Page 5080 – Christianity Today (2024)

A woman claiming to be a disenchanted Mormon missionary has conned scores of churches across the country out of thousands of dollars’ worth of cash, food, housing, medical care, and travel.

Bobbie Dintino, who allegedly has used as many as 40 aliases, has been identified with incidents at churches in more than a dozen states, including Pennsylvania, Florida, Indiana, Utah, Washington, and Alaska. She was confronted last March in Sacramento, California, by leaders of the Capital Christian Center and Dick Baer, founder and director of Ex-Mormons and Christian Alliance.

Baer had been contacted by Dintino several months earlier and began to trace her activities. According to Baer, the 28-year-old woman usually tells church leaders that she is ready to renounce her Mormon beliefs and wants to learn more about Christianity. She says her family has disowned her and thrown her out, leaving her destitute. Mormon officials are chasing her to “silence her,” she says, so she asks that her name and story not be told to anyone. She then professes a conversion to Christianity and is baptized.

In most of the cases Baer has researched, Dintino did not ask directly for money, but often received hundreds of dollars in aid from sympathetic Christians, he said. When confronted in Sacramento, she left behind belongings that included eight Bibles from various churches.

In addition to calling on Assemblies of God, Southern Baptist, Evangelical Free, Four-Square, and Calvary Chapel churches, Dintino has reversed her story to con Mormon churches as well.

Dintino was convicted in March 1987 of theft by deception by officials in Cedar City, Utah. According to county attorney Scott Burns, she was baptized into at least 50 Mormon churches before her arrest.

Several churches have confronted Dintino during the past two years. Local authorities have been reluctant to pursue prosecution of Dintino because of the relatively small amounts of money involved in each scam. She was last identified in Birmingham, Alabama, where she told a Christian group she was a former Jehovah’s Witness.

The massive number of dissidents being allowed to leave the Soviet Union has caused scrambling among American government officials and relief agencies to establish new immigration and refugee policies. Likewise, the unexpectedly high number of Soviet evangelicals among the émigrés is presenting a host of new challenges for the American church.

Richard Schifter, assistant secretary of state for human rights, projects that as many as 54,000 Jews and 10,000 Pentecostals will be among those receiving exit visas from the Soviets this year. The number of Soviet Jews leaving the USSR began climbing late last year and appears headed toward exceeding all previous records.

Evangelicals Leaving

The number of émigrés who are evangelicals, particularly Pentecostals, took many by surprise because between 1960 and 1987, fewer than 150 Christians were permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In the first four months of this year alone, nearly 3,000 have left.

“Ironically, the increased numbers of Christian émigrés has raised [several] issues for Western Christians that are very pressing,” said Kent Hill, executive director of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD).

A major issue has been securing refugee status from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for the Christian émigrés. Refugee status is granted to persons who have a “well-founded fear of persecution.” Initially, 169 Christians in refugee-processing centers in Rome were denied refugee status, although the INS overturned 145 of those denials after intervention by American evangelicals led by World Relief. At press time, an additional 11 reconsiderations were pending.

“The INS didn’t know who these people were,” said Serge Duss, coordinator of World Relief’s Soviet Refugee Program. “They didn’t give the Christians a chance to express their personal histories of persecution.” He added that many of the Christians carried from the Soviet Union a fear of talking to government officials, while others did not want to indulge in the “sin of pride” by discussing their trials.

Officials of World Relief and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) have conducted a flurry of meetings with representatives of Congress, the INS, and the Justice Department in order to educate them about the persecution Soviet Christians have suffered. Testifying before Congress, NAE president John White asserted, “Our brothers and sisters in the faith … have endured generations of harsh persecution because of their religious beliefs.”

At the advice of the evangelicals, the Justice Department invited Soviet Christian expert Michael Rowe of Keston College in England to Rome to brief INS and embassy workers on the Pentecostals and other Soviet evangelicals. Duss said the situation has much improved since then, although he had just received an unconfirmed report that four Estonian Methodist charismatic families had been denied refugee status. The Jewish community reports a continued 28 percent refugee status rejection rate for Soviet Jews.

Too Many Refugees?

In an attempt to address the problem, Rep. Bruce Morrison (D-Conn.) has introduced legislation that would grant “presumptive refugee status” to all Soviet émigrés who can prove they are members of the Jewish or evangelical Christian communities.

However, the flood of Soviet émigrés poses a larger problem for the U.S., which only allows a set number of refugees to enter each year. At an emergency consultation last month, Congress and the Bush administration agreed to raise the quota from 90,000 to 114,000 for this fiscal year, but many say even that will not be high enough. Also, budget constraints have made it difficult to secure government funds for the processing, care and maintenance, and resettlement costs for refugees making their way from Moscow, through Vienna and Rome, to America.

Many religious groups have assumed a large part of that financial responsibility. The Jewish community, for example, is currently paying $150,000 daily to feed and house Soviet Jews awaiting processing in Europe, and that amount is growing, according to Michael Schneider, executive vice-president of the Joint-Jewish Distribution Committee.

Christian groups have also been involved in these efforts, although Hill said they “have not had the kind of well-organized and well-funded émigré support mechanisms that our Jewish friends have maintained.” World Relief, with the cooperation of several other Christian groups, has taken the lead in resettlement of Christian refugees once they reach the U.S.

“The churches, particularly the Pentecostal churches across the country, have been enthusiastic and very supportive about offering sponsorship to Soviet Christians,” Duss said, although he added that World Relief still lacks the funds to place personnel in Vienna to aid with refugee processing.

NAE executive director Billy Melvin said that at this point he believes the evangelical community “is prepared” to handle large numbers of Soviet émigrés, although “how that will play out in the future is anybody’s guess.” Nonetheless, he is optimistic. “This is something that most of us never dreamed we would see in our lifetime.”

By Kim A. Lawton.

That the 2.9 million-member Presbyterian Church (USA) (PCUSA) is losing members (40,000 last year) has been well documented. Why it is happening is a topic of debate within the PCUSA.

Some emphasize demographic factors, noting, for example, that death occurs oftener among Presbyterians than birth. Others note critically that Presbyterians have historically isolated themselves from the working class and that, as a result, people moving up the social ladder no longer turn instinctively to Presbyterianism.

But Presbyterians within the denomination’s renewal movement maintain that the problem has less to do with too few being born than with too few being born again. The premise of the renewal movement is that the denomination, in its positions and programs, has emphasized politics and social action while the work of establishing and developing personal relationships with Jesus Christ has suffered.

It was with these concerns that nearly 1,000 renewal-minded Presbyterians met April 20–22 in St. Louis. One major purpose of the meeting was to launch the organization Presbyterians for Renewal (PFR).

More Than A Merger

In part, PFR represents a merger of two pre-existent renewal organizations, Presbyterians for Biblical Concerns (PBC) and Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians (CFP). PBC has its roots in the denomination’s northern stream; CFP emerged within the southern stream. North and South merged in 1983 to form the PCUSA.

However, PFR’s newly elected president, J. Murray Marshall, said the group will appeal to a far broader base than that represented by PBC and CFP. Marshall, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Seattle, noted that half of PFR’s 60 board members had no association with either of the pre-existing groups.

According to renewal leaders, a high percentage of those who leave the PCUSA do not affiliate with another denomination, but leave the Christian church altogether. At the St. Louis conference, Kenneth Hall said he has tried in his one-year term as moderator of the PCUSA General Assembly to address this “hemorrhaging out the back door.”

The problem, Hall said, is that the church is “not confronting people with the claims of Jesus Christ when they join.” He added, “We feel if we get too theological, people will get turned off. But if we don’t get theological, they will never get turned on.”

Denominational Loyalists?

In his address at the conference, Stated Clerk James Andrews, the church’s highest elected officer, warned that in the past the formation of organizations like PFR has, without exception, resulted in schism. “You’re one of the great hopes of the church,” said Andrews. “But may God constantly remind you that you’re potentially one of the great dangers.”

As of now, PFR’s leaders, as well as its statement of purpose, testify to a solid commitment to remain in the denomination.

Perhaps the new organization’s biggest challenge will be to deal with the question of whether and to what extent it should take clear stands on specific issues. A statement produced by 73 renewal leaders who met last year in Dallas specifically repudiated hom*osexuality. In contrast, the statement “A Covenant of Renewal,” signed by most of those who gathered in St. Louis, does not directly address any specific issue.

Paul Watermulder, who chaired the steering committee for the St. Louis conference, said PFR has “refused to become linked to individual causes” such as abortion, South Africa, and hom*osexual ordination. “Our cause,” he said, “is the cause of Christ, of bringing people into a relationship with him.”

Clayton Bell, a long-time leader in Presbyterian renewal circles, said this does not mean PFR will not take stands “somewhere down the line on particular issues.” Bell, senior pastor at Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, said there are some issues on which virtually all evangelicals are united.

Generally, however, renewal leaders agree the primary purpose of the organization is not to lobby on issues, but to work for spiritual renewal. They acknowledge there are some within the movement who may be uncomfortable with this stance, particularly when it comes to abortion.

Board member John Huffman, pastor of Saint Andrews Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, stressed the importance of acting responsibly if the organization does address specific issues. Referring to the issue of hom*osexuality, for example, he cautioned against “dehumanizing and antibiblical” attitudes.

Huffman added that, despite conservatives’ general dissatisfaction in recent decades with the direction of the PCUSA, denominational leadership on some issues has removed evangelicals’ “blinders.” Said Huffman, “I believe we have been renewed in some ways by the very movement we [are trying] to renew.”

By Randy Frame, in St. Louis.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY/June 16, 1989

Nearly nonstop shelling threatens to destroy Beirut, and along with it, a small group of courageous believers.

Beirut, once a jewel city on the Mediterranean and an open doorway for Christianity in the Middle East, has become today a synonym for chaos. During the past three months, the heaviest fighting in the 14-year war between Christian and Muslim armies has reduced life there to mere survival. Families huddle in basem*nts and shelters for days at a time, venturing out during brief lulls in the shelling to try to find food, water, and fuel, only to be driven back underground by the next inevitable but unannounced barrage.

Since this latest round of fighting began March 8, nearly 300 have been killed, and more than 1,000 have been wounded; the figures increase every day. As many as 100,000 Lebanese Christians (a term that describes about 40 percent of Lebanon’s population and includes Maronite Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestant believers) have fled the country, despite the fact that in recent months escape has been difficult and dangerous. Muslim shelling has closed the airport and the seaport of Junieh, isolating the Christian enclave of East Beirut from the rest of the world.

The evangelical church in Lebanon, which makes up about 1.5 percent of the Christian community, has suffered with its country. Church buildings have been hit by rockets and artillery fire; schools and ministry offices have been evacuated and closed; believers and their relatives have been killed and injured in the indiscriminate shelling.

Last April, the Karantina Alliance Church in East Beirut, the largest evangelical congregation in the country, was struck by two rockets, damaging the church library and roof and blowing out all of its windows. The building was empty at the time. The Beirut Baptist School and Mouseitbeh Church in predominantly Muslim West Beirut were also damaged when artillery shells landed in their compound. It was the fifth or sixth time the school has been damaged in its 30 years of operation, said Jim Ragland, a Southern Baptist missionary who now lives in Cyprus. The school, closed since mid-March due to the fighting, had enrolled 988 students at the start of the year.

Though the homes and businesses of many believers have been damaged, their lives have often been miraculously spared, according to reports coming out of Lebanon through Cyprus. Still, the deadly rain of ammunition has touched church members and their relatives throughout the city. One couple from Boucherieh Baptist Church were hurt and their home destroyed during a night of sporadic shelling. Edgar Broumna sustained critical injuries when an incendiary bomb exploded in his house. His wife, Ursula, a World Vision Lebanon staff member, was also injured in the blast.

Relief Lines Cut

Bombardment of the port city has made delivery of relief supplies virtually impossible. Even assessing needs has been difficult, according to reports from World Vision International. Water, milk, food, bedding, medical supplies, even candles for lighting the bomb shelters that are now home to thousands of Beirut’s residents—all have been assembled by cooperative relief efforts, but only a few small boatloads have made it to Lebanon.

Yet with every day of fighting, the need for aid has increased. Commerce is at a standstill; workers have been without jobs—and pay—for weeks. And according to Sami Dagher, pastor of Karantina Alliance Church in East Beirut, believers especially have suffered. “They don’t steal or bribe to get what they need,” he explained.

Some relief funds have found their way into Lebanon. According to Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan’s Purse, his organization has been able to transfer money to Lebanese banks, which have been open for a few hours at a time. Inflation and scarcity have rendered local currency almost worthless, but U.S. dollars, directed to and distributed by churches such as Dagher’s, can buy necessities.

A Growing Church

In spite of the war-zone hardships that surround it, the church in Beirut has not only survived, it has grown. Congregations have continued to meet on Sunday mornings whenever possible. Attendance at the Karantina Church, for example, has run at about 400, despite the emigration of many of its baptized members. Only during the heaviest fighting of the past three months has attendance dropped to about 125.

Total attendance in the 12 Lebanese Baptist Churches (8 of which are in Beirut) has also risen, to about 800, despite emigration. A recent series of revival meetings at the Church of God, pastored by Fuad Melki, included the baptism of 60 new members.

Church basem*nts have been converted to bomb shelters where scores of people seek refuge during the hours of shelling. These “foxholes” have proved a fertile mission field. Adel Masri, pastor of the First Church of God in Beirut, has presented the gospel to as many as 100 people at a time in his church basem*nt, he reported.

Indeed, the years of war have created a hunger for hope in the people of Lebanon, and many—Muslim and Christian alike—are looking to evangelical churches for it.

“If you attend a worship service at our church, you would not really believe this is a place where a war is going on,” Dagher said. “People are so happy in worshiping the Lord.

“We have learned to live day by day,” he continued. “Believers in Lebanon act and live as strangers in this world. We know that at any minute, we could be called home. Material things don’t mean much. Every time I leave my home, I don’t know if it will be there when I get back, or if I will come back.”

Dateline: Lebanon

April 1975: Civil war between Lebanon’s Muslim and Christian factions breaks out. Beirut is divided by the so-called Green Line into Christian East and Muslim West sectors. More than 60,000 people, mostly civilians, are killed in the first year of fighting.

Autumn 1976: Syrian troops, at the request of Christian forces, enter Lebanon. By autumn 1978, the Syrians have turned against them and are bombarding East Beirut.

June 1982: Israeli soldiers invade Lebanon to drive out Palestine Liberation Organization forces.

September 1982: Lebanese Christian militiamen kill hundreds in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in southern Beirut. A multinational peace-keeping force of American, French, and Italian troops arrives soon after.

October 1983: Two hundred forty-one U.S. Marines and 58 French troops are killed in two bomb attacks. Four months later, the peace-keeping forces leave. Militia control the streets; Westerners are targets for kidnaping.

February 1987: All U.S. citizens, including missionaries, are ordered out of Lebanon by the U.S. government.

September 1988: A divided Lebanese Parliament fails to name a new president. Outgoing leader Amin Gemeyal names Gen. Michel Aoun, commander of the mainly Christian Lebanese Army, to head the government.

March 1989: Aoun vows to drive Syria out of the country, setting off the current round of heavy shelling.

Forgotten Believers

Somehow, the Lebanese have survived one tragic turn of events after another in their tangled recent history. But many observers fear the latest round of savage shelling may have pushed the country to its breaking point. A brief cease-fire in early May provided little more than a chance for Beirut’s residents to stockpile whatever supplies they could, or to leave. Militant positions on both sides raise fears of a blood-bathed fall of East Beirut.

“People are suffering terribly, not only from the actual wounds of the war, but from the psychological damage, and discouragement, and despair of the situation right now,” said Leonard Rodgers, president of Venture Middle East, who has been in the Middle East since 1963. He worries not only about the population in general, but about believers as well, and asks for prayer on their behalf. “Christians have a very strong feeling of being abandoned.”

Dagher, who has watched his homeland disintegrate around him, shares Rodgers’s concern. “I am afraid for my country now more than ever,” he said. “Not as much because of the fighting, but because of the silence of the world.

“The pastor of another evangelical church [in Beirut] said to me the other day, ‘I wonder if the churches of the West still believe that we are members of one body, and that if one member is being hurt, the whole body suffers?’” Dagher said.

With no solution in sight, observers like Rodgers find it hard to be optimistic about the future of the country and its people. “Lebanon is an ancient culture that has survived wars since Nebuchadnezzar,” Rodgers said. “I think Lebanon will survive. The question is whether the church and the Christian population will survive.”

By Ken Sidey

Concern for the Hostages Rises

As the situation continues to deteriorate in Lebanon, the fate of the foreign hostages being held there is a rising concern. At press time, nine Americans were being held hostage, including American University professor Thomas Sutherland who this month marked his fourth year in captivity. Journalist Terry Anderson, the longest-held American, was kidnaped four years ago last March.

“Now with this terrible war going on, it’s probably one of the most dangerous times the hostages have faced,” said Lela Gilbert, prayer coordinator for Friends in the West, a Christian human-rights group. Since July 1986, the Seattle-based organization has been conducting an international prayer campaign on behalf of the hostages and their families (CT, Sept. 18, 1987, pp. 34–36).

Gilbert said her organization is concerned about a lack of public momentum behind the hostages. “Much of the interest was lost during the Irangate controversy,” she said. “People didn’t know how to support these men without taking a political position, and I think the fire went out.”

But Gilbert said a renewed prayer effort for the hostages and their families is needed now more than ever. She said some of the families have received reports of suicide attempts, psychoses, and deep bouts of frustration on the part of the hostages. Nonetheless, “We’ve said from the beginning, and we still believe, that prayer is the key to open the door for these men,” Gilbert said.

Journalist Jerry Levin, himself a former hostage in Lebanon (CT, May 16, 1986, p. 50), suggests that Christians “pray and push for peace in the Middle East and especially for nonviolent solutions to the sadly large number of difficult political problems that exist there.” Levin, who became a Christian during his captivity, said the situation is particularly crucial now because “[the hostages’] condition is always going to be made worse every time violence escalates.”

The nine American hostages are Anderson, Sutherland, Frank Herbert Reed, Joseph James Cicippio, Edward Austin Tracy, Alan Steen, Jesse Jonathan Turner, Robert Polhill, and Lt. Col. William Richard Higgins. Anglican envoy Terry Waite, a British citizen, also remains in captivity.

Christianity’S Effect

Christianity has never been tried, the cliché runs. And of course it’s true, but so is it true that Christianity has checked the movements of millions of men and women who but for the pull of dogma would know no vital brake upon their behavior. Sometimes the brake is effective, sometimes it is not. But that it should be there outweighs any concern over the excesses of Jimmy Swaggart or the ayatollah or the Mormon extremist or the Venezuelan savage—or the European relativist.

—William F. Buckley, Jr., Universal Press Syndicate (Tampa Tribune, Mar. 17, 1989)

Lost Horizon

We’ve lost sight of the fact that some things are always right and some things are always wrong. We’ve lost our reference point. We don’t have any moral philosophy to undergird our way of life in this country, and our way of life is in serious jeopardy and serious danger unless something happens. And that something must be a spiritual revival.

—Billy Graham in a speech at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s Founder’s Day (April 4, 1989)

Trivial Squabbles

Any difference [in a marriage] is relatively minor when compared to the fear that love no longer exists.

—Andrew Greeley in Sexual Intimacy: Love and Play

Just Enough Time

Do not be in too great a hurry. There is time for everything that has to be done. He who gave you your life-work has given you just enough time to do it in. The length of life’s candle is measured out according to the length of your required task. You must take necessary time for meditation, for sleep, for food, for the enjoyment of human love and friendship; and even then there will be time enough left for your necessary duties. More haste, less speed! The feverish hand often gives itself additional toil. “He that believeth shall not make haste.”

—F. B. Meyer in Our Daily Walk

Change From Within

Man is both a spiritual and an animal being. One can move a man either by influencing his animal being or by influencing his spiritual essence. In the same way one can change the time on a clock either by moving the hands or by moving the main wheel. And just as it is better to change the time by moving the inner mechanism, so it is better to move a man—whether oneself or another person—by influencing his consciousness.

—Leo Tolstoy in his essay “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?”

Above It All

Part of our boredom when we read books in which the vision of life seems paltry-minded is our sense that we are not.

—John Gardner in The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

For “Professionals” Only

[Frank] Laubauch states that he started [his] minute-to-minute practicing of God’s presence by “trying to line up my actions with the will of God about every fifteen minutes or every half hour.” Most of us would fall far short of doing so once a week. We excuse ourselves by stating we are too busy with our everyday priorities to move toward a more God-centered life. We feel this minute-by-minute approach is a discipline for full-time religious professionals in our midst, but not for us.

—Jim Smoke in Whatever Happened to Ordinary Christians?

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63, by Taylor Branch (Simon and Schuster, 1,064 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.

Martin Luther King, Jr., is remembered mainly as a political leader; his profession of preaching often seems almost incidental. But the behind-the-scenes portrait that Taylor Branch offers in Parting the Waters shows King as a preacher through and through. His life and the movement he led were grounded in the church and in Christian faith.

Also reviewed in this section:

Waking from the American Dream,by Donald W. McCullough

Faith and Reason,by Ronald H. Nash

The Warsaw Ghetto,by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski

The Road to Daybreak • Heart Speaks to Heart • In the Name of Jesus • Letters to Marc About Jesus • Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader(edited by Robert Durback), by Henri J. M. Nouwen

Branch, who is white, does a marvelous job of portraying King’s world of the black church, where preaching was a natural path of success for able black men. (Business and the professions offered far more limited possibilities in segregated society.)

Even as a student King was a sensational speaker, and despite an initial desire for a life in academia (he began work on a Ph.D. in philosophy), he landed his first pulpit at Montgomery, Alabama’s most influential black Baptist church. Dexter Baptist was determinedly respectable. The church’s middle-class members appreciated a pastor whose eloquence could mix references from Hegel and Hosea.

King might have spent his life as a symbol of black respectability. Instead, in 1955 he was, almost by accident, caught up in the Montgomery bus boycott. He was 26 years old when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white rider. Days later King was elected president of the upstart boycott movement, probably because he was new in town and had not had time to make enemies. He emerged from that first campaign as the indispensable leader of the civil rights movement. Like no one else, he could mobilize masses of frightened people to put their careers, their families, and their lives on the line for a goal that seemed utterly improbable—the end of segregation.

For most Americans, the civil rights movement was an occasional, disturbing intrusion on their TV screens. Branch tells the story as it was experienced by those involved. It is a thriller. Many were beaten, thousands were jailed, some were murdered. Homes and churches were bombed, and law enforcement officials, rather than prosecuting the terrorists, were fond of arresting the home owners and charging them with bombing themselves. In this passionate battle, King began as a strategist and inspiring speaker, but soon learned what Branch calls “the oratorical illusion,” finding “the greater witness of sacrifice than truth.” King made his biggest impact when he went to jail.

Indeed, it was his character, more than his words and strategies, that held the faction-ridden movement together. On the whole his honesty, his personal humility, and his sincerity were trusted by insiders as well as by those who merely felt his charisma. He was not hungry for power; he was financially scrupulous; and he genuinely believed and practiced loving his enemies.

It is in this context that King’s frequent extramarital affairs are particularly troubling. If King had been a man no more honest than necessary, his sexual immorality would merely demonstrate again that leaders can be hypocrites. The easy acceptance of his immorality by a circle of close friends, mostly preachers, is therefore even more disappointing. Branch says some of these “grew tired of King’s insistence that it was a sin, and of his endless cycles from hedonism to self-recrimination and back.”

King jeopardized the movement he led by his lack of self-control and left a sour, sad chapter to undercut his memory. There is no way to excuse this, however you bracket it with King’s many positive qualities; and King did not himself excuse it. Branch suggests that King’s internal battle stripped off any tendency he had for self-glorification. King was deeply aware of the power of evil, and he never suggested that it was mainly institutional nor primarily in the enemy’s camp. He knew that darkness camped in the human heart, on both sides of the battle line.

A Church Movement

The early civil rights movement was almost entirely a church movement, run by preachers. Meetings were held in churches, and they were classic worship services, with singing, prayers, inspirational preaching, and the offering. Indeed, some of King’s fiercest (and least successful) battles were to merge his campaign for civil rights with the (black) National Baptist Convention. He wanted the civil rights movement to be explicitly a church movement.

There was a difference to the civil rights meetings, of course. Preachers pleaded for people to put up their hands in commitment, and they counted the number who did, but they were pleading for volunteers to join a protest march (which usually meant arrest and imprisonment, and often physical danger) or to attempt to register to vote (which often meant the same). The focus of commitment was immediately this-worldly.

The motivation, however, was explicitly rooted in Scripture. King and others preached and acted in doggedly nonviolent biblical love for their enemies, doing so not only when the media were nearby but in closed sessions under intense pressure from violent white mobs and police officers. Glenn Smiley, a white Methodist pastor who encountered King during the bus boycott in Montgomery, remembers King’s impatience with nonviolence as a mere tactic. “Don’t bother me with tactics,” King said repeatedly. “I want to know if I can apply nonviolence to my heart.”

Years later in Birmingham, in the midst of bombings and beatings and deaths, King told the crowd that he would not allow the struggle to deteriorate into a conflict of black against white. “I’m sorry, but I will never teach any of you to hate white people.” He insisted that they pray for their enemies, and they did, meeting after meeting. Throughout his life King was plagued by doubts about his faith and doubts about himself, but he never seemed to doubt that God himself demanded justice of society and love between his people.

One could wish that Branch told us more about the Christian source from which these beliefs sprang; one is left to suspect that despite his learning (King was a genuine intellectual), King did not possess a fully worked-out theology of politics, nor perhaps had he reconciled lofty liberal theology with the fundamental pieties of black Baptist churches. King’s touchstones seem to have been his faith that God demanded love and justice; that the civil rights movement was asking for nothing more than what the American Constitution guarantees; that love was a powerful weapon for change; and that in the black church God could infuse his Spirit—through worship, music, and preaching—into black people. His theology seems to have been vague and skeptical at many points, but his practice of faith was heartfelt and urgent.

Among the most tantalizing details Branch records are the friendly contacts King had with a fellow Southern preacher who, though white, had rejected segregation—Billy Graham. King was tremendously impressed by Graham’s crusade evangelism, with its careful preparation months in advance, and he met several times with Graham and his aides to learn their techniques. King dreamed of a Graham-and-King crusade that would convert racially mixed audiences, first in the North and eventually in the South. “These dreams foundered,” Branch says, “on the question of emphasis between politics and pure religion.” The two men remained privately friendly, and Graham’s aides gave considerable practical advice to King’s organization, but their paths remained separate.

Assessing Greatness

King was a complicated man with unusual powers, and he faced a unique situation. As he himself seemed to recognize, segregation was relatively simple to correct. The civil rights movement asked for rights that, in retrospect, one can hardly believe were systematically denied to black Americans—the right to vote, for instance. King and his movement were largely successful in securing these rights. But the underlying racism, the mistrust, and the disrespect bred by humanity’s nature and nurtured by centuries of slavery and discrimination—these King knew would require a solution deeper than mere law. His unforgettable dream, proclaimed in the march on Washington, lies as far ahead as ever.

Nevertheless, if King is not exactly a model he is a reminder that Christians can change the face of society. He reminds us that great music, worship, and preaching can break outside the boundaries of the church. He reminds us that preachers need not always be marginal figures in society. He reminds us, particularly, of the courage and humility needed by those who lead us. Martin Luther King, Jr., was not a perfect man, as he himself was deeply aware. But reading this book one cannot escape the conviction that he was a great man, and that our nation would be far poorer if he had never lived and preached to us.

Waking from the American Dream, by Donald W. McCullough (InterVarsity, 210 pp.; $7.95, paper). Reviewed by James D. Berkley, senior associate editor, LEADERSHIP JOURNAL.

Prophetically comforting. The phrase may sound like an oxymoron, but it begins to describe this first book by Donald McCullough, pastor of Solana Beach (Calif.) Presbyterian Church.

Disappointment—it’s everywhere, tinting blue the lives of the upper caste, the miscast, and the outcast, Christian and secularist. “We live in a culture that tells us our dreams can be realized with enough hard work and positive thinking,” McCullough writes. “But at one time or another, in one way or another, we wake up to reality. We learn, often with great pain, that we can’t always have what we desperately want.” That’s the bad news. We live in a can-do culture gone sour.

But what is McCullough’s answer? Don’t look for froth or champagne bubbles. “Not every dream comes true,” he informs us. “Eventually the most positive thinker wakes up to this fact.… Spiritual maturity requires that we learn to drink from a half-empty cup.”

McCullough offers a theology for the rough road, not the primrose path. He issues a call to “faithful suffering.” As he outlines what this means, he also debunks the other theologies offering to fill our half-empty cup. Only one thing can fill us: “Because God is so much more than we want in a God, he’s just what we need.… God is big enough to move us off center, big enough to save us from ourselves, big enough to fill the vacuum in our hearts.”

These chapters surround the unfulfilled with, first, good reason to live even with the prospect of the half-empty cup, and, finally, with the promise of a cup overflowing. As McCullough writes: “The experience of unfulfilled longing speaks to us, if we let it, of an ultimate fulfillment, of something beyond the seemingly endless cycle of temporary relief and disappointment.” But McCullough doesn’t take us out of this world. With steady hand he points us back to this world—for now.

“Being worldly for Christ’s sake does not mean losing sight of heaven,” he tells us. “We must affirm life but not cling to it.… This provides the freedom necessary to serve this world with joy.” We are to be gritty and realistic, because realism includes God.

In this book, McCullough prophetically and firmly has placed his finger on the pressure points of contemporary pain. But at the same time, he carries in his bag the balms that ease contemporary aches, even the deep ones that cleave a heart. And that’s the comfort.

If this book were not so fresh and compelling, it might be overwritten. But it’s not. Instead, it is highly quotable (preachers, take heed), deeply satisfying, and exceptionally givable. For a universal malaise, McCullough has supplied a comprehensive treatment.

A Reasonable Faith

Faith and Reason: Searching for a Rational Faith, by Ronald H. Nash (Zondervan, 295 pp.; $17.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Gary R. Habermas, chairman, Department of Philosophy and Apologetics, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virginia.

In at least one sense, this volume has been long awaited. Some apologists have questioned why very few books on Christian evidences have been written from a presuppositional perspective (the idea that our foundational assumptions shape how we interpret reality). Here Ronald Nash, a prominent evangelical philosopher, sets out to help remedy this lack of emphasis.

Faith and Reason is divided into six parts: world views, the rationality of religious belief, God’s existence, evil and miracles, and a conclusion. The 20 chapters include some distinctive discussions of important issues that have taken on new significance in light of recent dialogue. Subjects such as testing and choosing a world view, the problem of gratuitous evil (suffering that appears to serve no purpose whatsoever), and contemporary objections to miracles are treated in a scholarly manner.

Nash explains that he had two types of readers in view: college or seminary students and the general reader who is interested in these issues. This volume would make a good text for courses in apologetics (or philosophy of religion). It is up to date on recent developments in philosophical theology, such as the work of Reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga and the current discussions concerning foundationalism. Additionally, the positions of critics are carefully set forth, often in their own words. Further, Nash frequently explains alternative positions that apparently differ from his own in an effort to show that there is room for a variety of perspectives within Christian theism.

Still another helpful feature is the level of conversation, which was purposely simplified and kept at an introductory level. And finally, discussion questions at the end of each chapter further serve to make this a valuable teaching tool.

Ronald Nash has been one of the most prolific writers among recent evangelical philosophers. This is another of his fine volumes that exhibits the philosophical sophistication his readers have come to expect. Such a work is a very welcome addition to the field of Christian evidences.

Bright Stars, Dark Skies

The Warsaw Ghetto: A Christian’s Testimony, by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski (Beacon Press, 117 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Guy M. Condon, executive director of Americans United for Life.

In The Warsaw Ghetto, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski’s personal observations and reports from resistance leaders unfold a stirring chronicle of twentieth-century hell and sainthood. Images of life within the Nazi-created ghetto, deportation to Auschwitz, desperate attempts to resist, and efforts to aid the Jews will revisit the reader long after finishing this brief work.

Two years before Bartoszewski helped found the Council for Aid to Jews in 1942, he was sent for a year to Auschwitz as a 19-year-old political prisoner. There he developed an unquenchable conviction to help “victims of Nazi terror.” The fact that Bartoszewski himself played a major role in the events he is describing gives his work an engaging presence, making up for difficult syntax caused by the translation from German.

By 1941 the Nazis had forced the Jews, who then constituted a quarter of Warsaw’s population, into the ghetto district. The population density of the 500,000 ghetto inhabitants was then 16 times more than that of the rest of the city. The overcrowding was only overcome through sickness, starvation, and “resettlement.” Despite resistance, the Nazis completed their purge of the ghetto population within five months of an initial uprising in 1943.

Amidst the horror, Bartoszewski offers visions of sainthood embodied in those who aided Jews and served in the face of unimaginable risk. “Selling or giving food to a Jew—even giving a glass of water to someone dying of thirst—was” punishable by death. One source “witnessed the extermination of a family of eight by the Nazis because a single Jewish child had been hidden in their house.” Not surprisingly, only a few of the rescuers lived to see the end of the war.

As many as 10,000 Jews lived illegally outside the ghetto. They depended on the Council for Aid to Jews for falsified birth certificates, certificates of baptism issued in Aryan names, forged work permits, identification papers, food, shelter, and financial support. Also important was exposing the dire circ*mstances of the Jews to the outside world, although pleas for help were too often met with “unsurpassable indifference.”

In the epilogue, Bartoszewski poses the questions “How could it happen, and what does it mean both for humanity and for the individual?” The Catholic author grapples with the paradox that “the attempt to annihilate the people of Abraham and Isaac was mainly the doing of Christians.”

Through the words of Polish writer Maria Kann, Bartoszewski explains the formation of the sin in specific terms. “The idea that there are different kinds of people takes seed in the minds of children. ‘Master,’ ‘servants,’ and finally ‘dogs’ that you can kill without punishment. This is the horrendous legacy left by the bloodthirsty Führer.” The guilt, according to Bartoszewski, also embraced “everyone who committed the sin of inaction: of indifference, small-mindedness, and cowardice.”

At the height of the civil rights battle, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “It’s only when it’s dark enough that you can see the stars shine.” For Bartoszewski, these manifestations of evil provide a setting for the transcending meaning of the Holocaust reflected in those who did something to save the Jews. The author recalls that God said he would spare Sodom for the sake of ten righteous people. The rescuers, of course, are the stars, the righteous few invoking God’s promise to save the rest, “assuring us that the world after Auschwitz will not be completely without hope.”

Five new books by Henri Nouwen are reviewed by Arthur Boers, pastor of Windsor Mennonite Fellowship, Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Over the years, Henri J. M. Nouwen has authored more than 20 books on spirituality and ministry. Always inspirational, he stirs in his readers a deep desire to pray and to give more time listening to God.

Nouwen, a Dutch diocesan priest, has spent most of the last two decades in North America, teaching in such prestigious institutions as Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. Yet he sensed that God wanted him elsewhere. “I felt I needed something else because my spiritual life was not deep. I knew that I wasn’t rooted deeply enough in Christ.”

Nouwen’s pilgrimage brought him to L’Arche, an international network of communities for the mentally handicapped. He spent his first year at the L’Arche in Trosly, France, but has spent the last two-and-a-half years at the one in Richmond Hills, Ontario, Canada. A humane alternative to the more typical institutions, L’Arche does not have goals of “normalization,” but is a home where the mentally handicapped and their assistants reside together as God’s children trying to live by the gospel. Life for the assistants includes basic care of cooking, cleaning, encouraging, and prayer. Although a priest for three decades, Nouwen says that joining L’Arche “was the first time in my whole to anything. The rest I had done. I’d life that I felt that God was calling me made a lot of initiatives.”

Although the intensity of caring for such needy persons might not seem to lend itself to writing, Nouwen has been prolific: five new books came out between fall 1988 and spring 1989.

Downwardly Mobile

The Road to Daybreak (Doubleday, 228 pp.; $15.95, hardcover) is the journal of his first year in L’Arche. This pivotal book introduces us to this unique community, which is at the heart of all his new books. During the year Road was written, Nouwen discerned God’s call to a downwardly mobile life, away from the status and prestige of teaching “the best and the brightest,” to serving among neglected and often despised mentally handicapped persons. L’Arche drew him from the life of academia where he felt barren and burnt out into a life of service where he felt God’s renewing hand.

The journal reveals Nouwen’s deeply intimate relationship with God. It is like reading love letters: “Jesus came to open my ears to another voice that says, ‘I am your God, I have molded you with my own hands, and I love what I have made. I love you with a love that has no limits.… Do not run away from me. Come back to me—not once, not twice, but always again.’”

Nouwen’s shared pilgrimage encourages us to be spiritually deepened, too. (In that vein, Heart Speaks to Heart [Ave Maria Press, 62 pp.; $5.95, paper] is a little book of meditations written while he was recovering from physical and emotional exhaustion.) His heartfelt prayers are moving, edifying, and nourishing. The Road to Daybreak is one of his best books in years, leaving the reader inspired by insights that will enrich one’s life and faith.

The Irrelevant Leader

Being in community with the mentally handicapped has profoundly affected Nouwen’s view of ministry. His new thinking on the nature of Christian leadership is given expression in In the Name of Jesus (Crossroad, 81 pp.; $10.95, hardcover).

Nouwen came to L’Arche famous and successful, but that meant little to his new work there. Likewise, “the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God’s love. The great message that we have to carry … is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God created and redeemed us in love and has chosen to proclaim that love as the true source of all human life.”

The Christian leader should be wary of fascination with effectiveness and relevance. “Too often I looked at being relevant, popular and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations.”

To those preoccupied with important social problems, he counsels: “Dealing with burning issues without being rooted in a deep personal relationship with God easily leads to divisiveness because before we know it, our sense of self is caught up in our opinion about a given subject.” In the Name of Jesus draws provocative and stimulating conclusions about the meaning and significance of Christian ministry.

Combating The Secular

Living a life of faith in a secular society has been the challenge of all modern Christians. Letters to Marc About Jesus (Harper & Row, 85 pp.; $12.95, hardcover) is a simple and telling answer to secularism. These letters to a teenage nephew in the Netherlands are not the severe criticisms of a “Dutch uncle,” however. Rather, they are a gentle, persuasive, and evangelistic appeal to one raised in secular culture.

Nouwen explains the gospel, trying to awaken love for Jesus. Some suggestions (for example, read your Bible) are basic. In addition, he brings the fruits of his lifelong walk with God. His plea will speak deeply to anyone at whatever stage of faith: “When you admit Jesus to your heart nothing is predictable, but everything becomes possible. I pray that you will venture on a life with Jesus. He asks everything of you, but gives you more in return.”

Nouwen’s greatest contribution in this secularist age is his eloquent celebration of God’s presence. Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader (Bantam, 198 pp.; $14.95, hardcover) is a welcome contribution to that end. Robert Durback, the editor, writes that “Nouwen’s gift is to hold up what is ordinary, even broken, despised, and discarded in our lives and … reveal it as something precious and full of promise.” Besides excerpts from Nouwen’s many writings, both published and unpublished, other bonuses include Nouwen’s biography and an essay surveying his books.

By growing aware of God’s loving presence in our lives, we can minister to others. In this way we overcome fatalism, despair, resignation, and stoicism. Henri Nouwen’s new books are an intimate, heartening, and prayerful resource in that very process.

ROBERT BROW¹Robert Brow is the rector of Saint James Anglican Church on the campus of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and contributed “The Origins of Religion” to Eerdman’s Handbook to The World’s Religions (Lion/Eerdmans).

Late last year, the Roman Catholic Church silenced the controversial Dominican priest Matthew Fox. His “creation-centered,” New Age-flavored, feminist spirituality was labeled “dangerous and deviant” by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Fox was told to cease teaching, preaching, and lecturing for a year. He agreed only to a six-month sabbatical.

More than anything Fox could have done on his own, however, the silencing brought his teachings out of obscurity and set Christians to wondering about what to make of his hybrid of Christian mysticism and modern consciousness. And Fox did not hesitate to take advantage of the limelight before the silencing went into effect. He created a stir by paying for a full-page advertisem*nt in the New York Times, with copies sent to national news media. In it Fox accuses the Vatican of being deaf, unable to understand, and given to institutional violence. He claims that his brand of mystical spirituality is the answer to the world’s cry for justice and liberation. He accepts the honor of being silenced in the company of Fr. Leonardo Boff of Brazil, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, and Catholic scholars Charles Curran and Hans Küng. And Fox classifies himself with those who were silenced in the past—such as Galileo, Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross. He concludes the advertisem*nt with a call for those involved in what he calls Creation Spirituality to keep speaking out until the awaited renaissance occurs.

What are Christians to make of Creation Spirituality’s esoteric excursions into ethics, theology, and mysticism? Anyone claiming, as Fox does, to be the embattled guardian of a joyful, egalitarian, and ecologically sensitive version of Christianity cannot fail to capture the fascination of a society that still hungers for religious experience. His talk of “deep interaction among all religions of the planet,” reverence for “Mother Earth,” and Jungian psychodynamics will win him points among seekers of modern enlightenment. The self-styled prophet claims to have recovered aspects of spirituality that have been long suppressed or overlooked.

Much of what Fox advocates, however—both beliefs and practices—should give Christians pause. Evangelical eyebrows rightfully rise at Fox’s ideas about same-and opposite-sex love-making, phallus worship, sweat lodges, powwow dances, and pipe ceremonies. But these are only skin-deep marks of the animal he is describing. As we scrutinize—and criticize—Creation Spirituality, we must do more than fasten on details. We need to look deeply, to where even more problems lie.

Paths To A “Renaissance”

For all of Fox’s interest in contemporary issues, he traces the early roots of Creation Spirituality to medieval mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). His favorite is Meister Eckhart (1260–1327), to whom he devoted his Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spirituality in New Translation (1980). He also claims that his Creation Spirituality draws inspiration from a wide array of biblical characters, church fathers, and contemporary thinkers such as the late scientist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

The acknowledged guru of Creation Spirituality in its modern form, however, is certainly Fox himself. His ideas began to be expressed in racy best-selling books with quirky titles: On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear (1972), Wheel We, Wee All the Way Home (1981), and Original Blessing (1983).

The silencing by Cardinal Ratzinger will certainly promote the sale of Fox’s latest book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (1988). The publisher is Harper & Row, which moves Fox decisively out of the quirky writing field.

Fox outlines his Creation Spirituality by describing four ways, or paths, of renewal. The first path, Delight, is also called the via positiva, a joyful attitude of respect for Mother Earth evidenced by eating and drinking, dancing and singing, and affirming the body with its senses—including the erotic and playful. In the second path, Darkness, or the via negativa, Creation Spirituality makes room for our sense of the world’s mystery and darkness, symbolized, for example, in native American moon rituals. It includes the Quaker stress on silence as opposed to busy activism. Most of all, says Fox, this path resonates with the “cosmic suffering” of Christ, the lamentations of Jeremiah, and the sad chanting typical of black churches in their oppression. Birthing, the third way, is the right-brain freedom of artists to generate new images and language, explaining, perhaps, why Fox’s Oakland-based Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality makes so much of “playshops,” where seekers realize their creative and mystical potential through dance, artwork, and storytelling. The final way, Compassion, includes concern for Mother Earth, justice, and peacemaking. Fox develops this in another book, A Spirituality Named Compassion, and the Healing of the Global Village, Humpty Dumpty, and Us (1979).

At first sight, these four ways of renewal may seem innocuous, even suggestive of helpful directions. And all four emphases can be found in some form in the Old Testament, in Paul, and even in the Gospels, as Fox documents. Why then should we look before leaping on the guru’s bandwagon?

A Massive Shift

Fox, as he will readily admit, is recommending nothing less than a transformation of the way we think about faith. He advocates what some have called a “paradigm shift,” a revolution in thinking such as took place when Newtonian physics gave way to Einsteinian relativity. Creation Spirituality is portrayed as the vanguard of a new manifestation of the kingdom of God in our midst, a second coming of the “Cosmic Christ.”

At the heart of any discussion of Creation Spirituality, therefore, are two very different ways of picturing the world and our place in it: theism and monism. Simply put, theism argues for a Creator who is distinguishable and apart from creation. Fox, in contrast, seems to be advocating monism, which is the belief that only one unified reality, only one eternal principle, exists in the universe. Monism therefore denies a Creator above and separate from his creation. Hindu thinkers also call this nondualism, meaning that there is no duality or difference between the human and the divine. To be precise, Fox is teaching a form of monism that is already 3,000 years old in India.

Over the generations, Hindu philosophers have divided monism into four species, an examination of which helps us assess Creation Spirituality. Since Fox denies that he is a theist, we must ask which of these four forms of monism is his adopted paradigm.

The first of the four, pantheism, claims that all that is, is God. Rocks are God, animals are God, you and I are God. On that view, God is indistinguishable from our world, and nothing can be called evil. That obviously makes any kind of ethical standards impossible. Whatever affinities Creation Spirituality seems to have for pantheism, Fox claims that his world view is panentheistic, which asserts “all things in God and God in all things.” So while Fox claims that his mysticism is “not theistic, which envisions deity ‘out there’ or even ‘in here’ in a dualistic manner that separates creation from divinity” (The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, p. 57), Fox is clearly committed to some things being right and others being wrong. This requires him to reject strict pantheism.

Fox is muddier when it comes to modified pantheism, the second form of monism. This view pictures God as the principle or life force that energizes our world. By observing what is creative and life enhancing, this view suggests, it is possible to distinguish good behavior from destructive. While this fits Fox’s concern to stop us from ravaging Mother Earth, the problem with a principle or life force is that it can never have a personal dimension. Although creation mysticism can be a merely impersonal vibrating in tune with the life force, Fox seems to be feeling for something that he wants to name in a personal way. He is keen to recommend gratitude and thanksgiving. How can one say thank you to an impersonal force such as gravity or energy?

A third possibility is absolute monism, which does more than argue that God is the absolute, ultimate reality of our world. Our problem, this line of thinking also argues, is that we live in a dream world of our own making. All we think and experience is maya (illusion). The absolute is totally impersonal since it is the opposite of any sense of personal distinction. In Hinduism, the discipline of yoga was originally designed to prepare a person for deep meditation, and the end product was an experience of this absolute when all the things of this world lost their hold. Salvation lies in loosing oneself from the chains of personality and merging with the absolute, like a drop of water in an ocean. Fox is evidently not an absolute monist. People having fun together is too important to him.

Modified monism is the fourth kind of monism, and it appears to be the basic paradigm that Fox has espoused. This world view understands God as the soul of the world. God is part of our world but also relates to the world, much as we feel our own personality is in some sense distinguishable from our body. The organs of the body may feel with and react to what the person experiences, but there is hardly a personal dialogue. It is a far cry from the Christian view of a Father who wants and allows a relationship with his children.

Our discussion of the varieties of monism is not just a matter of words or philosophical categories, as I discovered battling Hindu monism for 11 years as a missionary in India. I studied Hindu philosophy and discussed it with holy men by the sacred river Ganges. For eight years I taught in Hindi at the Allahabad Bible Seminary, contrasting the Bible’s Christian theism with the Bhagavad Gita and the worship of Krishna and Shiva. I spent three years establishing evangelical student groups across North India, traveling for days in crowded third-class compartments, participating in heated discussions all the way, often staying overnight in university hostels. So the scent of the monistic animal is still in my nostrils.

I find many of the same arguments in Fox’s work that I did in India. Fox himself admits that his panentheism is a totally different animal from Christian theism. In the face of Fox’s claim that Jesus was a nondualist, and not a theist, it should be easy to see that the Bible is not a monistic book, nor is the God who was in Christ a monistic deity.

The Creator’S Artistry

The Bible begins with God the Artist, a Creator, not some impersonal force. This Artist uses light for the colors of his palette. He puts in the land and sea and sky. He adds the trees and vegetation. After the birds in the sky and fish in the lake, he puts in mammals, and an amazing creature made in his own image. At each stage he steps back, half-closes his eyes, and says, “That is good.”

Such a Creator must in some sense be separate from creation. That is the first point to make about biblical theism. We guess some things about Van Gogh from his swirling skies, but the artist is not part of the canvas, or in the oils, or even perceived in the brush strokes. In Creation Spirituality, however, there is no ultimate distinction between the artist and his creation.

Second, the Artist of biblical theism is very personal. We can talk back, and thank him, and complain. As we get to know him, we expect to engage in dialogue, at times even argue. While Creation Spirituality seems to offer a sense of oneness with the world, even compassion, it can never hold out the promise and blessing of conversational prayer.

Third, Christian theism assures us that we pass at death from the canvas of the painting to the sphere or home of the Artist. The Artist made us in his image so we could eventually be part of his family. Monism or nondualism means there is nowhere else to go. At most, Hindus expect a reincarnation to another life in this world. Fox is careful not to argue for reincarnation in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, but neither does he offer hope of a bodily resurrection. Resurrection is reduced to “Jesus as Mother Earth crucified yet rising daily” (pp. 145, 149). For humans, resurrection merely means “aliveness, wakefulness, awareness, and rebirth—in short, mysticism” (p. 38).

A Guru In Christian Clothing?

Christians can hope Matthew Fox’s silence for six months will have clarified his mind. Is he a genuine monist? If he is, he should come clean and declare himself a guru in the ancient Hindu tradition. Or does he think he can enliven our sometimes too-stuffy theism with monist categories? Either way, there is confusion—and error—that must not escape Christians’ notice.

Fox actually has some things to say. Many will resonate with his chiding of the church—and secular society—for their arid rationalism. He speaks of “the art of friendship, the art of making beauty where we dwell, the art of conversation, of massage, of laughter, of preparing food, of hospitality, of the sharing of ideas, of growing food and flowers, of singing songs, of making love, of telling stories, of uniting generations, of putting on skits, of satirizing human folly.” The only item on this list that seems out of place in the New Testament is “massage,” but then even Jesus allowed a woman to massage and kiss his feet (Luke 7:38).

The significant thing is that all the arts recommended by Fox are with and for individuals. That is the glorious characteristic of theism, and the Christian view of God. The Artist made a world because he loves us and has a future for us in his family. That future finds its center in the concrete and personal love of God in Christ.

Rescue me, O LORD, from evil men; protect me from men of violence, who devise evil plans in their hearts and stir up war every day.… Keep me, O LORD, from the hands of the wicked; protect me from men of violence who plan to trip my feet.

Psalm 140:1–4, NIV

JAMES AND PHYLLIS ALSDURF¹James Alsdurf, a forensic psychologist, and Phyllis Alsdurf, a writer and editor, are authors of the book Battered into Submission, to be published next month by InterVarsity Press.

“I would never in my wildest nightmares have dreamed that my husband would ever abuse me, but he did. I took our two-month-old son and fled after the fourth time my husband struck me, which each time had gotten swiftly worse. My husband is a Christian, but his rage at things was unreal.”

Wife abuse. The Christian home. Two terms that should be mutually exclusive. Tragically, however, they are not. In the past eight years as we have attempted to examine whether or not physical wife abuse is a problem in Christian homes, we have met and talked with many women with heart-rending stories of violent abuse.

The Battered Woman

She comes from every class, every ethnic group, every walk of life. She sits in the church pew next to you each week. If current research is correct, roughly every other married woman you meet will at some point in her marriage experience at least one incident of physical violence at the hands of her husband. A 1988 estimate by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence suggests that three to four million women are beaten annually in their homes by husbands, ex-husbands, or lovers. Those figures account only for severe physical assaults that receive police and medical attention.

Wife abuse does not occur just in families where husbands are unsaved or alcoholics, where mothers work outside the home, or where couples are only nominally Christian. Some of the abused women with whom we have talked are married to church leaders, deacons, or pastors. They consider themselves to be committed Christians and for the most part would uphold traditional family values. Few, if any, would label themselves feminists, and almost without exception they have worked hard at being submissive to their husbands.

The majority of women in our sample (based on a survey of pastors in various Protestant churches as well as interviews with and letters from abused, Christian women) were in their first marriage, had children, at least some college education (almost 50 percent had graduated), held a part-time job, and were in good physical health. The families in which they grew up were, on the whole, “very religious,” stable (only about 10 percent had parents who were divorced or separated), relatively violence-free, middle-class families.

While Christian marriages have been shown to have a lower incidence of abuse, the tragic truth is that it does occur in some Christian homes. Generalizing from the different studies done on this topic, one can conservatively estimate that for every 60 married women in a church, 10 suffer emotional and verbal abuse, and 2 or 3 will be physically abused by their husbands.

The Batterer

What kind of a man beats his wife? One answer is that many men learn unacceptable methods of coping with anger and stress—methods that can be unlearned. Some experts focus on the “emotional illiteracy” of men who have been taught to “keep a stiff upper lip” and show no emotion. Men who have no outlet for ordinary, everyday anger are at risk of finally exploding in rage toward the people who have to put up with it: their wives.

Constance Doran, a Christian psychologist, characterizes the abusive man as very dependent, possessive, and deferential. Roughly 60 percent of the abusers with whom she worked were themselves abused or saw their fathers abusing their mothers. “Typically the violence pattern begins with the wife’s first pregnancy and is really directed toward the fetus,” Doran says. “There’s going to be another sibling and the husband is jealous.” The more saintlike and forgiving the wife is, the more it puts the husband in a victim role, and he doesn’t like it.

Rather than learning techniques for being more sensitive to her husband’s desires, the wife needs to let her husband bear the consequences for his violence, Doran contends. “The first step is to let the husband grow up and take responsibility for controlling his impulses. He needs to experience the natural consequences of his behavior.”

“By her compliance,” Doran continues, “the wife reinforces his violence. She exerts tremendous levels of energy to meet his every need. He hits her. The neighbors call the police. She says she fell and doesn’t press charges. By lying and covering up for her husband, the wife provides negative reinforcement for his violence. She is reinforcing tantrum behavior in a man who on the exterior may be very macho, but inside is as possessive as a two-year-old.”

Because of the nature of violence and evil, no one is exempt from being a possible abuser. Consider, for example, Swiss physician Paul Tournier’s own painfully honest admission in his book The Violence Within (Harper & Row): “Well-brought-up, reasonable, kindly people, gentle as lambs, can suddenly break out into brutal violence, in words, thoughts, or deeds—and it happens more often than you would imagine.… I have on occasion slapped my wife, and I have often spoken to her in the most wounding terms. I might try to reassure myself with the thought that it was only a passing accident, a mental aberration, when I was no longer myself in the heart of the moment—something soon put right! It would be more honest to say to myself that it was I who did it, and to see that it reveals an aspect of myself that I find hard to recognize; that I am much more violent than I care to acknowledge.”

Blaming The Victim

A few of the women with whom we have talked praised their churches and pastors for their efforts at intervention. Said a woman from the East Coast, “One of the reasons that mine is a ‘success’ story—my husband and I are back together after a three-month separation—is because my church did take action. It forced my husband to make choices, and he sought counsel himself.”

Another woman found that pastoral counsel varied greatly in the two churches she attended. “The first pastor I talked to focused on keeping the family together. The others had a more realistic and (now I believe) spiritual approach. They advised separation for as long as it takes to make a wise decision and to see if my husband is truly willing to change.… The pastors were committed to finding me a place to stay.… They have also loved and cared for my husband. One pastor has confronted him in love and has been involved in helping him to change.”

Unfortunately, some of the pastors who counseled the women we have interviewed were inclined to spiritualize and simplify the psychological, familial, and social complexities involved. Women report receiving such advice as that given to a Nebraska woman who was told to consider the abuse “an opportunity to suffer for Jesus’ sake.”

“The pastor put the guilt on my shoulders,” a Florida woman told us. “He blamed me for not submitting to my husband and said he would change because he had asked for forgiveness. But after counseling I realized he would never change; he was more abusive than ever. In a sense, the pastor was on my husband’s side. I was showing little faith, he said.”

Many women report that their pastors focused on getting them—not their abusive husbands—to change. What this technique communicates to the woman is that the responsibility for change is hers; it becomes a spiritual strategy for blaming the victim. According to this logic, if we could just get that nagging wife to stop carping at her husband, she would no longer be dragged across the floor by her hair.

A problem arises, however, when one considers what the data say: Most battered women do not know what triggers their husband’s violence. That is part of the terror of battering. The women have no idea when the abuse will occur, what will precipitate it. If they did, they would be the first to change. There is no masoch*stic joy in getting choked and stabbed, burned and bruised. Unfortunately, many women become almost obsessive in their attempts to figure out what they are “doing wrong” despite their powerlessness to control their husband’s outbursts.

The first time Mary was beaten she was riding in the car with her husband of 15 years and their three children. Inadvertently she gave the wrong directions. “Suddenly he turned around and slapped and socked me,” she said. “It was such a shock. That night I had a hemorrhage.” Her husband, an author, educator, and well-respected Christian leader, continued to beat her brutally for seven years. “You have this terrible fear of being alone with him in a room,” she said. “He’s so unpredictable you don’t know when he’s going to suddenly turn on you.”

When people blame the victim, they unwittingly become part of the problem. In shifting the focus from the abuser to the victim, the victim is, at least tacitly, held responsible for the abuser’s violence at a time when she most needs to be empowered.

Master Manipulator

For several years former pastor Dan Keller has been supervising therapy groups for batterers, offered by the Indianapolis Salvation Army. Four 26-week groups are run simultaneously and are always filled to capacity. Referrals come primarily through the courts.

Labeling wife abusers as “master manipulators,” Keller says he works at getting them “narrowly focused so they don’t get off on sidetracks. For the first 12 to 15 weeks I don’t believe anything they say.” Keller’s confrontational approach starts by breaking behavior down into small parts. “When you do, it gets extremely uncomfortable for the abuser. I don’t look at the big picture—what she did to justify his behavior. I don’t care what your wife did. It’s what you did, how you responded.”

Keller’s first goal with an abuser is to get him to “own up to the fact that he is abusive.” Gradually he helps abusers examine their emotions. “They think anger is the only emotion they have. We look at how they feel, how their bodies are feeling.”

Abusiveness, says Keller, is a learned behavior. “In the Christian relationship anything we learn we have to unlearn, as Paul said, by the renewing of the mind.” Keller does not introduce the Christian perspective until the end of the program because “most abusers have gotten saved, baptized, or had some religious experience before coming to see me as another way to manipulate their wives. If they know I’m an ordained minister, then they want to refocus their problem in terms of my theological position.”

Though he has seen the effectiveness of the Indianapolis program for abusers of all types—“I’ve had ministers in my group, and those from derelicts to Ph.D.’s, men of all socioeconomic and intelligence levels”—Keller is cautious about making predictions about the success of the program in terms of reconciliation. “When abusiveness has gone on for 10 to 15 years, the memories of those problems for the victim will hinder reconciliation for years.”

Traditional therapeutic approaches are ineffective with abusers, claims Keller, because you “counsel to the pain, you focus on her. The minute you do that you reinforce him.” “As hard as I push these fellows and despite all the baloney they give me,” concluded Keller, “no one says, ‘You don’t understand.’ … I’m the one person who refuses, without manipulating them, to be manipulated by them.”

By James and Phyllis Alsdurf.

Submission And Power

Over two-thirds of the women with whom we have talked stated that they felt it was their Christian responsibility to endure their husband’s violence, and that in so doing they would be expressing a commitment both to God and to their husbands. Fifty-five percent noted that their husbands had said that if they would be more submissive, the violence would stop; and one-third of the women believed that their submissiveness could be the key to stopping the violence.

Yet some studies seem to indicate that a battered woman’s use of compliance as a coping strategy can actually serve to provoke abuse. A 1986 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey concluded that women who report their abusive husbands to the police, rather than those who submitted to the violence, were less likely to be attacked again within the next six months. The survey found that “41 percent of married women who were attacked by their husbands or ex-husbands but did not call the police were assaulted again within an average of six months, compared with 15 percent of the women who alerted police.”

A misunderstanding of biblical submission can have a profound impact on how couples respond to abuse. No matter where one wants to locate power and authority in a marriage, the New Testament places explicit limits on their use and expression.

New Testament theologian S. Scott Bartchy points out that “the models of leadership to which even many Christian males appeal come straight from the battlefields and corporations of the ‘Gentile’ world.” It is Jesus himself, points out Bartchy, who calls us to examine the ways we use the power we have. In Mark 10:42–44 Jesus confronted the presuppositions of male power and dominance: “You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.”

As Richard Foster rightly discerns in The Celebration of Discipline (Harper & Row), if anything, “the sting of the teaching [on submission] falls upon the dominant partner.” He is to surrender his prerogative to power through self-sacrificing love. The degree to which a husband’s lack of Christlike, sacrificial love is overlooked is the degree to which a fully biblical marriage languishes.

What The Church Can Do

As antithetical as it is to all that life in Christ implies, there are Christian men who beat their wives. Some feel justified in doing so. Others recognize the sinfulness of their actions but feel powerless to stop.

For the former, the church needs to engage in an aggressive program of re-education. Abusers who feel biblically justified in keeping their wives “in line” through physical and emotional manipulation must be challenged and disciplined so they can see and express the Christian call to sacrificial love and so they can know God’s abhorrence of violence.

For those batterers who want to change but appear unable to do so, forces of spiritual bondage are at work that need to be confronted by the Christian community.

How can the church communicate its willingness to support the battered woman and her husband? By talking about this taboo subject in prayers, sermons, and Sunday school lessons. One former victim, now heading a task force for battered women in her rural area, tells pastors she addresses to pray at the end of each service for “homes where there is violence, homes where women and children are abused. It gets the church familiar with the words ‘battered woman’ so they aren’t so afraid of them. And it lets the battered woman in the congregation know that the pastor is aware of the problem. She’ll think, ‘He does care about me. I can go and talk to him.’”

Announcements can be made from the pulpit about area shelters or support groups for abusers and victims. The problem can also be discussed in Sunday school classes or confronted directly in a sermon on the subject of family violence. These small steps will help raise the level of awareness of the issue in the congregation.

Several women advised pastors to be wary of couples who are “too good to be true,” for by all outward appearances, such were they and their abusers. Said one: “I knew that if I didn’t treat him well and act real happy in public, I’d get it at home.” Frequent church hopping, intermittent attendance, and inappropriate outbursts of anger by the husband can also be signals. Another sign to look for, they noted, is very “private” couples, those who keep to themselves and rarely socialize or interact individually with church friends or even relatives.

One giant step toward rebuilding the shattered self-esteem of Christian battered women would be made if the church were to acknowledge publicly that wife abuse is indeed a sin. To recognize abuse as sin will often require the appropriation of church discipline. Numerous battered women with whom we talked noted that their violent husbands were not dismissed from the church board, refused Communion, or released from teaching Sunday school classes even after their abuse became known to the pastor.

Ministering to an abused wife means a willingness not only to stand in the gap by providing for physical services such as child care or temporary housing, but also to make a commitment to the long-term process of rebuilding the dignity of a woman whose sense of worth has been utterly shattered. A pastor can expect that efforts to intervene in the life of a battered woman will be characterized by trial separations, emotional vacillation, and the full range of possible disappointments.

Examination also needs to be made of the type of religious environment that permits the abuse of women to occur. Education within the church about the problem of wife abuse must be preventative in nature if it is to touch the issue at its root. A study of 296 California high-school students found that about 27 percent of those surveyed had experienced some form of violence while dating. Youth programs need to address the dynamics of male-female relationships. This will include expanding content within Sunday school classes to patterns of communication within male-female relationships, conflict resolution, challenging kids to define what their assumptions are about male-female interaction.

The challenge we face is thoughtfully to reexamine interpretations of what Scripture says about power and authority in relation to marriage and to embrace a definition of Christian marriage based more on mutuality. The word of hope to battered women, then, is found in God’s promise that “they shall know that I am the LORD, when I break the bars of their yoke, and deliver them from the hand of those who enslaved them.… They shall dwell securely, and none shall make them afraid” (Ezek. 34:27–28).

ROY M. ANKER¹Roy M. Anker is a member of the English department at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa. This year he is on leave at the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Movie Identification Quiz: Identify the following well-known movies:

Film #1: With glee on their faces, the villains incinerate a boy—while the audience watches his excised, fearstruck heart beat ever more furiously as he is lowered in a sling into boiling lava. Later in the movie, as an encore, a bosomy blonde begs and screams as she, too, is lowered into the volcano. The hero watches, smiling, relishing.

The movie comes amply stocked with torture implements: whips, chains, knives, potions. Body parts, slaves, spiders, voodoo dolls, magic rocks, and some blood drinking are also thrown in. Nice stuff. And yet, according to the ratings code, this PG film is acceptable for kids eight and older.

Film #2: In this PG film, a strange, winsome, teddy-bearlike creature comes, as an early Christmas present, to live with an ideal teen in an idyllic American village. When wet, the pet spawns clones that soon mutate into snarling pests, half human and half reptile. The cackling brood savors killing as much as their endless practical jokes, usually mixing the two. The picture’s last half allows for inventive, graphic ways for the humans and creatures to stalk and kill each other: blenders, chain saws, microwaves, catapults, crossbows, and various means of decapitation and incineration. And it all takes place on Christmas Eve. With its cuddlies and sentiment, the movie is pitched straight to the preteen market.

Film #3: For a secret mission, authorities give a life-term, rock-pile prisoner freedom. During that mission he single-handedly kills about a hundred enemy soldiers. Survival and mission success are hardly the point, nor is plausibility. What stands out is variety of assault, which is graphic and continual: burning, carving, impaling, gutting, garroting, bludgeoning, exploding, hanging, plummeting, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

This R-rated film helped make its star the favorite actor among teens in 1985, which poses an interesting conundrum: He made it to the top mostly because of a movie kids were not, according to the rating code, supposed to see. Despite its rating, this blood-drenched pageant of ritualistic machismo found its most fervent devotees among pubescent boys.

Film #4: In one of the most profitable teen films ever made, again rated R (those under 17 not admitted without parent or guardian), a group of fifties’ teens infiltrate and pillage both the high school and a local roadhouse, not to mention the local female population. These good, clean boys spy on the girls’ shower room, befuddle the police, enrage authorities, booze continuously, and score all they want, even the wimpiest one. In addition to these violent visual and attitudinal assaults, the language is relentlessly abusive of people, God, and sex. This is male teen heaven.

Film #5: A deranged and hideous man searches the night for victims, usually teens, whom he then proceeds to hunt down, one by one, to mutilate and kill. Always the camera’s eye is the attacker’s as he spies and closes on the unsuspecting and then terrified women (male victims do not merit this close cinematic attention). The audience repeatedly enters his pursuit, slowly approaching couples or girls caught in vulnerable moments, such as bathing or love making. Blades of all sorts—knives, axes, and chain saws—slash and dismember. The camera then pauses to appreciate the carnage pinned to walls or splayed all over. The monster turns away only when butchery finally sates his thirst for pain and murder.

And there is no ending this phantasm from hell. When the beast is finally killed, the movie leaves ample suggestion that it has not really died but will resurrect for even gorier escapades of carnage.

Answers To The Movie Quiz

Answer #1: Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) ranks eighth in all-time box-office receipts, right behind Spielberg’s other tale of fear, pain, horror, and black magic, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

Answer #2: Gremlins, another 1984 Spielberg production, ranks twentieth in all-time box-office receipts. Admittedly, saying bad things about Spielberg, the sweet fellow who brought us the lovable ET, is like impugning Mom and apple pie. It also labels one, in the minds of most, as suffering from hysterical paranoia. As much as the characters he has given us—such as ET and Indiana Jones—Spielberg himself has become a contemporary cultural icon, a kindly and trusty guru for parents as much as for kids. After all, Spielberg-directed or produced films account for 5 of history’s top-10 moneymakers (and 7 of the top 20) and have hauled in well over a billion dollars.

Answer #3: Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo: First Blood II stands number 22 in rank and is one of a successful series of seven Stallone films (four Rockys and three First Bloods, earning more than a half-billion dollars). Usually written by Stallone, these movies exalt the capacity to endure and inflict pain as the sole means of establishing manhood. In the First Blood and now Cobra movies, the motive for both taking and giving hurt lies in the desire to seek not justice, as did perhaps the old Western hero, but retribution—what we might call the “make-my-day” syndrome—in the manner of Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and Eddie Murphy. And a gloried route it is, full of muscle, sweat, blood, and sass, where nobody important ever really gets hurt; at least very much or for very long.

Answer #4: Porky’s (1982) cost less than $5 million to make and earned roughly $180 million. While clearly the most successful, it is only one of a whole spate of teenage sex films that border on soft-core p*rnography. A kind of middle-class high-school Animal House (which cost $3 million to make and made $ 150 million), Porky’s abounds in raunchy groin humor that rationalizes, normalizes, and then sentimentalizes adolescent randiness and promiscuity. Any means for dealing with a hormonal drive other than immediate and frequent copulation receives abundant ridicule. No one in this fantasy world ever experiences bad sex, let alone any unhappy consequence thereof, such as guilt, disease, or pregnancy.

Porky’s is simply the best known of a horde of money-making “teen pics” whose shapes and focus resulted from studio research into adolescent male sexual fantasies. Two of the more famous, Private Lessons and Risky Business (which gave Tom Cruise his start), put such dreams at their center. These films cover the walls of video stores and fill the late-night hours of cable stations.

Answer #5: In truth, the answer to this description could be any of 50 films, movies such as Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and their innumerable sequels. Their malevolent superhuman and indestructible monsters—Jason, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Meyer—return over and over again, no matter what the finality or gruesome mode of their destruction. And one can hardly imagine more painful and permanent departures. Until then, however, a vast abominable toll of hurt falls upon kids, mostly girls. With unfathomable malice and relish, the stalker’s pleasure, vicarious for the audience, inflicts terror, torture, and death. His strength and knives flash, threaten, coerce, subdue, and invade. Throughout they are clear-as-day surrogates for phallic assault, an obscene predatory distortion of any semblance of normal male sexuality. Women are the inviting game, and the pursuit itself, for the audience, becomes a game.

In its first weekend in the theaters, the third sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street took in nearly $13 million, more than double its production costs. Moreover, the first three Elm Street episodes have thus far sold more than a half-million videocassettes and who knows how many Freddy masks and bladed gloves ($15 million in spin-off merchandise).

The Power Of Art

All of these films, like it or not, somehow address and engage the interests and emotions of preteens and teens. Because stories, images, and melodies are hints and clues about the nature of life, whether beatific or horrific, they have particular appeal for young people who are very much in the business of figuring out who they are and what the world holds. That particularly difficult stage or passage in life explains, broadly speaking, both kids’ attraction and susceptibility to most any kind of artistic representation. They can hardly help being voracious consumers. For kids, then, art—movies, rock, TV, advertising—provides stories, images, and songs that serve as guides and comforts in the travail of growing up.

Of all the arts available to teens, movies are perhaps the most potent. Film utilizes and in many ways heightens several separate artistic elements—story, picture, and melody—and thus carries a kind of cumulative, synergistic clout. The total psychic consequence can surpass the sum of the ingredients. Ear and eye are fully engaged; story, movement, sound—all combine to provide a total experience that is brighter, larger, and louder than life itself.

And the movies are becoming more and more accessible. Hollywood thrives and prospers by figuring out what will appeal to kids and, given the lucrative enticements, is more than eager to chum out film upon film. As the commercial successes of the movies profiled earlier well illustrate, more than small change is at stake.

The market for movies among kids is simply prodigious. According to Gallup, in 1987 the average American teenager between 13 and 17 saw roughly 90 movies. Only about 10 of those were in theaters, a drop of 50 percent from 1985. The rest were viewed at home. Sixty percent of American homes now have a VCR, and another 30 percent receive a pay-cable movie channel (such as HBO). About a third of teens’ movies come from cable movie channels, and another third from rental and purchased videocassettes, a teen market that in three years has more than quadrupled. Hollywood films now earn as much in cable and cassette rental as they do in commercial release.

At the same time that home viewing is increasing, access to movies with offensive material is getting easier and easier. This is due to a number of factors. For one, a long-time problem, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) rating code is rarely enforced, allowing just about any junior-high kid to see any film, regardless of content. Movie makers insert questionable material—graphic sex, violence, and language—because they know that kids, who want to feel grown-up, want it. However, when critics complain of moviedom’s irresponsibilities, the filmmakers characteristically take refuge in rating-code enforcement—a willed and convenient delusion if there ever was one. Use of the rating code by those in the industry is a sham: They intentionally ignore it and then, if things get hot, hide behind it.

An additional problem with the code appears in the gradual dilution of its criteria. There has been a definite trend to allow ever-more controversial subject matter into the next lowest rating category—thus to ensure ever-larger audiences. R-rated material has become acceptable as PG or PG-13. This stands out most clearly in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and Gremlins, the two films that occasioned the creation of the PG-13 category. Spielberg and crew apparently thought that his sado-mayhem was just fine for the youngsters and bristled under the limitations on audience that an R rating afforded.

The tendency of the rougher material to seep down into the next-lower niche becomes even clearer when looking at two once-controversial R-rated films of the past. Both The Graduate (1967) and The Godfather (1972), initially condemned for their boldness, would today receive a PG-13 rating, if not, with slight alteration, a flat PG. And the list, sad to say, could go on and on. The only films now meriting an X are those that display the anatomical details of coitus—witness, if you must, the wretched 9½ Weeks, Angel Heart, or Fatal Attraction, all rated R despite frequent and graphic sexual content.

What nominal restraint the rating code exerts in theaters disappears altogether in video stores, where code enforcement, except for X, is virtually nonexistent. In big cities and small towns, with at least one video store per commercial half-mile, very young kids can rent virtually any film, from sex romps to slasher and war-gore flicks. Retail and mail-order p*rnography floats freely among the same young clientele. And if kids do not see it at night with parents home, they do during summer days while parents work. Furthermore, what rental outlets do not provide, cable movie channels, such as Cinemax and Showtime, are glad to furnish.

What this all adds up to is that curious kids usually find a way to see what they wish to see. Going to the movies—any of them—has become less and less difficult, though more risky.

Teaching Violence

Perhaps one theme or image ties together all the kid movies listed at the start, and it provides ample cause for alarm. That common motif, simply put, is the relish of a coercive violence—a violence that is, more often than not, insistently sexual in focus.

At the center of the Christian account of creation, in its grand vision of intimacy and harmony arising from the inmost heart of God, lies a deep aversion toward, and a fundamental ban on, violence and violation. In our lost Eden, mutuality and care infused the very texture of being, a posture of reverence and adoration toward every living creature. Neither violence, pain, nor death had any place.

Carnage, hurt, and dying now form the chief interest in almost all pictures made for children between the ages of 10 and 20. To be sure, violence has always been a strong component in American film, especially in Westerns and gangster pictures. Still, the nature and purpose of the violence depicted has radically changed. Cowboys and private eyes did what they had to with their weapons, but behind the violence lay concern and care for justice and for the defenseless. And in those old movies, the hero’s violence was always self-defensive and socially necessary, a way of keeping away a malignant, devouring chaos. The hero’s code provided for force, but the motive was always protective, and its actual use was reluctant and restrained, only enough to subdue foes. The more realistic the violence became, the more likely the film was to depict its social and emotional consequences.

By any estimate, a sea change has taken place in the climate of entertainment—not only in kid movies but in music and pro sports. Violence is now portrayed as pleasurable. Rambo kills with relish, again and again, pleasurably defusing his pent-up anger. Whether as a modern cop, Dirty Harry, or in the old West, as in Pale Rider and countless others, Clint Eastwood kills eagerly, promising his victims that their death will “make my day.”

The same spirit infects our comedy. In the Beverly Hills Cop series, Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley “blows away” all villains, and physically and verbally humiliates everyone in sight, friend and foe alike. The same applies to Murphy’s comedy concert films, such as Raw, in which he utters more than 500 expletives, offers a constant derision of women, and encourages a hom*ophobia that falls just short of promoting violence.

As violence is portrayed more positively and provoked with less and less motivation, as in the slasher films, it is ever more graphically depicted, both visually and verbally. In the recent and very popular Robocop, an R-rated film pitched to kids, a group of sado-thugs using shotguns methodically shoots off a captured police officer’s hand, then blows off his arm at the shoulder, riddles his torso with salvos (the bulletproof vest he wears allows them to do it for some time), and then kills him with a bullet to the forehead. When the “dead” officer is transplanted into a new sort of mechanical policeman, Robocop, he, or it, goes after thieves with similar excess and abandon.

Slasher films exhibit every conceivable sort of mutilation and direct most of it toward women. With knives as phallic surrogates, predatory sexual assault forms the chief narrative interest: Who will get killed next and how, and how will the “monster” finally be defeated (they never die)? Body counts for a single film range from 4 to 20. The level of brutality astounds at times and is generally made to seem fun. Since the monsters are always male, sexual arousal mixes with the pleasure of assault.

The experimental research of numerous social scientists, most notably Edward Donnerstein, has shown with some certainty that aggressive violent sexuality, as depicted in the slasher films, has measurable short-term consequences on male attitudes toward violence toward women. Researchers of the effects of watching violent p*rnography, a category into which the slasher films fall, agree that the material (1) reduces college-age males’ sympathy for rape victims, (2) increases their willingness to coerce women sexually, (3) increases levels of anger, and (4) “disinhibits” its expression, toward women generally. When films offer a mix of sex and violence—always from the point of view of a crazed male aggressor—those movies effectively model and advocate aggressive male sexuality.

That much researchers feel quite comfortable in asserting. We can only wonder, for example, about long-term exposure of violent p*rnography to pubescent boys. If viewed repeatedly, as much of this material is, by those whose notion of sexual relations is just forming, this stuff may prove a particularly volatile conditioning apparatus. Psychically and socially corrosive attitudes and practices can become deeply embedded. The movies’ message is more than clear: It’s all right and fun to hurt women to get what every male desires and deserves. To be sure, not many boys will grow up to be crazed rapists and murderers, but the spread of violent films will certainly spread hurt and suffering in the fraying of our social fabric.

These findings of modern social science on the effects of mixing violence and sex only reinforce what the moral and spiritual traditions of Judaism and Christianity have argued all along. Images and stories do shape the mind, mood, and imagination, and influence thought and behavior. But now we have movies that make obscene stuff seem feasible, interesting, and heartfelt—erotica with a punch and a slash, and its point is the pleasure of watching and inflicting pain.

Violence for kids has long been standard fare on television, and ample evidence suggests its very real dangers. Now with the advent of the VCR and easy access to extreme graphic violence and violent sexuality, its impact seeps ever deeper and more widely into our homes and into our children.

Getting Kids to Watch Good Movies

Given ten bucks and the car keys on a Friday night, most teenagers will head for the cinema or the video store. They probably won’t see Hamlet, either. Chances are, they will end up watching something shallow, sexually exploitative, and gratuitously violent. Concern over such movies can lead adults to overreact, condemning all films.

But there are lots of great films available, especially on videotape. The trick is getting kids to watch them. Teenagers and preteens tend to choose films from a few tried and true genres—horror, comedy, science fiction, action, and sexploitation. As a teacher, I used to spend a lot of time decrying such fare, but it didn’t have much effect on my Christian high-school students.

The best solution I found was to take them to good films myself. I looked for films with serious intentions that examined the human condition. Yet serious films often deal with historical, political, or cultural themes that are too obscure for young people to understand. Here is where the adult must help out.

For instance, the Oscar-winning movie The Last Emperor is a compelling story, magnificently staged and masterfully executed. After seeing it at a press screening, I decided to take all my juniors and seniors. It had what teenagers like in a movie—action, romance, drama, and visual spectacle. But it also dealt with important historical and spiritual themes.

Before we went, I asked them what they knew about China, which was almost nothing. So I began with a map and showed them China’s boundaries and traditional enemies. We discussed the dynasties and the tradition of the emperor. I explained the decay of the Qing dynasty, the emergence of warlords, the invasion by the Japanese, and the civil war between Chiang and Mao.

Because they had some background to work with, my students loved the film. When we discussed it later, they asked penetrating questions and shared thoughtful insights. Many of them even went back with their friends or parents to see it again.

I asked my students if they would have gone to The Last Emperor had I not taken them. Most said no. They said that a long film about a Chinese emperor would surely have lost out to movies like Nightmare on Elm Street 4 or Beverly Hills Cop 2.

I’ve taken high-school students to some sophisticated films over the years. They have seen the three-hour-plus Russian epic, Siberiade, and the Polish masterpiece, A Year of the Quiet Sun.

Young people like to think. They like to be challenged and stretched. But someone has to guide them lovingly. Parents can help by taking their kids to thoughtful, intelligent movies at an early age so they won’t think of movies as pure escape. Forget the concept of a “kid movie” and just look for a good movie.

The best way to choose such a movie is to read film reviews and then do some research. For example, before going to see Lawrence of Arabia, read up on the Ottoman empire in the encyclopedia and look at a map of World War I Arabia. Explain the basic issues to the kids and then see the movie. After the movie, have an informal discussion. Don’t work it to death, but try to take the experience a bit farther.

With some guidance and encouragement, kids can learn to choose movies for content and approach rather than for cheap thrills.

By Stefan Ulstein

Parents And The Movies

There is not an easy path for parents to take. Movies are not easy cultural products to assess. Almost any movie can be made to look good in ads or previews. And critics these days do not offer much help. In fact, few reviewers risk any mention of the nature or necessity of a film’s violence or sexuality. To the contrary, a sort of cutesy violence, however gruesome, as in Gremlins, seems fun and witty, even to critics with estimable reputations.

Parents must learn to play the role of quiet prophet for their children. Burdensome and painful though it may be, parents should watch the films themselves and work hard to label properly the realities of the screen. In watching the material with their kids later, parents should show their own reactions, speak afterward with candor about plot and images, and when the movie includes questionable material, name the foulness for what it is.

Of course, it is sometimes next to impossible to keep up with the more mobile teenagers, and, as noted earlier, kids have a knack for finding ways to see the movies they want to see. In these cases, it would be profitable to get them to verbalize their experience: What was the plot? How were good and evil portrayed? How did they react to what happened? Did the movie seem true to life? and so on.

Movie audiences, including adults, generally prefer to enjoy rather than reflect on the exact nature of movie content. Consequently, simple verbal description—plain talk—can go a long way in clarifying dubious content.

Summarized and translated into words, the images and content of a lot of films sound less than appealing: dismemberment, torture, evisceration, mutilation, slaughter, massacre, revenge, sadism, hurt, pain, rape, and death. Giving words to what we see can give us a new perspective. Indeed, appetites for certain films might differ radically if advertisem*nts described their actual content—details such as “15 women slowly mutilated in graphic detail,” or “90 Vietnamese killed in delightfully different ways,” or “Monsters and people blended and microwaved.”

Cultures that pander and gorge on violence do not last long (the world before the Flood, Sodom, Rome). God only knows our fate if we further smother the spirit’s capacity for delight in kindness and love. How long can we watch and relish the cruel leer on the tormentor’s face without ourselves turning mean, just plain mean?

Finding the time to be a parent may mean making the workplace take second place.

David Ross, 38, is a typical American dad. Sort of.

According to a recent story in Newsweek, the Los Angeles lawyer is trying to put his family above his career. At the office a lot when his first child, now six, was an infant, Ross does not want to repeat that pattern with eight-month-old Alexandra. He tries to spend more time with his children, but it isn’t easy.

Juggling office hours to spend “quality time” with kids is the new American pastime, especially as the nation sees more and more two-career families. And because career and family often collide, parents are looking for solutions.

One of those answers has attracted notice. A leading expert on career women recently proposed what has become known in the media as “The Mommy Track.” Felice Schwartz, the president of a women’s business-research group, has argued that women executives who have children are different from their male counterparts because they leave or cut back on work commitments while the children are young. Companies, says Schwartz, need to offer career options for women who cannot, or will not, work 60-to 70-hour work weeks.

While Schwartz targeted working women, her proposal raises larger questions about the place of parenting—and the role of fathers. With Father’s Day approaching, there may be no better time for Christian dads to ask what position their families should take in their lineup of priorities. To put it in stronger terms, fathers have no business opting for a “career track” when doing so will compromise relationships with spouse and children.

Maybe we need to start thinking about a “Daddy Track,” challenging dads to place home and family above career success, especially when the fast track leaves fathers too exhausted for wife and kids. Neglecting family needs may be more societally acceptable for males, but it still leaves its mark on children.

Kids Need Dads

Studies bear this out. Babies are more aware of their fathers than previously thought. Fathers tend to be more playful and physical than mothers, traits children need to see. And even in homes where the mother does not work, fathers have an indispensable role to play in modeling, disciplining, and building a child’s self-esteem. The controversy in evangelical circles about working moms sometimes misses this more subtle, but equally important, angle on healthy family functioning.

Perhaps the time-honored wisdom of Scripture includes a much-needed message on contemporary parenting. The Israelites—mothers and fathers—were commanded to take God’s words and “teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut. 11:19). Such training and molding took time and commitment.

It still does. There is no substitute for regularly scheduled (and unscheduled) spaces of high-quality relating. That cannot happen if Dad’s best insights and energies are always reserved for the job, and when all he brings home are the emotional leftovers.

In the Newsweek story on fathering, another dad told the reporter that when he takes care of his kids on the weekend, his friends sometimes say, “Oh, you’re babysitting.” “No, I’m not,” he replies. “I’m being their father.”

By Timothy K. Jones.

The vice-president of a Florida savings and loan, and his wife, a private-school administrator, were recently convicted of third-degree murder and child abuse following the death of their seven-year-old daughter for whom they sought the help of a Christian Science practitioner rather than conventional medical care. The case of William and Christine Hermanson is just the first of six current cases where parents are facing criminal charges after avoiding conventional medicine for religious reasons.

The issues surrounding these cases are many: including religious freedom, parental responsibilities, children’s “rights,” the unquestioned value of medical science, and the point at which the courts may intervene in family affairs. Apparently the questions will be with us as long as we acknowledge the freedom of Jehovah’s Witnesses (who refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds) and Christian Scientists in our society. (Christian Scientists are not prohibited from seeking medical care, but church teaching does encourage them to prefer spiritual healing at the hands of a Christian Science practitioner.)

The Hermanson case has focused attention specifically on one legal issue: the exceptions some states have included in their child-abuse laws that exempt parents from being considered “abusive or neglectful” if for religious reasons alone they do not provide medical care for a child. Despite the Florida exemption, the Hermansons were prosecuted and convicted.

One foe of such exemptions is Dr. Norman Fost, chairman of the Committee on Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Fost is quoted as saying, “I feel badly for parents, acting in good conscience, but good motives don’t justify preventable death.”

At first, that comment sounds reasonable. Yet it is horrifyingly utilitarian, demanding that a good outcome is the only thing that can justify a course of action. As Christians we believe that the first criterion of our behavior is faithfulness, and only relatively late does effectiveness enter into ethical decision making.

Another of Fost’s remarks was attractive at first blush. Accusing the Hermansons and others of “unfairly imposing their choice on their children,” he opined: “Religion is something that is chosen, not born into.”

Evangelicals, of course, have always championed choice in religion—the “hour of decision,” if you will. A religion that is not at some point made one’s own by conscious choice and deep personal commitment is at best empty. But evangelicals have also emphasized religious training in childhood. We know it is simply silly to allow children to grow up as little pagans without the benefit of biblical knowledge or the example of informed piety—and then to expect them to make an intelligent choice among the many religions and world views in our pluralistic society. Yet training children in the doctrine and practice of religion could be seen as “unfairly imposing [parental] choice on … children,” especially if one is willing radically to subordinate the spiritual responsibilities of family life to the rampant individualism of our age. For example, when children of unregistered Baptist believers in the Soviet Union are denied access to good schools and career paths, do we claim that the parents are being unfair to their children? No, we recognize that the spiritual solidarity of the family means that both blessing and tragedy will be shared by all as the parents take the lead in spiritual nurture.

Although we wish the Hermansons had sought conventional treatment for their child, we are more disturbed by their critics. Those who would charge them with child abuse or criticize them for living out their religion as a family understand neither the nature of the family nor of religion.

By David Neff.

In San Mateo County in California, the Planned Parenthood Association is paying a select group of teenage women ten dollars a week not to become pregnant.

Surprised? We shouldn’t be. Today honor, morality, and the Protestant work ethic are fast becoming part of a lost language for many Americans. More and more, money is seen as the only recognized arbiter of success, happiness, and even life itself. Now more than ever, money talks.

In another era, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford got their money the old-fashioned way: long hours, hard work, and vision. Today, junk-bond trader Michael Milken parlayed dishonesty into a multi-billion dollar fortune, but he is viewed by many as a genius. He, like those teens who will cash in on successful birth control, have learned the language of money.

As Christians, we know that there has not been some kind of golden age when people were somehow better. Industry barons and teenage girls have not changed—but the discourse of culture has. People are simply following the rules the culture at large sets out before them. And in that culture the ethereal motivations of morality, honor, and justice are being replaced with the Pavlovian reinforcements of hard cash.

Our leading congressman, the speaker of the House, cannot understand why civic duty should deprive him of acquiring additional assets. Closer to home, leading ministers find it easier to explain the “perks” that have become commonplace for the more successful servants of Christ.

Even former President Ronald Reagan saw the pursuit of money as a national mandate: “What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.”

Is it any surprise, then, that some choose the heady rewards of dealing crack over sobering poverty?

In a world before the advent of capitalism or communism, or even advertising, the apostle Paul saw the love of money as “the root of all evils” (1 Tim. 6:10). Jesus saw it in stark terms: either you served God or you served money (Matt. 6:24).

It is our mission as Christians to teach our neighbors another language.

By Michael G. Maudlin.