Page 4912 – Christianity Today (2024)

Christian Zionism mixes politics and prophecy to galvanize support for Israel. But the chemistry may be changing.

“Seventy Million Christians Urge President Bush to Approve Loan Guarantees for Israel.”

So read the headline of a full-page advertisem*nt in the January 27 Washington Times. Under it, 33 Christian leaders urged Bush to act on $10 billion of U.S. loan guarantees to help settle Soviet Jews in Israel. First on their list of reasons: “We deeply believe in the Biblical, prophetic vision of the ingathering of exiles to Israel, a miracle we are now seeing fulfilled.”

For evangelicals, perhaps no issue twines politics and religion more tightly than the past, present, and future of Israel. Since its establishment in 1948, this tiny nation has been at the center of heated international debate. But more important, its creation signaled for many Christians the beginning of the end times. “‘I will restore the fortunes of my people, Israel.… I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land which I have given them,’ says the LORD your God” (Amos 9:14–15).

In the past 20 years, 25 million copies of The Late, Great Planet Earth have popularized the view that modern Israel is a fulfillment of ancient prophecy. In the eyes of many believers, Israel’s battlefield victories and national prosperity are nothing short of the miraculous work of God. And today, as Jews from the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and “the ends of the earth” pour into Israel, some see the stage being set for God’s final act in history.

But do 70 million Christians—virtually every “born-again” believer in the U.S—really support unconditional loan guarantees for Israel? The sentiment, if not the number, measures the zeal of Christian Zionism.

Built on literal interpretation of scriptural prophecies and promises, Christian Zionism considers its support of Israel the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse” (Gen. 12:3). And Christian Zionists not only bless Abraham’s descendents, they see all the nations of the world, including the U.S., under obligation to do likewise.

“History records that God deals with nations according to how they deal with Israel,” says Ed McAteer, organizer of an annual prayer breakfast in support of Israel and other Religious Right causes. “One of the reasons America has been blessed over the years is because we have stood with Israel.”

McAteer is joined in his enthusiastic backing of Israel by dozens of other Christian groups. Bridges for Peace, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, Friends of Jerusalem, Christians’ Israel Public Action Campaign, and many others contribute millions of dollars’ worth of aid and services to Israel each year. They promote and sponsor tours to the Holy Land that bring thousands of Christian pilgrims to the area. The most extreme among them advocate rebuilding the Jewish temple on its ancient site, currently occupied by Islam’s Dome of the Rock, and restoring Israel to its boundaries under David and Solomon. And together they form an influential bloc of political support for Israel in the U.S., a constituency regularly courted by top Israeli officials.

But the Zionist mix of politics and theology, especially when applied to an area as explosive as the Middle East, is making some evangelicals increasingly uncomfortable. While still strongly supportive of Israel’s right to exist, they are reluctant to equate loan guarantees with blessings, and to turn aside questions of alleged Israeli human-rights violations as curses.

This ambivalence has blurred what was once a more hom*ogeneous “evangelical view” of Israel. And at the same time, it has prompted Christian Zionists to raise their voices even louder.

Friends Of Israel

Christian Zionism dates back to before the formation of modern Israel (see “The Path to Zion,” p. 49). But the dynamics of the current situation mostly took shape after the 1967 war, in which Israel captured territories in the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights. Land became the pre-eminent issue. For the most part, the Jews lost the support of the National Council of Churches, which grew increasingly critical of Israel and identified more closely with Palestinian positions. With some unease, Israelis discovered conservative Christians emerging as their new allies in the U.S.

Support for Israel formed a key plank in the platform of the Religious Right as it gained political power during the 1980s. Jerry Falwell personified the agenda, promoting almost unqualified endorsem*nt of Israeli policies and actions based on biblical mandates. In 1980, Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin presented Falwell the Jabotinsky Award for service to the cause of Israel.

During that time, many new groups sprang up, and older groups were revitalized, joining a network of pro-Israel efforts. Drawing strength especially from fundamentalist and charismatic/Pentecostal camps, the cause of Christian Zionism found a highly visible platform in religious broadcasting. For years, McAteer’s prayer breakfast for Israel was held in congjuction with the National Religious Broadcasters’ annual convention in Washington, D.C. (More I than 1,500 Christians are expected to attend later this month, when the prayer breakfast will be held for the first time in Jerusalem. Its program reads like a who’s-who of TV preachers, ministry leaders, and conservative politicians, as well as Israeli officials.)

While some groups have concentrated on lobbying for Israel-friendly U.S. policy, others have gone to work in Israel. More than 400,000 Soviet Jews have emigrated to Israel since 1989, and as many as a million are expected in the next five years. Their arrival has not only raised the eschatological expectations of many Christian groups but also given them a new means of service. They have chartered planes and boats, provided prefabricated housing units, and supplied food, | clothing, household goods, | job training, and education g for the new arrivals.

One of the most active—and controversial—organizations to emerge is the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ). From its beginning in 1980, the embassy has stood as a symbol of solidarity with Israel. At that time, all other foreign embassies moved out of Jersualem, in accord with a United Nations resolution protesting Israel’s claim on East Jerusalem. But the ICEJ moved in, affirming Israel’s right to all of the city as its unified capital.

With a staff of about 50 and an operating budget of about $80,000 per month, the ICEJ coordinates programs that include social services, publishing, and conferences. It sponsors a celebration during the annual Feast of Tabernacles, which draws several thousand Christians each October to march and show their support of Israel. Last year the ICEJ received an award from the Knesset Speaker’s Quality of Life Fund for its activities, a first for a Christian organization in Israel.

To critics, however, the ICEJ represents the spirit of political nationalism far more than the spirit of Christ. Indeed, embassy officials are vehement in their support of ruling Likud party policies and are quick to label criticism of Israel as anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. They have defended their work against ultraorthodox Jewish complaints by stating that “no one can point to a single Jewish person converted to Christianity as a result of our efforts.”

But embassy spokesman Jan Willem van Der Hoeven says ICEJ’s work is breaking down barriers between Christians and Jews by demonstrating love without ulterior motives. His commitment to what he says is a biblical vision for Israel is deep. And he is not at all apologetic for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. He points to the vast land holdings of the Arab nations and blames their unwillingness to welcome Palestinians as the root of current problems. Deportation, he says, is “the most humane way” for Israel to deal with “terrorists” and “rebels” in the so-called occupied territories. “Seventy percent of the Palestinians rejoiced as the SCUDS fell,” he says. “They have no legitimate claim to this land.”

Sacralized State

Some of the harshest criticism of the ICEJ, and Christian Zionism in general, has come from the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC), which represents 17 Christian denominations in the region, covering almost all of the 14 million Christians there. In 1986 the MECC executive committee condemned what it called “the misuses of the Bible and the abuse of religious sentiments in an attempt to sacralize the creation of a state and legitimate the policies of a government.” It urged other churches around the world to join in “a categorical rejection of the ‘Christian Zionist’ phenomenon, as representing a heretical interpretation of Holy Scripture.”

In the past five years or so, Christian Zionism has come under increasing scrutiny from evangelical quarters as well, on both theological and ethical grounds. “The equation in which biblical Israel becomes the modern State of Israel is just not consistent,” says Don Wagner of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding (EMEU). In Christian Zionism, Wagner sees an emphasis on secular Jewish nationalism, as well as a hostility to Arabs and Palestinians. Both, he says, are incompatible with Christ’s message.

EMEU represents a small, but growing voice among evangelicals. Founded in 1986 at a meeting hosted by John Stott of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, its mailing list numbers over 1,000. Ray Bakke, chairman of EMEU, says he sees the attitude toward Zionism shifting among evangelicals. “That doesn’t mean [they] have become anti-Jew, or even anti-State of Israel,” he says. “I think there is a growing awareness that the Likud party is intransigent.… The oppression inflicted upon Palestinians in the name of some theological rationale is just intolerable.”

A recent poll of CHRISTIANITY TODAY readers gives one indication that evangelical views toward Israel are changing. While 46 percent of CT readers surveyed indicated they have not changed their attitude toward Israel in the past decade, 39 percent said their stance was now “more critical” than before. Twelve percent said they have “become more accepting.”

An overwhelming majority, 88 percent, believe “Christians should hold the State of Israel to the same standards of justice and human rights in its international and internal affairs as any other nation.” A strong majority also agreed that “the State of Israel holds a special and unique role in the future of God’s kingdom.” But CT readers were less sure (24 percent) that “the biblical mandate is for Christians to support the State of Israel.” And one out of five said, “The State of Israel has no legitimate claim on territories occupied in the 1967 war (Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, West Bank).”

There appear to be several reasons behind the changes. The spread of information about the plight of Palestinians, including Arab Christians, has raised questions and criticism in the West about Israel’s human-rights policies. News media coverage of the intifada, the Palestinian protest now into its fourth year, has played a major role in educating Christians, says EMEU’s Wagner. But he also points to increased efforts by Palestinian Christians, aided by EMEU and others, to build relationships with religious leaders in the West.

A second, related reason is the increased concern among evangelicals for peace and justice issues in general. Once left to mainline churches in favor of an emphasis on evangelism, social concerns have been added to the evangelical agenda in recent years. As a result, Palestinian problems have found a wider hearing.

In recent months, the rhetoric surrounding Christian support for Israel has grown louder. Mainline church leaders have opposed the loan guarantees. Conservative Christians have backed them. What seems to be lost, as with so many issues involving the region, is a middle ground.

“Christians are looking for a way of sorting out the issues for a more nuanced point of view,” says Marvin Wilson, Ockenga Professor of Biblical Studies at Gordon College and author of Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith.

“The number-one obstacle to peace is nationalism, because so often it insists on the denial of the other guy,” Wilson says. “A biblical view can’t be anti-Arab and pro-Israel, or anti-Israel and pro-Arab. God’s heart is where justice is.” He faults evangelicals for looking for a quick fix, whether in theological or political terms.

The Path To Zion

On May 14, 1948, the modern State of Israel proclaimed its independence. For many Christians, the date marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of God’s dealings with his people. But the idea of a restored nation of Israel had been preached in churches for a century or more before the political reality came to pass.

The return of the Jews to a homeland in Palestine was a theme heard in prophetic conferences in England in the early 1800s. Its first great push came from John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren movement. His teaching, which grew popular in the 1830s, explained that God worked through two different peoples, Israel and the church, with two different purposes. His premillennial view, which included an emphasis on the rapture of the church, set the return of the Jews as a fixed point on the prophetic time line.

The growing premillennial movement took hold in the U.S. with the convening of the First International Prophetic Conference, held in New York City in October 1878. It was followed eight years later by a second conference in Chicago. D. L. Moody, the leading evangelist of the day, spread the premillennial expectation of the restoration of Israel. The Scofield Bible, published in 1909, further established the dispensational view of a literal homeland for the Jews.

At about the same time, Christian views of Jewish restoration formed their first ties with politics. In 1891, Methodist layman William Blackstone drafted a petition urging President Benjamin Harrison to convene an international conference “to consider the condition of the Israelites and their claims to Palestine as their ancient home.” What became known as the Blackstone Petition was eventually signed by more than 400 Christian and Jewish leaders, including a U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, several congressmen, and business leaders such as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Blackstone’s efforts actually began before those of Jewish political Zionist Theodore Herzl, who strongly influenced the 1948 founding of Israel.

Christian Zionism reached the peak of its political influence in the Balfour Declaration. Arthur James Balfour, former prime minister of England and foreign secretary, used his political weight to push a British proposal for a Jewish I homeland. Together with Blackstone and other Zionists in the U.S., he influenced President Woodrow Wilson to support the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised the Jews a homeland after World War I.

World War II and the Holocaust drew further support for a new Jewish nation. Under the direction of Carl Hermann Voss, the Christian Council on Palestine grew steadily during the early 1940s. In 1946 it joined with another group to form the American Christian Palestine Committee, which attracted theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich as members.

Less than two years later, by a 33-to-13 vote, the United Nations passed a resolution supporting the creation of the State of Israel.

Shifting Foundations

A third reason for changing attitudes—one that may signal deeper-seated movement in evangelicalism—is a shift in theological foundations. For years, dispensational theology, with its differentiation of God’s program for the church and for Israel, shaped conservative evangelical views. Its literal interpretation of prophecy, promoted by the Scofield Bible and scholars from Dallas Theological Seminary, marked the restoration of Israel as the starting point for many other end-times prophecies, culminating in Christ’s return.

But some say the influence of traditional dispensationalism has declined in the past decade. Others, like Darrell Bock, professor of New Testament at Dallas, say it is entering a new phase. He sees it going through a period of self-assessment. A new, “progressive dispensationalism” is emerging, one that is less “land-centered” and “future-centered” than past versions.

Still, such discussion is only now beginning in academic circles. A strong “echo of dispensationalism” remains in evangelicalism at large, as one scholar puts it, while support for Israel is as solid as ever from fundamentalist and Pentecostal camps. Many Christian Zionist groups report that donations continue to increase. And leaders like McAteer are confident that they represent “the Bible-believing Christian view of Israel,” the one that will eventually carry the day.

As Jerry Falwell has said, in five years, there will be “virtually unanimous” support for Israel among evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. But Falwell made that prediction in a 1984 interview. And like many prophecies about Israel, his appears to remain open to interpretation.

By Ken Sidey.

Classic and contemporary excerpts.

The last taboo?

If religion is the opiate of the masses, as Marx said, then why isn’t Hollywood out peddling the stuff from every street corner? If movies were all we had to judge from, one might never suspect the enormous resurgence of religious faith in this country.… This—certainly not sex—may be the last cinema taboo.

—David Ansen in Newsweek

(Oct. 14, 1991)

Individuals in God’s image

God does not make clones; each person is different, a tribute to God’s creativity. If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, we must accept people as they are.

—Henry Fehren in U.S. Catholic

(March 1991)

Valueless grace

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack’s wares. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer in

The Cost of Discipleship

Silly woodpeckers

A woodpecker tapped with his beak against the stem of a tree just as lightning struck the tree and destroyed it. He flew away and said, “I didn’t know there was so much power in my beak!” When we bring the Gospel there is a danger that we will think or say, “I have done a good job.” Don’t be a silly woodpecker. Know where your strength comes from. It is only the Holy Spirit who can make a message good and fruitful.

—Corrie Ten Boom in

Each New Day

The attractive Christian

You and I are to be such that as we walk up and down the streets of life, people will be struck and attracted. You have seen them turn and look at a well-dressed person.… They should be struck by us, and look at us, and think, “What is this person? I have never seen anybody quite like this before!” … That is the kind of people we can be and the kind of people that we must be. And when we become such people, believe me, the revival we are longing for will start, and the people outside, in their misery and wretchedness, will come in and will want to know about it.

—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in

Growing in the Spirit

City of peace?

The feeling of being beset by blind forces is especially strong in the mixed city of Jerusalem.… Hardly a day passes in the “holy city” without a riot or a stoning, without cars being torched or firebombs thrown, without attempted lynchings or the stabbing of an Israeli by a Palestinian (or vice versa). After each incident, municipal cleaning machines, marked “CITY OF PEACE” in three languages, appear on the scene to wash blood from the streets in time for the next group of pious pilgrims to pass by, fingering their rosaries and muttering solemn prayers.

—Amos Eton in The New Yorker

(Dec. 24,1990)

The best there is

I feel nearly certain … that any civilization we contact will be far wiser than we. To think we are the best the universe could manage—the mediocrity of it all!

—Harvard physicist Paul

Horowitz, on why he has

dedicated his career to the search

for extraterrestrial intelligence,

quoted in The Atlantic

(August 1988)

God’s a training school

I humbly bless his gracious Providence, who gave me his Treasure in an Earthen Vessel, and trained me up in the School of Affliction, and taught me the Cross of Christ so soon; that I might be rather Theologus Crucis, as Luther speaketh, than Theologus Gloriae; and a Cross-bearer, than a Crossmaker or Imposer.

Richard Baxter in Reliquiae

Baxterianae: or Narrative of His

Life and Times, I, 21.

Reagan’S Christian Soldiers

Under Fire: An American Story,by Oliver L. North, with William Novak (HarperCollins/Zondervan, 446 pp.; $25.00, hardcover);Koop: The Memoirs of America’s Family Doctor,by C. Everett Koop, M.D. (Random House, 342 pp.; $22.50, hardcover). Reviewed by John Wilson, an editor and writer for a publisher of reference books in Pasadena, California.

Although autobiography may not be an exclusively Western literary genre, it has flourished in the West as in no other culture. The notion that each person’s life has a discoverable meaning—an assumption basic to autobiography—is Christian at its roots.

Also Reviewed In This Section:

40Spare the Child,by Philip Greven

40The Scattered Voice,by James W. Skillen

42Faithful Attraction,by Andrew M. Greeley

44How to Be Pentecostal Without Speaking in Tongues,by Tony Campolo

44 Wake Up America!by Tony Campolo

From the Confessions of Augustine to C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, classic autobiographies have looked inward as well as outward, not content with a mere record of events. Many of the earliest texts in American literature are spiritual autobiographies or conversion narratives.

Oliver North and C. Everett Koop are distant heirs to this rich tradition. In their autobiographies, both men unambiguously profess an evangelical Christian faith; both discern a pattern of God’s working in their lives. Neither man, however, is much given to introspection; these books focus on public life, particularly on controversies that brought them to national attention during the Reagan years.

While each of these autobiographies has something to offer on its own terms, the two books are more interesting when read together, not only for their dovetailing accounts of how the Reagan administration did business (not a pretty story), but also, and more important, for what they reveal about the moral complexity of the world in which we all have to operate, no matter how far we are from the circles of power.

The Sin Of Pure Motives

Under Fire was midwifed by William Novak, whose specialty is writing other people’s autobiographies (for example, those of Lee Iacocca, Tip O’Neill, and Nancy Reagan). With Novak’s help, North has produced a readable narrative: glib, funny, at times saccharine and gratingly superficial, well stocked with portraits of the high and the mighty.

On the evidence assembled here, North would be a loyal friend and a good comrade—someone you would call on in a crisis. Considering the ordeal he and his family have been through, it is not surprising that he has apparently never fully faced up to his role in the Iran-contra affair. Although North acknowledges at several points that he and others erred, those admissions are quickly undercut by talk of pure motives. He does not seem to grasp that it was confidence in the purity of their motives that permitted him and his coconspirators (up to and including the President) to override the perhaps misguided but clearly demarcated congressional limits on aid to the contras.

Should North have been subject to prosecution? Absolutely not. See the appendix of Under Fire for letters of appreciation to him from both President Reagan and Vice-president Bush, dated November 1985; the note from Bush (source of the book’s title) will delight connoisseurs of his idiosyncratic English.

Surgeon On A Mission

Koop—written, the acknowledgments seem to suggest, with considerable help from the author’s son, Allen—is the better book of the two. A brief introductory chapter relates how, in August 1980, Koop was contacted about the surgeon general’s post by headhunters for the Reagan-Bush ticket (already confident of victory in the November election). Even in those first approaches there were hints of the failures of communication and the conflicting agendas that Koop would have to struggle with throughout his tenure in Washington.

The next several chapters, occupying about a third of the book, are straight autobiography. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a doctor.” Couple that sentence with a later one—“I never tired of performing surgical procedures”—and you have the essence of the man.

Chick Koop is one of those exceptional people gifted from childhood with an unswerving sense of purpose. The source of that gift remains a mystery, but Koop vividly sketches his Brooklyn childhood, his formative years at Dartmouth College and at Cornell’s medical school, and the circ*mstances that led to his pioneering role in pediatric surgery as surgeon-in-chief of Philadelphia’s Children’s Hospital. These chapters also touch on his family life, with his wife, Betty, and their children, and on his discovery, as a young adult, of what he had been missing as a nominal Christian: a genuine experience of Christ’s redeeming, sacrificing, and abiding love.

An admirable man, Koop shares one notable quirk with many other autobiographers: Recounting triumph after triumph, he finds it difficult ever to show himself in a bad light. The worst and virtually only failing he confesses to is that for several years, instead of spending precious free time with his family on Sunday afternoons and evenings, he did volunteer work at a skid-row clinic.

Chapters on his highly politicized confirmation hearing and his efforts to revitalize the surgeon general’s office are followed by a section on major issues: smoking, AIDS (Koop’s controversial AIDS report is reprinted in an appendix), the rights of handicapped children, and abortion.

Two points emerge from this record of Koop’s experience as surgeon general. First, it is heartening to see how much difference one determined individual can make (supported, as Koop repeatedly acknowledges, by many others). The second point is that Koop’s enormous effectiveness was a result of his ability to compromise without sacrificing his core principles.

We learn, for example, that even while Sen. Edward Kennedy was railing publicly against Koop’s appointment as surgeon general, the two men were meeting and discussing mutual concerns: “What I had feared would be a contentious encounter with Ted Kennedy instead became the beginning of an affable cooperation on a number of vital health care endeavors over the next eight years.”

At first it seems contradictory that Koop, a man of such strong will and stubborn integrity, should be a master of negotiation and compromise. Upon further inspection, however, it becomes clear that it was the strength of Koop’s convictions, founded on love, that enabled him to work so well with people whose convictions differed from his own. Perhaps that is the most important lesson we can take from this remarkable life story.

What Koop and North both lack as autobiographers is inwardness. They do not probe deeply into the lives they record, nor do they meditate on the process of writing autobiography. Situated firmly in the outer world we all share, they hardly reveal the inner worlds that are theirs alone.

Why Christians Spank

Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse,by Philip Greven, (Vintage, xiv + 263 pp.; $11.00, paper). Reviewed by Grant Wacker, associate professor of religious studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Rutgers University historian Philip Greven captured national attention a decade ago with the publication of The Protestant Temperament, an analysis of how particular theological outlooks coincided with particular child-rearing patterns in early America. In that volume, Greven argued that evangelical Protestants consistently disciplined their children more severely than their liberal counterparts. In this new study, which focuses on corporal punishment of children, Greven is both more evenhanded and more extreme.

He contends that the Jewish-Christian tradition itself, not just evangelical Protestantism, lies at the root of the physical abuse of children. Though Greven draws most of his evidence from contemporary Pentecostal and fundamentalist authors, he does so, he tells us, only because they are the most forthright proponents of a practice that is pervasive in the modern West.

Whatever the sins of others, the evidence against evangelical Protestants is both compelling and chilling. While Greven acknowledges that a handful of leaders, including Horace Bushnell and Dwight L. Moody, avoided swatting their children, he leaves little doubt that the overwhelming majority have endorsed everything from occasional spanking to infliction of severe physical pain and systematic deprivation of food, water, and light.

The harsh disciplinary advice of Susanna Wesley in the eighteenth century differs little from the punitive views of Larry Christenson, Jack Hyles, and Beverly and Tim LaHaye in the twentieth. In every case, subduing the will of the child has served as the all-consuming goal. The insistence of some contemporary evangelicals that young girls need strict disciplining in order to prepare them for a life of submission to their future husbands speaks for itself. Even the recommendations of so-called moderates like James Dobson give pause in the clear light of day.

The latter two-thirds of the book is devoted to the consequences of corporal punishment. The immediate pain and distress the toddler experiences is, in a way, the least of Greven’s concerns. He argues that the retaliatory anger a child feels may be buried at the time but often shows up in destructive personal and social behavior later on. The list is extensive: anxiety, fear, hate, apathy, depression, obsessiveness, rigidity, overprotectiveness, dissociation, paranoia, sadomasochism, domestic violence, aggression, delinquency, authoritarianism, and, perhaps most arresting for readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, apocalyptic premillennialism. Regarding the last, Greven avers that corporal punishment invariably ignites resentment, and resentment, sublimated in childhood, frequently reappears as a desire for the imminent end of the world. The salvation of a few comes at the expense of many.

How Christ’S Ambassadors Work With Caesar

The Scattered Voice: Christians at Odds in the Public Square,by James W. Skillen (Zondervan, 252 pp.; $9.95, paper). Reviewed by Bruce Barron, who works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as special assistant to U.S. Rep. Rick Santorum.

James Skillen, director of the Association for Public Justice in Washington, D.C., and an unusually sophisticated political theorist, identifies and respectfully portrays seven camps into which contemporary Christian political thinking can be divided. This is enough to make his book valuable. But he also goes on to present a constructive critique of each position and then moves toward articulating his own approach to doing politics as a Christian.

Due to space limitations, Skillen’s critiques are far from exhaustive and his counterproposals only tantalizingly suggestive. However, two distinctive themes emerge.

First, Skillen is preeminently concerned for developing a positive valuation of government as an institution, and of the Christian’s responsibility to work within it. This concern is most prominent when he chides “cautious and critical conservatives” for devoting too much attention to what government should not or cannot do. But it also pervades his critique of the politically liberal Christians who, as Skillen sees it, lack a framework of Christian political principles by which to prescribe what government should do and why.

Skillen’s second key theme is differentiation—that is, the increasingly complex development of modern society into a multiplicity of institutions (governments, businesses, families, schools, voluntary and religious organizations, and so on). In Skillen’s view, most political approaches fail to deal adequately with the implications of our highly differentiated society. Here he shows his affinity with the neoconservatives, represented by Richard Neuhaus and Michael Novak, who have given the most attention to this question.

The criterion of differentiation serves, among other purposes, to show why the Bible cannot be simplistically applied to modern public policy. One could wish that Skillen offered more guidance on how the Bible can be applied to contemporary issues, especially since he affirms the Scriptures’ continuing relevance in general terms.

But it would take another volume for Skillen to answer his own call for a comprehensive, positive Christian philosophy of public life. He is certainly well equipped to offer one; let us hope that we do not need to wait too long for this much-needed sequel.

Murky Terrain

The strengths of Greven’s work are numerous. He writes simply and clearly, avoiding the lingo of the social scientists who tutor much of his thinking (a severe punishment in itself). He makes good on his claim that scholarship should not be an arcane enterprise, interesting only to museum rats, but ought to illumine the very real problems of daily life. Most important, Greven forces us back to the drawing board. He compels us to reconsider the rationale for a practice most of us rarely think about, because virtually everyone does it. Indeed, he devotes more pages than one might expect from a professional social historian to a careful analysis of the biblical passages that have been used as a warrant for corporal punishment. Not surprisingly, he finds many of them, especially in the New Testament, ambiguous at best, perniciously misused at worst.

Unfortunately, the vices of this work almost swamp its virtues. I suspect that most readers, including basically sympathetic ones like myself, will be repelled by his persistent exaggerations. Recurring statements such as “the end of the world begins with the striking of a single child” scrape against our common-sense ordering of life. Further, the data Greven presents often fail to substantiate the conclusions he draws. To claim, for example, that Kathryn Kuhlman the child sometimes suffered humiliating treatment at the hands of a domineering mother is one thing. To conclude that Kuhlman the adult bore lifelong spiritual and psychological wounds from that treatment is quite another. Both statements may be true, but the inner life is murky terrain, and it takes more light than Greven offers to make the connections clear.

Comparative evidence would help. If societies exist where children are never physically punished, and if those societies are free from the maladies that afflict ours, Greven would have a more compelling case. If, in our own society, unpunished children can be shown to lead healthier, better adjusted adult lives (fewer divorces, less alcoholism, whatever), Greven would have an airtight case. But with one or two minor exceptions, Greven makes no effort to draw on “neutral” control data.

Thirty-Nine Lashes

The most disturbing feature of the book is Greven’s dogged singlemindedness. He refuses to acknowlege that gradations in the severity of discipline might have something to do with its morality. A single swat on the behind and 39 lashes at the post fall equally under his censure.

He discounts the possibility that children and situations may differ dramatically. Discipline that is nothing but punitive retribution in one setting may serve as a life-saving boundary in another. He largely ignores the myriad ways that violence against children may be subtly encoded in shaming practices at home and at school. And he pays little attention to what may well prove the most vicious culprit in the whole child-abuse syndrome: alcohol.

Philip Greven is manifestly a high-minded man. Yet his passion against human suffering sometimes outstrips the persuasiveness of his arguments. That is particularly unfortunate given the seriousness of the social problem he addresses.

Even so, he makes a powerful point, a point that everyone—including every evangelical Christian—needs to hear. Is it possible that parental love does not necessitate childhood fear? Is it possible that our ideas about punishing children have more to do with the efficiency requirements of modern industrial society than with biblical revelation?

The author aptly reminds us, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” If Greven has delivered only one child from the tyranny of an abusive parent, he has performed a laudable task.

The Bad News Is Not So Bad

Faithful Attraction: Discovering Intimacy, Love and Fidelity in American Marriage,by Andrew M. Greeley (Tor, 287 pp.; $4.99 paper). Reviewed by Ken Steinken, a writer living in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Everyone knows that married men and women in the United States are sleeping around more than ever, that children diminish the happiness of a marriage, and that most people, if they had it to do over again, would marry someone different. Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley provides convincing evidence in Faithful Attraction that these and many other commonly held beliefs are false, a fabrication of poor research and the media demand for instant analysis.

Greeley bases most of his unconventional conclusions on the results of the Love and Marriage Gallup study of 657 married couples, which was conducted in 1989–90 for Psychology Today. According to Greeley, this was the first “full-scale” national probability study of sexuality and fidelity in marriage.

Many of the findings defy conventional wisdom and indicate that marriage in America is far healthier than we have been led to believe:

• Ninety percent of American couples have had only one sexual partner since they were married (and it is not because they are afraid of AIDS).

• Four-fifths say they would marry the same person if they had it to do over again.

• Over 80 percent of all married men, regardless of age, say their wife is good-looking.

• Three-quarters of married people say their spouse is their best friend.

• Three-quarters of those questioned say divorce is “not at all likely.”

• Over 60 percent of American couples describe their marriage as “very happy.”

• The best predictor of whether or not a couple is happy together is joint prayer. The study found, for example, that couples from two-income families that pray together are less likely to consider divorce than single-income families that do not pray together.

• People who live together before marriage are less likely than those who did not cohabit to say their marriage is very happy. Those who have had premarital sex are also less prone to say their marriage is very happy.

Among other things, Greeley is a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and a research associate at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. Despite his credentials, he has encountered rough going in the scientific community. He cites several scientific journals that would not publish well-documented articles that reported the institution of marriage in the United States to be in good health. Scientific American rejected one article, saying they simply didn’t believe Greeley’s findings.

The volume of statistics given in the book may be somewhat intimidating, but one need not be a sociologist to appreciate the book. Greeley’s talent as a writer of fiction shows through in his ability to construct a readable and, in many cases, enjoyable sentence. In addition, Greeley simplifies the book by including 104 comparative graphs that illustrate many of the findings.

Greeley is quick to say, “Ethical and philosophical positions are not derived from survey research.” But he does allow himself to speculate on the meanings of some of the findings. For instance, Greeley titles his final chapter, “Can Marriage Survive?” Although all the data he has collected cannot substantiate his response, he begins the chapter with this statement of faith: “Yes.”

Tony’S Tongues Of Fire—And Smoke

How to Be Pentecostal Without Speaking in Tongues,by Tony Campolo (Word, 176 pages, $14.95, hardcover);Wake Up America!by Tony Campolo (HarperCollins/Zondervan, 188 pages; $15.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Robert Bittner, an editor and free-lance writer living in the Chicago area.

“The Charismatic movement is A bringing millions into a changed and holy lifestyle,” writes Tony Campolo, author, speaker, and professor of sociology at Eastern College. As a result, this movement is becoming “the most dynamic expression of Christianity in the world today.”

For noncharismatic evangelicals, those are strong words indeed. Yet, in How to Be Pentecostal Without Speaking in Tongues, Campolo ably fends off objections while calling all Christians to a deeper faith and a more vital Christian lifestyle—no matter what they may decide about Pentecostalism.

Beginning with the basics, Campolo takes care to explain the important concerns and distinctions of the charismatic movement for newcomers. Evangelicals and Pentecostals agree on far more than they might realize, Campolo asserts.

As evidence, he draws ten points from Romans 8 that summarize what it means to be truly “Pentecostal”—that is, to live a Spirit-filled life. He moves beyond the questions of “tongues” and miracles to such everyday—and every-Christian—concerns as how to nurture closeness with God and why we should be good stewards of the world around us. Even if one previously shuddered at the mention of Pentecostalism, there is enough simple insight in these chapters alone to recommend the book.

The author follows his exposition with a call to experience the power of the Holy Spirit. The chapter bears the unfortunate title “How to Make It Happen,” but Campolo is too down-to-earth to suggest magic words or mood music. In fact, the “how” is deceptively straightforward. “The infilling comes,” Campolo writes, “when you put no conditions on what you are willing to surrender in establishing a relationship with God.” These are words of refreshing integrity.

For all its benefits, however, the Pentecostal movement is not without charlatans or, even, demonic influences. The last half of the book is devoted to varieties of supernatural experience, common-sense guidelines for discerning “the phonies,” and two cautionary chapters of warning and encouragement regarding spiritual warfare and the power of evil.

The fact is that those most in tune with the work of the Holy Spirit often have a heightened awareness of demonic activity as well. Under the circ*mstances, a presentation of the familiar “armor of God” imagery of Ephesians 6:13–18 is an apt conclusion to this truly inspiring book.

Rousing Sleeping Christians

Ironically, little armor is required to follow Campolo’s prophetic call in Wake Up America! It is a book that urgently details America’s problems while offering surprisingly few (and these half-hearted) solutions.

Certainly the need for Christians to spark an American awakening is great. One need only consider the plights of our inner cities, the homeless, drug abuse, and inadequate social institutions. So why aren’t more Christians providing solutions? Don’t they care? According to Campolo, the majority of American Christians care deeply about these things, but they have become satisfied with their middle-class lifestyles. They are too settled to make radical changes—such as living in ghettos among the poor—and they are oblivious to the many small ways they can make a difference in the world.

Unfortunately, Campolo’s call is less than rousing. The man who once challenged university students to revise their materialistic values (“Would Jesus drive a BMW if he were alive today? No!”) settles for an appealing but essentially bloodless “Do what little you can, and God will honor it.” It is reassuring to know that we need not concern ourselves with spiritual tepidness and that the least we can do is sometimes enough. But given the dramatic weights of the problems, that approach seems inadequate.

A stronger solution by far would be found in spiritual rejuvenation that comes when Christians surrender their lives completely to the power of the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes faith demands that we believe a couple of wrinkled old-timers are going to have a baby.

Sometimes the promises of God seem beyond belief. The only human response is a bitter laugh.

In two successive chapters in Genesis (17 and 18), Abraham and Sarah, who are pictured in the New Testament as heroes of faith, laugh when God announces the imminent birth of a child. Their story honestly portrays the scandal and difficulty of faith, and it is a comfort to me that the Bible often pictures the great ancestors of the faith not as models of belief but as examples of disbelief.

Their story reminds us that faith does not always come to us in the reasonable, measured voice of some white-coated scientist. Sometimes faith demands that we believe that a couple of wrinkled old-timers are going to have a baby. Or that God will lead some slaves out of Egypt in triumph. Or that a virgin will conceive and bear a son. Or that a crucified criminal will rise from the dead.

The whole story of Abraham and Sarah revolves around the question God asks when Sarah’s laughter subsides: Is anything impossible—other translations have “too hard,” or “too wonderful”—for God? (Gen. 18:14). It is not an assertion or a proclamation, but a question. It comes as a question because faith requires a decision. The question demands an answer from us.

Unfortunately, we are tempted to answer it too quickly—and superficially. The question seems more rhetorical than real to many of us who have a long history in the church, who have heard all the stories before. We want to reply eagerly, like a kid wildly waving his hand in a fourth-grade Sunday-school class, “No, of course not! Nothing is impossible for God.”

Or we may tempted to answer too quickly in another way: “Yes, some things are impossible, even for God—if there is a God.” That is the prevalent answer of the modern world, and it quickly reduces the whole throbbing, mysterious universe to a closed system of cause and effect. God is no longer Almighty God—benevolent, maybe; kind and concerned, perhaps—but ultimately powerless to make any concrete difference. Everything is ultimately stable, reliable—and hopeless. This was the world Abraham and Sarah had come to live in, too, a world where you finally come to terms with barrenness at 90 years old.

But if we answer too quickly, we may miss the question’s real point. It is a question that forces us to a deep reflection on what we really believe about God. Our entire view of reality depends on how we answer it.

For if we answer the question by saying, “No, nothing is impossible for God”—and mean it—we have a whole new view of reality. Then anything can happen, and the possibilities are staggering. Then the world is not a closed system, but a place where old women have babies, slaves march through the Red Sea, and the dead rise again. The world is a place that is pregnant with unheard-of possibilities.

Abraham and Sarah leave the question tantalizingly unanswered. But the question lights up the biblical sky like the path of a comet. The root word that we translate here as “impossible” or “too wonderful” pops up again and again, and it is fascinating to see when and how. (I am indebted to Walter Brueggemann, who pointed out this trajectory in a journal article.)

Exodus 15 is an early example. Miriam dances in triumph, slapping her thigh with her tambourine at God’s deliverance of Hebrew slaves through the Red Sea. She sings, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendors, doing wonders [doing the impossible]” (Exod. 15:11, NRSV).

Later, when an angel visits Manoah, Samson’s father, to announce Samson’s birth to his barren wife, Manoah wants to make sure this comes from the highest levels of heaven. Manoah asks, in effect, “What did you say your name was?” To which the angel replies, “Just call me’ Impossible’ “(Judg. 13:15–18).

The word occurs often in the Psalms, Israel’s hymn book. Whenever they sing the praises of God who does “marvelous” or “wonderful” works, it is the same word. Israel praises God as the one who does wonderful impossibilities, and Israel is often warned not to forget the impossibilities God has done on their behalf.

But the subject of impossibilities becomes even more interesting in the New Testament. When the angel visits Mary to announce her pregnancy, the angel also announces the pregnancy of Elizabeth, her cousin, who is very old, as Sarah was. Then the angel comes to answer the question the visitor proposed to Abraham and Sarah centuries earlier. “And now, your cousin Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37, NRSV).

Jesus takes up the same question in his teaching. In Mark, when he describes the difficulty of discipleship, and the disciples balk at how hard it is, Jesus says, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God” (10:27). And in Matthew, after Jesus has rebuked his disciples for their inability to cast out a demon, he says, “Truly, I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (17:20, NRSV). When we have faith, when we rely on God, then truly nothing is impossible, not only for God but for us.

The question of what is possible for God and for people of faith, then, has reached its climactic answer. Everything is possible! Nothing is impossible!

But wait. Is that really true? Are we given a kind of blank check drawn on the New Jerusalem Bank and Trust? Such a view is often exploited by religious teachers who promise that everything, from financial security to favorable weather, from happy sex to healing, is available to the one who believes hard enough. Kenneth Hagin, a well-known exponent of this theology, wrote a booklet entitled How to Write Your Own Ticket with God. For him, to struggle with whether something might be God’s will or not is a sign of a lack of faith. To wonder whether something might be possible is to question God. According to this theology, we now live by faith in the kind of world where God, like some trained seal, jumps through impossible hoops at the snap of our fingers.

Are the divine possibilities empty vessels that we can fill with our own contents? No, God is the one who does impossibilities, and, as Abraham and Sarah’s laughter makes clear, he doesn’t need our faith to do so. We also have to remember that the impossibility granted to Abraham and Sarah was not any impossibility. It was an impossibility that fulfilled God’s will and purpose.

This becomes clearer when we look at one more instance where the word that has to do with possibility occurs in the Bible. Jesus lies prostrate on the ground of Gethsemane, praying to be delivered from that hour of pain and torment he had been facing all his life. Maybe he remembers the encouragement to faith he himself gave the disciples, and he prays accordingly: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I will but what you want” (Mark 14:36, NRSV).

Perhaps, then, one answer to the question of the divine visitors to Abraham is yes, there is at least one thing impossible for the Lord: It is impossible for him to go back on his will and purpose to save humanity through the suffering of his Son. Obedience without a cross, salvation without death, newness without barrenness, these are impossible with God. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies,” Jesus told his disciples, it remains a single seed and cannot bear fruit. Jesus did not seem to know the wonderful theology that we can write our own ticket with God. His was a nonrefundable ticket to a cross. That night in Gethsemane, agonizing in fear, he learned the secret of obedience to God’s will and purpose. As Frederick Dale Brunner puts it, “The irony of the Anti-Christ is that he sometimes appears as the Superchrist. The Anti-Christ ridicules the fleshly, human, struggling, not-always-knowing-the-will-of-God-for-sure Christ of Gethsemane.”

Resurrection will come, but only through the valley of the shadow of death. New life will come, but not apart from the death of the old self.

In our pain, failure, barrenness, sickness, and doubts, we, like Abraham and Sarah, struggle with the question, “Is anything impossible for God?” When someone like my wife, Judith, who struggles every day with multiple sclerosis, asks that question, it takes on a whole new meaning and urgency. Is it impossible for God to banish this disease from her body? Of course not. The issue is not one of possibilities or impossibilities, but of God’s will for this world, this time, this place. And God’s will we can leave confidently in his loving hands, just as Jesus did.

As Abraham and Sarah and Jesus found, the answer to the question “Is anything impossible for God?” may follow slow and painful waiting. It may demand faithful patience. It may include long, dark nights of seeming abandonment. It may not even become clear until that “great gettin’ up morning.” But the whole biblical story tells us the ultimate answer to that question: “No! Nothing is impossible for God.” In due time, the child of laughter, Isaac, will break through the long wait of barrenness. Easter morning will dawn, bright and clear, after the dark night of the cross. That is why today, right now, in faith, we can sing the praise of the God for whom nothing is impossible.

Amid all the pulse takers and poll watchers in Congress, Rep. Henry Hyde is more interested in being right than in being popular.

The walls of U.S. Representative Henry Hyde’s outer office sport all the trappings of democracy and reveal much about this 67-year-old veteran of conservative politics. Visiting constituents can look to their left in Room 2262 of the Rayburn Building just south of the Capitol and see a giant map of the Illinois Sixth Congressional District, which extends from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport south and westward past Wheaton College. They can stare ahead at two gargantuan blowups of thank-you notes to Hyde from kindergarten classes to which he sent flags. They can look to the right and see a large photograph of the Capitol, with the words of Alexander Hamilton, “Here, Sir, the people govern.”

It is not clear, however, whether Hamilton said those words proudly or sarcastically. (He was not overly fond of what “the people” tended to decide.) A look at Henry Hyde’s inner office also suggests more ambivalence than first meets the eye. His two Illinois-obligatory busts of Abraham Lincoln are outnumbered by three statuettes of Don Quixote, whose impossible dreams were not of, by, and for the people. Standard photos of Hyde handshakes with smiling Presidents are overshadowed by a large portrait of a weary George Washington at Valley Forge: “His force of character kept 11,000 men together during a terrible winter,” Hyde says.

The inner office also displays photos of Douglas MacArthur, and of Oliver North testifying at the Iran-Contra hearings. Hyde was a determined defender of Ronald Reagan at the hearings, and his office walls have many photos of “the best” President of recent decades. Hyde’s office also has room for the two bulldog bookends of twentieth-century British politics, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, and a portrait of Thomas More, the sixteenth-century English lord chancellor. Catholic attorneys such as Hyde often hang a print of that great Holbein painting because More is considered the patron saint of lawyers; but Hyde has a bust of More as well: “He gave his life for a principle.”

A congressman, Hyde says, “has to decide to be somebody or do something,” and the former is, unfortunately, far more prevalent. “Congress is a following institution, a poll-taking, weather-vane kind of enterprise. You will not see an awful lot of profiles in courage,” he says.

That might not be so terrible if American society were in such good shape that courage could be a luxury. But, as Hyde notes, “the overturning of the spirituality that undergirded society, and the ascendance of secularism, of materialism, of the denial of spiritual values, seems to be the regnant philosophy today in America.”

Hyde is known as an antiabortion crusader, but he generally fights society’s ruling ethos not just on one issue but across the board. The leaders of media and academia, he says, “admire and implement the Enlightenment ethic, the notion that [theological] revelation has nothing to teach us. In their view, the obstacles to a good society are simply ignorance. ‘If only we could educate everybody,’ they cry, ‘not only would racism, sexism, and crime disappear, but we’d have a wonderful life—Utopia itself!’ Ask them about sin, and they reply, ‘Sin? There’s no such thing. Society is the cause of evil and crime.’ Somehow, it appears, society has ‘failed’ the rapist, the dope dealer, the mugger, the murderer. Society’s to blame, not the individual responsible for his choices.”

There have been three great styles of twentieth-century American oratory—northern Irish, southern white, and black evangelical—and all three are disappearing under the pressure of media mavens who teach public figures to speak in clipped sound bites. Hyde’s rolling cadences represent an unapologetic throwback to a better class of rhetoric. For example, while lots of conservative politicians like to mention the references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance and on the back of a penny, only Hyde issues the challenge: “A nation ‘under God’ means a nation under God’s judgment, constantly reminded by our smallest coin that the true measure of ourselves comes from beyond ourselves.” Hyde’s office walls display photographs of Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, but he also has words of praise for Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and sentences of scorn for those who decry the Religious Right: “There is a repressive fundamentalism extant in our country today, but it’s not of the religious variety. It is the secular fundamentalism that the courts, the ACLU, People for the American Way, and many of our law schools are teaching.”

Hyde is relaxed as he rocks softly in his office chair, but there is an edge to his voice as he talks about colleagues who roll over under media pressure: “People want to do what’s right, but unfortunately they would rather be perceived as doing right than as actually doing what’s right. I think they are torn, and perception wins out, because the adoration of the secular press is heady.”

Hyde rolls in his right hand a long cigar as he discusses the job of a member of Congress: “You are supposed to be better informed than the average constituent who gets his information from a paragraph or two in the newspaper, or a sound bite on the television at night. You can make people aware of the truth.”

Hyde is perhaps best known for his constant enunciation of one unpopular stand—that human life begins at conception. He became a prolife advocate in 1969 while serving in the Illinois House of Representatives, and during his first term in Congress introduced the Hyde Amendment, which, since 1976, has prohibited the use of federal funds to pay for abortion. Yet, with over 90 percent of media leaders favoring abortion, Hyde acknowledges that many politicians are retreating from antiabortion positions. He is irritated by so-called seamless-garment rating systems that link abortion to other “life issues,” such as the death penalty and nuclear deterrence. They are just a “way of protecting the Kennedys and the Moynihans,” he says. He also does not care for the merging of birth-control and abortion concerns found among some Catholics and fundamentalists: “Abortion is killing an innocent human life. The other is preventing conception of a human life, which I think is morally wrong, but there is a vast distinction.”

Hyde is concerned about future leadership for the prolife cause. He was once square-jawed and lean, but years on the rubber-chicken and chocolate-mousse circuit have softened the lines. He senses a similar aging taking place in the prolife movement. The future of abortion, he argues, is tied to development of a new generation of prolife leaders: “Mario Cuomo says, ‘There is no consensus,’ but it’s the job of political leaders to help form a consensus.”

Hyde does not seem optimistic as he runs through a list of younger politicians who might have been prolife leaders but flip-flopped instead: “Thirty pieces of silver don’t seem to me to be worth it.” Hyde added, “I say this as one ready to condemn myself. I in the last election endorsed some prochoice people,” including Illinois’s new conservative, Baptist governor, “but the more I think about it, the less comfortable I am with my decision.”

Nevertheless, Hyde still hopes for the conversion of even those who are legalistically prochoice: “You’ve got to believe in redemption, you’ve got to believe in Saul of Tarsus, you have to believe that people will change their minds.” Good teaching in churches is vital, he believes: “We need prophets and emissaries of transcendence, rather than people who compromise with the world.” A major problem, however, remains “the quality of clergy emerging out of the sixties and seventies.”

In Catholic churches, Hyde complains, “You have bishops lobbying for female priests and hom*osexuals. You have a Catholic press that is a great occasion of sin, a way to lose your soul.” Many of the church’s clergymen and even some cardinals, Hyde says angrily, “lack moral energy,” and “the big Catholic colleges are a great place to lose your faith; you send your kid to Notre Dame, and he comes out an agnostic at best.”

After graduating from a Catholic high school in 1942, Hyde went on to receive B.S. and J.D. degrees from Georgetown University and Loyola University School of Law; in those days, he emerged from schooling with a strong faith and a strong body. Now Hyde walks the floor of Congress with burly grace, but almost a half-century ago, during the last half of a 1943 NCAA playoff game, Hyde at 6’3” and 180 pounds ran the floor of a basketball court well enough to hold DePaul great George Mikan to one point.

Hyde has similarly outplayed top-rated liberal politicians year after year, so that even co*kie Roberts of Left-leaning National Public Radio grudgingly admits, “Hyde is one of the smartest men that ever walked.”

Nevertheless, the task gets harder each year, and he comments, “You can show the truth to people, you can rub their face in it, but if their will isn’t ready to accept it, they’re not going to accept it.”

In recent redistricting based on the 1990 census, Illinois lost two seats, and the Republican Hyde could have been gerrymandered out of a job by a Democratic legislature. But the respect he has engendered proved greater than the political desire to eject a troublemaker. And Hyde plans to persevere. Each time he talks about abortion on the floor of the House, he implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) hurls a question at his colleagues: “Do you want to continue to deceive yourselves?” In the back of Ted Kennedy’s mind, Hyde believes, “way back, hidden away in a closet somewhere, is the realization that he is dead wrong on abortion—dead wrong.” The hope of engendering a conversion keeps Hyde soldiering on, even when the pilgrim’s political progress of the 1980s seems to be turning into the regress of the 1990s.

Hyde has been married to one woman for 43 years. He has four children, five grandchildren, nine terms in the House, and a bit of disappointment at having to remain the gadfly rather than the seat of power himself. But he carries around quotations in his coat pocket, and pulls out a favorite one—“This is great stuff,” he says—about the Illinoisan who suffered many disappointments until lightning struck: Lincoln “hid his bitterness in laughter … and met recurring disaster with whimsicality.… Out of a tragic sense of life he pitied where others blamed [and] endured humanely his little day of chance power.”

It will be an uphill battle, but the church can and must create a sexual counterculture.

“Don’t you think,” people sometimes ask, “that the pendulum will swing back to traditional values? Won’t people see how bad things have become and return to the good old ways?”

I would like to agree, but I have been listening to the same hopeful question for two decades. As trouble increases, we seem to grow more lethargic rather than more disturbed. Anyway, I doubt the pendulum is an apt metaphor for society. Perhaps more appropriate is a massive ball on a steep slope: It takes a lot of effort to push it uphill, and if you let go for an instant, gravity takes it down.

The ball is rolling downhill fast right now. More kids go to bed with more partners earlier and earlier. Children are born without fathers. Marriages dissolve. A sizable subculture does without marriage at all, and so they sink deeper into poverty and violence. There is more child abuse, sexual and otherwise; more spousal abuse; more sexually transmitted diseases, including one that is invariably fatal; more abortions; more kids bouncing between parents like Ping-Pong balls.

But is America worried? I don’t hear too many alarm bells. Tongues cluck about the terrible trends, but the broad middle class continues rolling with the ball. When a recent study found how deeply children suffer when their parents divorce, every commentator I read emphasized that the study did not mean that people should stay married for the sake of their children.

Even if people were ready to change, could they? It’s hard to push that ball uphill. For example, children who grew up in broken homes almost uniformly vow they will not repeat their parents’ mistakes. But they do repeat them. For whatever reasons, they end up divorcing more frequently than those from intact families. They want to do better, but by themselves they can’t.

Sexual Counterculture

If there is hope in our situation, it is not in clucking tongues. It must come through a counterculture—a disciplined minority that shows a different way by their stubborn adherence to a distinctive pattern of life. We must become a people who are consciously, un-defensively different, and who experience that differentness as a blessing. The church was such a sexual counterculture in the Roman Empire, and it could be again.

The church has been lulled to sleep. For generations, Christian sexual ethics were part of the dominant Western culture. Not everybody lived by those ethics, certainly, but people generally agreed about what was right and wrong. If a husband cheated on his wife, he didn’t say it was the most moral thing he had ever done because for the first time in his life he had been true to himself. He said temptation had gotten the better of him, and everybody agreed it was a shame.

That was a comfortable situation for Christians. It is nice to have your views supported by the culture you live in. But times have changed. Christians now find themselves holding a minority position.

We don’t like to stand out. We don’t like to sound intolerant, hypocritical, or simplistic. So we keep quiet. A long time ago, preachers mentioned sex to thunder against adultery. In the nineties, if preachers mention sex they will say how wonderful and God-given it is. Fine; but can we say something that disagrees with the world view of MTV?

My hobby horse is sex education—not how terrible it is in the schools, but how absent it is in the church. If we have something serious and life-redeeming to say to our children about their sexuality, why aren’t we saying it?

In the churches I know, a kid is lucky to get four sessions on sexuality during junior-high or high-school youth group. The first three weeks are on dating and how to pick your marriage partner, and the last week there is a little talk about what is really going on—one session, maybe two, to counteract a lifetime of NBC. I don’t think anybody could honestly describe that as a serious response to the sexual crisis.

Nearly the same pattern shows itself in the way we prepare couples for marriage. They come to us willingly, asking to be married in church. They are full of idealism and hope. With some notable exceptions, most churches pass over the eager couple with a word of encouragement and a cheerful sigh. This is like sending soldiers out on horses to face tanks. How much suffering comes from our negligence?

Visible Hope

Is there hope that the church will respond seriously to the sexual crisis? Yes, despite everything, there is strong hope. It has, for me, two bases.

One is my faith in the words of Jesus that Satan will be unable to prevail against the church. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the church belongs to God, and he has not abandoned it. God will not allow us to be completely defiled. (1 Cor. 6:18–20 specifies sexual sin as defiling.) At least a remnant will remain, and new life will spring forth.

I have another more earthly reason for hope. Genesis 2:24 spells it out: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”

These words are not mere inspirational jargon. Rather, they explain a perplexing fact: men and women meet each other, fall in love, and start afresh. They choose the claims of a new, undefined bond over their own flesh and blood. We have all seen it happen. Romeo and Juliet meet again and again, ditching their family prejudices to start something new. This is the very opposite of sociological fatalism. One’s upbringing is not one’s destiny.

These new beginnings are rooted, Genesis says, not in Law but in Creation. You don’t have to tell men and women to bond; they will do it whether you want them to or not, because that is the way God made them.

They may make their new beginnings badly, of course. They can create a marriage of abuse, of dishonesty, ultimately of mutual hatred. Those from “good” families can and will make bad choices—a fact that properly frightens every parent who sends kids off on a date.

But new beginnings work in the opposite way, too. Those from “bad families” also leave and start anew—and that can be a hope for a culture that is speeding downhill. No matter how our culture disintegrates, new bonds will appear amid the chaos.

New Beginnings

How does this relate to the church? It doesn’t, necessarily. These new beginnings happen as often outside the church as inside it.

The church, though, is where many of these new beginnings end up, to be nurtured and encouraged. They end up in the church because the church has something to help their new hope: God’s Word and his Spirit.

Here and there, in a regular flow, I see these new families begin. Joe and Linda, for example, are a couple who have found their way to our church. Both are products of broken marriages. Both are extremely conscious of how that heritage threatens their own marriage. They are determined to do it differently. Unlike other young couples, they take nothing for granted. They are very aware that they are vulnerable.

There will always be Joes and Lindas making new beginnings, and the church will always have a tradition of strong countercultural belief—the gospel. Sooner or later, I am sure, these will coalesce—a new generation who see sexual differentness not as a burden, but as a blessing.

These couples will take the measures needed to strengthen that differentness, to teach it to their children. They will create a sexual counterculture. Then we will have a place to stand as we challenge gravity and stop the runaway ball.

I believe it will happen. But I don’t believe it is happening yet.

I will believe it is happening when I see church people spontaneously organizing themselves to teach sexuality to their children—not passing the job off to the youth director, but insisting that sex education become part of the church curriculum from a very early age.

I will believe it is happening when our AIDS-spooked neighbors discuss the radical possibility of sending their kids to our churches for sex education that is really serious.

I will believe it is happening when couples get married at city hall because they just weren’t serious enough to face First Baptist Church and the marriage preparation they require.

I will believe it is happening when church families stop watching primetime TV.

I will believe it is happening when church “prayer requests” concern sexual and marital issues as often as cancer.

I believe it will happen. I wish I knew when.

What can we learn from the conservative victory?

In the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), The Controversy is over. This does not mean that all the fighting has stopped, much less that the belligerents on either side have suddenly been seized with the spirit of genuine reconciliation. Far from it. Ecclesiastical wars, like those fought with real bullets and bombs, leave lingering scars that only time and a new generation of noncombatants can begin to heal. For this shalom we must wait.

Still, as everyone on all sides now admits, the battle for control of America’s largest Protestant denomination has resulted in a decisive shift in direction for the SBC—a shift called takeover by moderates, and turnaround by conservatives. This process is not likely to be reversed in the foreseeable future, despite continuing skirmishes between incumbents and insurgents, and guerrilla maneuvers played out at all levels of local Southern Baptist politics.

The recent conflict in the SBC is part of the wider struggle of American evangelicals to come to grips with the crisis of modernity and can only properly be understood in that larger context. Of course, there are many other aspects of The Controversy that can be and have been studied with much profit: its “Southern” dimension, its demographic make-up, its populist appeal, its political configurations, and so on. However, when viewed against the background of recent religious history, one fact stands out above all others: For only the second time in this century, a major American denomination veering from its historic, evangelical roots toward a mainline Protestant posture has changed its trajectory. (The first involved the Missouri Synod Lutherans.) It is little wonder, then, that sociologists of religion would seize on a phenomenon that even a close reading of American denominational history would not have prepared one to predict. This change has been as sweeping and dramatic as it was unexpected and, I would argue, has been a midcourse correction necessary for the health and survival of the denomination.

Nevertheless, the settlement of The Controversy has prompted a profound crisis of identity for Southern Baptists in this last decade of the twentieth century. Moderates, as defenders of the latest Lost Cause, must now decide whether they can find a place to stand in the new order or else seek alternative alignments. For most of them, secession is not an option; but how to function within a fractured family is not clear, either.

Conservatives have even greater worries: Can they survive their own success? Can they forge a new consensus that will include most, if not all, Southern Baptists who really do stand with them on the crucial issues, and can they do so without replicating the very system their movement was launched to correct? The replacement of one set of bureaucrats with another doth not a reformation make. As Southern Baptists move from an era of conflict into one of reintegration, a host of identity issues needs continued attention.

Roots Of The Controversy

Issues of Southern Baptist identity, of course, are not limited to the recent squabbles. In 1900 the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board, then only nine years old, published a remarkable collection of essays entitled Baptist Why and Why Not. In the opening paragraph, J. M. Frost declared: “Baptists are one in contending for the faith; one in their history and the heritage of their fathers; one in their purpose to preach the gospel of the grace of God among all nations.” The chapter titles of the book have a polemical ring: “Why Baptist and Not Campbellite,” “Why Immersion and Not Sprinkling,” “Why Missionary and Not ‘Omissionary.’”

The purpose of the volume was to provide a “campaign book,” a tool for the promotion of denominational interests such as Baptist schools, missionary endeavors, and benevolent concerns. While recognizing diversity among themselves on many ancillary matters, the 25 contributors to this volume (including college presidents, seminary professors, leading pastors, and missions strategists), stood together on a common doctrinal foundation:

We accept the Scriptures as an all-sufficient and infallible rule of faith and practice, and insist upon the absolute inerrancy and sole authority of the Word of God. We recognize at this point no room for division, either of practice or belief, or even sentiment.

Church leaders appended a “Declaration of Faith” to the volume, incorporating many of the articles that would later be adopted in the Baptist Faith and Message statement of 1925. It clarified a number of important doctrinal issues, asserting, to give one example, that Scripture has God as its author, salvation as its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter. Also in 1925 the convention provided a confessional and organizational basis for consolidation and expansion by approving the Cooperative Program, a unified plan for distributing contributions to various agencies and boards of the church.

What About “Indoctrination”?

While there has never been absolute uniformity among Southern Baptist congregations, the denomination entered the twentieth century remarkably united in its basic mission and purpose. Three developments during the early decades of the century further solidified the Southern Baptist synthesis: the refusal to join the emerging ecumenical movement, the containment of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, and the construction of an impressive denominational bureaucracy supported by a systematic plan of finance. These were not isolated strands but rather interwoven threads of the developing Southern Baptist consciousness. Each reinforced the other and each provided a common enemy (or enemies) to oppose the “bastard” Union Movement, as one denominational executive described it; theological liberalism, safely sequestered in the northern denominations; and ecclesiastical separatism, epitomized by Texas-based J. Frank Norris, whose guerrilla tactics against the denominational “machine” were more of a nuisance than a genuine threat.

Two trends of the 1950s portended ill for the conflicts of the next three decades: the introduction of historical-critical studies in Baptist seminaries and colleges, and the dominance of a program-centered approach to ministry. The success of the latter imbued SBC leaders with a sense of invincibility as they steered the denomination in an increasingly progressivist direction during the 1960s and 1970s, while conservatives picked up the term inerrancy as a rallying cry. As Southern Baptist sociologist Nancy Ammerman notes, the moderate agenda was camouflaged by an amorphous appeal to “freedom” because moderates knew that they could not rally majority support for their progressivist ideas. The underlying theological basis of the conflict was seldom explored. Moderates largely denied that there was a theological rationale for the conflict, while conservatives so fixated on inerrancy that other doctrinal areas were ignored or pushed to the side.

By the early sixties, Southern Baptists had developed a style of denominational life characterized by theological fuzziness. This was the result of a long process of slippage going back at least 50 years. An illustration of how far things had moved is provided by quoting a statement of George McDaniels, a leading pastor and later president of the SBC, issued in 1919:

In other decades Baptists were better indoctrinated than they are today. The environment in which they lived, sometimes inimical to them, was conducive to the mastery of their principles. Of later years, a tendency to depreciate doctrinal discussion is easily discernible, and young converts particularly are not rooted and grounded in the faith. Modern nonchalance acts as if it made little difference what one believes.

By the 1960s the word indoctrinated, which McDaniels used in a positive sense, had taken on a sinister connotation for many Baptists. Whatever it was, they didn’t want it done to them!

Earlier generations had been nurtured on the classic Baptist catechisms of Spurgeon, John Broadus, and J. P. Boyce. Later they were nurtured in the solid instruction of B.Y.P.U. (Baptist Young People’s Union). Gradually, however, these models of explicit Christian education yielded to the educational philosophy of John Dewey. The discourse of conviction gave way to the religion of civility. Within polite circles of the Baptist establishment, to ask about one’s theology was taken as a gauche intrusion into the realm of privacy. It was almost like inquiring into the method of birth control one used: Everyone assumed its presence, but it was hardly relevant to the discussion of the practice of religion. Even conservatives who were still sure they “believed the Bible” were often woefully ignorant of its contents and even less aware of the rich doctrinal heritage to which they were heirs. Thus Billy Bob Baptist, as a recent SBC president has dubbed the typical preacher boy (preacher girls in those days were beyond the structures of plausability), was totally unprepared for the vigorous assault on the traditional understanding of Scripture he encountered at—of all places!—his home-state Baptist college and his pastor’s recommended seminary. This repeated saga reinforced the sense of mistrust, alienation, and betrayal that would eventually issue in revolution. When later, in the midst of crisis, denominational leaders tried to reassure an aroused constituency that all was well, vast numbers thought they had reason to know better.

It would be a gross mistake, of course, to assume that SBC seminaries in the sixties and seventies were suddenly hi led with death-of-God liberals, and even more preposterous to imagine that mainstream Southern Baptists were seduced by the theology of the secular city. Most Southern Baptists, then as now, remained strongly committed to a conservative, evangelistic expression of faith. What did occur, however, was a discernible loosening of these commitments. The educational and bureaucratic elites who set policies and guided the boards and agencies of the convention developed an increasing preoccupation with a mainline Protestant agenda. This trend was subtle and usually held in check by a pragmatic concern not to overturn the apple cart. But it manifested itself in various ways: a one-way ecumenism to the left, a flirtation with the faddish theologies of the day, an uncritical dissemination of historical-critical presuppositions concerning the Bible, an intellectualist disdain for the kind of piety held dear by the grassroots constituency, an affinity for left-of-center politics, and a covert prochoice advocacy on abortion. Most Southern Baptists would have been outraged to know that the head of their Christian Life Commission during this period was supportive of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights.

The SBC’s structure allowed for the insulation of elites from the great majority of church members. More and more ordinary Baptists in local churches sensed a growing gap between themselves and their church leaders in Nashville and Atlanta. To be sure, many of the Baptist bureaucrats of this era were sincere and devout, if somewhat colorless, persons. Only a few were true liberals in the theological sense. Many others, however, were not a little embarrassed by the “fundamentalist” roots of their own religious past. They had left the sawdust trail long ago. Now they were eager to nudge their buoyant if backward denomination along the same path of liberation they had found so emancipating themselves. Alert to all the evils of Baptist fundamentalism, of which they were true cultured despisers, they were theologically naïve and ill-prepared to believe any warnings of a leftward drift within the denomination.

The Toppling Of The Moderates

In most mainline denominations, evangelicals voted against the new culture with their pocketbooks and their feet. They simply quit giving and going—hence the precipitous decline suffered by these church bodies over the past 30 years. Some Southern Baptists also became frustrated and gave up on their denomination. A few of these were bright progressives on the Radical Left fringe—the “missing generation,” as Ammerman calls them. There was also a “missing generation” on the Right—those who became independent Baptists and non-Baptist evangelicals, having concluded either that the convention was hopelessly lost to liberalism or had become increasingly irrelevant to wider evangelical concerns.

Most Southern Baptist conservatives, however, decided to stay and vote with their votes. Ironically, the very watchwords of the moderate movement—freedom, soul competency, the priesthood of all believers—provided a basis, through the democratic governance of a voluntary association, for the toppling of the moderate regime.

Thus, at precisely the time a significant segment of SBC leadership was being drawn into the orbit of mainline concerns, more and more Southern Baptists were beginning to take notice of the common ground they shared with other conservative Christians outside the SBC. This was not an entirely new development. As far back as 1942, Southern Baptist leaders R. G. Lee and John W. McCall had been active in the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals. More than anything else, the ministry of Billy Graham had made large numbers of Southern Baptists aware of and receptive to the wider world of American evangelicalism. Meanwhile, on college campuses across the nation, thousands of Southern Baptist students were being converted and discipled through the work of Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the Navigators, and other evangelical ministries against which the blander Baptist Student Union approach could hardly compete.

Rather than cultivating closer ties between Southern Baptists and other evangelicals, some moderate leaders responded with a standoffishness that reinforced old stereotypes of isolationism and parochialism. Typical of this attitude was the reaction of an SBC agency head to the press’s dubbing of Jimmy Carter as a “Southern Baptist evangelical” during the 1976 presidential campaign:

We are not evangelicals. That’s a Yankee word. They want to claim us because we are big and successful and growing every year. But we have our own traditions, our own hymns and more students in our seminaries than they have in all of theirs put together.

Despite such efforts to equate “Northern” evangelicalism with Yankee imperialism, the 1970s and 1980s were marked by increasing fellowship and cooperation between Southern Baptists and evangelicals. The writings of inerrantist scholars such as Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Lindsell, John R. W. Stott, J. I. Packer, and Francis Schaeffer, among others, began to circulate among Southern Baptist pastors. Such writings were critical in focusing the widespread, populist concern over the erosion of scriptural authority. Schaeffer in particular had a personal, shaping influence on Paige Patterson, one of the principal architects of the conservative resurgence in the SBC. When The Controversy finally burst into full blaze with the election of Adrian Rogers in 1979, Southern Baptist conservatives, or at least their leaders, were well aware of other recent “battles for the Bible”—some “won” (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod), others “lost” (Fuller Theological Seminary).

In retrospect, it appears that the moderates had only one chance to stem the tide. Had they from the start recognized and responded proactively to the legitimate concerns raised by the conservative movement—rather than merely reacting defensively to the raucous and sometimes distasteful way in which such concerns were aired—they might have seen a more balanced and harmonious resolution of the conflict achieved. Later in The Controversy, in the 1980s, when they did try something of this approach, it turned out to be too little, and much too late.

Instead, the moderate movement itself was deeply divided between those who saw the conservative resurgence as a benign swing of the pendulum requiring no vigorous response, and others who believed it to be a cancerous intrusion that had to be cut off.

What both wings of the moderate party failed to realize was the deeply ideological character of the conflict. For most conservatives—which is to say most Southern Baptists—The Controversy was about theology, however “political” it may all have seemed to insider moderates and curious onlookers. Students of Christian doctrine who have seen how much rested on a single iota in the fourth-century debates over hom*oousios and hom*oiousios will not be surprised that the future of the SBC came down to whether the miracles in the Bible were really miraculous and the history truly historical. As writer Richard Condon notes, “A nuance in an ideological difference is a wide chasm.”

Where did this passionate concern for doctrinal integrity come from if, as I have argued, the traditional theological consensus had already worn thin by the “acids of modernity” on the one hand, and denominational pragmatism gone to seed on the other? The concern came primarily from two sources. First, it grew out of a vestigial memory of, and intuitive loyalty to, the Baptist heritage, with its reverence for the primary icon of the tradition, the written Word of God. Second, the concern for doctrinal integrity came from the impetus of the wider evangelical resistance to new values in the culture. The conflict with culture’s pluralism led conservative Southern Baptists to look warily at mainline denominational trends and pull in evangelical reinforcment embodied in such writers as Harold Lindsell (himself a Southern Baptist) and Francis Schaeffer.

What’S Next In The Sbc

Despite the recent ascendancy of the conservatives, the SBC stands today on the brink of schism. The next several years will very likely witness the emergence of a splinter denomination guided by activist moderates who have abandoned their hopes for reforming the SBC in a mainline Protestant direction. Like Landmark Baptists and Independent Baptists, who left the convention in earlier generations, these “Free Baptists” (as they might like to be called) will continue to exist side-by-side with Southern Baptists. They will offer still another Baptist alternative on the religious landscape, much as the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and mainline Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA), churches coexist in most Southern cities.

The conservative victory in the SBC will prove hollow, however, unless accompanied by genuine spiritual and theological renewal and a process of reconciliation with cooperating, Bible-believing moderates who are willing to take some theological boundaries seriously. Conservatives cannot afford to gloat in victory, or relax into the halcyon routine of a new establishment. For, as sociologist Peter Berger points out, the very social and political successes of evangelical movements are frequently their undoing, as they are sucked into the ambience of a culture inimical to their most basic purpose and ideals. Perhaps the greatest lesson of the past 30 years is this: We are able to understand the present and illuminate the future only to the extent that we do not forsake the warranted wisdom of the past.

It Happened

To deny that the Holocaust occurred is to set the preconditions for another one.

Guest editorial by Richard V. Pierard, professor of history at Indiana State University.

The emergence of David Duke as a political figure has again drawn public attention to the contention that no Jewish Holocaust occurred in World War II. The ex-Klansman has said that Hitler and the Nazis did not systematically and successfully destroy most of Europe’s Jews.

For years, Holocaust denial has been a stock-intrade of shadowy creatures on the extreme Right. In recent times, several pseudo-scholars have come forward to argue against the “extermination legend” and “myth of the six million.” Through an elaborate process of distortions, half-truths, and falsification of data, these “revisionists” seek to convince the gullible that Hitler did not order the annihilation of the Jews, but instead had this “alien minority” placed in labor camps where they could not subvert the war effort.

Harsh war-time conditions caused the epidemic diseases and malnutrition in the crowded camps; crematories were necessary to dispose of the remains of the few thousand who died. Cyanide gas was used for delousing and fumigation in order to check the spread of typhus. There were so few Jews left in Europe because most had emigrated to North America or Israel. Pictures of gas chambers and emaciated inmates are fabrications. And so the story goes.

In fact, Holocaust denial is the ultimate Big Lie. The whole process of destruction is so well-attested through eye-witness accounts, official documents, and contemporary press reports that no one in his or her right mind could deny that it happened.

So why is such a monstrous falsehood perpetrated? The answer is twofold. One reason is anti-Semitism—the ongoing hatred of Jews that animates extreme rightist groups in North America, Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere. The other is the intention to deny Jews the right to a land of their own, where they may live peacefully within secure borders.

Is Holocaust denial merely a Jewish problem? No, it is also an American Christian problem. We must never forget that anti-Semitism has its roots in the theology and practice of the Christian church, from the writings of the church fathers, through the Inquisition, even in the comments of Martin Luther. Moreover, the U.S. government and people did little to help Jews in the years 1933 through 1945. Opinion polls in our “Christian nation” in 1942 found that people disliked Jews more than the German and Japanese enemies, while officials in Washington pooh-poohed the accounts of extermination programs as “atrocity stories.”

Evangelicals may try to evade the issue by arguing the Holocaust was a product of theological liberalism. But we cannot let ourselves off the hook so easily. Robert Ross excellently shows in So It Was True (1980) that while our magazines reported the grim details of the Nazi policies, our modest attempts to persuade the U.S. authorities to do something lacked moral passion.

Likewise, conservative free church Christians in Germany supported the Hitler regime just as fervently as most in the official church did. In 1984, the German Baptists even issued a formal statement confessing that they had been taken in by the “ideological seduction” of the time. They had not stood up for truth and righteousness.

The bottom line is that to deny the Holocaust is to set the preconditions for yet another one. It behooves evangelicals to stand up and utter a forthright no to the “revisionists” and their fellow travelers. The very credibility of our faith is at stake.

Ex-gay ministries may be the most misunderstood segment of the evangelical parachurch network. They are often reviled by those they wish to reach, and widely mistrusted by evangelical congregations. It seems anything associated with hom*osexuality—even its healing—feels out of place in a respectable Sunday-go-to-meetin’ culture.

Unfortunately, this lack of acceptance means the church could easily miss lessons these groups might teach. In a recent newsletter from Desert Stream, an ex-gay group associated with the Venice (Calif.) Vineyard, founder Andy Comiskey described new directions these ministries need to take. Each new direction has serious implications for local congregations.

First, says Comiskey, those who seek to minister to hom*osexuals must be careful not to be caught in the trap of “fight[ing] the deceived on their own turf.” Outrageous claims by the gay PR machine and its media missionaries can easily provoke angry responses and put ex-gay leaders on the defensive. But, says Comiskey, their message of healing is a “holy offense,” tied to the belief that “freedom results from a living relationship with Jesus Christ.” Keeping that message up front is the key to changing lives.

The church at large can learn from this wisdom. What hom*osexual person who feels a deep need for sexual wholeness will seek help from a church best known for gay bashing or antigay activism? A firm belief in the sinfulness of hom*osexual activity need not degenerate into antigay rhetoric. It must instead find expression in a gospel-based appeal to experience forgiveness, acceptance, and wholeness.

Comiskey’s second point also touches the church. Those who have grown into greatest wholeness under Desert Stream’s ministry are those who have become “known and liberated unto whole relationships and service of others within the local church.” Will our churches find ways to integrate these ministries into congregational life? Some have; but it must happen on a wider scale. Former hom*osexuals easily become locked into a negative identity, thinking of themselves primarily as something they are not, rather than as something positive God has called them to be. “To the degree that we … commune together on the basis of our identified problem, we play into the same deception that undergirds the gay community,” writes Comiskey. “We perpetuate the myth that … our brokenness necessitates unique and esoteric healing keys unknown to the majority.” Will the churches facilitate the breakdown of ex-gay isolation?

Third, Comiskey calls for a major shift in emphasis among the ex-gay ministries: from helping hom*osexual strugglers to the restoration of all sexually broken persons. Heterosexuals who have been sexually abused or are sexually addicted have a “profound common ground” with those struggling with hom*osexuality. The groups are different enough and enough alike to increase the healing potential significantly. What are needed are sheltering and caring churches that can bring these groups together.

Fourth, in the sunny Southern California culture from which Comiskey writes, ex-gay ministries have relied, perhaps too much, on standard psychological approaches. Comiskey warns that “sin became rationalized,” and “psychobabble replaced the language of redemption. The clear word of the Father was dismissed for a thousand words of false consolation.”

Here, too, is a word for the church. For as the therapeutic culture has engulfed our congregations, many have fallen into an uncritical acceptance of the therapeutic goal (while others have reflexively rejected all psychology). For many, says Comiskey, “‘soulgazing’ has displaced the cross.…” But the Father’s goal for his children is not being well-adjusted; it is being holy. There is, however, a proper use of psychology: “to identify what is broken in us so that we might seek the Father more accurately for the freedom only He can offer us.” The churches clearly teach the goal of holiness.

These admonitions from a leader in ex-gay ministry challenge us all. It is worthwhile eavesdropping on that movement’s internal conversations.

By David Neff.

By the time high-school seniors pick up their diplomas this spring, more than three-fourths of them will have earned more than an education during their school years. They will have graduated into the sexual revolution. According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 73 percent of high-school seniors have had sexual intercourse.

The moral consequences of promiscuity are obviously of concern to all Christian parents. (And we cannot pretend that our children are in the chaste 27 percent. Various researchers have found that the statistics on sexual activity are about the same or only slightly lower for children from Christian homes.) But besides the issue of right and wrong, there are the concerns of health and sickness, life and death.

The CDC’s study of teenage sexual behavior reinforces what should by now be common knowledge: promiscuous sex spreads disease. And the center warns that adolescents may be the next group to succumb wholesale to the AIDS epidemic. But this newest and deadliest threat is not their only concern. Other sexually transmitted diseases (STDS), such as syphilis, gonorrhea, genital herpes, and chlamydia are on the rise and have a higher annual incidence than AIDS. While not as deadly as AIDS, these diseases are more than inconvenient; some are incurable or have been linked to infertility and cancer. Already they touch three million teenagers annually.

As Tim Stafford points out in this issue (“The Next Sexual Revolution,” p. 28), we urgently need to build an intentional Christian counterculture—one that challenges all Christians, including teenagers, to be different and to celebrate that difference. We must find ways to present the “good news” about sex—before our children receive the bad news.

By Michael G. Maudlin.

I have always believed that it is the duty of the Christian to be loyal to his church and faithfully to attend its services.

Even in my unbelieving days, I never gave up regular attendance at the worship services of my church—partly out of habit and partly because I didn’t want to hurt my parents, whom I dearly loved. But when I became a Christian, I made a commitment not only to God, but to the church, the people of God. 1 publicly confessed my faith in Christ and convenanted with my fellow church members to live my life in ways consistent with that commitment.

That is no doubt why I have been concerned about, and even a bit suspicious of, the so-called electronic church. Made-for-television religious entertainment tends not to breed loyalty to the church but to foster an isolated, private, and individualistic kind of Christianity; and that is not the kind of Christianity nourished in the Bible.

I am not in the least unappreciative, however, of the good that has come through Bible-centered religious broadcasting. Through the ministry of those radio or television preachers who stress biblical teaching, many have for the first time experienced the joys of God’s free grace and have found ultimate meaning for this life and hope for the life to come. At an advanced age, my own grandmother found Christ by tuning in to the radio program of Dr. M. R. DeHaan, whose gravelly voice and open Bible teaching nourished the faith of many during the middle of this century. My father, too, came to realize the joyous wonder of the gospel through that same preaching. I have tender memories of him sitting with an open Bible in his hand, and his heart and mind attentive to the words of this radio pastor.

No doubt one can worship all alone. Our Lord taught the importance of secret prayer. And good Bible study can take place at one’s desk, undisturbed and undistracted. Some of my most precious times of spiritual growth have occurred when I was alone with God.

But the electronic church and all privatized Christianity do not involve direct participation and involvement with others in the visible body of Christ. And Scripture makes abundantly clear that we are to be members of a local church. We are to confess our faith in baptism. We are not to forsake regular assembly with other believers. We are to engage in corporate worship and prayer and biblical instruction. We are to bear the burdens of fellow believers.

For years I have known these things theoretically. I have taught them to my classes, preached them from the pulpit, and shared them with those who come to me for counsel. But during the last six months the Lord has provided me with a first-hand object lesson in these biblical truths. I have gained a new and vivid realization of the importance of the local church and of fellowship in the body ol Christ. I have experienced in a new way what it means to belong to a local church and to take part in its life.

Warned of a problem through a routine blood test, my family doctor advised a series of diagnostic tests—all of which proved negative, but led in turn to an operation that showed I had a malignant tumor. This required a second major surgery, and I write this in the midst of ten weeks of radiation treatments. My radiologist assures me that the average rate of recovery is between 75 and 80 percent, but that 20 to 25 percent do not recover. I probably won’t know, he says, into which category I fall for another six months.

But that is not new. When has a Christian ever been assured of this life? Our faith is in God. Our future lies in his hands, and, whatever happens here, we are ultimately safe in him.

Nevertheless, this has proved a disquieting time for my wife and me. Fortunately, the loving concern and earnest, faithful prayers of my friends have taught me anew the joy of resting in Christ and his sufficiency. Most of all, it is the earnest prayer and loving care of my fellow church members, many of whom I did not even know by name, who surrounded me, fortified me, and proved to be a source of spiritual strength during these days. In a new way I am grateful for my local church.

What would you say to a Unification Church member who challenged your belief in Jesus Christ? Many cults were active on the college campus I attended. But even as a young Christian, I was ready to respond to the Moonie who confronted me one day, thanks to a series of sermons preached by Jack MacArthur on Christianity and the cults.

Unfortunately, such preaching of apologetics is rare in evangelical pulpits today. The gospel is proclaimed, but seldom defended in such a way as to resolve the doubts of the faithful or the objections of the skeptic. But the rational defense of Christianity is both necessary and beneficial.

It is necessary because the very idea of objective, absolute truth is being eroded in pluralistic America. In What Americans Believe, pollster George Barna reports that only 28 percent of his respondents expressed a strong belief in “absolute truth.” Such relativists need to be convinced that Christianity is more than just a “lifestyle” or a “religious preference” if they are to surrender to Christ as “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6, NIV).

In our pluralistic day, sermons should set forth the exclusive claims of Christ as rationally superior, not just dogmatically demanding. This means building a reasonable case for the uniqueness and finality of the Incarnation, one that can withstand critical questions, such as: Are the biblical documents reliable? Is Christ significantly different from other religious figures? Can’t the pagan be saved? Aren’t miracles fables? Isn’t God in everyone? As Francis Schaeffer taught, “honest questions deserve honest answers,” not a rejection of the questioner’s curiosity.

An apologetic for apologetics is that we find it in the Bible itself, often mingled with preaching (see Acts 17:16–31). Peter gave us this charge: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15).

Whatever their level of formal training in the field of apologetics, pastors can benefit from studying the relevant books, both ancient and modern, that intellectually advance Christianity. Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, for instance, is a neglected masterpiece that repays careful study. Pastors will deepen their own spirituality by growing in their understanding of Christian truth, how it can lose credibility, and how it can be defended.

Considering the many demands on pastors, no one should require they become apologetic wizards. But given the need, the words of apologist G. K. Chesterton apply: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” Feeding the starving with something less than gourmet cuisine is no crime.

Many in our congregations are praying, “Lord, I do believe, but help my unbelief.” Apologetics helps answer that prayer. Great doubts, honestly encountered and mastered, can lead to even greater faith. I know a woman who had been grieving over a miscarriage, whose doubts about God’s goodness were assuaged through learning basic theology and apologetics. “Now that I understand who God really is,” she said, “I can trust him.”

At the same time, the preaching of apologetics will challenge unbelievers with arguments and evidence. Imagine the surprise of the unbeliever who stumbles into a church on Easter to hear a compelling defense of the resurrection of Jesus as an objective fact of history. Instead of hearing only “He is risen!” he hears, “This is why you should believe he is risen!”

Arguments alone seldom win a soul to Christ, and God’s thoughts transcend ours (Isa. 55:8–10). Nevertheless, God also says, “Come, let us reason together” (Isa. 1:18). Let us honor the God of truth by supplying the pulpits of the land with a faith reasonably proclaimed.

Douglas Groothuis is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of Revealing the New Age Jesus (InterVarsity, 1990).

Speaking Out does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.