Page 5704 – Christianity Today (2024)

Henry james once said that America was too young a country to have any good stories in it. Perhaps he knew too little of New England (except for Boston). The rocks and walls, the steep mountains and hard winters alone make New England a natural setting for novels. Add to that people with high-pitched, clipped speech and sturdy—some might say rigid—religion. Complex characters rooted in rock and ground.

John Gardner, who lives in Vermont, takes us to this stubborn land and its people in October Light (Knopf, $10). Despite its mixed reviews, the novel was named by all publications that compile such lists one of last year’s most significant books (it was published in December). As its title suggests, the book hovers between seasons, not quite winter but no longer autumn. Not quite the future but no longer the past. A present unequally mixed of both. Eerie. Shadowed. A New England light in October is hard to see by; much of the action of the book takes place at dusk or evening.

Sally Page Abbott, eighty, lives with her seventy-two-year-old brother James, a crotchety beekeeper and farmer. He hates television—it spews immorality—and he shoots a hole in his sister’s set. That starts the quarrel. A few days later he chases her to her room with a log from the fireplace and locks the door behind her. At first he won’t let her out; then she refuses to leave her room.

Sally’s niece, her niece’s husband, her old friends, and her minister all try to talk her into what she considers surrender. To Sally the issue is not just a silly quarrel but a moral matter. James must recognize his sins, how he destroyed his son, his wife, and now his sister. Sally is the instrument of healing for James and his family.

While Sally stays in her room she reads a trashy novel about marijuana smugglers. And we read it along with her. Fortunately many of its pages are missing. As a satire on the pseudo-philosophical potboiler, it is nearly successful. But as a trigger for Sally’s memories of the past, it is farfetched. The everyday scenes and atmosphere that evoke James’s memories work much better.

The limbo-like quality disappears as the novel moves toward its close. Sally leaves her room; her niece Ginny undergoes a profound change; and James’s pain at his son’s suicide and his wife’s bitter death finds release. He too experiences a conversion of sorts. Winter rises, the past disappears. The novelist’s images of earth, the seasons, and farming unify and focus the story.

Gardner writes lovingly about New England and its people. His descriptions capture the country, his felicitous use of dialect, the people. Out of the decay of characters and country come repentance and forgiveness. Christianity is their anchor. Gardner understands what is true in life, and therefore what is holy. A dying man’s reflections on life near the end of the novel are worth the price of the book:

“I’ll miss that, this year, or ennaway take pot in it in a way I never did before. But I can’t complain.…

“James, how come you’re listening to all this?”

James thought about it. “Becauth,” he said at last, “ith true.”

Ed’s smile widened. “That’s what I tell my Ruth,” he said. “She’s got good poems and bad poems.… I explain to her only the good poems are exactly true.”

“Like a good window-thash,” James said, “or horth.”

By striving for truth, by doing good work, Ed and James and the others try to minimize the decay, which, says a painter, “most people hadn’t yet glimpsed.” As Catharine Marshall explained in a quite different way in Beyond Our Selves, Gardner shows how God releases the memories of the past to heal the present for the future. Or, in the words of Scripture, we must die to live.

The ‘Key’ Of Stevie Wonder

It took nearly two years of studio work to produce Songs in the Key of Life (Tamla, T13-340C2 $13.98), Stevie Wonder’s ambitious two-record set with an additional seven-inch extended-play disc. Many contemporary records suffer when producers spend excessive studio time working and reworking arrangements, but Stevie Wonder instills all twenty-one songs with color, variety, and a sense of spontaneity. The album is Wonder’s masterpiece, the apex of the maturation that began with Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Inversion, and Fulfillingness First Finale.

Songs is a “concept album” loosely based on Wonder’s life history. “I Wish” finds the superstar longing for the carefree days of childhood. In “Sir Duke” he pays tribute to his musical roots and proclaims music the universal language. “Knocks Me Off My Feet” tells of the joys of first love, “Summer Soft” bemoans love lost, and “Ordinary Pain” recalls the hurt of love gone bad. The ecstasy of fatherhood is celebrated in “Isn’t She Lovely,” in which he rejoices in what God has made through love.

We hear Wonder’s philosophy of life from the first cut, “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” in which he warns that hate is destroying everything: “The force of evil plans/To make you its possession/And it will if you let it/Destroy everybody.” He calls on everyone to combat hate with love.

“Pastime Paradise” divides humanity into those who live for the past by “conformation to the evils of the world” and those who live for the future by “conformation to the peace of the world,” always looking to “when the Saviour of love will come to stay.” Although life is filled with troubles, he proposes in “As” that “God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed.”

Synthesized strings provide the background for “Village Ghetto Land,” a picture of grim ghetto life. The singer asks, “Tell me, would you be happy in Village Ghetto Land?” God is the world’s “only free psychiatrist,” according to “Have a Talk With God.” Aided by a classroom of children he chronicles the contribution made by non-white people in building America in “Black Man.”

The upbeat Songs in the Key of Life shows that purpose and meaning in life are found in living for the future. Although a few of the songs have excessive refrains or some awkward phrases and rhymes, Wonder’s performance overcomes these flaws. This album is a tour de force.

DANIEL J. EVEARITT

Daniel J. Evearitt is the assistant pastor of Tappan Alliance Church, Tappan, New York.

Once Clyde Kilby of Wheaton College was asked one of those inevitable questions about literature: “Dr. Kilby, I just can’t understand why you spend so much time and attention on these fantasies by Tolkien and Lewis and Williams. What good do they do? They’re about an imaginary world; they don’t tell us how to cope better with this one. Why read them?”

With the longsuffering smile of a teacher speaking to one who had not seen the light, Dr. Kilby replied, “If I went down the street to a magazine rack, I could probably find two hundred articles on how to live better. How to improve my marriage, how to lose weight, how to attract a lover, how to succeed in business, how to banish guilt, how to get rich, how to love myself. People gobble up those articles. But does anyone really change? Another magazine will print the same advice next month, and people will still writhe with the same problems. These books by Tolkien and Lewis and Williams bypass all that good advice. They don’t tell me how to do something; they tell me what to be.”

I have almost (but not quite) come to the same conclusion about advice on marriage. I spent a year studying the first five years of marriage, the period when the divorce rate is highest. I began by interviewing nine couples who revealed to me the struggles of their first five years. Then I read every marriage book I could find, Christian and secular. The advice contained in most of them was compact and well-blended, a convenient pill I could offer to each couple. But the best advice cannot solve a problem without the cooperation of the people whose problem it is.

I remember well the long interviews my wife and I had with the nine couples. Most started at a restaurant with polite chatter about how they met and what attracted them and where their inlaws live. By midnight, however, back in our living room, the conversation had changed. Unresolved conflicts oozed open. Often a session intended to gather helpful information for others turned into a plea for help.

Listening to them, I sometimes questioned the whole notion of marriage. We have placed greater demands on marriage now than in previous generations. Besides satisfying the need for asexual relationship, marriage is now being asked to supply needs for comradeship and partnership as well. Added to this is the weight of ideals our romanticizing culture excites in us. It’s no wonder many marriages cannot bear the strain.

Some marriages seem cursed with a time bomb of impossible expectations that must soon explode. As I encountered these time bombs, both in the couples I interviewed and in written accounts, my first reaction was to lower the ideals. There must be, I thought, some way to disassemble marriage and put back only certain pieces of it—say, sexual release and companionship—without insisting that marriage bear all the pressure of two souls becoming one.

But a strange thing is happening. G. K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, described his spiritual journey as a long, romantic, tempestuous sea voyage. When he finally sighted land, however, he discovered he had ended up exactly where he started—in cozy England. Something similar is occurring among observers of the marriage scene. Counselors who were once offering new visions of open marriage and sexual license are starting to use words like “fidelity” and “commitment.”

As I talked to the nine couples with their varying degrees of conflict, I discovered that the ones whose marriages were in severe trouble were not those who expected the most from marriage but those who expected the least. Those with the highest ideals seemed to have the closest relationships, and after a year’s study I have come to the conclusion that our marriage ideals have been set not too high but too low.

The Bible at first reading seems to say little about marriage, but I found that God does show us what marriage requires and how we are to exercise the principles that build sound marriages. God himself embodies the ideal in three areas that encompass most of the marital conflicts of the nine couples I interviewed.

1. Ego sacrifice. The fundamental human need, says John Powell, is “a true and deep love of self, a genuine and joyful self-acceptance.” But marriage calls us to transcend that fundamental human need. The beloved’s needs and pleasures must take equal if not superior status to our own.

From our toddler years we learn to protect ourselves. A child grabs a toy and clutches it to his chest, yelling “Mine!” As we grow older, if someone criticizes us we want to lash out in revenge, or perhaps we begin to doubt ourselves. Our egos must be protected.

We go through life like so many clenched fists, striving to prove ourselves to one another, striking out when thwarted. As children we learned not to expose our deepest secrets even to a best friend, for they might be broadcast all over school the next day. Marriage, however, calls us to unclench the fist and allow someone to see what lies inside. We must expose our nakedness, physical and emotional, to another person. The secrets are out. Marriage calls for utter transparency and trust in a world where we have learned that these are a sure path to pain.

The ego sacrifice required by marriage does not, of course, entail a forfeiting of ego. I do not lower my self-esteem and think less of myself for the sake of my wife. Rather, I should raise my esteem of her so that in a thousand areas—squeezing toothpaste, picking up socks, buying records, tolerating dripping pantyhose, eating out, selecting TV shows—I sometimes consciously opt for her convenience or pleasure above my own. My will bends as I sublimate my own needs and desires for her sake, or the sake of the relationship.

The absence of this ego sacrifice manifests itself in great power struggles between husband and wife. Each fights for his own territory. Each insists on being “right,” with the result of devaluing the other. One couple I talked with, Brad and Maria Steffan (these names and the names given to the other couples I interviewed are fictitious) periodically fought emotional wars that could last a week. Says Maria, “It’s as if I’ve built a protective shell around myself I can’t let Brad enter. I have always been competitive. I can’t stand the image of the submissive, boot-licking wife. I despise the seductive, baby-doll wife taught in books like The Total Woman. I want my independence, yet I want to lean on Brad. Marriage is so confusing.”

She continues, “We read books on marriage which say the key is the self-sacrificing giving of each partner. But in our relationship, that’s dangerous. It’s like there’s a giant power struggle going on and we’ve both only got so much ammunition. If I take the peace initiative and let Brad through my defenses, he might hurt me. I might lose.”

In contrast, the biblical ideal shows God, the All-powerful, creating human beings almost as parasites who would require attention and a constant giving of himself with little in return. You can see the awesome figure of a sacrificial God in the Old Testament prophets’ description of him as the Wounded Lover. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?… Mine heart recoils within me …” (Hosea 11:8).

The best example of God’s self-sacrifice on behalf of his beloved creation is found in a New Testament passage that gives a profound insight into the Incarnation: “Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:5–8). God took a risk, exposing himself, becoming vulnerable, to the point of joining the human race to show us how it’s to be done!

One couple I talked to described a horrible two-year period of angry quarrels, temper tantrums, and walkouts. The wife, Beth Pestano, had come from a troubled family. Her father had left and her mother had died. Beth used the first few years of marriage to unleash her pentup anxieties. She would fly into irrational rages over insignificant details. Somehow Peter rode out the violence of those first few years and continued to show her love. Today they have one of the happiest marriages I know of.

I asked him, “Peter, how did you do it? What kept you from cracking in those long months of giving a lot and getting very little in return?” He then told me the story of his conversion, when God had tracked him down after months of angry rebellion.

“The most powerful motivating force in my life,” he concluded, “was the grace of God in loving me and giving himself for me. When I hated coming home to face Beth, I would stop for a moment, think of God’s sacrifice on my behalf, and ask him for strength to duplicate it.”

Marriage, as taught by God’s good example, challenges our lust for power and ego gratification. It requires sacrifice. The well-known prayer of St. Francis could be directed toward this aspect of marriage: “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; not so much to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.”

2. Acceptance. The world teaches us that worth is a quality to be earned. In school you earn a grade, or perhaps a starting position on the varsity team. In business you work your way up to a plush office and a good salary. In the army you earn stripes on the sleeve; those with few stripes take orders and those with many stripes give orders. Everyone understands the system and his own ranking within it.

Against this background, God carves out a unit, the family, where worth is not earned but given, determined by the mere fact of birth. A moronic son has as much worth as a genius—he deserves love simply because he was born into the family. At least that’s the theory of the family. The prodigal son who squanders his father’s riches is welcomed as eagerly as his older brother who followed all the rules. (And the lesson of the older brother is the lesson of one who tries to inject the world’s value system into the family, demanding that behavior determine worth.)

What does this have to do with a couple groping their way through their first few years together? Everything. The principle of assumed worth begins with marriage. If it is not present there, it cannot be passed down to the children. The sense of worth in marriage is set squarely within God’s value system, not the world’s. I should accept my wife totally. I should love her because she is my wife. Nothing is unforgivable. Nothing can sever the love—she can count on that. This is the bedrock ideal on which God built the structure of marriage.

A devout young Christian husband, Mark Parsons, told me how he almost pushed his wife away by jabbing at traits in her that he disliked. “You chit-chat too much; you’re not serious about things that are important to me; you don’t always make sense when you talk.”

Cynthia felt trapped. “When a problem came up,” she recalls, “Mark would want to talk about the causes immediately, just like an instant replay on TV. I couldn’t talk about it—I would lash out, attacking him personally, anything to avoid the issue. He would bring up the comment I made in anger and ask for an explanation. How could I explain my anger without showing more anger? So I would clamp shut and be silent. Then he’d want to talk about why I was so silent. I felt smothered, hounded, attacked, as if I was in a wind tunnel with hurricane-force winds coming from every direction.”

Just in time Mark realized that his pressure on Cynthia would never help her change. She needed to feel accepted and loved before she could make adjustments. He saw this by considering how Christ brings about changes in us. “Naturally Christ wants the church sinless and perfect. But how does he accomplish that? Not by pressuring us and berating us and sternly rebuking us. He is loving and forgiving toward us. He wants our growth, but he refuses to reach in with a magic wand and drive out all imperfections. He allows us the freedom we need to turn to him voluntarily.”

The Christian Gospel offers unearned acceptance, but many Christians seem to demonstrate that quality very poorly in their marriages. Husband and wife become self-righteous judges of each other’s behavior and attitudes. I know of a man who is completely turned off by the church because his Christian wife complains so relentlessly about his smoking habits. Another husband inspires unimaginable guilt in his wife. After the wedding he discovered she had had sexual relations with other men. Refusing to forgive her, he uses the fact as a dagger in arguments.

We forget that though Christianity sets our ideals high, it sets our forgiveness quotient even higher. There is no limit to God’s grace in accepting our failures.

I think of a married couple in their mid-fifties who have endured twenty-five years of difficulty in marriage. They are of opposite temperaments; they moved overseas unprepared for a new culture and suffered tearing family tragedies. Yet their marriage today exudes open, accepting love. Once the wife told me, “I used to think I loved Jack because of certain things about him—his good looks, his winsome personality, his dedication. But it didn’t take long to see through all that. I found out over the years there can be only one reason to make me love him. That reason is because I want to. We’re together, I believe, because God put us together, and I’m going to make it work. I will to love him and accept him regardless.”

Somehow a husband and wife have to learn to communicate love, a love that stretches around any bulges of failure and disappointment. Love and acceptance are not like rubber bands that weaken as they are stretched; they become stronger as they are tested and the partner perceives trust and faithful love.

In the book of Hosea, God showed that his fidelity was so great it could forgive gross adultery. Does God’s love seem weaker for forgiving such behavior? No, it is unfathomably greater. Similarly, active, accepting love within marriage can build unbreakable bonds of trust.

In my interviews, I encountered one beautiful example of this kind of acceptance. John and Claudia Claxton, a couple in their early twenties, were faced with the specter of cancer after just one year of marriage.

Claudia’s body quickly began to deteriorate. Surgeons removed her spleen and some lymph nodes. Even more draining than surgery were the radiation treatments that followed. Claudia was exhausted by the daily regimen. She would go to bed at 10 P.M. and sleep till noon the next day. The radiation damaged good cells as well as killing the diseased cells, so her energy was sapped. Her throat was raw and so swollen she could barely swallow. Areas of her skin turned dark, and the hair at the back of her head began falling out.

I talked with John and Claudia about the inevitable pressures. Claudia experienced waves of self-pity, questioning her worth because she was a constant concern to everyone around her. Yet somehow John managed to communicate an overpowering love. He would come and sit for hours on her hospital bed, holding her hand, touching her face, telling her he loved her. (She ultimately responded to treatment and now seems cured.)

John said the love was not an effort, merely a natural outgrowth of patterns that had been set even before their marriage. “When a couple meet a crisis,” he told me, “it’s a caricature of their relationship and what’s already there. We love each other deeply. We had always insisted on open communication; when something bothered us, we would talk it out. We trusted each other. Therefore when the Hodgkin’s disease came, there were no lingering fears and grudges to undermine our relationship. My love for Claudia would continue regardless of what happened to her body.”

3. Freedom. This third battlefield was the most common one among the couples I interviewed. A newlywed daily discovers something about his spouse he doesn’t like. Our natural human tendency is to want to control the other person, to squeeze him into our mold. We want to seize his freedom.

Here are some areas of skirmish that the nine couples brought up:

• frequency of sex (in most cases the husbands wanted their wives to change by wanting sex more often);

• moodiness;

• sloppy habits of dress and housekeeping;

• a desire to have “old” friends without involving the spouse in the activities;

• physical appearance, especially weight;

• verbal attack of the spouse in public;

• styles of settling conflicts;

• irritating hobbies or avocations;

• a complaining attitude;

• failure to talk things over.

I was amused to read of the adjustments Paul and Nellie Tournier worked through in their first years of marriage. “I’m an optimist and she a pessimist,” Paul Tournier reported in Faith at Work magazine (April, 1972). “She thinks of every difficulty, misfortune, and catastrophe that might happen, and I cannot promise her that such things will not happen. But God is neither optimist nor pessimist. The search for him leads one beyond his own personality and temperament to a path that is neither optimism nor pessimism.

“Little by little I have learned that God speaks to everybody—men and women, adults and children, blacks and whites, the rich and the poor. To discover the will of God, you must listen to him in all men. Of course, I prefer to have God speak directly to me, rather than through my wife, and yet in truly seeking his will I must be persuaded that he speaks as much through her as through me; to her as much as to me.”

Most of the problems about Christianity that puzzle so many people pertain to this issue of human freedom. How can God allow sin? How can he allow unjust rulers? What about pain and suffering? How can God allow people to go to hell? We want God to reach down with a wrench and forcibly fix things.

There is no adequate way to describe the premium God places on human freedom. But the Bible does contain some glimpses of the freedom ideal. One is in the analogy I already spoke about: the faithful, persistent wooing of an adulterous lover in Hosea. God respects freedom so much that through all of human history he has allowed human beings to play the harlot against him.

Another glimmer of God’s respect for freedom is captured in the scene of Jesus weeping as he contemplates the people of Jerusalem who have rejected him. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem …,” he explained. “How often would I have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not” (Matt. 23:37). Reading that, we may forget that the speaker is the all-powerful God. He could have charged into Jerusalem on a stallion of fire, streaking the skies with lightning, causing earthquakes with the resonance of his voice. He could have demanded their allegiance. But Jesus chose not to. He respected human freedom so much that he allowed himself to be rejected.

The final, most compelling glimpse of all comes in the image of the cross. God, eternal and omniscient, could see from the beginning the ultimate sacrifice our redemption would require. The lamb was slain before the foundation of the world. He could feel the sharp slap on his cheek and the crusted blood on his back and brow. He could hear the hooting and jeering as the world voted to murder him. And yet, knowing all that, he sacrificed all, spilling his own blood, to allow man the choice of responding freely to the love he offers.

Does it do any good to spiritualize about how marriage is like the Christian life and how true love is God’s love? Does it do any good to enlarge the ideals of love to divine proportions? Only if you believe marriage can be a crucial settlement in God’s Kingdom. It is exalted, not because it is so different from the rest of life, but because it allows us a frontier to practice God’s value system of ego sacrifice, acceptance, and freedom, so that we derive strength to present that system to the rest of the world.

The exalted nature of marriage assures us that it will involve strife and conflict. In marriage we are tiptoeing through a field of land mines on the way to paradise.

Moses David Berg claims to be the “original founder” of the Jesus revolution. He is a former Christian and Missionary Alliance minister who in 1968 began a ministry to hippies in Huntington Beach, California. It has grown into a globe-encircling network of 800 “colonies” (communes) in seventy countries. There are reportedly 5,000 full-time disciples, two-thirds of them male; fewer than 15 per cent are in the United States. Since his “retirement” in 1970, Berg, now fifty-seven, has maintained a low profile in Europe, but he carries on his role of latter-day prophet (Moses) and King of Israel (David) by writing a profusion of “MO” letters—more than 500 in five years. These he mails to his colonies to be printed and distributed on street corners in exchange for donations.

Throughout their tempestuous history, the Children of God have become notorious for using profane and vulgar language excessively, for demonstrating their hatred against “the system” (disrupting church services used to be standard procedure), and for requiring converts to “forsake all” (parents, education, jobs, churches) and to turn over all their possessions to the organization. Hundreds of young people have disappeared into the COG, and the controversial Ted Patrick, charging that the COG used brainwashing methods, proceeded to kidnap (he prefers “rescue”) and “deprogram” disciples at the behest of distraught and desperate parents.

In recent years the COG has undergone radical changes in both theology and methodology. The MO letters have become increasingly sex-oriented. Berg, who is said to have several concubines, insists that his letters are “God’s Word for today” and have supplanted the biblical Scriptures (God’s Word for yesterday). Yet the letters endorse some totally unbiblical practices.

Much of the truth about the COG is shrouded in secrecy. But in July, 1973, Jack and Connie Wasson (whose “Bible” names were Timotheus and Gracie) broke with the COG. Connie had been one of the original four dozen members in Huntington Beach; Jack had been involved for just a year. Two years later, in July, 1975, David Jacks (Jonathan Archer in the COG) repudiated Berg as a false prophet and left the organization. Jacks, a member for over five years, had helped to pioneer South America for the COG. He was a COG archbishop and had access to top-level information denied to ordinary disciples and to leaders of lower rank. In the following interview these two young men—Jack Wasson, 28, and David Jacks, 24—hope to alert the public to the evils being perpetrated by David Berg on his followers (many of whom, they believe, are sincerely motivated Christian young people). Their charges can be fully documented from Berg’s own writings.

Contact was made with Eugene “Happy” Wotila shortly before this article went to press. Wotila’s seven-plus years in the COG date back to the sect’s beginnings in Huntington Beach. Known as Joab, he was a leading Bible teacher in the sect. In October, 1975, he was excommunicated by Berg for raising questions about COG teachings, among other things. His statements confirm the basic information provided in the interview with Wasson and Jacks.

Joseph M. Hopkins, the interviewer, is the author of a book on the Children of God scheduled to be published this summer by Acton House. He is a professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.

Hopkins. Very few people have seen a picture of David Berg. What is he like?

Jacks. He’s in his mid-fifties. A frail man. He has a bad heart. He’s got gray hair and sometimes wears a goatee. He has a large nose. And he has a strong face, strong features. He has piercing eyes, and when you meet him he seems like he’s really checking you out—not in a friendly way but in a very probing way that puts you on the defensive. Sometimes he rants and raves like a madman. Everybody is afraid of him. One time, while we were in Texas, he came in with a large chain and started throwing it down on the table, screaming that he had come to set the captives free from the system.

Hopkins. David, you were in the COG throughout most of its history. Would you describe a few of the changes?

Jacks. The COG started out small and grew rapidly. When I joined there was just one traveling colony of a hundred members, with David Berg teaching the classes. Berg’s immediate family were the key leaders. However, as the organization grew, people with business experience were recruited, and they soon rose to prominence in the group. The strategy is still evangelism, but the messages are 100 per cent different. It’s not so much Jesus Christ any more; it is Moses David. And the methods are different. Before, it was street evangelism. Now it’s peddling literature for money.

Hopkins. What about discipline?

Jacks. When I first joined the COG, it was very regimented. But as David Berg’s goals changed, more liberties were granted to the lowly disciples. Now, with permission, they can date—even date people outside the organization. They can also go to movies. By relaxing the rules, I think Berg is trying to buy acceptance, to gain popularity and more followers. Drugs and tobacco are still taboo, but alcohol is permitted in moderation—usually only at parties.

Hopkins. You say when you first joined there was just one traveling colony. What is the set-up now?

Jacks. Now colonies range from six to twelve full-time followers. The colony leader is called a shepherd. When it gets more than twelve members, a colony has to divide and create a new one. Three (sometimes two) colonies form a district, presided over by a district shepherd. Three districts form a region, headed by a regional shepherd. Three regions constitute a bishopric, presided over by a bishop, and three bishoprics constitute an archbishopric, headed by an archbishop. Three archbishoprics constitute a ministry, governed by a minister; and three ministries constitute a prime ministry, ruled over by a prime minister. At the time I left there were four prime ministers in the COG. They are members of the board of directors called “the King’s Counselors.” It’s a pyramid type of government, rule from the top down.

Hopkins. How important are the MO letters?

Wasson. The COG disciples believe the MO letters are the inspired word of God for today—and the Bible was the inspired word of God for yesterday. For this reason the MO letters are called the “New Wine” and the Bible the “Old Wine.” There are at this time more than 500 MO letters; and besides this, there are a number of tapes that have been sent out by MO to the colonies. The first MO letter was called The Old Church and the New Church. Berg had a wife but had been living with his secretary, Maria, and the word was beginning to get out. He was either going to have to repent or to sidestep the situation, which is what he chose to do. There was a meeting in Montreal, Canada, in 1969. David Berg had this prophecy about “the old church and the new church.” In it he said that Maria was the new church and Jane Berg, his wife, was the old church, and that God was putting away the old church, Jane, because she had been a hindrance to the work. In her place God was giving him a new wife, Maria. David Berg was doing what was explicitly forbidden by Scripture, and he knew it. To justify himself, he had to come up with something that was at least as authoritative as Scripture, if not more so. That was the very first MO letter.

Hopkins. Aren’t there various categories of MO letters?

Jacks. Here they are. First there are the “G. P.” (General Public) letters—the ones they sell on the street. After that come the “D. F. O.” (Disciples and Friends Only) letters. Next “D. O.” (Disciples Only). Then “L. T. O.” (Leadership Training Only). And after that, “L. O.” (Leaders Only). He even has “R. F. O.” (Royal Family Only) letters.

Hopkins. With David Berg out of the country, how are these letters processed?

Wasson. Copies are sent to area leaders, who print them up for the colonies. COG headquarters formerly got $.25 royalty per disciple on each letter as it was issued. But now at least 40 per cent of all the money the kids make on the street “witnessing” is sent to higher administrative levels. The remaining 60 per cent or less is used to finance the colonies. According to a recent issue of the New Nation News (the official COG news publication), 218,108,922 MO letters were distributed in a 4¼-year period beginning October 1, 1971, which breaks down to approximately 4.3 million per month.

Jacks. In Peru and Bolivia, over a period of a year and a half, we passed out 1.5 million letters, which was one letter for every twelve people in those two countries.

Hopkins. What is the average donation?

Jacks. Down there it was maybe $.08 a letter. Here in the States, they get anywhere from $.05 to $1.00 per letter. Berg gets 10 per cent of that. And of course he derives income from other sources, too—the kids who “forsake all,” contributions from sympathetic parents and friends, and so on. Benefactors are called “kings” and “queens.” Berg teaches that you should use them but don’t let them use you. But witnessing is the basic means of income. Kids go out on the streets for six to ten hours a day. In the States they bring in from $25 to $100 a day each. On the basis of ten people, that would mean $500 to $1,000 a day per colony, or $2,500 to $5,000 per week. This income is almost pure profit. Some letters cost less than a penny to print. At some of their discotheques (Poor Boy clubs) they now charge entrance fees. They put their slogans on coffee cups and sell little gold yokes and MO tee shirts with COG slogans such as “I am a Toilet” on them. They’re marketing tapes and albums.

Hopkins. Is the term “spoiling Egypt” still in vogue?

Jacks. Not in the old way; it’s bad public relations. But Berg still espouses this philosophy—of using the system but not letting it use you. They still practice “provisioning”—getting all the food and lodging they can free, along with paper, clothes, glasses, dinnerware, haircuts, anything they can.

Hopkins. What do they say when they go up to someone to “provision” something?

Jacks. They will say, “We’re a Christian group. We’re trying to help get kids off drugs. If you can help us out, we’ll really appreciate it and God will bless you.”

Wasson. And what kind of drug program do they have?

Jacks. They have no drug program whatsoever.

Hopkins. Isn’t it hypocrisy for them to rip off the system when they flatly condemn it in all its aspects—churches, government, education, jobs?

Jacks. David Berg takes the attitude, “I’ll take anything the devil has and use it for God’s glory.”

Hopkins. A year ago I wrote the IRS to ask for their most recent financial report on the COG. They wrote back, “We have no record of the COG as being listed as an exempt organization.” This suggests that an investigation of the financial operation of the COG in this country would be in order.

Jacks. It’s long overdue.

Hopkins. To get back to the MO letters, is it true that Berg claims to have received messages from occult sources?

Wasson. He has a number of what he calls “spiritual counselors” (the Bible calls them “familiar spirits”) that give him revelations, supposedly from God. His main counselor is Abrahim, a supposed Gypsy king who has been dead for a thousand years, who enters into Moses David’s body and speaks through his mouth in a broken-English dialect. The messages that come, as you will see, are blasphemies and heresies, filled with arrogance, pride, and lust. There are dozens of these counselors. Besides Abrahim, there are Rasputin, the Pied Piper, Joan of Arc, Oliver Cromwell, Merlin the Magician, William Jennings Bryan, Martin Luther, and many more.

Hopkins. You mean he actually claims that he is in communication with these people?

Wasson. Oh, yes. That they enter into his body and speak to him. Many of these revelations come in the middle of the night after he’s primed the pump with a little wine.

Hopkins. Do you have a MO letter in which he describes this method?

Wasson. Yes. In Jesus and Sex (March, 1974), Berg states, “When I get drunk, I yield to God’s spirit.… If you get intoxicated, why, it just makes you even more free in the spirit—at least it does with me.”

Hopkins. Did I read somewhere in a MO letter that he claims to have sexual relations with spirits?

Wasson. Definitely. He has mentioned in a number of letters his sexual involvement with spirits whom he calls “goddesses.” But these spirits have become so aggressive lately he admits to being afraid of them. In MO Li’l Jewels (September, 1976), he says regarding the goddesses: “I BUMPED INTO ONE OF those women the other night when the light was out in the hall. They were waiting for me and whispering to each other.… ‘Everybody keep quiet. Be still so nothing will disturb the sleep of David.’ (Maria explains: ‘He was talking about the whispering and giggling of the goddesses outside the door where they wait their turn to make love to him.’)”

Jacks. He seeks the help of a palm reader in one letter. In The Green Door he visits hell.

Wasson. The letter Madame M, subtitled “from one psychic to another,” was written at the time his son Paul (known as Aaron in the cult) either jumped or fell to his death in the Alps in 1973. He tells of visiting a Gypsy fortune-teller called Madame M. She told him some really wild things. Here’s a sample: “‘I THINK YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION, DON’T YOU?’ (David: ‘In a sense,’ I answered. ‘It is as though Abrahim my angelic helper comes in and blends with my body.’) Madame M continues, ‘YOU HAVE SUCH POWER!—LIKE MERLIN THE MAGICIAN!’ (In other words, I could have the power of the greatest of the magicians of the world to help me if I wanted it, even like Merlin the Magician, King Arthur’s court magician!)”

Jacks. MO has a long history of astrology, palm reading, and that sort of thing. He’s followed Jeane Dixon for years.

Hopkins. What status do the MO letters have in the colonies? Are they placed on the same level as Scripture?

Jacks. Let me answer in David Berg’s own words. In August, 1973, he wrote in a letter called Old Bottles: “I want to frankly tell you, if there is a choice between reading your Bible, I want to tell you that you better read what God said today, in preference to what he said 2,000 or 4,000 years ago. Then when you’ve gotten done reading the latest MO letters, you can go back to reading the Bible.”

Hopkins. I’ve been told that when a new MO letter hits the colony, the kids go wild.

Wasson. Oh, definitely! They believe David Berg gets the big “heavies” from God. Really, their veneration of MO approaches idolatry. When I was in the colony at Houston, it was expected that after new MO letters were read there would be received confirming prophecies from the disciples, like, “Yea, this is my servant, David. Hear him and obey him. Thus saith the Lord.” He definitely believes he is God’s endtime prophet. He believes he is the fulfillment of those Old Testament messages which refer to King David, who was to come in the future: Ezekiel 34 and 37; Hosea 3, and the like. Of course, most theologians believe these passages refer to Jesus Christ. And he teaches that many of the Children of God will be among the 144,000 spoken about in Revelation 7 and 14. He believes they are Israel restored.

Obviously, comparing himself to King David and Moses serves very nicely for his pyramid type of leadership structure, with penalties for disobedience to God’s endtime leader. If your leader is wrong, God will judge him; but you must obey your leader. There was a case in Los Angeles in the early days when Abraham (an early COG leader) was giving a class on obeying leadership, and this illustration was used: “If your leader had told you to stand on a corner and witness, and a truck came bearing down on you, in that case you might be able to move. Otherwise, it is your duty to obey, period.” The result of this sort of indoctrination is a reign of terror. If you even question in your mind Moses’ leadership, God will know it and you will be judged.

Hopkins. What about sex in the COG? There have been rumors of immorality and hanky-panky in the higher echelons. Are they true?

Jacks. extra-marital relationships, definitely. Berg cites Abraham, Solomon, David, and so on, as examples for his having concubines. The top leaders have sexual affairs with girls in the group. But the disciples themselves are practically eunuchs for a year or so until they get married in the COG.

Wasson. This fooling around with sex goes way back. Married couples were encouraged as a group to participate in “skinny-dipping”—swimming in the nude. It was considered unrevolutionary not to participate. And COG members will do almost anything to avoid being called unrevolutionary. It was also policy for all married couples to attend evening “leadership training” sessions at the TSC (Texas Soul Clinic) Ranch in west Texas in the early days of the COG. These sessions would be led by David Berg, and no matter what subject they started out about, they always ended up on the subject of sex, with David Berg quite frequently leading the couples into a mass love-making session while he looked on. Then this doctrine came up that was taught only among the top leadership: “all things common,” based on Acts 2:44. They applied the “all things” even to wives and husbands. The wife- and husband-swapping was not explicitly condoned in a MO letter, but it was allowed and participated in by the top leadership. But after the NBC “Chronologue” program, which exposed some of the inner workings of the COG, they panicked and forbade any more of this to go on for a brief period. Then it resumed.

Jacks. Listen to this quote from Beauty and the Beast (July, 1974): “There were a lot of times … when I would pick up a girl, not necessarily because I needed to make love to her sexually, although I often did in the long run, but just for companionship. Sometimes I did it as much, if not more, for her sake than even for mine. Because after talking with her for some time, she felt so much love that she wanted to make love, and I wanted to make her happy. And those girls usually think that they haven’t done their job or earned their salt till they’ve gone all the way.” Berg actually encourages fornication for the purpose of winning disciples. He says, “To go as far as kissing them on the mouth or deep-kissing them so that they get their germs and everything on you, that’s a pretty big sacrifice.… We have shown the world every other kind of love.… Now we’re going to go as far as giving them other forms of physical love, even sexual love, to minister to one of their finest and greatest needs.” In Flirty Little Fishy (March, 1974) there is a picture of a mermaid making love to a naked man with the caption, “Hooker for Jesus.” The COG now considers the “Flirty Fish Ministry” one of its most important, and there are a number of recent MO letters on the subject. Basically it means religious prostitution, and they are really into it now. As a result, recent reports from inside the group state that venereal disease is not uncommon and that there are numbers of mothers without husbands (the COG calls them “widows”!).

Hopkins. It’s reported that many of the COG marriages are really common-law liaisons, without benefit of clergy. Is this true?

Wasson. In the beginning, the COG taught that a marriage license was just a piece of paper and wasn’t really necessary. The actual marriage was when you went to bed. They had what they called betrothals—a kind of unofficial ceremony in the colony. Then when the COG started dealing with Fred Jordan (a Los Angeles evangelist and early benefactor of the COG who later repudiated the movement), he wanted the kids to get legal marriages, so that many of them did get legally married after that time. I would say about half of the COG are legally married to someone, although only a small per cent are living with their own legal husband or wife. All marriages, incidentally, have to be approved by the leadership. To go on with the effect of the COG upon married life, I’m going to quote from a MO letter called One Wife: “God breaks up marriages in order that he might join each of the parties together to himself. He rips off wives, husbands, or children to make up his bride if the rest of the family refuses to follow. He is the worst ‘ripper-offer’ of all. God is the greatest destroyer of home and family of anybody!… If you have not forsaken your husband or wife for the Lord at some time or another, you have not forsaken all.”

Hopkins:God is in the business of breaking up families? I thought that was the devil’s business!

Wasson: In the letter Mountain Maid David Berg promoted topless bathing and encouraged the girls not to wear undergarments, and since that day only a handful of girls in the COG have been wearing a bra.

Jacks. MO’s greatest pride now is his new sex book. He says it is hotter than anything in the latest sex shops. It’s called Free Sex. On the cover are a nude fellow and girl, and the whole thing is full of MO letters on sex. But the freakiest thing is his letter called Revolutionary Love Making. It is absolutely the grossest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. I don’t know how to describe it.

Hopkins. There are pictures of people actually engaged in various forms of intercourse. Before we leave this sex thing, how can the colonies remain clean with this lascivious material being fed into the members’ minds?

Jacks. The COG is degenerating. David Berg is getting more and more into p*rnography, spiritism, astrology, and other far-out things—substituting this garbage for the fundamental Christian faith.

Hopkins. The MO letters abound with four-letter words. Is this sort of language common in the colonies?

Jacks. Most of the Children of God, all the way down to the lowest disciple, swear like pirates. Even when they witness, they use four-letter words. They believe it helps them relate to people on the street.

Hopkins. The MO letters aside, how does COG theology compare with the doctrinal teachings of most mainline denominations?

Wasson. In the beginning the COG taught pretty much straight Bible. The main Bible teachers were Joab and Joel Wordsworth. Just recently, however, these two men were denounced by Moses David and excommunicated. He wrote to the colonies, “Any disciple in possession of Joel’s letters had better destroy them immediately or be in danger of excommunication if found with them in his possession.” This is like kicking the Bible out of the COG. Because practically all of the Bible lessons in the COG were written by Joel Wordsworth. Now his writings are contraband. The point is that COG theology is now based entirely on the MO letters. Those letters are totally heresy and blasphemy. They encourage witchcraft, religious prostitution, immorality, cursing, rebellion, bitterness, hatred. Another thing David Berg teaches is lesbianism. In Women in Love (December, 1973) he writes, speaking of sexual relationships between two women: “When He’s speaking of love, He [God] says if you do it in love, against such there is no law, right? If it’s real love. So why not? IT IS NOT EXPLICITLY FORBIDDEN SUCH AS IT IS WITH MEN WITH MEN. Male hom*osexuality is expressly, definitely and specifically forbidden and cursed and called sodomy. In that case it is absolutely forbidden and a sin. But I don’t see and I’ve never been able to find any place in the Bible where it is forbidden to women.”

David Berg also believes in universalism. Here’s what he says in this letter Old Bottles (April, 1973): “I’ll never be satisfied until everybody on earth is saved, which will never happen of course. But I’m looking forward to the day when … everybody or at least almost everybody will be saved—at least there won’t be many left in Hell if any.” Also, on the subject of Jesus, David Berg says in Revolutionary Sex, “From personal revelations and Bible study, I am convinced that Jesus Himself could have enjoyed His Father’s own creation of sexual activity with some of the women He lived with, particularly Mary and Martha, and yet without sin. Why should it have been a sin for Christ to have enjoyed sex that He Himself had created?”

Hopkins. In view of all these nonbiblical teachings that have been imposed on Berg’s disciples, what would you say about the spiritual state of the young people involved in the COG?

Jacks. I am convinced that in the early days most members were born again and really received Jesus as their personal Saviour when they entered the group. Salvation verses were really stressed—John 3:16; Romans 10:9, 10; Romans 3:23 and 6:23; John 1:12; Revelation 3:20, and so on. However, with emphasis on the Bible decreasing …

Wasson. Having a confrontation with Christ isn’t the big thing anymore. The key to success in the COG is how effectively a person fits into the Moses David witnessing machine, producing more income and more disciples for King David.

Hopkins. Let’s move on to COG eschatology.

Jacks. David Berg is a very apocalyptic person, and he believes the whole world—America, first of all—is under impending doom. He believes that we are living in the last generation, and that the United States is the “great prostitute that sits on many waters” and the “Babylon” of Revelation. Another interesting thing is David Berg’s courtship of Mu’ammar Gadaffi, the radical strong man of Libya. Berg believes the Children of God are actually going to rule the planet Earth before Jesus Christ returns. He says that they will evangelize the world and that Gadaffi will help them by making a peace pact with Israel.

Wasson. David Berg is into astrology, and he saw Kohoutek (the “Christmas comet” of 1973, which was to have been the brightest of the century but fizzled) as a sign of America’s coming destruction on or before January 31, 1974. A lot of the COG wrote their parents and friends in the United States saying, “Get out, get out, while there’s still a chance. America is going to fall.” The COG wore placards and paraded up and down the streets of almost every major city in the free world saying, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed.” And of course the comet just fizzled out.

Hopkins. If America is to be destroyed by God, then who is going to fight in the Battle of Armageddon?

Jacks. Israel is going to be invaded by Russia (Gog and Magog), according to Ezekiel 38 and 39. The United States will get involved, and Israel and America will go down the drain. A world Communist government will be set up. Armageddon will take place at Christ’s return, at the end of the seven years. The seventh trumpet will be blown, and Jesus will come in the clouds with all of God’s people rising to meet him. This, Berg believes, will take place in 1993.

Hopkins. Wouldn’t you say that one of the appeals of the COG is to be part of an elite group through whom God’s promises and purposes are to be fulfilled?

Jacks. Yes, indeed. It’s a very secure feeling. You feel that you are super-important, that you alone know what’s going on.

Wasson. David’s oldest son, Aaron (the one who died), wrote a song, “We are the 144,000. Who else could it be but us?”

Hopkins. What about sacraments in the Children of God?

Jacks. They started out baptizing in water in the early days. They did it by immersion. But it became a cumbersome thing to do and they just stopped doing it.

Wasson. Once in a long while—maybe on Christmas or some special occasion—they’ll get a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and have Communion. But they don’t do it regularly.

Hopkins. Are the charismatic gifts practiced in the COG?

Wasson. All claim they are Spirit-baptized and pray in tongues. On healing, the Children of God believe that suffering often is the judgment of God. So when they pray for someone who is sick, they ask the Lord to show the person where he has sinned so he will confess and so be healed.

Hopkins. Do they believe in natural childbirth?

Jacks. Yes. For a long time the women gave birth to their babies in the colonies. But they have lost some children in the past two or three years, so more of them have been going to hospitals.

Hopkins. What is their policy on medicine and doctors?

Jacks. They’re opposed to people who try to make money out of people’s afflictions. If you have faith and get better, then you get brownie points; but if you don’t, then there’s no condemnation about going to a doctor.

Hopkins. What happens on Sunday in the COG? Is it a special day?

Jacks. No, not at all. If they have a rest day at all, it’s usually on Sunday. But there’s no set day of the Lord.

Hopkins. It’s reported that the Bergs and their retinue live like kings while most of the lowly disciples languish in poverty. Is this an exaggeration?

Jacks. No, I think it’s well founded. David Berg doesn’t live lavishly, but he does live comfortably—very comfortably. I know for a fact that John Treadwell (Jethro) has always lived very nicely in the COG. He’s always had a nice apartment, has taken fencing lessons, and jets around the world like an aristocrat—all on his expense account.

Hopkins. An ex-member told me that in the colony where he was in Texas they ate moldy bread and whatever cheap food they could scrounge.

Wasson. Although the diet of the regular disciples was very poor in earlier days, since the practice of selling the MO letters became big, more money is available and diets are much improved. In poorer parts of the world, however, they can still be very bad.

Hopkins. Is it fair to say that Berg tolerates parents only if they support the COG?

Jacks. That’s right. This is what he says about parents in Who Are the Rebels? (March, 1970): “You, our parents, are the most God-defying, commandment-breaking, insanely rebellious rebels of all time, who are on the brink of destroying and polluting all of us and our world if we do not rise up against you in the name of God and try to stop you from your suicidal madness of total genocide. To Hell with your devilish system. May God damn your unbelieving hearts.”

Hopkins. What about the charge of brainwashing?

Jacks. The Children of God do not brainwash. They do not withhold food or sleep or anything like that. Leaders are not trained in the art of mind control.

Hopkins. Yet there are kids who come out of the COG and insist they were brainwashed. And their parents say that when they were in they had the glassy stare and the programmed grin. Ted Patrick now claims to have deprogrammed more than 1,200 young people from the COG and similar cults.

Wasson. We have had correspondence with 250 to 300 ex-members who were in anywhere from two to seven years, including long-term members who were in leadership all the way up to the top. One thing they are all adamant about is that they were not brainwashed. None of them feel that their mind or their free will was ever taken from them.

Hopkins. Then you don’t believe in the concept of mind-control—that people can be programmed into a cult and then need to be deprogrammed out?

Wasson. Not at all. I do believe in the Bible. The Bible teaches that we are free moral agents. If people believe a lie, they choose to believe a lie. As a matter of fact, God will send them a lie if they refuse to accept the truth. He will send a “strong delusion” because they have rejected the truth (2 Thess. 2:11).

Hopkins. Then what is your alternative to deprogramming?

Wasson. There are very few in the COG today who wouldn’t think seriously about leaving if they had what they considered an acceptable alternative. Those of us who are working in “Recovery” believe that those who have been through the COG and similar groups and have made it out O.K. are the most capable of understanding the particular problems of guilt and bondage that former members complain of. Just knowing there are others who have “made it out” is a major help to those who would like to leave but doubt they could make it on the outside. We are planning for the near future a course for former cult members and other interested persons dealing with the special ministry and problems of the “New Age Cults.” Also, we are preparing tapes and literature for former members and their families in an effort to help them through the difficult transitional time. We further expect to open at least one recovery center where former members can come and “get their heads together,” where we will offer counsel and encouragement. All of these efforts will be conducted with the help of former cult members.

Hopkins. What in your judgment is the future of the COG?

Wasson. My opinion is that the organization cannot survive much longer. The thing that holds it together is David Berg. If he goes, there’s no one person who has the charisma to inspire the loyalty of the thousands of disciples. And the leadership is torn asunder by bitter rivalries and jockeying for power. There is a good chance the group would split into various factions led by rival leaders—Jane Berg (“Mother Eve”), John Treadwell (“Jethro”), Maria, Joshua, Rachel, and so forth. Maria is right up there next to MO. But she has no charisma at all.

Jacks. But if anyone wanted to grab the reigns of the COG, he would have to go with her. She will have a strong bargaining position. Even though she lacks the charisma or the know-how to run the organization, whoever wants to take over will have to go with her. One reason for this is that MO has prophesied that Maria will be the oracle of God. There have been similar prophecies about Rachel (who married a wealthy Italian member of the COG).

Hopkins. Tell me, as you look back on your experience, do you feel that you learned something? Have there been any positive results?

Jacks. It’s hard to look back on 5½ years of your life and not find something there that was good. I still feel very close to those whom I knew in the group. We have been through a lot together. Actually, David Berg is and always has been the corrupting factor in the COG. If it hadn’t been for him, the COG could have been a force for good instead of for evil. I really believe that. One thing no one can deny is these are some of the most committed young people in the world. And as individuals in the COG are set free from the Berg influence, they turn out to be some of the most committed Christians in the world. “He that is forgiven much loveth much.”

Wasson. For me I guess it was like Marine boot camp. I wouldn’t do it again for anything, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. The fact is after graduating from a Bible college and being a denominational minister I was looking for something more. The original goals and vision of the COG were good. With this broad experience in the area of the “New Age Cults” I believe God has projected me into a ministry which has unlimited potential. I could never have understood it had I not been through it. Perhaps someone else could have, but I couldn’t. I thank God I can offer reassurance to the victims and families of these cults, not as an outsider but as one who has been there. Not as one condemning but as one forgiven.

During the past few years I have noticed that whenever my fellow pastors and I get talking about our frustrations in the ministry, the discussion inevitably turns to the apparent death of marriage. In my last parish I “presided over” more divorces than marriages. Keeping track of the divorces, near divorces, trysts, breakups, and swaps sometimes seemed almost like a full-time job. I increasingly found myself ministering to people in all sorts of open or clandestine “arrangements” outside marriage. And it seemed as if a time of cohabitation had replaced (or supplemented) the traditional engagement period. My fellow pastors report the same kinds of experiences.

At a recent conference on worship in my denomination, a number of participants called upon the church to develop new rituals through which it could solemnize amicable divorce, “hom*osexual marriages,” and the public union of two heterosexuals who are “committed to each other but not for a lifetime arrangement.” There seems to be a war against the traditional institution of Christian marriage, and many in the church are ready to enlist.

Other Christians plead for a return to the “sanctity of marriage” stand. As it was in Israel’s culture, marriage is the cornerstone of Western civilization, they say, a foundation without which our culture cannot survive. In their eyes, the taboo against sex outside marriage is as valid as ever. The Church must hold the line against this subversion of marriage.

I wish to argue that, instead of being merely a vestige of the past, or a dreary relic from a sinking bourgeois culture that we must labor to keep afloat, Christian marriage has a future, one that cuts to the core of our shallow, selfish, hedonistic culture. In a world gone crazy with its own self-delusions and falsehood, Christian marriage has become a subversive activity.

It was predictable that marriage would become a focal point of the revolt of the sixties. To subvert the institution of marriage, to call its values and mores into question, to uncover marriage as a tool of an oppressive society, was rightly seen as an attack on the very core of decadent “bourgeois morality.” There was a focus on the hypocrisy of many marriages, the drabness of many marriages, the tragic enslavement of women in many marriages. Many of the criticisms were valid, and for the Church to ignore or defend these weaknesses is unpardonable. (Of course, all this had been said before. Marriage has always been a prevalent but not a particularly popular institution in Western society. The Roman antinomians, the European Romantics, the Jazz Age flappers of the twenties—these and others had questioned the value of marriage.)

The first thing one notices about the current revolt against marriage is its failure to be truly revolutionary. To be revolutionary is to be radical, to cut to the root (Latin: radix = “root”) of a society. But the “revolt” against marriage seems only to accentuate and perpetuate the very worst elements of twentieth-century Western culture.

This revolt seems to have gone the way of many other so-called revolutionary expressions of the sixties. A true revolution is difficult to maintain in our society: the communications media quickly cheapen it before there is time for its meaning to come fully into focus. We become sick of it by satiating ourselves with it. Today’s revolution becomes tomorrow’s Pepsi commercial. The youthful exuberance of the defiant teen-age couple living in extra-marital bliss in Love Story becomes grist for tomorrow’s soap-opera sequel. What begins as a genuine symbol of revolt becomes the commercialized property of the herd. “Open marriage,” “living together,” “trial marriage,” “the amicable divorce”—these have become jaded symbols of a merely ersatz revolution.

The so-called revolution against marriage is no revolution at all. It is merely one more example of our modern Western craving for instant gratification. We want everything right away, without risk or investment—from instant oatmeal to instant sex. We are a society of instant hedonists. The pursuit of pleasure, companionship, and sexual joys for their own sake is in fact an unconscious collaboration with “the system” at its worst rather than a rejection of it. Immediate gratification is the fundamental value that sustains the dream world of advertising. Advertisers are constantly telling us that we can have what we dream of and have it now if we just smoke this, or swallow this, or smear this on our faces. Sex is predominant in advertising because it is so successful in selling the magic potions that promise to give us what we desperately want (popularity, immortality, happiness, perpetual youth, and the like).

The “revolt” against marriage serves only to reinforce the inhumane values that lie at the heart of the worst excesses of consumption-oriented systems. We live in a throw-away economy in which waste is a virtual necessity. Things must be thrown away to make room for the new and improved model. In such a system, carried to its logical extreme, not only every thing but also every person seems expendable. The need for labor (people) is controlled merely by supply and demand. People are of value only as long as they are useful in helping us to get what we want. Sex becomes recreation, quick gratification with no messy leftovers.

Spokesmen for the new hedonism as institutionalized in the so-called revolt against marriage would like us to think they are offering something new and important. They aren’t. What they offer is the inhumane values—disposability, expendability, instant gratification—that make up the darkest side of the “system” itself.

A truly revolutionary concept for our age is the Christian idea of marriage, of a sex relationship based on lifelong total commitment. According to Christian theology, marriage entails risk as well as commitment. It asks a person to venture out, to expose himself to the complex reality of another human being. It is risky to dare to link your future with another person’s, to accept all that person’s strengths and weaknesses. This element of risk will always be unpopular. “Liberation” in our world too often means liberation from responsibility for anyone else but oneself. We are, classical Christian theology maintains, basically self-seeking, self-gratifying individuals. The ritual of marriage itself is realistic about human weaknesses and limitations. It says that what we would do “naturally” is not always the best that we could do.

I am fond of a phrase (long since deleted) from the original marriage rite in the Book of Common Prayer in which the minister warns the couple not to enter into marriage “wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts.…” I sense a naïveté about human nature in many current “alternatives” to marriage. Advocates of the “open marriage” and the extra-marital “arrangement” assume that a feeling of “love” (abstractly and vaguely defined) is enough to ensure mutual trust and consideration.

The Christian marriage ceremony illustrates the belief that a deep sexual and emotional encounter between two people requires a revolution in which both turn away from self-centeredness. To be united to another person means to risk oneself in a rite of initiation and passage (as anthropologists call it) that entails a death of the old self and a resurrection of the new. Within the ceremony there are numerous images of this death and resurrection, such as “for this reason a man leaves his father and mother” and “the two become one flesh.” To remain your same old self after you are married is not enough. Many marriages fail because the partners fail to comprehend what a transformation is demanded of them.

Related to our fear of risk is our fear of permanence. To say that sex is best when experienced within a lifelong, unconditional commitment is to challenge some basic assumptions of modern society. We are obsessive “neophiles,” lovers of the new. We have a low tolerance for repetition, pattern, sameness. “Love” becomes an ecstatic experience of release occurring in a moment of bliss that cannot be duplicated. In fact, repetition or duplication somehow seems to rob this so-called love of its significance for us. Anthropologist Margaret Mead says she has seen this fear of repetition and permanence in no other society on earth. In other cultures, what is permanent and trustworthy is what is valuable. Perhaps our fear of permanence is due to our technology and its rapid-fire change, or our uprootedness, or the shallowness and youthfulness of our culture. Whatever the causes, it is a striking characteristic of our nation.

Karl Barth has said that the love of Christian marriage is love in its most mature and Christ-like manifestation. God has covenanted with us to be for us in a permanent relationship that transcends changes of time and circ*mstance, and marriage is meant to be a human equivalent of this divine covenant. Love is best in marriage because in the context of promised permanence and fidelity, love is truly free. Many couples report that the worst time in their relationship is the engagement. In each person’s mind are questions about the rightness of the marriage. There is always the possibility that each argument will be the last, that when the other person walks out and slams the door in a huff, he or she will not come back.

Marriage should change all this because, once permanence is promised, each person is free to be his or her real self. There is no longer a need for the games, the masks, the little falsehoods.

As Barth once said in another context, no one can truly repent or be truly honest about his shortcomings and sins unless he is first absolutely convinced of the security and permanence of God’s love. Any repentance and confession before this is just play-acting. What is true of the divine-human relationship is true of the human relationship of marriage. The covenanting of two people brings a sense of security and openness that is found almost nowhere else in human encounters. Only in this long-term relationship can the honesty, forgiveness, acceptance, and healing take place that make life together possible.

Marriage has suffered partly because the word “love” has been emptied of significance. “Love” has been commercialized, sentimentalized, and cheapened. Christian marriage affirms that love is more than a feeling; it is a conscious decision to yoke onself with another person through thick and thin (“sickness and health, richer and poorer, till death us do part”). In the marriage ritual the minister asks not “Do you love this person?” but “Will you love this person?” The faith assumes that loving is something one can decide to do. It can be an act of the will. I have often reminded couples who come to me to discuss divorce because “we don’t love each other anymore” that they once stood before God and the church and promised to love.

The shallow, gushy “love” of our contemporary world is pagan love that loves only the lovely and the lovable. It is a feeling and nothing more. It is the love of the white person who loves black people only when they conform to white expectations. It is the love of rich people who love poor people only when they are the “deserving” poor. Such selfish, on-again off-again affection falls far short of Christian love.

In the old Book of Common Prayer, one of the three reasons given for the divine ordination of marriage (the other two were “procreation of children” and “to avoid fornication”) was “for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that one ought to have the other, both in prosperity and adversity.” The uniting of two people in marriage is thus a paradigm of the manner of life that God intends, not only for these two people but for the world as a whole. The Puritans used to speak of the family as an ecclesiola or “little church.” They were right. In the Family of God (church) or in the Family of Man (humanity in general) there is a continuing need for permanence, mutual concern in times of joy and sorrow, openness, and risk. Marriage is God’s doing with one man and one woman that which he is always trying to do within the world as a whole.

Marriage will probably continue to be unpopular, and people will probably continue to search for “alternatives.” Many people’s dissatisfaction with marriage may be related to the fact that it is difficult and demanding, calling forth from us the best that we have. Its values challenge many of the values we have accepted over the past few years. In a world of flux where everything and everyone seems to have a price, where few dare to link themselves with other people for a moment much less a lifetime, where TV tells us we can have anything we want with no risk and have it right now, where people are used and disposed of almost as easily as soft-drink cans, marriage is a revolutionary, downright subversive activity! As revolutionary as the love of Christ himself.

Within Protestantism there are two classic approaches to theology. The one initially emphasizes God’s action in regard to man. The other begins with man’s experience of God. The former tends toward creedal definition and might be labeled a “theology of the Word”; its trinitarian focus is on Christology (on the revelation of God to man), and perhaps its most representative expression is the theology of Martin Luther. The latter tends toward the intuitive and interpersonal and might be labeled a “theology of experience”; its trinitarian focus is on the Holy Spirit (on man’s experience of God in his creation and redemption), and its classic theological statement is that of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Although the evangelical believes that Schleiermacher, the nineteenth-century romanticist and liberal theologian, made several crucial mistakes in working out his theology, his starting point was not necessarily in error. Even Karl Barth, a strong proponent of a theology of the Word, recognized the validity in principle of formulating an experiential theology. Barth’s term for such a theology was a “theology of awareness.” He said, “What Schleiermacher constructed by means of his theology of awareness by planting himself in the center which for the Reformers had been a subsidiary center, could be the pure theology of the Holy Spirit; the teaching of man brought face to face with God by God, of man granted grace by grace” (Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl, Simon and Schuster, 1969, p. 341).

Evangelicals are beginning to recognize the truth of Barth’s statement as they explore the possibility of an experientially based theology. Influenced by those who stress either a charismatic approach to faith (e.g., Michael Harper, Robert Mumford, Dennis Bennett, David Wilkerson, Larry Christenson) or a relational approach (e.g., Bruce Larson, Keith Miller, Charlie Shedd, Wes Seeliger, Ralph Osborne), evangelicals are beginning to build their theologies around what it means for man to be in the presence of God.

To stress one’s experience, which is an experience of the Spirit, is not, according to evangelicals, to ignore the Word as manifest both in Scripture and in Christ himself. Indeed, to do so would be foolish, for it would result in a formless mysticism. Word and Spirit must be joined together in any adequate Christian theology. What is being increasingly attempted today is a reversal of the Reformer’s approach to the Christian faith. Evangelicals are suggesting that theology must travel from Spirit to Word, not from Word to Spirit, the pattern of their heritage.

In this article I will look at the basis for this change in theological orientation in the evangelical world. I will then consider a criterion for judging the adequacy of any evangelical experiential theology. In conclusion, I will offer a suggestion as to the bipolar nature of theology based on the experience of the Holy Spirit.

Recognizing that theology is at best a stammering, an inadequate attempt to set forth an understanding of God, theologians such as Paul Holmer of Yale have criticized mainline evangelical theology for its desire to be “logically tighter” and “conceptually better defined” than the Bible itself. Evangelicals have been guilty, says Holmer, of a “tidying up complex,” which unfortunately works at cross purposes with the intended goal of their preaching, the development of the Christian’s life. Evangelical intellectualism based on a rationalistic and idealistic philosophy has so abstracted the Christian faith that it risks missing the heart of the Gospel. In their desire for precision, evangelicals have become so analytical, so mired in contrived conceptual schemas, that correct doctrine has superseded faith and life as the focal point of Christianity. The faith and life are there in the evangelical’s hymnody, preaching, and devotional life, but certain extrinsic factors have clouded them over in the theological arena. (Holmer’s comments appear in The Evangelicals, edited by David Wells and John Woodbridge, Abingdon, 1975.)

This charge against the evangelical’s formulations of his faith (not against this faith per se) is also being leveled from within evangelicalism itself. Influenced by the wider Christian world, evangelicals who have adopted either a relational (“incarnational”) approach or a charismatic (“neo-pentecostal”) approach to their theology are more and more challenging their fellow believers to rethink the Gospel from the standpoint of their own experience with it. Their claim is that traditional evangelical theology is largely irrelevant or inadequate.

For example, I spoke recently to a minister who is sympathetic to the charismatic movement and who had just finished a series of sermons on the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church today. He read traditional evangelical statements on the Holy Spirit in his preparation and granted their doctrinal orthodoxy, but he complained that he found them sterile and therefore incomplete. The Spirit, he felt, had suffered reduction. Formal statement did not match the exhibited power of the Holy Spirit within the Christian community.

The prescription for health that is increasingly being sounded from within evangelicalism is this: if the Church is ever again to set forth a relevant and adequate theology, it must begin not with reflection on the person of Christ but with reflection on our experience with him through the Holy Spirit.

In other words, to talk more adequately about the Word, one should begin with the Spirit. It is, after all, the Spirit who is the expression of the Father and Son to man. It is the Spirit who is at work in the world and in the lives of believers. As Jesus himself stated, “When the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:13–15). An adequate theology of the Spirit therefore will be at one and the same time a theology of the Son and of the Father. Its concern is to take seriously how we experience God in Christ within our faith and life, and this begins through the work of the Spirit.

While this critique of mainline evangelical theology has enough truth in it to cause the establishment to bristle in rebuttal, experiential theologians are not without their own potential pitfalls and excesses, as the example of Schleiermacher would suggest. Barth once remarked that even those who are judged to be heretics, with all their “recognized folly and wickedness, should and must have a voice in theology.” Evangelicals must be sufficiently confident of their theology to hear openly and attentively the voices not only of their favorites but of the Christian community in its entirety. For one never knows who among his theological forebears might provide a particularly needed and wholly unexpected word of correction or addition. Thus it may be that Schleiermacher has something to say to us today.

Schleiermacher’s theology was perhaps the most thoroughgoing modern attempt to carve out a theology of experience. It is not that Schleiermacher succeeded where contemporary evangelicals are failing. Rather, it is by the clearcut failure of his attempt at experiential Christian theology that he can be of service.

In particular, evangelicals can cull from Schleiermacher’s writing a criterion for judging any theology of experience. Put most simply, it is this: the success of an experiential theology must be judged by the ease (or lack of ease) with which it moves from Spirit to Word. As evangelicals work out their formulations of the faith in and for the life of the Church, they must keep in mind this built-in test. If Word and Spirit can be held in dynamic union, then experiential theology has the possibility of becoming definitive for the life and witness of the evangelical church today. If not, such theology must be called to task and dismissed as sub-biblical, as Schleiermacher’s was. The Word cannot take the place of the Spirit, as has often happened in conservative circles. But neither can the Word be ignored.

In Barth’s important study of nineteenth-century theology quoted earlier, he noted that Schleiermacher, like the Reformers before him, acknowledged two basic theological motifs: first, the question of man’s action in regard to God; and second, the question of God’s action in regard to man. The former was answered by “the Spirit of the Father and of the Word which enables man to hear the Word.” The latter was answered by “the Word of the Father which is spoken to man.” For Barth, the importance of Schleiermacher in the history of the Christian Church was that where the Reformers said “the Word of God” first and then added the human correlate of faith (justification by grace through faith), Schleiermacher reversed this order (justification through faith by grace). To begin with man, as Schleiermacher did, was not necessarily to dismiss God. Rather, it was to take man in the presence of God as the proper epistemological starting point for theology. Rather than exclude the Word, such a theology of the Spirit sought to bring the Word to bear on it as the other side of an experiential approach to Christianity. Rather than moving from Word to Spirit, Schleiermacher’s theology progressed from Spirit to Word.

A comparison with Luther is instructive at this point. Luther’s theology was above all a theology of the Word. But it was at the same time a theology of the Spirit. “Justification by grace (a theology of the Word) through faith (a theology of the Spirit)” might summarize his position. There was a trinitarian unity to his understanding. He moved with ease from a theological focus in the Word to one in the Spirit. Word opened out into Spirit.

Making use of this insight, Barth asked whether there is to be found in Schleiermacher’s reversal of traditional Reformation theology a similar trinitarian unity. If so, he suggested, it is a genuine, proper theology.

Unfortunately, though Schleiermacher was Christian in his intent and legitimate in his initial approach, the difficulty of convincing his readers that Christology was indispensable to his religious understanding suggests that the spirit that formed the center of his theology was not the Holy Spirit. That is, this theology failed the trinitarian test and thus proved sub-Christian. Even in his failure, however, he succeeded in permanently opening the question of the significance of experience, imagination, and affection in theology.

Until recently, it has been “liberal” theology that has continued systematically to explore Christian theology from the vantage point of the Spirit (e.g., Tillich, Gilkey, Keen). In “conservative” circles formal theology has been dominated by a propositional starting point centered in the Word (e.g., Henry, Schaeffer, Montgomery). But while an experiential starting point has been largely neglected by evangelical scholarship, such an approach has entered strongly into the life and witness of the conservative church through its informal and lay theology.

Such church-renewal movements as Faith at Work, pioneering in developing an “incarnational” approach to life and ministry, have been widely influential among evangelicals. Understood in “incarnational” or relational terms, Christ becomes known preeminently in and through the lives of others. It is for this reason perhaps that most of the literature in relational theology centers on a recounting of personal experiences. “If every man is a priest,” suggests Larson, “every man is a discoverer and a participant with God, and he has something valid to report about God from his own experience” (Living on the Growing Edge, Zondervan, 1968, p. 79). In the books of writers like Larson, Keith Miller, and Charlie Shedd, we learn by observing the Spirit at work in the lives of others. Often the correlate to relational theology is a bias against traditional systematic theology. For those whose lives have been influenced by relational theology with its focus on man’s experience of new life, formal doctrine seems sterile and often irrelevant.

Alongside the church-renewal movement centering in relational theology, the charismatic movement too has made wide inroads into evangelicalism, affecting both life and worship. The charismatics have discovered their focal point theologically in the demonstrated gifts of the Spirit. It is the charismata, not agreement in doctrine, that draws together this widely assorted group. Catholics, Episcopalians, Assemblies of God believers, Methodists, and Presbyterians all come together freely, experiencing the fullness of the Spirit and letting traditional denominational theological distinctives—all formulated with primary reference to a theology of the Word—fade into oblivion.

One of the leading spokesmen of the charismatic movement, Michael Harper, editor of the English neo-pentecostal magazine Renewal, states in writing about the demonstrated success of the Church of the Redeemer in Houston: “The world awaits a fresh manifestation of Christ within His body, the Church. It is tired of … the airy-fairy doctrines of theologians. ‘Show us,’ the world yells at the Church. ‘Let us see you do it. Then we’ll listen to your words.’ ” Harper than proceeds to tell about the experience of this charismatic, community-styled church, stating that he has “discovered a new way of living, not a new way of thinking about life.” We must begin, he says, with the experience of the Spirit, not with what has been written about the Holy Spirit and his gifts (A New Way of Living, Logos, 1973, p. 12).

Both in relational theology and in charismatic theology, an experiential approach to Christianity is being voiced. For Larson, to “live on the growing edge” is to feel “the breeze of God’s Spirit … blowing through the Church today.” For Harper, the new life in Christ is intimately tied to a fresh experience of the life of the Holy Spirit through charismatic manifestation. For both, the experience of the Spirit is crucial as their theological point of entry. It is for this reason that the similarly experientially oriented theology of Schleiermacher can be instructive.

The emphasis on an experience of the Spirit must be ultimately judged by its faithfulness to the Word. In this regard, it is not enough to note that the Word as Scripture is used both in relational theology and in charismatic theology (as it was by Schleiermacher); one must also raise the question whether it is misused. In both charismatic and relational theology, the danger is that of stressing what the Word says (or doesn’t say) to me, at the expense of what it says on its own terms. Evangelicals should reject such an approach. While direct illumination, dialogue, and application are necessary to any adequate reading of Scripture, they cannot lord it over the intended meaning and authority of the text. One’s experience with the Spirit must flow into and out of his experience with the Word, carefully studied.

The misuse of this hermeneutical principle can be illustrated from the literature of both the charismatics and the relational theologians. For example, in A New Way of Living Michael Harper reports being influenced by a woman who said within a worship service at the Church of the Redeemer, “The Lord [= Spirit] has given me a scripture … ‘Thou shalt not uncover thy sister’s nakedness’ [Leviticus].” The spiritual leader present at this occasion interpreted the text to mean, “God is saying that we are not to seek for or allow any publicity for the moment. This is a work of God which should not be uncovered” (p. 20). Given this “word” from Scripture, Harper felt compelled not to write on this particular charismatic group for five years until he was given a new direction.

No explanation of this allegorical interpretation was offered. It was accepted as a valid message from God. Spirit and Word have here been joined, but clearly at the expense of the intended meaning of the Word. Serious exegetical study has given way to a blatant manipulation of the text. Scriptural authority has been marshalled for a direction that has no scriptural basis.

Within relational literature the “Serendipity” books of Lyman Coleman illustrate this same danger of scriptural misuse through an overstress on the experiential. In one of his group Bible studies, for example, Coleman uses the account in John of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet (13:1–5). He asks you to close your eyes and “allow your imagination to create the scene for you.” He then goes on: “Ask yourself, if Jesus should come to me for the same reason that He went to His disciples—to serve them—how would He minister to me? What is my deepest need at the moment?… In other words, how would he ‘wash my feet’ today?” After meditating on this question the group participant is then asked to share with the others how Christ would minister to him and why (Discovery, Word, 1972, p. 50).

Although it is certainly true that Christ wants to minister to our present needs, is this the intended meaning of the text? Was the problem of dirty feet the focus of the passage? When we look at these five verses in their context, we find that what the author intended here was a statement of the meaning and value of Jesus’ death. Coleman avoids the author’s intention (an interpretation of the atonement) by reducing the twenty-verse pericope to only the first five verses. The foot-washing incident is shorn of its interpretative context and used allegorically. Unfortunately, under the rubric of Bible study, what is actually taking place is “Christian” sharing. The experience might support Christian community, but the Word has been manipulated in the process.

In fairness to both authors, let it be said that faithfulness to the Word seems to be their intention. But this makes matters all the more serious, for Scripture is therefore central, and not peripheral, to their theological formulations.

Let Schleiermacher be a constant reminder and goad to both relationalists and charismatics. An experiential theology must ultimately be judged by the ease with which it flows into a theology of the Word. Any friction created as one moves from Spirit to Word in his theology must be eliminated. Any attempt to hasten an experience of the Spirit by pressing on it a veneer of the Word must be resisted. Teaching and preaching can take place when someone presents the experience of his own heart as stirred by the Spirit. But how is this best done? Surely not by bolstering Christian experience with faulty exegesis. The Bible must not be used as a sanction for one’s independent Christian feelings and experiences.

As Schleiermacher worked out the implications of his theology of experience in his book The Christian Faith, he sought to distinguish two ways in which we become conscious of God’s Spirit, two modes of apprehending our dependence on him. The first was in our experience of the totality of the natural world. The second was related to our awareness of sin and redemption. To put it in simplified terms, we might say that Schleiermacher’s theology attempted to do justice to both general and specific revelation. Or to put it another way, his theology consciously had two points of focus, creation and recreation theology.

While generalizations are hazardous, it seems to me that experiential theology today is having problems similar to those Schleiermacher encountered in emphasizing concurrently these complementary aspects of the Spirit’s work. Relational theology, for example, in reasserting the role of the Spirit in creation, has tended to emphasize the insights of psychology and the human-potential movement. The cure of the soul has been discussed in terms of Maslow’s “Peak Experience,” Mowrer’s New Psychology, Transcendental Meditation, “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.,” the need to show your anger, a sanctified sensuality (and sexuality), and so forth. The uniqueness of the Spirit’s re-creative role as an agent of Christ effecting supernatural change in the life of the believer has tended to become blurred by this redefinition in natural terms.

It was such a danger that the theologians who met at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1975 warned against. In their appeal to the Church, they pinpointed the following themes (among others) as “superficially attractive, but upon closer examination … false and debilitating to the Church’s life and work”: “Theme 6: To realize one’s potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation. Theme 7: Since what is human is good, evil can adequately be understood as failure to realize human potential. Theme 8: The sole purpose of worship is to promote individual self-realization and human community.” What these theologians saw was a movement in current theology toward trivializing the gospel promise, underestimating the pervasiveness of sin, and downplaying the independent reality of God.

Although relational theology has by no means jettisoned the Gospel, sin’s reality, or God’s independence, its stress on self-realization and human community makes this an ongoing peril. Because rebirth in Christ through a personal experience with his Spirit has been central to all definitions of evangelicalism, this danger of overemphasizing the Spirit’s work in and through the natural remains only this—a danger. Evangelicals must take note, however, of the need to maintain the uniqueness of the Spirit’s work in the Church, apart from his creative and preservative role in creation at large.

Charismatic theology has tended to overstress the other focus of the Spirit’s work, his re-creative role within the faithful community. In the process, the Spirit’s creative witness in the world at large has been glossed over or denied. Within the charismatic movement, separation from the world has been a central tenet. Biblical passages such as “[escape] the defilements of the world,” “do not love the world or the things in the world,” “whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God,” and “keep oneself unstained from the world” are used as divine support for underinvolvement or noninvolvement in cultural activity, politics, and secular education. When this suspicion of the world is combined with a life of piety—of study, prayer, singing in the Spirit, group sharing and praise, faith healing, speaking in tongues, evangelism, mutual edification and support—the result is an intense concentration of energy within the believing community. Little time and interest remain for outside pursuits.

An aspect of the charismatic movement contributing to the neglect of the Spirit’s work in creation at large has been the tendency toward “charismania,” a preoccupation or fixation with the gifts of the Spirit so that this experience becomes an end in itself and the only adequate experience of the Spirit. The Spirit’s creative contribution in society and nature is neglected.

If the evangelical community is to be enriched by reflection on the Spirit in our midst, the Spirit’s role must neither be limited to the Church nor reduced to God’s creative presence in the world. Biblical theology can serve as our paradigm in this regard. For example, the insights of Old Testament wisdom literature (with its focus on creation theology) can be productively brought to bear on Pauline theology (with its focus on redemptive theology), and vice versa. In the wisdom literature, the Spirit’s role in creation is appreciated and highlighted in and of itself, even while on the horizon we are pushed outward to look for a further, necessary re-creative act by God (Job, Ecclesiastes). With Paul, on the other hand, the Spirit’s role in re-creation (both in redemption and sanctification) is emphasized, while we still look outward to that work of the Spirit which is preliminary and generally available to all men (Romans, Acts 14:15–18). If one centers on Pauline thought, one might tend to undervalue the richness of created life, of common grace. But to center, as wisdom literature does, only on the Spirit as observed in created life is to bar oneself from the glorious further revelation he provides in Christ. The Spirit’s work both in the Church and in creation at large must be valued within any adequate evangelical theology.

The exact nature of an experientially based theology has not yet been delineated within the evangelical community. Richard Quebedeaux’s The Young Evangelicals has perhaps provided a preliminary and hastily drawn map of the direction it might take. Whether this proves to be so or not, evangelicals will need to ask two questions continually as they develop their formulations of the faith based in their experience of the Spirit. First, does a stress on the Spirit open naturally and authentically into an emphasis on the Word? Second, have the work of the Spirit in creation (natural revelation) and the work of the Spirit in re-creation (redemption and sanctification) been kept in dynamic union? An evangelical theology of experience must be bipolar—Spirit and Word, creation and re-creation. If it is, it could be definitive for the life and witness of the Church in the years ahead.

From the Church’s Valentine Box

Do you remember those sheets of cheap paper, purchased for a nickel and given to assorted people on Valentine’s Day? They didn’t represent True Love—the loving kind had cupids and hearts on lacy paper, not caricatures in lurid color on newsprint. But they still expressed a kind of crude affection, like unrefined oil that sometimes spills and mucks up our beaches, yet is necessary to make the world go round.

Here is a recent offering of newsprint valentines addressed to familiar people in the church.

TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE WOMEN’S FELLOWSHIP:

Hail to thee, Queen of Potluck Meals,

Of circles, rummage and bazaar deals;

Shall our chicken be creamed, with peas from a can,

Or baked in the oven with rice in a pan?

I’ll call the whole committee together so we can come to a united decision.

TO THE YOUTH WORKER:

Your years, dear friend, show more and more,

And have you seen the Wittenburg Door?

Exit relational theology,

And enter gerontology.

Wow! Far out! Could you talk a little louder, please?

TO THE PASTOR:

You complain that people at twelve o’clock sharp

Stop paying attention and begin to carp;

Yet knowing they’ve already listened plenty,

You “Finally brethren” until twelve-twenty.

Since TV came in, I’ve found more sin and less and less hunger for the Word.

TO THE TRUSTEES:

The Singing Christmas Tree was good,

But where’ll we ever store the wood

That’s cluttering up the parking lot

Until December’s fresh “Fear not”?

Is there room in the hangar with the Gospel Blimp?

TO THE CUSTODIAN:

We give you our pews, our toilets and kitchen

Expecting them to be made shiny and glisten,

And when after thirty-six meetings they’re not,

We want you to know that your smile helps a lot.

I’m glad. Now how about raising my pay or giving me help?

TO THE BUS DRIVER:

We admire your courage and nerves of steel,

Ignoring the shouts and a missing wheel,

As you stop to pick up those unsaved twins,

Total Depravity and Original Sin.

My trouble comes more from the Saving Graces.

EUTYCHUS VIII

In the Key Of the Classics

I sincerely appreciate your recent editorial on Benjamin Britten (Jan. 7). As an evangelical and a church musician who is also working on a graduate degree, I find that there is far too little material dealing with the area of serious music and composers as it relates to us in the evangelical music ministry. As far as I know there is not one interdenominational music magazine which is keyed toward the trained evangelical musician. I hope you will provide more space and reporting on such in future issues.

WESLEY SMITH

The First Assembly of God

Cleveland, Ohio

No More On the Negative

From its inception I have subscribed to and enjoyed CHRISTIANITY TODAY. You are to be commended on a job well done. But I am getting tired of articles … by disgruntled ministers who couldn’t make a go of it in the ministry. I tried to wade through Andre Bustanoby’s “Why Pastors Drop Out” (Jan. 7). I couldn’t even force myself to concentrate on it. Please, a more affirmative tone on the ministry, which is the greatest job and challenge in the world.

RAYMOND GAYLORD

Cascade Christian Church

Grand Rapids, Mich.

I am constantly amazed at God’s good timing. When we need a word of understanding, he always seems to supply it. Last Tuesday, after a rather difficult weekend, I returned to my study to find the January 7 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY waiting for me. “Why Pastors Drop Out” provided much needed encouragement. It is sometimes comforting to know that others have gone through similar feelings and that there is hope.

DANIEL S. MILLER

Monmouth First Baptist Church

Monmouth, Ore.

Puissant Poem

Thank you for courageously publishing “For Christ the Lord” by George E. McDonough (Jan. 7). The poem was puissant and deeply Christian. (I suppose mine may be a minority view.)

(The Rev.) HENRY HUBERT HUTTO

Austin, Texas

Attention to Family Planning

The editorial “Matching Actions With Confessions” (Nov. 19) has come to my attention. I would like to call attention to some inaccuracies in the paragraph purporting to describe the family-planning program to be conducted through Buddhist monks in Thailand which the Planned Parenthood Program/Church World Service plans to partially support.

1. It would be incorrect to say that in certain parts of Thailand the best way to help with population planning is to work through Buddhist monks who are community leaders. It is more factual to say that it is one way which might prove effective. Since it has not been tried as yet, its success or failure has yet to be determined.

2. The agency responsible for the training is the Asian Cultural Forum on Development, a non-governmental and ecumenical organization. It is associated and actively collaborates with the Freedom from Hunger and Action for Development Campaign of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Its membership comes from the principal religious cultural groups of Asia—Buddhist, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.

3. I suspect that far from being insulated from any gospel witness, the religious beliefs of all members will be thoroughly in witness because of the very nature of family-planning education.

4. And finally, Christians, both Thailand nationals and American missionaries, were sought for their opinions. The response has been full support of the project.

ILUMINADA RODRIQUEZ

Director, Planned Parenthood Program

Church World Service

National Council of Churches

New York, N.Y.

Joseph Hopkins’s interview on the Children of God and its founder, “Moses” Berg, is important reading. Knowing about this sect, you might be able to keep some young person from falling under its spell.

Robert Johnston tackles a subject currently in vogue in some circles, relational theology, tracing it back to Schleiermacher. He weighs the subjectives of experience over against objective revelational realities.

After learning about relational theology, go on to read William Willimon’s and Philip Yancey’s articles about that most intensive, most challenging, and potentially most rewarding human relationship: marriage.

The voices of those locked in hopeless poverty in Latin America should ring in the ears of Christians north of the border. The miseries there are, whether we recognize it or not, burdens upon our consciences.

Before the presidential election last November the National Council of Churches publicized “An Open Letter to North American Christians.” Taken at face value, the letter is something that no sensitive evangelical can read without conviction and sadness. While ignoring the denials of civil rights and distortions of justice by the present government of Cuba and the fact that Cuba is locked into an exploitative system, the document is moderate in tone and speaks eloquently for the voiceless.

Regrettably, voices like these tend to be drowned out by the strident tones of the advocates of liberation theology. This theology has been patterned after such models as black and feminist liberation. It represents one possible response of concerned Latins to oppressive economic and political situations that seem totally unresponsive to peaceable attempts at change.

Advocates of such a theology face serious perils—or at least serious temptations—that we need to take into account as we hear them.

One peril that shows through the literature of liberation theology is an uncritical use of biblical models. The major model currently in use is that of the Exodus. Rather too easily, in my opinion, Latin American theologians assume that today’s oppressed people are the heirs of God’s Exodus—that they are the present-day counterparts of the Israelitish people in Egypt.

Seldom are all facets of the Exodus account considered. For instance, Moses’ abortive use of violence as a means of deliverance, with its forty-year cooling-off period, is seldom mentioned. Nor is it observed that the Exodus was Jehovah’s deliverance, not a seizure of power by an underground movement.

Attempts to domesticate God have not been particularly successful in the past, and there is little reason to suppose that this current form will be any more effective. It is precisely this form of idolatry that emerges as any group assumes for itself a “people of God” role.

It is disturbing that liberation theologians do not give more attention to building a set of common values and adequate symbols among their peoples. Without these, any liberation by violence will probably lead only to a change of oppressors. Mere oppression neither makes any people to be “the people of God” nor guarantees that a victory by force will produce lasting liberation.

A second peril grows out of the first. Some liberation theologians suggest that the Exodus is a model by which all oppressed peoples, regardless of their circ*mstances, can understand their plight and find deliverance from their miseries. It may be questioned whether the Bible can be used indiscriminately to justify all political and economic struggles.

A third peril lies hidden in the rationale advanced for this position. Hugo Assmann, who with Gustavo Gutiérrez and Juan Luis Segundo may be regarded as a spokesman for Latin liberation theology, highlights this aspect of the problem. In his Theology For a Nomad Church, Assmann makes clear the movement’s assumption that the purely “salvationist” understanding of the Christian mission has been rendered obsolete by what Gutiérrez calls “the unvarnished affirmation of the possibility of universal salvation.”

By this historicizing (or relativizing) of the Scriptures, the liberation theologians think they have effectively disposed of the historic understanding of the Great Commission. They suggest that the “liberating” work of the Church is now a purely horizontal thrust into the world. The dualism of nature-grace is set aside in favor of what Segundo calls the “salvation of history” rather than salvation history.

This points to a further peril, that of supposing that a “pilgrim church” must necessarily be outside society, a “nomad church.” In practical terms, this means that liberation theology may fairly be called a “guerrilla theology.” Among the features of guerrillas’ mind set are these: they desire direct confrontation with all opponents; they consider themselves alienated outsiders; they give priority to “psychological and motivational superiority”; and they seek to prove themselves by slaying the oppressor.

Latin liberation theology appeals largely to Marxist models. This accounts for its simplistic assumption that all human ills grow out of the misdoings of one class, which is regarded as the bearer of all evil. In the radical form of this theology, North American capitalism is seen as the sole cause of injustice and misery in Latin America.

Its advocates can thus easily adopt the myopic stances of the United Nations World Population Conference in Bucharest and the World Food Conference in Rome, both held in 1974, and close their eyes to the problems raised by burgeoning populations and tradition-hindered ways of agriculture. This is a source of great confusion.

A guerrilla movement may derive motivation from simplistic assumptions like these. It will at the same time serve to turn off responsible persons. And while many Latins may think in broad Marxist categories, they are not fools. They understand that in Marxist lands, one set of injustices has been exchanged for another.

The letter mentioned earlier reflects a reasoned outlook at this point. Its writers recognize that at least some of the miseries and frustrations in Latin lands stem from “our own weaknesses and sins.”

How shall evangelicals respond to liberation theologies? They must first distinguish between voices and decide which are responsible. On the basis of this decision, they have at least a two-fold duty. First, they must serve as a voice for the poor and the disadvantaged in keeping their case before other believers. Second—and this is more difficult—they must bring pressure to bear upon government(s) to do two things: first, to stop supporting oppressive regimes, whether of the right or the left, for political and economic advantage; and second, to restrain by regulation business interests and institutions that exploit men and women below the border. The followers of the Friend of the Poor can do no less.

Even though Pam Werner, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Sidney C. Werner of Scarsdale, New York, had been in the Unification Church for a number of months, she maintained periodic contact with her parents—an act discouraged by leaders of the controversial Korean-offshoot sect founded by Sun Myung Moon. When Moonie leaders in New York learned, however, that Pam, 28, had told her parents of her whereabouts, they changed her name and forbade further contact.

But Pam agreed last September 18 to meet her parents briefly at the Washington Monument while they were visiting the capital. At that meeting Pam’s mother persuaded her to meet for “shopping” in a nearby Maryland suburb the next day. What Pam didn’t know was that the parents were armed with a court order, a team of deprogrammers, and a body guard, ready to take her off for intensive “deprogramming” from the cult. The two young attorneys who head the Freedom of Thought Foundation, based in Tucson, Arizona, had been unable to get the usual “temporary conservatorship” (guardianship) order from a Washington judge, but they had secured one from a judge in nearby Maryland.

The next day, after six weeks of tailing the girl, the deprogrammers, plus local police, served the papers and whisked her off to a motel, then on to Ohio, where it took three days to “break” her from the rip of Moon doctrine.

After that, she spent thirty days in “rehabilitation” at the Freedom of Thought Foundation ranch, perched on a bluff on the outskirts of Tucson. Then she went home happily with her parents, who are of Unitarian background. They had spent at least $10,000 for the deprogramming.

Deprogrammings aren’t new; they’ve been going on at least since the San Diego-based patriarch of the art, Ted Patrick, started breaking the rigid “mind control” some sects are alleged to have over young converts who renounce past life-styles, parents, and friends for the austere discipline and often heretical theology of the so-called new religions. Patrick is now doing time in a California jail for falsely imprisoning and detaining cultists against their will (see August 27, 1976, issue, page 4). He has been granted work-release privileges, a ruling that evokes expressions of outrage from his foes.

But the Freedom of Thought Foundation (FTF) is unique—and inside the law, apparently—because the two attorneys, Michael Edward Trauscht, 28 and Wayne Howard, 29, have found the only legal means so far for parents to gain custody of their children for a thirty-day period. The temporary conservatorship or guardianship document is issued by a judge on the basis of testimony from psychologists, physicians, former cult members, and often the parents themselves.

Trauscht, a restless, energetic former county prosecutor, says his deprogramming team has already extricated more than seventy young persons from the cults since the foundation “went legal” just over a year ago. Trauscht, Howard, and Joe Alexander, 58, the chief deprogrammer, would like to make Tucson the anti-cult capital of the world—and they just may succeed if court challenges fail to squelch their method of getting young people to “think for themselves” again.

But the cults, supported by vast resources and (in the case of Moon’s Unification Church and the Hare Krishna movement, for example) far-flung empires, are fighting back with their own lawyers. And some religious groups, like the National Council of Churches, civil-rights leaders, and organizations like Americans United for Separation of Church and State, are raising questions about the legality, propriety, and permanency of deprogramming tactics.

An outspoken opponent, during a Los Angeles press conference called by the headquarters of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, called the FTF and the growing network of related deprogramming groups (nearly every major city now has one) “an outrageous nationwide conspiracy to deprive people of their civil and religious rights.”

Trauscht, in a hurried interview in Tucson between deprogramming forays, insisted that he agrees persons should be guaranteed freedom of religion, speech, and association. But, he added, “somewhere inherent in these rights is freedom of thought. We argue that the courts have a duty to see that those rights are not taken away.”

Senior deprogrammer Joe Alexander, a former auto dealer who claims to have deprogrammed about 600 persons in the past five years, his wife Esther, their son Joe, Jr., 25, and Trauscht and Howard opened the FTF rehabilitation center in Tucson with a $105,000 donation from the parents of a southern California young person deprogrammed from an Eastern religion.

Typically, a deprogram “rescue team” from the FTF operates like this: Trauscht acts as a legal consultant, Howard as a lawyer for the parents, the Alexanders and young ex-cult members as deprogrammers and as restrainers in case the subject tries to escape.

Tucson psychologist Kevin Gilmartin, 27, has frequently gone along to study the group or assist in counseling, though he says he never begins a counseling relationship unless hired by the parents with the subject’s approval.

“Prior to Trauscht’s legal precedent,” said Alexander, “we would snatch the kid on a street corner and hustle him to a motel room.” That kind of strong-arm approach is what landed Patrick in jail and precipitated criminal charges against an Arcadia, California, family several months ago for falsely imprisoning Madonna Slavin, a Krishna devotee. The Krishnas and the young woman also slapped a $2.5 million damage suit against her relatives and the deprogrammers (none was connected with the FTF).

Although the FTF approach, with the court order, is more sophisticated, the deprogramming target, after being watched during a stakeout for the appropriate moment for seizure, is still rushed to a motel room, usually within a short drive of where he is apprehended. There he is subjected to intense questioning, often for many hours spread over several days. The critical point is reached, deprogrammers say, when the subject suddenly “sees the light” and renounces his cultic faith.

“Look, I’m not here to take God out of your life,” Alexander told a young person under deprogramming recently. “I want you to realize that what you’re involved in is not of God.”

Not everyone on the receiving end of the deprogramming agrees, and some have returned to the religious group from which the FTF was trying to remove them.

One, Walter Robert Taylor, 22, a young monk taken from the Monastery of the Holy Protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Oklahoma City last July 15, returned to the monastery a few weeks later after being left unguarded in an Episcopal monastery in Phoenix. He recently told his story at press conferences, including one held at National Council of Churches headquarters in New York.

The son of a gynecologist in Richland, Washington, Taylor was raised an Episcopalian. He left college in 1972 to join the monastery, which is described as part of the Old Catholic church. Taylor’s parents claim the monastery was made up of Hindu followers at the time he joined. A Hindu group did occupy the Oklahoma City property at one time but left before the monks moved in.

(The Old Catholic movement grew out of protests against the Vatican in Europe many years ago. The only North American body officially recognized by the mainstream Old Catholic group is the Polish National Catholic Church of America, which claims 282,000 members in 162 congregations. The liberal ordination practices of several dissident Old Catholic bishops over the years has resulted in the formation of a number of small groups identifying themselves as Old Catholics. Many of their beliefs parallel traditional Catholic doctrine.)

In depositions in a case now pending before the Oklahoma Supreme Court, Taylor alleges that the guardianship proceeding was held without notice and in the absence of his attorney, that psychologist Gilmartin submitted a letter of professional opinion to the court “without ever having seen or examined me,” and that FTF deprogrammers abused him, kept him without sufficient food and sleep in a motel room presided over by a “goon squad,” and ripped off his monastic clothes while he was held down bodily by four persons. He was taken from Oklahoma City to a motel in Akron, Ohio, then to Howard’s home in Mesa, Arizona, where, alleges Taylor, Howard “discussed his sexual exploits and fornications and encouraged me to have sexual intercourse, which is contrary to my monastic practices and beliefs.” He says he was forced by Howard to sign legal papers to the effect that he didn’t want an attorney and that he would remain peacefully with the deprogrammers.

Next, he was taken to an Episcopal monastery in Phoenix “in an attempt to get me to change my monastic allegiance.” Left alone overnight, he telephoned his attorney, Charles Lane, also a member of Taylor’s Oklahoma City monastery, who sent him a plane ticket.

Meanwhile, the original guardianship order was voided by another judge a week after it was issued, and the case bogged down in legal hassles. At issue in the Oklahoma Supreme Court is whether Taylor’s parents can ever again institute guardianship proceedings.

The battle lines are forming. Lane says he wants to see the deprogrammers jailed as kidnappers. “This has gone completely beyond the borders of deprogramming members of cults,” declared United Methodist clergyman Dean Kelley, a church-state specialist with the NCC and the American Civil Liberties Union. Kelley believes the ACLU and church groups may mount a campaign to stop deprogramming. Andrew Gunn, executive director, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told reporters his group is studying the situation. He expressed concern “about the attitudes courts are taking” toward deprogramming. “The religious rights of everyone are imperiled if deprogramming is allowed to continue the way it has been,” he warned. Howard, however, says the claims are exaggerated and will not stand up in court.

Appearing in the New York press conferences with Taylor (known to his fellow monks as “Father Philaret”) was Deborah Dudgeon, 23, of Toronto. In 1974, she recounted, Ted Patrick and a team of Canadians attempted unsuccessfully to deprogram her after she converted to Roman Catholicism (she was raised a Protestant), dropped out of college in favor of pursuing social work, and joined a community of ten other young Catholics. Patrick was ordered to stay out of Canada by officials as a result of that case.

One of the most debatable aspects of deprogramming is whether or not physical force and abuse are inflicted by deprogrammers. Several former Moonies, interviewed at the sprawling ranch house used as the rehabilitation center, insisted that there was no physical harrassment during their deprogramming, though they were aware it would be futile to attempt escape during the first few days. They said Trauscht always tells a subject he will be free to go back to his cult after thirty days if he wants to.

According to Esther Alexander, who acts as a kind of “substitute mother” during the rehab period in the Tucson house, no one who has stayed the full month has returned to a sect. “We make friends with the kids first,” she said. “They are allowed to eat and sleep as much as they wish, play games, or work on crafts. Sometimes I take the girls into town for shopping.”

No effort is made to indoctrinate the deprogrammees with any specific religion during their stay at the ranch, say spokesmen, though nonsectarian prayers are said before meals. During the final week they are usually allowed to have Bibles in their possession; before that Bible reading is discouraged “because of the way it has been twisted and programmed in the convert’s mind,” according to Alexander, who was raised a Roman Catholic.

Gilmartin, the psychologist, says he wholeheartedly supports the FTF but is not a member of the team. The worst aspect of the “new religion” cults, he says, is “a lot of waste in potentially very creative people.” He believes “some kids have been helped by the cults—others devastated.” Those particularly susceptible, he believes, are young people “just entering adulthood, bright people who are abstractly related, often into things like painting and philosophy.”

Many former cultists, however, testify they were “psychologically kidnapped” by cult leaders who turned them into glassy-eyed “robots for God.”

An Oakland, California, attorney is going all out to break the chain of legal victories won by the FTF. Ralph Baker, representing a young man who rejoined the Moonies after an abortive deprogramming, says he is seeking a “test case” to challenge the constitutionality of the temporary conservatorship approach. He is convinced that it is a misuse of the law, which was originally designed to protect the elderly and senile from irrational acts such as giving away all their money.

The battle has begun to determine just what kind of coercion or “mind control” is involved, both in cult proselytism and in deprogramming, and the courts may well be the arena for the fray.

For frantic parents, the attempt to “rescue” a son or daughter from a cult is costly. Legal fees alone can run $3,000 to $5,000. With transportation expenses of the professional deprogrammers, motel rooms, meals, and other costs, the tab can easily reach $25,000.

Whatever the cost, business is brisk. “I’m getting twenty to fifty calls a day from worried families,” Trauscht said recently. “People are begging for help.”

Alexander, who said he gets ten requests to deprogram Moonies for every one to deprogram a follower of some other religious group, told of a man who pleaded for help for his 16-year-old daughter, who apparently was taken from a laundromat and was last seen on the West Coast with Moonies.

“You ask me how can I do this?” Alexander shrugged. “How can they do something like that?”

Scientology: Filing On

An “amicable settlement” was reportedly reached in a $1.5 million libel suit filed in Los Angeles in 1971 by the Church of Scientology against the publishers and author of the book, The Scandal of Scientology. Financial details were not disclosed. The church said it has agreed to withdraw the charges, and the author, Paulette Cooper of New York, has agreed to sign a statement of apology and admission of error.

Claims against Tower Publications, the publisher, were dropped in 1974 following a settlement in which Tower withdrew the paperback book from the market and paid a nominal cash settlement of $500, according to a Los Angeles Times report. Tower also issued an apology to the church. Officials of Tower said pursuing the matter was not worth the legal costs. Court records show that Tower won a ruling in 1973 that it had been improperly served with documents in the suit.

Last month Gregory Taylor, 26, a Church of Scientology member who was wrongly arrested in September in an apparent case of mistaken identity, filed a $750,000 suit against officials involved in the case, including agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service. The agents were allegedly seeking to serve an arrest warrant on a former member of the Church of Scientology on charges of using forged government identification in order to gain access to confidential records. The IRS acknowledged the error and apologized in a letter.

On another front, the Scientologists have been filing a number of requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to determine what the federal government has in its files on them. After a three-year legal struggle with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Scientologists recently obtained documents that “indicate the FBI employed illegal search and seizure against the church,” according to a Scientology release. The records allegedly show that the FBI in 1958 investigated a film the church was producing and “seized” the film from the manufacturer for private viewing.

In early 1975 the church appealed to President Ford to direct federal agencies to make available “to any religion or church, upon their request, any records or information collected on that religion and its activities, and to expunge from those files and records … any false, malicious, or defamatory information that can be proven to exist.” Months of hassling with White House personnel ensued, and not long ago Administration officials ended the discussion by expressing belief the federal agencies were abiding by the FOIA. They suggested that if abuses were suspected the Scientologists should go to court.

A number of other church groups are also seeking access to files under the FOIA, but they have had little success so far, according to news releases. The groups include the U.S. Jesuit Conference, the American Friends Service Committee, the United Church of Christ, the Mennonites, and the Mosque of Islam.

The Church of Scientology has also responded to attacks on it by General Secretary Philip Potter of the World Council of Churches. In a speech in North Carolina last fall, Potter likened Scientology to totalitarianism, saying it produced a “kind of religiosity, a certain kind of schizophrenia … a judgmental mind.” Criticizing it and the Unification Church, he said both movements can produce a “criminal personality,” are “quite frightening,” and prey on “sensitive spirits.”

In reply, Joyce Gaines, a Scientology public-affairs officer, called for the promotion and strengthening of dialogue between churches, not its destruction. Religions ought to join together “to bring about peace of mind and trust in one’s fellow man,” she commented.

Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and his family recently experienced personal tragedy. A young man who died under mysterious circ*mstances in Las Vegas in mid-November was identified weeks later as Hubbard’s eldest son, Geoffery Quentin McCaully Hubbard, 22, of Clearwater, Florida. He was found in a semi-comatose condition in his car near the Las Vegas airport, and he died a short time later in a hospital, where he was listed as a “John Doe.” Police and private investigators were looking into the death last month.

Brazil: Indian Fight

Interior Minister M. R. Reis of Brazil says his government will ban all Protestant and Catholic missionaries from work among the country’s indigenous Indian tribes next year unless they cooperate with official policy. The government has called for the rapid integration of Indians into modern society. Bilingual education will be ended; the Indians will be taught to read and write only Portuguese. They will be responsible for preserving their own culture, asserted Reis in published reports. He claimed he had never seen a religious mission help Indians make progress. One tribe, said he, lives in misery within six miles of settlers with modern conveniences.

Mission leaders, anthropologists, and even government Indian officials, however, contend that the policy will condemn the primitive tribes to cultural extinction and social disintegration. The missionaries insist that the social welfare of the Indians is a high-priority item in their work. They also criticize the rapid expansion of settlers into Amazonian lands, saying it has resulted in exploitation, social disintegration, and deadly disease among the Indians, along with the loss of traditional hunting grounds.

The Indians are believed to number between 100,000 and 200,000.

Graham on Drink: ‘Don’t’

Billy Graham said it again last month, but there are probably still people who believe he has failed to speak clearly enough on the beverage alcohol issue.

“It is my judgment that because of the devastating problem that alcohol has become in America,” the evangelist explained, “it is better for Christians to be teetotalers except for medicinal purposes.” He made the statement in a message prepared for delivery on his weekly “Hour of Decision” radio program. The date for airing the sermon, “The Abuse of Alcohol,” had not been announced by mid-January, however.

Meanwhile, Graham’s Minneapolis office printed the message in pamphlet form and used it to answer the inquiries about remarks attributed to him in news media around the nation. The subject came up initially in a Miami Herald interview. In the course of remarks about President Carter’s announced decision not to serve anything stronger than wine in the White House, Graham said that the wine of New Testament times was fermented and not simply grape juice, as some evangelicals contend. The evangelist said the paper’s article was accurate in its quotation “as far as it went.” However, when a news agency rewrote the Herald piece and circulated it widely it was distorted, he reported. People around the country wrote to him and to their local news media to object to his “new position,” and he then wrote the longer treatment of the issue. Among other things, Graham quoted biblical authorities as saying that wine of Bible times was a weaker variety than today’s.

“The creeping paralysis of alcoholism is sapping our morals, wrecking our homes, and luring people away from the church,” Graham declared in the message. While finding no foundation in the Bible for an absolute prohibition on drink, he appeals to the fourteenth chapter of Romans (the warning against causing a brother to stumble) as reason enough for Christians to abstain.

Deaths

Two well-known Christian figures died last month, both of heart attacks: Harry Willis Miller, 97, an American, and Bishop Hanns Lilje, 77, a German.

Miller spent twenty-five years in China as a medical missionary of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. A thyroid surgeon, he developed a process to make soybean milk to feed malnourished Chinese children. The product is now widely used among the 10 per cent of the world’s population allergic to regular milk. He founded several hospitals. Among his patients were Chou En-lai, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, Alexander Graham Bell, and William Jennings Bryan. He also served in Trinidad, Taiwan, Japan, and Libya. He died on his way to a church service in Riverside, California.

Bishop Lilje, an international Lutheran and ecumenical leader, died in Hannover, West Germany. He helped guide the reforming of German Lutheranism after the fall of the Third Reich. In 1944 the Nazis jailed him for preaching “inner resistance.” Because of ties to a group that attempted to assassinate Adolph Hitler, he was sentenced to death. He was saved by the advancing Allies “and the grace of God,” Lilje told interviewers later. He said he refused to be an active member of the resistance movement but gave pastoral advice to its members, conceding that with the realities of Hitler “there may be a situation in which violence is the only way out.” At the same time, he ruled out church support for “sheer bloody revolution.”

A noted linguist and author, Lilje took a tolerant attitude toward committed Christian leaders in eastern Europe who must make difficult decisions regarding witness and church activity. “From my own experience under the Nazis, I know that the lines are not always clearly drawn,” he said. This approach led to a controversy with the late Bishop Otto Dibelius over the extent to which a believer owes allegiance to an anti-Christian state. Even a totalitarian state has its authority from God, maintained Lilje, although he allowed for Christian resistance when a state turns against “the divine order and forces citizens to do the same.…”

He was presiding bishop of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany (a federation of eight territorial Lutheran bodies) for fourteen years, president of the Lutheran World Federation for five years, and a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches since its formation in 1948 (he was a WCC president 1968–75). He retired from his administrative duties as bishop of Hannover in 1971.

Religion in Transit

Concern over excessive violence and sex on television is widespread. Chicago civil-rights figure Jesse Jackson, who now considers himself part of the evangelical camp, says he may attempt to mount a movement against it. A number of pastors across the nation are calling on their members to protest to sponsors; some churches plan boycotts. The Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) has announced a nationwide boycott of TV April 11 through 18 “as a symbol of our discontent” with “unwholesome” TV trends.

Nearly 100 persons identified with the anti-war movement last month made public an appeal they signed that was critical of Viet Nam’s human-rights record (see January 21 issue, page 47). It was made public after Dinh Ba Thi, the Vietnamese observer at the United Nations, rejected it. Two of the signers, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, now have second thoughts: they joined three non-signers (including Don Luce, president of Clergy and Laity Concerned) in complaining that the appeal was made public “in an irresponsible manner.” They say “new materials” from the Vietnamese show the human-rights problem is being worked on.

Bible Presbyterian minister Carl McIntire mortgaged his Faith Seminary property in Philadelphia for $425,000 to finance the purchase of radio station WXUR years ago. Then he spent $600,000, according to his calculations, in a losing battle to save the station when the Federal Communications Commission declined to renew its license. Now the mortgage company is demanding payment of the $202,000 balance on the seminary mortgage, and the beleaguered McIntire—fresh out of prospective lenders—warns that the school faces foreclosure. He placed some of his New Jersey shore properties on the market recently to help raise cash.

Campus Crusade for Christ recently hosted a “Campus Cults Summit Conference” attended by representatives of nine other Christian groups that work among college-age young people. The result, say spokesmen, will be a coordinated effort to reach cult members and “those who are subtly influenced by cult teachings.” A “campus cults resource kit” will be produced as part of the plan. Organizations discussed included Transcendental Meditation, the Unification Church, the Children of God, The Way, and the Local Church.

Editor Roger Dewey has announced the “temporary” termination of Inside, an evangelical social-issues magazine published by the Massachusetts-based Christians for Social Justice, in favor of a projected political newsletter.

In its first month of distribution, the American Bible Society’s “Good News Bible” sold one million copies—exceeding records set by other best-sellers. For example, evangelist Billy Graham’s book, Angels, God’s Secret Agents, the best-selling non-fiction book of 1975, sold 810,000 copies in its first three months, say ABS officials. They expect sales of ten million copies of the Bible during 1977.

The Washington National Cathedral (Episcopal) in the nation’s capital is in trouble. It has an operating deficit in excess of $2 million, according to news sources, and a total debt of more than $11 million. There have been reductions in staff, the cathedral will be open ninety minutes less each day to visitors and those wishing to pray, and other cutbacks have been initiated to reduce expenses by at least 25 per cent.

The two men Gary Mark Gilmore said he murdered last July had some things in common: both were descendents of Mormon pioneers, both were students at Brigham Young University, both had served as Mormon missionaries, and each left a wife and small child. Gilmore last month became the first person executed for a capital offense in the United States since 1967. A vigil of seventeen persons outside the prison was led by United Presbyterian executive William P. Thompson, president of the National Council of Churches. Other prominent clergy also participate.

President Paul Jacobs of the northern California, Nevada, and Hawaii district of the Luthern Church-Missouri Synod, has become the sixth LCMS district president to resign as a result of the doctrinal controversy in the Missouri Synod. He cited disagreement with LCMS leadership and policies. In a Dallas meeting, some middle-of-the-road district presidents laid down a five-point platform for the future direction of the LCMS. It speaks out strongly for maintaining inter-Lutheran unity, rights of local congregations, the validity of certain activities operating “independent of the official organization,” and a political process that is not “manipulated.”

There are perils to ministry in the inner city, as any urban worker knows. Last month Garnell Stuart Copeland, 35, the gifted organist and choirmaster at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in downtown Washington, D.C., came home late one evening after a churce service. Three youths jumped him outside his home and stabbed him to death in an apparent robbery attempt. Months earlier the church’s rector, Edgar Romig, was attacked and seriously wounded (he lost an eye) in the neighborhood after driving Copeland home.

Personalia

Arthur McKay, 58, pastor of Knox Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, was named senior minister of the 1, 232-member New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., where Abraham Lincoln and other former Presidents worshiped. McKay is a former president of McCormick Seminary in Chicago and of the Rochester (New York) Center for Theological Studies. He was one of 254 candidates (including ten women) considered for the $31,835-a-year position, according to a WashingtonPost story. Among his predecessors was the late Peter Marshall.

Last year actress Ann B. Davis gave up her 25-year theater and acting career (“Schultzy” on the Robert Cummings TV show and “Alice” on “The Brady Bunch”) and sold her Los Angeles home to join a charismatic Christian community of twelve adults and six children at the Denver home of Episcopal bishop William C. Frey and his wife. The year since then has been “one of the best” of her life, she told a reporter. It all started three years ago with a quest for a deeper Christian experience and attendance at Bible-study and evangelism-training sessions in Hollywood (see October 10, 1975, issue, page 52). The Frey community is an attempt to live in the church and go to the world instead of the other way around, she said.

Stephen W. Nease was installed as fifth president of the thirty-two-year-old Nazarene Seminary in Kansas City. The school has 455 students, a 54 per cent increase in three years.

Pastor L. Doward McBain of First Baptist Church, Phoenix, Arizona, was named president of the American Baptist Seminary of the West in Berkeley, California.

Clayton L. (Mike) Berg, Jr., of the Latin America Mission has assumed the executive leadership of the mission, succeeding former general director Horace L. Fenton, Jr., who will represent LAM in an at-large ministry. LAM plans to move its headquarters from New Jersey to Miami.

World Scene

A new Protestant seminary in Yugoslavia has been accredited by the government and will be in a position to grant degrees at a university level upon completion of five years of work, according to a report published by the Lausanne Continuation Committee. The school, housed in a Lutheran church in Zagreb, has about thirty students. Leaders Vlado Deutsch of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church and Josip Horak of the Baptist Union spearheaded the founding of the school as a result of their attending the 1974 Lausanne congress on evangelization. Of Yugoslavia’s 22 million population, 125,000 are Protestants. Large numbers are Orthodox (six million), Roman Catholic (five million), and Muslim (1.5 million).

All Southern Baptist Convention missionaries will be out of East Malaysia (on the north coast of Borneo) by mid-1977 because of unrenewed visas, according to SBC sources. It’s all part of the plan of the government of Sarawak state to “reduce drastically” the number of missionaries (others as well as Southern Baptists).

Jimmy Carter’s phenomenal climb reached its climax last month when the devout Baptist layman from the peanut farmlands of southwest Georgia was sworn into office as America’s thirty-ninth president.

Carter, whose outspokenness about his spiritual rebirth led the way in making the nation’s Bicentennial year also the year of the evangelical, said his inaugural marked “a new beginning, a new dedication within our government, and a new spirit upon us all.”

He reached the top rung of his ladder out of obscurity by taking the oath of allegiance on a Bible given to him by his mother several years ago. It was opened to the sixth chapter of Micah, a well-known portion of which Carter used as the basis for his inaugural address: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Carter read the passage in the King James Version. He said that he also had before him the bulky Bible used by George Washington in the inauguration of the first President in 1789.

The new President did not otherwise invoke the name of God in his address, but his remarks nonetheless reflected a strong moral tone. He sought to communicate a sense of personal humility when he said, “Your strength can compensate for my weakness, and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes.”

Carter urged people to learn, laugh, work, and pray together. “In a spirit of common good,” he said, “we must simply do our best.”

He is only the third Baptist to reach the nation’s highest office despite the fact that Baptists outnumber all other American Protestant denominations. Presidents Warren Harding and Harry Truman also were Baptists.

Reflecting an often stated belief in leadership by personal example, he called on the nation to demonstrate that its system is worthy of emulation.

“We are a strong nation,” he declared, “and we will maintain strength so sufficient that it need not be proven in combat, a quiet strength based not merely on the size of an arsenal but on a mobility of ideas. We will be ever vigilant and never vulnerable, and we will fight our wars against poverty, ignorance, and injustice.” The ultimate goal to which he pledged to work was “the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this earth.”

Carter ended his speech by saying:

“I join in the hope that when my time as your President is ended, people might say this about our nation: that we had remembered the words of Micah and renewed our search for humility, mercy, and justice; that we had torn down the barriers that separated those of different race and region and religion, and where there had been mistrust, built unity, with a respect for diversity; that we had found productive work for those able to perform it; that we had strengthened the American family, which is the basis of our society; that we had insured respect for the law and equal treatment under the law for the weak and the powerful, for the rich and the poor; and that we had enabled our people to be proud of their own government once again.”

One of the most moving moments of the ceremony came when Carter at the outset of his speech acknowledged Ford, thanking him for what he had done to help heal the land. New Presidents have rarely mentioned their predecessors in inaugural speeches. Carter’s gesture evoked an ovation from the thousands of spectators packed onto the east grounds of the Capitol.

The invocation at the inaugural ceremony was pronounced by United Methodist bishop William R. Cannon of Atlanta. Cannon prayed that God would grant a “new and vital realization of thy sovereignty and our dependence,” and that he would save us from “the arrogant futility of trying to play God.” He asked for forgiveness of those sins that “marred our national character and impaired the effectiveness of our government in recent times.” Cannon’s prayer noted the “inestimable service” of Gerald Ford and the “brilliant mind” of Carter and his “exemplary Christian life and devotion to thee and to thy people.” (Reporters noted that Rosalyn Carter seemed to be reading her Bible while Cannon prayed.)

The benediction was delivered by Roman Catholic archbishop John Roach of Minnesota, who in praying for Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale, observed that “there is loneliness on the mountain. Grace that loneliness with your presence.”

A Jewish cantor from Atlanta, Isaac Goodfriend, sang the national anthem at the close of the inaugural ceremony. Protests had been voiced that there were no clergy from the Jewish and Greek Orthodox faiths on the program. According to Religious News Service, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, national director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, called Goodfriend’s appearance “a sop to the Jews.” Tanenbaum and Father John Tavlarides, pastor of a Greek Orthodox cathedral in Washington, also expressed concern that having a cantor sing the national anthem mixes religion and patriotism.

One of the notable firsts of the 1977 inaugural was an early-morning outdoor “People’s Prayer Service” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A crowd estimated at more than 5,000 braved twenty-degree cold to participate in the half-hour event. Carter’s pastor in Plains, Georgia, the Rev. Bruce E. Edwards, took part along with the President’s sister, Ruth Carther Stapleton, and Martin Luther King, Sr., a retired Baptist minister. Among the musicians was the well-known Metropolitan Opera soprano, Leontyne Price, who sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

King delivered a short sermon from the same spot where his late son gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the march on Washington in the summer of 1963. The elder King took his message from Christ’s words to Peter, “Lovest thou me more than the least of these? Feed my sheep.”

Parts of the service, including a closing illustration cited by King, were drowned out by commercial jets taking off from the nearby Washington National Airport.

After breakfast on Inauguration Day, Carter watched the Lincoln Memorial service on TV, then attended a private “Pre-Inaugural Service of Prayer” himself at First Baptist Church. With him was his family, Mondale, Cabinet designees, aides, and members of their families. The service, planned about three weeks earlier, began at 9 A.M. and lasted almost an hour. It was closed to the public, press, and even members of the church, except for ushers and four dozen choir members.

There was one congregational hymn (“O God, Our Help in Ages Past”), with two solos by Myrtle Hall of King’s College (known best for her appearances at Billy Graham crusades), prayers by several clergymen (including pastor Charles A. Trentham of First Baptist), and a short sermon by pastor Nelson L. Price, 45, of the 5,000-member Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta, Georgia. Price has been a “prayer partner” of Carter since eight years ago when they were both speakers at a Junior Chamber of Commerce meeting.

Price, using Colossians 3:23 as a text (“Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord”), summed up his message afterward in an interview: “Let the Spirit of heaven permeate the new spirit of Washington with a new commitment to personal purity, prolific prayer, and proper principles.”

Trentham prayed that Carter’s family life would survive “the pressures of public responsibility.” “Let nothing sully the clear image they bear of honor, integrity, and loving concern,” he implored. (A church spokesperson said the Carters planned to visit both First Baptist, where Harry Truman worshipped, and Calvary Baptist Church during their first Sundays in Washington. Both churches are about seven blocks from the White House.)

Another clergyman who led in prayer was Mrs. Mondale’s father, John Maxwell Adams, emeritus chaplain and religion professor at Macalester College.

On the last Sunday of 1976, Carter and his wife and daughter attended the United Methodist church in Plains. There they heard a sermon by Bishop Cannon in which he predicted a new era of compassion and justice in American life. Thirty years ago the Carters were married in the church, where Mrs. Carter had been a member.

The following Sunday the Carter family was back at the Plains Baptist Church, as were two bishops and two laypersons from the predominantly black African Methodist Episcopal Church. The group said they had come to show their support for Judge Griffin B. Bell, Carter’s choice for attorney general. Bell had come under attack from some civil-rights groups because of some of his decisions as a judge and because he belonged to three private clubs that exclude blacks and Jews. One of the bishops, I. I. Bearden, is board chairman of Morris Brown College, which named Bell its “man of the year” in 1976.

The Plains Baptist Church is now on record as having its membership rolls open to otherwise qualified blacks, but no out-of-towners need apply. The congregation unanimously rejected clergyman Clennon King, another black man, and a white woman after it became clear that they lived too far from Plains to be able to carry out the spirit of the church covenant. A Baptist Press release observed, “Southern Baptists encourage new members to join churches in the immediate community so they may be active.”

King, whose home is in Albany, Georgia, had appeared at the church the Sunday before Carter’s election, triggering a congregational crisis (see December 3, 1976, issue, page 50). The members subsequently voted in principle to admit blacks to membership and in so doing gave a vote of confidence to pastor Bruce Edwards, who strongly advocated the open-door policy. Only one family has left the church reportedly as a result of the controversy. Some younger members of a nearly black church are said to be planning to try to transfer their membership to Edwards’s church.

King had failed to meet with an examining committee prior to the vote on his application. Edwards said that he had been unable to reach King to advise him verbally of the meeting but that he had been sent a notice of it.

The same Sunday that the vote on King was taken Carter taught the men’s Bible class for the last time before his inauguration. The subject was, “Jesus Facing His Call.” Carter was to be in Plains for one more Sunday but said he preferred not to teach on the topic scheduled for then: “A prophet is without honor in his own country.”

Edwards himself planned to be away from the church on Sunday, January 30, and the sermon that day was scheduled to be delivered by James Hefley, a well-known evangelical author who is compiling a book on the Carter roots in Plains.

Carter is expected to be watched closely by religious leaders and by many others who are curious about what kind of personal style will emerge from his born-again faith. The first indication came in an interview in People magazine where Carter said he intended to revert to a “wine only” policy during White House social functions. “That is my present intention,” Carter said. “Most of the Presidents have not served hard liquor at receptions.” People said “wine only” was the drinking policy at the White House until John F. Kennedy became president.

There is also interest in some details of Carter’s theological beliefs. The Atlanta Constitution said last year that Carter did not “believe in such biblical accounts as Eve’s being created from Adam’s rib and other such miracles.” Carter is reported to have written the Constitution denying the article and saying, “I have never made any such statement and have no reason to disbelieve Genesis 2:21–22 or other biblical miracles.”

Graceful Exit

President Gerald Ford closed his State of the Union address with a prayer:

“May God guide this wonderful country, its people, and those they have chosen to lead them. May our third century be illuminated by liberty and blessed with brotherhood, so that we and all who come after us may be the humble servants of thy peace. Amen.”

Ford’s address before a joint session of Congress constituted a formal farewell after twenty-eight years in the federal government, including twenty-nine months as the chief executive.

He prefaced the prayer with the statement, “My fellow Americans, I once asked for your prayers, and now I give you mine.” He was referring to an appeal he had made upon being sworn in: “I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your President by your ballots. So I ask you to confirm me as your President with your prayers.”

Ford’s dignified and spiritual goodbye included references to the separation of powers, which “places supreme authority under God, beyond any one person, any one branch, any majority great or small, or any one party.” When Ford was a congressman he met regularly with others in Wednesday prayer meetings. W. Barry Garrett, Baptist Press representative in Washington, wrote that “although during the first part of his presidency Ford dropped the regular prayer meetings to avoid a show of religiousness, he quietly and without publicity resumed private prayer sessions with his colleagues during the past year.”

Ford, an Episcopalian, was among those who attended a communion service at National Presbyterian Church on the morning that the new congress convened. The service has become a Washington tradition.

Here’s Life

Here’s Life, Dallas! Here’s Life, Philadelphia! Here’s Life, Portland!

All across the United States in 1976 that theme showed up, differing from place to place only in the name of the city. The evangelistic saturation effort spearheaded by Campus Crusade for Christ hit 165 metropolitan areas last year, and this year it aims for fifty more.

While the name of the overall effort is Here’s Life, America, the non-involved resident of target areas is more likely to remember another slogan, “I found it!” First it shows up on billboards and television, then on bumper stickers and in newspapers. Finally, if all goes according to the plan of Crusade’s founder, Bill Bright, everybody in the area will hear “I found it!” in person or on the telephone from a trained Christian.

Bright’s plan is probably the most comprehensive evangelistic scheme ever carried out in the United States. He had originally intended to present the Gospel to every person in the country by the end of 1976. Beyond that, he wanted to saturate the world’s population by 1980.

Even though the 1976 target was missed, the number of evangelistic presentations recorded during the year by Campus Crusade may still set a record. At year-end, officials reported that volunteers had made some 6.5 million personal contacts and that 536,824 persons had expressed a desire to receive Christ as Saviour. They note that these figures are incomplete since they believe many who made decisions because of the program never recorded them. They point out, for instance, that one television special was seen by an audience estimated at 50 million in its 240 showings, and that those deciding for Christ as a result of the telecast would not necessarily report to Here’s Life.

While there is a heavy use of the media in each area, success depends to a great extent upon the volunteer workers from local churches. The primary thrust of the plan is for a trained Christian to share Bright’s “four spiritual laws” with people who are willing to listen. At the conclusion of the presentation the listener is asked if he wants to commit his life to Christ, and a model prayer is recited for his guidance.

About two million people last year were curious enough to respond to the “teaser” advertisem*nts, calling a central telephone bank to ask about “I found it!” Their names were assigned to volunteers in their own neighborhoods, who then tried to arrange appointments for face-to-face sharing of the Gospel. If they could not work out personal meetings, the workers either recited the four laws on the telephone or mailed a booklet to the inquirers.

Additional millions of Americans who did not ask for an explanation of “I found it!” heard one anyway when a Here’s Life telephone surveyor called them. Workers attempted to reach every home in their assigned areas to offer an opportunity to hear the Gospel.

The workers, trained in a fourteen-hour course, were encouraged to use a step-by-step presentation in their telephone survey to lead the listener to a point of expressing an interest in getting “closer to God.” Those with such an interest were then asked if they would like to hear the four laws.

Persons praying the prayer of commitment on the telephone were then visited by the workers and given a special Living Bible edition of the Gospel of John and aids to Christian living. They were also encouraged to join five-week Bible-study groups. At the end of the year, the total number enrolled in such groups was reported to be more than 60,000.

The workers at the heart of the campaign in 1976 came from 11,826 congregations of all major denominations, according to Crusade’s statistics. Over a quarter of a million Christians were trained, and most of them took a shift one night a week for three weeks at a neighborhood telephone survey center.

As many as half of the adult members of some churches had active roles in the campaign, but in others only a handful actually completed the training and accepted telephone assignments. For a variety of reasons many churches across the theological spectrum did not participate. From both fundamentalist and liberal camps there were a few who opposed it publicly.

On the national level, there was also opposition, but little of it appeared as theological opposition. Most of the opponents saw in Here’s Life a scheme by Bright to harness evangelicals for conservative political action. He denied, however, that the campaign had any political motivation. He also denied, in a letter to Time managing editor Henry A. Grunwald, that he had ever been involved in partisan politics.

Time, in its January 3 edition, said Bright appeared to have “undergone a political conversion of sorts” since he recently indicated that he was more optimistic about the nation’s future than he was early last year. In his letter responding to the article, Bright said the “conversion” was “actually renewed hope and optimism—a result of a spiritual movement that is sweeping across America as millions of Americans are turning to God. Historically, whenever individuals or nations turn to God the blessing of God is assured.”

Most of the objections have been to the techniques employed by Here’s Life, with writers in such publications as the Christian Century and the Banner of the Christian Reformed Church calling it a canned approach from which no deviation is permitted. Crusade officials have insisted, however, that cooperating churches are free to use any method as long as there is a clear and concise presentation of the Gospel. When the Banner published a pastor’s article opposing Here’s Life, it was run alongside an article favoring the campaign. The latter was written by an evangelism official in the denomination’s Board of Home Missions.

Some expected opposition from members of the Christian Reformed and other Calvinistic groups failed to materialize after the four-laws booklet was revised. For years Bright had been under attack in some Reformed communities, especially for the first law, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The 1976 Here’s Life version, “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life,” found a much wider acceptance.

There were also significant changes in the fourth law. The early version read, “We must receive Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord by personal invitation.” The beefed-up 1976 version is: “We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.”

As is often the case in community-wide evangelistic efforts, there were some objections from church hierarchies because planners went directly to pastors and laymen without the permission of denominational officials. In Peoria, Illinois, for instance, the Roman Catholic bishop, Edward W. O’Rourke, wrote in his diocesan paper that Here’s Life was being conducted “without my knowledge or consent.” He went on to describe it as “incomplete … misleading, and mischievous” and “not acceptable in a pluralistic society.” The impetus of the campaign moved him to urge his own people to be more zealous in studying the Scriptures and evangelizing.

Campaign officials have stressed, especially since the pilot program in Atlanta, that follow-up by local churches is essential if Here’s Life is to have lasting effects. Since many of the people who respond to the telephone calls are not churchgoers, it was suggested that follow-up Bible studies be offered initially in home or other “neutral” neighborhood locations. Some churches that followed this suggestion nevertheless reported immediate jumps in attendance at their worship services.

Others, while unable to note any direct attendance increase, are still pleased with the results of their participation. Members of their churches who had never had any training or experience in presenting Christ gained that during the campaign.

A pastor in the Washington, D.C., area expressed his appreciation to the area Here’s Life executive committee chairman, John Broger, by explaining that he now has twelve “assistants” able and willing to help in the work of evangelism. Before the twelve lay members participated in the campaign’s training and calling, he had none. Broger, the veteran director of information for the Armed Forces at the Pentagon, said another pastor told him that Here’s Life gave him his first actual experience of leading a person to Christ.

The national capital area campaign, held after the national elections in November, contacted about one-fourth of the homes in Washington and its suburbs. There are approximately 800,000 households in the Washington television viewing area, and Here’s Life volunteers recorded contacts with 203,000 of them during the three-week calling period. Some of the 230 cooperating churches kept their special telephone banks after November, and workers are still calling neighborhoods that were not reached during the three-week period. Volunteers reported that 10,800 persons prayed to receive Christ during the capital area campaign.

Broger said 7,000 volunteers were trained in the Washington area. They worked in 150 telephone centers, some with as many as twenty telephones and some with as few as four. Training and administration were handled by twenty-two full-time Campus Crusade staffers, all of whom raised their support outside the Here’s Life local budget.

Here’s Life has had a high price tag. In the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, the budget was reported at just over $200,000. In the five-county southern California area it was $600,000. The largest budget items are purchase of media space and telephone rentals. The volunteer workers usually pay for their own materials. Most of the funding comes from local businessmen, the rest from cooperating churches.

Crusade officials express hope that the churches involved in four-week campaigns in 1976 will now move into Phase II, emphasizing discipleship of both new and older Christians. A Phase III projected for 1978 is to involve more use of the media.

Meanwhile, for some cities, 1977 is the year of Phase I. The nation will probably get a better view of “I found it” than it has previously had this spring when the spotlight turns on for Here’s Life, New York.

A Veteran Out, A Lesbian In

There was talk of schism last fall after the Episcopal Church opened the priesthood to women. Now there’s more than talk. Clergyman Albert J. duBois, 70, coordinator of Anglicans United, announced the formation of a new body to be known as the U.S. Episcopal Church. Initially, said duBois, the new denomination will have about fifty parishes with “between 10,000 and 12,000 members.” It will use the 1928 edition of the Episcopal Prayer Book and observe traditional canon law.

A long-time leader in the Anglo-Catholic wing of Episcopalianism, duBois maintained he wasn’t leaving the Episcopal Church “as constitutionally established.” He added: “We represent the loyal remnant—the others have left us.”

Meanwhile, the Episcopal diocese of Colorado has decided for now not to contest in court the secession from the diocese by St. Mary’s Church in Denver. The parish voted in November to leave the denomination in opposition to the women’s ordination issue.

Conservatives in the Episcopal Church have differed on whether to stay in the denomination. Many already upset by liberal trends in church life expressed outrage last month when Bishop Paul Moore, Jr., of New York ordained an avowed lesbian at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Manhattan: Ellen Marie Barrett, 30, a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley, California.

Moore explained that “many persons with hom*osexual tendencies” are already in the ministry, and that Ms. Barrett is “highly qualified intellectually, morally, and spiritually to be a priest.”

Bishop William Frey of Colorado warned Moore in a telegram before the ceremony that his action seemed “totally irresponsible” and would harm the church. “Ordination of practicing hom*osexuals,” said Frey, “does not represent the mind of the church and is plainly contrary to the teachings of Scripture which we have all sworn to uphold.” And during the service, a priest of Moore’s diocese, James Wately, declared that Ms. Barrett had not rejected hom*osexuality as “a sinful life-style.” The ordination, he said, was “a travesty and a scandal.”

Ms. Barrett two years ago was a founder of Integrity, the “gay caucus” in the Episcopal Church, and she has been involved in hom*osexual counseling projects in New York and Berkeley.

Time quoted her as saying that her lesbian lover “is what feeds the strength and compassion I bring to the ministry.” hom*osexuality, she has said, “is an alternative life-style that can be a good and creative thing.”

Ms. Barrett was the second admitted hom*osexual to be ordained in a major denomination. The first one was William Johnson of the United Church of Christ in San Francisco in 1973.

A Jesuit seminarian, Thomas Sweetin, told reporters last month in New York that he had been refused ordination to the priesthood because of his hom*osexual orientation. He said he has been “inactive” sexually in recent years but still believes hom*osexuality can be “viable.”