Page 5110 – Christianity Today (2025)

“The Audacious Experiment”

I appreciated Richard John Neuhaus’s comments on the two aspects of the religious freedom clause of the first amendment [“The Upside-down Freedom,” Dec. 9]. He says, “Historically, religious freedom is in largest part an achievement of religion, not a secular achievement against religion.” This may be true, but it is well for Christians to realize that those who drafted the First Amendment were not Christians, but deists. Religion here takes on a vague and general meaning. Also he states, “The Declaration of Independence, which is key to understanding our constitutional history, says that we are endowed by the Creator with certain ‘unalienable rights.’” This is again a deistic concept.

As Christians we must focus not on our rights, but on the realization that all we have is a gift, freely given at the price of the life of God’s son. We have yet to see whether “the audacious experiment” of American democracy has worked.

Sally Frahm

Austin, Tex.

Neuhaus stated that the American government is the “oldest continuing government in the world.” In 1988 the English celebrated the 300th anniversary of the revolution of 1688, which, according to the historian A. L. Rowse, was “The Sensible Revolution.” It achieved five things without shedding any blood: (1) The Crown could no longer rule without Parliament; (2) There could be no standing army without the permission of Parliament; (3) Only Parliament could raise taxes; (4) Installing William and Mary on the throne established a Protestant succession; (5) The judiciary achieved independence.

Surely what was omitted was the word republic.

Eric S. Fife

Bradenton, Fla.

Neuhaus asserts that “the moral ligitimacy of the state itself depends upon the state’s acknowledgement of a higher authority”; the U.S. Constitution does not. Rather, it grounds the authority of government on “We the people.” Further, the Declaration of Independence states that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Frederick Edwords

American Humanist Association

Amherst, N.Y.

A point overlooked that probably explains the increased inversion of the First Amendment is the heightened and more widespread religious pluralism in the U.S. The only way government can protect “free exercise” for people of all persuasions or no persuasion is to give “no establishment” a priority over “free exercise” in legal determinations. For example, in a public school where attendance is required, “no establishment” dictates that mandated prayer be forbidden; but this very decision equally guards the “free exercise” of religion to Baptist, Buddhist, and Jewish children.

Rolland M. Ruf

Collegdale, Tenn.

Moral Hypocrisy?

I think Gary Hardaway is unduly harsh in his column, “No Pardon for North” [Speaking Out, Dec. 9], The act of applying funds generated from one covert, off-the-books transaction (sale of arms to Iran) to another (aid to the contras) is not fairly characterized as “embezzlement,” or even, in my view, “misappropriation.” Second, I don’t believe anyone seriously contends that the Boland Amendment expressly applies to the activities of the NSC. Finally, I do not share Hardaway’s sanguinity about the role of the court in passing judgment on covert activities of the executive branch. I think the notion is utterly foolhardy. What next? Will we be trying our soldiers for murder if they are sent into battle for a cause of which Congress disapproves?

The issue is of grave importance and ought to be squarely faced: Are we to have and exercise a covert capability? To admit the necessity of covert action and then build a hedge of impossible requirements around its exercise is moral hypocrisy. As a lawyer I have much practical experience in our courts and am dismayed at the trend toward turning them into universal plebiscites for the resolution of political and policy issues. They are tools ill-formed for that purpose. If the trend continues, justice is doomed to become the hostage of politics, and the rule of law will perish.

Stephen P. Oliver

Torrance, Calif.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s disclaimer does not excuse printing such possibly libelous material. The writer admits that his remarks presuppose North is guilty. As a lawyer I must condemn a writer so unprincipled as to attempt to prejudice a case in court while it is being tried. He speaks of lying, stealing, embezzling, destroying evidence, etc., as though such crimes have been proven, though such is not the case.

Thomas J. Potts

Greenville, S.C.

Whither The Sunday School?

Your article on “Will Sunday School Survive?” [News, Dec. 9] raised realistic questions about its health. Because I was reached with the salvation message through the Sunday school, and work in the Sunday school, I am concerned about potential or perceived loss to an institution that still has vibrancy.

The article raises the possibility that enrollment is up in evangelical denominations and independent churches. This is probably true. I am concerned when Sunday schools in mainline denominations go down, because it reflects a national attitude toward the need for religious education. If there were a greater thirst for the Bible, it would be reflective in both evangelical and mainline groups. Historically, enrollment meant “submembership” into the local church, and was meant primarily for those not old enough for full church membership, or who for other reasons couldn’t qualify. Today, enrollment generally is a mailing list with little “bonding” value.

The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches marks the decline beginning in 1970, but that was also when a shift was made in measuring Sunday school from enrollment to attendance. Prior to 1971, Sunday school attendance was generally higher than church attendance. Even though the national trend is away from enrollment, I see this as weakening the movement.

Elmer L. Towns

Liberty University

Lynchburg, Va.

According to all I have read from Win Arn, and the statistics he gathers, nearly everything in your article was correct. However, you listed the Nazarenes as experiencing lapsed enrollment during the 1980s. I pulled together our enrollment totals for the U.S., Canada, and the denomination worldwide: In the past nine years the Church of the Nazarene has increased in enrollment overall. Even with just the U.S. figures, we have increased enrollment from 839,248 in 1980 to 861,761 in 1988.

Phil Riley

Church of the Nazarene International

Kansas City, Mo.

Refocusing Advent Observance

Three cheers for Mary Ellen Ashcroft! I cannot say “Amen!” loudly or exuberantly enough for her excellent article, “Away from the Manger” [Dec. 9]. For the past several years, I have tried (without much success) to refocus the observance of Advent in the churches I’ve pastored away from preparing for Jesus’ birth (how can we prepare for something that’s already taken place?)—to preparing for his coming again in glory, triumph, and judgment. In view of the scriptural directive to “watch and be ready,” this seems to be the more urgent and expedient course for us Christians to pursue.

I cannot help wondering if the fact that nearly all our Advent observances focus on the first, rather than the second, coming of Jesus isn’t part of Satan’s strategy to better ensure that that Day’s coming will catch many of us unawares, and unprepared.

Rev. P. Douglas Martin

Gordonsville United Methodist Charge

Gordonsville, Va.

I think it is wonderful we evangelicals are rediscovering the church calendar. But if we really are going to observe Advent (as I think we should), let’s recognize that it is not a season during which we are meant to meditate on Christ’s second coming. There are other times for this, such as Communion, when we “remember his death until he comes.” Advent was meant to be a time when we meditate on the mystery of the Incarnation—how God became flesh and dwelt among us, bringing us salvation not only through an atoning death, but also by sharing our humanity. If we are too comfortable with Christ as a slumbering babe, the problem may be that we have an inadequate appreciation of how fully he shared our humanity, and how important this is for our salvation. Let Advent be a time when we meditate on this.

Christopher Smith

S. Hamilton, Mass.

Addiction Recovery

I read with interest the Alsdurfs’ article on codependency and addiction [CT Institute, Dec. 9]. I consider myself a recovering codependent/coaddict; my husband is a sexual addict in recovery. Both of us have been active church members for many years.

I have been in therapy for close to two years in addition to 12-step programs. For those with codependent behavior—who are trying to change their behavior as well as heal old wounds—a 12-step group is a great source of support and tool for living in recovery. Some in my group are beginning to see the possibilities for a real relationship with God for the first time because of the 12-step group and consideration of the steps. Christians should be wary about criticizing groups that successfully minister to people who are often ostracized and criticized, if not barred outright, by church fellowships. I am grateful to God that the healing of broken people comes first to most churches and pastors when a 12-step group asks for meeting space. Thank you for your thoughtful article on this subject.

Name Withheld

Drugs Not On The Short List

I disagree with Terry Muck [Editorial, “Stoned Logic,” Dec. 9]. Restrictive drug laws make no more sense today than prohibition did a generation ago. Prohibition was an evangelical darling, but it gave subsidy to the mob. For all the “good” intentions, that law helped create an evil empire in our midst. We now make it more wealthy, because the normal human response to any rule is to find a way to break it, even at great personal expense.

Christians would do well to limit their call for prohibition to those acts found in the Decalog, like murder, theft, or adultery. That law is our charter. We foolishly add to that short list.

Terry L. Schoen

Walla Walla, Wash.

Comparable Mirth

At our church board meeting the other night, staff salaries came up for review. One of the new members of our board made a plea for “comparable worth”—the idea that pay be based not on gender-dictated tradition but on “the relative worth of a given job to an organization.”

So, he argued, Agnes, our church secretary ($14,750), should make as much as our pastor ($26,500). And, based on comparable worth, he had a point. The church gets along fine during the pastor’s four weeks of vacation; but let Agnes go away for five days and the Great Commission grinds to a halt.

Then someone pointed out that Pete, our part-time janitor, ought to make the same amount, too. If he didn’t clean up after the junior-high caramel-corn party, the church would stop in its tracks—literally. And there’s Claire, whose pineapple upside-down cake at a potluck has probably drawn more people to church than any high-powered evangelist who has everpounded our pulpit. She’s definitely worth twenty-six five.

Before we knew it, we were figuring the pay scale for Sunday school teachers, prayer warriors, ushers—every one of them make a significant contribution to our congregation. By the time we caught up with ourselves, our church of 130 had a proposed payroll of more than $3 million. Being firm believers in a balanced budget, however, we found a way out: We passed a resolution declaring that we are all of incomparable worth, and tabled any further discussion of salaries.

Meeting adjourned.

EUTYCHUS

I was asked to write an extended blurb to promote a teaching aid that a friend had produced. I said I would. I was then told that to save me time a draft blurb would be prepared, based on things I had said in my books. All I would have to do was sign it.

The draft duly arrived, and behold! it began by making me tell a personal story that never happened, and went on to make me declare a personal debt to material I have never yet encountered. As advertising, it was no doubt a well-calculated come-on, but as literature (well, what else can I call it?) it was fiction dressed up as fact. Could you have signed such a thing? I couldn’t.

What to do? Rather than penalize my friend for the crassness of his entourage, I wrote a truthful blurb, and since I was able to adapt some parts of the original draft, I dare say some of my time really was saved. But just as mint candies, called humbugs in England, leave an aftertaste in the mouth, so this brush with human humbug, in the Dickensian sense of that word, left an aftertaste in my mind—and it was not a pleasant, warm glow, either.

Here was one evangelical devising false statements for another evangelical in the interests of a third evangelical, his boss. The justification offered would no doubt be that these statements, whether true or not, would encourage the use of good Christian teaching material, and that was all that mattered. That would be a way of saying that these statements fall in the category of what Plato called “the useful lie,” a type of statement that managers make in order to manipulate people into doing what seems good for them (and, of course, for their masters, too). To see the end as justifying the means, or, as old-time Jesuit casuists put it, to treat a lawful intention as legitimizing whatever is done to fulfill it, is typically modern. But it is not right.

Surely the means to any end has a moral quality of its own. Surely I am not respecting God’s image in my neighbor if I conspire to bamboozle him. Surely advertising a product by making false statements to people who expect me to tell the truth would be a case, even if small-scale, of doing evil that good might come—a way of acting that God condemns. Surely the Devil is the father of white lies as well as of black ones. Surely the old dictum that those who tell white lies soon become colorblind is true.

Said Samuel Johnson, that eighteenth-century man-mountain of Christian common sense: “Accustom your children constantly to this: if a thing happened at one window and they say, when relating it, that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.” The contemporary willingness of Christians to trade in hype and untruths suggests that some of us were not brought up on this wise principle of meticulous respect for the facts.

Evangelical Christians have become sensitive over the past few years about the sanctity of life. Thank God we have! But is it not high time we developed an equally sensitive conscience about the sanctity of truth?

Have you ever wondered why, following a solemn call to patience under pressure and before an equally solemn call to sustained prayerfulness, James inserts: “Above all, my brothers, do not swear.… Let your ‘Yes’ be yes, and your ‘No,’ no, or you will be condemned” (James 5:12)? People swear, we know, in order to commend falsehoods as true, as when Peter swore that he did not know Jesus. James only echoes Jesus (Matt. 5:34–37) in requiring plain, honest truth at all times, and no doubt his reason for making the point here is that he knows how those under pressure can be tempted to affirm untruths in order to get out from under.

But why “above all”? Why does James treat total truthfulness as so very important? Because, I think, he knows that nothing corrupts character so quickly or so deeply as habits of deception and untruth. I too know that; don’t you? There is no Christ-like consistency, no deep-level discipleship, without a passion for truth everywhere. I suggest we need to consider our ways.

J. I. PACKER

What do you notice first about a Third World slum?

You see numbing uniformity, for one thing. You focus on one home: walls made of cardboard and woven straw matting, a piece of tin slung across for the roof. It seems casual, temporary—the kind of structure bored Cub Scouts might throw together on a lazy summer afternoon.

But next to that home stands another just like it, and another; they stretch for miles—yes, miles—in all directions. Around the world, the names for slums may vary—shantytown, favela, barrio—but the construction does not.

In Lima, Peru, a wiry, tanned young American named David Wroughton stands in a slum neighborhood of 100,000 people, trying to explain to some visitors how such “instant cities” come about. Wroughton directs a Christian agency called ACUDE (a Spanish acronym for United Christian Action for Development) that works in these slums.

“Peru calls these areas pueblos jovenes, or ‘young towns,’” he begins. “In an effort to encourage land redistribution, a former government relaxed the laws against squatters. If you own a plot of land that is not being cultivated, a group of 20 to 50 families can get together and launch an ‘invasion.’ They just show up one night, throw together these instant dwellings, and raise a flag. You cannot expel them, and eventually they will gain legal rights to your land.”

The land policy has changed the face of Peru. So many settlers have flooded in that pueblos jovenes now fill virtually every vacant space in Lima. Slums, not suburbs, encircle the city, giving shelter to more than three-and-a-half-million people.

According to Wroughton, the pueblos jovenes go through several stages of progress. At first, fights may break out over property lines. No city services exist, of course, so each household digs a simple hole in the ground to serve as a toilet. Trucks bring in loads of water to sell at extortionate prices.

After a year or so of haggling with the government, a community may get water, electricity, and perhaps even a sewerline. Houses of sun-dried brick gradually replace the shacks. Vegetation appears: zucchini plants and grass and jacaranda trees. Finally, community leaders attempt to obtain title to the land they have invaded, a laborious process that may take ten years and require a few mass demonstrations in front of the presidential palace.

Thus, minicities have sprung up all around Lima. In this staunchly Catholic country, the pueblos jovenes take on poignant names: Via Salvador—“Way of the Savior”; and Ciudad de Dios—“City of God.”

Wroughton’s organization assists such impoverished areas mainly by providing jobs, ACUDE (affiliated with Opportunity International, formerly the Institute for International Development) provides loans for very small businesses, which help create more employment (one job for every $1,250 invested) and fit in well with Third World cultures.

Free Enterprise At Work

It is a hot, muggy afternoon, and Wroughton is checking on ACUDE’s projects in an early-stage settlement. He steers his four-wheel-drive Toyota through a labyrinth of dirt alleys. There are no street names, or even streets. Children shiny with sweat dash into the alley after a battered soccer ball. A skinny dog rouses himself to bark at the newcomers. You can see into most of the shacks: bare rooms, no glass in the windows, a statue of the Virgin along one wall.

Wroughton stops at a storefront business, the Speedy Parrot. Inside, a shoemaker greets him warmly. ACUDE loaned him $500 for a stitching machine, and as a result his business went from subsistence level to a kind of family assembly line. Two children and a mother-in-law are in the kitchen, boxing and sorting shoes for stores downtown.

“We start with individuals like this man,” Wroughton explains. “No bank would consider giving him a loan. He had no assets, no balance sheet to examine. We use local churches to screen potential borrowers for us, which encourages a sense of responsibility and honesty.”

The next stop, a bakery, shows the progression from family business to an enterprise with several employees. The owner opens the door after a few loud knocks, and the yeasty smell of bread fills the air. The baker smiles constantly, bows slightly in response to every question, and then eagerly shows off his brick oven which is large enough to hold 25 tin sheets of rolls.

Appearances may deceive, Wroughton remarks on the way out. The baker is one of his problem cases. After ACUDE loaned him money for new equipment, the man squandered all his profits in a lottery for an automobile. “About 20 percent of our borrowers run late with their payments, although sometimes they have good excuses: a family member comes down with typhoid fever; a thief steals a week’s earnings. In all, about 5 percent of our loans are never paid back. Yet, we feel proud of the fact that 90 percent of our businesses are still operating after three years.”

ACUDE has gradually moved toward an aggressive free-enterprise stance, an evolution that reflects Wroughton’s own change in thinking. “Having grown up in Peru, I was scandalized by the wastefulness of U.S. society I saw while in college. For a time, I ate only food that I retrieved from garbage containers behind grocery stores. And when I came to Latin America [first Colombia, then Peru], I favored more socialistic programs. But I have seen too many of them flounder here.

“Under land reform, for example, Peru went from huge food surpluses to perennial shortages. The peasants had no training, and much of the land they worked became desert. People had no incentive to be productive. Here in Lima, the bloated government bureaucracy makes it almost impossible to start a small business. As a result, over half the economy is ‘informal,’ or unofficial.”

Wroughton concluded that ownership was the key ingredient needed to instill pride and responsibility. ACUDE built in incentive programs. If a tailor pays off a $500 loan, he can qualify for a $1,000 loan; if he repays that, he can get a $1,500 loan. In this way, some ACUDE-financed businesses have blossomed into enterprises with 10 or 11 employees. More than 500 small businesses are now surviving, even thriving, because of ACUDE, which began with an initial investment by American Christians of only $360,000.

Although the initial loan pool comes from contributions, ACUDE does not operate like a charity. Wroughton explains, “We charge maximum interest for our loans, which in Peru is 40 percent. That seems steep, but with a 60 percent inflation rate we still lose money on every loan. And we badger all those who fall behind in payments. We’ve learned the hard way that charity ‘handouts’ can breed a form of permanent dependence. I want these borrowers to be working their hardest to pay back loans and succeed in business. Only that spirit will make these families self-sufficient.”

For his last stop of the morning, Wroughton drives to a one-room store. It is a neat building, with a very limited assortment of goods: bread, Coca-Cola, cooking oil, chewing gum, pens, pencils. The manager, Toribia Chavez, insists on serving complimentary soft drinks to Wroughton and his guests. She has an open Bible on the counter, and she tells Wroughton she is praying for him and all the other employees of ACUDE. The meager stock in her store comes from one of their loans.

Chavez has 16 children, aged from 11 to 33. She runs through the names of the older children, proudly describing what each is doing now. One son is learning carpentry skills in an ACUDE training program. The income from her store supports the 10 children who still live at home and her disabled husband as well.

“That’s what makes it all worthwhile,” Wroughton says after the visit, as he ducks under the doorway and steps into bright sunlight. “You can read the gratitude on her face,” he says. We have worked with Senora Chavez for three years, and she now has the same feeling of success as the owner of a corporation in the U.S. She feeds her large family with dignity.”

By Philip Yancey.

A strange court decision underscores the apostolic advice against being unequally yoked.

Jerold Simms and Dorothy Boeke got a divorce. Boeke is now remarried and is continuing to raise their children, two girls, ages five and seven. Tragic, yes. Unusual, no.

But there was one unique feature of the Simms-Boeke story that caught the attention of the national news media just after Christmas. For the first time in U.S. history, a court had intervened in a family to declare in what religion the children ought to be raised. The judge in a Colorado family court gave Mrs. Boeke, who is Catholic, “physical custody” of the children, while she gave Mr. Simms, who is Jewish, “religious custody.”

A bit of background: Dorothy Boeke was raised in a Christian home, but when she married Jerold Simms, she converted to Judaism.

The Simms home was not actually “a home full of Judaism,” Dorothy Boeke told ABC-TV’s Morton Dean on “Nightline.” “The children were only two and four years old at the time of the separation,” she continued. “So they had had, in fact, no religious training at that time.… We only went to synagogue like two times a year. We were not practicing Jews at all. We had a very nonreligious home.”

After several years of marriage—and marital problems—Dorothy Boeke wanted to return to her Christian upbringing. After reconverting to Catholicism, she began to attend Mass daily and to bring young Rachel and Lauren with her. When her estranged husband learned of it, he asked the court to enforce his “religious custody” and to forbid the mother from taking his daughters to church except on Easter and Christmas. This the court did, creating as much confusion as it did clarification.

In addition to raising the obvious religious liberty question, the ruling also indicated an extraordinarily naive understanding of religion on the part of the court, as if it were something that happens only in church or synagogue on Sunday or Saturday. The girls’ stepfather knows better. “I don’t know if I am permitted by court law to say grace or worship God the way that I know God in my own home,” protested David Boeke.

Fortunately, experts suggest that the conflict raised by this decision will probably warn other courts away from similar decisions.

Dividable Property?

A deeper and more troubling matter remains, however. What is a family’s religion in the court’s—and society’s—eyes? ABC-TV’s Brian Rooney posed the issue this way: “Whether the courts can treat religion as dividable property, almost like the house, the car, and the family record collection.” And the courts are often a reflection of our commonly held sentiments.

Our society now talks about “religious preference” as if religion were something one shopped for like a new automobile or a college. In our noble efforts at tolerance and pluralism, we treat religion as a matter of taste or style. Yet we have forgotten that we do not choose a religion so much as a religion chooses us.

Religions choose people in a variety of ways. Some find themselves chosen by the religion into which they were born. Their culture and ethnicity determines their religious identity.

Others are chosen by a religion as the Spirit of God finds them in their need and pulls them into a helping and healing community of faith. “I once was lost, but now am found” is their refrain.

“Was blind, but now I see” would be the confession of still others, who are inescapably gripped by the intellectual soundness of a particular theology. They, too, have been chosen as much as they have done the choosing.

This independent and uncontrollable quality of religious faith can be a wild card in a marriage. It is difficult enough for a man and a woman of similar religious upbringing to forge a common spiritual vision that will allow them to devote their mutual energies to the kingdom of God. Because marriage is often a subtle contest of wills, and because religion is for Protestants a last refuge of personal decision, husbands and wives can manipulate each other through religious differences, often in ways too subtle for them to recognize.

Visible Differences

Once you introduce the more visible differences of an interfaith marriage—whether Jewish-Christian, Catholic-Protestant, mainline-sectarian, or even humanist-supernaturalist—the situation gets both easier and more difficult.

It is easier because religious differences are more visible before marriage than many of the other differences couples have to cope with. We can see our different religious heritages and practices more easily than we can see differences in money management, personal tidiness, or ways to sort laundry. Apparently, couples from differing faith backgrounds take the time to discuss this potential source of conflict before marriage and as a result find it easier to transcend those differences in the early years of marriage. One study of couples in their first year of marriage compared couples in interfaith marriages with those who had married spouses of the same religion. Their finding: “Newlyweds in interfaith marriages were 10 percent more likely to report that marriage was easier than they had expected it to be” (Arond and Pauker, 1987).

That said, interfaith marriage is also more difficult because, for those to whom faith is not a “preference,” for those who feel “chosen,” the stakes are higher. There is a lot of pain believing that your spouse and your children, the people you love most, will not see the kingdom of heaven.

And for many, the bond to children is stronger than the bond to spouse. Couples who have been able to work out the peaceful coexistence of two religions in a marriage often find themselves starting from scratch when children arrive. The ties of blood are deep and mysterious, but their strength continues to surprise us. The primal human sense that in our progeny we live on is part of this. We feel that if our children do not carry on our faith, we have lost something. But above that shadowy emotion rides the bright prospect of building the kingdom of God both here and hereafter through the blessedness of family life. “Happy is the man whose quiver is full of them.” Miserable are they who are forced to submerge and surrender their religious convictions as their children are being led by another vision.

The televised pain of David and Dorothy Boeke and Jerold Simms serves to remind the church, both Catholic and Protestant, that it once took with utter seriousness the apostolic injunction against being “unequally yoked” (2 Cor. 6:14). In our rush to accommodate the niceties of modern culture, we have failed to repair the hedges around Christian marriage and to steer young adults away from unequal yoking. It is time not only to recall the rules of yesteryear, but to articulate clearly a theology of Christian marriage that places united service to the kingdom of God once again at its center.

By David Neff.

Just when you thought your relief dollars made little difference in the lives of the world’s starving, Ethiopia gives us reason to hope.

That’s right, Ethiopia—a country the State Department pessimistically classifies as a “permanent disaster.”

It seems as though a second famine, which many believed would be far greater than the first, has been averted. For how long is unknown. But for the time being, there will be no heart-rending scenes of mass starvation from that part of the world. No spectral images.

Journalistically speaking, says Robert Seiple of World Vision, “it is fair to say that Ethiopia is the largest ‘nonstory’ of the year.”

It is, in fact, an astounding success story in which the church played, and continues to play, a critical part. It is the sort of good news that few will sing about, but which offers hope and encouragement both to the men and women who give to those who receive.

It was estimated that 1.3 to 1.6 million metric tons of food would be needed to sustain the population of Ethiopia in 1988, or on average, over 100,000 metric tons of food a month. In August of 1986, the largest month of distribution during the 1984–86 famine, 83,000 metric tons of food were distributed. Thus, every month could be worse than the worst month of the last disaster. And yet, throughout 1988, the pipeline of food was filled, maintained, and ultimately distributed in such a way that the prophecies of holocaust remained unfulfilled.

Moreover, Christian relief groups such as World Vision and World Relief continued to oversee development projects geared to meet not only immediate needs, but offer hope for the future. For example, World Vision, with the help of a group of volunteers from some Minnesota churches and the indigenous population, began to dig wells, cap springs, and plant trees in the Ansokia Valley north of Addis Ababa. Hillsides were terraced. Children were immunized. Better farming techniques were introduced. Roads were made passable.

Today, Ansokia, a famine camp in the last disaster, exists as an oasis. And it can be replicated throughout Ethiopia. “But,” warns Seiple, “the need is for perseverance.”

“A commitment to relief need only last as long as the immediate problem exists,” he says. “A commitment to development needs to be maintained over years, even decades. In the process, we must transcend ideologies that are not our own, governments that are not always to our liking, difficult environments that are uncomfortable.”

In short, the church has brought hope, but it can ill afford to rest. Instead, it must continue to be the hands and feet of Christ, and continue to bring his healing touch to those who can hope in nothing else.

“Compassion fatigue” is not an option.

By Harorld Smith

RUTH A. TUCKER¹Ruth Tucker is visiting professor of missions at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. She is author of From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya and Guardians of the Great Commission: The Story of Women in Modern Missions (Zondervan)

In 1959, after seven years of missionary service in the Baliem Valley of Papua New Guinea, Dorie and Lloyd Van Stone faced a wrenching decision. Their young son, Burney, had not adjusted to the boarding school that he was required to attend. He was severely depressed, and after a visit home, had to be tom from his mother’s arms and taken back to the school against his will. The Van Stones decided they could not sacrifice their son’s well-being for the sake of their work—an attitude that was then an exception to the rule. There was no alternative but to leave the mission field.

Today family concerns are paramount in the minds of potential missionaries and missionaries already on the field. And the plight of missionary kids (MKS), once a peripheral issue, has become a key factor in shaping the future of world evangelism.

Mission board representatives find that the first question prospective couples often ask relates to the well-being and education of their children. “When I first began doing recruiting in the early 1980s, the subject rarely came up,” says Hal Olsen, a representative for the Africa Inland Mission. “Now it comes up all the time.”

Young parents schooled in sermons and radio broadcasts of “family theology” are having second thoughts about bringing up their children in the uncertainties of a foreign environment. “The notion is popular among today’s younger missionaries that being overseas during the years of childhood and adolescence will hurt the child,” observes Ted Ward, dean of international studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Though his extensive research on intercultural education has convinced him otherwise, Ward says much of the parents’ anxiety derives from “a negative view of the intercultural experience.” “Americans in general,” he says, “are linguistically and culturally narrow.”

In fact, many missions leaders are concerned by what they perceive to be an almost exclusive emphasis on the health of the family and the individual. “Family has become god in many churches, thereby throttling many potential missionaries,” writes Evangelical Missions Quarterly editor James Reapsome. “Some churches are putting the married state, home comfort, and the education and happiness of children before world evangelization.”

School Days

At the center of the MK issue is education. What is the best system of MK schooling? For much of this century, the predominant answer in many areas of the world has been boarding schools. This approach allows parents to be with children at least once a year, and in some cases as often as three or four times a year if the school runs on a schedule of three months of classes followed by one month of vacation.

Boarding schools were developed as a welcome alternative to sending children to their home country for education, but such schools have not been accessible to all missionaries. In some cases, this deficiency has created painful family upheaval.

Marlene Hess, who teaches at Michigan State University, was raised as an MK in Liberia. In the late 1950s, when she was 12 years old, her parents returned to their mission work, leaving Marlene and her two sisters with a family they met for the first time only one day before the separation. Her 10-year-old brother was sent to live with another family. Between sixth grade and high school graduation, Marlene spent only one year with her parents.

For Marlene and her family, there was no time for tears and feelings of self-pity. God’s will came first, and God’s will meant long separations. During those years she suppressed the pain, but the emotional stress surfaced during her college years and took a heavy toll. Her mother, too, suppressed anxiety until, in the late 1960s, she and her husband were forced to leave the field due to what was whispered about as a “nervous breakdown.”

In an effort to avoid such situations, MK boarding schools have grown in size and number over the years. Studies of boarding schools offer mixed reviews, but the schools nevertheless have a reputation for offering high-quality education. Weaknesses arise in staffing and funding. Teachers are typically volunteers who raise their support, and thus their services are often welcomed whether they are qualified or not. Many have no training to work with transcultural kids, and their term of service is often only one or two years.

Another weakness frequently cited is the “compound mentality” that the environment can foster. MKS can become so involved in their own small community that they lose awareness of the nationals living close by. And the nationals sometimes resent the massive expenditure of money—by their standards—on boarding-school children, when their own children attend poorly constructed and underequipped facilities. Thus boarding schools can be perceived as a form of elitism.

Boarding-school education is simply not suitable for every child or every family. (For instance, the Van Stones’ older daughter adapted well to boarding school.) And it has been the subject of bad press. To counter the negative image, many missionaries raised in boarding schools have responded defensively, which has served to polarize the issue.

On one side are those who, like a visiting speaker at Western Baptist Seminary in Portland, Oregon, feel that missionaries who send their children to boarding schools are out of the will of God. On the other side, some MKS brand those who complain about alienation and loneliness “a bunch of crybabies!” as one wrote in a recent issue of Simroots magazine. Rhetoric aside, it would be difficult to obtain an accurate survey of the MK response to boarding schools. However, an informal, anecdotal survey seems to show that for every one MK who has bad memories of boarding school, there may be two or three who sing its praises.

Satellite Sessions

Fortunately, today there are many options for MK education, options that didn’t exist a century—or even a generation—ago. These offer approaches to accommodate virtually every personality type and taste. For missionaries working in or near large cities, a variety of private schools that allow children to live at home may be available. These include American schools (military and civilian), international schools, and non-English-speaking schools, such as a French or German school.

National schools are also an option. Although they can have drawbacks, they offer the greatest opportunity for the MK to identify closely with the culture and people. Other alternatives include home schooling and correspondence studies, or a combination of the two. Here the greatest drawbacks, as with any home-schooling program, are the lack of social and intellectual interaction with peers and the time consumed in parental teaching.

The wave of the future, in the minds of many parents and MK educators, is the satellite or field education system—a program that utilizes computers, itinerant teachers, and regional learning centers where students can assemble periodically. Though still in the early stages of development, such systems have been promoted by Wycliffe Bible Translators and other missions that work in remote areas.

Despite the options now available, however, MK schooling, even at its best, is an aspect of missionary life that can often be filled with frustrations. If the children are in boarding school, they are away too long. If they are in home schooling, they are home too much. If they are in national or international schools, they may find themselves ahead in some subjects and behind in others, and sometimes unprepared for college entrance exams in their homeland.

Problem Or Fad?

Are the problems that MKS confront being magnified simply by overemphasis of the subject? “For those who are inclined to emphasize the hardships and hazards of missionary life, it is easy enough to focus attention on the problems of missionary children,” observes Ward. “Every childhood tantrum, every adolescent pain, every perplexing dilemma of educational choices becomes transformed into an MK problem.”

Some leaders have suggested that the issue is the latest fad in missions, and in the long run it may serve neither the cause of missions in general nor the MK in particular. Still others emphasize that the most crucial element in MK development is not the type of schooling or the degree of cross-cultural adjustment required, but rather the family world view, its perspective of the world.

Parents, of course, are most influential in the formation of this family world view, molded to a large extent by their outlook on life. Their perception of God; their relationships with each other, their children, the culture, the mission organization, and their co-workers; their style of problem solving, showing affection, sharing responsibilities, and using leisure time—all these factors have a profound influence on a child’s development. And they account to a large extent for the MK’s attitude toward his or her unique lifestyle.

Miriam Adeney, who teaches cross-cultural ministries at Seattle Pacific University and Regent College and served as a missionary in the Philippines, advises missionary parents to encourage their children “to look for things they can appreciate in their new culture,” such as colorful festivals, foods, family lifestyles, and intriguing art, music, drama, and poetry.

Missionary parents can make times of separation less difficult by openly expressing painful emotions of fear and anxiety, says Frances J. White, a clinical psychologist at Wheaton College Graduate School and a former missionary to Africa. When children are not verbally expressive, she says, parents must “try to read behind their words.” Letting MKS know their parents understand what they are going through “assures them that they have been heard and understood.”

White also encourages families to celebrate farewells and homecomings with parties—to make them celebrations to anticipate and to look back on with fond memories. She emphasizes proper mental preparation ahead of time for such changes, and recommends that parents schedule a period of transition to buffer what otherwise might be a sudden culture shock.

Testing the MK Stereotype

Are MKS misfits? The stereotype persists that missionary kids, because they grow up in two (or more) cultures, have difficulty assimilating into either one.

But is the image accurate? The question has prompted an increasing amount of research in recent years, while response to the perceived needs of MKS has spawned a growing list of organizations and networking groups.

Many recent studies have been commissioned by mission boards, but the vast majority consists of independent graduate research. Though these studies approach the MK question from different angles, many offer similar conclusions: that MKS do struggle with social adjustment.

One such finding was recorded recently in a master’s thesis submitted to the Wheaton College Graduate School, “A Study of the Psychosocial Development of Adult MKS.” In that study, Karen Wrobbel examined nearly 300 adult MKS. She concluded: “The finding that psychosocial development was lower for the MKS in this study was an unexpected, or at least unhoped for, finding. The data indicate that the adult MKS studied, while having much positive resolution, are not resolving the development crises … as successfully as their monocultural counterparts.”

Other studies also suggest MKS have lower self-images than their peers.

But while research supports some notions about MKS, it disproves others. For example, the idea that boarding school has a negative effect on missionary children has not held up. One study found self-esteem higher among boarding-school MKS who had spent more years separated from their parents than among those who had spent fewer years away from their parents.

Another study indicated higher self-esteem was found among MKS whose postadolescent years were spent at a boarding school, compared with nonboarding-school MK peers. Wrobbel found that MKS who had spent most of their growing-up years overseas were better adjusted socially than those who had spent only one or two terms abroad.

Another common theme found in studies of MKS is that they tend to be high achievers and intellectually more advanced than their non-MK peers. This conclusion has been widely assumed for decades, but only recently has it gained statistical support.

More in the future

Studies currently in progress promise even broader understanding of the MK “problem.” For example, a comprehensive graduate-study project was recently initiated at the University of Tennessee to examine dysfunction in missionary families.

Probably the most far-reaching research effort is being undertaken by a research team headed by Leslie Andrews, associate dean of Alliance Theological Seminary, Nyack, New York. This team is made up of individuals from several mission organizations and is known by its acronym MK-CART/CORE (Consultation and Research Team/Committee on Research and Endowment). This long-term research program includes six phases, the first two involving a thorough analysis of MK schools worldwide. More than 5,000 hours’ worth of data from 18 schools has already been collected from the first phase alone.

One of the most publicized research and networking endeavors is the International Council on Missionary Kids. There have been two ICMK councils to date—in Manila (1984) and Quito (1987). Both focused on alleviating the negative side of the MK experience through more effective care giving.

One major aspect of care giving is re-entry assistance. In 1986, Interaction, Inc., an organization headed by David Pollock of Houghton College, sponsored the first of its CORE (Consultation on Re-Entry) seminars, designed to research problems related to MKS’ re-entry into their native culture and to recommend ways to alleviate those problems.

As these and other projects clarify the profile of the MK and his or her needs, churches and mission agencies will be better prepared to meet the increasing demands for family well-being on the mission field.

By Ruth A. Tucker.

Sons and Daughters of the Pioneers

Prior to the modern mission period, which began around 1800, the “MK issue” was virtually nonexistent. During the centuries of Roman Catholic missions, missionaries took the vow of celibacy. Even many of the earliest Protestant missionaries, such as the great Frederick Schwartz, who served 40 years in India during the eighteenth century, were single.

But beginning with William Carey, questions of what to do with missionary kids emerged. Dorothy Carey was mentally ill during most of her years in India, and the Carey children often had to fend for themselves. Their wayward behavior was a source of concern to one fellow missionary, who believed the fault lay with their father: “The good man saw and lamented the evil, but was too mild to apply an effectual remedy.”

For other great pioneer missionaries, their greatest trials often involved the death of little ones or the years of separation when their children returned to the homeland for education. Adoniram and Ann Judson lost two children before Ann herself died. Adoniram’s second wife, Sarah Boardman, was a widow with a young son, whom the Karen people affectionately called “Little Chief.” When he was six years old, Sarah sent him back to America for his education. The separation was surely traumatic for this little boy, whom his mother described as having “a clinging tenderness and sensitivity which peculiarly unfitted him for contact with strangers.” Sarah had eight more children by Judson, but died before she could see “Little Chief” again.

The mouths of babes

Despite the difficult circumstances so often associated with MKS of earlier generations, there is evidence that many of these children went on to become well-adjusted adults. For example, of the five children of Adoniram and Sarah Judson who survived to adulthood, two became ministers, one a medical doctor, and one the headmistress of an academy. Another served honorably in the Union Army until he was disabled in battle.

Still, many MKS of past generations did resent their circumstances. The son of Alexander Duff, a Scottish missionary to India, was left as an infant with a “widow lady” when his parents returned to the field. On their homecoming 11 years later, he was immediately drilled on his catechism by his father, who rebuked him, saying, “The heathen boys in my Institution in Calcutta know more of the Bible than you do.”

During the four-year furlough, the boy and his mother bonded almost as though they had never been separated. The parting in 1855, from young Duff’s perspective, was a mixture of sorrow and anger: “I … well remember how my mother’s and my own heart were wellnigh breaking, and how at the London Bridge my father possessed himself of the morning Times, and left us to cry our eyes out in mutual sorrow.… A sadder parting as between mother and son there never was. The father buried in his Times … parted from the son without any regret on the latter’s part.”

Another MK whose childhood was marred by painful separations was Ida Scudder, whose father was one of a longline of Reformed Church medical missionaries to India. When she was 12, her father returned to India following his furlough, and two years later her mother joined him. Ida had to be torn from her mother, who was taken by relatives to a Chicago train station while Ida sobbed uncontrollably in her mother’s empty pillow. Although Ida vowed she would never become a missionary, she later returned to India to become one of that country’s most distinguished missionary medical doctors.

Birth of the boarding school

When C. E. Hurlburt, general director of the Africa Inland Mission, arrived in Kenya in 1901 with his wife and five children, he shocked many old-timers. But he insisted that family life was paramount and was determined to have an MK boarding school on the field close enough for parents to spend time with their children three or four times each year. All of Hurlburt’s children later became ATM missionaries to Kenya. And the school he founded, Rift Valley Academy in Kijabe, Kenya, has since become one of the largest and best-equipped MK boarding schools in the world.

It is paradoxical that the MK boarding school, the institution that has become so controversial today among missionary parents, was initiated for the purpose of strengthening family ties and avoiding the long separations that created turmoil in families.

By Ruth A. Tucker.

In Their Parents’ Footsteps

MKS themselves have widely differing viewpoints on their own unique lifestyle, and its advantages and disadvantages. One MK now in her 50s looks back with bitterness. As a child, she felt abandoned during the long separations and resented the sacrifice she had to make for a ministry to which her parents—not she—were called. In spite of her experience, she has continued in the faith, but she is the only one of her family’s four children to do so.

Rosie Roth, who has served as a house parent for MKS in Nigeria, points out that time spent with parents can be as difficult as separations. She recalls one teenage girl who returned from a vacation with her parents in a deep depression. Roth spent extra time with her, and finally the girl poured out her heart. “As I gathered her in my arms,” Roth says, “the sobs came, and so did the real cry of her heart: ‘Dad didn’t have time for me, he didn’t have time! He was so busy with his work, and I know that is why he came. But I need him, too!’”

Other MKS, however, present an entirely different view. Tammy Carlson, a seminary student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, has fond memories of growing up in Singapore. She always thought she had led a normal life, until she became the center of curiosity in a Sunday school class while home on furlough. Her “normal” life has included travel to Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Guam, Western Samoa, New Zealand, Australia, Egypt, and Israel, as well as living in Singapore. She is now preparing for mission service herself.

Following in their parents’ footsteps is not uncommon among MKS. Steve Richardson, son of Don Richardson of Peace Child fame, grew up in Irian Jaya. When he was a baby, his father left in a dugout canoe to make contact with the Sawi tribe. Steve, a graduate of Columbia Bible College, is following a similar calling and is himself initiating a work—with his wife, Arlene, also an MK—to another unreached tribe, the Sundanese of West Java in Indonesia.

New World

Just as changing attitudes toward the family have reshaped the attitudes of missionary parents, the changing face of world missions has created new MK questions, and has offered | some answers as well.

One of the most important changes is that the MK issue today is no longer limited to Western missionaries. As more non-Western Christians serve cross-culturally, the MK situation becomes more complicated. For example, Joshua and Hiroko Ogawa, Japanese missionaries who have served in Indonesia and Singapore, chose not to send their daughters to the Chefoo Boarding School, where other OMF (Overseas Missionary Fellowship) MKS were educated, because they feared they would lose their Japanese identity. Instead, they sent them to national schools and supplemented their education with Japanese correspondence courses. Both daughters have returned to Japan for their high school studies.

tieth century, however, also holds opportunities for family togetherness that have been largely ignored in the past. For more than a century, missionaries have been passing through the teeming, world-class cities on their way to tribes in sparsely populated areas. Today, as more and more tribal people immigrate to urban areas, the needs there are greater than ever. In those cities, missionaries have almost limitless opportunities for ministry and for a lifestyle that does not require children to live away from home. Perhaps, had the Van Stones been commissioned to Buenos Aires instead of the Baliem Valley, they might never have been caught in the dilemma of choosing between what was best for their child and what was best for their ministry.

What conclusions can be drawn about the life of an MK? Surveys done over the years indicate that the vast majority of MKS, despite their frustrations, would not have chosen a different lifestyle. Perhaps the situation can best be summed up by saying that by its very nature, the life of an MK has potentially negative side effects—especially if parents are not attuned to the child’s needs—but at the same time it offers tremendous opportunities not found in other vocations. Family bonds and the well-being of children need no longer be sacrifices inherent in missionary work. As the nature of missionary work changes to meet a changing world, families can find new ways to fulfill Christ’s Great Commission—together.

When CHRISTIANITY TODAY asked its readers which religious questions seemed important to them, “Does God have a plan for my life, and if so, am I living it?” received the second-highest number of “high interest” ratings—62 per cent of those surveyed.

The editors knew divine guidance was an important topic to young Christians. But when we considered that the average CT reader is in his or her forties, we were surprised at the high rating, and decided to consider what the question of divine guidance means for persons in midlife.

Many religious people expend their spiritual energies telling God how much they love him and about the wonderful plan they have for his life. Of course, they don’t put it that way, but—cloaked in proper pious platitudes—they devote their prayers to telling God what to do.

On the other hand, mature followers of Jesus Christ are more concerned about God’s will for their lives. Thus they may spend more prayer time in listening than in talking.

But listening for God’s voice has become a problem for many Christians. Some seem to hear his voice as perhaps Joan of Arc heard it, getting her instructions from Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret—and then they proceed to take on impossible and irrational projects just as the Maid of Orleans did. Others listen, if not exactly expecting to hear voices, at least hoping for some solid assurance that God wants them to choose a particular path at a crossroads in their lives. And when they don’t get it, their faith may falter as they raise the wrong question: whether God is present in their lives, rather than whether some of the talk they have heard on guidance might not be a bit vacant. To add to the puzzlement, there are indeed some who listen faithfully, act on what they hear, and live lives of exemplary spiritual achievement.

Have I Done Well?

The puzzlement is unfortunately complicated for people who are reaching midlife. Much of the writing about knowing God’s will for our lives has been focused on questions and spiritual approaches appropriate to youth.

After World War II came to an end and the United States was flooded by GIs seeking jobs, educations, and sweethearts, Christian thinkers addressed the question of God’s will largely in terms of choosing a career and finding a mate. Twenty years later, as the leading edge of the baby boom entered college, the concerns were largely the same. But in the last decade of the twentieth century, the the leading edge of the baby boom is entering the bewildering landscape of “midlife crisis”—and facing a new series of questions.

While both young adults and midlife Christians are dealing with issues of identity, these Who-am-I questions take a different form at different stages of life. Young adults ask, “Who am I?” by asking which career to pursue or whether to pursue a career at all. Midlife adults are more likely to ask whether they have been successful in their chosen careers. Young adults try to understand their sexual future by asking whether they should marry and, if so, whom. Midlife adults are more likely to examine their sexual past, asking whether their earlier choices about marriage and children were indeed the right ones, and whether they have fulfilled their obligations and, in turn, been fulfilled by them. Young adults try to gain knowledge by earning degrees and honing their techniques. Midlifers, by contrast, try to consolidate wisdom by asking what they have learned.

The questions of midlife, thus, are essentially evaluations (Have I done well?), while the questions of young adulthood are choices (What shall I do?). This process of evaluation is an opportunity for growth as well as a door to disaster.

For example, giving a negative answer to the question “Have I paid enough attention to my children and instructed them well?” can help midlifers recognize shortcomings and do what they can to improve relations with their offspring. But in some circumstances, it can call forth a neurotic response that imposes moralistic and restrictive religion on teenagers who are supposed to be discovering their own values and testing their own judgment.

Likewise, a sense of failure within marriage can lead to deepened intimacy and understanding. Or it can produce a panicky search for intimacy and excitement outside of marriage, resulting in the pain of separation, divorce, and child-support payments.

Unworkable Ideas

Not only are the kinds of questions asked in midlife different, but the understandings that are often taught to young people of how God guides are no longer workable in a period of adjustment to imperfection and limits.

A number of erroneous ideas were at least tolerable in the energy of youth: (1) that missing God’s preferred choice in a situation by choosing some other, but equally God-honoring and moral, path will lead to spiritual ruin; (2) that the special guidance given to apostles and prophets as they spread the Good News or corrected God’s people is somehow the norm for what all Christians should expect; and (3) that God’s scriptural revelation of right, of wrong, and of principles to live by is not sufficient information for us to please God.

Young people, who are more spiritually idealistic, energetic, and resilient, may survive this kind of erroneous teaching. But these ideas, if taken seriously at midlife, can be much more potent for spiritual ruin. Either midlifers will give up hope of special guidance and therefore give up hope in God, or they will listen to their subjectivity, follow their impulses, and claim God’s blessing for the turmoil they create. In this regard, I never cease to be amazed at those who abandon hope for their marriages and pass through an illicit affair or two on their way to a second union, only to interpret that experience as God releasing them from bondage and bringing them a blessing in the guise of a new spouse. However unwise our early choices may have been, there is never an excuse for trying to improve the situation by violating the clear and inspired commands of Scripture.

Why Ask?

Why then do we even bother ourselves about seeking God’s plan for our lives? Why do we so often put ourselves through the anguish of searching? While all Christians wish to live within God’s will, most of us proceed in our day-by-day routine doing the tasks we find at hand. We feel settled that it is God’s will for us to change the baby’s diapers, go to the office, mow the lawn, and teach our children well. We also know it is God’s will that we not do certain things—lie to the Internal Revenue Service, for example, or sexually abuse children.

And we do not bother much to ask God about the incidental affairs of living. These questions we recognize as having no moral significance.

But as midlife adults, it is natural for us to ask about God’s will for our lives partly because of what Scripture says, and partly because of what our psyches tell us.

The Intimate God

Scripture tells us of a God who is near to us: one who keeps account of the hairs on our heads (Matt. 10:20; Luke 12:7); one who has plans for some of us from the moment of conception (Judges 13:5; Ps. 139:13–15; Jer. 1:5); one who wants good things for us in the same way a father wants good things for each of his children (Luke 11:11–13). God even keeps track of the two-for-a-farthing sparrows, Jesus said. Of how much more value are we human beings than birds to him (Matt. 10:29, 31; Luke 12:6–7)!

We could infer from these texts that God has a plan for us. How could an all wise God who knows us better than we know ourselves not have a blueprint for our lives, an itinerary through the bewildering choices of career and job assignment, housing and community choice, mate and offspring? The fact that certain biblical characters were chosen before their births to do special work for God seems to reinforce this idea. And the mystical direction of the Spirit experienced by such as Paul and Philip (Acts 8:26–29; 13:1–7; 16:10, 6–7) likewise gives the impression that God has our lives mapped out for us.

But is that the necessary implication? Healthy parental love wishes for its offspring a rich and rewarding life. But healthy parental love does not force its specific hopes—that a daughter should marry a doctor, for example, or be one herself—on its children. Healthy parental love gives guidelines for safety. (“Don’t stick your fingers in electrical outlets,” we tell our little ones, and when they are older, “Just say no to drugs.”) Wise parents try to inculcate good habits and edifying practices (brushing regularly, going to church and giving to charity, and changing the oil in your car every three to four thousand miles). But within wise guidelines, our children face a creation that is bulging with good possibilities. And healthy parents encourage their offspring to invest themselves in those possibilities.

Likewise, God seems to have given our first parents only a few limitations (“Don’t touch that tree, but from all the others you may freely eat”) and a host of possibilities. And our spiritual ancestors received moral and spiritual laws (the Ten Commandments in particular and the Mosaic legislation in general) that guarded their heritage of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (not strictly biblical terms, I realize, but not exactly unbiblical either).

Under the New Covenant, Christians are encouraged to live in a spirit of freedom and sonship rather than in a spirit of fear and slavery (Rom. 8:14–17; Gal. 4–5). In fact, without revoking any of his former guidelines, God has articulated for those who walk in the Spirit a summary guideline of sacrificial love; for those who live by a rule of self-sacrifice in search of the good of their fellow human beings will surely fulfill all of the moral and spiritual laws.

It seems from Scripture that God does on occasion have special purposes for chosen individuals. But it also appears from Scripture that the bulk of humanity is given the freedom and responsibility to choose wisely within the limits of the moral law. This has been argued briefly but cogently by J. I. Packer on the pages of Eternity (April, May, June 1986) and at length by Gary Friesen with J. Robin Maxson in their book Decision Making and the Will of God: A Biblical Alternative to the Traditional View (Multnomah Press, 1980). It seems only reasonable that to those creatures he has made in his image, God gives the principle and burden of freedom. The daunting truth about our high calling is well put by Bishop Dafyd in Stephen R. Lawhead’s Merlin (Crossway, 1988): “The higher a man’s call and vision, the more choices are given him. This is our work in creation: to decide. And what we decide is woven into the thread of time and being forever. Choose wisely, then, but you must choose” (p. 328).

God’s Will—and a Little Creativity

Never have I seen a time when people are busier but with less sense of direction in their lives. Lou Harris tells us that 86 percent of Americans are chronically stressed out—and that number includes Christians. The question is why. Why are we so willing to tolerate stressed-out living? Why are our lives so lacking in direction and purpose?

I have particularly wondered about this in light of the fact that there is so much sermonizing and writing on how to find God’s will for our lives by “open and closed doors,” “fleeces,” and assorted “pulse taking” measures. Virtually all the personal-growth books, career-planning texts, and financial manuals for Christians provide simple, direct formulas for finding God’s will. And yet there is a majority of men and women who still seem to be wandering in the wastelands of uncertainty and confusion.

Back to basics

One reason why people are so stressed out and confused is that we are trying to do it all, have it all, and follow Jesus too. But we won’t find God’s will by doing the American Dream with a Jesus overlay. If we seriously want to find God’s will for our lives, we must begin with very different questions than “What do I want?” and “What will God let me have?” Instead, we must ask, “What does God want?” “What is God doing in history?” and “How does he want to use my life?” And the way we answer these questions is simply to go back to the Bible. There we discover God’s purposes for his people and his world. I usually begin by studying Isaiah.

The vision of the prophet is absolutely breathtaking. He describes a spectacular new heaven and new earth—nations of the world in which the blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame dance with joy; captives are set free, and a sumptuous banquet is spread for the people of God.

God purposes to create a new order of righteousness under his reign in which there is no more sin. He purposes a new kingdom of justice in which there is no more oppression of the poor; a new era of peace in which the weapons of war are transformed into the implements of peace; a new age of wholeness in which the partial are made whole; and a new day of celebration when suffering and death are put away and we share in the wedding feast of our God forever.

Clearly, Jesus Christ understood God’s purposes for the human future. And as the Messiah, he made God’s purposes his purposes, singularly devoting his life to that vision. The author of Hebrews encourages us to look “unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Heb. 12:2). What was the joy set before him? It was the complete realization of the purposes of God, a world in which all things are made new.

This same Jesus taught us to pray a very radical prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It is clear in the Gospels that he expects his followers to join him in his vocation of praying and working to see the kingdom purposes of God realized on earth as they are in heaven. He repeatedly urged us not to worry about the self-involving agendas of a secular society but to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, assuring us that he will supply our essential needs (Matt. 6:33).

In other words, if God is ultimately opposed to sin and plans to create a new order of righteousness, then we too must work for righteousness. If God is opposed to the oppression of the poor and wants to create a new society of justice, then we too must work for justice for the poor. If God is opposed to the suffering of the innocent and intends to create a new era of peace, then we too must commit our lives to work for peace and reconciliation. If God’s heart breaks over those who are partial, and he wills sight to the blind and healing for the disabled, then we too must work to bring wholeness to the broken. And if God wills to create a wedding feast to celebrate the establishment of his reign, then we too must join him in celebrating his reign now in anticipation of that day when Christ returns and God’s kingdom is fully established.

Obviously, we can’t all fully devote our lives to all that God intends for the human future, but we can through prayer, retreat, and community discover how God wants to use our lives and gifts to work intentionally for his purposes now. Some will be called to work one evening a week doing evangelism among international students. Others will discover their vocation in working with the growing number of abused kids in our cities. Still others will become involved in agricultural projects in Somalia. All, however, must find ways to express God’s loving purposes through their lives.

What I am suggesting is this; (1) Once we have clarified what God’s purposes are through biblical study, (2) discerned through prayer how God wants to link our lives to his purposes, and (3) had that call confirmed in community, then we have the opportunity to orchestrate our whole lives around that sense of purpose. I call this whole-life discipleship.

Whole-life discipleship

Al felt called of God to go into engineering when he graduated from the University of Washington. He turned down the first job he was offered because even though the pay was good, building cruise missiles was, for him, counter-kingdom. He looked a little while longer and took a job redesigning cardiology equipment. One day a friend invited him to visit a home for cerebral-palsied kids. During that visit it all came together for Al. He is now at the University of Chicago learning to use advanced engineering design and computer systems to help cerebral-palsied kids move and communicate for the kingdom of God.

Virtually any occupational or professional training can, with a little imagination, be intentionally directed for God’s loving purposes. But if we can’t do it through our occupations, then each of us needs to find some way through our leisure to work for the purposes of God. Most of us, with some modest changes in our timestyles, could find one evening a week to do ministry.

Recently, I received amazed stares when I told a church congregation that one of the top discipleship decisions they will ever make is the decision to purchase a home. I explained, “Talk all you want about the lordship of Jesus in your life, but once you sign that contract, both husband and wife are working for the mortgage company for the next 30 years.” Usually it is a decision not to do short-term overseas service. It is a decision to have less time for family life. And with both spouses working, they probably won’t have any time during the week to be involved in service to anyone else.

John and Pam created an alternative so that they and their family could place God’s purposes first. They decided to build their own house. Since they only have two little boys, they decided to construct a simple, two-bedroom house. John and Pam have just completed construction of their suburban house. The total cost: $25,000 (not including land costs), paid up front (as opposed to a mortgage that would have cost nearly $500,000 over 30 years).

Since they have no mortgage, Pam does not have to work outside the home. She has more time for family life and working in the church. As for John, he can afford to take time off from work periodically to go overseas and do video work for World Concern in Nepal.

I realize we can’t all build our own homes, but with a little imagination, most of us can find creative ways to free up some time to join our Lord in “bringing sight to the blind, release to the captives, and good news to the poor.” We can discover a way of life that is less stressed and more festive and satisfying than anything the rat race can offer.

By Tom Sine, author of Why Settle for More & Miss the Best? (Word).

The Desperate Search For God’S Favor

But despite God’s gift of freedom, it seems that many people expect him to have an agenda for their existence, perhaps not because of what Scripture tells them, but because of what their psyches whisper. Of course, the desire to please God in making our choices great and small is a sign of spiritual health. But there is another drive to please—a desperate desire to pacify God and win his favor by divining exactly what he wants and doing only precisely that. That desire is a sign of spiritual pathology. This inability to live with uncertainty, to allow God to allow us freedom, may often be rooted in a bad experience with a parent or other authority figure. I have seen this consuming passion most often in people who felt abandoned by a parent—an adopted teen whose adoptive parents beat her; a collegiate man whose father died early and unexpectedly of cancer; another whose father still lived but had grown cold, distant, and uncommunicative. In counseling, all of these persons came to recognize that they subconsciously feared God would abandon them (as the human parents had) if they failed to win his favor at every juncture in their lives.

Midlife can bring this fear of abandonment even more intensely than young adulthood. And thus midlife anxieties can produce an even more intense search for being “in the will of God” as an assurance that when other aspects of life are decaying, at least one can Jacoblike tighten a full-nelson hold on God.

At midlife, many adults discover they are not going to rise any higher in their organizations. They discover they will probably never enter a higher salary bracket than they already have. They find their superiors at work noticing the industry, creativity, and stamina of younger employees—all at the very point when their own energies begin to ebb and their joints begin to stiffen. They discover their children are not achieving all they had hoped. And they realize their children are no longer malleable, but already set steadily on their own courses.

Midlife adults may also find their own marriages have lost their luster and that, as the children grow older and leave home, the needs of offspring can no longer distract attention from deficiencies in their marriage. And then their friends and former classmates begin to die off, just one or two, in accidents or with untimely coronaries; but the person in midlife has entered the valley of the shadow of death.

Loss is real at this stage. Loss of goals. Loss of energy. Loss of a sense of accomplishment. Loss of family pride. Loss of friends. And loss of faith—for those who have been good churchgoing, pillar-of-the-community Christians discover that even their faithfulness to religion has not made them exceptions to the life patterns of the rest of humanity. As Raymond Studzinski writes:

The desire to totally control one’s environment and one’s future, frequently through a close relationship with God, the all-good provider, has proven to be unrealizable. Plagued by unfulfilled dreams and by shattered ideals, persons at midlife find that the enemy of their fulfillment and happiness is less outside themselves in other people or in situations and more within, in their own hearts. They experience their internal chaos in terms of not knowing what they want, what they care for, or if anything is worthwhile. Rather than being fulfilled, they feel drained by all they have done in their lives. Life looks like a series of losses with the greatest loss, that of life itself, still ahead. (Raymond Studzinski, O.S.B., Spiritual Direction and Midlife Development [Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985], p. 37.)

Holding On To An Idealized Past

Whenever a person is moving into a new phase of life, it is not unusual for him or her to want to hold on to elements of the former stage. Every parent learns how a teenager can act remarkably mature one minute and revert to utter childishness the next. At least for the teen there is the promise of increased freedom and responsibility that will lure him or her to “put away childish things.” But what is to motivate the person in middle age to move ahead developmentally? The promise of false teeth and bifocals? Thus it is only natural that the midlife person will try to grasp at the piety of his or her youth, longing for the excitement and enthusiasm that followed conversion and trying to revive the sense of God’s intimacy that accompanied an important personal spiritual experience. But that energy cannot be contrived. A spiritual discovery once made cannot be made again. And thus the midlife adult often feels the loss of God’s presence along with the loss of youth, idealism, and opportunity.

The most healthy reaction is not to look for God in an idealized past, but to move into the future, confident that God will present himself to us in new and different ways.

For example, the believer who does not try to recreate his or her spiritual past can find God’s presence and a sense of direction in different scriptural stories and motifs from the ones that appealed in the passionate and energetic days of youth. Teens and college students are often challenged by images of the young Daniel and his friends standing firm for truth in the court schools of Babylon. Or perhaps they are inspired by the exploits of a young Gideon, David, or Esther. Stories of courage and accomplishment are models for the channeling of the spiritual energies of the young in the service of God.

But the midlife believer, who sees that his tomorrows are fewer than his yesterdays, and who realistically understands that many of his earlier goals may be unreachable, will find inspiration in the biblical tales of failure, of repentance, and of persistence: Peter’s rebounding from faithlessness to take a post of apostolic leadership; Paul’s wisdom and faithfulness in spite of the physical torment of his “thorn in the flesh” and the politicization of the churches he had helped found; Hosea’s faithfulness in the face of Gomer’s promiscuity; the aging David’s acceptance of his inability to complete the building of the temple, yet doing what he could to amass the materials. These stories can be inspirations at midlife.

Similarly, persons in midlife must look for God’s presence and listen for his direction in the new challenges that come with a new phase of living. Many midlife men, for example, are given a new opportunity in the workplace. Instead of being rising young stars, they now find themselves in a position to become mentors—to take the skills, wisdom, and savvy acquired in the first 20 years of work life and use them to help younger, more energetic workers to develop themselves and make a contribution to their field. Thus one can find God’s presence in these new serving relationships.

And more than ever, midlife persons can seek God’s presence and guidance in their relationships with fellow believers. The achievement-oriented lives of so many young adults effectively prevent them from developing deep relationships in either the family or the church. So much energy and time are devoted to making it financially and achieving advancement that barely enough is left for perfunctory family meals and church attendance. But midlife can be a time of consolidation rather than expansion. Wise midlifers may recognize that they have reached a career plateau. For these individuals, the pressure is off if they will allow themselves to be thankful for what they have achieved with God’s help. If they will, they can then turn their attentions to mining the riches of their relationships. And in these relationships, they can find God’s presence and his guidance.

A few years before I formally became a midlifer (the transition begins at about age 40 and ends at about 45, says Studzinski), I was considering a career change. Should I return to school for a degree in clinical psychology? I asked myself. After all, I had done a fair amount of pastoral counseling, something I had enjoyed. I asked God for guidance, and then asked four Christian friends who knew me well: a former student who had graded papers for me; a former secretary who was now involved in career guidance counseling; a fellow campus minister with whom I shared racquetball games and lockerroom chat twice a week; and my wife. All four said it would be the wrong choice—and each of them gave different reasons. And all of the reasons were compelling. Later, when I considered becoming an editor, the voices of friends confirmed the decision. At all stages of our lives, God makes himself present to us in our relationships. But at midlife, we need to turn to our friends more than ever. And in addition, we need to avail ourselves of the spiritual mentors God has given us in the church.

Love For The Unlovely

Understanding two aspects of the character of God is important to the person in midlife, for these scriptural themes help us feel yet more comfortable in our relationship with God at the same time they help us make decisions consistent with God’s character.

First, God is characterized by covenant faithfulness. So, too, should his people be. If there is any aspect of God’s character that through sheer repetition in the Hebrew Scriptures should impress us, it is this characteristic. The Hebrew word chesedh appears nearly 250 times in Scripture—mostly in connection with God’s character. Often translated “lovingkindness” and still more often “mercy” in the older translations, when associated with divine love the word is perhaps best rendered as “covenant faithfulness.” Or as E. M. Good writes, chesedh is “a faithful love, a steadfast, unshakable maintenance of the covenantal relationship” (“Love in the OT,” The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 3, p. 167).

The steadiness of God’s covenant love is spotlighted repeatedly by the unfaithfulness of Israel. In spite of their whoring after other gods, their syncretistic adaptations of pagan deities, and their grinding the faces of the poor, Yahweh’s lovingkindness seems to endure forever. He continues to send his messengers to woo them and warn them.

The biblical covenant between Yahweh and his people has both a unilateral and a bilateral character. It is radically one-sided, of course, for Yahweh chooses a group of people who have little to recommend them, leads them forth from bondage, gives them civil and moral laws by which to live, gives them food and drink, and finally, he gives them a land in which to live. All this he does when they are so disorganized and disorderly they cannot hope to take any credit themselves. Thus his covenant with them, his agreement or contract, is one-sided. Knowing their weakness, Yahweh nevertheless promises to be faithful.

Yet there is a subtle two-sidedness here. While Yahweh knows their weakness, while he realistically understands that he will not receive perfect obedience from this nation newly formed, he places upon them the condition of keeping covenant, that is, to remember him as the source of their existence (Deut. 6:10–15), to obey his commands (Deut. 7:6–11), and to be holy as he is holy (Lev. 11:45). After all, as David sings in 2 Samuel 22:26, with those who are faithful, God is faithful (“With the chasidh you practice chesedh”).

Christian theologians differ on whether God’s covenant love for Israel is in some way conditioned on their continued obedience. A case can be made from Scripture for the idea that God’s covenant faithfulness has its limits. And a case can be made for the completely unlimited character of that chesedh. But most biblical scholars will agree that God’s covenant faithfulness includes a tolerance far beyond any human comprehension.

Human covenants are by their nature more bilateral than divine covenants. But the promises we make (as in the marriage service) and the promises inherent in our very existence (as in our relationships to our children) are to be characterized by a divinely unilateral quality. No matter what my children may do, they are still my children. No matter what my spouse may do, she is still spouse to me. Wise Christians therefore treat these bonds as indissoluble. And in the turmoil of midlife, they preserve these covenant relationships by practicing a longsuffering lovingkindness.

Faithful In The Face Of Failure

The painful story of Hosea and his fidelity to the faithless Gomer is recorded in Scripture as a parable of God’s utter faithfulness and an example of how human love can partake of divine chesedh. In the face of Israel’s spiritual adultery, God says he will romance her: “Therefore”—that is, because of Israel’s idolatry (Gomer’s adultery)—“therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.… And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.… And I will betroth you to me for ever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love [chesedh] and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the LORD” (Hosea 2:14, 15b, 19–20).

The word of the Lord through Hosea is the word of faithfulness in the face of infidelity. When midlife Christians evaluate the “success” of their relationships, they must remember that God, who condemns his people’s idolatry, lives yet by his covenant with them.

It is natural for persons in midlife to evaluate the health and success of their relationships. But midlife Christians must resist the temptation to write off completely the relationship that did not fulfill their romantic (and perhaps unreasonable) expectations. Seeking solace or excitement in an affair is anything but practicing covenant faithfulness. Love does not seek solace; love does not thrive on thrills. Love suffers; love forgives; love nurtures; and love heals when possible. And rather than discarding a relationship, love examines it to see whether it might be entering a new chapter of existence.

Such covenant faithfulness is difficult, to be sure. But it can indeed be rewarding—even when a divorce seems inevitable.

Divorce certainly seemed inevitable when Ellen returned from a trip abroad. Charles could tell from her distant coolness that something had changed for the worse and that the marriage was over. That was over five years ago. Charles still doesn’t know if Ellen was unfaithful to him on that trip. But whatever had happened had caused Ellen to turn on him and blame him for all her bad experiences and turbulent emotions. Charles, hurt though he was, decided to exercise covenant faithfulness, to act like a husband even though Ellen wouldn’t let him be a husband. Over the next few years, Charles insisted that she see a counselor and face her inner turmoil; he insisted that they come to an agreement about their property and avoid expensive and upsetting legal wrangles; he helped Ellen get launched on a new career (she now makes significantly more than his ministerial salary); and when she wanted to save money for a down payment on a new house for herself and their son, he invited her to move back in with him so she could set the money aside. Over five years passed between their separation and their divorce, but those five years were a time of growth for both and, in a curious kind of way, faithfulness for Charles. Ellen’s midlife turmoil could have spelled emotional and financial disaster for them both. Charles’s Hosea-like commitment avoided ruin even when he could not singlehandedly avoid divorce.

To be godlike at midlife means to hold faithfully on course, as Charles did, even when faced with failure. But Charles’s story also demonstrates another aspect of God’s character.

The Chess Master

God is the master of creative possibilities, one who is not boxed in by our bad choices. Having been created in his image, we share in that creativity. Surely Charles would have chosen another course for his ill-fated marriage; but given the realities of a sin-ripped world, Charles chose a creative path that wrung more good out of a painful situation than anyone might have hoped for. Likewise, the sovereign God (who is all wise) would often have chosen a course different from those chosen by his people through the ages. But given the hard realities of human history, the creative God finds ways to bring victory from tragedy, success from failure, and hope from disappointment.

Einstein reputedly said, “God doesn’t play dice.” True, but I believe God does play chess. The essence of dice is chance; but the essence of chess is strategy; and the essence of strategy is looking beyond the narrow confines of the immediate challenge to the multitude of options that are open beyond. Human beings often feel squeezed by the either/or-ness of daily life. We may feel we have a narrow range of options, none of them particularly attractive. But like a good chess player, our sovereign God in his foreknowledge sees his second, third, and fourth moves hence. Thus he can—and does—bring good out of evil. This is illustrated in the wisdom of Joseph, who had been betrayed by his jealous brothers only to be made governor of Egypt. In Genesis 50, Joseph faces his fearful brothers and says, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (v. 20). No one could have advised those foolish brothers that it was God’s will that they sell their sibling into slavery. But it was God’s will that many should be preserved from starvation; and, like a chess master, he took the deplorable circumstances of Joseph’s life and brought good to many. This must be the meaning of Romans 8:28, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” It is not that Paul affirms the goodness of all circumstances, but that he affirms God’s creative good will in all circumstances.

Can Christians find a way to be creatively godlike when faced with hard choices? Yes; they can choose not to follow their flesh-bound instincts and sulk, rebel, or give up. Instead, they can follow the intuitions of God’s Spirit, which leads them to “be imitators of God,” to “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:1–2).

What gives us the courage to act in sacrificial and creative love, in unorthodox (by the world’s standards) ways as Charles did in his disappointment with Ellen? It is the surety of God’s faithful and creative love. When we love creatively, we can and do make mistakes. But we gain the courage to act from knowing that our mistakes are more than matched by God’s creative opportunities. Nothing we do in the spirit of sacrificial love can permanently thwart his good and loving purpose for us.

Excerpted from the book Tough Questions Christians Ask (Christianity Today/Victor Books)

MARY ELLEN ASHCROFT¹Mary Ellen Ashcroft teaches part-time at the College of Saint Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota.

For awhile I thought my dislike of video cameras was sour grapes: I’d missed filming my children’s first staggers across the room, and I have no reel-to-reel memories of exotic places I’ve visited.

But my regret flamed into something hotter last summer. Picture the scene: Three parents lounging in deck chairs by the lake, their eyes alternating between magazines (propped dutifully against their knees) and the lake (in order to count the kids occasionally—one, two, three, four, all there).

Suddenly, a shriek: “Daddy, look! look! I’m swimming! Look!” Even the two of us whose progeny this isn’t drag ourselves a little straighter to goggle at the child’s discovery of buoyancy. Splutter, shout, swim.

I turn to congratulate the proud father, but his chair stands mysteriously empty. I twist around to follow the sound of breaking twigs and see the father bolting up the hill, heading frantically for his cabin. My friend and I pipe up the obligatory parental praise to the new swimmer, “Hey, good work, John, nice job.”

Four or five minutes later, the frantic father appears. He is sweating profusely, jiggling his video gear, and plugging the sound cord into the relevant hole. The star, meanwhile, has hauled himself out of the water and stands shivering (not exactly the kind of footage that will inspire Grandma on a snowy evening). “Hey, son, I want to catch you swimming!” But it’s no good—the swimmer’s moment of glory has passed, and Dad has missed it.

Later that same day we meet another video whiz, this time a mother with four children. The children are riding model trains, and they are shrieking, “Look at me, Mom!” Mom cannot ride or shriek because she is filming from the platform. What would posterity say if she did not preserve these memories? Fun cannot just “happen”; it must be engineered and recorded. As the kids cruise into the station, mother shifts Tom so she can get Randy in the picture, and she adjusts Franny’s hat so that you will be able to see Bill’s face.

Magic In Mothballs

Why are video cameras such a hot item? One reason, I suspect, is because we finally have the technology to indulge our covert materialism. Despite what we utter in church, we suspect anything that we cannot touch, see, and hear. We want desperately to own and keep that which cannot be kept. We want to mothball Sally’s first steps and preserve the moment when John learned to swim (at only five years old!).

We don’t trust intangible memories; we want something we can store and access with the press of a button. We cling to the materialistic world view in which the visible is all important, and we struggle to capture and cage each “magic” moment.

But magic moments cannot be captured. We cage the memory, but it escapes. Pry open the cage (rerun, rerun), and the magic is gone—what crouches in its place is tame and boring. The filmer/reporter misses the essence of the experience: the sparkle in the child’s eyes as she toddles across the room; the seashore smell of salt, spray, and breakers as they are thrown onto the sand.

There is a distance, as if you were to contemplate the principle of kissing while in the act of kissing, or wonder if you’re really having a good time while in the act of skiing. When we view reality through an objective lens, we move to the sidelines; we are not swept into the tingling, the formidable, or the overwhelming. We are left holding an empty chrysalis: the life—the magic—has flown.

Forty or 50 years from now, I can picture retirement villages filled with people who struggle to catch vague memories of events they never fully experienced by watching tape after tape of recorded happenings—no memories evoked and considered because the participants were never fully present.

Bethlehem On Videotape

Epiphany is the moment of revelation. I try to imagine the wise men’s visit today: Mary to Joseph, “Joseph, will you grab the video camera? I’ve got to get this on tape”; to the wise men, “Say, would you mind backing up and approaching the house again, maybe a little more slowly this time, but with some eager expressions, please? Okay—no, that camel is blocking the angle.”

How did Mary manage without a video camera? Scripture tells us she stored up her experiences and pondered them in her heart. She fully lived them and then ruminated their significance again and again.

Scripture points to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air and exhorts us again and again to reflect on God’s sustaining care. The psalmist moves from depression to praise by remembering and meditating on God’s works (Pss. 77; 107). The children of Israel are commanded not to make tangible, graven images, but to remember God’s act of deliverance. Hundreds of years later, Augustine writes that without the “sweetness” and the “delight of truth” given in contemplation, the “burden” of action commanded by the duty of love would be unbearable (De civitate Dei, xix: 19).

Like the children of Israel, we need faith in order to throw ourselves fully into our experiences with our children, with God, and with his world. Paul writes, “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” When we surround ourselves with our taped lives, we are like two-year olds who treasure the pile of glitzy wrapping paper but do not realize that the Savior is born; we squeal over foil-wrapped eggs in a pink-and-green basket when it is Jesus’ resurrection that has shattered the world’s despair.

Our lives consist of a series of experiences, some more photogenic than others. God, through his Spirit and his Word, breathes significance into and around these experiences so that they grow into treasure houses of faith that can sustain us in times of pressure or depression. Mary’s experiences of God were her treasure, and they were carefully stored where moth and rust could not touch them. She had her treasure with her when she scrubbed the kitchen floor, when she walked to fetch water from the village well, and when she suffered a mother’s anguish at the foot of the cross.

The World We Created at Hamilton High 1953–1987, by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press, 296 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Bruce L. Shelley, professor of church history, Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary.

During a visit to a high school campus in the late seventies, Gerald Grant noticed a teacher who was visibly upset. A group of students had verbally assaulted her in the hallway. Had she reported the incident? No, she said. “It wouldn’t have done any good.”

“Why not?” Grant asked.

“I didn’t have any witnesses.”

That incident, according to Grant, exemplifies what has gone wrong with urban public education. Relativism reigns. Moral benchmarks have crumbled. And the value-free atmosphere has turned schools into institutions where teacher and student are peers and adult authority is reduced to what can stand up in court.

Grant’s convincing analysis and argument for the recovery of moral principles in education makes The World We Created at Hamilton High significant reading for Christian parents, youth pastors, and other evangelicals who are concerned about life on today’s high school campuses.

Grant, who is professor of cultural foundations and sociology at Syracuse University, traces how the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies destroyed the peaceful world of the 1950s American high school. He calls the school in his book “Hamilton High” and locates it in “Median, U.S.A.” In reality, the school is Nottingham High in Syracuse, New York, which opened its doors in 1953 in a middle-class neighborhood.

During its early years, Hamilton reflected its setting: high achievement and social conformity. Twenty years later, however, pimps strolled the school grounds. The principal had a full-time bodyguard, and school closings due to violence were commonplace.

Also reviewed in this section:

Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Scandal,by Shusaku Endo

What’s Good About the Good News?by Neal Punt

Book Briefs

Eerdmans Analytical Concordance to the RSV • New Dictionary of Theology • The Message of the Bible • Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible • The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia • The Serendipity Bible Study Book of John • Reflections on the Gospel of John • LifeChange Series: Colossians and Philemon • Tyndale New Testament Commentaries: Colossians and Philemon • The Wycliffe Exegetical Commentary: Philippians • Word Biblical Commentary: 1 Peter • Tyndale New Testament Commentaries: 1 Peter

A Negotiated Reality

According to Grant, the dramatic changes at Hamilton can be traced directly to a string of reforms designed to guarantee high school students the legal rights of adults. Today, Hamilton no longer thinks of itself as a traditional academic community, responsible to impart moral values to students along with information and skills. As a result, cheating is widespread. The school’s drug counselor claims to be unqualified to tell students what is right and wrong. And teachers do not attempt to impose discipline or to tell students how to live. In short, Hamilton is a bureaucratic, utilitarian institution in which people get what they want and move on.

Students’ rights changed the climate of education completely. Teachers—who are of special concern to Grant—began to feel that their reprimands following even blatant misbehavior would not be supported by school administrators. Many began to “look the other way” to avoid bringing a misconduct charge against a student. They feared not only legal battles, but also physical battles.

The old student-teacher relationships, built on years of informal consensus, were swept away, and in their place stood a new legal “equality.” Teachers, writes Grant, “were placed in the paradoxical position of being asked to socialize their equals.”

By the mid-1980s, teachers and students at Hamilton had reached “a negotiated reality.” Though the harsh, adversarial tone of the seventies seemed a thing of the past, there was no return to the attitudes of the fifties. Students themselves deplored Hamilton’s lack of respect, absence of caring, and hostility; but they celebrated their individuality and diversity, and resented any attempt on the part of a faculty member “to pry” into their personal lives or “to interfere.”

Recovering Moral Authority

According to Grant, today’s substitutes for traditional morality can be found in two practices, one of which is what sociologist Robert Bellah calls “therapeutic contractualism.” This style of interaction and “human relations” management, writes Grant, “tends to encourage the view that if a student gets in trouble it is a psychological problem to be dealt with in a therapeutic relationship, rather than a failure of the community to morally educate.”

The second substitute for traditional morality is “values clarification.” This process, according to Sidney B. Simon, who popularized the method, “involves knowing what one prizes, choosing those things which one cares for most, and weaving those things into the fabric of daily living.” Teachers of values clarification stress that values are different and that no one set of values is better than any other.

Critics of this process, including Grant, charge that it breeds relativism among students, and that it has produced a coercive peer pressure that encourages them to adopt the most popular set of values.

The time has come, says Grant, to restore moral authority. But he insists—and here many Christians may find their most serious difference with him—that the case “needs to be made anew that morality is independent of religion and that religion is neither a necessary nor a sufficient justification for the most basic, universal, ethical principles.”

Still, Grant’s argument remains compelling, and the issues he raises are crucial. Schools must affirm and impart moral as well as intellectual values. Any call for educational reform that ignores them will inevitably fail, as a visit to Hamilton High School demonstrates.

Scandal, by Shusaku Endo (Dodd Mead, 261 pp.; $18.95, cloth). Reviewed by Terry Muck, executive editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Perhaps no passage in literature is more in harmony with the apostle Paul’s view of sin in Romans 7 than Feodor Dostoevski’s chilling look at the human soul: “In the reminiscences of every man there are some things that he does not reveal to anyone except possibly to friends. Then there are some that he will not even reveal to friends, but only to himself, and even so in secret. But finally there are some that a man is afraid to reveal even to himself.”

Shusaku Endo’s Scandal, the latest in a long list of brilliant novels, takes a similar look at the dark heart of humanity. It is the story of a Japanese novelist, Suguro (who resembles Endo himself in many ways), whose old age and impending death teach him that “deep in the hearts of men lay a blackness they themselves knew nothing about.”

Suguro learns this lesson when he is threatened by a journalist-blackmailer, who claims he has seen the Christian novelist roaming Tokyo’s red-light district. Others corroborate the story. Suguro strongly denies it and insists an imposter is trying to ruin his reputation. The suspense builds as the reader tries to decide if Suguro is really a philanderer, a moral Jekyll and Hyde, or an innocent man defamed by an imposter.

Recognizing The Dark Side

Endo uses this dramatic story to examine Suguro’s unfolding awareness of his own dark side and of the evil that lurks in all men’s souls. Our simple-minded conception of sin is stripped naked as we learn that the real evil of this powerful, often-unconscious force goes far beyond the do’s and don’ts of everyday morality. Sin affects our relationships with others, distorts the accuracy of our self-awareness, and even defines the boundaries of salvation itself.

Endo paints gripping portraits of relationships in order to illustrate what happens when we fail to recognize the evil side of our nature. Suguro, for example, is “a novelist who peered into the depth of his soul … but as a husband he was careful not to expose himself beyond the essential boundaries.” Toward his audience, Suguro feels “a prick of conscience, as though he had lied … to all his many readers. Don’t overestimate me, he wanted to tell them.” Another distorted relationship in Suguro’s life involves a lady of noble birth and bearing, Madame Naruse—a hospital volunteer of saintly heart by day, and a participant in sadomasochistic parties by night.

In these and many other relationships—with his editor, his fellow writers, and even with the muckraking journalist—Suguro slowly, and then only partially, learns the lesson of self-disclosure: that people simply cannot relate in any meaningful way to someone who does not recognize his own capacity for evil. “Everyone has had the experience of wanting to hurt someone who is too good and too innocent,” Endo writes.

But the real danger is to the individual’s own soul. It is here that Endo masterfully reveals Suguro’s growing awareness of what he has hidden so long. At first he totally denies the possibility of danger. Then he treats it merely as an object of professional, authorial curiosity. Finally he realizes he must come to grips with his dark side or else his whole world will crumble: “A hand somewhere was trying to shake loose the tight grip on the world that he had built for himself. The hand was seeking to hurl him into a nightmarish world he had never before imagined.… He felt as though his entire life had been built on a foundation of mendacity.”

And then, somehow, in this final recognition of evil comes the starting point of—what? Salvation? Maybe. There is some hint that in the very act of recognizing personal evil, the capacity to accept salvation is born. But Endo refuses to tie up the bow so neatly. The missionary Paul does in Romans 7. The theologian Calvin provides a systematic answer. But novelist Endo has made his point powerfully in his story and leaves us to face our own dark side and its death-dealing consequences alone.

Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, by Walter Wangerin, Jr. (Harper & Row, 191 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Katie Andraski, a poet living in Belvidere, Illinois. She is the author of When the Plow Cuts (Thorntree Press).

Walter Wangerin’s intelligence is so rich he could become a lasting voice in American letters. His first novel, The Book of the Dun Cow, won the American Book Award in 1980 and was chosen as the New York Times’s Best Children’s Book of the Year.

Since his initial success, Wangerin’s talent has expanded and grown bolder, leading him to play with his art by stretching the language or inverting classical literary structures (opening a story, for example, with its ending; then returning to its middle and beginning). But Wangerin’s talent is unruly. If given free rein (by Wangerin or his editors), it can turn to overwriting and sentimentality, which tax the perception and patience of his reader.

Unfortunately, this is evident in Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, a collection of 12 short stories—Wangerin’s own confessions of sin and of faith. The stories alternate between boyhood and adulthood, so the climax of the boy’s sin is paired with the climax of the pastor’s growth in faith. Wangerin calls it “chiastic” structure, with the child’s descent crossing the adult’s ascent in the middle of the book.

One of the best childhood stories is “Spittin’ Image,” about the grandfather who teaches the boy not to fear death. With all the lessons over but one, the boy approaches his dying grandfather: “I walked to him and stuck out my lesser hand. He took it and held it to his huge, wide shovel—and he did what you do for the dying. We shook hands.” The story has many such wonderful moments, cleanly written. Pure Wangerin.

But it also holds too many modifiers, which spoil the story’s effect. And in one scene, when the boy and grandfather explore a cemetery, Wangerin alludes to lines from Dylan Thomas: “I was happy as the grass was green, oh, I was lordly in the rivers of windfall light.” I would rather see the scene through Wangerin’s eyes and language.

Lessons To Learn

The title story, “Miz Lil,” sets the tone of the lessons of adulthood that the pastor must learn. Much of the story’s action takes place in the context of the pastor’s daily duties—greeting people at the church door, preaching, visiting them at home. After a sermon one Sunday, the pastor asks the opinion of Lillian Lander, one of his church’s godly cornerstones. In his sermon, he told how he had shut off the church’s water to prevent Marie, a prostitute who lived across from the church, from stealing it. He would not support her business, he proudly announced.

Miz Lil says, “God was in your preaching. Did you hear him, Pastor?… You preach a mightier stroke than you know. Oh, God was bending his black brow down upon our little church today, and yesterday, and many a day before. Watching. ‘Cause brother Jesus—he was in that child Marie, begging a drink of water from my pastor.”

Again, however, Wangerin’s playful talent overruns the power of his story; his inverted structure is confusing.

Material in two other adult stories has appeared elsewhere in the Wangerin canon. Many of the same details and characters of “Yolanda Jones” appeared in The Orphean Passages. And in “Baglady” Wangerin retells the story of Robert, which appears earlier in the collection.

Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace is as much about God’s grace as it is about Wangerin’s childhood or his work as a pastor in a church called Grace. Wangerin himself has said, “Grace is God drawing you through a story.” In this book he shows how God hazed him step by stubborn step into faith and obedience. He invites the reader to see how this strange grace operates in action and character. And when he tells his stories cleanly and simply, their innocence and reality do indeed draw readers through to God.

Baglady

An Excerpt

“The baglady had found what she was feeling for. She snatched it up between us—almost like some talisman against an evil—and she hissed a second sentence with startling clarity, … and my neck began to tingle. But what she held was a half-pint carton of milk. And what she was doing was giving it to me.

I heard an expulsion of air, a sigh from the congregation. I interpreted their sigh. The drama around me diminished me, and I was moved, and the microphone sagged away from my mouth.

Behold: the impoverished is nourishing the preacher. Behold: the servant is being served.”

—from Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

What’s Good About the Good News? by Neal Punt (Northland Press, 142 pp.; $7.95, paper). Reviewed by Donald McKim, interim pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Berwyn, Pennsylvania.

God’s “plan of salvation” has caused theological wranglings for centuries. Universalists and particularists, Calvinists and Arminians, evangelicals and liberals have all sketched their visions of how God saves people. In What’s Good About the Good News?, Neal Punt, a Christian Reformed pastor, seeks to draw Christians to his central thesis, which was presented in his previous book, Unconditional Good News (Eerdmans, 1980): “All persons are elect in Christ except those whom the Bible expressly declares will be finally lost.” He distinguishes this premise from the one held by most Christians: All persons are outside of Christ except those whom the Bible expressly declares will be saved. There is a world of theological difference between the two propositions.

Punt quotes the Reformed theologian Charles Hodge, who wrote that “all the descendants of Adam, except those of whom it is expressly revealed that they cannot inherit the kingdom of God, are saved” (Systematic Theology). Punt says this means “all humans are to be viewed as elect in Christ unless we have final and decisive evidence to the contrary.”

Qualified Universalism

The author targets what he sees as a significant error made in every theological tradition. He states that although the doctrine of original sin teaches all persons are sinful and deserve God’s judgment, this is “something altogether different” from saying all persons are outside of Christ. Original sin itself does not tell us how many will be saved or lost. The good news is that “the electing grace of God does intervene on behalf of every person except those who, throughout all their life, willfully and finally ‘refuse to have God in their knowledge.’” People are only lost when, in addition to their sin in Adam, they reject whatever revelation God gives them. They are lost by their own willful decisions.

This perspective allows for biblical affirmations of universalism and particularism. Punt presents a “qualified universalism”—not all are saved, because the broader context of Scripture clearly speaks of people who are lost. Yet “all those and only those for whom Christ accomplished salvation will be saved.”

Punt, however, will not draw the logical conclusion of double predestination from this. For “while one might say that God’s not choosing some is tantamount to his rejection of them,” the Bible “never draws that implication and neither may we.”

The elect are saved by God’s sovereign grace, and the nonelect are lost by their persistent unbelief and sin, according to Punt. How these two concepts are interrelated is “beyond our ability to comprehend.” Faith, repentance, and obedience are necessary personal responses to the gospel; without them, one will not be saved. Punt holds that all infants will be saved because they have not willfully rejected Christ, despite their sinful nature.

Motive For Missions

Punt’s position implies “that some who live their entire life beyond the reach of the gospel may be saved by God’s grace given to them in Jesus Christ our Lord.” Consequently, the motive for missions is to share the joy and hope of the Christian gospel. The singular message of missions is salvation in Jesus Christ—to which people respond in faith and repentance, also part of God’s grace. Practically, this asks: Do we respect ourselves as equal children of God and treat all other human beings with the same respect?

Punt presents a plan of salvation that emphasizes the good in the Good News. Theologians will ask how his views differ from contemporaries such as Karl Barth and G. C. Berkouwer. By stressing that all persons are elect in Christ, Punt puts the gospel in a positive perspective. Yet he does not neglect the notion of human responsibility and the eternal consequences of a willful rejection of Christ.

Here he is true to the biblical tensions between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility, and he refuses to probe into biblical mysteries beyond the limits of God’s revelation.

Book Briefs

Shaking Loose Biblical Fruit

Pause at every verse of Scripture and shake, as it were, every bough of it, that if possible some fruit at least may drop down.

—Martin Luther

Every student of the Bible—and that category should include every Christian—can benefit from the help provided by Bible-study tools. Here are several new general reference works and study aids for specifically shaking the New Testament.

General reference works

The Eerdmans Analytical Concordance to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, compiled by Richard E. Whitaker (Eerdmans, $49.95), was assembled by biblical scholars aided by computers. Rather than separate lists for each Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek word, the book uses a single list for each RSV word. The original language words are listed at the head of each entry, and they are keyed to the Scripture texts cited.

The Message of the Bible, by George Carey, consulting editor (Lion, $26.95), is a highly visual tool that does not skimp on information. An impressive lineup of evangelical scholars, many from the British Isles, write succinct outlines, summaries of Bible books, expositions of key tests, and articles on major teachings.

The new Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible in two volumes, edited by Walter A. El well (Baker, $69.96), strikes a happy balance between “too short and skimpy” and “too long and technical.” To study the Gospel of John, for example, you will find a five-page minicommentary on the book, plus 11 more pages on the life and writings of this apostle. Because the structure of the Gospel is built around seven miracles (“signs”), you will find more under “miracle” (with a cross reference to “sign”).

The revised International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, volumes I–IV, (Eerdmans; $39.95 each; four-volume set, $159.95) is now complete. Edited by G. W. Bromiley, the work covers almost everything most students would want to know about the Bible. Articles range from a few lines to near book length.

In the course of Bible study, general readers and scholars alike benefit from a knowledge of terms and ideas such as canon, doubt, millennium, miracle, Pentecost, Sabbath, and wrath.The New Dictionary of Theology, edited by Sinclair B. Ferguson, David R. Wright, and J. I. Packer (InterVarsity, $24.95), provides 630 articles (which fill 738 pages) on these and other biblical topics, as well as theological terms, events, and people. Also included are serious treatments of such unusual topics as African Christian theology, animal rights, bioethics, black consciousness, feminist theology, Indian Christian theology, the Lausanne Covenant, liberation theology, and the sociology of religion. Bibliographies aid further study.

New Testament tools

For home or personal Bible study, The Serendipity Bible Study Book of John, edited by Lyman Coleman et al. (Lamplighter/Zondervan, $2.50; also available for Romans), can be combined with Reflections on the Gospel of John, volumes I–IV, by Leon Morris (Baker, $8.95 each). The former is a creative inductive guide; the latter is a meaty devotional exposition.

Those leading a lay Bible study on Colossians and Philemon will find help in Colossians & Philemon, by Yvonne R. Schultz, a guide in the LifeChange series (NavPress, $4.95); and the Tyndale Commentary Colossians and Philemon, by N.T. Wright (Eerdmans, $5.95). LifeChange provides richer fare than is found in most Bible-study booklets. The guide provides 15 to 20 questions for each passage, using an inductive method to teach study skills and define difficult words and phrases. It also includes pertinent background information and offers optional questions for application or extra study. Wright produces the same succinct, high-quality treatment that marks other volumes of the Tyndale New Testament Commentary.

The first volume in the new Wycliffe Exegetical Commentary has just appeared: Philippians, by Moisés Silva Moody, $23.95). It examines how each passage of Philippians contributes to the argument of the letter as a whole. The result is a commentary that is less atomistic than most. Silva is a master of Greek semantics and syntax, and uses his language skills to clarify meaning. The work is meticulous and the writing is lucid.

First Peter receives fresh, evangelical treatment in two works: J. Ramsey Michaels’s entry in the Word Biblical Commentary, 1 Peter (Word, $24.95); and Wayne Grudem’s 1 Peter, in the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Eerdmans, $5.95). Michaels follows the usual WBC format: bibliography, translation, notes, form/structure/setting, comment (phrase by phrase on the Greek text), and explanation for each passage.

Grudem examines Peter’s use of several Old Testament quotations to demonstrate that “the church has become the true Israel of God.” He includes two additional notes on the dwelling place of God and retribution, which enable the student to see the larger context of Peter’s letter.

By Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is the author of Matthew: People of the Kingdom (Shaw).

CHRISTIANITY TODAY/February 17, 1989

Is there more to George Bush’s faith than public prayers and church attendance?

“Heavenly Father, we bow our heads and thank you for your love. Accept our thanks for the peace that yields this day and the shared faith that makes its continuance likely. Make us strong to do your work, willing to heed and hear your will, and write on our hearts these words: Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes, nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people. Help us remember, Lord. Amen.”

—A prayer offered by George Bush at the beginning of his inaugural speech, January 20, 1989.

Many evangelicals who once thought President George Bush’s proclamations of faith may have been politically motivated are now warming to the notion of a genuinely Christian president. And as the Bush administration takes shape, many Christians will be watching closely to see how—or if—Bush’s religious beliefs will affect his policy making.

“Never Any Doubt”

Bush never used to talk openly or easily about his religious beliefs. In an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY last fall, Bush said his faith “has been very personal.” Yet, in the same interview, he asserted that “there was never any doubt that Jesus Christ was my Savior and Lord” (CT, Sept. 16, 1988, p. 40).

While many politicians stop talking about their religion after they are elected, Bush has seemed to increase his public discussion of religious matters. On the day following his election, he told reporters he and his wife had gone to church that morning because “God’s help is absolutely essential.”

Similarly, during last month’s inaugural events, the Bushes scheduled both private and public worship services, and Bush proclaimed the Sunday following his inauguration a national day of prayer. During his inaugural speech, Bush said that his first act as President would be a prayer (see above).

The Bushes have followed through with their stated intention to attend church every Sunday. The family, lifelong Episcopalians, generally rotate worship at several Episcopal churches in the Washington area, but they have also visited other churches, including a black Baptist church. The Bushes have said they will not allow security precautions to hamper their worship pattern, and, indeed, Barbara Bush told one television interviewer that she believes one of her duties as First Lady is to “get my husband to church.”

Billy Graham, who has been a close personal friend of the President and his family for more than 25 years, believes Bush’s faith is “strong and genuine.” Graham told CHRISTIANITY TODAY, “I’ve had prayer with him many times and discussed spiritual things with his whole family on a number of occasions.”

Bush has included other Christians in the leadership of his administration. Vice-president Dan Quayle and his wife have regularly attended McLean Presbyterian Church in northern Viriginia and are considered evangelicals. Mrs. Quayle has been part of a Bible study along with Joanne Kemp, wife of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp, and Susan Baker, wife of Secretary of State James Baker. In addition to the Quayles, two Cabinet members, Kemp and Labor Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole, have been outspoken about their evangelical beliefs.

Faith And Public Policy

While many Americans might concede that faith is a good thing for the nation’s highest leader, determining how that faith is worked out may be more complicated. Robert Maddox, speech writer and religious liaison for President Jimmy Carter—a President who was very open about his born-again Christian faith—said a deep personal faith has many benefits for a President. “The personal strength that he can gain from his faith—from his own study of the Scripture, from his prayer life, from his own walk with the Lord—can bring great strength and a sense that he is not walking alone,” Maddox said.

Maddox noted how the Bible can “push the President to think about human problems in biblical terms. Mr. Carter did that, and it came out in a public way in his commitment to human rights, and in other quiet ways that frequently affected domestic and foreign policy.”

However, Maddox said deep faith can also pose difficulties for political leaders. “Presidents can wear their religion on their sleeve too much … and polarize people,” he said. “Politicians always have the subtle temptation to use their religion to make it look like God is on their side.”

James Skillen, executive director of the Association for Public Justice, also cautions that a Christian President could end up pushing a “civil religion” where “God is the nationalistic god of the American republic.”

Skillen said Christian citizens need to take more care in distinguishing between how a person performs the duties of office and how he confesses his faith in office. “Christians should be far more astute in looking at how George Bush is going to set his priorities, how he’s going to work on them, and at his agenda, regardless of what he says about his faith,” Skillen said. “Judge him on those deeds and not so much on how he wraps [religious] language around it.”

Bob Dugan, director of the National Association of Evangelicals’ Washington Office on Public Affairs, said his concern is “that people may read too much by way of assumption into a statement of personal faith. A personal faith in Christ does not necessarily imply any particular political position, or, as in the case of Jimmy Carter and abortion, that he would be willing to translate personal conviction into political conviction.” In the case of George Bush, Dugan said, “We’re still going to have to look at his individual policies and see how he translates the personal faith into his political convictions.”

In making such translations, Maddox advises Bush to go to Scripture. “I would like some sense that Mr. Bush struggles with the biblical mandates about the poor and the hungry and the widow and the orphan, that he struggles with the concepts of war and peace,” Maddox said.

Skillen urges the President to “learn to call on others with whom he could pray, with whom he could get encouragement.” Dugan suggests that Bush place an evangelical at the top level of his staff in the White House. In addition, Dugan advises Bush to continue with regular church worship. He said he was “always disappointed” that Reagan did not attend church.

Some evangelicals remain skeptical about how Bush’s faith will be worked out, but evangelist Graham said he is confident “it will have a great influence.” Said Graham, “[Bush] desperately wants to see the moral values of this country restored and implemented, and when he says he wants to see a kinder, gentler nation, it means he wants to reach out to the people who feel discriminated against and the homeless and the poor.”

By Kim A. Lawton in Washington, D.C.

ANALYSIS

Pious Presidents

Some Presidents of the United States have served as lay preachers, Sunday school teachers, vestrymen, or choir members; others have been alcoholics, womanizers, inveterate gamblers, or liars. But whatever their personal lifestyles, every elected President from George Washington to George Bush has made deferential reference to the Deity in some form in his inaugural address, often with warmth and feeling.

Ulysses Simpson Grant (1869–77), for example, attended services with considerable regularity with his devout wife at the Metropolitan Methodist Church in Washington. When as President he was requested by the Sunday School Times to compose a message for its readers, he advised; “Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts and practice them in your lives.”

Yet this same President Grant was plagued by chronic alcoholism and gave up plans to reform the civil service when a designing group of politicians plied him with choice wines, expensive cigars, and fast horses.

Although relatively honest, Grant allowed corruption to run rampant during his eight years as President. Historians have considered the various departments of the national government during his administration to have been riddled by more scandal than ever before or since.

Similarly, Warren G. Harding’s (1921–23) inaugural address was laced with references to God and biblical themes. His mother was a devout believer and his sister a missionary to Asia. As a young man, Harding joined a Baptist church in Marion, Ohio, and in time became a trustee. Both before and after he became President, he was widely known as a humanitarian and man of good will.

However, his administration, like Grant’s, was riddled with corruption, and his name became forever linked with the infamous Teapot Dome Scandal. Moreover, after his untimely death in 1923, his womanizing, frequent gambling, and hard drinking (during the period of national prohibition) came to light. Harding, as one historian commented, clearly had genuine religious feelings, but they had little impact on many aspects of his public and personal life.

For this reason, Christian citizens should reserve judgment on the meaning of the God words a newly elected President utters in his inaugural address to the nation, remembering always the words of Jesus: “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matt. 7:20).

By Robert D. Linder, professor of history at Kansas State University.

One of the most watched marriages of the last decade has been the union between political conservatives and the Religious Right. That marriage, according to most observers, played a substantial role in the “Reagan revolution.”

But now that President Reagan has left office, there are questions as to how well the marriage is progressing. In fact, a few of those who helped arrange the marriage have said they are less than pleased with how it turned out.

Disenchantment

In his book, The Samaritan Strategy, former Religious Right activist Colonel Doner discusses “serious spiritual flaws” in the foundation of the Religious Right that led to its failure. Doner cofounded Christian Voice, the organization responsible for biblical “report cards” on political candidates (see sidebar on p. 39). In his book, he maintains that GOP strategists used Christians, never intending believers’ influence in the party to be significant.

Ed McAteer, who helped bring together religious and political conservatives in the early days of the Religious Right, disagrees with Doner that the movement failed; he cites as evidence George Bush’s unanimous victory in Bible Belt states in last year’s election. But McAteer said he generally agrees that Christians within the Religious Right have been used. He noted that during last year’s presidential primary season he was on Bush’s paid staff as a liaison to Christians and Jews. As soon as it became obvious that Bush would win the nomination, McAteer said, he received notice that his services would no longer be necessary.

McAteer, who serves as president of the Religious Roundtable, has been bothered lately by some aspects of a movement within the political Right known as cultural conservatism. The movement’s philosophy is laid out in the 1987 book Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda, published by the Institute for Cultural Conservatism. Its main spokesman is Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C.

The thrust of cultural conservatism is to advance “traditional values,” as specified in the book. According to the movement’s philosophy, there is a “necessary, unbreakable, and causal relationship between traditional Western, Judeo-Christian values, definitions of right and wrong, ways of thinking and ways of living” and the “secular success of Western societies,” including prosperity and personal liberties.

The movement enjoys widespread acceptance among evangelicals. Robert Dugan, public affairs director for the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), said he has been a strong supporter ever since he discovered the movement. He said the movement’s importance is rooted in its efforts to build political coalitions rooted not in economics, but in moral values.

What disturbs McAteer is the role the movement ascribes to religion. Weyrich was quoted a few months ago in a Tennessee newspaper as saying belief in “God’s revealed truth” is not necessary in order to be a cultural conservative; the news report indicated that, on this point, the Religious Right and cultural conservatism part paths.

Weyrich called the report misleading and said cultural conservatism is committed to the restoration of Judeo-Christian values “in every aspect of society.” But McAteer maintains that the movement upholds the Judeo-Christian tradition merely because its values are functional, not because the Bible is true. He claims it is impossible to uphold the values without upholding the ethic that produced them.

Whereas Weyrich maintains that a conservative Christian is, virtually by definition, a cultural conservative, McAteer eschews the label: “Cultural conservatives say religion is important. I say belief in God is essential. It’s impossible for me to get behind a movement that says it doesn’t matter if you believe in God.”

The NAE’s Dugan maintains, however, that McAteer is “jousting with windmills.” Said Dugan, “Cultural conservatism is not asking the Christian political movement to stop being Christian. It’s just saying that cultural conservatism will be composed of far more than just evangelicals.”

He added, “Those of us who know the Bible understand that [the values upheld by cultural conservatism] came from the Scriptures. A person does not have to subscribe to our spiritual heritage to come to the same conclusions.”

Theoretical Impasse

The opposing views amount to contrasting theories of the conditions under which Christians ought to be a part of political alliances. It is not a new debate. McAteer maintains there is a “difference between coalition building and accommodating atheists.” He said he has always disagreed with the Moral Majority because of its inclusion of atheists and agnostics.

Dugan stresses that the purpose of the cultural conservatism movement is to enable those with shared values to win on election day. He said the movement has provided a comfortable political framework for many whose religious beliefs include strict separation of church and state: “We don’t go to Capitol Hill waving our Bibles around and saying, ‘You have to enforce this because it’s found in sacred Scriptures.’”

Weyrich said he welcomes “the help of all people who have reached the right moral conclusions, even if they have not reached them on the basis of the faith.” He cited professed agnostic Bernard Nathanson, who produced the antiabortion film The Silent Scream, as an example of such help. But McAteer said he was uncomfortable with casting a former abortionist (Nathanson) in the role of a hero until he repents of his sins.

A Common Cause

Except for the differing theories of political action, proponents of cultural conservatism and those in the Religious Right have little to disagree about. And both groups are concerned that their values find representation in the current presidential administration. This concern is not so much over economic and political issues, but over social and moral issues, such as abortion and gay rights.

McAteer expressed skepticism about the Bush administration’s ability to deliver on its promises to the prolife community; he said this skepticism was nurtured by the recent appointment of Lewis Sullivan as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. McAteer is in the process of organizing a major effort to educate a prolife constituency about the role of Supreme Court justices in the event of a battle like the one in 1987 surrounding former nominee Robert Bork. He said he has received help in the project from Bork and former Attorney General Edwin Meese.

Dugan believes there is a struggle going on “for the soul of the Republican party.” He rejects the notion that the GOP has been insincere in courting evangelicals. “If I thought otherwise, I’d have blown the whistle long ago,” Dugan said, adding, “I can demonstrate that, on the abortion issue, we’ve gained a lot in the last eight years.”

Dugan expressed confidence in President Bush’s sincerity in wanting to uphold the values shared by cultural conservatives, but he added, “It may be hard for that to manifest itself because the basic strategists who surround him may not take to our kinds of issues.”

McAteer said the Republican party is fortunate that Democratic leadership is “so far to the Left,” it is not an option for the Religious Right. Dugan is less cynical. He said that although it is too early to tell if evangelicals will have access to the Bush administration, he fully expected such access.

By Randy Frame.

A Crusader’s Regrets

Since leaving Washington, D.C., in 1986, Colonel V. Doner (his given name is Colonel) has spent a lot of time pondering what went wrong with the Religious Right. The co-founder of Christian Voice has concluded, among other things, that he and his colleagues should have been more like Mother Teresa and less like strident political operators.

Christian Voice drew national attention during the 1980 election for its “report cards” on congressional Democrats and for its ambitious campaign ads, including a television spot linking then-President Jimmy Carter with the homosexual rights movement. The group’s tactics were dubbed among the Religious Right’s most controversial. Doner and his ideological cohorts claimed credit (rightly, according to many observers) for defeating Carter and 30 congressmen they deemed undesirable.

But Doner, 40, now says he regrets failing in those days to communicate care for those in need: the poor, the elderly, people with AIDS, the homeless. What’s more, he says, the antagonism he displayed on such television shows as “60 Minutes” and “Phil Donahue” may have alienated believers and kept hundreds of others from considering the validity of the Christian faith.

Doner, head of the Christian Action Council in Santa Rosa, California, says he now hopes to mix his conservative concerns with issues traditionally closer to the hearts of liberals. “Wouldn’t Jesus be concerned with both the poor and the aborted?” he asks. “Wouldn’t he have us be concerned with those exploited by landlords and by pornography?”

Along with a few conservative friends, Doner is seeking to meet with evangelical Christians of the political Left. His aim: to work together on common concerns—an idea he would have scoffed at a few years ago.

Doner has set forth his views on the failings of the Religious Right in his book The Samaritan Strategy (Wolgemuth & Hyatt). In it he also discusses his views on the future of Christian activism.

With no apologies, he acknowledges in his book making the controversial commercial on Carter—which showed men hugging and marching—in order to get free time on network news. He tells how Republican sources provided $1 million in 1984 to start the American Coalition for Traditional Values. And he says that by 1986, GOP leaders, wary of the increasing power of Christians, were halting the financial flow to Christian political operators.

Looking ahead, Doner predicts that the problems of the homeless, AIDS, drugs, and child abuse will overwhelm budget-squeezed governments in the next decade and challenge churches to engage in a more enduring activism: service. By caring for those in need, he says, Christians one day may earn the chance to help guide their communities. “You have credibility saying a hard thing if you have a reputation for caring for people.”

Many of those who remember the Doner of a decade ago are skeptical that he is truly changed. Some nonbelievers in Santa Rosa maintain that the emphasis on service is merely a strategy to replace the failed political strategies of the past.

Doner says he’s not surprised by such scrutiny, adding that time will prove that his interest in service programs is not merely a way to gain political power. “We must do it,” he said, “because we truly have compassion.”

By Robert Digitale.