying to force their piety on an unwilling society. Rather, it was the response to an enormous public-safety and health crisis. In the new industrial era, thousands of drunken workers were being killed or maimed each year, while the tavern trade spawned prostitution rings, spreading venereal diseases that then, like AIDS today, had no known cure.

And Prohibition worked: per-capita alcohol consumption declined, industrial safety dramatically improved, and the spread of VD slowed. Not until 1970 did per-capita alcohol consumption again reach pre-Prohibition levels.

All of these are, of course, pragmatic issues about which advocates and critics of legalization can argue indefinitely. But the immediate debate should turn on deeper, moral issues. These should be of particular concern to Christians.

Abandoning Our Future

First, government’s primary duty—at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective—is to restrain evil and promote order. No one, including Bill Buckley or Milton Friedman, could argue that drugs are benign. They destroy individual lives and create chaos for society through soaring crime, lost productivity, and staggering welfare costs. For government to legitimize drugs would be for government to abandon its most fundamental duty.

Second, laws have moral consequences. The old canard “you can’t legislate morality” is a dangerous myth. The law is a body of rules regulating human behavior, which reflects society’s view of right and wrong. Statutes prohibiting murder, for example, reflect the moral judgment that human life has intrinsic dignity. The law both reflects moral values and is a moral teacher.

This leads to a third crucial issue: decriminalization would destigmatize the use of drugs. Human behavior is profoundly influenced by societal attitudes that reject particular actions as wrong. Government cannot nod yes to drugs and urge its citizens to “just say no.” To so undercut its efforts at antidrug education would be fatal, for ultimate victory over drugs will come only when we curb demand.

Our responsibility to ourselves and our posterity is to envision greater possibilities for our society and strive toward those, making whatever sacrifices that are necessary. Our vision should not be of a half-stoned society that crassly sanctions immorality; it must be of a society in which our children and grandchildren can live free of the drug curse. That’s a goal worth fighting for, win or lose.

There is one final image of drug abuse that proponents of legalization rarely mention. They argue for what has become that most sacred of American rights: individual freedom. Since people have the right to choose their own behaviors, why not allow mature adults to choose to use drugs if they want? “It is absurd that Americans should be forced to pay for a war on drugs just to keep people from choosing to harm themselves,” writes one decriminalization supporter.

No one who has seen a crack baby, addicted to drugs in its mother’s womb, could accept the idea that drug abuse is a victimless crime. These infants, filling neonatal intensive-care units across the country, weigh two or three pounds. Their skin is so sensitive they cannot be held. Many have violent seizures, their twig-like arms and legs twitching convulsively. Often they must be calmed with sedatives—because all they do is cry. What government with any claim to moral authority would sanction substances that so cruelly destroy the generation that holds its future?

What does it take to get through to kids who have rock music blaring in their ears half the time? For starters, try more rock. At least, that’s one approach taken by Kenny Marks, called the leading Christian “American roots rocker.” But if you listen to his work, especially his latest album, Another Friday Night (Day-Spring), you’ll find he is up to more than just a rowdy time.

“When people catch onto the context of my music,” Marks says, “they find it’s not just rock for rock’s sake. I’ve always had a vision of taking an energetic medium, like rock music, and using it to communicate to kids something really good and powerful, which is a relationship with Christ.”

While rock and Jesus may not be new, Marks’s focus is. He zeros in on relationships—with our friends, with ourselves, and with God—and he sings to teenagers in their own language. Imagine a Jackson Browne who has seen the light, and you have Kenny Marks on Another Friday Night. In fact, the first song begins, “I was runnin’ on empty—Now I’m runnin’ on love.”

The album’s message of hope emerges powerfully from solid imagery and nondidactic lyrics. The song “The Threshold of Regret” tells about a crack in a window pane that no one has fixed for 20 years, a crack caused by a fight between a mother and father.

“I’m trying to point out how many of us as adults leave things unrepaired,” Marks says. “Nobody ever took the time to fix the crack, and I see that in a lot of our lives: We break things, and they need somebody to take time.”

The third song in a trilogy about two high-school kids is typical of how Marks likes to touch on touchy subjects. Johnny and Jeanne must deal with the reality of their sexuality, their unwanted child, their rocky marriage, and their isolation in divorce. As Jeanne tucks her son into bed, she hears him pray: “The next time you see Daddy,” he says to Jesus, “tell him I’m all right.”

“In the area of sexuality,” Marks says, “we really need good Christian models to say, ‘Let’s talk about it, so that long before the issue of abortion comes up, we’ve spoken about the issue of sexuality, and then when these other issues are brought up, we have established in some sense a right to be heard.”

To help earn that right, Marks has produced video versions of “The Next Time You See Daddy” and “The Party’s Over,” the second song in the Johnny and Jeanne story. He also participates in outreach events that have included tours with Billy Graham crusades. “If someone says, ‘Hey, Kenny, we’re doing a three-day event building to a presentation by Josh McDowell and we want you to kick it off right for us,’ I’m glad to help. My goal is to be a servant and be adaptable.

“I want to write about things that Christians and non-Christians—people who struggle—all deal with. I would love to be thought of as a communicator who took a chance.”

By Dan Coran.

ARTBRIEFS

Life Inside

Imagine: You’re a teenager, you’re black, you live in a housing project, and your family barely scrapes by on Mom’s paycheck. Where could Christ possibly fit into the scene for you? That is the question explored in Making It Through the Cracks, a video drama by Urban Ministries, Inc., of Chicago.

The video tells the story of two teenagers who deal with life in the inner city. One admires a character who calls himself Crack and talks about his future to his English teacher: “Take a look at the top spots in every major corporation,” he says. “Do you see any black faces? You see, I’ve got it figured out: I can get rich right here, right now.”

The other teenager attempts to deal with his problems through hard work—and Christ.

Making It Through the Cracks offers a glimpse at different influences on these teens: parents, teachers, friends, pushers—and even Jesus, who compels a kid to “just say no.” There is also a rap testimonial, complete with choreography and strobe photography.

The action-packed video already has garnered one award: It collected a Chicago Emmy for Excellence by an Independent Producer in October 1989. The occasional rough spot in the production only serves to remind viewers that life in the city is not all Huxtables and Jeffersons.

Making Progress

Do you ever get a bit squeamish when talk turns to an important literary work you’ve never read? For many of us, the problem with many classic works is their archaic language and obscure allusions. So for those of us whose seventeenth-century English is a bit rusty, Discovery House Publishers has produced a revised edition of John Bunyan’s classic allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Complete with extensive footnotes by Warren Wiersbe, this 217-page paperback in modern English removes any plausible excuse for not reading this Christian classic. All biblical allusions are explained, and two additional essays at the end help place the work in its cultural context. Also included are some pen-and-ink drawings of Christian—in Eddie Bauer outdoor wear for his trip to the Holy City.

This book is writ in such a dialect

As may the minds of listless men affect:

It seems a novelty, and yet contains

Nothing but sound and honest gospel strains.

So wrote Bunyan, and Wiersbe has helped to make these strains more audible to the modern ear.

Picture This

Anyone who takes a look at Guido Rocha’s Tortured Christ will realize that the familiar cross we see above the church altar every Sunday is not the only way to depict the sacrifice of Christ. In his book Seeing the Mystery, William Taylor attempts to show us how artists worldwide, and from all eras, have portrayed the life of Christ in art. A quick flip through this thin paperback will be enough to catch the unsuspecting browser by surprise.

Everything from Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà to Dali’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper is here, including Taylor’s helpful hints as to what to look for in each work. Taylor is a theologian and artist who was a missionary in India for 17 years, then principal of the United Church of Canada’s theological college in Vancouver for 24 years. He developed a collection of over 3,000 slides of religious art, some of which found their way into this 96-page, full-color book.

More pictures and a more nuanced theology would have made the book even better, but as Taylor writes in his preface: “This is not a book of theological theories.… It is an adventure in which each reader is invited to see what the artists may say to him or her.”

By Dan Coran.

Two current films, Henry V and Glory, dare to examine the higher purpose of war. In so doing, both depart from the existentialism embodied in the themes of recent Vietnam war-era movies. Neither film glorifies war, but each examines seriously the range of reasons for which men choose to fight.

“Winds Of Grace”

In Henry V, Shakespeare’s free adaptation of the history of Henry’s invasion and subjugation of France in the fifteenth century, Henry appears as a pious, if unsophisticated, young monarch. His desire to reign as a Christian king conflicts with his baser desire to conquer as a kingly knight. Spurred on by a legitimate claim to the French throne, a desire to protect the church from taxation by the French aristocracy, and a simple lust for power, adventure, and loot, Henry and his band embark on a bloody campaign.

Henry is a complex warrior whose resolve is tempered by the “winds of grace.” When the fortified city of Hartfleur withstands repeated battery, he pleads with the governor to surrender quickly lest his soldiers, “with conscience wide as hell,” go on a bloody rampage of rape and murder. This is less a threat than an acknowledgment of that demonic side of war that arises when men give themselves over to the “prince of fiends.” Firmly convinced of the rightness of his cause, Henry seeks to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. When the horrified governor surrenders, Henry, true to his word, restrains his men.

Death With Dignity

Glory recounts the true story of Robert Gould Shaw, a white, Bostonian Brahmin, who leads the first all-black fighting regiment in the American Civil War. He is no stranger to the war’s appalling toll. Wounded at Antietam, where 40,000 men fell in five hours of carnage, Shaw willingly leads his doomed band of warriors into the jaws of death.

The black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Infantry brave dangers greater than those faced by white soldiers. Jefferson Davis, furious at the North’s arming of blacks, proclaims that any Negro caught bearing weapons against the Confederacy will be immediately returned to slavery. Those taken in Union uniform will be executed.

These men fight not simply to prove their own manhood but the manhood of their race. If white society refuses them dignity, they will purchase it with their blood. The shy, bookish Shaw writes to his mother: “I only hope that I do not hold the men back.”

Terrifying Ambiguities

Each film is deeply moving because of the range of emotions explored. In one of Glory’s most touching scenes, the soldiers sing a gospel round on the eve of battle. The Christian soldiers testify to God’s sovereignty and the rightness of their cause. When Trip, an embittered ex-slave demurs, the Christian soldiers encourage him to speak his heart. In a rare moment of vulnerability, he overcomes his hate and proclaims the black brigade his only family.

King Henry, on the eve of the decisive battle, moves among his men in disguise, hoping to learn their true feelings. Like him, the men believe their cause to be just, but they are deeply troubled by the enormous human cost. Henry spends the final moments before dawn in fervent prayer.

Both films explore the terrifying ambiguities of war and the inability of human beings to control its course. The dogs of war strain at the leash. Once freed, they turn on their would-be masters, for their true master is not the Prince of Peace, but the Prince of Darkness. The wise warrior understands they cannot be tamed or trusted, and seeks only to chain them up.

By Stefan Ulstein, a teacher in Bellevue, Washington.

Jerry Levin’S Great Escape

Beirut Diary, by Sis Levin (InterVarsity Press, 240 pp.; $14.95, hardback). Reviewed by Wesley G. Pippert, former senior UPI Middle East correspondent and now director of the University of Missouri Washington Graduate Program.

Beirut Diary is Sis Levin’s story of 1984, the year her journalist-husband Jerry was held hostage by Shi’ite Muslims in Lebanon. It is also the story of her own journey in coping with the ordeal and conquering it. Levin’s book is powerful, fast-moving, and clearly and vividly written.

There are critical subthemes: How Jerry Levin, agnostic, opera-loving CNN bureau chief in Beirut and grandson of a rabbi, came to faith in Christ during his 11-month captivity. How Sis Levin, his evangelical Christian wife, almost in desperation, brushed aside State Department caution and timidity and herself became an effective player in the labyrinth of Middle East politics.

Levin arrived in Beirut in December 1983—about the same time I was on temporary assignment there—and Sis joined him in January. Three months after Jerry’s arrival, he was kidnaped on a Beirut street. Sis stayed in the Middle East for a short time as the leads quickly evaporated; then she returned to the United States for even greater disillusionment.

Fair-Weather Friends

Gradually Sis realized the people she should have been able to count on weren’t helping—not CNN, and not the U.S. government. The State Department kept telling her: Don’t speak to the press, you will endanger the hostages’ lives. Finally she figured out why: “[T]his hostage crisis is probably an embarrassment to President Reagan in this election year. I remembered his promise in the Rose Garden in 1981 after beating Jimmy Carter—whom he defeated in large measure due to the Iranian hostage situation—that America would never be held hostage again. Public awareness of the seriousness of the hostages’ plight could be devastating. And I knew the truth.”

(Things are not much different now. Last summer Rep. Paul Henry [R-Mich.] sponsored a resolution to designate AP Beirut bureau chief Terry Anderson’s birthday—the fifth he has had in captivity—as “National Hostage Awareness Day.” President Bush signed the bill with no fanfare whatsoever, thus forgoing media coverage.)

As 1984 wore on, Sis decided to go public. She met Landrum Bolling, then director of the Ecumenical Institute between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Bolling looked saintly, but he knew how to operate in the Middle East. Within weeks, he and Sis were in Damascus, and through a series of seemingly miraculous events, she found herself telling her story in a private conference with the Syrian foreign minister.

With typical Middle Eastern mystery, the foreign minister smiled and said, “I will be in touch with you again.” He was, several times.

Weeks passed. Then, one February day Jerry noticed the guard had secured his chains carelessly. That night Levin knotted together his blankets, crawled through a window, dropped to the ground, and ran away barefoot. An almost-smiling Syrian soldier picked him up and delivered him to freedom. Did he escape? Or was he allowed to escape?

Eternal Choices

Sis Levin’s ordeal in trying to secure her husband’s freedom was dramatic enough. But there is more to this book.

Hours after they were reunited, Jerry told Sis that months before, early in his solitary confinement, he had mulled over eternal questions. He finally came down to the choices: “Believe in God, or not believe in him.… Reject Jesus or accept him.” So, Jerry said, “I did believe.” And he prayed for the first time.

During her husband’s captivity, Sis Levin’s own spiritual walk was deepening as she wrestled with the issues of forgiveness and peacemaking. “Forgiveness must begin with looking at the hurtful situation or person honestly until you understand your own reaction,” she learned. “Almost always, there is a lie to be discovered.”

“There was a context to the hostages’ captivity that was full of history and insensitivity, bad choices and pain. The kind that comes when a nation abandons dialogue and embraces military force,” she found.

Those questions have driven Sis and Jerry Levin ever since. They force all of us to deal with critical questions about the ancient enmity in the Middle East.

Sis Levin’s book clearly is sympathetic to the plight of the Arabs. That point of view, once in short supply in evangelical circles, has become more common in recent years. As we have been putting tough questions to the Israelis, perhaps we now need to put some tough questions to the Arabs:

1. How can the Arabs blame Israel for every one of their problems as they seem to do? The seeds of civil war in Lebanon were sown by Britain and France long before Israel became a state.

2. Acknowledging the Arabs’ grievances, we must ask: Is it ever justified to use terrorist tactics? I think not, and even Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, is moving toward that view.

Terrorism is terrible. It has become an art form in the Middle East, and Jerry Levin got snared. So did Terry Anderson. It is God’s mercy that Levin is free—and a believer. We pray for those still held.

Leapfrogging History

Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875, by Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen (University of Chicago Press, xviii + 296 pp.; $29.95, binding). Reviewed by Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion who teaches at Columbia University. He is the author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America.

For the earliest settlers, the New World offered that rarest of opportunities—the chance to start anew, to build institutions from the ground up. Religious leaders found that opportunity especially seductive because they were thus freed from the ecclesiastical accretions of the centuries. They could fashion their beliefs and practices according to the dictates of their own consciences instead of the whims of hierarchies in Rome, London, or Canterbury.

Very often, as Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen argue in Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875, Protestant leaders in America claimed the purity of the New Testament church as their sole model. In so doing, they were able to leapfrog centuries of church history, ignoring both the insights and the lessons of the past, in search of some untarnished—albeit imperfectly understood—primitive ideal of the New Testament. Underlying this belief in the ability to appropriate “first times” was the persistent myth of objectivity—the fatuous assumption that we can read and interpret the Bible in its original purity, absent our own cultural biases.

Although the restorationism of Alexander Campbell is the best-known American example of this quest for the primordium or “first times,” the authors contend that the restoration ideal pervades American history. Drawing on the work of Sidney Mead and especially Theodore Dwight Bozeman (toward whom the authors are almost embarrassingly obsequious), Hughes and Allen contend that the American search for some mythological primordium began with the Puritans, extended even to Thomas Paine and the Enlightenment tradition, continued with Baconianism and Common Sense philosophy in the nineteenth century (which rationalized this myth of objectivity), and finds its most recent incarnation in Allan Bloom’s best-selling jeremiad, The Closing of the American Mind.

The nineteenth century provided especially fertile soil for this enterprise. Mormons, Baptists, and “Christians” (Disciples of Christ) thrived in the early national period, and sectarians used the appeal to “first times” to cut through all the confusion engendered by religious pluralism. “To proclaim one’s own sect a reproduction of the ancient, apostolic order,” the authors write, “was to anoint one’s sect the one, true church while all others were merely historic, tradition laden, and therefore false.”

Restorationism’S Dark Side

If this quest for the primitive seems merely quixotic or benign, Hughes and Allen point out its more pernicious effects. Beyond the arrogance implicit in claims to have appropriated the biblical primordium, restorationism has figured into Southern defenses of slavery and has issued in coercive domestic and foreign policies, even as politicians have insisted on a kind of “national innocence still rooted in unswerving fidelity to the primordial principles of ‘Nature and Nature’s God.’”

Evangelicals, moreover, get hit from both sides of the temporal continuum. While many evangelical preachers summon their congregations to a New Testament, “first times” purity, they complement these teachings with warnings about the end times, the coming apocalypse. The result is a suspension between two ideals—the ideal of a primitive past and the ultimate ideal of new heavens and new earth—with a consequent devaluation of the present (“This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through”).

Hughes and Allen offer a beguiling thesis. The restoration ideal has, I think, both less and more explanatory power than the authors claim for it. The apparent ubiquity of this theme leads to the question, Is there any movement in American Protestantism that was not in some way restorationist? The authors insist there are such, but they provide no examples. Hughes and Allen overreach somewhat in trying to construct an interpretive template through which to view all (or most) of American Protestantism. On the other hand, the ahistoricism that plagues American Protestantism, especially evangelicalism, reaches well beyond the Baconian readings of the Bible and the Common Sense ideal of nineteenth-century hermeneutics. In recent years, the mythology of “first times” has prompted all sorts of hyperbolic claims for America’s Christian origins and the piety of the Founding Fathers. In that way, religion and politics have been hopelessly intertwined in the quest for the elusive primitive ideal in American history.

Hunted By The Hound Of Heaven

Between Heaven and Charing Cross: The Life of Francis Thompson, by Brigid M. Boardman (Yale, 410 pp.; $37.50, hardcover). Reviewed by Alzina Stone Dale, author of T. S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet.

The late Victorian poet Francis Thompson is familiar to most of us only as the author of the hauntingly beautiful poem The Hound of Heaven, with its familiar opening line, “I fled Him down the nights and down the days.” Few know much about his short life, with its poverty and drug addiction, or have read the poem The Kingdom of God: In No Strange Land, from which this biography’s title comes. Still fewer know that he was raised and died a Christian.

Using Thompson’s unedited notebooks and letters, Brigid Boardman has reconstructed Thompson’s life to show us a poet who speaks to our condition. For, despite the Romantic imagery of his work, G. K. Chesterton had summed him up accurately by saying that Francis Thompson was

a shy volcano [whose] sky-scraping humility, his mountains of mystical detail, his occasional and unashamed weakness, his sudden and sacred blasphemies [show that] the shortest definition of the Victorian Age is that he stood outside it.

Boardman, too, calls Thompson a modern, who, believing in the affirmative value of the arts and imagination, wrote that he was struggling to be the poet “not of the Return to Nature but of the Return to God.”

Raised by middle-class parents who were Roman Catholic converts, Thompson was caught between his church’s stern and negative emphasis on sin, penitence, and good works, and his own dreamy, poetic instincts. As a boy Thompson wanted to become a priest, but because of his introspective nature, his schoolmasters denied him ordination. His doctor father then sent him to medical school, but Thompson, hating blood and surgery, failed his examinations, although he retained a lifelong interest in science and nature.

He fled to London, hoping for a literary career, but ended up on the streets, becoming addicted to opium, which was cheaply and legally available. This experience gave Thompson a lifelong sympathy for the poor and homeless and made him seem something of a social radical to the church of his day. But if there were no other way in which Thompson’s story could speak to our time, his struggle with opium is painfully reminiscent of our “brightest and best” who also turn to drugs when faced with failure or despair.

After three years on the streets, in 1889, when he was 30, Thompson was suddenly rescued—literally and figuratively—by Wilfrid Meynell, editor of the Roman Catholic journal Merry England and husband of the poet Alice Meynell. The rest of his life the Meynells paid for Thompson’s room and board and detoxifications, and published his essays and poems. But they never quite let Thompson go—or grow up—and after his death they edited his published work, hoping to maintain his image as an orthodox Catholic “saint.”

In writing her biography, Boardman’s purpose was to “rescue” Thompson from that image and the later one of an addicted decadent, and her account of the writing of The Hound of Heaven can stand as a paradigm for the rest of Thompson’s career. Sent to stay at a monastic house to complete his drug withdrawal, one dark December afternoon he began to write about the Christian concept of the pursuit of the soul by God, which led to self-revelation and acceptance. He described it as part of a process that reached back to the earliest records of human hope and fear, and Boardman shows that his notes reflect his insight that this cry came not only from the psalmist and early Church Fathers, but from the natural world where the fear of death was built into ancient myths and rituals. The “godless” Romantic poets also fired Thompson’s imagination, for it was Shelley’s line “Once the hungry hours were hounds” that began the poetic process.

Filled with Thompson’s own brand of brilliant imagery, the poem opens in the cosmic world, then fleeing from time, moves from the reality of London’s streets to opium nightmares and man’s perennial search for a substitute for God in his creation. Boardman insists that the poem does not end in a mystical union between the soul and God, but that, trying to reconcile his poetic vision of beauty with the Christian vision of heaven, Thompson left the divine invitation open.

In a later poem he was to suggest that

… your estranged faces,

… miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder

Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.

Thompson died in 1907 at 48 of tuberculosis combined with drug abuse, having enjoyed brief spells of fame and little fortune. Boardman sums up Thompson as a poet who, according to strict literary standards, was not great, but one who had a great vision. He saw that the essential values of Christianity are common to all human experience and are best communicated through the symbolic language shared by religion and poetry.

Officials of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) have filed formal charges against two San Francisco congregations that ordained three openly hom*osexual ministerial candidates in January 20 services. According to a spokesman for Lutheran Bishop Lyle G. Miller, hand-delivered letters to Saint Francis and First United Evangelical Lutheran Churches stated that they had “willfully disregarded and violated a criterion for recognition as congregations of the ELCA.”

All three of the ministerial candidates at issue, two of whom constitute a lesbian couple, have the necessary theological training. But church officials say they are not eligible for the ministry because clergy guidelines stipulate “chastity before marriage and fidelity within marriage” as the norm for sexual intercourse.

Assuming the situation does not change, a synodical discipline committee will conduct a hearing and issue a ruling in the case. Its three options at that time will be to remove the two congregations from the ELCA, to require censure and admonition by the bishop of the synod, or to suspend congregational rights and privileges for a designated period.

Traditionalists within the Episcopal Church would like to see similar action against those in their church who have ordained practicing hom*osexuals. According to (Mr.) Kim Byham, president of the church’s gay and lesbian organization Integrity, the recent highly publicized ordination of Robert Williams by Newark Bishop John Spong was “only the latest in a long series of ordinations of open, self-affirming, noncelibate lesbians and gays in the Episcopal Church since 1977.”

However, in a recent statement expressing “profound anger,” Spong said he regretted the ordination of Williams, who, after his ordination, publicly ridiculed the concepts of monogomy and chastity.

Byham said about five self-avowed, practicing hom*osexuals have been ordained yearly in the church since 1977, when the first was ordained. The church’s 1979 general convention passed a resolution calling the ordination of practicing hom*osexuals “inappropriate.” The resolution is dismissed as nonbinding by advocates of hom*osexual ordination.

Based on reports in Religious News Service.