Page 4535 – Christianity Today (2024)

It was February 1995 when the dawn raiders attacked the Sudanese village of Sokobat in northern Bahr-El-Ghazal. Apin Akot was already out tending his cattle with his two-year-old son when his wife and two daughters, ages five and nine, were rounded up by fundamentalist Islamic militia. They had been armed and encouraged by the government of Sudan to carry out a jihad (holy war) against the Africans—mostly Christians—of the south. The government, the National Islamic Front (NIF), is a totalitarian military regime, which seized power in 1989. The government cannot pay salaries, but the militias can keep the bounty of war as their reward—including human bounty. On that fateful February morning, when his wife and daughters were taken, his five-year-old could not keep up with the raiders as they drove their captives northwards. So they tied her onto a horse, damaging a nerve and paralyzing her left leg.

Apin Akot is a loving husband and father; he is also a brave man. He sold all his cattle, took his money, and, risking capture, torture, and death, walked north for many days to find his enslaved family. Paying an Arab to help him find them, he confronted their owner and tried to purchase their freedom. He negotiated the release of his wife and five-year-old daughter, but the master would not relinquish the nine-year-old: she was nearly old enough to become a concubine and much more “valuable.”

Apin Akot did not have enough money for her and had to return with his wife and little daughter, leaving his eldest daughter to her fate. As he left, she said, “The worst thing for me would be to die. As long as I stay alive, I know you will come for me.”

Our group met Apin Akot soon after his return and felt his family’s grief. His wife told us, “The Arabs came at dawn and captured us; on the way they did what they wanted with us. They tied babies onto horses, and our daughter has a paralyzed leg as a result. We walked on foot for two days. We were taken north to a camp where they built a fence around us. We were beaten every day. They took girls to work. Sometimes we had to work as domestic slaves or as water carriers. For food we were given only unground sorghum—no milk, no oil, nothing else.”

We were able to provide the necessary funds for Apin Akot to redeem his elder daughter. Risking his life again, he returned north and negotiated her freedom—just in time. This year, she would have been subjected to a barbaric cl*torectomy (“female circumcision”). His daughter, Akec Apin, told us her story: “When I was captured, my hands were tied with strong rope. All the bad jobs were given to me—grinding dura and carrying water from the well at night. If I was slow fetching the water, my master beat me with a big stick. All the family beat me.”

She was told by her owner that this year she would be married to his son. She would be forced to join in Muslim prayers and wear Muslim women’s headdress. She said that when her father came the first time, she could not believe her eyes; she looked again and again and thought it was a dream. When she had to say good-bye on that first occasion it was “a bad time,” and she could not eat anything for days.

Now she is happy, and Apin Akot is overjoyed, saying, “When I got my daughter back, I felt as if I had been born again—like God giving me new life.”

Despite their suffering, they still smile with the famous Sudanese smile. I wish you could see the joy on their faces when they worship in what they call their “cathedrals” under the beautiful tamarind trees.

The Baroness Cox is the president of the U.K. branch of Christian Solidarity International, P.O. Box 99, New Malden, Surrey, KT3 3YF, England.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY CHURCH: Finding a Better Way to Influence Our Culture, by Dean Merrill (Zondervan, 183 pp.; $12.99, paper). Reviewed by John Wilson.

If there is one thing that American Christians at the end of the twentieth century have in common, it is a strenuous wrestling with what it means to be the church. Sometimes, though not as often as we might hope, this questioning is pursued with full consciousness of the issues at stake, undergirded by sustained theological reflection, and always tested against Scripture; more often, questions like What is the church, really? and How do we know what it should look like? are taken up in a pragmatic, hit-and-miss fashion. But whatever form it takes, this questioning cuts across all the usual dividing lines of race and denomination and worship style. The members of the Willow Creek Association are rethinking church from the ground up—not least in dispensing with the name “church”! And so also, when Francis George, the new archbishop of Chicago and soon-to-be cardinal, makes evangelization the keynote of his program, he is asking American Catholics to rethink the meaning of church.

With Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Church: Finding a Better Way to Influence Our Culture, Dean Merrill has made a valuable contribution to this ongoing reexamination. Merrill, a former vice president at Focus on the Family and currently vice president and publisher of the International Bible Society, does what a long line of Christian provocateurs have done, going all the way back to the apostle Paul. The trick is simple. You merely ask Christians, Suppose what you say you believe is really true—how should you then live?

That question is too staggering in its implications to be treated fully in any one book (or any ten books), and the provocateur typically homes in on certain teachings that play against the complacencies of this or that segment of Christendom, as Dorothy Day did with the Catholic Workers, or as John Perkins has done in a series of challenging books calling for racial reconcilation, or Philip Yancey in What’s So Amazing About Grace?

So too Merrill has a target audience in mind (though he wouldn’t object, I’m sure, if other Christians listened in). He’s primarily addressing evangelical Christians, especially but not exclusively those who share at least some of the concerns of the Religious Right.

Merrill’s method is to take some notion that is axiomatic among the readers whose minds he hopes to change—and then turn that assumption upside-down or inside-out. Is America a Christian nation? Well of course it is! the unwary reader responds. Just look at the Founding Fathers. Yes, says Merrill, let’s do that—and he proceeds to deconstruct that beguiling illusion. (See especially the wonderfully titled chapter, “Will We See Thomas Jefferson in Heaven?”) Is America sledding toward Gomorrah? Absolutely! Why, just look at today’s newspaper. Not so fast, counters Merrill. A close-to-the-bone slice of his own family history, from “the Indiana heartland” in the year 1915, suggests that maybe the good old days weren’t as radically different from our troubled times as we’re encouraged to believe.

And so it goes. But Merrill is not simply taking these assumptions piecemeal; he has a broad strategy in mind. We Christians—or Christ-followers, as he prefers to say—constitute a minority, even in “Christian” America. Sounding a little like Stanley Hauerwas, he calls for a fundamental change in the way Christians seek to influence the larger culture.

Of course we live in a fallen world, Merrill says; what did we expect? But have we forgotten that God is still in charge? We are impatient; we want God “to hurry up, to cure all ills, to settle all scores. When he does not, we often conclude that he doesn’t really care, and so we’ll have to take up the job he is neglecting.” What hubris! “Whether fast or or slow, dramatic or subtle,” Merrill reminds us, “God’s action in this messy world should never be undersold. He is still the supreme authority, and while his timing may mystify us, his power is not to be doubted.”

So how should the Christian minority seek to influence our culture? Instead of fighting fire with fire, we can be salt and light:

What would it take for non-Christians to begin saying about us, “You know, I don’t understand everything about those people, and I don’t agree with them on some issues. But they’re certainly good to have around. They’re a valuable asset to society. I’d hate to see this town, this country, this nation have to get along without them.”

This passage hints at the limitations of Merrill’s book as well as its winsomeness. Unlike Hauerwas, Merrill doesn’t take our fallenness quite seriously enough. What would non-Christians do if Christians were consistently following in Christ’s steps? That would be interesting to see. Crucify us, maybe?

There’s a lack of tough-mindedness at other points as well, most egregiously in the sappy “Short ‘To Do’ List for Christ-Followers” that concludes the book. This includes a number of bulleted items, the first six of which are as follows:

1. Pray regularly for the president to hear God’s voice. 2. Pray regularly for the vice president to hear God’s voice. 3. Pray the same for your U.S. representative. 4. Pray the same for your two U.S. senators. 5. Stop telling politician jokes. 6. Stop laughing at other people’s politician jokes.

And so on. It’s the sort of list that makes you run screaming to your files for an antidote—a good dose of P. J. O’Rourke, say. Merrill should visit the American history section of his local superstore to take a look at the recently published and extremely revealing volumes of tape-recorded history from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. (And then there’s the fellow currently in office.) No politician jokes? Does the man want to rob us of our only consolation?

But whatever bones you have to pick with Merrill—and every reader will have some—his book will repay your full attention. Pack it in the carryon bag on your next trip—you could read it in one long flight—or read it in your small group or Sunday-school class. But feel free to go ahead and enjoy a good politician joke now and then.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

WILLING TO BELIEVE: The Controversy Over Free Will, by R. C. Sproul (Baker Books, 224 pp.; $15.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Allen C. Guelzo, Grace F. Kea Professor of American History and chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Eastern College, Saint Davids, Pennsylvania.

Free will is one of those perennial tough-nut problems, like consciousness and expressway traffic, whose solution seems perfectly obvious until we start thinking about it. It usually appears, from our internal sensation of being able to choose (or to move or to pause over possible actions), that the human will has things perfectly up to itself. But then come the second thoughts: What is meant by the will itself? If our wills are free, do they still obey us? And what is the connection between the us of our consciousness and the it of our wills? Who controls whom, and under what circ*mstances? Let free will show up, and streetcorner scholasticism happens.

In addition to being a tough-nut problem, free will is also what you might call an iceberg problem, in the sense that whatever answer we give to it is usually connected to a larger mass of less visible assumptions about God and human nature. If the will is not free enough, we get a picture of human behavior that looks like puppets on a string, and a picture of God that looks like Miss Havisham. If it’s too free, we get something that looks even less than human, “an erratic and jerking phantom” (in the words of Richard Taylor) “without any rhyme or reason at all,” and a God who looks a good deal like Huck Finn’s Aunt Sally.

As one of the most articulate popularizers of Calvinist theology today, R. C. Sproul does not like what he sees on the tip of the free-will iceberg. “A majority of professing evangelicals,” complains Sproul in the introduction to Willing to Believe: The Controversy Over Free Will, have bought a careless and overoptimistic free-will-ism, and that has become linked to the even more ominous adoption of a happy-face anthropology whose fundamental conviction is “that human beings are basically good.” It is not clear, from the way Sproul frames his complaint, whether it is defective thinking about free will that has trickled down to “a clear repudiation of the biblical view of human fallenness,” or the other way around. Nevertheless, it is clear to Sproul that there is a great deal wrong with the way evangelicals talk about free will.

In technical terms, Sproul sees this as the result of a lamentable shift away from a monergistic concept of the relationship between human wills and God (that is, that God is the single actor in regeneration) toward a synergistic concept (in which God assists and humans cooperate), which Sproul is clearly convinced is only a few paces removed from outright theological syncretism. Part of the reason for this shift, and part of the difficulty monergism has in making its case to modern evangelicals, is the popular perception that freedom and monergism are “either/or” quantities, as though monergism inalterably means that human actions are inconsequential and human wills possess no meaningful freedom, and as though synergism was (by elimination) the only option.

Sproul argues that what monergism opposes in synergism is not human freedom or moral responsibility but absolute human autonomy, “a degree of freedom that is unlimited by any higher authority or power,” and which sits poorly beside the Christian idea of God as an eternal, creative, almighty being who moves people’s hearts to act or to believe.

What this means, unhappily, is that Sproul has committed himself to telling two stories simultaneously, one about the psychological entity we call the will and how it operates, and the other about freedom and monergism, where the argument often runs toward ontological abstractions rather than telling us what a will looks like when it is free. Of the two, it’s clear that the story about freedom has most of Sproul’s attention.

Cast in the form of “an historical reconnaissance” of eight major writers (from Pelagius to Lewis Sperry Chafer), Willing to Believe never actually gets around to establishing what the will even is, which seems at the very least a strange omission in a book about free will. What Sproul does lavish his care upon is demonstrating through his “reconnaissance” how monergists have actually developed respectable definitions of human freedom without having to resort to synergism or free will.

The principal difficulty with this “reconnaissance” is that it rarely probes very deeply beneath the surface of its subjects. Despite Sproul’s penchant for twirling Latin theological tags (the book includes a Latin theological glossary), all of the primary sources on Augustine are from nineteenth-century English translations, and his chapter on Pelagius is a summation of several antique secondary histories. There is also an unfortunate drift toward hom*ogenization—to making all monergists say pretty much the same thing and in the same tone of voice. There is no attention here, for instance, to how Calvin made just the kind of conventional theological harmonization of freedom and monergism Sproul likes, but then also expressed a deep skepticism whether that harmonization would convince anyone who was not already convinced of the tremendous power of God and the equally tremendous impotence of humanity. “You ratiocinate, I admire; you dispute, I believe,” was Calvin’s ultimate reply to synergists in the sixteenth century who doubted the dominion of God over human wills, “Rather admire with me and exclaim: O the height and the depth! Let us agree to tremble together lest together we perish in error.”

The temptation to routinize complex arguments has its worst effects when Sproul turns to two figures who, as a student of the late John Gerstner, he might have been expected to handle with more finesse. The first of these is Jonathan Edwards, whose Freedom of the Will (1754) is often read as though it were the urtext of American Calvinism. Oddly, Freedom of the Will was not, in strict terms, a theological book, since the most critical parts of Freedom of the Will were devoted to the psychology of the will and the logical inconsistencies of free-will-ism. What’s more, Edwards’s centerpiece argument about the will—that everyone possesses the natural ability to will freely (in that everyone can will and has the natural endowments to execute choices), but only those regenerated by divine grace possess a moral ability to will the good—generated deep and abiding suspicions among Old School Calvinists like Hodge and Warfield. For a century after Edwards’s death Calvinist churches in America were racked with indecision over “Edwards on the Will” (it played a major part in the 1837 New School-Old School Presbyterian schism). None of this hinders Sproul from endorsing the natural/moral ability formula, despite the fact that this places him, rather strangely, on the side of the New Schoolers rather than the great Princetonians.

It also places him, even more strangely, on the same side as Charles Grandison Finney. Perhaps because Finney “is a hero” to the very “contemporary evangelical community” that he criticizes so strongly in his introduction, Sproul finds little in Finney “that is theologically orthodox,” and a great deal that isn’t. Finney not only reduced regeneration to simple decisionism, Sproul complains, but also heaved aside forensic justification, threw over any limitations on the extent of the Atonement, and defined human depravity out of existence. Sproul seems utterly unaware that Finney lauded Edwards as his great model and indignantly identified himself as a Calvinist in the struggle of Calvinism with “low Arminianism,” and deployed precisely the argument Edwards had made on natural and moral ability throughout his great revival campaigns in upstate New York and New York City from 1826 to 1835 (and cited chapter and verse from Freedom of the Will to prove it).

That Finney had a particularly coarse and brash way of using Edwards is true, but it is also beside the point. Even Finney’s notorious claim that revival was “a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means and not a miracle” was simply to say what Edwards had said about human choices being the right responses to motives. Some of Finney’s other unorthodoxies have similar Edwardsian roots, although there is no account of them here, either. Sproul takes no notice of how Edwards’s doctrine in Original Sin has no concept of immediate imputation, nor does he recall that in 1750 Edwards explicitly endorsed Joseph Bellamy’s teaching on unlimited atonement as “the proper Essence and distinguishing Nature of saving Religion.” Between too much hom*ogenization and too little reading, Sproul falls unwarily into articulating notions of freedom and monergism which, oddly enough, don’t differ all that much from Finney—kinder and gentler, perhaps, but still more like Oberlin than Princeton than he seems to realize.

If Sproul can be faulted for not reading far enough into the details, he also has to be faulted for leaving too many genuinely important things out. Sproul touches on none of the late medieval theologians (Bradwardine, Ockham, Biel) and major Calvinist confessions and catechisms to examine notions of willing and freedom, and takes only passing notice of one of the most influential Protestant summations of monergism, the Sententia (or canons) of the Synod of Dordt. He is also strangely silent on the modern free-will debate, where the drift of both high and low culture has been, not toward assertions of overweening autonomy, but toward no-fault victimhood, evolutionary determinism, and abuse excuses.

What is missing most, however, is a conclusion. The final chapter surveys the semi-Calvinism of dispensationalist theologians Lewis Sperry Chafer and Norman Geisler, but without any summary of the previous chapters and without the missing definition of the will. We are left instead at the end with the assumption that monergism has only to be reconciled to freedom to get piety. I suspect that this might have surprised our most famous monergist, John Calvin, who believed that piety would get you to monergism, and then you would stop worrying about freedom. “Our view is simply that [God] possesses by right such great power, that we ought to be content with his mere nod,” Calvin wrote in De Aeterna Praedestinatione Dei in 1552. “Attend to who God is and who you are. He is God, you are man.” Four and a half centuries later, I still don’t know of a better place to begin talking about free will.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

WHEN GOD FINDS USKierkegaard said that most of us read the Bible the way a mouse tries to remove the cheese from the trap without getting caught. Some of us have mastered that. We read the story as though it were about someone else a long time ago; that way we don’t get caught. But if we see the Bible as the story of the triumph of God’s grace, the story of God searching for us, then look out. The story will come alive. God will find us and we will know that we are found.

—Maxie Dunnam inLiving the Psalms

MORE THAN ONE USE[Y]ou don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.

—Anne Lamott inBird by Bird

WORTHWHILE LIFELet us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

—Mark Twain, quoted in “A Word a Day” electronic posting

DESENSITIZED ABOUT GODIt is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all.

—Dorothy Sayers, quoted inGod in Pain, by Barbara Brown Taylor

GOD IN MECompassion lies at the heart of our prayer for our fellow human beings. When I pray for the world, I become the world; when I pray for the endless needs of the millions, my soul expands and wants to embrace them all and bring them into the presence of God. But in the midst of that experience I realize that compassion is not mine but God’s gift to me. I cannot embrace the world, but God can. I cannot pray, but God can pray in me. When God became as we are, that is, when God allowed all of us to enter into the intimacy of the divine life, it became possible for us to share in God’s infinite compassion.

—Henry Nouwen inSeeds of Hope

OUR HUMAN CONDITIONThere is no innocence in childhood, only less mature depravities.

—Gerald Early inThe Hungry Mind Review (Winter 1996-1997)

SIN MARS A WORK OF ARTWhen I feel my sin and am shaken because of it, it is not at all because of feeling inferior to others. It is because one of God’s masterpieces has become stained with sin.

—Paul Tournier inEscape from Loneliness

TASTE ABANDONEDWe live in a country that has never made a movie about Leonardo da Vinci and has produced three about Joey Buttafuoco (famous only for having had a teenage lover, Amy Fisher, who shot his wife).

—Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 9, 1994)

SHOUTING EDUCATORSI’ve always tried to be aware of what I say in my films because all of us who make motion pictures are teachers, teachers with very loud voices.

—Star Wars creator George Lucas,on receiving an award for career achievement

HOME MISSIONThe greatest mission field we face is not in some faraway land. The strange and foreign culture most American evangelicals fear is not across the ocean. It’s barely across the street. The culture most lost to the gospel is our own—our children and neighbors. It’s a culture that can’t say two sentences without referencing a TV show or a pop song, and that can’t remember what it was like to have to get up and change channels. It’s a culture more likely to have a body part pierced than it is to know why Sara laughed. … It’s a culture that we stopped evangelizing, and have instead declared a culture war upon.

—Dwight Ozard inPrism (July/Aug. 1996)

AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATHPeople who want to be amused have lost the art of living.

—Holbrook Jackson inPlatitudes in the Making

DUAL DANGERSIt is equally dangerous to man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing God.

—Blaise Pascal in Pensees

POOR TRADEOFFThe tragedy of much modern life is that the abandonment of the knowledge of God means that futility has taken over.

—Leon Morris inThe Cross of Jesus

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

As the death toll in Mexico’s blood-stained southern state of Chiapas continues to rise, Protestant and Roman Catholic church leaders are intensifying their efforts toward peaceful reconciliation.

Starting in 1994, the Zapatista Liberation Army launched an armed campaign against the Mexican government. The Zapatistas are demanding greater autonomy for Mexico’s 8.7 million Indians, who are among the poorest ethnic groups in all of Latin America. Much of the bloodshed has been concentrated in Mexico’s southern states, including Chiapas, along the border with Guatemala. About 500 peasants have died in the conflicts, both in attacks by the Zapatistas and reprisal killings by government supporters.

TENSIONS INFLAMED: Since September 1996, official peace talks have been stalled. Last year, killings on both sides persisted, including two evangelical lay church workers ambushed and slain in November and 45 Indians massacred on December 22 in the Chiapan village of Acteal. More than 50 people face charges in the Acteal killings, including the community’s mayor, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has ruled Mexico since 1929.

The conflict has cut across many religious, political, cultural, and ethnic boundaries within Mexican society, and it has inflamed the long-simmering tensions between majority Roman Catholics and minority Protestant groups.

Evangelicals represent about 4 percent of Mexico’s 96 million people. During the 1980s, evangelicals grew at three times the rate of population growth. Protestant evangelism has been concentrated not only in Mexico’s cities, but also among Indian groups, which may be Catholic in identity, but are often animistic in their belief and practice. Pentecostals and Presbyterians are the two largest Protestant denominations in a country that is more than 80 percent Roman Catholic.

“Religious differences, especially between evangelicals and Catholics, are an exacerbating part of the conflict, but not a root cause of it,” says Phil McManus of SIPAZ International, a Catholic peacemaking organization based in Santa Cruz, California, which has been active in Chiapas. “You have instances of Catholics and evangelicals squaring off and fighting each other. But you’ll find them fighting over things that have little to do with religion.”

OPEN DIALOGUE: Starting in 1996, a group of church leaders launched a series of community-based dialogues in hopes of stimulating reconciliation and curtailing violence.

“When you get in a room and sit face-to-face and each tell your stories, it’s difficult to think of them as your enemy,” says Ken Sehested, executive director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, which is involved in the dialogues.

For 1998, another dialogue and a peaceful march are scheduled. Abdias Tovilla, a Presbyterian pastor, lawyer, and seminary director, says the talks are “the best way to abate the violence.” As head of the Evangelical Human Rights Office in San Crist—bal de las Casas, Tovilla says, “The Zapatistas are pressuring evangelicals, Catholics, and [others] to join their movement. When people don’t join, the Zapatistas threaten and kill.”

Typically, the discussions are held over a three-day retreat, using alternating venues. Participants met at a Presbyterian seminary for the first meeting and at a Catholic diocesan facility for the second.

In order to build community, attendees served meals and cleaned up the kitchen in mixed groups. McManus says, “It’s a very human thing and breaks down some barriers.”

REFUGEES FLEE: As the conflict has worsened, thousands of Indians have fled their family lands and villages across the mountainous Chiapas region.

Refugee squatter camps of Indians have popped up around San Crist—bal de las Casas, a major population center. One such camp contains 30,000 people, mostly evangelicals.

Well-armed villagers and private militias have often carried out reprisals against Zapatista supporters and others, forcing Indians to flee.

Baptist Peace Fellowship’s Sehested believes that violence in Chiapas stems in part from paramilitary groups of conservative Chiapans seeking to hold on to the current political system that has marginalized the participation of Indians in politics and the economy.

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION? Among evangelicals, the task of peacemaking has been made more difficult because they are internally divided over the root causes of the conflicts. Church leaders have difficulty agreeing on where economic and politically motivated strife ends and religious persecution begins.

While a longstanding animosity exists between faiths, Sehested says that what some evangelicals define as religious persecution by traditionalist Catholics, such as banishment from their villages, may be motivated more by economic and cultural issues.

But evangelicals are targeted in numerous communities. In San Juan Chamula, evangelicals have been marginalized for more than 30 years. Human-rights activist Tovilla says, “I feel that the caciques [local bosses] are bothered by the continued advance of the gospel in Chamula.”

GRASSROOTS PEACEMAKING: In late January, the government released more than 300 Chiapan prisoners in hopes of reopening talks with rebel groups, but the Zapatista leader Subcommander Marcos has rejected new talks.

Meanwhile, evangelical and Catholic leaders remain committed to their own talks. SIPAZ’s McManus comments, “If grassroots church leaders who have moral authority in their communities get involved, they can have a real impact. The churches now potentially have a very large role to play.”

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

No one can know too much or be able to do too much,” Harold Lindsell wrote in a book on missions published more than 40 years ago. Lindsell, in applying such counsel to his own life, wrote more than 20 books, becoming a potent force for growth and development of the evangelical movement.

Lindsell died January 15 in Lake Forest, California, after a long illness. He was 84. Lindsell served as CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor from 1968 to 1978. Subsequently, he became editor emeritus and a director on the board of the magazine’s parent corporation, Christianity Today.

Under Lindsell’s editorial supervision, CT played an important role in rallying evangelicals after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. As an author, Lindsell is best known for his 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible, which documented and deplored the defection of noted evangelical institutions from belief in the inerrancy of Scripture. His series of annotated study Bibles, including the Harper Study Bible, Revised Standard Version, and his 1973 study of Christian ethics, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, also have proved to be enduring in their popularity and scholarship.

FOND REMEMBRANCES: “I loved him as a brother,” says CT founder Billy Graham. “He was a counselor to both Ruth and me. Many times I called him for advice.” Ruth Graham credits Lindsell with being used by God to save her doubting faith when all attended Wheaton College.

Although ordained a Southern Baptist and possessing a solid academic pedigree, Lindsell never had any seminary training and never held a pastorate. Yet in important ways his peers saw in him the heart of a pastor and a man for whom prayer was second nature.

“He was a man of prayer who not only wrote about the subject, but lived it out personally,” says Harold L. Myra, president of Christianity Today.

STORIED CAREER: Lindsell met Carl F. H. Henry, who preceded him as CT editor, when they were undergraduates at Wheaton College in Illinois. Lindsell served as best man at Henry’s wedding, and the two served together on the faculties of Northern Baptist and Fuller Seminaries.

Lindsell sometimes came across as having a crusty demeanor. Backed by his firm convictions, he had been a debater in college, and throughout his life he thrived on enthusiastic exchanges of opinion, even at the family dinner table. Many found Lindsell remarkably tolerant. Coworkers liked his collegial bent as well. Arthur H. Matthews, who served on the CT editorial staff with Lindsell, hails him as “the best boss I ever had.”

At Columbia International University in South Carolina, then Columbia Bible College, Lindsell achieved his first academic post as history teacher and registrar. There he met student Marion Bolinder, whom he later married. The Lindsells raised four children.

From there, Lindsell went to Chicago to teach at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, then to Pasadena, California, where 50 years ago he teamed with Henry, Everett Harrison, and Wilbur M. Smith as the founding faculty at Fuller. In addition to teaching missions and church history, Lindsell served as the seminary’s first registrar, and later he became dean and then vice president. He left Fuller in 1964 to become associate editor of CT.

“In many ways, he remains a hero to us,” says Richard Mouw, Fuller’s president. “We believe that his indictment of Fuller on the inerrancy issue was unfair. At the same time, we continue to affirm the need for theological vigilance along with a better understanding of how to exercise it.” Mouw added, “Now he and Dave can talk things over,” referring to David Hubbard, the late Fuller president under whose tenure the seminary deleted biblical inerrancy from its statement of faith.

Although Lindsell’s views on biblical revelation did not prevail at Fuller, they proved to be a catalyst for the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America. After The Battle for the Bible, Lindsell wrote a 1979 follow-up book, The Bible in the Balance. Lindsell is survived by his wife, four children, a sister and a brother.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

In 1994, as veteran nbc News reporter Bob Abernethy returned to the United States to retire after a five-year stint in Moscow, he pondered how to spend the rest of his life. He resolved to help television do a better job covering a long-ignored beat: religion.

“Even from 5,000 miles away, it was clear that there was a lot of growing attention in the U.S. to what was perceived as the problem of the national media ignoring religion,” says Abernethy, who spent four decades at nbc. “It seemed there might be a niche for a national weekly half-hour news program on religion and ethics.”

Abernethy, now 70, launched a one-man crusade that met resistance from networks and foundations. But when he called on the Public Broadcasting Service and the Lilly Endowment, both enthusiastically endorsed the idea. In 1995, Lilly gave two grants totaling $5 million, one of the largest donations to a single recipient in its history, enabling Abernethy to establish an office and begin work on the first year’s 39 half-hour programs.

Last September, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly debuted to little fanfare and sparse audiences. But in the past six months, the show has been receiving growing attention and acclaim for its mix of news and features. Abernethy says the program is the first of its kind not funded by a religious institution.

BROAD, BALANCED COVERAGE: Similar in some ways to pbs’s nightly News Hour, the weekly show begins with a summary of religion news from around the world before examining a few topics at greater length in feature stories and roundtable discussions. Each program closes with a calendar segment, which explains the meaning and relevance of forthcoming religious celebrations and holidays.

Some roundtable discussions in early episodes zigged and zagged more than they zinged. Still, the show has made significant improvements, even if it still falls somewhat short of Abernethy’s goal of rivaling nightly newscasts.

While network news producers usually require compelling arguments to give a story three minutes on the nightly news, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly has lavished up to nine minutes on bigger features, enabling viewers to understand believers’ faith and values.

Thus far, the show has focused on a dizzying variety of religious trends and subjects, including Promise Keepers, research on prayer and healing, gospel performer Kirk Franklin, television’s portrayal of Catholic clergy, physician-assisted suicide, the Salvation Army, the growing popularity of Eastern Orthodoxy, religion and sports, worldwide persecution of Christians, and school vouchers. Kim Lawton, formerly Washington editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, is the program’s news editor.

A moving segment in December focused on the Community of Jesus, an Orleans, Massachusetts-based largely Protestant group, and followed members as they went on their rounds of work and worship and interviewed them about their decisions to join the community and their deep commitment to Christ.

“I don’t think you can cover religion unless you let people talk about what they believe, and we’re a little more comfortable letting that happen than other news outlets may be,” says Abernethy, who studied theology and social ethics at Yale Divinity School during a 1984 sabbatical.

“There is no stereotyping or major distortion like you frequently see in the press,” says Roy Larson, director of the Gannett-Medill Center for Religion and News Media in Chicago. “It’s good to hear reporters who know what they’re talking about.”

THE HARD PART: Getting the show up and running may have been the easiest component of Abernethy’s crusade.

A more difficult assignment has been to convince independent pbs affiliates to air the program. A spokesperson for New York’s WNET, which produces the program, says only 190 of the nation’s 349 pbs stations carry it. Several larger markets, including Phoenix, Denver, and Houston, do not. In some markets where the program airs, it is in the wee hours of the morning.

The biggest challenge will be obtaining more funds to keep the show on the air after its 39-episode run ends in June. Programs cost an average of $100,000.

Jeanne Knoerle, program director for the Lilly Endowment’s religion division, is optimistic. “We think this is a program that really needs to grow and be seen by more people, and that takes more time,” she says.

People of strong faith may be uncomfortable with a show that gives fair and balanced treatment to all faiths but favors none. “We haven’t been able to inspire a massive, organized support from national organizations down to individual congregations the way I had hoped,” Abernethy says. WNET has created a free 20-page viewer’s guide designed to help individuals and groups discuss the show. (It is available by writing the show at P.O. Box 245, Little Falls, N.J. 07424-0245.)

Richard Cizik, a policy analyst for the National Association of Evangelicals’ Washington, D.C.-based Office for Governmental Affairs, gives Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly high marks. He says he is disappointed that evangelicals—who often complain about poor media coverage of religion—don’t watch and support such a program.

“This program fills a void,” says Cizik, “but it is editorially neutral and does not confirm evangelicals’ prejudices. I would challenge our own community to view it not only as a chance to learn about the rest of the world but also as an opportunity to enter into dialogue with other faith communities.”

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Despite an expanding dialogue between Roman Catholics and evangelicals on theological issues, conservative activists on both sides are not about to wave a white flag.

At a recent Ex-Catholics for Christ (ECFC) conference at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, about three dozen demonstrators outside waved “Catholics for Christ” signs and distributed “Catholic Answers” tracts, which proclaim Roman Catholicism as Christ’s one true church.

Meanwhile inside Grace Community Church, more than 500 former Catholics listened to leaders of ministries that evangelize Catholics. Condemnation of ecumenism between evangelicals and Catholics was a common theme. Speakers included Grace’s pastor, John MacArthur; Word of Life’s director, Joe Jordan; the Berean Call’s Dave Hunt; and Good News for Catholics’ Jim McCarthy.

The recent signing of “The Gift of Salvation” (CT, Dec. 8, 1997, p. 34) by Evangelicals and Catholics Together proponents holds little promise for opponents of the original ECT document. That controversial 1994 declaration, conceived by Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson and Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus of the New York-based Religion and Public Life, laid the groundwork for Catholics and evangelicals mutually recognizing each other as “brothers and sisters in Christ.” Its purpose was to provide a framework for both sides to work more cooperatively within the pro-family movement.

Neuhaus told CT that Catholics and evangelicals “can agree on the meaning of salvation,” and those who target Catholics for evangelism see the ECT project as “a serious threat to their niche market.”

Nevertheless, inactive or nominal Catholics should be evangelized, Kent Hill, an ECT signatory and president of Eastern Nazarene College, told CHRISTIANITY TODAY. “Evangelicals ought to evangelize all nominal Christians, whether they are Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Nazarene, or Baptist.”

BLURRED THEOLOGY? For former Catholic Jim McCarthy, author of The Gospel According to Rome (Harvest House, 1995), differences in Protestant and Catholic theology remain his central concern. “Our doctrine prevents us from accepting each other as brothers and sisters in Christ,” he says.

At the conference, Good News for Catholics (www.gnfc.org) distributed, among other materials, a deck of flash cards, each with a belief commonly held by Catholics as a basic requirement for salvation. The reverse side of the cards give Bible verses, intended to dispute Catholic teaching on such subjects as the sacraments, church attendance, and keeping the Ten Commandments.

Catholic activists have been quick to respond to these doctrinal challenges from evangelicals. Catholic apologist Karl Keating, focusing on McCarthy’s controversial video, Catholicism: Crisis of Faith, has accused McCarthy of using deceptive tactics to promote sales.

“It is cunningly packaged to look like a Catholic video for a good reason,” Keating wrote in a recent review. “Its producers want to get it into the hands of unsuspecting Catholics.”

In a related development, the Eternal Word Television Network, founded by Mother Angelica, has a new show, The Journey Home. The program highlights the stories of Catholic or Protestant backsliders returning to the “Mother Church.”

The zeal among some evangelicals and Catholics is a byproduct of the signing of the ECT documents, says Mike Gendron of Proclaiming the Gospel (www.pro-gospel.org). Gendron believes that ECT has muddied “the biblical distinctions of the gospel and set the mission of the church back 500 years.” He says, “If [ECT] is sustainable, then its endorsers must declare the Reformation was a terrible mistake and the martyrs who died defending the gospel died in vain.”

But Neuhaus considers such talk “uncharitable” and “a sin against the living Christ who calls Christians to exercise grace with one another.” Indeed, says Neuhaus, the Council of Trent “did not fully understand the intent of the Reformers. We can’t go back to the sixteenth century and untangle it. We have discovered that when we encounter one another now, we can say we are in agreement on the meaning of salvation.”

Some evangelical leaders who are supporters of ECT remain firmly committed to interaction with Catholics. Recently, Jack Van Impe, author, prophecy teacher, and broadcaster, spent the entire broadcast of Jack Van Impe Presents defending Pope John Paul II as a man of God. He warned that the next pope could be the false prophet of the Book of Revelation. “We’ve got to stick together as brothers and sisters in Christ,” he says.

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For the past two years, Nigeria has ranked as the world’s most corrupt place to do business, according to an independent survey of global business executives. But recently, thousands of church leaders gathered to take aim at the country’s corruption problems and agreed to stop shifting blame to political leaders for society’s problems.

“In Christian ethics, it is never wrong to do right and it is never right to do wrong,” said James Ukaegbu, chair of the four-day Congress on Christian Ethics in Nigeria. More than 2,000 Nigerian Christian leaders have signed a new convenant recommitting themselves to biblical truth and ethics. The covenant reads in part: “We pledge to submit to the lordship of Christ, leadership of the Holy Spirit, and authority of God’s word in every part of life.”

GRACE WITHOUT REPENTANCE: “Although the church in Africa is experiencing tremendous numerical growth, it has failed to halt Africa’s moral degeneration,” said Goffried Osei-Mensah, deputy international team leader of African Enterprises. “The church has offered the grace of Christ to people without demanding thorough repentance. This has resulted in a lack of moral transformation.”

“Covenant signers standing together is particularly important in view of the fact that many of the millions of strongly moral-minded Christians in Nigeria feel alone when it comes to open resistance to the massive extortion that surrounds us,” said pastor Garry Maxey.

The covenant focuses on transforming society through Christian ethics. “We pledge to develop and maintain our families according to the principles of God’s Word which prescribe marriage of one man to one woman for life,” the document states. “We will practice faithfulness and fidelity by forsaking fornication, adultery, hom*osexuality, and all other forms of sexual abuse. We shall rear our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.”

The military government has taken notice of this movement. It has set October 1998 as its date for the return of civilian rule. Nigeria’s Lt. Gen. Jeremiah Useni says the forum not only identified problems in the church and the country, but also promises to “realign this nation morally and spiritually.”

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Spencer Perkins, an emerging leader in the racial-reconcilation movement, died January 27 at his home in Jackson, Mississippi, of heart failure. Perkins, 43, is survived by his wife, Nancy, and three young children.

Perkins’s father, evangelical leader John Perkins, 65, issued a statement saying, “Spencer now sees clearly what I still see only dimly through a glass.

“Spencer is the one who invited me to Sunday school in 1957, out of which I came to know Jesus Christ,” his father said.

Wayne Gordon, who cofounded the Christian Community Development Association with John Perkins, said, “It’s the wrong time in his life for [Spencer] to leave us. A few months ago, we were prepared for John to die.” The elder Perkins has had successful surgery for prostate cancer.

Gordon said that Spencer, with his writing and speaking partner, Chris Rice, had forged “the most dynamic, deepest, strongest black-white relationship in the country—there’s none like it.”

Rice and Spencer Perkins directed the International Study Center of the Voice of Calvary Ministries, founded by John Perkins in the early 1970s in Jackson. The twosome served as top editors for Reconcilers magazine (formerly Urban Family) to champion the message of racial reconciliation and community development among evangelicals. In 1993, they coauthored More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel (IVP).

At the funeral, Rice gave an emotional remembrance of his “yokefellow.” Rice said, “I stand before you as a witness that racial reconciliation is possible.”

Just three days before his death, Perkins blacked out while at an ethnicity and reconciliation conference hosted by Reconcilers Fellowship. He recovered from what turned out to be a diabetic seizure and insisted on delivering his closing address to the gathering. “Spencer outlined a new vision for a higher level of reconciliation—a call to radical grace among the races,” recalls Rice. “He had been eager to deliver this message, and we thank God that he did.”

The John M. Perkins Foundation (P.O. Box 32, Jackson, MS 39205) has established the Perkins’ Children Fund for the children’s educational expenses.

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