Robert C. Roberts
They do not force their lessons on us, so we often fail to learn from them.
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
They do not force their lessons on us, so we often fail to learn from them.
These days, couples who have decided against having children are often strikingly can did about it. We may be shocked at the casual way they measure the value of children against winter sports, trips to Europe, and careers.
It was the moment it dawned on our three-year-old that everybody dies that put the matter into perspective for me. An old friend had died suddenly, and Beth had been told about Ollie Mae going to heaven. For a few weeks Beth could be heard praying out loud, “God I love you and please don’t die me until I’m very old.” Once at the dinner table she blurted out, “I don’t want to go to heaven; I just want to stay in this world with you and Mommy forever.” In moments like those it comes home to you what you’ve brought into the world: a soul like yourself, caring infinitely for life, categorically hating the idea of not existing—a being absolutely not to be compared with ski trips and flexibility of schedule and career continuity.
Children signal a change in your life from which you will never wholly recover. Initially it is a change from being footloose to being able to go out only rarely—and only then with the hassles of finding a decent baby sitter, and of having your “free” time at home reduced to that evasive hiatus between the moment you get the last child cajoled, pajamaed, peed, tucked in, storied, kissed, watered, and prayed with, and the time, 45 minutes later, when you flop exhausted on your bed and sink into that similitude of death from which you will not rise until the wails from the crib commence at about 2 A.M. Yes, if you’ve been used to spur-of-the-moment outings for pizza, visits with friends, and trips to the hardware store, there is no doubt that having children represents a radical change in your life.
In one degree or another, this change is both inevitable and obvious to everybody. But there is another kind of change that children can bring on—not inevitable, and not so obvious. It is a kind of spiritual growth that, if it occurs (and it doesn’t always occur), is a blessed by-product of parenthood, a debt of deepened humanity that parents owe to God for the privilege of being given children to rear.
Jesus dares to commend to us the lilies of the field and the birds of the air as spiritual teachers. They are there, for those who have eyes to see, as reminders of truths that often evade us. Like the lilies and birds, children do not force their lessons on us; witness the fact that so many of us fail to learn from them. And yet they are not like books of wisdom that sit silently on the shelf waiting—maybe for years and then finally in vain—for us to open them. Nor are they like lilies that present themselves only at one season of the year and then perhaps only if we go out for a walk. Having children in your house is like having books that climb down off the shelves, jump into your lap, and demand to be read daily, nay hourly and by the minute. It is like having lilies and birds that sit at your table and interrogate you year-round about your soul.
The avoidance of children, so greatly facilitated by birth control, abortion, and day-care centers, is not the unmixed blessing that some take it to be. Indeed, as a basic outlook and policy, it is a deathly curse. Some couples, after falling into spiritual laxity, have scurried back into the bosom of the church upon the wife’s pregnancy. Children enhance our sense of vulnerability, and so may incline us toward greater dependence on God. Knowing that in our children our stake in the well-being of this planet extends beyond the years of our own life may provoke a greater sense of responsibility about the environment. And of course, child rearing is an excellent school—even better than Harvard—for learning the virtues of patience and self-control. But right now I want to dwell on just three of the countless ways the presence of children among us can be a force for deepening our spirituality, transforming our vision, and fitting our hearts for God’s kingdom. Children can remind us of the fundamental importance of love, of our kinship with every human being, and of our need for eternity.
One reason we flee the company of children is the pursuit of achievement—the doing of business, the building of careers—in short, “becoming something in this world.” If you let children become a serious part of your life, they will inevitably “slow you down.” But as Christians we know that this pursuit is at best secondary and at worst the formula for loss of selfhood. The apostle Paul, thinking of church-related powers and achievements, even some enormously heroic ones, warns against their emptiness:
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:1–3).
If spiritual emptiness and loss of self are possible for the most eloquent evangelists and preachers of the gospel, and for Christian prophets and miracle workers and martyrs, how much more for people who give themselves without reservation to money making, intellectual brilliance, medical and political careers, fame, and influence? And being a Christian business person or politician is no guarantee against the danger. As Paul makes abundantly clear, even if these things are done in a Christian context and for Christian goals, the danger remains that in God’s eyes, they may amount to absolutely nothing.
If you live with a three-year-old, it is more difficult to fall into thinking of life as the pursuit of one or another achievement. A three-year-old does not judge her worth by her achievements or by her parents’ achievements; she judges this fundamentally by whether she is cherished. This is what she “demands,” what her unenculturated nature wants from life. When her daddy looks into her eyes, centers down into her presence and converses with her, his achievement mentality fades into the background, and life is focused in something more like the perspective of God. In the presence of this child, who so simply desires to be cherished, the daddy whose heart meets her need momentarily becomes “something”—the opposite of the “nothing” to which the apostle refers.
Of course, your humanity can be achieved without children; you might, for example, try loving your neighbor. But my point is that children are an especially compelling object of love. Despite the resistance we sometimes put up, there is something natural to us about loving children. And so they become a primary focus of our humanity in a world where there is so little of it. Our homes, where our children dwell, are like oases and special schools in which love is learned, love for its own sake, from which, with effort, we can go out into the world and see it more humanly.
We are sometimes told that Christian love is not a matter of liking people; after all, we are called upon to love “neighbors” with whom we have no natural ties of affection, and even enemies. And so we get a picture of Christian love as a kind of gritting our teeth and doing our cold duty toward people who mean nothing, or less than nothing, to us. You are supposed to love without having your heart in it, and if you care too much about people, there is even the suspicion that your love is not genuinely Christian. But this picture is false to the New Testament. Jesus is said to have had compassion on a mixed crowd (Mark 6:34) and on a presumably unknown leper who came to him (Mark 1:41). His demeanor toward people is in general not that of a man doing his cold duty, but one of affection. And the apostle tells us to be “tenderhearted” to one another (Eph. 4:32).
There are few places in life where being tenderhearted is as naturally powerful in us as in our role as parents. The psalmist, wanting to describe God’s compassion for his people, chooses the familial image: “As a father pities his children …” (Ps. 103:13). In the New Testament there is no writing that more exudes tenderheartedness than the First Letter of John. It is infused with the affection this old man feels for his disciples. Nor is it an accident that he repeatedly addresses them as “my children.” It is as though John’s family life has given him a way of “seeing,” an emotional matrix through which to perceive his friends. We take a natural joy in the well-being of our children, and a natural sorrow in their troubles. Here, if anywhere in life, we feel that organic connection with other human beings that means that we suffer when they suffer and rejoice when they rejoice (1 Cor. 12:26).
These facts suggest a spiritual exercise. Let us say that you come in contact with a morally disreputable person, a selfish, calloused, militaristic, and deceitful person—you who are a parent. He is not one toward whom you are naturally disposed to be “tenderhearted,” but in Christ you are called to love him. And this means, in part, to be tenderhearted toward him. The exercise is this. Contemplate him (that is, look at him, listen to him, or just think about him) with your child’s help. Thinking of your own child, remember that this man was once a child, one who desired above all else acceptance, security, warmth of affection. Look at him now, but picture him as the age of your own little one.
In doing so, you will see through the calluses to that central core of personality around which so much thorny growth has accumulated. You will see beyond the cruelty and ruthless ambition to the essential human passion of which it is so ugly a perversion—the passion for acceptance and love, for an identity of his own. A certain tenderheartedness—of your human kinship with even this person—will supervene upon you when you remember where this man has come from: he has come from a childhood, in essential ways like the one in which your little boy is now sojourning. As Franz Kafka put it, “A man’s embittered features are often only the petrified bewilderment of a boy.”
This past Christmas we took our annual trip to Wichita to visit my parents. My 78-year-old father renewed his acquaintance with my one-year-old daughter. The human distance between these two close relatives was, of course, striking: the fresh, soft-skinned young one, plump as a transparent grape, just starting out in life; and my father, the raisin, with so many years behind him—“many years” by a certain myopic human way of reckoning things, that is. In a short time (as the history of the world goes), my little daughter will herself be an old woman, bouncing a beaming baby upon her knee.
“A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever” (Eccl. 1:4).
With our modern machines of war we are less certain than the Preacher that the Earth will remain “forever.” But that the generations pass away—of that there is no doubt. And the coming of the new generation, those little bunk dwellers and Hot Wheels riders who soon will take our place as the “productive members of society,” remind us of our own passing, and also of theirs. In reminding us, they also make the fact more poignant by the beauty of their enthusiasm, their heedless zeal for life, their astonishing aptitude for wisdom and folly, their sheer lovability. Indeed, to love children is to love life, not like an egoist who cringes in the face of his own annihilation, but like a connoisseur who appreciates the treasure for its intrinsic worth. And so, finally, children can help us learn a right appreciation for the gospel of Jesus Christ, the message of redemption and eternal life. Without that message the beauty of children would compel another conclusion:
“All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.… I have seen everything that is done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl. 1:8, 14).
Clinging to Christ we are not forced, in beholding the unutterable value of life, to conclude that all is vanity, and that creation—at least from our point of view—is a colossal bad joke. In him the delectable goodness of human life, so vividly exampled in our children, becomes something in which we can take joy without reservation.
- More fromRobert C. Roberts
- Children
Theology
Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.
He keeps investing in unworthy stock-take Mozart.
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
He Keeps investing in unworthy stock—take Mozart.
The film Amadeus presents Mozart as a superlatively gifted jerk. He preens and wenches and giggles absurdly. He scorns the dullness of other people’s music and praises the brilliance of his own. He uses his wonderful mind for such inventive crudities as talking dirty backwards. And day after day he creates music of such soaring, yearning, seamless beauty that it splits his rival Antonio Salieri into two persons—one of them wanting to worship and one wanting to kill.
For Salieri is the prince of mediocrity, the patron saint of every epigone who must live with the knowledge that by comparison with genius he is outstandingly so-so. Salieri knows that Mozart is a sun to his candle, a torrent to his trickle. By a classic irony of envy, Salieri is in fact just gifted enough to appreciate and thus to resent Mozart’s greatness.
He resents it especially because he had wanted such a gift for himself. Half devoted to God, half to himself, Salieri had ached for a sublime talent that would reflect back to God the effulgence of the divine beauty and simultaneously make the reflector celebrated and immortal. Salieri, that is, had run for election as the voice of God. God’s response was to place his treasure in an obscene brat. Thus the musical incarnation of the glory of God (“Amadeus” means, of course, beloved of God) prances through the film with a coprophagous grin on his face; the smaller rival must wear what Angus Wilson once called “the painful grimace of sour good loserliness.”
Envy is poisonous enough when it peevishly refuses to concede that a rival has earned his success. But what if the rival hasn’t? What if the staggering greatness of another is a sheer gift?
A pervasive theme of Scripture is that God’s choice of vessels is incalculable. He elects the shifty, tainted Jacob rather than his more dependable brother. He elevates an eventually lustful, murderous David over an understandably envious Saul. He chooses Israel, prompting the puzzled jingle of un- and anti-Semitic observers: “How odd of God / To choose the Jews.” Augustine and Calvin speak with similar wonder about Jesus Christ: “Whence did that man deserve to be the only-begotten Son of God?” Their answer? He didn’t. He was graciously elected to the position through no merit of his own. It has to be admitted that Augustine and Calvin’s Christology sounds suspiciously adoptionist or Nestorian at this point. It sounds either as if the person Jesus Christ had been promoted from mere humanity to divinity or else as if somehow the man Jesus were at one time a different person from the Son of God. Still, the general theme runs deep in Scripture: Where humanity is concerned, God keeps investing in unworthy stock.
One of the great mysteries of divine grace is that it lodges itself in stables; it packs its treasures into earthen vessels; it makes itself heard here and there in the midst of four-letter words. And it chooses for Incarnation a humanity “without beauty or majesty to attract us.” How odd of God. We do not understand his choices or his ways. How much more fitting if he had chosen one of us! How much more edifying if God’s gift had been properly packaged! From Joseph’s brothers to Herod to the Pharisees to Judas, our response to God’s greatness incarnate in other human beings is curiosity turning to envy turning to murder.
Toward the end of Mozart’s life, Salieri works up a scheme. He will trick Mozart into writing a great requiem mass, kill him, and then pretend authorship of Mozart’s wondrous music when it is played at the great man’s funeral. At a stroke Salieri can thus vindicate himself as a composer and take revenge on God who had chosen an undeserving vessel. In order to triumph in this way Salieri must concede defeat. He must seize and use and take to himself the very greatness that has made his life hell. But once more a surprising God intervenes. Mozart dies before completing the mass. Salieri’s bitter conclusion: God chose to kill his beloved son rather than let him share his gift with another.
Here is half a gospel for all of us who reverence the Incarnation. Like Salieri we can profit from it only vicariously, only by magnificent defeat of our own pretensions and by humbling attachment to this other person, this truly incarnate one, this truly godly one. His godliness, his Christ-life, his divine beauty must become ours. We are only candles to his original light.
But then, in fact, God’s gift does become ours. The advent and death of God’s beloved Son does open the treasure house for all God’s children. Salieri was bitterly wrong. The gospel he missed is trumpeted by Paul: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”
Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift.
- More fromCornelius Plantinga, Jr.
- Film
- Music
Theology
Philip Yancey
Some overlooked passages and what they have to say about God’s creation.
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
The “Moral” Land
As I read the neglected book of Leviticus recently, I was struck by the fact that Levitical laws on the Sabbath also applied to the land—as much for the land’s sake, it appears, as the people’s. What turned out to be good agriculture is in fact presented as an act of worship: “The land itself must observe a sabbath to the Lord” (Lev. 25:1–7).
Astonishingly, numerous passages in Leviticus portray the land as having almost a “personal relationship” with God. It is even sometimes personified with its own moral nature. For example, God explained to Moses that the Canaanites had defiled the land so greatly that he had to punish it for its sin! The land responded by vomiting out its inhabitants (18:25; 20:22). “And if you defile the land,” God warned, “it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you” (18:28). (Interestingly, the prophet Hosea also describes a travailing land: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land … because of this the land mourns” [Hos. 4:1–3].)
In contrast, if the Israelites did not defile it, the land would respond with fecundity, and overflow with milk and honey (20:24). In his final summing up, as God swore that he would remember the Abrahamic covenant, he added,” and I will remember the land” (26:42). The remembrance would continue even after the children of Israel had been expelled from the Promised Land: “For the land will be deserted by them and will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them” (26:43).
Checks And Balances
God gave Moses an extraordinary reason why he wouldn’t let the Israelites conquer the inhabitants of Canaan all at once. It would take some time, he said, because otherwise “the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you” (Exod. 23:29). In other words, he didn’t want to disrupt the ecological balance of the land.
Handling With Care
Some of the laws in Deuteronomy express a gentle respect for nature. For example, a person who happened upon a bird’s nest with a nesting mother could take the young bird but not the mother “so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life” (Deut. 22:6). Also, contemplate the phrasing in this regulation to an army laying siege to a city: “Do not cut them [trees] down. Are the trees of the field men, that you should besiege them?” (Deut. 20:19).
Creation Laughter
Unfortunately, the creation/evolution debate, with its emphasis on scientific detail and theory, has tended to obscure one of the most basic facts about Creation: it was a time of great joy in the heavens. Nowhere is this better expressed than in God’s magnificent speech in Job, chapters 38–41. There, God reveals Creation as a time when “the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy” (38:7).
One by one, God calls forward examples of his wildest creations: the lioness, the mountain goat, the wild donkey, the wild ox, the ostrich, the horse, the hawk. He seems to take greatest pride in their very untameability. The wild donkey, for example, “laughs at the commotion in the town” (39:7). As for the wild ox, will he be “content to serve you? Will he stay by your manger at night?” (39:9). And of the mysterious leviathan, God says, “Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?” (41:5).
We would do well to consider these words, and what they reveal about our Creator, as we risk the extinction of “useless” species.
- More fromPhilip Yancey
- Creation Care
- Science
Theology
Paul Brand
We can live with less money. Without the land we will die.
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
Soil is life. Can we preserve it for future generations?
I grew up in the mountains of South India. My parents were missionaries to the tribal people of the hills, and our lives were about as simple as they could be—and as happy.
There were no roads. (We never saw a wheeled vehicle except on our annual visit to the plains.) There were no stores, no electricity, no plumbing. My sister and I ran barefoot, and we made our own games from the trees, sticks, and stones around us. Our playmates were the Indian boys and girls, and our lives were much the same as theirs.
Rice was an important food for all of us. And since there was no level ground for wet cultivation, it was grown all along the streams that ran down the land’s gentle slopes. These slopes had been patiently terraced hundreds of years before; and now every one was perfectly level, and bordered at its lower margin by an earthen dam covered by grass. Each narrow dam served as a footpath across the line of terraces, with a level field of mud and water six inches below its upper edge and another level terrace two feet below. There were no steep or high drop-offs, so there was little danger of collapse.
Those rice paddies were a rich soup of life. When there was plenty of water there would be a lot of frogs and little fish. Egrets would stalk through the paddy fields on their long legs and enjoy the feast. Kingfishers would swoop down with a flash of color and carry off a fish from under the beak of a heron. And it was here I learned my first lesson on conservation.
I was playing in the mud of a rice field with a half-dozen other little boys. We were racing to see who would be the first to catch three frogs. It was a wonderful way to get dirty from head to foot in the shortest possible time. Suddenly, we were all scrambling to get out of the paddy. One of the boys had spotted an old man walking across the path toward us. We all knew him as “Tata,” or “Grandpa.” He was the keeper of the dams. He walked slowly, and was stooped over a bit as though he were always looking at the ground. Old age is very much respected in India, and we boys shuffled our feet and waited in silence for what we knew would be a rebuke.
He came over to us and asked us what we were doing. “Catching frogs,” we answered. He stared down at the churned-up mud and flattened young rice plants in the corner where we had been playing. I was expecting him to talk about the rice seedlings we had just spoiled. Instead, the elder stooped down and scooped up a handful of mud. “What is this?” he asked. The biggest boy took the responsibility of answering for us all.
“It’s mud, Tata,” he replied.
“Whose mud is it?” the old man asked.
“It’s your mud, Tata, this is your field.”
Then the old man turned and looked at the nearest of the little channels across the dam. “What do you see there, in that channel?”
“That is water, running over into the lower field.”
For the first time Tata looked angry. “Come with me and I will show you water.” A few steps along the dam he pointed to the next channel, where clear water was running, “That is what water looks like,” he said. Then we came back to our nearest channel, and he said again “Is that water?”
We hung our heads. “No, Tata, that is mud.” The older boy had heard all this before and did not want to prolong the question-and-answer session, so he hurried on. “And the mud from your field is being carried away to the field below, and it will never come back, becausemud always runs downhill, never up again. We are sorry, Tata, and we will never do this again.”
Tata was not ready to stop his lesson as quickly as that, however. He went on to tell us that just one handful of mud would grow enough rice for one meal for one person, and it would do it twice every year for years and years into the future. “That mud flowing over the dam has given my family food since before I was born, and before my grandfather was born. It would have given my grandchildren and their grandchildren food forever. Now it will never feed us again. When you see mud in the channels of water, you know that life is flowing away from the mountains.”
The old man walked slowly back across the path, pausing a moment to adjust with his foot the grass clod in our muddy channel so that no more water flowed through it. We were silent and uncomfortable as we went off to find some other place to play. I had experienced a dose of traditional Indian folk education that would remain with me as long as I lived. Soil is life, and every generation is responsible for all generations to come.
The Hand Of Man
I have been back to my childhood home several times. There have been changes. A road now links the hill people with the plains folk, but traditional ways still go on. The terraced paddy fields still hold back the mud. Rice still grows. And the old man the boys call “Tata” is now one of the boys I used to play with 65 years ago. I am sure he lays down the law when he catches someone churning up the mud, and I hope the system holds for years to come. I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.
The Nilgiri hills, or Blue Mountains, were a favorite resort in the hot season for missionaries from the plains. They were steep and thickly forested, with few areas level enough for cultivation, even with terraces. The forestry service allowed no clearing of the trees except where tea, coffee, or fruit trees were to be planted. These bushes and trees, in turn, held the soil—and all was well.
Thirty years after my encounter with “Tata” I was back in India, a doctor and a missionary myself, with a wife and growing family. We began going to the Nilgiris for every summer holiday, and our children reveled in the cool air and lush forests. But something was different, or soon became so.
A new breed of landowners had begun to take possession of the land. These new “farmers”—former political prisoners who, following India’s independence, were given tracts of land—had not farmed before. They had never been exposed to a Tata teaching them the value of mud. They wanted to make money, and make it fast. They knew the climate was ideal for potatoes, and that there was a market for such a crop. Forests were thus cleared on sloping land, and potatoes planted. Two and even three crops could be harvested per year, and money flowed freely into their purse.
But harvesting potatoes involves turning over the soil, and monsoon rains often came before a new crop could hold that soil. Not surprisingly then, as my family and I returned to those mountains of boyhood memory, the water now looked like chocolate syrup. It oozed rather than flowed. We were seeing rivers of mud. I felt sick.
I went over to ask old Mr. Fritschi and his wife, a dear Swiss couple living in Coonoor on the Nilgiri hills, about the havoc that was being wrought and to find out if there was anything we could do. They had been missionaries of the Basel Mission but were long retired and now owned a nursery of young plants and trees. They loved to help and advise farmers and gardeners about ways to improve their crops. It seemed to me that these devoted people would know if there was some way to advise the landowners about ways to save their soil.
Mr. Fritschi’s eyes were moist as he told me, “I have tried, but it is no use. They have no love of the land, only of money. They are making a lot of money, and they do not worry about the loss of soil, because they think it is away in the future, and they will have money to buy more.” Besides, he continued, they can deduct the loss of land from their income tax as business depreciation.
Thirty more years have passed and we have left India. But every year I go back to visit Vellore Christian Medical College and take part in the leprosy work there. I do not, however, enjoy going back to the Nilgiri hills. I look up to those slopes and see large areas of bare rock of no use to anybody. Those deforested areas that still have some soil look like gravel. And the clear streams and springs that ran off from these areas 60 years earlier are dry today. When the rains come they rush in torrents and flood, then they go dry.
Oh Tata! Where have you gone? You have been replaced by businessmen and accountants who have degrees in commerce and who know how to manipulate tax laws. You have been replaced by farmers who know about pesticides and chemical fertilizers, but who care nothing about leaving soil for their great-grandchildren.
A Worldwide Drama
Outside of India I have seen another drama involving trees, soil, water, and human starvation working its tragic sequence. The place is Ethiopia.
I first came to Ethiopia in the early 1960s when I went to Addis Ababa on behalf of the International Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled. My task was to negotiate the establishment of an all-Africa training center for leprosy workers, with an emphasis on rehabilitation. I met Emperor Haile Selassie and his minister of health, as well the ministers of agriculture and commerce, the dean of the then-new University Medical College, and representatives of American AID and the Rockefeller foundation. Later I went to work in the new training center as a surgeon, teaching reconstruction of the hand and foot. But, as had happened so often in my life, it was the land that caught my attention. Most of our leprosy patients were farmers, and their future had to be in farming if they were not to be dislocated from their families and villages.
The emperor was very gracious as we talked about the problem. He gave us the use of tracts of the royal lands to farm. The Swedish churches had sent farmers into Ethiopia to teach the patients how to farm more efficiently; and it was a joy to see acres of tef, the local food grain, growing to harvest. Patients with leprosy were learning how to work without doing damage to their insensitive hands. We were grateful to the benevolent old emperor, and all seemed to be going well. Gradually, however, we began to see the real problems of that tragic country.
Camping out in the countryside, while visiting distant treatment centers, we were impressed with the way the countryside was fissured with deep canyons where streams had eroded the soil on their way to join the Blue Nile. Farms on the edges of these canyons were having to retreat year by year as their soil slipped away into the rivers. There had once been trees and forests on this land, but the trees had been felled for timber and firewood, and also to make way for grazing and cultivation.
What impressed me most, however, were the poor crops and stony fields that were cultivated by the peasant farmers. Every field seemed to be covered with great stones and boulders. Many of these stones were of a size that could have easily been levered up and rolled away to the edges of the fields where they would have made useful walls to hold the soil in and keep marauders out. As it was, it must have been a constant irritation to have to till and harvest between these rocks.
It did not take much inquiry to find out why such simple improvements had never been made. The peasants knew, and were frank to tell us, that if ever they made their fields look good they would lose them. The ruling race of Amharas, based in the capital city, contained all the lawyers and leaders of the country. Any good piece of land could be claimed by one of the city-dwelling Amharas simply by stating that it had belonged to his ancestors. Supporting documents were easy to obtain. In court the peasant had no chance. His only hope of being allowed to continue farming his land was to make it appear worthless.
Both the Ford foundation and the Rockefeller foundation had considered sending help to teach good farming methods and to halt erosion, but both insisted to the emperor that land reform had to come first. Only if the land were owned by the people who farmed it would it be taken care of in a way that would preserve it for generations to come. The peasants had to have confidence that their handful of mud would still be there for their children. If not, why not let it go down the river?
I believe the emperor wanted to introduce land reform; but if he tried, he failed. The Amharas were too strong for him. The established church, the old Ethiopian Orthodox church of which the emperor was head, had vested interest in the status quo, and was on the wrong side of real justice. This has happened so often in the past, when churches got comfortable and wealthy. We need to be watchful and aware today.
On a state visit to Egypt, Emperor Haile Selassie walked down to the river Nile and kneeled to scoop up two handfuls of the rich fertile mud on its bank. Raising his hands, he said, “My country.” The Blue Nile had carried Ethiopia to Egypt, and the old emperor knew it. He could not send the mud upstream again and he did not have the courage to make the changes that would have arrested further loss.
Today the emperor is dead. Every cabinet minister with whom I negotiated for our training center is dead—they were killed by the firing squads of the revolution. There might not have been a famine today if the trees had not all been cut, if the land had not eroded away, if the absentee landlords of Ethiopia had not been so greedy, and if the church had insisted that justice should prevail.
I did not like the revolution or the foreign invaders who brought it about, but they would never have succeeded if the people had not been laboring under a sense of injustice. The new Marxist government has not suceeded in bringing back the trees or the land, and it has spent its energy in war. But the roots of Ethiopia’s problems stem from generations ago—even before the leaders who have now died for their collective sins.
Kindred Sins
Today I live in Louisiana. I have no soil or water problems. In fact, my topsoil is so deep and so rich that I would not even try to plumb its depth. And the land is so flat that even when it floods my soil stays where it is.
But I cannot be at peace. My home is right beside the Mississippi River. I could probably throw a stone into the water from my roof. My house is an old one and built up on piles. At the time it was built, the occupants would expect to sit on their porch and watch the muddy waters of the Mississippi swirl under the house for a few days each year. If I were to analyze my garden soil, I would find that most of it came from Kansas and Ohio and Iowa and other states upriver. A farmer from Iowa could come to my garden, as the emperor of Ethiopia did in Egypt, scoop up a handful of mud, and say, “My farm!”
But no mud comes from Iowa to my garden now. The corps of engineers has built a dam, or levee, all along the bank of the river, so the mud runs straight out to sea. During the spring floods, I walk along the levee and look at that mud. They tell me that many whole farms flow past my house every hour. I know that Iowa has lost more than half its topsoil just in the hundred or so years since Americans started farming that land.
Because I am haunted by the mountains of India and by the erosion of Ethiopia, I have to ask why American farmers still lose soil. They tell me they know all about contour plowing, but say modern farming machinery is so big that it is impossible or uneconomic to plow around contours. So they just go straight up and down. They get it done faster—and lose the soil faster. This all gives better returns to the shareholders, and improves all the market indicators. Shareholders and members of the board are today’s absentee landlords of the farm. They are not farmers. They tell me that only small family farms still do contour plowing, but they are going out of business. Big companies are buying them up, so they can use “efficient” methods.
They tell me that the American forests are replanted when they are cut, and I think that is probably true. But I also understand that wide clear-cutting is practiced even on steep slopes. It is a matter of pride that every part of every tree is used for timber or pulp or chipboard when it is cut. But then, nothing goes back into the land. There is no building of the soil, just depletion.
My Mississippi River is also the site now of scores of petrochemical plants and herbicide factories. I have chemical plants to my right and industrial plants to my left. (The proximity of the river is convenient for getting water to cooling towers and receiving effluents.) All the trees downwind have turned white and died. They tell me it was fluorides, but it could have been any one of the effluents that have given parts of Louisiana the highest incidence of cancer in the country. Ten years ago all the cattle in this area were declared unfit to sell for beef because of unacceptable levels of tetrachlorme thane in their fat. I wonder what the levels are in me and my family.
I look at the great Mississippi and think back to the days of Huckleberry Finn and his raft, when the river was largely water and fish. I look down now at the swirling mud and see it as no better than the Blue Nile, or the Cauvery River in India that carries mud from the Nilgiri Hills. Is there a common thread? It is not ignorance in all cases. Nor is it dire poverty (although that sometimes leads to the cutting of the trees for fuel). No, there would be enough for all if it were not for greed. More profit. Faster return on investment. A bigger share for me of what is available now, but may not be available tomorrow.
God has something to say to us about this. And he said it repeatedly by his prophets. Moses described in detail the care of the land in Leviticus 25. It was to be nurtured and given a regular sabbath year of rest. It was never to be sold on a permanent basis but regarded as a trust from the Lord. “The earth is [the Lord’s], … and you are sojourners …” (vs. 23). Later, Isaiah pronounces God’s judgment: “The earth dries up and withers, the whole earth grows sick; … the earth itself is desecrated by the feet of those who live in it, because they have broken the laws … and violated the eternal covenant (24:4–5, NEB). Hosea adds: “Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying” (4:3, NIV). God is concerned about his creation and looks to us whom he put in charge of it. We are to share in its redemption (Rom. 8:21), not be agents of its destruction.
My Legacy
I would gladly give up medicine tomorrow if by so doing I could have some influence on policy with regard to mud and soil. The world will die from lack of pure water and soil long before it will die from a lack of antibiotics or surgical skill and knowledge. But what can be done if the destroyers of our earth know what they are doing and do it still? What can be done if people really believe that free enterprise has to mean absolute lack of restraint on those who have no care for the future?
I cannot, however, conclude without a small balance of joy and an indication that God still has a church that produces people who care. In the final analysis it is not knowledge or lack of it that makes a difference, but concerned people. The sense of concern for the earth is still transmitted by person-to-person communication and by personal example better than by any other method. Old Tata still lives on. He lives in the boys who played in the mud, and they will pass on his concern for the soil and his sense of its importance to future generations.
Old Mr. Fritschi still lives on through his son. The love of trees he tried to promote in the Nilgiri hills is now being promoted by his son on the plains at Karigiri. A single dedicated person giving a good example is better than a lot of wringing of hands and prophecies of doom.
Ernest Fritschi was born in India and lived there long enough to love it, take Indian nationality, and marry a lovely Indian wife. He studied in Madras University, became a doctor, and then an orthopedic surgeon. Working with leprosy patients, he joined the Leprosy Mission and worked in many countries, including Ethiopia, and then became director of the Schieffelin Research and Training Center at Karigiri near Vellore.
The land for the center had been barren gravel with not a tree anywhere, and water had been hard to locate. I remember walking over the large acre-age before we started to build and thinking that it was no surprise the government had donated it so freely. It was good for nothing else.
Ernest, however, had faith in the land and was determined to prove that it could be productive of more than buildings and a hospital. Other directors had made a good start, but Ernest made a rule for himself that every year he would plant trees. He collected seeds and seedlings from everywhere and nourished them in his own garden until they were strong. Then he would plant them out just before the rains, and have them watered by staff and patients until they had root systems deep enough to survive. The hill that formed one border of the Karigiri land was bare and rocky, and the rains would send a rushing flood of water over the gravel of the hospital grounds. So Ernest built contour ridges of gravel and soil to hold the water long enough for it to soak in.
I remember the hospital and its surrounding staff houses and chapel as they grew. They were grey and white and stood out on the skyline. They could be seen for miles as the only structures breaking the monotony of the gravel slopes. Today, as I approach that hospital, it is hidden in a forest with trees higher than the tallest buildings. The place has been declared a sanctuary by the environmental department of the state government in recognition of what already exists. The whole area is full of birds; we counted and identified over 40 species in one afternoon. The water table, falling in most places, was rising last year under the gravel at Karigiri. Soil is building, not being lost.
What is a few acres among the millions where the reverse is true? It is important to me because it sounds a message. One man can make a difference. Dedication is what is needed. And faith. It is important, too, because the man who made this little revolution is not a professional farmer or a government official. He is a doctor who loves trees, soil, and water. He was sometimes criticized by his board of governors who said his goals and objectives should be to treat and rehabilitate leprosy patients. Money, they argued, should not be diverted to other goals, like farming and reforestation. But he proved that concern for soil and trees benefits patients too. Buildings do not need air conditioning when they are shaded by trees. Patients who see and participate in good practices on the land learn to reproduce the same when they go home.
Not far from there is the Christian Medical College, founded by the beloved American doctor Ida Scudder. She insisted on building the college on an extensive piece of land where there would be room for gardens and trees. She was followed by others who had the same view, including the first Indian director, Dr. Hilda Lazarus, who doubtless had claims to fame in her own medical specialty but whom I remember for her love of trees.
Dr. Lazarus is long gone, but her trees and philosophy remain. In my day we used to get excited and concerned about new drugs and new diagnostic equipment, but today when I visit the Christian Medical College, I find the director more likely to be excited about preserving the water table, and growing the right kind of crops and preserving the soil. This is health, and this is hope for the future. There is still life in the land, and God still blesses those who recognize “the earth is the Lord’s.”
I am a grandfather now. My grandchildren do not call me Tata, but I rather wish they would. It would not mean much to them, but it would remind me that, in addition to the immortality of our spirit, we all have a sort of immortality of our flesh. If the kids called me Tata, it would remind me that, down the centuries, there may be many generations of people who will bear my humanity, who will enjoy life, or who will suffer in proportion to the care that I now take to preserve the good gifts that God has given us. Part of that care is in teaching and in example.
My grandson is called Daniel, and the next time he comes to visit me I shall take him out into my garden and scoop up a handful of mud. I shall ask him, “Daniel, what is this?”
- More fromPaul Brand
- Environment
Ideas
Kenneth S. Kantzer with Paul W. Fromer
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
A building consensus could at least put an end to abortion on demand.
An American consensus is shaping up on what to do about abortions. It is not what most evangelicals like. Rather, it poses a serious moral dilemma for them, and it calls for some hard decisions.
There is increasing evidence for this new consensus, which opposes abortion on demand, and especially all abortions of convenience. According to a current poll, its size has reached 58 percent. This is despite consistent support by public media of the prochoice movement’s view (90 percent, according to a study by Samuel Rothman and Robert Lichter).
This new consensus is formed primarily of conservative Roman Catholics, conservative evangelicals, a sprinkling of Mormons, conservative Jews, and a growing body of ethically conservative blacks (generally evangelical, though not sailing under that banner). It also includes not a few liberals concerned over the growing erosion in Western culture of any commitment to the sanctity of life, and also some others not identified with any of these groups.
The presence of this broad consensus sets the stage for a dilemma among conservative evangelicals because most of them (66 percent, according to a Gallup poll taken in fall 1984) hold an absolutist or near absolutist opposition to abortion. (They oppose all abortions, or all except those where the mother’s life is endangered, or, possibly, where rape or incest has occurred.) In this they have been able to count on traditional Roman Catholics and some others, but they have lacked the necessary support to secure a constitutional amendment for what they believe is right.
Their dilemma arises because, based on this broad national consensus, they could probably now get a stricter law than the one currently in force, but the new law would not be as strict as they believe to be morally justified. Can they honorably settle for less—on the ground that half a loaf is better than none?
The growing national consensus against abortion on demand rests in part on the broad heritage of Judeo-Christian values—still lively in Western culture and in America. The vast majority of Americans have always affirmed that their own personal and private conviction was opposed to abortion on demand, and a slight majority have gone on to state support for laws restricting it. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University, writes: “If, given a choice between the present law of abortion-on-demand, up to and including viability, or a more restrictive law, … the majority of Americans polled consistently have supported the more limited option.” He acknowledges that “there is not a consensus in America for the absolute prohibition of abortion.” But “there is and was a moral consensus … for a stricter abortion law. A remarkably well-kept secret is that a minority is currently imposing its belief on a demonstrable majority.”
Before considering whether half a loaf is acceptable, we need to see the main factors leading to the rise of the prochoice movement in the sixties and seventies, and the subsequent resurgence of the prolife movement.
Prochoice Upsurge
We have to admit that many more Americans today than, say, half a century ago or even 20 years ago, will defend the morality of abortion on demand (though this does not mean a majority, since the view started with little support). The movement away from the more traditional view first gained wide acceptance during the sixties.
In 1962 the American Law Institute published a study advocating a change in abortion laws to allow for abortions before viability in cases of rape, incest, the mother’s health, or deformed and mentally retarded fetuses. (“Viability” occurs when the fetus can live outside the mother’s body.) Five years later the American Medical Association endorsed these recommendations and reversed a medical history reaching back to Hippocrates. Planned Parenthood, NOW (National Organization for Women), and the ACLU joined the chorus of approval.
State legislation kept pace with this new attitude toward abortion. California, Colorado, and North Carolina repealed their strict laws in 1967, and state after state followed in quick succession. Finally, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973 ruled unconstitutional most state laws that made abortions before viability a legal offense punishable in one way or another. This radical change in moral climate led many to conclude that, on moral grounds, Americans had generally come around to supporting abortion on demand.
Yet the result of this swift change in the law did not, in fact, mean this. Quite the contrary, most continued to affirm their own personal rejection of abortion except in extreme circumstances. But the will to support laws against abortion seemed to disappear.
At the same time, the church-state issue was heating up. Opposition to abortion is a private religious conviction, it was argued, which must not be written into a law that would violate the First Amendment with its guarantee of separation of church and state. Such a law would establish a religious viewpoint; further, it would deny the free exercise of religion to anyone who had no religious scruples against abortion, or whose religious convictions favored aborting children who would become a burden to society. Many Democrats in the election of 1984 objected strenuously to a plank in the Republican party platform demanding that appointed judges agree to the sanctity of human life. This, so they argued, was to make a religious viewpoint a requirement for office, and therefore violated our Constitution.
Further, many argued that it was unwise to pass such a law in present-day America because of the lack of a consensus supporting it. Unpopular laws cannot be enforced. In any case, it would affect only the poor and uneducated, and would inevitably, so it was said, lead to the scofflaw attitude of the latter days of Prohibition.
Gov. Mario Cuomo, in a speech at Notre Dame University, was typical of politicians taking this position. As a loyal Roman Catholic, he affirmed his own agreement with the traditional position of his church. But he said that as a responsible office holder representing the American people, he could not support laws the people did not want.
Finally, the most central argument supporting abortion on demand rested on the rights and freedom of women. No woman, it was felt, should be forced to go through an unwanted pregnancy. That would violate her inalienable right to privacy and her freedom as an independent citizen.
Turning Of The Tide
Yet the traditional support even for laws against abortion was by no means completely eroded. In fact, the prolife forces, especially among evangelicals, began to gain momentum. In 1975, as a result of a meeting in the home of evangelist Billy Graham, the Christian Action Council was formed to combat the trend. Right-to-life organizations sprang up in almost every state. In seeking to bring America back to its moral heritage, Moral Majority made abortion a primary concern. Writers like Surgeon General C. Everett Koop (The Right to Live: the Right to Die) and the film by Dr. Koop and Francis Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, aroused many lethargic evangelicals to active support of the prolife position.
Roman Catholic opposition to abortion was also stepped up. In a widely advertised position paper, the American bishops linked abortion on demand with nuclear war as a primary moral issue of our day.
Archbishop John O’Connor of New York has been especially outspoken for more stringent abortion laws; he has called Roman Catholics to act consistently with their faith. In what some felt was a direct attack on vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, he pointedly expressed his disagreement with statements made by her and other Roman Catholics on the matter of abortion. He believed it was impossible to be a consistent Catholic and prochoice.
The influence of Roman Catholic leaders and the newly active evangelicals has significantly buttressed the prolife position. Their antiabortion stand is well thought out, and it obviously stems from the deep moral and religious conviction of people who care. No doubt the growing consensus occasionally received a temporary reversal from irresponsible extremists who bombed hospitals, or, drifting at the fringe of moral responsibility, seemed more concerned to gain headlines than to advance the prolife cause. Yet such setbacks were momentary, and the consensus is still growing.
Statistics Of Mayhem
Undoubtedly, however, the greatest impact on the attitude of the American public did not come directly from these traditional sources. Rather, it arose from the growing awareness of what is really going on. From 8,000 legal abortions in the United States in 1966, the number grew to 400,000 in 1971 and has now soared to 1.6 million annually—about half as many abortions as live births. At least 14 major cities scattered across the United States are recording more abortions than live births, and the total number of abortions for the last decade has reached well over 15 million—two to three times the number of deaths in the ovens at Hitler’s Auschwitz.
As the awesome statistics came bit by bit to public attention, many Americans, though not willing to identify themselves either as conservative Roman Catholics or evangelicals, became appalled. What originally they had seen as part of a broad movement toward freedom they now saw to have gotten completely out of hand.
What further disturbed those who were neither Roman Catholic nor evangelical concerned the increasingly trivial reasons for abortion. John Brown III, president of John Brown University, writes: “Abortions have become a matter of convenience, not of conscience. A pastor told me of a couple who chose to have an abortion because the unexpected pregnancy interferred with vacation plans.” The life of an unborn child is all too often reckoned to have little intrinsic value, and to be disposable at the convenience of the mother. But the twisted morality that leads to such a conclusion has become revolting to many Americans.
On To Infanticide?
The killing of unborn infants, moreover, is by no means the end of the matter. The logic that leads to abortion on demand also leads straight to infanticide. Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse, a medical team writing in the New York Review of Books, declared: “The Prolife groups were right about one thing: the location of the baby inside or outside the womb cannot make such a moral difference. We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus the week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive.” Mary Tedeschi, writing in Commentary, points out where this leads: “Thus, infanticide presents the champions of abortion on demand with an uncomfortable choice. They can either describe events that seem increasingly arbitrary—like ‘viability’ or birth—as the points at which a fetus or baby attains its rights, or they can allow, as the more outspoken ‘ethicists’ already have done, that infanticide, or at least certain instances of it, is as justifiable as abortion.”
In this regard, Joseph Fletcher, the liberal who has long favored situation ethics, writes, “Why stop with the unborn? The only difference between the infant and the fetus is that the infant breathes with its lungs.… If through ignorance or neglect or sheer chance … the damage has not been ended prenatally, why should it not be accordingly ended neo-natally?”
Probably the most famous American case of infanticide is “Baby Doe” of Bloomington, Indiana. He was born with Down’s syndrome, and with a detached esophagus (the latter easily remedied by a simple operation). Lawyer Carl Horn III notes that though many parents petitioned to pay for the necessary medical care and to adopt him, the baby’s parents and the courts rejected all offers. As a result, Baby Doe starved to death.
So the logic that leads to prenatal abortions leads also to freedom to kill newborn babies. It will, in fact, lead to the right to put to death any human being of whatever age if that person becomes a burden to society.
Further, science is more and more making nonsense of the Roe v. Wade guideline on abortion, which many accepted as the enlightened standard for the future. That decision was predicated on the right of the mother to choose to abort up to the time of viability—the sixth or seventh month of pregnancy. But as Sandra Day O’Connor in a dissenting opinion (Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health) notes, “The Roe framework … is clearly on a collision course with itself.” Medical progress is pushing farther and farther back into pregnancy the time at which the fetus is viable. Eighteen-week-old fetuses frequently live outside the womb today, and University of Tennessee researchers predict that in several years they will have perfected an artificial womb capable of sustaining a fetus only a few weeks old. Accordingly, the mother’s freedom to choose whether to bring her child to birth or to kill it is shrinking. Her choice based on the Roe v. Wade principle could soon be practically eliminated.
Politics And Morality
Finally, a conviction is growing on the part of many that it is, indeed, morally right and truly American to make certain moral demands on politicians. A separation between church and state is assuredly guaranteed by our Constitution. But for the good of the state as well as of religion, that separation must never become complete. “Thou shalt not murder” is a religious conviction of all Christians, but it is not wrong to impose it on society. It is the moral duty of conscientious religious citizens to seek to impose certain moral requirements on society—to advance not their own personal religious viewpoint, but the good of society as a whole.
During the last presidential election, Archbishop O’Connor argued for the right of citizens to question a candidate about his stand on abortion, and for the right of a candidate to state his opposition to abortion and his intent to work within the law to bring about a change in the law. There is nothing either un-American or unconstitutional about that. O’Connor asserted: “You have to uphold the law, the Constitutions says. It does not say that you must agree with the law, or that you cannot work to change the law.” He called on Roman Catholics to ask candidates to state that they opposed abortion on demand and were committed to work to modify the permissive interpretations of the Supreme Court.
So the renewed opposition of conservatives and the growing reaction against the excesses of proabortionists have created a significant change of attitude toward abortion and the freedom-of-choice movement that grew so rapidly in the sixties and seventies. A sense of moral outrage is emerging. Things have gone too far too fast. Matters have gotten out of hand. Something must be done.
Denominational Second Thoughts
Consequently, many Protestant groups are taking another look. The Southern Baptist Convention had in 1974 supported the prochoice arguments. But in 1980 it reversed itself, and in June 1984 it passed a resolution opposing abortions even in cases of rape and incest.
In the late sixties and early seventies the United Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Protestant Episcopal Church all passed resolutions favoring a freer attitude toward abortions. But in 1983 the Presbyterian Church (USA) sent study materials to its member congregations urging a review of a statement that had earlier called abortions not only a right but sometimes an “act of faithfulness before God.” In May 1984 the United Methodist Church voted to tighten its previous statement on abortion. This year the Episcopal Church faces a convention battle over abortion; leading the fight will be a new body calling itself the National Organization of Episcopalians for Life (NOEL). Last summer the African Methodist Episcopal Church reaffirmed its opposition to abortions except in cases of rape and incest; and in August 1984 the Lutheran World Federation passed a resolution deploring abortions of “preborn children.”
In May 1984 the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod published an official report (Abortion in Perspective) calling Lutherans back to their biblical moorings against abortion, as reflected in writings of the early church fathers and in the Reformation heritage.
A Question Of Strategy
This new stirring in the older mainline denominations indicates their growing realization that the Christian moral sense extending across the centuries may have been right after all. It may now be possible to reverse the position that has developed over the last two decades. A new consensus is forming. It is clearly against abortions for convenience, and all abortions on demand. There is even some evidence from polls, as President Hesburgh has noted, that the consensus might include laws against abortion except for rape, incest, and serious danger to the mother’s life. (It is estimated that these exceptions account for only ½ of 1 percent of all abortions.)
But there is also abundant evidence that the American people are unprepared to approve any constitutional amendment or any law banning all abortions.
This poses a serious dilemma in strategy for all fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals, and traditional Roman Catholics—that is, for all antiabortion absolutists or near absolutists. Such conservatives agree that most—if not all—abortions are wrong. And so they fear, and rightly so, that any law insufficiently strict will be taken as approval of many morally offensive abortions. In fact, they suspect that such a law might preclude eventual passage of a more just law barring almost all abortions.
Yet Americans now clearly have it in their power to pass legislation outlawing the vast majority of abortions. Meanwhile, the deaths of over a million-and-a-half unborn children take place every year. In this case there appears literally to be a “moral majority” of antiabortionists. If they could agree on a course of action, much of this moral curse on our nation would be removed immediately.
Surely the path of moral and spiritual wisdom would dictate support for a second best. We would refuse to compromise moral conviction, however, because we would still hold our more stringent prolife views. But we would support a less-than-the-best law for the present since it is all that can now be passed. And we would pledge to work for a better law. Not only is this a legitimate area for immediate Christian action, but it would seem a moral imperative for evangelicals in view of the lives hanging in the balance. Accordingly, on more than one occasion the Reverend Jerry Falwell has publicly maintained his willingness to support any law that will reverse the abortion-on-demand, prochoice position now enforced by our courts. We applaud his strategy and warmly commend it to all evangelicals who are more interested in saving lives than in winning a point.
In summary, careful appraisal of the American scene makes evident that no absolutist law or constitutional amendment has the remotest chance of passing in the near future—certainly not in the next four years. But some sort of law that would at least eliminate one of the most frightening issues of our day in its most extreme form—abortion on demand—is within our reach.
- More fromKenneth S. Kantzer with Paul W. Fromer
- Abortion
- Pro-Choice Movement
Steven Baer
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
Braving temperatures indistinquishable from those that gave inaugural parade planners cold feet a day earlier, at least 70,000 undaunted prolife protesters made their annual January 22 descent on Washington and the Supreme Court. They came to mark the twelfth year since the Court declared a constitutional right to abortion—a year of escalating violence at abortion clinics and “family planning” centers.
Episodes of violence were and are justly condemned. But to understand the perpetrators and why the term “terrorism” is generally misapplied to their acts, one must also clearly understand the routine violence that occurs daily within abortion clinic walls.
A $500 million-a-year abortion industry has sprung up around Roe v. Wade—an industry exponentially more violent than any of the attacks to date on its facilities: By seven weeks gestation, about the time most women know they are pregnant, the fetal heart has been beating for a month, and the brain is emitting brain waves. The fetus has a delicate face, and hands are already emblazoned with unique fingerprint patterns. By the end of the first trimester, during which 85 percent of America’s 1.5 million annual abortions occur, the fetus is sexually differentiated, her major organ systems are functioning, and ultrasonography reveals that she can suck her thumb and swim almost as freely as a fish within her dark, amniotic confines.
But this is no phylogenetic throwback to the Devonian age—as some abortion rhetoric based on debunked ontogenic theories once suggested. Neither is the fetus a “mere blob,” “mass of tissue,” or simple “product of conception.” For all who have eyes to see, the infant’s form is undeniably, unmistakably human.
And to watch her die, as I did in a recent viewing of a suction curettage abortion via ultrasonography, is a numbing experience. It happens nearly 4,000 times a day in this country, and prudence has not restrained its practitioners from pressing to the limit the expansive legal parameters drawn by the Supreme Court. By 1980, according to the Centers for Disease Control, at least 50,000 abortions annually were occurring in the fifth and sixth months of gestation.
Most empathic Americans represented by Washington’s prolife marchers express their opposition to abortion’s brutality by supporting the efforts of their movement’s lobbyists, political action committees, and courtroom activists. Focusing on the two lives involved each time a pregnant woman enters an abortion clinic, many attempt to dissuade through sidewalk counseling and offerings of housing and help from a growing network of crisis pregnancy centers. Increasing numbers are picketing abortion clinics and the homes of those who operate them. And on the fringes of a movement frustrated for more than a decade by governmental recalcitrance and 16 million abortion deaths, some are building bombs.
To call them terrorists, at least in most cases, is overbroad. Dictionaries define terrorism as efforts calculated to inspire fear. Yet as abortion-rights leaders admit, the clinic assailants have apparently gone to great lengths to ensure that no one is hurt by their actions. Such circumspection runs counter to terrorism’s aims. The obvious primary aim of these individuals is not to intimidate abortionists or their often troubled clientele, but to save concrete, individual lives. For this group, letters to Congress and the editor are not enough; the most helpless members of their communities are dying daily with state sanction, and they cannot tolerate it. For them, destroying the local clinic and its suction aspirator with a firebomb simply means no unborn babies will be killed there the next day. It is as justifiable, they would likely say, as destroying a Dachau or an Auschwitz.
Such thinking is, however, shortsighted. It ignores the fact that the totalitarian system that gave rise to Dachau and Auschwitz provided no institutional means for dissenting citizens to alter its violently unjust policies. The American system does provide such means, however slow the processes of change through them may be.
For prolifers to resort to violence before exhausting the alternatives—including nonviolent civil disobedience of the sort seen in the civil rights movement preceding this one, and lately made chic by proabortion congressmen like Senator Lowell Weicker in the seige of South Africa’s embassy—is to jeopardize both the cause and the nation. The moment someone the whole country recognizes as human dies in an abortion clinic blast, the battle lines may be drawn irrevocably.
Those on the violent fringe of the movement must realize that America’s constitutional democracy and rule of law, even when it has dehumanized, is too precious a system to put at risk. Those who defend the Supreme Court’s radical decision of taking human rights from the unborn must realize the need for reform. There are millions of lives at stake, on both sides of the womb.
1Steven Baer is executive director of the United Republican Fund of Illinois.
- More fromSteven Baer
- Abortion
- Pro-Life Movement
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
Designer Cult
The watchful folks at Jesus People USA are now warning of a new religious movement, founded by a Reverend Watson T. Yup, that is attracting thousands.
Reverend Yup’s “eat, drink, and be trendy” gospel has become a way of life for many who take up their credit cards and follow him.
The devotees—mostly young, upscale, and professional—can be seen worshiping their stomachs at five-star restaurants, wearing their distinctive apparel, which features other people’s names stitched onto hip pockets. They do their fund raising at well-appointed offices and studios in any major metropolitan area.
“Wats Yup has changed my life,” said one follower, looking up from his L. L. Bean catalog. “I’ve learned to seek the triune deity: Latest, Best, and Most.”
Little is known about Yup himself, although rumors indicate he lives in a resort condo and performs a daily spiritual discipline known as “brunch.”
Some parents of Yuppies are concerned, but none as yet have hired deprogrammers to kidnap their offspring from the health club and force them to think for themselves.
“I don’t know where we went wrong,” said one mother. “My son slaves his life away just to be recognized by a certain maître d’ named Henri.”
So far, the Yupification Church has avoided the wrath of conservative church groups, but if things continue onward and yupward, that situation could change.
EUTYCHUS
Latent Anti-Catholicism?
One gets the distinct taste of sour grapes in the jeremiad against the draft on Catholic social teaching [Editorial, March 1] and wonders if this is (a) latent anti-Catholicism or (b) envy at the fact that such a letter will be “read, marked, learned and inwardly digested” by the faithful whereas a similar epistle by the NAE or the NCC would be ignored, if not dropped down the memory hole completely.
MSGR. GORDON D. WIEBE, S.S.C., PH.D.
Catholic Apostolic Church of America
Hayward, Calif.
The strength of Kantzer’s critique came in his concluding remarks. But I object to the implication that the Catholic church’s position on birth control is a cause for embarrassment. As a Protestant, I am embarrassed that we have not understood this issue as completely as the Pope.
LEILA ZAFFINI
Columbus, Ohio
I have reread the pastoral: it does not call for unilateral disarmament. It does address the buildup of weapons to the point we have reached, where the U.S. and Russia can obliterate each other many, many times over.
REV. WARD MCCABE
St. Mark’s Church
Clara, Calif.
Kantzer must have been cut out of the fabric of Fackre’s work, The Religious Right & Christian Faith. A more suitable topic on which to write may be “Pastoral Letters and Realities of Faith.” Perhaps it is time God is treated as the deity people worship and not the nation in which we live.
REV. K. EDWARD BRANDT
Newport First Church of God
Newport, Pa.
Peck’s Poor Theology
Ben Patterson’s review of Scott Peck’s poor theology is well taken [“Is God a Psychotherapist?” Mar. 1]. Objective theology never has been and never will be the handmaiden of psychotherapy. In referring to Satan as an “it,” Peck declares that the Devil’s cleverest wile is still around. He does not exist.
JAMES SAXMAN
Tacoma, Wash.
Hesitant Evangelicals?
Your excellent report on the sanctuary movement [News, Mar. 1] will help all Americans to understand what is going on. Having been involved in helping refugees for several years before the movement began, I was surprised to learn that evangelicals have been hesitant to join. This is not our experience; at a recent national symposium, evangelicals were very much in evidence.
CHARLES TROUTMAN
Tucson, Ariz.
True Humanism
Robert Webber’s review [“Reason, Religion, and the Right to Disobey,” Mar. 1] of Packer and Howard’s Christianity:The True Humanism is itself humanistic (not that Webber would deny it). It centers ultimate value on man, not Christ, as though Christ created the world to fulfill man rather than to glorify Himself. It demonstrates the internal contradiction of the term “Christian humanism.” Webber unintentionally demonstrates the danger of defining humanism differently from secular humanism. Merely disagreeing with the Manifestos does not Christianize humanism—Webber, Packer, and Howard notwithstanding.
NEAL FRAY
Longview, Tex.
Shelton Before Mcintire
The News item, “Supreme Court Prevents Shelton College from Granting Degrees” [Feb. 15], gives an erroneous impression that the school is only now attempting “to become a degree-granting institution,” and was “founded by … Carl McIntire.” The school existed as Shelton College for five years before McIntire took it over; for 43 years before that it served several generations of day and evening school students as the National Bible Institute, a degree-granting institution in New York City under the presidencies of founder Don O. Shelton (1907–41) and J. Oliver Buswell, Jr. (1941–55).
It was William Whiting Borden who, appointed to the board of directors in 1910, helped to guide the fledgling school through its early years. Under Buswell the growing curriculum was approved and registered by the New York State Board of Regents in 1950, as the National Bible Institute became Shelton College, adding the B.A. to the Bible and Religious Education degrees.
JAMES O. BUSWELL III, PH.D.
William Carey International University
Pasadena, Calif.
Lincoln, Yes! Vidal, No!
Mark Noll marred his especially good article [“The Perplexing Faith of Abraham Lincoln,” Feb. 15] by mentioning Gore Vidal’s assessment of Lincoln’s religion. Vidal is not even worthy to be spoken of in the same breath with Abraham Lincoln.
ELIZABETH CORAMAN PAYNE
Bridgewater, Va.
What you ask on page 16 of the February 15 issue is remarkable. You say, respecting the death of Mr. Lincoln, that “five weeks after he delivered this address on March 4, 1965, Lincoln was dead—and American politics returned to ‘normal’ ”! Welcome to the club of those of us who are not perfect ourselves.
REV. HAROLD A. HARRIS
University Heights Cumberland
Presbyterian Church
Tampa, Fla.
Sheep In Wolves’ Clothing
The Bible is clear concerning how believers are to deal with wolves in sheep’s clothing, but how are we to deal with sheep in wolves’ clothing? Heavy metal rocker Michael Sweet made a comment [“A Christian ‘Heavy-Metal’ Band …” Feb. 15] which creates irreconcilable tension for the Christian mind: “We’re here to show people you can look this way … and you can let Jesus be the Lord of your life.” Sweet exposes his own error when he claims that “the problem with other religious rockers is that their theology is stronger than their music.”
KELLY KREPS
Stanfordville, N.Y.
James Hitchcock notes in What Is Secular Humanism that rock music assaults people at a deeper, unconscious level. Stryper’s heavy metal music (not lyrics) has the same effect on the unconscious level of young people.
There are right and wrong ways to present the gospel of Jesus Christ; rock music is perverting “the right ways of the Lord.”
DAVID A. NOEBEL
American Christian College
Tulsa, Okla.
As a young person I can understand the desire to want to be associated with the world. But this is contrary to the teachings of the Bible. The Christian world as a whole has forgotten what it is to please God. They just please themselves, then add Jesus in where he fits.
JEANETTE R. HUGHES
Miami, Okla.
Our missionaries bringing the gospel to the world do not dress as witch doctors to convert the natives. The rock trend in the church today is a “Trojan horse,” made of iron and clay, held together with neologism. This maverick horse is full of compromise and appeasement to the world, the flesh, and the Devil.
W. R. DUNN
Bellingham, Wash.
Please cancel my subscription. An article about a Christian heavy metal band is the same as writing about a “Christian” physician who performs abortions and says he makes an impact on the murderers of America who also perform abortions.
WILLIAM T. PRATT
Oconamowoc, Wis.
Inconsistent?
I just don’t understand! One minute you are condemning pornography [Editorial, Feb 15] and the next you are reviewing two films that are highly suspect for viewing by any Christian. My call to CT is not only for consistency, but for a standard of morality that reflects those of the Master.
ED FELTER
First Church of the Nazarene
Placentia, Calif.
Seminary Training For Whom?
I’ve been gripped by reading Ward Gasque’s “Must Ordinary People Know Theology?” [Feb. 1], I concur that theology must not be limited to the pastor or other leaders of the church. Yet I disagree with a major point: a seminary should not broaden its curriculum to accommodate all men and women. As a seminary student, I have come to a basic understanding of the reason for a seminary education: for the training and education needed to properly lead the church, an education should focus on languages, theology, and exposition.
Too often programs are expanded to include courses designed to attract people. This is not to say “laity” should be excluded. But seminary should remain for those going into full-time ministry.
JAMES A. LADD
Alhambra, Calif.
I wasn’t aware that ordinary people were executives of large corporations, business people, doctors, nurses, lawyers, educators, bankers, journalists, actors, and homemakers. I sort of thought they were more like farmers, fishermen, laborers, the unemployed, the silent sufferers.
REV. JOHN MERKS
Gander Baptist Church
Gander, Newfoundland, Canada
While the article discussed seminary training for “lay ministers,” which is a nonbiblical designation, it misses focusing on the proper arena for instruction: the local congregation. The encouragement to teach the Bible is missing at this level, yet practically speaking it is the best place for this instruction. The evidence of this abysmal failure is before all of us.
LEONARD WARREN
Escondido, Calif.
Is The Ats Out Of Date?
Mr. Frame [“Cheap Degrees: Are They Worth It?” Feb. 1] appears to take for granted the quite new ATS [Association of Theological Schools] standards and criteria. The ATS, as presently structured, is out of date, out of touch with the needs of churches, ministers, and seminary professors.
I have all of their “professional qualifications,” and more, from “top ten” institutions (Pomona College, Hartford Seminary, Boston University School of Theology, University of Edinburgh, Tübingen University), to which I pay high tribute. But what prepared me to answer God’s call was not my degrees. An effective minister or teacher in [any] denominational school must be called—of God, by a people of God. Dwight L. Moody and Charles G. Finney had no “ATS degrees.”
DR. HENRY DAVID GRAY
American Congregational Center
South Pasadena, Calif.
Crucial Added Information
We were pleased to read the item in North America Scene [Feb. 1] regarding the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a lower court’s ruling that a Schenectady, New York, church is not subject to jurisdiction of presbytery or the Presbyterian Church (USA). One crucial bit of information should have been included: the formation of the Schenectady congregation predated the establishment of both the presbytery and Presbyterian Church (USA). This would warn other congregations who might be considering a pullout.
HELEN E. ZECHER
Syracuse, N.Y.
Finding God In Physics
CT, if anyone, should be able to address the new physics with clarity, thought I. But Allen Emerson’s article [“A Disorienting View of God’s Creation,” Feb. 1] left me frustrated. I can’t be the only one who has come to faith and vision of the grandeur of God precisely through the pursuit of these concepts in physics. Not only that, but as I’ve discovered language and metaphors apprehensible by those without scientific training, I’ve seen others’ visions of the Creator God stretched.
KAREN COOPER
No address given
Allen Emerson’s final statement was well taken: we need to realize anew how majestic God is.
MARIAN BRAY
Santa Ana, Calif.
I must challenge some interpretations that need major revision due to an unfortunate mixture of quantum physics with Einstein’s Special Relativity. Extensive research in the worldwide professional literature since Einstein’s death in 1955 reveals denials or severe criticisms of Einstein’s Special Relativity by at least a 2/1 ratio.
Emerson should also define “instantly” more precisely. If really instantaneous, cause and effect would indeed be confused. However, with Einstein’s velocity of light exceeded, the quantum experiments do not necessarily violate cause-and-effect laws: this is because the nuclear velocities are still finite even at 75 times the velocity of light.
HENRY G. FOLLINGSTAD
Augsburg College
Minneapolis, Minn.
The grace of God and wrath of God sometimes seem to oppose one another. A tension exists between the concept of eternal security and the strong suggestion that the saved can be lost, which we also find in Scripture. These concepts seem to find a partial parallel in the ideas of new physics with light existing as a particle or a wave. These ideas seem mutually exclusive and yet both are true.
LILLA LANGFORD, M.D.
Hawthorne, N.J.
Instead of being disorienting, the “new physics” sheds some new light on orthodox Christian theology. The complementarity principle states that “two contradictory theories—that of waves and corpuscles [particles]”—must be held for light and electrons, as DeBroglie said. Their perceived nature depends on how we choose to detect them. In like manner, Christianity states that God is one and yet shows himself to us in three persons depending on how he chooses to reveal himself to us.
PAUL E. MOORE
Parsippany, N.J.
Erratum.We regret that the article by Eutychus, “Twelve Months of Sundays” (CT, Jan. 18, 1985, p. 9), infringed on the copyright of an article by LeRoy Koopman, “A New Proposal for the Church Year,” in the October–November 1982 issue of the Wittenburg Door. Our apologies to Mr. Koopman and to Mike Yaconelli, editor of the Wittenburg Door.
As Christians we have no necessary conflict with genuine science, nor genuine science with us.
WARD MCCABE
San Jose, Calif.
I certainly hope the author’s “theological acquaintance” spoke in jest when he said the validation of quantum mechanics would destroy his faith. Otherwise, he is laying himself open to unnecessary tragedy. For the life of me I can see quantum mechanics doing no harm to anybody’s faith in the God of the Christian faith, unless that faith involves a too-small concept of God.
JIM BRUNER
Wheeling, W.Va.
In order to more fully understand the relation of Christianity and physics, one must remember that, with few exceptions, the basis of physics was established by men of Christian faith: Newton, Gauss, Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Maxwell, and Rutherford, to name but a few.
MAX W. CALLEN
Minneapolis, Minn.
Emerson Responds To Critics
At the onset of the article, I mentioned several best-selling books by physicists on the new physics. I wrote that quantum theory has been plagued with controversy, haggling, and puzzlement. What I did was to present the views expressed not only in these books but in other places as well.
These views are visible and prominent, if not prevalent. [Some] professors do not agree with these views. I presented the situation the thoughtful Chrstian is most likely to encounter. I intended to help the layperson put things in perspective.
ALLEN EMERSON
Holland, Mich.
Letters are welcome; only a selection can be published. All are subject to condensation, and brevity is preferred. Write to Eutychus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188.
- Catholicism
Theology
Robert V. Gortner
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
Do “nice guys finish last”? If so, then maybe that explains why so many capable evangelical men and women shun the competitive world of business.
National opinion polls rank business managers well below the more traditional professions—and, tragically, the Christian academic community has done relatively little either to alter these negative perceptions or favorably influence the profession’s ethical climate.
Few colleges provide the special combination of balanced education and a vision for ministry in the “power professions” that would allow individuals to develop into top-level business executives. Today, Christian young people interested in business-related careers are faced with the dilemma of choosing a secular college with a superior business reputation yet an environment rife with temptation and little Christian support, or attending a Christian institution where a student’s faith can be strengthened and integrated, but which may not be highly regarded by business recruiters and prestigious graduate schools.
Some faculty members at Christian liberal arts colleges become indignant at the thought of such a dilemma. It is more important, they say, to acquire knowledge and appreciation of religion, philosophy, music, literature, art, and history instead of concentrating on more pragmatic courses. Yet, Christian colleges could provide their present, frequently excellent, emphasis on the liberal arts but also make stronger efforts to include effective, pragmatic curricula in business, accounting, information systems, and computer science to meet the needs of those students interested in pursuing management careers.
Pragmatic courses can be sufficiently broad, deep, and demanding to provide the knowledge, versatility, and logical thought patterns desired by discerning employers. Ideally, these course offerings would have to be thoroughly and creatively taught, and be kept relevant to current affairs and state-of-the-art developments in each of the various disciplines. Such programs, moreover, would require particularly dedicated teachers who have acquired appropriate, in-depth training and experience in the business world. Yes, these teachers would encounter a substantial reduction in compensation compared to that available in the business community. But creative recruitment, including probes among top Christian businessmen recently retired or about to retire, could fill these needs.
Collectively, Christian colleges might work to establish a few adequately equipped colleges to train students in fields requiring large capital expenditures for laboratory equipment. Cooperation could allow certain campuses to serve each other—and most important, serve their students.
Christian colleges must achieve a blend of courses and activities that satisfy the aesthetic and pragmatic needs in a young person’s development. All such programs, enthusiastically led and supported by college presidents and boards of trustees, would spawn more outstanding graduates who, in turn, would further enhance the reputation of the Christian colleges and faith communities from which they come and in which they serve. In addition, well-prepared, well-salaried graduates would support future endowment programs, and more immediately would cause a higher proportion of outstanding high school graduates to seek enrollment in Christian college programs.
Many Christians feel that the pursuit of power and wealth is sinful. For that reason, many good people shun careers in business management and look critically at those who prepare for and pursue ambitious paths. Nevertheless, the world operates on a power structure. Decisions are made and actions taken from positions of relative strength. Politics pervades all walks of life, including the time-honored professions of medicine and the clergy. Should Christians flee from positions of power and wealth? Absolutely not.
Christ told us to be salt and light. He also demanded that we use our talents wisely. Paul tells us very clearly to “do all to the glory of God.” More recently Richard Halverson, chaplain of the United States Senate, told a graduating class here at Taylor that “all career paths should be considered a calling of the Lord, with opportunities for ministry in each.…”
Christians must do their best with their God-given talents. If they are blessed with success, power, and wealth, then they have a responsibility to use those blessings in stewardship and effective witnessing.
Employers cannot afford to employ “nice guys and gals” with few meaningful skills. The world needs “Christian tigers” who can combine tough minds and warm hearts in such a way that they can be Christian, competent, competitive, caring—and successful. And further development and promotion of this challenge and responsibility should be enthusiastically pursued by the Christian academic community.
1Mr. Gortner is chairman of the Business, Accounting, and Economics Department at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.
- More fromRobert V. Gortner
- Anger
Culture
Rob L. Hewell
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
To worship is to enjoy god. To lead worship, however, is hard work.
Worship leaders must coordinate instrumentalists, vocalists, and readers, all the while concentrating on the congregation’s encounter with God. Is it possible to lead others in such a life-changing encounter and encounter God ourselves? Strange, isn’t it, that directing worship inhibits worship itself!
And yet I do worship, which I discovered in a painful way. After spending a week incapacitated by a pinched nerve, I was determined to lead worship on Sunday, even though back pain demanded the use of a cane I knew I would feel foolish using. There was also the embarrassment of standing and sitting slowly, and moving carefully.
That Sunday morning I realized my determination to be there was not born out of a sense of duty or desire to be seen—nor even a need to lead. I made the effort because I wanted to worship!
This is not, however, where the ability to worship while leading worship begins. It starts with our daily personal contact with God. No one can worship once a week and become strong in the faith. The New Testament teaches that corporate worship is a must—Christ went to the synagogue as a “custom” (Luke 4:16). But public worship alone can become a ritual. Worship as a part of the Christian lifestyle, however, provides vitality for the gathering of God’s people.
My personal devotional life consists not only of Scripture study and meditation, but also singing hymns and choruses that my study brings to mind. Other special moments center on family worship and on those events where our daily lives meet God.
Late one evening, our tireless two-year-old was having difficulty falling asleep. After trying everything else, I finally took her in my lap and sang a simple chorus she had recently learned. She quickly began singing along. Not only was our frustration calmed, but the Lord, I’m sure, heard our little song of praise.
Planning worship grows out of our personal awareness of God. While it requires certain organizational skills, it essentially is the ability to join life in our world to the God who is in ultimate control of that world. Unless this connection occurs, worship will be unsatisfying.
Some churches find guidance in following the church calendar. Others look to other sources of direction and motivation: the pastor’s sermon topic or a particular book of the Bible; a churchwide emphasis on stewardship, evangelism, or education; yearly scheduled church events; and a continual desire for praise and celebration throughout all of the church’s services.
I have also been strengthened in worship planning because of my desire to be more than a worship leader. In developing caring relationships with people, I have learned where their needs and hurts are. But this demands integrity, not manipulation. Our purpose in planning worship is not merely an emotional experience, but it is to unite people with the God who meets and fills human needs. The quality of worship is not measured by how we sing, pray, or preach—although we should seek excellence in all we do. Rather, true worship is recognized by a renewed covenant, forgiveness accepted, fellowship restored, and vision clarified.
Still, planning is key. It is difficult to anticipate a personal experience when we worry about others’ readiness to do their part. I start planning early enough so all aspects of a service can be worked out but not so early that the momentum is lost before the day arrives. My preparation includes studying hymn texts and tunes, working through the order of worship, Scripture study, and attempting to feel the “heartbeat” of the congregation.
I communicate with everyone who will be leading—to provide necessary materials and to encourage their personal preparation through prayer. Most important, when I thoughtfully consider the Lord and his people, an expectancy is born in me long before Sunday.
When I can enter a service knowing that musicians, lay leaders, and staff members all know what they are to do, then I have freedom for personal expectations. Well-planned worship allows me to function naturally and freely—and permits me to worship with those I lead. Where spontaneity and planning meet, great worship occurs.
Too much focus on the elements of worship can actually hinder worship.
One Christmas, during the offertory—“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”—a baby began to cry. I initially felt the parents should leave so we could hear the music. But then, it occurred to me that we were celebrating the coming of the Christ-child: what better way than through hearing Bach’s beautiful song and the lovely music of a babe’s cry. This provided a moment of worship not soon forgotten by many who were present. All worshipers can be alert to the beauty of the unexpected.
Evangelical worship, and thus each body of believers, will be strengthened as we who lead accept the joy and challenge of making true worship of the living God a vital event for all who participate, including ourselves.
1Mr. Hewell is minister of music at Westside Baptist Church, Omaha, Nebraska.
- More fromRob L. Hewell
- Worship
Books
Robert E. Webber
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
Christ The Victor, Christ The Center
The Person of Christ, by David F. Wells (Crossway Books, 1984; 205 pp., $7.95 pb). Reviewed by Robert E. Webber.
Theological issues rarely make front-page news. However, when the book The Myth of God Incarnate was published in July of 1977, the secular press immediately turned it into a front-page controversy.
John Hick, the book’s editor, argued that the notion of God becoming incarnate as man must finally be acknowledged as a myth. The Reformers, he argued, dropped the supernatural concept of the sacraments. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theologians dropped the idea of a supernatural Bible. So now, in the twentieth century, the time had finally come to be honest about the last myth—the Incarnation.
Hick’s heresy illustrates the dilemma of modern theology. Unable to verify in any historical or logical way the supernatural assertions of the New Testament, many moderns have resorted to a mythological interpretation of the life and times of Jesus. Not so David F. Wells, who tackles the tough questions pertaining to a supernatural Christology in The Person of Christ: A Biblical and Historical Analysis of the Incarnation.
From the very beginning of Christianity, the bottom line has always been supernaturalism. Thus Wells, professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, offers in his book an apology for the supernatural Jesus, and consequently enters into dialogue with all those who reject orthodox theology.
Appropriately, he begins the study of Christology not with an arsenal of texts, but with the Christ event itself and with a description of the cosmic nature of Messiah’s work. Christ is, as Paul reports in Colossians, not only the creator—the one in whom all things consist—but the redeemer, the one in whom all things are recapitulated, restored, renewed, and recreated. He, the Christus Victor, has destroyed death, trod down the Devil, and dethroned the powers of evil. The choice between a mythological Jesus and a historic, supernatural, and cosmic Christ starts here. And the choice one makes, like a stone cast into still water, sends ripples in every direction.
An Excerpt
“It is abundantly clear from this overview that the New Testament has provided its own categories for interpreting the figure of Jesus, and we do violence to its thought if we supplant them with others more familiar or congenial to us. The Protestant liberals did this, choosing to replace the Kingdom by the category of conventional biography; the Bultmannians are doing it by discounting the human and historic significance of Jesus and eliciting his contemporary meaning through existential verities. In the one case the in-breaking of God with and in Jesus was muted, and in the other the significance of this in-breaking is seen to come, not so much through Jesus, but in each believer. Thus these theologians have developed hermeneutical categories which are reductionistic, and the result is that the real significance of God’s action is largely or completely lost.”
Faith’S Core
Christology is now and always has been the central issue of the Christian faith. When Peter preached his Pentecost sermon, the central theme was that “this Jesus whom you crucified” is Lord and Christ. One of the earliest Christian confessions was “Jesus is Lord.” Primitive hymnology such as John 1:1–14 declared that the pre-existent Logos became flesh and manifested the glory of God. And the Christological hymn of Philippians 2:1–11 affirms the divine descent into human form and the human ascent into the heavens followed by the exaltation of Jesus.
These liturgical affirmations, which reflected the experience of the earliest Christian communities, soon became the objects of reflection and intellectual inquiry, as well as theological speculation. It was not enough for the church simply to affirm the deity of Christ and the coalescence between the human and the divine. As the faith moved out into the hellenistic culture, intellectual questions about Christian experience inevitably arose. How is Jesus related to the Father? And what kind of language best describes such indescribable matters as the union between the human and the divine in the person of Jesus? This shift from an experiential Christianity to an intellectual Christianity raised—and raises—numerous questions about Jesus’ identity that Wells addresses forthrightly from a supernatural perspective.
This orientation on the supernatural Christ does not, however, keep Wells from addressing the proof-texting supernaturalist who does not think theologically. Indeed, Wells is concerned about those Christians who have been stumped by wrong-headed theology. What do you say, for example, to cleancut missionaries from the Jehovah’s Witnesses who insist that “Jesus really isn’t God” because “the New Testament teaches that he’s the Son of God, the first-born of creation, but not the same essence as God”? Or, what do you say to your neighbor who says, “Oh, I certainly hold Jesus in great respect. Surely he is a window to the Father, the leader of a great humanitarian ideal, the originator of love as the central religious motif. But God? Hardly.”?
Unfortunately, there are too many supernaturalists who give weak and even heretical answers to these tough questions. For example, a few years ago this reviewer lectured to an Inter-Varsity group at a Midwestern secular university. During a discussion of Christology, a man stood to his feet and insisted he could solve the problem of the relationship between the human and divine in the person of Christ. He proudly announced that “Jesus was a human shell in whom the Logos resided.” Because this was the essential argument of Apollinarianism, a heresy of the early church, I retorted with tongue in cheek, “You’re a heretic. We ought to burn you at the stake.” I later discovered he was the faculty adviser.
This illustration points up still another value of The Person of Christ—Wells’s methodology. It approaches the Christological issue from a biblical, historical, and contemporary perspective, while speaking to a major problem that has plagued evangelicals since their beginning: the disdain for history and tradition. We tend to leap from the New Testament text to the present, disregarding 2,000 years of history. Cheers for Wells, who does not do that. He painstakingly leads us through the major early church battles, the undermining of supernaturalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the presuppositions of the modern reformulation of Christological thought. Consequently, The Person of Christ is not only an example of good methodology, but of solid scholarship.
Wells is no theological sissy. He tackles his thesis with a John Wayne resolve, swaggering into the antisupernatural town with both barrels blazing, pumping biblical, historical, and theological bullets into his falling targets. And his book is no bus station handout. It is a treatise for the serious student, the thinker. Wells does not tolerate the monosyllabic set who are satisfied with nine-verse tracts.
So get your theological dictionary, your Roget’s Thesaurus, and discover again that a supernatural Jesus, a supernatural Bible, and a supernatural working of God through the sacraments do indeed belong to a seamless robe.
Robert E. Webber is professor of theology at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.
An Affinity For Life
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, by Lewis Thomas (Bantam Books, 1984; 168 pp., $5.95 pb). Reviewed by Daniel Pawley.1Daniel Pawley is an assignment writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In his autobiography, The Youngest Scientist, Lewis Thomas, the esteemed chancellor of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, revealed fragments of his evangelical upbringing. Raised in the Dutch Reformed tradition, this son of a doctor and a Protestant fundamentalist mother attended Sunday school in a ramshackle church near Flushing, New York. Though he now says little about those church roots, one wonders what effect they might have had on a life and career that deals so profoundly with the mystery and majesty of our living Earth.
Thomas’s first two books of essays on science, The Lives of a Cell (Bantam) and The Medusa and the Snail (Viking), seem almost worshipful. While he speaks freely of evolutionary processes, he seems to give credence to a specifically created universe. He seems compassionate, and his reverence for the myriad forms of cosmic and human mystery struck me, the reader, as worthy of my attention as a Christian.
Now, in his latest book of essays, Thomas again plays the part of the compassionate (and sometimes angry) scientist. Through the lenses of science and the humanities, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony explores moods of a world hardening under the awareness of potential nuclear war.
Using Mahler’s music as an illuminant for commenting on the tedious threat that nuclear war poses, Thomas writes, “There was a time, not long ago, when what I heard, especially in the final movement, was an open acknowledgement of death and at the same time a quiet celebration of the tranquility connected to the process.… Now I hear it differently. I cannot listen to the last movement of the Mahler Ninth without the door-smashing intrusion of a huge new thought: death everywhere, the dying of everything, the end of humanity.… My mind swarms with images of a world in which thermonuclear bombs have begun to explode.”
A literary critic once observed of writer William Faulkner that the key to his compassion for the people of his beloved Mississippi was his moral outrage at the hypocrisy and decadence of the Old South. Thomas, a medical doctor and research pathologist, also writes as one who has been morally outraged—but by our Pentagon’s stockpiling of nuclear armaments.
With the money we spend on thermonuclear weapons research, Thomas asserts, “we could be building Scarsdales on Mars if we had a mind to. We could be gardening out in the galaxy.… We could begin paying attention to all our children, everywhere on the globe, and their children still to come. We could even begin learning enough about each other to begin growing up as a species, liking each other, on the way to loving each other.”
Also, like Faulkner, Thomas’s outrage gives way, in the long run, to a sense of unforced compassion, as when he shifts his focus toward the effects of nuclear awareness on youth. “How do they stand it?” he asks. “How can they keep their sanity? If I were very young, sixteen or seventeen years old, I think I would begin, perhaps very slowly and imperceptibly, to go crazy.”
Nature-Boy Enthusiasm
To understand Thomas’s thinking, one must consider his never-ending capacity to appreciate the natural world. “I rely on nature,” he stresses. And it is precisely his affinity for the living, thriving cosmos that leads to his despair over the grim thought of nuclear annihilation. “It’s not just that there is more to do, there is everything to do,” he pleads on behalf of biological and medical research.
With the nature-boy enthusiasm of a modern-day David, Thomas catalogs his fondness for living organisms through melodic, scientific psalms. Childlike, he delights in the mysterious biological ways of cats and bees. In his essay depicting seven wonders of the modern world, he elucidates the nature of certain bacteria that can find peace only in water temperatures of 250 degrees centigrade; a species of beetle that performs precisely timed-and-measured functions in eight-hour increments; and, most wonderful of all, a chattering human child.
Marveling over the lowly termite (in language that might be suitable for describing Christian fellowship), Thomas explains, “There is nothing at all wonderful about a single, solitary termite, indeed there is really no such creature, functionally speaking, as a lone termite, any more than we can imagine a genuinely solitary human being; no such thing. Two or three termites gathered together on a dish are not much better; they may move about and touch each other nervously, but nothing happens. But keep adding more termites until they reach a critical mass, and then the miracle begins. As though they had suddenly received a piece of extraordinary news, they organize in platoons and begin stacking up pellets to precisely the right height, then turning the arches to connect the columns, constructing the cathedral and its chambers in which the colony will live out its life for the decades ahead, air-conditioned and humidity-controlled, following the chemical blueprint coded in their genes, flawlessly, stone-blind.”
Having eyes and a mind for such profound mysteries, one wonders how anyone can peer so deeply into the created universe without concretely acknowledging a scheme, a creator. Thomas avoids such visible affirmations. However, in breaking down the components of nature and the language used to describe it, he challenges a few long-standing scientific notions. Of “Big Bang,” the commonly accepted theory of our world’s beginnings, he charges, “It could not, of course, have been a bang of any sort, with no atmosphere to conduct the waves of sound, and no ears. It was something else, occuring in the most absolute silence we can imagine.”
Clearly, Thomas sees what few of us have the training or the accuracy and magnitude of vision to see: the world. And what he sees, he would like to continue to see, in new and advancing ways, without the intrusion of nuclear war. Boiling down the consequences of such a prospect, he turns to his thesaurus to note that “words like ‘disaster’ and ‘catastrophe’ are too frivolous for the events that would invariably follow a war with thermonuclear weapons. ‘Damage’ is not the real term; the language has no word for it. Individuals might survive, but ‘survival’ is itself the wrong word.”
Under the potential sizzle of a thousand nuclear suns, Thomas feels deeply the medical doctor’s prospective despair at not being able to heal. Still, as reviewer John Updike commented on one of Thomas’s earlier books: “His [Thomas’s] willingness to see possibility, where others see only doom, is tonic and welcome.” I quite agree. However, with the publication of Late Night Thoughts, one notices how such “possibility” has begun to melt into the apparent doom of Thomas’s own nuclear prophecies.
He has not given up, though, and it is not as if he is without solutions. Indeed, he offers capsules of intriguing advice. To the world’s military leaders, for instance, he suggests, “Maybe the military people should sit down together on neutral ground, free of politicians and diplomats, perhaps accompanied by their chief medical officers and hospital administrators, and talk together about the matter.… After a few days of discussion, unaffectionately and coldly but still linked in a common and ancient professional brotherhood, they might reach the conclusion that the world is on the wrong track, that human beings cannot fight with such weapons and remain human.…”
But it is here that the theologically minded person must depart such ideology. Despite the immense value and encouragement found in Thomas’s twin capacities for compassion and reverential appreciation of nature, his solutions to the dark dilemmas that face mankind (while admirable for their practicality) remain forever shallowly humanistic.
Like Faulkner, he articulates the problems masterfully and discovers his compassion in the process. Yet, without the full assurance that answers lie in humbly acknowledging and beseeching the Creator Himself, only the problems remain.
- More fromRobert E. Webber
- Life of Jesus