Page 4763 – Christianity Today (2024)

After a year of debate and division, a Presbyterian theologian explores what went wrong at last year's controversial Re-Imagining conference.

The furor aroused by last year's Re-Imagining conference exceeded in magnitude anything in memory of mainline Christianity. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which met in Wichita last June, received more overtures of protest over Re-Imagining than on any topic in the denomination's 200-plus-year history. Re-Imagining has awakened various mainline denominations to a state of crisis in theology, and with it the need, in the words of the Wichita general assembly, to assert that "theology matters."

Indeed it does. If Re-Imagining stimulates mainline Protestants and Catholics to recover a responsible theology, guided by Scripture and creed, then it may play an important role in arresting the theological and moral drift so characteristic of mainline Christianity. If not, such events will signal the demise of the churches that support them. But to learn fully the lesson of Re-Imagining we must first be clear as to what exactly went wrong at the conference-which can act as a case study of what goes wrong when we abandon Bible and creed as our moorings for guiding the work of the church.

More than 2,000 attendees from all 50 states and 28 countries gathered in Minneapolis from November 4-7, 1993, "as midwives of the new life that will be born from our tears and struggles," in the words of an opening speaker. Three years in the planning, Re-Imagining was a global theological colloquium of feminist voices. Global, too, were its concerns: violence and war, racism, sexism, poverty, oppression, and economic injustice. These and other sources of tears and terror were addressed in moving pathos and acid iconoclasm. Re-Imagining was a mega-event for body, mind, and spirit. In addition to 34 plenary addresses, there were small groups, workshops, ritual and worship, music, dance, plays, and visual arts. For the intrepid listener, it is captured in 24 double-sided cassettes-nearly 30 hours of recording.

The reason why the repercussions from Re-Imagining—especially among mainline denominations—have equaled, if not exceeded, in magnitude anything in recent memory is not that the positions espoused were especially novel or more radical than feminist positions advanced in academic circles and literature. What distinguished Re-Imagining from myriad other similar events is that it not only claimed to speak to the church, but in certain respects for it. One-third of its attendees were clergy. Speaker after speaker called on the churches to undertake a new reformation of doctrine. And most significantly, the event bore the imprimatur of "The Ecumenical Decade: Churches in Solidarity with Women, 1988-1998," initiated by the World Council of Churches and funded by some 20 ecclesiastical organizations, including the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (PCUSA), the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the American Baptist Convention (ABC), the United Church of Christ, and four religious communities of Roman Catholics.

BREAKING TABOOS

Re-Imagining left no doubt that women's issues are here for the duration. Speakers from around the globe gave impassioned testimony to the anger and alienation that often characterize the experience of women in the church. The sense of solidarity among women, particularly with the poor, oppressed, and those struggling for justice and equality, was particularly evident. Speakers were sharp in naming the powers that oppress and do violence to life. One could not remain unmoved by several voices of courage in the face of injustice.

One such voice was that of Violet Al Raheb, an Arab Lutheran living in Bethlehem (Israel), whose description of the oppressive conditions facing Arab Christians in the birthplace of our Savior was particularly revealing. She appealed for an expansion of spirituality from a private and individual model to a communal model that practices solidarity with fellow believers, regardless of geopolitical factors.

Again, Rosario Batlle, a Mexican-Puerto Rican Presbyterian (PCUSA) currently at the United Evangelical Theological Seminary in Madrid (Spain), told of her experience with African women who, through their study of the Bible, discovered the significance of women in early Christianity, as well as their own affirmation for leadership in churches. She spoke of finding her identity in the cross of Christ, warned of a danger in feminist and liberation theologies to label opponents as enemies, and sought ways of liberating the truth of the gospel rather than redesigning it.

Unfortunately, these positions were exceptions at Re-Imagining. When Chung Hyun Kyung, professor in theology at Ewha Women's University in Seoul, South Korea, mounted the podium, she announced, "A white Christian brother gave me an apple." Chung then took a bite from the Edenic apple and, with cheers from the audience, asked, "What taboo have you broken today?" A bit sophom*oric, perhaps, Chung's gesture nevertheless typified the spirit of subversion that permeated Re-Imagining, frequently in crude and irreverent expressions.

Arguing for a re-emphasis on the Spirit and a de-emphasis on Jesus, Delores Williams, professor of theology and culture at Union Seminary (N.Y.), spoke of the Incarnation as "the Spirit mounting Mary." Decrying the "pit of patriarchy …[that] distorts all relations in the created world and its institutions between human being and God," Johanna Bos, Presbyterian (PCUSA) professor of Old Testament at Louisville Theological Seminary, concluded, "We are not here to join the great pissing contest."

Nadine Addington introduced Susan Thistlethwaite, United Church of Christ professor of theology at Chicago Theological Seminary, by quoting Thistlethwaite's conversion to feminism: "I started to pray aloud, 'O Father,' and I stopped. 'O Brother,' and I waited. And then I said, 'O s-.' "

Melanie Morrison, cofounder of clout (Christian Lesbians Out Together), said, "I know in my heart that the canon is not closed, it is open. I know this because the Bible does not reconcile me with the earth and the Bible does not reconcile me with my sexual self." Morrison later delivered a lesbian altar call as a background chorus sang, "Keep on moving forward …never turning back." Jane Spahr, cofounder (with Morrison) of clout and lesbian evangelist for the Downtown Presbyterian Church of Rochester (N.Y.), claimed her theology was first of all informed by "making love with Coni," her lesbian partner.

The flaunting of such vulgarisms and sacrileges at Re-Imagining dispels the notion that they were aberrations from the agenda. They were calculated to represent it. No less disturbing were the cheers, applause, and occasional banging on tables that followed such spicy derisions. Most distressing, however, was an undisguised intolerance for other viewpoints, which belied the spirit of inclusivity, diversity, and nonviolence that was touted as the feminine way. No male voice was heard in four days of the conference (only 83 men attended), and never was heard an encouraging word about the masculine gender.

The most uncharitable accusations were targeted for the two whipping boys of liberalism, the Roman Catholic hierarchy and "fundamentalism." Among various aspersions, the Roman Catholic hierarchy was denounced by Beverly Harrison, United Methodist professor of Christian ethics at Union Seminary (N.Y.), as "the pedophile capital of the world." Fundamentalism, raked with malice and misunderstanding, was maligned as a movement rooted in fear, alienation, and the desire to deprive others of life.

IS THEOLOGY MERELY POETRY?

Re-Imagining was a carefully orchestrated event in which various patterns emerged that typified most, if not all, its speakers and liturgies. Its broad outlines can perhaps be captured in four angles of vision, the first of which is Re-Imagining's understanding of the nature of theology.

At the opening session, Mary Bednarowski, professor of religious studies at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities (Minn.), said, "We have come together from many parts of the world to re-imagine our religious traditions." Not only does our Christian tradition have "the resilience, the inexhaustible resources, and the creativity to sustain a re-imagining of its most central symbols," she continued, but the task of re-imagining them was incumbent upon those present. Similarly, Rosario Batlle spoke of theology as poetry that reflects the luminous experiences of our lives.

The characterization of theology as symbol or as poetic image was critical to the theological experimentation of Re-Imagining. A symbol or poetic image is like an abstract painting to which any number of meanings can be assigned, depending on the subjective impression of the viewer. No meaning can claim to be definitive or to exclude other and quite contrary meanings. If theological statements (for example, "we are justified by grace through faith") are essentially symbolic in nature, then they are, like various explanations put forth for the origin of the universe, for example, simply models of human understandings; or worse, like the assigning of a telephone number to a given address, they are arbitrary designations. If such is the case, then we are, of course, free to change the model or the number when doing so serves specific interests. This was the position advanced at Re-Imagining.

The Christian tradition is united in affirming, however, that theological statements are not primarily symbolic but descriptive—that is, they stand in a defining relationship to objective realities. For example, the statement "Michelangelo was a creative artist" claims to assert something true of Michelangelo, something that cannot be discarded without distortion or destruction of the truth to which it testifies. The validity of the assertion is not determined by what it may evoke in the one who makes it, which is the case with symbols and poetic images.

The theology of the church is like this. It strives to define (even if it is incapable of doing so perfectly) what is the saving core or kerygma of the gospel. Theology is not, as was bemoaned at Re-Imagining, something to "fence us in," "tie us up," "or justify male domination," but to identify, declare, and preserve the way of salvation. Hence, as Paul taught, we are responsible "to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted" (Rom. 6:17, NRSV). The truth claims of the gospel are not our claims, but Christ's, and following him, the apostles' and the church's. The responsibility of the church vis-a-vis those claims is not to re-imagine them, but to discover their significance for each generation and to transmit them. Sound doctrine is not a corral that confines but a map that directs to the goal of salvation, or, to use another metaphor, a set of harbor buoys that show the navigable passages between God and humanity.

IS ONE GOD ENOUGH?

A second hallmark of Re-Imagining was its understanding of God. It is not possible to identify a single prevailing view of God, for syncretism, polytheism, pantheism, and monism were all in evidence. But one thing was clear: the Triune God of Bible and creed was roundly circumvented.

Anne Primavesi, a "research theologian" from Dublin, Ireland, asked, "Is one God enough?" The primary expression of God, according to her reading of Genesis, is creation itself, from which she derived a nature mysticism. Only later, she claimed, was the divine presence in rocks, rivers, flowers, and trees limited to the word of revelation, "narrowed down, down, down until it becomes solely the revelation of Jesus Christ." In the voice of Moses the law-giver, this confining revelation became the voice of male domination, coercive over the whole creation. Like Marcion and the Gnostics of the early church, Primavesi drew a sharp distinction between the God of creation and the God of redemption. But unlike Marcion, whose creator Demiurge was a base and inferior God, Primavesi's creator God is superior to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. God is hence supremely incarnated in earth rather than in Jesus. The catechism, she pronounced, should read, "One God is not enough!"

Elizabeth Bettenhausen, ELCA coordinator of the Study/Action Program at the Women's Theological Center in Boston, condemned the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo as a boring doctrine, indeed, a violent act of male autonomy "that is downright dangerous for women's lives." The references to God in the plural in Genesis are, in Bettenhausen's judgment, only "to remind us, probably inadvertently, of the goddess and the earth from which he came." The audience was directed to pantheism over transcendence, to a spirituality of creation.

Even more than pantheism, however, a rampant syncretism characterized Re-Imagining. Chung Hyun Kyung, the apple-eater, described herself in these words: "My bowel is Shamanist, my heart is Buddhist, my right brain is Confucianist, and my left brain is Christian." A world parliament of religions reduced to one, Chung introduced her three special goddesses: Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction; Quani, a Buddhist goddess who prays for the abolition of hell; and Enna, a Philippine earth goddess. "These," she exclaimed, "are my new Trinity." This is, of course, simply a tri-theism, but it was nevertheless the extent of Trinitarian theology at Re-Imagining.

An opening naming ritual was introduced thus: "The naming of our God is a sacred act." In the Bible, of course, God's name is the result of his self-disclosure, as "Yahweh" at Sinai, but preeminently as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. At Re-Imagining, the audience was invited to supply its own names for God: divine ancestor, mother God, lover, alpha and omega, fire of love, she who is eternal, Sophia, earth mother, spirit woman, cosmic maxim, ninjan, womb of creation, prime mover, and yin and yang. Jesus Christ was not named.

The process of amalgamation was furthered by Kwok Pui-Lan, Chinese professor of theology at Episcopal Divinity School (Cambridge, Mass.). Appealing at points to the superiority of Confucianism and Mahayana Buddhism over Christianity, Kwok argued that assigning a referent to "God" was inherently irrational. The concepts of sin and guilt in Christianity were dismissed. "O Jesus," she said, "who are you that reconciles us to God? Who is this funny God? Who needs to be reconciled with him?" She argued rather for multiple incarnations and reincarnations. "The broken body of the HIV Thai prostitutes is now God's incarnate among us," she claimed. Again, Jesus has been reincarnated in the endangered environment, specifically as a fig tree. "If we cannot image Jesus as a tree, as a river, as wind, and as rain," she said, "we are doomed together. If we are forever anthropocentric in our search for the redeemer, we are doomed."

If there was a baseline God of Re-Imagining, it was the God of Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a Ghanian theologian: "The one God of many names," she said, "is the God of all creation." Never mind that the concept of God differs radically in the world's religions, and that to say everything is of God is to say nothing at all. We are again at a theology of abstraction, the inevitable result of forsaking the doctrine of revelation for a theology built purely from below. Whether Aristotle's Prime Mover or Virginia Ramey Mollenkott's monistic source of all that is, "God" becomes the ideal backdrop, in the words of Feuerbach, upon which we may project our own idiosyncrasies. At Re-Imagining the result was a decisive shift away from a salvation procured for us by the work of God in Jesus Christ to a salvation potential within creation. The doctrine of redemption, with its call for repentance and promise of transformation of self and society, was supplanted by a theology of immanence in which the distinction between God and the world was blurred or eliminated. What is, either is God, or is what God intended it to be.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JESUS?

A third characteristic of Re-Imagining was its perspective on Jesus Christ. As a rule, presenters spoke from their own experiences and contexts, and this lent a particularity to each story. Barbara Lundblad, pastor of Our Savior's Atonement Lutheran Church in New York City, alluded to the story of Jesus writing on the ground in John 8 and encouraged women "to write a word that has not been spoken before." Many stories were thus told at Re-Imagining, but the story of Jesus was not told.

It was not an oversight. On the second day of the conference, Lundblad announced euphorically, "Some authority would call our worship of last night verging on heresy. We did not last night name the name of Jesus. Nor have we done anything in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." Applause and cheers followed. In the 49 songs, chants, liturgies, and prayers contained in the Re-Imagining program book, the name of Christ appears twice; Jesus, only once (in an African-American spiritual). No prayer was addressed to Jesus, and none ended in his name (with the exception of an untranslated Amerindian prayer). "Amazing Grace" appears in the program with the caveat, "We will hum this piece without text." Talking circles were addressed to God, the Spirit, community, and the Minnesota Harvest Festival—but not to Jesus.

The cross and atonement were likewise subjected to derision and dismissed as sanctions for violence and oppression. Typical of many speakers was Delores Williams, who announced, "We have a whole different notion of incarnation." The first incarnation, she argued, took place not in Jesus but in the Spirit's visitation of Mary. The significance of Jesus for Williams consisted in the example of his life as "an ancestor-friend God." But he did not conquer sin on the cross. "I don't think we need a theory of atonement at all. I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff." For Williams, "the Spirit [rather than Jesus] tells us who God is." Likewise, Ingeline Neilsen, Swiss musicologist and missionary to Zimbabwe, condemned the hymn "Lift High the Cross" as an example of an oppressive view of God. For Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, professor of English at William Patterson College (N.J.), the cross symbolizes God as an abusive parent. The Atonement is "wild theology that encourages the violence of our streets."

John 14:6 affirms that Jesus "is the way, and the truth, and the life." Re-Imagining attested to many ways, truths, and lives. Jesus was not the definitive revealer of God and reconciler of humanity to God. He was, rather, one of various avatars, or manifestations, of God. For Mollenkott, Jesus is simply an elder brother, companion, and trailblazer, one among many siblings who shows us how to live in oneness with the divine source.

Nowhere was the offense against the central figure of Christian faith more blatant than in the concluding worship event. Preaching on the story of the Canaanite woman (Matt. 15:21-28), Christine Smith, professor of preaching and worship at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities (Minn.), presented the Canaanite woman as heroine and Jesus as villain, pleading for a world in which there is no begging, no humiliation, and no crumbs. In a Holy Communion look-alike entitled "Blessing over Milk and Honey," the worship leader invoked "Our maker Sophia," and engaged the audience in libidinal antiphony: "With the hot blood of our wombs we give form to new life…. With the milk of our breasts we suckle the children…. With nectar between our thighs we invite a lover, we birth a child; With our warm body fluids we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations." There was no mention of Jesus or his atoning sacrifice. The Song of Solomon was neatly substituted for Golgotha, eros for pathos, leaving no trace of the One who gave his life for the redemption of the world.

It is perhaps one thing to espouse such views from a podium where the audience is granted autonomy over against a presenter. But worship on the Lord's Day (read: Sophia's Day) is a more serious matter, for there the audience is transformed into a worshiping congregation. With the "Blessing over Milk and Honey" the mask was off Re-Imagining: it was, as more than one speaker attested, an evangelical event with its own specially minted theology, liturgy, and worship. One wonders how the clergy present could participate without violating their ordination vows.

IS SOPHIA GOD?

The role of divine revealer denied to Jesus at Re-Imagining was filled by Sophia. "Bless Sophia, dream the vision, share the wisdom, dwelling deep within" echoed some two-dozen times through Re-Imagining like the Gloria Patri in a Benedictine monastery. There are, to be sure, passages in the Old Testament that personify sophia (Greek for wisdom), and on occasion speak of her as an attribute of divine activity (see "In the name of Sophia," p. 43). At Re-Imagining, however, no speaker addressed the role of sophia within the biblical or theological tradition, and particularly the Eastern Orthodox tradition where it has played a significant role. Sophia, rather, was presented in unspecified relationship to the Christian tradition, independent and even alien to it.

Ostensibly, Sophia was intended to represent a feminine expression of the Holy Spirit, but in reality, Sophia was the elevation of an attribute of God (wisdom) to the place of God. The practical result was that Sophia became a subjective metaphor for the political, social, gender, sexual, or ecological preferences of various speakers. We have noted the shift in theological authority at Re-Imagining from transcendence to immanence. That is, theology was severed from its traditional moorings in the transcendence of God, the person and work of Christ, the institution of the church, and the Holy Scriptures, and rooted to human experience alone-a tendency, incidentally, increasingly characteristic of many modern theologies. Any distinction between the "Spirit" and human experience was effectively eliminated, thus positing ultimate authority in human experience, which, at Re-Imagining, meant feminine experience.

The endeavor to shift theology from dogmatic to experiential categories verged on spiritual narcissism. "I reverence the Presence within you," began an opening liturgy, after which participants were instructed, "Whisper the sacred word that is your name." Several speakers alluded to the divine within them. Aruna Gnanadason of the Church of South India wore a red dot on her forehead as a symbol of the divine in her. Chung Hyun Kyung of Korea spoke of spirituality as an archaeological excavation of the layers of God within her. Barbara Lundblad took the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 61, which Jesus applied uniquely to himself in Luke 4, and applied it to herself: "The Spirit has anointed me. I need to know that this word is spoken to me in the spirit of Sophia. Trust the stirring in your womb."

The problem with locating theological authority in human experience is that human experience varies, making an objective standard impossible. In the name of Jesus Christ, the Ku Klux Klan, "German Christians" under Hitler, and the death-to-abortionists faction have advocated things that Christians-including Christians at Re-Imagining-abhor. The authority of human experience leads to the oldest and most violent ethic in the world: might makes right.

The equating of the Spirit with human experience at Re-Imagining resulted in elevating "the evil of patriarchy" to mythic proportions. Never defined, "patriarchy" fulfilled the stereotype of Re-Imagining that "subhuman" fulfills for the Fascist and "capitalism" for the Communist. In a story narrated by Aruna Gnanadason, patriarchy replaced sin as the source of all evil in the world. Man seized the demon of patriarchy to brutalize the creation, including woman, his innocent victim. The church, with its "brain-damaging theology," sanctions the present state of oppression. There is only one thing patriarchy cannot stamp out, however. That is the feminine spirit, compassionate and regenerating, which will ultimately prevail.

Gnanadason's mythic archetype might have been dismissed as a theological melodrama were it not echoed in Dirty Harry-epithets from speaker after speaker. One was left blinking in incredulity at such a simplistic-and self-righteous-world-view. But the show went on. Most of the fallout from the blast on patriarchy landed in the lap of the church. A male-dominated clearing house of power over women, the church became the object of all sorts of drive-by shootings from speakers. The upshot was that the institutional church was effectively eliminated as a viable community of faith. Virginia Mollenkott made it explicit when she advised that "it may be necessary for the substantial liberated minority in every denomination to leave the denomination in order to form the holistic church."

Re-Imagining's theology of immanence came to most explicit elaboration in sexual imagery. Susan Thistlethwaite declared, "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism." The motif pervaded Re-Imagining at every level. It was most apparent in the default apology for lesbianism, hom*osexuality, transgenderism, and bisexuality that characterized Re-Imagining. Not a few speakers identified themselves as lesbian. Decrying "the unspeakable treatment of lesbian and bisexual women in mainline churches," Mary Hunt, Roman Catholic feminist of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (water) in Silver Spring (Md.), stated, "To be an out lesbian in Christian church circles is to live threatened with spiritual if not physical death." Quoting Mollenkott that "grace is a lesbian," Hunt urged breaking with "preoccupation with eternal truth …and the excess baggage of patriarchy." "People doing justice [for hom*osexual rights] …is what it means to me to be religious. Whether it is Christian or not is frankly, darling, something about which I no longer give a pope."

An appeal for consensual sexual acts followed in consort with the affirmation of lesbianism. "Imagine sex among friends as the norm," continued Mary Hunt, "young people learning to make friends rather than to date. Imagine valuing genital sexual interaction in terms of whether or how it fosters friendship and pleasure…. Pleasure is our birthright."

THE JUDGMENT OF HULDAH

Re-Imagining gave voice to the pain and alienation that many women experience in the church. Christians, especially those who affirm Galatians 3:28, for example, should hear such pain with a renewed commitment to the equality of women as coheirs of salvation and as complementary partners in the church. But Re-Imagining was not the way to go about it, as has been recognized from many quarters. Re-Imagining's radical revisionism with respect to the way theology is done, the nature of God, the significance of the Incarnation, and the person of the Holy Spirit poses a theological danger that the church cannot ignore if it is to remain the church.

The steering committee and various denominational leaders have labeled critics of Re-Imagining as divisive and factious. A postconference communique warned that "Unofficial conservative publications within …denominations have attacked the conference as heretical and pagan." The attempt to deflect responsibility with words like unofficial and conservative is a lame ad hominem. That is like accusing doctors of jeopardizing health for attacking illness, or the police of disrupting communities because they prosecute crime. What other word besides heresy is appropriate where the Incarnation and Trinity were dismissed, where orthodoxy was derided, where Scripture was repeatedly contradicted, and where a goddess named Sophia was actively promoted? It is not those who name heresy who divide the church, but those who practice it!

In conclusion, 2 Kings 22 preserves a judgment that is of significance for Re-Imagining. During King Josiah's reign, repairs were undertaken on the temple. "The book of the Law" (Deuteronomy) was discovered and read before the king, who directed the prophetess Huldah to be consulted, "for great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us." Huldah's interpretation did nothing to allay the king. "Behold, I will bring evil upon this place and its inhabitants," said the prophetess. Johanna Bos interpreted Huldah's prophecy as a condemnation of male domination of the temple, fulminating, "This old house of patriarchy has got to come down."

That is a decidedly idiosyncratic interpretation. Huldah's prophecy is not about male domination or patriarchy. It is about apostasy and idolatry, the very things that characterized Re-Imagining. "Because they have forsaken me and have burned incense to other gods, …therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place" (2 Kings 22:17).

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James R. Edwards is professor of religion at Jamestown College, Jamestown, North Dakota.

Copyright © 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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It is unnerving to say that the most godly person I have ever known is my father, James "Buck" Hatch, who turns 80 this year—unnerving because he has never been a tower of strength. Those of us who have known him best saw his weaknesses as clearly as his strengths. Grace amid weakness is, I suppose, the theme of this birthday tribute, for it was through his brokenness, not his strength, that he brought healing attention to the shadowed interior rooms of people's lives. His life has much to say about the nature of Christian ministry.

A painfully shy person, always near the brink of depression, Buck has experienced life more as a vale of tears than as a vista of opportunities. I often remember Dad coming to dinner—a boisterous affair with four sons—and just sitting at the table, not uttering a word.

His life cannot be canonized as an all-American success story. It was his father who had been the Horatio Alger type, rising from poverty on a hard-scrabble North Carolina farm to ownership of a prosperous hosiery mill in Charlotte. My father had little use for the respectability my grandfather sought. Driving a Pierce Arrow, owning a fashionable home, joining the country club-these did nothing to fill the void of a soul not at home with itself.

Why his eldest son consistently forfeited opportunities for success was an enormous puzzle to my grandfather. An honors student at Duke University, Buck abandoned his pursuit of a career in medicine, much to his father's dismay, after a powerful conversion experience drew him toward the ministry. He served for a time as a Presbyterian minister in Mississippi and then did graduate work in psychology at the University of Chicago under the renowned Carl Rogers. Once again he refused to use his degree as a professional springboard. He went to work for what his father feared was an upstart, fundamentalist institution, Columbia Bible College. To my grandfather, a dyed-in-the-wool member of Charlotte's staid First Presbyterian Church, this made no sense.

Without fanfare, for over 40 years, my father has poured himself into people at Columbia Bible College and the surrounding community. Year after year he taught classes in Scripture, biblical hermeneutics, psychology, and family life. His office was open ten hours a week for counseling, a pattern he continues today without charging a fee.

My parents' relationship has been a model of gentleness and mutual respect. Dad was the most untypical Southern gentlemen I have known. He didn't wait around to be waited upon. From bathing the children to washing the dishes, he did whatever would be of most help to my mother. Mother, in turn, used our home and her warm hospitality to enhance Buck's calling. Their commitment to a common ministry cemented their beautiful relationship. Toward this end, they gladly submitted themselves to each other.

Dad has been no respecter of persons. He has naturally gravitated to "little" people, the ungifted, the unattractive, those often regarded as unlovely, or troublesome, or unuseful. One deeply wounded person whom he counseled for years wrote, "You have been Jesus in flesh and bone to me."

As an adolescent, I could never understand how the ministry of my shy and private father reverberated with such power in people's lives. When he taught, people listened, riveted. When he preached, people's views of God and themselves changed, often in dramatic ways. And when he counseled, broken people tasted healing.

No amount of analysis can explain the contagious quality of love he radiates: he is a vessel simply brimming with the powerful love of Christ. But it is instructive to think about the central characteristics of his life and ministry.

OUTRAGEOUS AFFIRMATION

Describing my father's character requires a word that is the antithesis of judgmental. Robertson McQuilkin, Dad's longtime friend and colleague, coined it on my parents' fiftieth anniversary when he wrote, "Your affirmation was constant and outrageous."

That's the word—outrageous. Buck showers boundless affirmation upon family, friends, and students alike. A family friend recently told me he regularly visits my parents' home feeling that his life is a failure, and he always comes away buoyed with hope. "I could walk into Mr. Hatch's house unshaven, dirty, and completely disheveled," he noted. "If I had only one strand of hair in place, Buck would stop me to note how great I looked."

What a refreshing gift—to release others from judging themselves severely. In the exercise of this gift, Buck's life and beliefs converge. The depths of his own experience awakened him to the heights of divine grace and care. His bedrock conviction: God is far more reliable, faithful, and forgiving than his people imagine.

Dad has known that inner yearnings for the embrace of God are rarely fulfilled, that people hear the message of grace but seldom believe it intended for them. Whatever people profess about God's love and care, Buck knows the default mode of the human heart: God seems aloof and indifferent, and we are distanced from him by our repeated failures and lack of faith.

Dad's single-minded goal throughout his preaching, teaching, and counseling has been this—to remove the veils that keep people from seeing God's lovingkindness. As Philip Yancey once noted in a letter, Dad's influence was key in "unpolluting" his faulty concepts of God. Dad's purpose, as Augustine put it, was to "restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God might be seen." He did not chide people for their lack of spiritual vitality. Instead, deftly as a surgeon, he lifted away layer upon opaque layer of guilt and shame. In Buck Hatch's presence, people experienced love and acceptance.

Buck lived what he taught—unconditional love. He knew nothing of stern fundamentalist moralism, despite living in an environment steeped in it. Instead, he gravitated to those who were out of step: the lonely, the rebellious, the angry, the confused-and particularly anyone whose self-esteem had been stripped away. Scores of letters to my parents attest to his rare ability to pour himself into hurting people. One student wrote: "You have been a father to the hundreds of people who needed a father like you."

OWNING BROKENNESS

The sterling quality of my dad's ministry was not forged without great cost. Through the goodness of God over fourscore years, my father has come to radiate a deep and abiding joy. But you could not call him a happy person. He has always wrestled with thorns in the flesh that drove him not to rely on himself.

Buck Hatch bore the scars of a terribly dysfunctional family, whatever its outward success may have been. He remembers sitting at the top of the stairs, night after night, straining to hear a single kind word between his parents. He always climbed into bed disappointed.

The second of five children, Buck seemed most buffeted by his shattered home life. Although bright, he was insecure, melancholy, and introverted. His older sister and two younger brothers, however, came to maturity visibly confident, outgoing, and successful. One brother became student body president at Wheaton College where a friend described him as the most natural leader he knew. Similarly, his sister was a professional woman in the 1950s, rising to be director of personnel at the Carson, Pirie, Scott department store in Chicago.

Their success was short-lived. My aunt became a chronic alcoholic and lost her job, her apartment on the Magnificent Mile, and her exquisite furniture. My uncle's story was yet more tragic. After serving as a chaplain in World War II, he openly renounced the ministry and his faith, cut off ties with the family, and lived a meager existence, bouncing from odd job to odd job, until his death. Another brother, whose life as a young man seemed stable and prosperous, witnessed the collapse of his personal and family life. He died prematurely, his health also compromised by alcoholism.

This story of a shattered family is a parable of grace. Buck Hatch, who began his pilgrimage carrying the heaviest burden, found strength in his infirmity and became a stronghold for his troubled siblings. My aunt, beaten and fatigued, moved in with my parents, who worked patiently to get her back on her feet.

Dad's sister-in-law, rudely divorced by his brother, also moved to Columbia and found loving support in our home. Years later she wrote my parents: "I am not writing this letter just for myself. This comes from all the Hatches alive and dead whom you two have loved, helped in so many ways, and prayed for through the years. … [You have] helped a very unhappy and sorrow-filled woman get her life back together-again so gently, so lovingly and unfailingly there when needed."

Dad never fled from his own brokenness or tried to paper it over. It is this lack of pretense that people found so winsome. My dad's brokenness, not his strength, gives him ready access into the interior rooms of people's lives. He typically listens more than he speaks. When he does have something to say, it springs from deep wells of experience. And when people confess to him their dark nights of the soul, they do not get pat solutions but an embrace from one who has also traversed the darkness.

AFFIRMING THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL

My father always laughs at any suggestion of his being an intellectual and points to my mother whose love for books outstrips his own. Yet from the time of his graduate training at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, my dad pursued a serious intellectual agenda: how to relate the natural "truths" of modern psychology to biblical revelation. In personal terms, he explored what it meant to have a relationship with God for those severely wounded by broken relationships.

This was Dad's passion a generation before the church became awash in therapeutic forms of Christianity. Dad rejected any suggestion that he was an authority on the subject and refused to put his thoughts into writing, despite repeated suggestions from former students. Yet his insights were profound.

In his teaching and counseling, Dad emphasized an incarnational view of reality, a careful blend and balance of the natural and the spiritual. He did not, for example, expect quick and easy spiritual solutions to problems faced by Christians who had been denied healthy intimate relationships. If Christianity is a relationship, my father reasoned, how can someone who has grown up in a web of poisoned relationships learn to identify with a nurturing and covenant-keeping God? Like the Swiss physician Paul Tournier, Dad emphasized that new life in Christ does not free us from obedience to the natural order. In other words, no progress in faith erases a person's past. Everything that has been lived and gathered by experience still exists and must be reckoned with.

At the same time, Dad insisted that helping people to cope psychologically was only the beginning of the pilgrimage to know God and his ways. Effective counseling, as he saw it, allowed people to get beyond themselves and prepared them to encounter the matchless grace of God, the only enduring reason for living.

Moving easily among these diverse realities—psychological, theological, and pastoral—gave my father acute insight into how broken people easily miss the essence of the gospel. How do hurting people negotiate the lofty expectations of the Christian life? The Bible speaks of a life characterized by love, joy, and peace, yet people often look within and find pain, frustration, and bitterness. Buck Hatch understood that the logical reaction for many was to despair of living a fruitful Christian life. Similarly, he understood the tendency of persons who had not known much affirmation to try to win God's acceptance through a flurry of good works.

With words gentle but firm, Dad called a halt to the cycle of guilt that plagued these Christians. He insisted that the gospel offered no quick fixes for deep-seated dispositions of the soul. Using Jeremiah, a man of tears, he was able to explain to some why life, given their backgrounds, would be a continuing struggle. At the same time, he pointed them to a faithful Savior whose mercy was always new. My father knew that for some, just getting through each day could be a glorious victory of grace.

Try as they might, some people over the years were slow to believe that God loved and understood them. Yet they could count on the acceptance of at least one other person. Bitter travail and gracious healing allowed this friend to stand in the stead of his Savior.

My father's ministry became widespread despite his best efforts to keep it small and local. He resisted lecturing at other institutions, putting his thoughts into print, or—perish the thought—creating a clinic or a parachurch organization to continue his work.

We live in a day when Christians strive to emulate the latest successful ministry, unaware that as a goal that is a contradiction in terms. The life of Buck Hatch is a vivid reminder that the divine economy inverts natural priorities. In Christ's kingdom, the last shall be first, life is saved by losing it, and weakness confounds strength. In the greatest paradox of all, bitter affliction may allow the power of Christ to rest upon us. This is the best training I could have received in a religion that worships a crucified Savior.

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Nathan Hatch is vice president for graduate studies and research at the University of Notre Dame.

Copyright © 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The awareness of sin used to be our shadow. Christians hated sin, feared it, fled from it, grieved over it. Some of our grandparents agonized over their sins; a man who lost his temper might wonder whether he could still go to Holy Communion. A woman who for years envied her more attractive and intelligent sister might worry that this sin threatened her very salvation.

But now the shadow has faded. Nowadays, the accusation you have sinned is often said with a grin and a tone that signals an inside joke. At one time, this accusation still had the power to jolt people. Catholics lined up to confess their sins; Protestant preachers rose up to confess our sins. And they did it regularly. Their view was that confessing our sin is like taking out the garbage: once is not enough. As a child growing up in the fifties among Western Michigan Calvinists, I think I heard as many sermons about sin as I did about grace. The assumption in those days seemed to be that you could not understand either without understanding both.

Many American Christians recall sermons in which preachers got visibly angry over a congregation's sin. When these preachers were in full cry, they would make red-faced, finger-pointing, second-person plural accusations: "You are sinners-filthy, miserable, greasy sinners!" Occasionally, these homiletical indictments veered awfully close to the second-person singular.

Of course, the old preachers sometimes appeared to forget that their audience included sincere and mature believers. (You wondered what language they would have saved for Himmler or Stalin!) Such preachers were also capable of sounding self-righteous: their own hearts were pure, they wanted you to believe, and even when they were adolescent they yearned much less for sex than for Sunday school.

Still, you were never in doubt what these preachers were talking about. They were talking about sin. In today's group confessionals it is harder to tell. The newer language of Zion fudges: "Let us confess our problem with human relational adjustment dynamics, and especially our feebleness in networking." Or, "I'd just like to share that we just need to target holiness as a growth area." Where sin is concerned, people mumble now.

Why should we speak up? The reason is that although traditional Christianity is true, its truth saws against the grain of much in contemporary culture and therefore needs constant sharpening. Christianity's major doctrines need regular restatement so that people may believe them, or believe them anew.

But anyone who tries to recover the knowledge of sin these days must overcome long odds. To put it mildly, modern consciousness does not encourage moral reproach; in particular, it does not encourage self-reproach. Preachers mumble about sin. The other traditional custodians of moral awareness often ignore, trivialize, or evade it. Some of these evasions take time and training. As sociologist James Davison Hunter has observed, schoolteachers no longer say anything as pointed as "Stop it, please! You're disturbing the class!" for these are judgmental words. Instead, to a strong-armed youth who is rattling classroom windows with his tennis ball, educationally correct teachers put a sequence of caring questions: "What are you doing? Why are you doing it? How does doing this make you feel?"

The word sin, Hunter adds, now finds its home mostly on dessert menus. "Peanut Butter Binge" and "Chocolate Decadence" are sinful; lying is not. The measure for sin is caloric.

Recently, however, a few of the older breezes have begun to blow again. In 1990, a mainline syndicated columnist wondered "Why Nothing Is 'Wrong' Anymore." In 1992 the vice-president of the United States drew guffaws from talk-show types when he complained that TV's Murphy Brown made voluntary single parenthood look like merely another lifestyle option-and a glamorous one at that-but he also drew widespread support from people (including "Newsweek" and "Atlantic Monthly" cover-story writers) who were otherwise barely tolerant of his quixoticisms.

In the summer of 1993, the "New York Times Book Review" ran a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, and MTV produced a special video on the same topic. Though, as John Leo commented in "U.S. News & World Report," the "Times" pieces were often artsy and arcane, and the MTV production so fragmented and trivial as to suggest that its spokespersons really lacked a vocabulary and frame of reference sturdy enough for the topic, the fact that these sources addressed the topic at all was surprising and newsworthy.

The same summer (July 1993) "Theology Today" devoted a whole issue to serious discussion of sin, including essays on contrition, civil sin, and preaching on sin. Mindful of decades of trivializing where sin is concerned, Thomas G. Long titled his editorial introduction "God Be Merciful to Me, A Miscalculator."

In one of the best known and most widely reproduced editorials on morality in the nineties ("The Joy of What?" Dec. 12, 1991), the "Wall Street Journal" counted the beads on a string of public sex scandals-Anita Hill's abuse charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Magic Johnson's confession that his HIV infection was a by-product of promiscuous sexual athleticism, William Kennedy Smith's grimy testimony in his Palm Beach rape trial. The Journal then said this: "The United States has a drug problem and a high school sex problem and a welfare problem and an AIDS problem and a rape problem. None of this will go away until more people in positions of responsibility are willing to come forward and explain, in frankly moral terms, that some of the things people do nowadays are wrong." Remarkably, the Journal strongly implied that it was high time we got the word sin out of mothballs and began to use it again and to mean it.

Samuel Johnson said that we need to be reminded much more often than instructed. Sin is no exception. Indeed, for most of us a healthy reminder of our sin and guilt is clarifying and even assuring. For, unlike some other identifications of human trouble, a diagnosis of sin and guilt allows hope. Something can be done for this malady. Something has been done for it.

But reminders must be timely. Books on sin today must meet concerns and untie knots that did not worry Augustine and Calvin. They were not worried about the flattening of human majesty in modern naturalism or of human corruption in Enlightenment humanism. They did not wonder at the Californian tendency to conflate salvation and self-esteem. Nor did they meet a widespread cultural assumption that the proper place to inquire about the root causes of human evil is a department of psychology or of sociology.

How must the doctrine of sin be taught in settings where pride is no longer viewed with alarm-where, in fact, it is sometimes praised and cultivated? Or where the apostle Paul's intimidatingly detailed lists of virtues and vices have shrunk to tolerance and intolerance, respectively? Or where democratic impulses have heightened our sensitivity to sins against inequality but have also invaded spaces formerly reserved for the transcendently holy? What can the Christian church say about sin in settings where it has itself contributed much to such tendencies, including the tendency to democratize God?

My goal, as suggested, is to renew the knowledge of a persistent reality that used to evoke in us fear, hatred, and grief. Many of us have lost this knowledge, and we ought to regret the loss. For slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, is both pleasant and devastating. Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system. What is devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually, we make ourselves religiously so tone deaf that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of the breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint.

To renew our memory of the integrity of creation and to sharpen our eye for the beauty of grace, we have to know our sin. In the space that remains, let us remind ourselves of one particular category of sin-the sins of evasion, the moves we make to avoid God-given responsibilities.

FLIGHT

"The West has finally achieved the rights of man … but man's sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer."

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

At Yale University in the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted a controversial set of psychological experiments to test human willingness to act harshly on command. He gives us a report in his book "Obedience to Authority." What Milgram discovered tells us much-much more than is comfortable to know-about our readiness to evade responsibility.

Through ads in the local paper soliciting volunteers at a generous hourly rate for "a scientific study of memory and learning," supplemented by a later random mailing, Milgram gathered a diverse pool of subjects. By appointment, these people appeared singly at Yale's Interaction Laboratory where they met the experimenter, a youngish man in a gray laboratory coat, and also a portly, middle-aged man they supposed to be another subject like themselves, but who was actually an actor trained by Milgram.

By casting rigged lots, the experimenter arranged in each case for the genuinely naive subject to be the "teacher" in the study and for the actor to be the "learner." The subject was told that the idea of the experiment was to test the effect of punishment on learning and that, as teacher, his task would be to administer penalty shocks to the learner each time the learner returned an incorrect answer to one of the test questions.

The actor-learner was then strapped into a kind of electric chair and assured in the subject's presence that though the shocks could be "extremely painful," they would cause "no permanent tissue damage." The subject, in turn, was placed before an imposing shock generator said to be connected to the learner. This generator featured a long horizontal row of switches labeled in voltages ranging from "15 volts" to "450 volts," with groups of the switches additionally designated as "slight shock," "moderate shock," "strong shock," "intense shock," up to "danger-severe shock," and, finally, to a simple, ominous "XXX."

During the tests, the actor (who, of course, was actually receiving no shocks at all) proved to be a most unpromising student. Out of every four questions, he got about three wrong. After each miss, the experimenter instructed the subject to shock the learner with the next highest jolt-beginning at 15 volts and moving up through 30 levels to the maximum 450 volts-and to announce before each shock the present level of voltage.

The actor-learner responded convincingly to this steadily intensifying punishment: he grunted at 75 volts, protested at 120 volts, and demanded at 150 volts to be released from the experiment. At 180 volts the learner cried out "I can't stand the pain," and, at 270 volts, he emitted what "can only be described as an agonizing scream." At 300 volts the learner shouted desperately that he would no longer cooperate by trying to answer questions, and after 330 volts he lapsed into dead silence.

Naturally, many subjects found their role in this drama progressively upsetting. Thus, when they turned questioningly to the experimenter, he prodded them, as necessary, with a sequence of increasingly authoritative commands: "Please continue," then "The experiment requires that you continue," then "It is absolutely essential that you continue," and finally, "You have no other choice, you must go on."

Under such pressure, most subjects began to show signs of strain. Some merely blipped the victim for a millisecond instead of really zapping him. Some tried to reduce the strain by such subterfuges as signaling the answer to the victim. Many also dissented verbally from the unexpectedly painful course the experiment was taking-while still continuing to press the switches. At every stage, a number of disobedient subjects quit. But obedient subjects reduced their distress by some ploy, maintained loyalty to the experimenter, and kept on buzzing the learner right through his protests.

How many obeyed? Much depended on the proximity of subject and victim. When the learner was in another room and could not be heard except for his urgent pounding on the wall late in the test, 65 percent of the subjects inflicted the harshest punishment. When subjects could hear the victim's cries, but not see him very well, their compliance dipped slightly to 62 percent. When the victim moved into the same room with the subject-who now had to hear the victim's protests and see his looks of panic and reproach-compliance dropped to a still substantial 40 percent. (Some of the compliant subjects reduced their strain by trying to twist their heads around so that they would not have to see the victim.) Even when subjects were ordered to force their dull student's hand down onto the shock plate in order to stimulate him to do better, an alarming 30 percent still shocked their victim clear up to 450 volts.

Why? Why would any ordinary person punish an innocent, protesting, screaming, and finally silent stranger in this way? None of the obedient shockers looked like scrofulous monsters. Most gave little outward indication that they were even particularly aggressive, let alone hostile. A number identified themselves as members in good standing of Christian churches. Virtually all of them, when interviewed, stated their opposition, in principle, to hurting innocent people. Yet, what they rejected in principle they did in practice, however distressed they felt about it. They did it because somebody in a laboratory coat told them that they had no choice.

What the Milgram experiments show is that the same pattern of obedience to authority that binds children to parents, pupils to teachers, citizens to police officers, even airline passengers to flight attendants—the same pattern on which society depends for order and stability—can also transform us into tools of evil. The sobering truth is that given their readiness to obey, given enough pressure to reinforce this readiness, decent people will assault innocent strangers on demand and thus evade one of their most basic moral and spiritual responsibilities.

What is this responsibility? In its interpretation of the sixth commandment ("You shall not kill"), the Heidelberg Catechism states not only what the commandment prohibits, but also what it requires:

Q. Is it enough … that we do not kill our neighbor?

A. No. … God tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves, to be patient, peace-loving, gentle, merciful, and friendly to them, to protect them from harm as much as we can. …

Of course, the subjects in the Milgram experiments were caught in a bind. They knew as well as anybody that we ought to be friendly to others and protect them from harm as much as we can. In interviews they said they knew this. But they were also in the habit of obeying authority. Moreover, by signing up for the experiment and accepting payment for their role in it, they had implicitly promised to comply with its provisions. And, initially at least, what reason did they have for distrusting these provisions? Weren't the subjects entitled to assume that a social scientist within the walls of a prestigious university knew what he was doing?

They were. But as their auditory space began to fill with the learner's protests, pleas, and agonizing screams, the subjects also had to face the realization-almost unthinkable-that they had blundered into the laboratory of a madman and had made themselves his agents. Some quit. Others resolved the conflict by obediently electrifying their neighbor-a number of them continuing to defend their compliance even in the postexperiment dehoaxing sessions.

Again, why? In his analysis, Milgram describes what he calls "the agentic state." A person is likely to shift into the agentic state, says Milgram, every time he enters a hierarchical structure held together by various levels of authority. Once inside the structure, he no longer thinks of himself as a responsible moral subject, but only as an agent of others. He comes to see himself not as a person, but as an instrument; not as a center of moral responsibility, but as a tool.

Moreover, once shifted into an agentic state, he finds it remarkably hard to shift back. He is in too deep. He has too much momentum built up. Shifting into disobedience is at that point like trying to shift a car into reverse at 30 miles per hour. He finds himself bound to a morally deteriorating situation that he wants to abandon, but he cannot find a good, clean place to break off. It seems so bumptious to say to a person with a laboratory smock, a clipboard, and the aura of science about him that his experiment is obviously out of control and that it is time to quit. Who can say that? Who dares to disrupt a well-defined social situation in this way?

Not enough of us. The record of wrongful subservience to authority-from Nazi Germany to My Lai to Watergate to everyday life in business and industry-is notorious and discouraging. Somebody commands a soldier to shoot civilians through the back of the neck, or a plant foreman to fire a whistleblower, or an attorney to suborn perjury, or a secretary to destroy evidence, and people obey. They may not like to do it, or want to do it, but they do it. They then defend themselves with the standard rationalization: "I was only following orders." "If it were up to me, I wouldn't do it, but I have to do as I'm told."

Copyright © 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Few recent controversies have been as explosive as the one raging around the invocation of Sophia in worship, especially at the ecumenical Re-Imagining conference held last year in Minneapolis. Before that conference caused such a stir, few Christians realized the Christian heritage of that word: sophia is the Greek word for wisdom. The New Testament uses it when speaking, for instance, of the wisdom of God (Rom. 11:33; 1 Cor. 1:24; Eph. 3:10). However, other religious systems around that time had a goddess named Sophia, so the word can also express pagan notions.

Nevertheless, it also plays an important role in Scripture. In the Old Testament, Wisdom (chokma in Hebrew, sophia in the Greek Old Testament) is often celebrated, and most lavishly in Proverbs 1-9. Wisdom is there personified in female form. She is praised in exalted terms: "all the things you may desire cannot compare with her" (3:15), for "she is a tree of life" (3:18), and her "fruit is better than gold" (8:19). Wisdom cries out in the streets, especially encouraging the "simple" and "scoffers" to gain deeper understanding (1:20-23; 8:1-6). Nonetheless, most people reject her (1:24-27).

Wisdom also has a cosmic role: "I have been established from everlasting," she sings, "from the beginning, before there was ever an earth" (8:23). When God created, "I was beside him as a master craftsman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him" (8:30). Yet despite these lofty functions, Wisdom in Proverbs does not seem to be an actual divine being, but rather a personification of one of Yahweh's attributes.

This Wisdom imagery expands in later Hebrew literature, most of it now found in the Apocrypha. Since Protestants have not accepted these writings as canonical, they are often unaware of how great an impact some of it had on the New Testament. But notice the apocryphal book Wisdom, which declares that Sophia "pervades and penetrates all things. / For she is a breath of the power of God, / a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty. … / a reflection of eternal light, / a spotless mirror of the working of God, / And an image of his goodness" (Wisdom 7:25-26).

Now compare this with Hebrews 1:3, which calls Jesus, God's Son, "the brightness of his glory / and the express image of his person, / and upholding all things through the word of his power." Almost all biblical scholars agree that in formulating this description, the writer of Hebrews was significantly influenced by the former passage.

Hebrew Wisdom imagery also helped shape John's concept of Christ as the Word (logos). Like Wisdom, the Word was with God from the beginning (John 1:1-2; Prov. 8:22-23; Wisdom 6:22; Sirach 24:9). Both manifest God's glory (John 1:14; Wisdom 7:25) and bestow light and life (John 1:4-5, 9; Wisdom 7:26; Prov. 3:18). Like Wisdom, the Word descended from heaven to bestow God's truth (John 1:14, 17-18; Sirach 24:8-11; Baruch 3:37; Wisdom 9:9-10), but was not generally received (John 1:11; Prov. 1:24-27; 1 Enoch 42). These themes appear not only in John's prologue (1:1-18), but also throughout his gospel.

Wisdom imagery also lies behind Colossians 1:15-17. This text, Hebrews 1:2-3, and John 1:1-18 are probably the three most extensive New Testament affirmations of Christ's deity. Many evangelical commentaries illuminate these passages' indebtedness to Wisdom terminology (see, for instance, the relevant volumes in the "New International Commentary on the New Testament" [Eerdmans] and the "Word Biblical Commentary").

Moreover, most participants in the Christological controversies of the early Christian centuries, which formed the classical confessions of Christ's deity, understood Wisdom in Proverbs 8 to refer to Christ. Jaroslav Pelikan, dean of current church historians, maintains that in this process "the basis for the fullest statement of … the divine in Christ as Logos was provided not by … John 1:1-14 but by Proverbs 8:22-31."

If Sophia/Wisdom imagery occurs in such basic texts, it should not surprise us to find it elsewhere. Paul, in fact, calls Christ "the Wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:24; cf. 1:30). Matthew seems to indicate that Jesus regarded himself as Wisdom. Consider, for example, Jesus' well-known words "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls" (Matt. 11:28-29).

This seems similar to Sophia's call in Sirach 51:26-27: "Draw near to me, you who are untaught … why are your souls very thirsty? … Put your neck under the yoke, and let your souls receive instruction. … See with your eyes that I have labored little and have found for myself much rest."

Moreover, Luke reports that the "Wisdom of God" said, "I will send them prophets and apostles … " (Luke 11:49); yet, in the parallel passage in Matthew, Jesus himself says, "I will send you prophets … " (Matt. 23:34).

The basic point of this biblical overview should be clear: the central New Testament texts that affirm the deity of Jesus Christ draw on language about Wisdom/Sophia. Now, if the New Testament authors could employ Sophia imagery to describe the God revealed in Christ, contemporary Christians can surely make some valid use of it in worshiping this same God.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

But alas!-the issue of how we can use Wisdom language in worship, as the current furor attests, is far from simple. For although Sophia terminology was applied to Jesus in ancient times, it also designated non-Christian deities. How, then, in our world, where Sophia language is unfamiliar and open to misuse, might the church employ it? Let me suggest several guiding principles.

The first, fundamental principle of Christian worship must be that worship can be addressed only to the One, Trinitarian God. Worship of any other god or goddess is idolatry (1 Cor. 8:5-6).

A second worship principle, however, is that experience of this Trinitarian God is varied. As Creator of everything that is, and as Bestower of a many-sided, far-reaching redemption, the Christian God is known and praised through a wide range of creatures and activities. For this reason, Christian worship has ascribed a great variety of adjectives and names to God.

Consider, for instance, the beloved hymn "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise." I find 18 adjectives or names for God in its first two stanzas. Some-such as the mysterious "unresting, unhasting, and silent as light"-do not appear to be literal equivalents of biblical words. The poet's creativity played a role in forming them. Yet they surely evoke awe of the biblical God.

"Wisdom" is among those titles often ascribed to Christ. Consider, for example, the moving imagery of an English text associated with Bach's exalted music: "Jesu, Joy of man's desiring / Holy Wisdom, Love most bright; / Drawn by Thee, our hearts aspiring / Soar to Uncreated Light."

As with many other titles, Wisdom can sometimes be applied to Jesus without specifying who is meant. For instance, each stanza of the familiar "O come, O come, Emmanuel" begins by invoking a different name: Emmanuel, Rod of Jesse, Dayspring, Key of David, Wisdom, and Desire of Nations. Since it is clear who is being addressed, the words Jesus and Christ do not-and need not-appear in this hymn.

According to our second principle of worship, then, there is no reason why Sophia could not function as a divine title, or a source of imagery, enriching Christian awareness of God. Yet any such use must be consistent with our first principle: It should be clear that such worship is being directed to the Triune God alone.

Since Sophia is presently unfamiliar to most Christians, and is troubling to some, this title and its associated imagery is best used in conjunction with others that clearly refer to Christ or God. Sophia seems more likely to arouse objections when this name is invoked alone, allowing the impression that a different deity is being addressed.

Although Christian worship should engage the emotions and senses and does not always need to be filtered through the rational mind, it should always be consistent with Christian teaching. Thus, when new themes are being introduced, some instruction is helpful. Moreover, when novel or questionable practices emerge, it is appropriate to ask whether they accord with the church's beliefs.

A POLEMICAL CLAMOR

I am glad that questions are being raised about events like Re-Imagining because some features accompanying the current Sophia emphasis are questionable in light of Scripture. For instance, while the Bible indeed teaches that God is "immanent," or present in some sense everywhere (Jer. 23:24; Eph. 1:23), the biblical God is also "transcendent," or vastly superior to and different from everything else; similarly, while Jesus Christ is like us in being fully human, Christ is quite unlike us in being fully divine.

Much current Sophia worship, however, is so focused on an immanent divine presence, and seems to regard Jesus as so little different from us, that one can often ask whether anything other than the depths of nature or the human self is being invoked, and hence divinized. When numerous such expressions emerge at a conference funded and attended by several denominations, church members can appropriately question them.

I am not entirely happy, however, with how this questioning has occurred. We live in a society where people's awareness, shaped by the news and entertainment media, is dominated by conflict. Only disagreements seem to get attention. This atmosphere demands that individuals align themselves quickly with one of the warring camps in every dispute, and live thenceforth in dread of the demonic designs of the other.

In an atmosphere in which everything seems "black or white," we may overlook the fact that new worship forms involve creativity, and hence risk. Some may place all who attend such events under suspicion, leaving the impression that all participants must have agreed with every public statement. This may frighten those attracted by the biblical Sophia either into silence, or into the arms of the pagan Sophia's more extreme advocates.

To be sure, a line exists between truth and falsehood, and stand for truth we must. But even if we assess the effects of Re-Imagining very negatively, biblical Christians do not need to conform to the polemical pattern of our age. In the current controversy, we need to see more of the patient, humble attitude that recognizes the danger of being too "simple" or a "scoffer," and heeds the call to "cry out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding … seek [Wisdom] as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures" (Prov. 2:3-4).

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Thomas Finger is professor of systematic and spiritual theology at Eastern ennonite Seminary, Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Copyright © 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The city of Santa Cruz, situated in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia, is one of those frontier places where cultures meet and traditions are challenged. Close to the borders of Paraguay and Brazil, Santa Cruz is a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Guarani, and Brazilian cultures. Peruvians and Brazilians sell their goods in the main square. In her streets, one sees old Mennonites from distant colonies, Quechua Indians who have migrated from the highlands in search of land, and Japanese and Korean colonists settling in as Germans and Jews did 50 years ago.

Santa Cruz is a window into what missions is going to be in the decades to come. A Korean Presbyterian missionary who barely speaks Spanish has almost single-handedly established a Christian university that serves 1,500 students and trains medical doctors, dentists, engineers, agronomists, and ministers. A Colombian couple, volunteers with the Mennonite Central Committee, live in one of the poorest barrios of the city and minister to the poor in cooperation with the local Catholic priest, himself an American missionary.

A Brazilian evangelist has brought a team of 20 young people from Sao Paulo to teach them how to do missions and survive by faith without receiving any money from a mission board. They are challenging Bolivians to join their team of missionaries to Muslim countries.

Alejandro Escobar, born in Argentina and a citizen of Peru, works in Santa Cruz with Canadian and American missionaries and Bolivian experts in a holistic mission project. They use the latest computer technology, marketing, and management theory to create jobs and encourage entrepreneurism for thousands of families in the region.

In the approaching millennium, the remarkable work at Santa Cruz will become less the exception and more the rule. The Christian mission worthy of that name in the future will be truly international, ecumenical in the best sense of that term, unapologetically holistic along biblical lines, and daringly willing to face the new world order into which we are moving. Consequently, there will be a need for a paradigm change that will allow us to be obedient to the drive of the Spirit, in tune with the revealed design of the Father, and faithful to the clear example of the Son.

MINISTERING TO GLOBAL NOMADS

The world in which missions will take place in the coming decades is going to be a cruel, cold, desperate world. In the words of Jacques Attali, it will be "a world that has embraced a common ideology of consumerism." One of the images Attali uses to convey the contrasts and tensions of tomorrow's world is that of the "nomadic man" since circling the globe will be possible for an increasing number of people in years to come. Predicts Attali, rich nomads, with their Walkmans, their fax machines, their laptop computers, and their cellular phones, "will roam the planet seeking ways to use their free time, shopping for information, sensations and goods only they can afford, while yearning for human fellowship and the certitudes of home and community that no longer exist because their functions have become obsolete."

At the same time, says Attali, tomorrow's world will hold roving masses of poor nomads, "boat people on a planetary scale-seeking to escape from the destitute periphery, where most of the earth's population will continue to live." Anyone involved in Christian missions has seen these poor nomads, carrying their children and their misery. Some navigate the southeast Asian seas in flimsy boats; others desperately cross the U.S.-Mexico border through sewage collectors and across barbed wire; still others pack the train stations and homeless shelters of Germany; while some even stuff themselves into United Nations trucks in the Balkan peninsula.

Circling the globe in a kind of nomadic existence has always been part of the missionary enterprise. Remember the seaborne apostle Paul, headed for Rome in Acts 27? It was Paul, a missionary in chains, who offered expert travel advice to his captors, kept calm in the midst of the storm, gave leadership at the moment of danger, and thereby gained the confidence of the centurion in whose charge he was a prisoner. What a powerful message it was when Paul broke the bread and gave thanks, restoring confidence and hope among his hearers!

This story brings to my mind two simple but searching questions for our times: Where will the missionaries of Jesus Christ place themselves as they circle the globe in that nomadic world? And how will they carry the presence of the kingdom and the message of the King as they move among all kinds of nomads?

USING JESUS' MISSIONARY METHOD

These questions about missionary presence and style have motivated some of the most creative missiological thinking of recent decades, which has resulted in a refreshing and challenging return to Scripture. Missiologist David Bosch has said, "Our point of departure should not be the contemporary enterprise we seek to justify, but the biblical sense of what being sent into the world signifies."

"Mission in Christ's way" is the agenda that John Stott pioneered in 1966 as he shifted attention from the classic passage of the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 to the almost forgotten text of John 20:21: "As the Father sent me, I am sending you." This is the text where we not only have a mandate for mission, but also a model of mission-an incarnational model where we live alongside and partner with the people we are trying to reach. Before we search for methods and tools that will help us communicate a verbal message, we must search for a new style of missionary presence relevant to this moment of human history.

Essentially, the shift to the Johannine pattern of mission and a return to biblical teaching means the abandonment of the imperial mentality in missions. Imperial missiology carried on missionary work from a position of superiority: political, military, financial, and technological. The maxim "The cross and the sword" symbolized the attitude of Iberian missions in the sixteenth century, and "commerce and Christianity" symbolized the mindset present at the height of Protestant-European missions in the nineteenth century. "Information, technology, and gospel" symbolizes the mindset in our contemporary age of nomads. The change of mind that this postimperial mission requires bears heavily upon the evangelical missionary establishment today. A change of methodologies alone will not work. Take the reality of Islam as a case in point.

Islam has become one of the great missionary challenges of today. It is now a rival faith in Indonesia, several African countries, the Middle East, and even the heart of American and European cities. At the time of the Crusades, Islam was a thriving, conquering faith that could barely be stopped at the doors of Europe. Within the frame of an imperial and Constantinian mentality, missions in those years became a holy war against the Moors.

The fact that we still operate with these and similar categories was dramatically portrayed in the Urbana 1990 missionary convention. It was December of 1990, a few weeks before the Gulf War, and there were anti-Arab sentiments in the air, fostered by the media, the rhetoric of the United States' political and military leaders, and the fiery language of religious fundamentalists. In a missionary convention, one expects to hear a discourse shaped by the spirit of Jesus Christ. But a plenary address on the Middle East-that area of "creative access," as it was called-was no different from the one that dominated the airwaves of a nation at war.

A member of the Urbana staff clearly expressed the protest that many others felt was necessary: "From a position of power and wealth, we divide the world according to our categories and strategize how we will conquer. Foreign policy is couched in spiritual conflict terms, and militaristic attitudes are baptized in the name of Christ. Haven't we learned anything from history?"

What we learn from history is that the inhumanity of the Crusades was not the only way in which Christians related to Islam in those days. Francis of Assisi pioneered a different approach. In 1219 he managed to cross the lines of battle and gain entrance to the sultan of Egypt. There Francis presented to the sultan the message of Christ in its simplicity and beauty.

This same approach was developed into a missionary methodology by Ramon Llull, the famous Spanish mystic and apologist. At a time of war and confrontation, he made four missionary trips to North Africa in order to preach to the Muslims, and he died as a result of persecution in his last attempt in 1315.

Contemporary missionaries to Muslims, such as William Miller, Dennis Clark, Phil Parshall, and Margaret Wynne, have abandoned the imperialist mindset and have stressed spirituality and readiness for suffering as fundamental components of missions to Islam.

Several other evangelical missionaries have gone through the pilgrimage of learning to practice missions according to Jesus' model, forsaking the crude traditions of the imperial age. Missions in the coming years will follow in the footsteps of pioneers such as Viv Gregg, the New Zealander who became a companion to the poor in Manila. In his moving account, he describes revolutionary proposals for missions without giving up any of his evangelical convictions.

Luis Scott, an American scholar from Ohio, built his house among the poor in Mexico City and supported himself teaching Greek in a national university there. He now combines a church planting ministry and an academic career discipling younger Mexican scholars.

The incarnational style dramatically portrayed by these pioneers is not necessarily something that all missionaries should duplicate, but in this style, a pattern of imitating Christ has been recovered. To be truly effective, our missionaries must be shaped by the spirit of this incarnational model.

AN INTERNATIONAL VISION

The last recession in the United States led to mergers of missionary organizations, restructuring of mission boards, and an increase in the hiring of fundraising specialists. But despite rumors that human and material resources for missions have evaporated in Europe and North America, last year more than $2 billion were dedicated to the missionary enterprise in the United States and Canada alone. Without question, the missionary enterprise is still strong, especially in North America.

Consider InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's triennial Urbana missions convention. In spite of the lamentations of mission boards that have difficulty finding candidates, last December almost 20,000 people-25 percent of whom were of an Asian background-attended the four-day convention, eager to learn and receive an intense and serious missionary challenge.

As evidenced in the more diverse ethnic makeup of Urbana '93 (in all, nearly two-fifths of those attending represented ethnic minorities), much of missions' future success depends on its willingness to adapt to and take advantage of the resources of an increasingly multicultural society.

The most articulate defender of the historic role of Western missionaries in the Third World is Lamin Sanneh, an outstanding African scholar from Gambia, who teaches World Christianity at Yale University Divinity School. The general secretary of the Church Missionary Society, one of the most prestigious missionary societies of the United Kingdom, is Michael Mazir-Ali, a bishop who went to England from his native Pakistan. When 200 Korean missionaries working in Latin America look for fresh missiological thinking that may throw biblical light on their problems, they ask Ecuadorian missiologist Rene Padilla for advice. All of these examples reveal the cosmopolitan flavor that missions is taking on around the world.

In the coming decades, missions going East and West will require resources from all quarters. It is becoming increasingly apparent that responsible mission-minded people today must work together, whether from the North or the South, the East or the West. The next century demands an international vision.

LESSONS FROM AMERICA'S THIRD WORLD

Global migration has forced missions to take on a holistic thrust. We see this in large cities in the United States. One result of the intensification of nomadic lifestyles has been that what we usually call the Third World has now come to North America. Americans are now able to see on their streets the architectural shapes of mosques and Hindu temples-not as exotic ornaments for casinos, but as places of worship for communities that sometimes outdo Christians in their missionary zeal. Moreover, those indigenous churches over which mission-minded Americans once rejoiced when they read missionary literature have become sister churches just down the street. Congregations of Haitian Baptists, Filipino evangelicals, and Latin-American Pentecostals are now taking over abandoned church buildings in downtown Philadelphia.

American Christians are being pushed by the logic of these facts into a choice: They can become authentically missionary at their own doorstep and therefore assume a holistic stance (because as they establish relations with recently arrived brothers and sisters, they will not be able to avoid a gamut of social and economic problems, such as illegal immigration, drug-related issues, oppressive structures, police abuse, and so on). Or they can isolate themselves and reduce their commitment to sending money through traditional missionary agencies that do not require active involvement or solidarity with the people the missions are trying to reach. Thus they will turn their religion into a formality: baroque buildings, orthodox theology, empty words, and meaningless ritual. No matter how successful some churches may appear, as they provide religious support for a declining American culture instead of preaching true conversion and discipleship, they will be condemned to irrelevance.

This is a time in which taking a truly missionary stance means announcing the whole counsel of God to a society that is hypnotized by a passion for consuming. In the kind of increasingly paganized society that the United States has become, a critical distance and a prophetic stance are urgently required of Christians. They have to become "resident aliens" in their culture.

On this point, evangelicals could learn a lesson from the history of the Catholic church in Latin America. Traditionally, it was a church that allowed greed, injustice, and corruption to shape society, used political means to keep her privileges intact, and that always embraced conservative causes when the world was crying for reforms. Now Latin Americans are leaving that church at the rate of 400 people every hour.

Partnership in mission with the growing ethnic churches will demand a change of missiological beliefs. Societal solidarity, respect, and equality will all be indispensable prerequisites for entering into partnership. The largest churches of a particular denomination in New York are Hispanic and Asian. They are successful churches in the urban jungle. But the executives of that denomination appear unwilling to learn from the Hispanic and Asian pastors about missions in the city. Rather, they bring specialists from missiological think tanks that tell them what they want to hear. The seriousness of missionary commitment of American evangelical churches in the coming decades will have to be measured not only by the amount of money they give to organizations working abroad, but also by the effective answer they give to the missionary challenge of American cities.

Partnership in mission also includes a reappraisal of predominant patterns of middle-class Western culture. It is well-known, for instance, that while the Anglo church fled to the suburbs, ethnic and Pentecostal churches have remained in the heart of American cities. Many of these churches have the marks of what we could describe as "popular Protestantism," because they coincide with the marks of the culture of poverty, such as oral liturgy, narrative theology, uninhibited emotionalism, maximum participation in prayer and decision-making, dreams and visions, and an intense search for community and belonging.

Historians and missiologists point out that during our century this form of Christianity is the one that has grown most extensively all over the world, but especially among the urban masses in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It is also the kind of Christianity that is surviving in American cities. Sociologists point out that such numerical growth takes place especially among socially marginalized groups that suffered uprooting and anomie during periods of rapid urbanization. Becoming partners with these churches will require serious self-appraisal for the more institutionalized, well-mannered, predictable churches of respectable, middle-class evangelical congregations.

EVANGELIZING THE WEST

Missions experience can be the source of vitality and renewal for churches and individual Christians who have lost their sense of purpose. Daniel Fountain, an American Baptist medical doctor, spent almost 30 years as a missionary in Zaire with his wife, Miriam. What he says in a self-critical way about medical practice could also be applied to counseling, teaching, and pastoral work.

For many reasons we have lost the art of communication. Diagnosis is made by electronic and computer technology, and prescriptions are handed out with minimal instructions. We do not admit our patients to the mystique of medical knowledge and, as a result, we lose their confidence. … Medical specialists can repair, alter or prop up the human body with great skill and we even have a growing supply of "spare parts." Yet we seem unable to touch the human spirit or bring wholeness to the sick person.

Medical practice on the mission field along the lines of current canons of Western medicine proved insufficient for Dr. Fountain. Compelled by the cry of human need and his own commitment to serve people, he rediscovered the relevance of the biblical view of persons. According to Fountain, "secular philosophy ignores or even denies the realm of the spiritual because it is beyond the limits of scientific experimentation. Life has no ultimate meaning and God has become irrelevant to any considerations of health and healing." The problem that the doctor finds is that much illness and "disease" comes precisely from that loss of meaning and purpose, so he cannot avoid the conclusion that "if the sick person is to be made whole, we must involve in the restoration process the center of the personality where the quests for meaning and purpose exist."

Fountain's challenge coincides with the opinion of one of the greatest missiologists of our time, Lesslie Newbigin, who says that "there is no higher priority for the research of missiologists than to ask the question of what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and this modern Western culture." For Newbigin, this task is urgent, not only for those who deal with the missionary crossing of frontiers in other lands, but for pastors, evangelists, and seminary professors who have to deal with the missionary encounter here in the United States or in Europe.

Bishop Newbigin went back to England to minister in a parish of factory workers after spending 30 years as a missionary in India. There he experienced the outcome of the secularization process that, during his absence, had made deep inroads into the culture of his country.

Newbigin describes how Western missionaries in our time have come to share in the general weakening of confidence in the modern Western culture; "they have become more aware of the fact that in their presentation of the gospel they have often confused culturally conditioned perceptions with the substance of the gospel and thus wrongfully claimed divine authority for all the relativities of one culture." What he finds surprising in the missiological literature about contextualization is that there is no serious reflection about "the most widespread, powerful and persuasive among all contemporary cultures-namely, Modern Western culture. Moreover, this neglect is even more serious because it is this culture that more than almost any other, is proving resistant to the gospel."

This is one of the new missionary challenges: bringing missions to this increasingly resistant Western culture. Precisely at this point, God has brought the Third World church to the heart of the American and European cities where that Western culture has become a mission field. Missions at our doorstep is the training ground for carrying on missions around the world.

At the end of this century, we find ourselves facing the prospect of a new world order, which scares us not only for what is unknown about it, but also for what we may reasonably expect it to be by looking at contemporary trends. However, we also find the amazing reality of the church as a truly global body-closer than ever to that vision of the seer in Revelation: the multicultural, multilingual, multiracial company "that no one could count," crying out in a loud voice, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb" (Rev. 7:9-10, NIV).

We are closer, but not there yet. The missionaries of God's kingdom have many geographical, cultural, and sociological frontiers to cross; the task is not anymore "the white man's burden," as it seemed to be at the beginning of this century. It is clearly the task of men and women in a new global church, a task that demands a renewed biblical vision for a new historical moment.

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Samuel Escobar teaches missions at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. This essay is adapted from an article first published in the January 1994 issue of Prism magazine.

Copyright © 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Every year for the last 20 years or more, America's mainline denominations have cut back on the number of missionaries they send. Why? Are missionaries no longer necessary? Or have these churches lost the way?

The question calls to mind a discussion Jesus had with the disciples near the end of his earthly life. Although he had said that he would prepare places for them in his Father's house, ever-skeptical Thomas asked, "Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?" (John 14:5).

In this age of skepticism and doubt, Thomas's plea rings with relevance as today's mainline denominations similarly lack confidence in the way. The implications are grave for the future of Christian missions. If we have lost the way, how can we expect to show the way to others?

Despite any questions that may have lingered in the minds of the early Christians, they did not need to re-examine or re-imagine their commitment t world missions every three or four years. In fact, until the great theological depression in mainline churches, even more recent Christians had no need to ask about the purpose of missions.

For these believers, Christ's command was simple and urgent: save souls from a Christless eternity. Or at the very least, give them the chance to know that they are lost. Faced with this straightforward challenge, the church exploded into the modern missionary movement, a race against time and the Devil for the eternal salvation of humanity.

Many people consider this the classic and most familiar theology of mission: salvation free for all, but only in Christ. Solidly evangelical, it was the theology of my parents and is not as old-fashioned and outdated as some may think. This same theology is also today's theology of the South Korean Presbyterian church, which gains three or four times more members every year than Presbyterians in America lose every year. Moreover, the vast majority of Third World churches follow this theology, and they are growing, unlike many of our mainline denominations.

This theology sent one of my brothers to the inner city, another to India, and still another into medical missions. As for myself, I was drawn into missions by the words of Robert E. Speer, then chairman of the board at Princeton Theological Seminary. In the middle of a talk he was giving to me and my classmates, he stopped, took out his watch, and said, "This watch could tick for nine and a half years without numbering the unbelievers in China alone." I could not get this picture out of my mind. Five years later, I was in China to find some of those unbelievers.

Emphasizing the lostness of the unsaved and redemption in Jesus Christ alone, this theology is responsible for sending more missionaries around the globe than any other theology of mission. Through time, however, the foundations undergirding this theology began to shake. Old urgencies were denied, or at least ignored, and no one seemed sure of anything eternal anymore.

Instead of emphasizing eternal life after death, proponents wanted a theology that redeemed the millions upon millions living in misery and filth by providing the life abundant that Jesus came to give them. The challenge became to create a future in, not beyond, history, without hunger and without hate, without sickness and without tears; where men and women were all brothers and sisters together, justice rolled down like the waters, and the nations studied war no more.

Called a theology of the kingdom, this was considered the second theology of missions, a more modern, practical mindset that emphasized "works" over "grace." In its most popular form, it has become liberation theology. At times, it has come dangerously close to building the kingdom without the King. But kingdom theology has its merits, and its roots are biblical: the Jesus who said, "I am the way … " also said, "I am the life" and "As you did it to one of the least of these"-the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the prisoners-"you did it to me" (Matt. 25:40). This is a kind of liberation I can never ridicule.

But in recent times, the paralysis of skepticism has struck those desiring to be liberators. Wars, holocausts, depressions, brutalities, scandals, aids, drugs, and failed revolutions have created a disheartening crescendo of defeat. Worst of all, these events happened right here in the "Christian" West, in what too many had believed was the kingdom. But the kingdom refused to stay built, and the liberators lost hope.

HAVE WE LOST THE WAY?

These are the two familiar descriptions of the missionary: as evangelist and as social activist. One emphasizes the saving of souls; the other, the building of the kingdom. Both are needed. The problem is that neither alone can motivate the whole church for missions. Critics of the Left still caricature the evangelical promise as "pie in the sky by-and-by," while critics from the Right even more devastatingly point out that the "paradise-here-and-now" activism of yesterday's failed revolutions has given us more hell on earth than hope of heaven.

Thus the question: Have we lost the way? How does the church fulfill its mission in this kind of a world, and in our kind of a discouraged church? Where can we find a compelling motive to unite and renew the whole church in Christian mission?

Both the unfairly caricatured evangelists and the well-intentioned but much criticized builders of the kingdom need to take a step toward a more biblical, Christ-centered theology of missions. Christ should define our mission; anything more is idolatry, and anything less is no longer Christian. The Bible reminds us that the evangelist can no more save souls than the social gospeler can build the kingdom of God. Souls are saved by the Holy Spirit, whose witness is never separated from Jesus Christ as the only way. And only God can build the kingdom, whose promised King is Jesus Christ, Lord of all of life.

In their basic motivation, the evangelist and the reformer are actually not that different. At their best, both sincerely believe that their motive is Christian love. But love has lost much of its biblical meaning in today's post-Christian world. America's modern culture-captive theologies use the word love in such a warm, loose, or fuzzy way that I question how far we can use it anymore to describe our motivating base in Christian mission.

RETHINKING OUR MOTIVATIONS

I would like to suggest instead that the original motivation for missions in the church was not love, but obedience-more specifically, obedience in love. As C. S. Lewis once observed, "[We] do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because [we] have never attempted obedience."

Of course, love, as described in the New Testament, is fundamental, still the first and greatest commandment. Love began the mission: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have everlasting life." Love was the motivation of God the Father. But what was the motivation of God the Son?

The Son surely came on his mission with no less love than that of the Father. However, it is interesting to note that the Bible does not say so. Although the life of Jesus on this earth was undeniably filled with unbounded love and compassion, we are not told that he came into the world because he loved it. Insofar as the Bible distinguishes between the Son and the Father in reference to the mission, it tells us that the Father founds the mission motivated by love, while the Son goes on the mission motivated by obedience.

Paul reveals a rare glimpse into the mind of Christ before the mission of his incarnation. Through the apostle's writings, we see that it is not love, but humility and obedience "unto death, even death on a cross" (Phil. 2:5-8) that compels Christ to sacrifice himself. He loves the world, but he goes to the cross because he obeys: "Not my will, but thine, be done" (Luke 22:42). God is love, but it is obedience that forges, focuses, and incarnates that love into a mission.

The same theme applies to the apostles, the first missionaries of the church. Was it love for a despised and rejected race that sent Philip to the Ethiopian? Not according to the record. "An angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, 'Arise and go' " (Acts 8:26, NKJV). And he went. Was it love that sent Peter to the proud and unclean, to the Roman centurion? Not if you read Acts. The Spirit told him to "Arise and go" (Acts 10:20). And he did.

Was it a passion for millions of lost Gentile souls dying without hope and without Christ in this world that made Saul into Paul "the apostle to the Gentiles?" He loved his own people, the Jews, too much for that, as the record shows. But the Spirit said in Acts 13, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them," and thus the apostle almost reluctantly obeyed to reach the Gentiles. In the "strange new world of the Bible" (Barth), apostles and missionaries are made not by looking at the world in love (though that they must do), but primarily by listening to God in obedience.

At this point, many are inclined to change the subject in embarrassment and go on to more practical missionary matters concerning techniques, methods, cross-cultural relations, and fundraising appeals. How can we wait around to listen for the voice of God when there is a whole world out there that needs to hear the good news and see it practiced?

Back in my college days, I knew an earnest and intense young woman who wanted desperately to be a missionary in Africa. But she thought that God had not called her because she had heard no supernatural calls, only silence. So one night a realistic and practical-joking friend gathered a group of girls together, robing them in white sheets. At midnight, they stole into the troubled girl's room, moaning in hollow tones, "Come to Africa, come to Africa."

This woman, paralyzed in her waiting for the voice of God, was partly right, but partly wrong. Wrong in her stereotyped notion of how God ought to speak to her, but completely right in believing that without the positive assurance of God's leading she would never be a missionary even if she did go to Africa. And although her joker friends were wrong to pose as substitutes for the voice of God (a temptation for preachers and professors as well), they were right in portraying a God who works in his own mysterious way through imperfect human means.

This is especially true in missions, which is why our theology is so important. It keeps us on the right way. We are only dressing up in white robes and stealing in upon the unwary with false guideposts and lesser challenges if we settle for anything less than truth, love, and through it all, obedience, as according to the Scriptures.

OBEDIENT WITNESSES

Two years ago we had a surprise call. A Korean pastor from the Sangdo Presbyterian Church in Seoul wanted to fly us to Chile for the groundbreaking of their new missionary project. The church was celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary and wanted to commemorate it by undertaking a missions project in Chile. Recalling the words of Jesus to be his witnesses "unto the uttermost parts of the earth," they pulled out a globe, put a pin in South Korea, and stretched a string as far as it would go all the way to the opposite end of the globe, which turned out to be Chile.

Although there were already three Korean evangelists at work in Chile, there was no Korean missionary doctor. Remembering the legacy of the first missionaries to Korea, who had initiated a wide range of social reforms, these Koreans said, "Let's celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary by building a Christian hospital for the Mapuche Indians in southern Chile." The hospital was dedicated this spring.

For these Koreans, it was as simple as that: having a firm faith and displaying cheerful obedience. If this sounds too simple for us sophisticated, Western evangelicals, I suspect we may be getting too academic, like the professor from Yale who visited our mission in northern Korea years ago. He wanted to preach in a country church, so the mission sent him with a missionary interpreter to a rural Korean village. The professor began his sermon, "All thought is divided into two categories, the concrete and the abstract."

The Korean interpreter looked at the tiny congregation sitting with eager attention on the floor of the little church-toothless grandmothers, barefoot schoolboys-and made a quick decision. "Dear friends," he translated, "I have come all the way from America to tell you about the Lord Jesus Christ." From that point, the sermon was firmly in the interpreter's hands.

I vote for more simplicity and theological integrity in the church's approach to mission. How will people remember us 50 years from now? Will it be, "Oh yes, those old churches. They lost it. They gave up on missions. They talked about 'the concrete and the abstract,' about gods and goddesses, and who knows what else. And no one understood."

More non-Christians, refugees, and homeless live in the world than ever before in history, including in our own cities. At the same time, membership in many denominations is hemorrhaging at a shocking rate. The day of the missionary is far from over. We need to allow the Holy Spirit, the Great Interpreter, take over here and now with grace and power so that the world takes notice that the church is spreading the good news of Christ.

Jesus responded to Thomas's doubts by saying, "I am the way." Nothing could be clearer for us than to follow Christ's example in all circ*mstances, including our approach to missions.

We know the way. God promises the power. Our part is to obey.

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Samuel Moffett is Princeton Seminary's Henry Winters Luce Professor of Ecumenics and Missions, emeritus. Born in Pyongyang, Korea, he spent over 30 years in the mission fields of Korea and China. This article is adapted from a talk given at the Presbyterians for Renewal breakfast during the 206th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), June 1994.

Copyright © 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

When gambling broke out of the glitter ghettos of Las Vegas and Atlantic City in the late 1970s, it began a long and successful march into nearly every state and many local communities, racking up surprising victories and cowing opponents.

Gambling has advanced so swiftly that until recently there were few national organizations devoted to opposing it. Instead, antigambling activists have toiled in isolation and with little national fundraising to combat the gambling industry's estimated $35 billion in revenues.

Now, however, the sparkle has worn off some of the early promises made by gambling industry promoters, and Christians are attempting to bear witness to the failed predictions for gambling's abilities to bring true prosperity: Antigambling leaders had predicted crime would rise due to casino gambling, and it has. Las Vegas and Atlantic City have two of the nation's highest crime rates. In Biloxi, Mississippi, a regional casino hot spot, armed robberies doubled from 1992 to 1993.

Christians warned that underage gamblers would be insufficiently policed. A 1992 report by Chicago's Better Government Association (BGA) estimates that 7 million juveniles gamble in the United States. In the northeastern part of the country, as many as 80 percent of high-school students reported gambling for money in a one-year period.

Antigambling activists cautioned that the burden of lotteries and other gambling methods would fall disproportionately on the poor. Low-income households have quickly become heavier users of state lotteries than the wealthy. The gambling industry is developing new ways to attract the moderate-income gambler with entertainment and by installing easy-to-use slot machines.

Nevertheless, gambling, once roundly condemned not only by church leaders, but by societal leaders as well, is now widely accepted and available, often with state governments promoting and benefiting from lotteries. Today, Utah and Hawaii are the only states that do not permit gambling of any kind.

The proliferation and acceptance of gambling has been explosive:

* The amount Americans wager each year has grown from $17.3 billion in 1976 to $329.9 billion in 1992, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling.

* Organized gambling has crossed over into "family-oriented" entertainment. Las Vegas has been in the forefront, hoping to gain new customers as it loses its dominance in gambling. At the MGM Grand, billed as the world's largest "hotel, casino, and theme park," parents and children can visit 33 acres of rides, shows, themed streets, restaurants, shops, and casinos.

* The race to conquer new markets for gambling is shifting into high gear as the gaming industry saturates markets. Through much of 1994, as many as two casinos were opening each month in Mississippi. (Yet Gannett News Service reports that half of the casinos in Atlantic City are bankrupt, and half of the casinos in Nevada are operating with a 3 percent profit margin.)

* Gaming Entertainment television (GETV), a Pittsburgh-based cable television network, offers viewers a broad range of gambling activities. The network hopes to have nearly 3 million subscribers by the end of the century.

In some cases, social problems have already begun dogging the footsteps of gambling operations. There are unemployment and money woes, for example: The closing of Mhoon Landing casino in Mississippi, only one year after it opened, will throw almost 1,000 people out of work. It is the second casino operated by the same company to close this year. From a survey of its callers, the Texas Council on Problem and Compulsive Gambling reports 59 percent of compulsive gamblers have financial problems, 29 percent are addicted to alcohol, and 25 percent are unemployed.

THE LAST GOOD WAR

In some ways, gambling is the last agreed-upon sin for many Christians. Denominations that disagree vehemently over abortion, female pastors, and capital punishment nonetheless unite to oppose betting. The reason may be straightforward-people work together to rebuff attacks on their community-but some observers see the unusual unanimity as a sign of the deterioration of the culture.

"That's the terrifying part of it for me," says Eugene Winkler, senior pastor of downtown Chicago's First United Methodist Church/Chicago Temple. "When you trace the history of just the Methodist part of this, we have stood against all of these immoral forms throughout our history, and we have yielded over and over again, and we've just acquiesced. I think this is kind of the last moral crusade for us."

In the long run, he believes the pendulum will swing back toward outlawing gambling when its negative effects become too large to ignore. "I don't think there's any doubt we are in a state of moral decay that is growing, eating away at the body politic in America," says Winkler.

Historically, the current struggle between gambling entrepreneurs and religious leaders reprises a similar struggle in the nineteenth century, which had its own fights over gambling and lotteries.

Marvin Olasky, professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., notes that the "Boston Recorder" did more than just run sermons against gambling in the nineteenth century. "It [covered] particular people who had gambled and lost everything. They gave a face to the issue." Politicians of early America also tried to dissuade gamblers.

"Now, probably the opposite is the case," Olasky says, "because we have our government leaders promoting state lotteries, and you have journalists very often winking at it."

Though churches may have fairly broad agreement that gambling is harmful to individuals and to society, few place it at the top of their church's crowded agendas. Nonetheless, Olasky suggests that people from different denominations who represent different theologies can work together against gambling without compromising doctrinal stands.

Winkler agrees. "The church cannot keep yielding moral ground and expect to be any force for good in society." He says gambling foes must "make the government do what it promises to do when it licenses [casinos], and that is to control them."

To Tom Grey, spokesman for the National Coalition Against Organized Gambling, the mix of big money politics suggests a disgrace of major proportions is coming. "You think the savings and loan was a scandal," he says. "Wait until the gambling thing hits on how government sold us to Las Vegas."

RAISING THE STAKES

Determination is increasing on both sides of the battle lines as the gambling industry undergoes severe growing pains.

In this mix of events, wartime terminology comes easily to gambling opponents. Not content to be on the defensive, they have initiated an aggressive offense. Grey, a United Methodist minister from Galena, Illinois, recounts a meeting he had with a gambling industry leader who told him,

" 'We have Las Vegas in the west, Atlantic City in the east, New Orleans in the south, now we want Chicago for the head of the cross.' I'm sitting there, saying, 'We'll deny you Chicago.' "

"This thing dies in the Midwest," Grey vows. "Ten years from now, they'll write the story that in the heartland of America, it got turned back."

As a longtime antigambling activist, Grey has had the opportunity to view the tactics of gambling proponents, who promise cash-strapped cities easy money.

Gambling companies "used to come in in parades, with governors cutting ribbons. Now they have to fight their way in, they have to bribe their way in," Grey says. "We are breaking the invincibility of their advance."

Fresh from a handful of recent successes (see "Showdown in Blackhawk County," p. 60), Grey is taking his fight nationwide through the National Coalition Against Organized Gambling.

The coalition formed in May, following the successful rebuff of a lottery referendum in Oklahoma. A group of antigambling activists, members of a wide range of faith groups-from Unitarians to Christian Coalition activists to United Methodists to Muslims-met in Chicago to create the organization. The group shares tactics and information, helping to transform a series of local skirmishes into a nationwide movement.

Two years ago, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved riverboat gambling, but, due to a mistake in the wording of the bill, games of chance were not allowed. Progambling forces pushed through another referendum, this time to be decided two days after Easter this year. Grey saw a chance to "steal" a victory and traveled to Missouri, where he hooked up with conservative businessman Mark Andrews. Grey then put together a coalition of conservative and liberal Christians to defeat the referendum.

"We had no money; we generated a movement," says Grey. "The Right already had phone banks and was already working on this. The mainline churches hadn't really done a thing. So what happened was that God gave us this incredible victory." Out of a million votes, the referendum failed by 1,261.

A MATTER OF SOVEREIGNTY?

Despite those recent victories, antigambling activists are facing a battle zone with dozens of frontlines. The 1988 passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act made it possible for Native American groups to run reservation-based gambling operations, which have become extremely profitable and are spread nationwide.

Paul G. Jones, executive director of the Christian Action Commission of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, reports that one local Native American tribe in his state already has a 24-hour casino on its reservation and is trying to buy land along the Mississippi River shoreline. This bid is leading some to challenge whether land purchased by a tribe becomes part of the reservation-and thus open to gambling-or is merely tribal-owned land, one of many new questions raised by gaming's spread.

"In a period of twelve-and-a-half years, it's gone from no legalized gambling in the state to all kinds of legalized gambling," Jones says. He says charitable bingo, legalized in 1987, "has been a total disaster," requiring the state to change the law several times to fix loopholes. "There are still some groups out there that have some of the strangest reasons for operating as a charitable organization."

For many Native American groups, faced with high rates of alcoholism, unemployment, and suicide, the promise of big profits from gambling has been quickly embraced. Native American activists suggest that the way to dissuade tribes from pursuing reservation gaming is to offer economic alternatives. Huron Claus, a Mohawk and discipleship coordinator for Christian Hope Indian Eskimo Fellowship (chief) in Phoenix, says Christians need to examine why Native Americans are attracted to gambling's profits. Gambling has caused some tribes to grapple with the cultural impact of sudden wealth and the presence of casino workers from outside the tribe, sometimes outnumbering the entire tribe.

"The real issue is: How do we deal with the gambling?" Claus says. "There needs to be a call to the Christian leadership on a tribal level and a church level. There are few Christians in tribal leadership; they need to be role models in their tribes." Claus does not support reservation gambling and he urges Christians to develop businesses that offer healthy alternatives to Indians. Claus also notes that it is an opportunity to share the gospel: of the 2 million Native Americans in about 500 different tribes, he says fewer than 8 percent are professing Christians.

ON CAPONE'S HOME TURF

Perhaps the nation's most-watched gambling skirmish is in Chicago, where Mayor Richard M. Daley has sought for years to introduce casino gambling, first in land-based form and now on riverboats. Casino gambling remains stalled in the state government, not so much because of church pressure but because of the strength of the racing industry, which fears the loss of gaming dollars to 24-hour casinos.

After rural horseracing interests teamed up with state Republican lawmakers-as well as some religious activists-to defeat land-based casinos in 1992, gambling forces came back with a proposal for a downtown entertainment complex with a riverboat casino.

"It'll be essentially what they tried to get land-based," says Winkler. "The riverboat is just going to go about 100 yards and come back. It's subterfuge."

One of the greatest fears of casino opponents has been the corruption of public officials. J. T. Brunner, staff director of the Chicago Metro Ethics Coalition Project, charged in 1992 that his organization's investigation of the effort to bring casino gambling to Chicago "was complicated by a high degree of misinformation filtered to the general public by individuals and organizations which had already taken a position on the issue. … Our academic research confirmed that many of the proponents' claims were highly questionable."

In its 1992 white paper, "Casino Gambling in Chicago," the BGA's claimed that irregularities had occurred in the city's study and promotion of casino gambling. In his introduction to the study, Brunner, who also serves as BGA executive director, wrote, "The accounting firm who supposedly ran objective projections for the Mayor's Committee has joined them, appearing as an advocate at the Mayor's press conferences."

In discussing the proposed job gains caused by casinos, Brunner writes: "It is interesting that the proponents didn't suggest the alternate sales pitch, social gains from additional revenues. One may understand this by examining their public-relation documents, 'Jewel in the Crown' and 'P.R. Battle Plan,' in which they found that Chicagoans simply don't believe that additional money will effectively cure social problems because of the Atlantic City experience and our own experience with the lottery."

LONE-STAR BATTLEGROUND

Weston Ware, associate director of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commisson, believes Christians need to be more vocal about the spread of gambling. "When you look at Atlantic City, their success is still very questionable," says Ware, who estimates that he has testified on every piece of gambling legislation before the Texas legislature since 1982. "It was a slum by the sea. And now, it's a slum by the sea with casinos."

Ware says the clout of churches and individual Christians is in their abiliy to deal with the issue locally. "The power that we have in lobbying the legislature has to do not with some individual that's recognized as representing the churches," Ware says. "The power has to do with the persons back home who know and supported or have worked with legislators over time. That legislator has to feel that he is being held accountable and responsible by individuals at the local level."

Texas, which does not have casino gambling, does have a state lottery, chartable bingo, and dog- and horse-racing tracks. When Texas adopted the lottery, it also agreed to print on every lottery ticket the number for a hotline for compulsive gamblers. The state gives the hotline-run by the Texas Council on Problem Gambling-$575,000 to spread awareness of problem gambling.

If proponents succeed in legalizing casino gambling, Texas may have as many as 25 casinos, says Sue Cox, executive director of the council and a former activist against gambling. She fears that if casinos are legalized, the total number of problem gamblers may not grow dramatically, but people playing bingo will shift to slot machines, and those who are betting on sports will also patronize casinos. "Because casinos offer the opportunity to lose money more quickly on a 24-hour basis than do other games, the degree of the problem will grow."

To Cox, the problem with churches is that they do not continue their activism once the casinos are in place. As a resource person who has only received one call from a church for assistance, she says churches have failed to show compassion and offer help to compulsive gamblers and their family members. Cox recommends that churches gather information on gaming-stocking their libraries with books on compulsive gambling-and minister to problem gamblers either through small groups on compulsive gambling or at least an all-purpose addiction support group.

"It's easy to have sympathy with the family," Cox says. "It's very difficult for many believers to have sympathy with the gambler."

Copyright © 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The Rutherford Institute has filed a sexual-harassment lawsuit claiming that Deseret Palmer, a 15-year-old student, was subjected to viewing a film that contained graphic violence, profanity, and nudity. Violation of the Constitution's Establishment Clause, guaranteeing separation of church and state, is also claimed because of "torturing and killing in the name of religion."

According to Rutherford attorney Scott Kendall, the case began in November 1993 when, without prior parental consent or student notification, a teacher at Rio Linda High School showed her ninth-grade American literature class an R-rated 1991 video interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum.

One scene depicts three religious figures, apparently priests, inspecting the heroine's body for signs of Satan. "They rip off her clothes," says Kendall, "and she is standing totally naked, full frontal nudity."

Physical molestation goes on for approximately three minutes, Kendall says. "In a film, three minutes is a long, long time. Here are these young boys whooping and hollering, and the girls are getting embarrassed." Palmer became so disturbed that she became physically ill. "Clearly, under the California Educational Code, this was sexual harassment," Kendall says.

Superintendent James Rutter said Palmer's teacher apparently violated district policy by not previewing the film. However, the district has not apologized or taken disciplinary action.

Copyright © 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Division for Church in Society has heeded the unanimous recommendation of an 11-member consulting panel and decided not to release a human sexuality statement at the denomination's August 1995 biennial meeting.

A 17-member Task Force on Human Sexuality, which formed in 1989, came under fire a year ago when it released a controversial first draft. Among the proposals was an "open affirmation of gay and lesbian persons and their mutually loving, just, committed relationship of fidelity." Soon after the draft became public, the ELCA appointed the 11-member panel to ensure the biblical soundness of the task force, and Karen Bloomquist, the staff member responsible for the statement, resigned.

The second draft-which has been reworked by a three-member writing team-is to be distributed to clergy this month. The Division for Church in Society had hoped to receive comments on the second draft by next January, but voted last month to extend the response period to June 30.

"We are not convinced that the time line allows for adequate time for the church to engage in that continued process of deliberation," says Melissa Maxwell-Doherty, who now chairs the 11-member panel. The task force last met in July and has no plans to meet again.

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Making good on campaign pledges to improve "quality of life" in New York City, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has proposed sweeping measures to restrict the location of "sex shops" to remote areas of the city.

The recommended regulations, which must clear a lengthy review by the city council, will prohibit adult video stores, X-rated theaters, and topless bars from opening within 500 feet of residences, schools, houses of worship, or each other.

Sex shops "have deteriorated the quality of life in the city," Giuliani says. "They hurt the economy of the city. They cost us jobs. They cost us money." The New York City Planning Commission cites supporting evidence.

Jerry Kirk, president of the National Coalition Against p*rnography, calls the proposal "excellent."

The proposal has also drawn backing by liberals and feminists. The New York Times called the mayor's plan "a response to legitimate community anger" and his method of using zoning as a means to restrict these establishments "sound."

Similar legislation found wide support in the city council last year, and several cities, including Los Angeles, Boston, and Philadelphia, have adopted comparable measures in recent years.

Copyright © 1994 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.