Page 5571 – Christianity Today (2024)

It’s viewed so differently by those not caught in the trauma.

“The worst time to go through a divorce is when you belong to a church!”

In the past five years. I have listened to such words describing the feelings of divorcing and divorced men and women who were part of a church family at the time of their divorce.

Divorce, perhaps more than any other sin, is one of the most deadly “I gotcha’s” in the church today. Few pastors and even fewer laymen know how to respond to a fellow parishioner’s divorce. The usual response from both groups seems to be one of suspicion, judgment, penalty, and a lack of communication and lack of love.

What the church community fails to realize is that the divorced person suffers under a tremendous emotional and spiritual overload of guilt, fear, rejection, and lack of self-esteem. The last thing such a person needs is a further injection of pity, penalty, and judgment from fellow members. The two ingredients divorced people need so desperately are compassion and healing.

Much of the church’s negative attitude to divorcing and divorced people comes from a strong desire to protect the marriage and family structure as we know it. There is the fear that if love and compassion are shown to a divorced person, this may be interpreted to mean divorce is acceptable as a way and means of life. A pastor told me he would like to have my divorce recovery seminar in his church but he was afraid his people would get the idea that he affirmed divorce—and even worse, that other churches would condemn his church and people for sponsoring such a workshop.

There are more than one million new divorces in America each year. They happen to elders, deacons, Sunday school teachers, ushers, pastors, pastor’s children—literally to everyone. The increasing divorce rate is a tragedy of our time. It is not right. But getting angry and isolating the people to whom it happens will not help erase the problem. The Scriptures teach us that Jesus was against sin, but that he expressed a consuming love for the sinner. One of Christ’s most loving encounters was with the woman at the well. She had marital problems that would outrival most, yet Christ did not treat her with the attitudes many divorced people in our churches face. In addition to defining the scriptural answers to questions about divorce, we must ask, How do we minister to and care for the divorced person?

The first thing we must do is take an honest look at the problem and ask the old question, “What would Jesus do?” I think he would talk about it, and he would do so from church pulpits. I think he would teach that divorce is a sin but that it is not the unforgivable sin. I believe he would show us how to reach out in love and compassion to help heal the hurts experienced by divorced people.

Divorce is viewed so differently by those not caught in the trauma. Nondivorcing people seem to think that divorcing people are having fun and should be punished. Quite the contrary. From the thousands of people who have gone through divorce recovery workshops to the solitary individuals sitting in my office, their feelings about divorce are best summed up by such descriptive terms as lost, alone, hurt, wounded, empty, bitter. Divorce is never fun. It is a battle to survive and begin again. The pastor and the people of God need to provide the love and healing elements to help divorced people rebuild their lives.

The pastor has the primary responsibility to set the pace in building a congregation’s right attitude toward divorced people in both congregation and community. A basic teaching in this area deals with forgiveness and centers in 1 John 1:9.

Let me share several guidelines for both pastor and people in helping divorcing people:

1. Don’t get into the judgment business. Remember, you will never have enough of the facts to give you the right of judgment.

2. Listen with love and understanding. A good friend is a good listener. Divorced people need to share feelings and hurts. This is most critical in the first months of a divorce experience.

3. Be supportive in any way you can. Helping in getting practical things done is vital. When people are caught in emotional turbulence, they often need help in getting the daily chores done.

4. Don’t give cheap advice. The “if I were you” routine is of little help when you have never been there.

5. Don’t load your spiritual holster with Bible bullets and come out firing at the newly divorced person.

6. Try to refer divorcing people to human resource people in your community who are specialists at helping people through divorce. Pass along good, helpful reading materials. (In fact, provide a good supply in your church library. I frequently check church libraries and find few books on divorce recovery, but many books that speak against divorce.)

These are a few of the things anyone and everyone can do. But what are some significant things the church can offer?

Singles ministries, as the newest specialty ministry in many churches across America, are growing rapidly. Fifty million singles make this a “new frontier” ministry. Singles include those never married, formerly married, and widowed. Singles ministries are effective where all three groups share in the many unique aspects of life and growth in their own supportive community, which should provide mental, spiritual, and social opportunities for growth. Everyone needs to belong to a family. Divorce often means the loss of family as society knows and understands it. Building an extension family or supportive community is thus vital in helping people recover from a divorce experience.

A divorced person often moves overnight from a world of married friends and activities to a world where there are no friends or activities. Where there is no new supportive community for this person, the healing process becomes more of an agonizing survival process and an endurance in loneliness and grief. When the pastor and church are sensitive to this and provide a group structure into which a newly divorced person can move, acceptance, affirmation, and healing begin immediately to take place.

While serving as minister to single adults at Garden Grove Community Church, I observed many nonchurch-related formerly marrieds attending our divorce recovery workshop, and then moving on into the singles department and mainstream of church life. I soon began to realize what a field for outreach in ministry this area was. Over three years we watched a singles ministry grow from 250 to 1,200 singles. A church, a pastor, and its people are in the business of healing hurts in people’s lives. People who are already in the church respond to this as well as people who are now outside the church.

Divorce is one of life’s most painful hurts. It leaves scars on people’s lives forever. The job of pastor and people is to find ways to apply the healing love of Christ to these lives.

Jim Smoke is an author and consultant on ministry to singles, based in Tustin, California.

A work of art can lift us to a level above and beyond ourselves.

Dorothy sayers said the church has never really made up its mind about the arts. Views range all the way from puritanical denouncement to exploitation. Presently we seem to be in a position where some arts are condemned while others are enthusiastically exploited. The criterion for such categorization seems to be whether a particular art form is seen as “usable” for specific tasks within the church, such as preaching, teaching, or evangelism—or even, perhaps, whether it provides wholesome, family entertainment.

Most lovers of art will agree with Miss Sayers when she dismisses such attitudes as “false and degrading.” I stand firmly on the side of those who say art has its own value and does not need to be “justified” by whether or not it can be used by the church. In fact, I also believe that art and propaganda rarely mix: art was not created to be a teaching tool—nor is it most effective when it is used in any of its forms merely to accompany Sunday sermons,

I do believe, however, that left to itself, art can be used by the Holy Spirit in his task of calling God’s people to himself.

In a recent national survey it was found that Americans are becoming increasingly narcissistic, hedonistic, and several other “istics” that indicate we are living in a society that is, for the most part, sick. In what may be a cynical reaction to the “greening” of our culture in the late sixties—or perhaps the failure of that “greening”—we seem increasingly to be interested in boats, planes, racquets, and Sunday afternoon football. In another word: “things.” But in our day there seems to be little else to work for, and so we work for weekends. And “things.”

I think it is entirely possible and even quite likely that this preoccupation with things, with pleasures, and the temporary, is the main hindrance in our culture to personal and meaningful contact with God. F. David Martin said as much in his book, Art and the Religious Experience: The Language of the Sacred (Bucknell, 1972). He called it the “ontical treadmill” and considered it a major barrier between contemporary man and God. Martin goes on to say there are two kinds of experiences that force us off this ontical treadmill where we perceive only things as real, to a position where we may more easily contact God or be contacted by him. He believes these experiences are either crisis times or aesthetic events. These two may not be the only categories of experience that have such an effect, but the point is that these two kinds of experiences do have the power to impel us to God, and that power is useful, if not necessary, in the Holy Spirit’s work today.

It is relatively easy, of course, to understand how crisis experiences can force us off this treadmill. Anyone who has lost a loved one through sudden, tragic death, or who has lost a job, or suffered through financial disaster, can relate to the significance of the questioning process that seems to accompany such experiences. Questions of identity, of mortality and, above all, of purpose and meaning, invariably surface at such a time. Evangelists and preachers respond to these times in people’s lives almost instinctively. Communication theorists tell us that at such times the central perception structures are in such a state of flux that it is relatively easy for them to be reordered in such a way as to account for a radical change in perspective. In other words, there’s good scientific reason for a person to be converted at this point.

Although no one would say there was anything of “saving grace” about the events that led to such a conversion—for those events usually are excruciatingly painful—we do hear it said often that “God obviously had a purpose in it.” And, of course, those who say that are right. We can therefore understand how crisis experiences can force us to stop thinking about our weekends and our motorhomes and our pensions and our taxes and about many other things.

But what about the aesthetic experience? Can it really have a similar effect?

A work of art results from the artist working out his personal and usually passionate vision in a structured form. Most artists, when asked what their works “mean,” will declare: “If I could have said it any other way, why would I have gone to all the bother of writing a play” (or composing music, or painting a picture, or writing a poem)? The result is a message that is at the same time both personal and universal, with content or meaning that could be communicated in no other way.

Since a serious and significant work of art is usually the result of an earnest and often spiritual questioning process on the part of the artist, the work itself may involve insights and meanings that themselves are related to the question of ultimate meaning in the universe.

The effect of a work of art on its audience, according to poet W.H. Auden, is disenchantment. He says that art is not primarily “a means by which the artist communicates or arouses feelings in others, but a mirror in which they may be conscious of what their own feelings really are.… By significant details it shows that our present state is neither as virtuous nor as secure as we thought.” The term disenchantment is thus appropriate if we consider that modern man indeed may be “enchanted” by a reality that consists primarily of things. Christians ought to denounce the scientistic credo that proclaims nothing of value or relevance exists outside the world of matter.

My experience of standing on a ridge in the Cascade mountains is closely related to the experience of viewing a professional production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Both lift me to a position far above where I normally dwell to a place where the air is clearer and the light is brighter, and I am able to see more clearly what is true and what is false. In that “rarefied” atmosphere, even eyes long misted over have a chance to see and encounter not only truth, but the Author of all truth.

It is thus that a work of art produces an effect not unlike that of a crisis experience. By sharing the vision of the artist—even if it is only a glimpse—we can recognize that what we think are neat patterns of understanding do not fit, and that there is more to reality than meets the eye, and that, ultimately, life itself is mystery. When we are in that condition we are in the state of flux that is like the one experienced by the person going through one of life’s crises.

Can art save souls? Not at all. Art has no more saving power than the death of a loved one, or a divorce, or the onset of a terminal disease. But by the intensity of its vision or beauty it can shock us into a new realization of our true position in the overall scheme of things. At the very least, it can force us to stop and ponder the question, even if for only a passing moment.

Author Chad Walsh perhaps puts it best: “I do not quite see how the aesthetic experience as such produces the radical reorientation that we call justification—but I do see how it prepares the way in some cases, by liberating the imagination from the flat common sense, and by making a person open to new experiences and a transformed sensibility.”

Gerald Baron is instructor of drama and coordinator of performing groups at Seattle Pacific University. Washington.

The high degree of orthodoxy is not altogether encouraging.

Jesus once asked his disciples for a report on opinion polls about himself. “Who do men say that I, the Son of man am?” George Gallup was not among the Twelve, and the disciples had no background in scientific sampling. But they came up with a quick survey. Jesus was said to be: (1) John the Baptist; (2) Elijah; (3) Jeremiah; (4) some other prophet.

Then Jesus put the same question directly to his twelve disciples. “Who do you say that I am?” Peter’s answer was more than an opinion: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus affirmed his answer, told him that the heavenly Father had revealed it to him, and promised to build his church upon the confessing apostle, together with the others who shared with him the power of the keys of the kingdom (Matt. 16:18–19; 18:18). The apostolic confession expressed bedrock Christian faith. Jesus could not accept a lesser confession.

A more recent poll, conducted by the Gallup organization for CHRISTIANITY TODAY, continues to compare the opinions of the population at large with the convictions of those who are the special servants of Jesus Christ.

The apostolic witness seems to have had some effect over the centuries. Better than one-quarter of the sampled American population (26 percent) claim to believe that Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man. They would stand with Peter, who was not satisfied with an estimate of Jesus that regarded him as a prophet—even the greatest of prophets—alive from the dead. The pollsters did offer an option for folks today who would agree with the common opinion in Jesus’ day. They phrased it: “Jesus was a man, but was divine in the sense that God worked through him.” That is a rough modern equivalent to allowing that he might be Jeremiah raised from the dead. But the option was sweetened up (and confused?) in the questionnaire by the added words: “He was the Son of God.” More than half the American public tested bought that composite option (57 percent).

The apostles, in their survey, did not report the least favorable estimates of Jesus. We know there were some: Jesus had enemies who claimed to believe that he was Beelzebub, a devil. But then, as now, few thought of Jesus as merely a great religious teacher (11 percent on the Gallup Poll).

But what about the clergy? If Jesus were to turn to our Christian clergy today with the question “Who do you say that I am?” what answer would he receive? The Gallup organization says that 87 percent of the clergy believe “Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man.” Only 1 percent view him as no more than a great religious teacher, but there are 12 percent who deny his full deity. Among Catholic clergy and in three of the largest Protestant denominations surveyed, the apostle Peter has more followers: the Southern Baptist clergy chose the orthodox God-man answer almost unanimously (99 percent), followed by Catholics (98 percent), other Baptists (96 percent), and Lutherans (95 percent).

The one other large Protestant denomination identified in the survey pulled the average down. No less than 30 percent of the Methodist clergy refused to affirm the full deity of Christ. One is left to speculate on how many smaller “mainline” denominations have a comparable number of clergy who shrink back from the apostolic confession.

Other questions in the poll provide further comparisons of the opinions of Americans generally with the convictions of the clergy. These questions raised the issues of the authority of the Bible, life after death, the existence of the devil, and the origin of man. Most surprisingly, and regrettably, no questions were asked about the meaning of Christ’s crucifixion or about the reality of his bodily resurrection on the third day. With such central questions for evangelical orthodoxy set aside it is difficult to assess the doctrinal positions reflected in the responses.

Concerning such additional questions as the poll did ask, biblically the clergy were clearest on the issue of life after death. These were the options given in the poll: (1) There is no life after death. (2) There is life after death but what a person does in this life has no bearing on it. (3) Heaven is a divine reward for those who earn it by their good life. (4) The only hope for heaven is through personal faith in Jesus Christ.

About four out of five clergymen chose the last statement. Since it is the only statement connecting Christ with the life to come, one might expect that even those who want to add merit to grace would have chosen it over the third statement, which is in no sense Christian. Yet incredibly, of the Catholic clergy polled, 61 percent chose the third statement, while merely half that many (31 percent) chose faith in Christ as the only hope of heaven. It seems clear that Martin Luther’s discovery of the message of Galatians has yet to be made by the great majority of Roman Catholic clergy. Here the Catholic clergy are far outdistanced by the general public, for 45 percent of the public chose the fourth statement, that only through personal faith in Christ is there hope for heaven. Of the general public, 26 percent chose the works religion of number three, and an evenly divided 20 percent chose one of the first two answers.

Mariano Di Gangi, Canadian director of the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship, observes, “The fact that 61 percent of Roman Catholic clergymen suppose heaven to be the reward of man’s good works should provide fresh incentive for the evangelization of such a significant segment of Christendom still plagued with a misunderstanding of the gospel.”

Evangelist Leighton Ford found reason for hope on the other side of these statistics: “The high percentage of Catholics who hold orthodox positions on the person of Christ especially, and the authority of the Bible to a lesser extent, is very interesting. Even more interesting is that nearly one-third of the Catholic clergy see personal faith in Christ as the only hope for heaven. It strikes me that evangelicals need to find out who these Catholic clergy are and start building some bridges of friendship and encouragement to them.”

Perhaps the response of the Catholic clergy might have been anticipated, but can it be true that nearly half of all Americans believe that their only hope for heaven is through personal faith in Jesus Christ? When faced with Dr. James Kennedy’s question, “Why should God let you into his heaven?” better than 4 people out of 10 can give the gospel answer. The burning question remains for those who in their heads know the right answer: have they also put their personal faith in Christ? Are they living as believers?

While, as we have seen, only 26 percent of the general public affirmed the full deity as well as the humanity of Christ, in all the other doctrinal areas more than a third (and up to half) of those questioned gave the most orthodox answer. Orthodox Christian beliefs are widespread in America. Beyond the company of the orthodox and converted who attend church with some regularity there is a large population that claims to have, in opinion at least, Christian answers.

Beliefs about the devil and Adam and Eve were included in the questionnaire, presumably on the assumption that these doctrines would be particular targets of a scientific and humanistic world view. Again one might wish that this issue had been addressed in relation to Christ’s miracles and his resurrection.

Answers on the origin of man were surprising. Here the biblical orthodoxy of the general public almost reached that of the clergy. Half the public affirmed that “God created Adam and Eve, which was the start of human life.” They chose this over the options of theistic evolution, with or without God’s intervention to create man. The clergy picked Adam and Eve by 57 percent, while 31 percent favored an evolutionary concept with God beginning the process and intervening at a later point to transform man into a human being in His image.

Again the Catholic clergy differed strikingly from most Protestants, although not this time from the Methodists. Only 27 percent of Catholic clergy chose Adam and Eve, theistic evolution being the choice of 66 percent. Methodist clergy chose a historical Adam and Eve by 29 percent, theistic evolution with intervention by 48 percent, and theistic evolution with no divine intervention by 18 percent.

Methodist liberalism shows up again in questions about the devil. Eighteen percent of the Methodist clergy deny the existence of the devil altogether, while another 36 percent regard him as an impersonal force. Less than half (42 percent) think of him as a personal being. Baptist and Catholic clergy are most convinced of the existence of Satan (Southern Baptists 96 percent; Catholics 82 percent).

People in general seem much more convinced about Adam and Eve than about the Tempter. While half of our friends and neighbors accept Adam and Eve, only 34 percent believe in a personal devil. Now that demons have enjoyed so much prime time in movies about the occult, it would be interesting to see if minor devils have gained more credibility than the prince of darkness.

What about the Bible? The survey offered an orthodox answer: “The Bible is the word of God and is not mistaken in its statements and teachings.” No less than 42 percent of the general public chose that high view of the Bible, preferring it to a parallel declaration that said: “The Bible is the word of God but is sometimes mistaken in its statements and teachings.” This lower view was chosen by 30 percent, and 23 percent viewed the Bible as no more than a collection of ancient religious philosophies.

Clergy disagree with the last opinion. Only 3 percent were ready to write off the Bible as less than the Word of God. As to whether God’s Word is free of mistakes, the preachers are divided. About one quarter of them, both Catholic and Protestant, think the Bible is sometimes mistaken in its teachings. Sixty-nine percent affirm an inerrant Bible. Sharp divergence again appears between Southern Baptists and Methodists. Ninety-four percent of the Baptists think that God’s Word is without mistakes, while only 41 percent of Methodist clergy will affirm that.

The authority of the Bible divides Catholic from Protestant clergy. Only 5 percent of the Catholic clergy would turn to the Bible first to test their religious beliefs, while 77 percent would turn first to the church. These figures are almost exactly reversed among Protestant ministers: 76 percent would turn to the Bible first, and only 4 percent to what the church says.

Just how biblical authority operates among Protestants may not be so clear when applied to a test case—the ordination of women. This is opposed by 63 percent of the Catholic clergy, presumably on the ground of the church teaching so recently reemphasized by Pope John Paul II. But only 40 percent of Protestant clergy are opposed to the ordination of women, while 52 percent favor it. We may assume that most, if not all, of the Protestant opposition would claim that they go to the Bible first, and appeal to such biblical texts as 1 Timothy 2:12, “I permit not a woman to teach, nor to have dominion over a man, but to be in quietness.” That leaves at least 36 percent of Protestant ministers in the class of those who go to the Bible first and favor the ordination of women. No doubt many or most of these may believe that the Bible should be interpreted to support the ordination of women. Yet the real tests of the operational authority of the Bible can only appear when biblical teaching runs counter to the pressures of contemporary culture. Biblical authority seems to stand the test on the crucial doctrine of eternal life through faith in Christ; indeed, more Protestant clergy believe that doctrine (86 percent) than would claim to go to the Bible first (76 percent).

When Protestants do not go to the Bible first, they turn someplace other than to church authority. The other source of authority, put ahead of the Bible by 11 percent of the Protestant clergy is “what the Holy Spirit says to me personally.” This is the primary source of authority for 23 percent of the Methodist ministry.

Most clergymen claim to have had a life-changing religious experience (78 percent). This claim is made by more Protestants (82 percent) than Catholics (56 percent), and ranges in Protestant communions from 100 percent among the Southern Baptists to 52 percent among the Lutherans. Of those who profess such an experience almost all said that it involved Jesus Christ (94 percent) but fewer identified it as “asking Jesus Christ to be your personal Savior” (73 percent). Lutherans (26 percent) even less than Catholics (34 percent) identified their experience in this way. The survey distinguished between orthodoxy and conversionism as patterns for classifying responses to the questionnaire.

Leighton Ford felt that “the wide gap between the number of Southern Baptists and Lutherans who have had a religious conversion experience indicates the effect that expectation has on our experience. When conversion is preached and expected in our church fellowship, it seems to happen more regularly!”

Even so limited a survey provides the beginning of a weather map of the currents of religious opinion moving across our continent. One fact of religious barometric pressure is the “high” of Christian orthodoxy and conversion experience in the general population. Better than a third of the population are in this pattern.

Among the clergy, major differences of religious conviction do exist, and the general perceptions of these differences are well founded. Catholic clergy really do believe in salvation by works and put church authority rather than biblical authority first; Southern Baptists are strongly conservative; and the Methodists have many more liberal ministers than Baptists or Lutherans have.

But what may not be expected (at least by those who have not attended the Urbana missionary conventions or visited evangelical seminaries in recent years) is the orthodox and conversionist “high” among the younger clergy. Ministers between the ages of 18 and 29 are much more conservative in their views of the Bible (78 percent are for inerrancy), salvation by faith in Christ (87 percent), the creation of Adam and Eve (70 percent), and in testing their beliefs by the Bible first (76 percent). They also lead in professing a conversion experience (83 percent). Only one in a hundred of the younger clergy would put church authority ahead of Scripture, but 17 percent put the speaking of the Spirit rather than the Bible as their first authority in testing belief. Presumably this reflects a charismatic strand in the renewal movement, a movement that has so profoundly influenced the younger generation of Christians, and therefore of Christian pastors.

Orthodox Christians cannot write off sub-Christian views among the clergy on percentages. Jesus was betrayed by only 8 percent of his disciples!

Yet the burning questions raised by the survey come from the orthodox answers given by so many. Dr. William Iverson, scholar-evangelist in the streets of Newark, New Jersey, notes that more than a quarter of the whole American population professes evangelical faith. “A pound of meat,” he says, “would surely be affected by a quarter-pound of salt. If this is real Christianity, the ‘salt of the earth,’ where is the effect of which Jesus spoke?” Iverson looks for the care of the poor that should mark the gospel. Reflecting on the survey of the clergy as a whole, Leighton Ford concluded that “our theological education must give much more attention not only to helping clergy to come to clear beliefs themselves, but even more so to helping them communicate these beliefs effectively to their congregations and to those outside the faith.”

John E. Kyle, missions director of Inter-Varsity, notes the missionary potential of so many orthodox and converted ministers and such a large community of Christians in America. “There is need,” he says, “for at least 120,000 missionaries to reach the 2.7 billion people unreached by the gospel.… Such orthodoxy could well fuel the great reservoir of young people in the United States to embrace Christ as Savior and enable them to be called out to serve as missionaries of the gospel of Jesus Christ overseas.”

Biblical Christianity in America has withstood the fires of secularism and the floods of materialism. About one-third of the population and two-thirds of the clergy have kept the faith, and their conviction seems to be deepening with the younger generation. To whom much has been given, much shall be required. “If ye know these things, blessed are ye if ye do them” (John 13:17).

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Like Joanna Kramer I was charged in court as unfit to mother.

“Kramer vs. kramer” is one of those romanticized celluloid sagas that transforms the strained relational settings of contemporary culture into a storybook opera and the victims of our self-actualization society into amoral folk heroes. A “sound” father-son relationship grows from the debris of a never-to-mature marriage between Joanna and Ted Kramer.

Maybe it can happen that way. But in real life, such stories are necessarily more cluttered—cluttered with the emotional scars and acted-out trauma that afflicts our complex psyches; cluttered with the dehumanizing warfare between injured egos.

In real life I am a kind of Joanna Kramer. Like Joanna, caught in divorce and a court battle for custody, I was charged with being unfit to mother.

In this Academy Award-winning Columbia Pictures release, Joanna Kramer walks out on her son and husband in an attempt to escape her debilitating subjugation to her husband’s career. After “finding” herself and reviving a sense of self-worth by way of professional career achievements, she returns to reclaim her son. But the husband-father, Ted Kramer, seeks the court’s indulgence to retain custody.

Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep portrayed the roles of husband and wife with Academy Award brilliance. Nevertheless, I was somewhat put off by the smoothness of dialogue that carried them through what I was supposed to believe was an emotion-rending experience. Ted Kramer was appealingly—even heroically—brash, fighting his way through corporate barriers, demanding “now or never” decisions from chief executives so he would have a fitting job as ammunition in the coming custody trial, PTA meetings and other inconveniences of parenthood had cost him the high pressure position Joanna had helped him keep. She, by contrast, is seen as an intense, withdrawn personality who, in a state of depression, fled her family yet sought to maintain emotional contact with her son by sneaking glimpses of him from behind windows in neighborhood shops.

The son, Billy, played by Justin Henry, is too self-assured to be the focus of a brutal custody fight. Scenes like Daddy Kramer’s messy struggle to make French toast for Billy the morning after Mommy leaves, or Billy coaching Dad in the supermarket are cute, romanticized substitutes for the real thing. Lacking was the tedious, tiring drudgery that is part and parcel of housekeeping and child rearing. A scene where Billy challenges his dad’s authority over eating a dish of ice cream is more charming than most real-life confrontations. And Ted Kramer’s professional and personal life at home perhaps are not and could not be interrupted often enough to convey the feelings of frustration and rage generated in analogous real-life situations.

Nevertheless, the father tells the court he “was there” for his son during the mother’s derelict absence, and therefore deserved custody. The mother testified to the court that she had lost her self-esteem as a housewife. She had come to feel that the need for some creative outlet outside her role as wife and mother was evidence of her flawed character. She had since come to realize that her need for creativity and affirmation of worth were legitimate human needs and did not mean she was incapable to mother. Her former husband, on the other hand, had refused even to discuss her desire to return to her profession and a sense of worth, she told the court

I discussed the film with my own son. Terry, now age 24, in the light of the relational misfortunes of our own family life. He argued that Joanna Kramer should have conducted her personal struggle for self-worth within the structure of family life. He contrasted her flight from responsibility with Ted Kramer’s sacrifice of income and professional prestige to meet the challenge of single parenthood.

But. I countered, these choices were forced upon him by Joanna’s abandonment. He was forced to choose between his son and a career after he found himself a single parent—after his wife walked out. Still, Terry argued, Joanna Kramer should have stayed and fought what had made life dysfunctional within the home.

I have compassion for Joanna: like her, I became unable to function in my home. I kept struggling to pull out of that depressing and exhausting hole into which societal convenience had thrown me. I looked for members of our family to function in roles that evolved out of our relationships. Yet prevailing custom burdened my husband and me, and we began to die emotionally. There was awesome pressure to confine me to a role that a deep South culture had fabricated. That role bore too little resemblance to the person I felt God had created me to be. There was no room in that role to acknowledge my God-given, creative potential (primarily that of writing). My husband and I made some effort to allow me to function in both home and a career (an effort that Ted Kramer would never consider), but it didn’t work. I became depressed, loathed myself for seeming to be the lesser member of the marriage. The crunch of worrying what others thought when I tried to move outside an externally imposed role crushed my spirit.

The movie Kramers fell into the suffocating pattern of the male’s paid employment dictating a family’s values and personal development. Joanna Kramer walked out.

I, too, used inappropriate methods to achieve the family communication that would allow room for each of us to grow. My husband filed for divorce. After my behavior became even more inappropriate my husband charged that 1, too, was unfit to mother. I did not fight the accusations in court, but took them to God in what has been a long journey. At first I was bitterly angry, feeling betrayed by my Creator. My attitude was similar to Joanna Kramer’s when she said: “I worked very hard to become a whole human being and I don’t think I should be punished for that.”

Certainly the main issue in the Kramer film was what was best for the child Billy. Both Joanna and Ted matured during the story. The father confessed to his son that he realized too late he had tried to make his wife “be a certain kind of person” and he had thought when he (the husband) was happy that meant she (the wife) was happy.

Yes, Terry. I should have faced my problems with marriage long ago. God is good to give me opportunity now to build Christ-like relationships with my children. But I wish I had learned effectively and legitimately to refuse psyche-killing patterns in the structure of family life—before divorce. And I wish Joanna Kramer had discovered the same kinds of positive techniques.

The film has faults, but I recommend it as an incentive for those who would postpone the pain of facing and resolving the adjustments of roles in a marriage relationship.

Ruby Alice Christian works at Chapel of the Air in Wheaton, Illinois.

Compassion can tempt ministers to pick and choose which of God’s laws they will honor.

Dr. george long, senior minister of Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church, used to feel anxiety when almost routinely he married a divorced person to a new mate. Then he changed his policy. Now Long refuses to marry someone unless that person has scriptural grounds for his or her divorce or has genuinely tried to become reconciled with the first mate.

When a divorced man recently wanted to be remarried, Long asked, “Where is your first wife?” Getting an unsatisfactory answer, he would not perform the ceremony. The man found another minister to marry him, but Long had his peace. As he puts it, “How can I say, ‘I’m sorry for what I’m about to do’?” He feels that in this case he would have been encouraging adultery.

Yet many ministers today automatically remarry the divorced—with or without scriptural grounds for the termination of their first marriage. They feel they are “ministering grace” by their lenient and permissive attitude toward divorce and remarriage. One seminary professor of pastoral care even remarried a person who, looking at his past marriage said, “I don’t want to commit my life to Christ. I might have to back off the divorce and I don’t want to do that.” Yet all the while the rejected spouse was praying for a reconciliation. This particular pastor/professor is usually king; but may the grace he is ministering be a variety of the “cheap grace” Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke against so strongly?

In an effort to shed some light on the dilemma divorce and remarriage pose to pastors, I queried a number from different denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, Southern Baptist, and Congregational, as well as one from a well-known Bible church. I asked them the following questions:

• What are your struggles as you try to formulate a position on divorce and remarriage?

• What do you consider your responsibilities to people in your church—not only to those wanting to marry again, but to the rest of your congregation?

• How do you feel about ex-spouses of the people who come to you wanting absolution and a new marriage?

• Does it make a difference if the ex-spouse was divorced against his or her will without scriptural grounds and is still praying for a reconciliation? What is your responsibility to them? Do you have any obligation to work for a reconciliation?

The answers I received were surprisingly consistent and indicated a greater concern in this area than might be supposed from the relative ease with which divorced people today remarry.

Typical of the group was Dr. Long: “Matthew 19 says that unfaithfulness in marriage, by which I believe Jesus meant physical unfaithfulness (not the intangible ‘spiritual’ unfaithfulness that is now sometimes mentioned), sets the partner sinned against free to remarry. 1 Corinthians 7 says that willful, persistent desertion allows the party who was deserted the freedom to remarry. These two grounds for divorce were recognized by Reformed churches as the only two legitimate ones until the 1950s when the constitution of the PCUS [Presbyterian Church in the United States] was revised to indicate that unfaithfulness could be spiritual as well as physical, making the whole matter subjective, and that remarriage of divorced persons should be based upon the responsibilities of future success rather than upon the condition of past relationship.

“In trying to apply biblical principles, I have concluded that I should not remarry one partner if the first partner is still unattached unless the person talking to me is willing to go back (or has already gone back) to the first partner, confess his or her part in the wrong, and earnestly seek reconciliation. If the first partner has already remarried, or refuses a reconciliation, I interpret that as the desertion spoken of in 1 Corinthians 7.

“This approach I consider to be fairly lenient, but it still requires me to dig in my heels rather frequently. Everyone seems to agree that our society has too much divorce, but when anyone tries to dig in his heels and not cooperate with the swing toward more and more divorce and remarriage, he faces considerable pressure.

“The crux of the problem in Matthew 19 is that divorce is only a part of the transgression. The way Jesus words it, remarriage is a part, too. Obviously, if we know that what we are about to do is wrong, we should simply not do it, instead of doing it and then asking forgiveness.

There is a tension in the pastor’s heart between a desire to accommodate those wanting his blessing upon their marriage and a responsibility to his entire congregation that requires him to uphold biblical principles that govern marriage, divorce, and remarriage. I want our congregation to understand that our options are to make our marriage succeed, or to remain single the rest of our days (1 Cor. 7:11), except in the limited instances when remarriage after divorce is scripturally permitted. While this hurts those denied the blessings of their minister upon the desired marriage, it helps to strengthen the moral fiber of the congregation at large.

“I take the above positions humbly, and even reluctantly, and have suffered and gained some grey hairs as a result. But I feel that I live only once, and want to be as faithful to my understanding of our Lord’s teachings as I can.”

Ray Stedman, of Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California, had this to say: “My struggles basically arise from my tendency to empathize with couples who are going through difficult times in their marriages, or who are divorced and have met someone else with whom they feel they can have a happy marriage but are not biblically free from the old one. Yet I know that to wish them well and to remarry them would only involve them, sooner or later, in much deeper problems, because the biblical guidelines have not been satisfied. My struggle, therefore, is in refusing to let my feelings guide my actions and rather following the biblical guidelines as sympathetically as I can.

“Our entire pastoral staff takes very seriously our responsibility to the church to examine thoroughly the Scriptures and to teach what they say to the entire congregation. I don’t think our feelings have much to do with our actions in remarrying people. We may feel a great deal of sympathy, and probably do, but whether we remarry ex-spouses or not is a matter of biblical guidelines and not our feelings. We refuse to remarry anyone who is not biblically free to remarry, but we always try to feel sympathetic and helpful toward those who are injured in the breakup of a marriage.

“It makes considerable difference if the ex-spouse was divorced against his or her will and is still praying for a reconciliation. We simply will not marry anyone who does not have a biblical ground for divorce, and we insist that such people make every effort to become reconciled with their previous mates under such circ*mstances. If they will not do so, then we simply tell them they will have to look elsewhere for someone to marry them, for we follow the biblical rule, ‘Do not be a partaker in other men’s sins.’ We will not be a party to adultery, and make every effort we can, with grace and sympathy, to help people face the issues and act in a proper and biblical way.”

Richard Halverson of Washington, D.C.’s Fourth Presbyterian Church put it this way: “I have an obligation to work for reconciliation, and we have an annual service where marriage vows are renewed. I refuse to marry anyone unless I feel the divorce was on biblical grounds—unfaithfulness or desertion, by which I mean reconciliation is impossible.”

Ron Davis of Hope Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis says: “One of the most difficult things in my life is to confront people one to one when they have done wrong or when they have hurt someone. Whenever this happens, it is as if God is saying to me, ‘All right, Ron, if you want to be Lord, don’t confront them. But if you want me to be Lord, as hard as this is for you, they must be confronted. This is part of your responsibility in discipleship.’ One of the evidences that we are going to be presented mature in Jesus Christ is when we are committed to doing Christ’s will, even before we know how hard it is.”

Steven Brown of Key Biscayne Presbyterian adds: “I believe that God has never affirmed divorce. This includes Christians and non-Christians. Marriage is a part of the Adamic covenant and is therefore binding on everyone. I will do anything to keep a marriage together. I never even suggest divorce as an alternative because it isn’t one. I show couples what the Bible says (e.g., Mal. 2:16; Matt. 19) and let them know that no matter how bad their situation, God is perfectly capable of restoring their marriage. Divorce is sin.

“In some cases there will be two believers who are having problems with their marriage, and one of the believers refuses to return to his/her spouse. If there is no reconciliation, then it is right for the church to declare the wrong partner an unbeliever (according to Matt. 18:15–20) and then to act under the principles of 1 Corinthians 7 about a believer living with an unbeliever. Then the person seeking the unrealized reconciliation is free and the other has sinned by refusing to become reconciled.”

In fairness to ministers taking such a strong, biblical stand on divorce and remarriage, I must say that all have struggled. And none are legalistic. They all have compassionate hearts and that is just the reason the struggle is so difficult.

Steve Brown brings up the matters of physical abuse and hom*osexual spouses, which he calls “grey areas.” I believe the matter of hom*osexuality is pretty clear. Adultery is adultery whether it is performed with a man or a woman. A husband having hom*osexual relations, in my opinion, has committed adultery and/or fornication just as clearly as if the act had been performed with a woman who was not his marriage partner.

But the problem posed by physical abuse disturbs me deeply, too. I have two daughters, and as strong a stand as I take against divorce, I could never stand idly by and see them harmed. And I could never question their decision to seek divorce if they had tried to deal with the situation prayerfully, but failed. I fall back on the argument concerning “hardness of heart.” A wife beater certainly does not have a “soft” heart; neither is he loving his wife as Christ loves the church (Eph. 5:25). And I don’t think it is stretching the point to call such a man “unfaithful” to his wife and their marriage covenant. There is nothing subjective about black and blue marks and broken bones.

I have a close friend who finally divorced her husband after years of threats on her life and repeated beatings—some so bad as to require plastic surgery. She does not have a hard heart, but I believe her ex-husband does.

Brown is typical of the compassionate pastors when he says: “I have struggled with the issue of marriage and divorce more often than I can count. I can’t tell you the times I have stayed awake at night praying for wisdom in dealing with very difficult situations.”

Just the other day I met a minister who was miserable over the divorces in his church and over some 20 marriages about to break up. I asked if he were doing anything to support these marriages, or offering any kind of challenge. He sheepishly lowered his head and said, “If they’d come to me for help, then I’d try to do something.”

I contrast that with the advice given in Why Christian Marriages Are Breaking Up, by Gerald Dahl, a marriage and family counselor in Minneapolis: “The problem is that the church has become silent. Its passiveness toward troubled Christian marriages reflects a definite neglect of the authority given to it by God to shepherd its marriages and families.… The church must sense the responsibility to personally look after each marriage within its group of believers.… This includes discipline and authoritative correction as well as love and nurture.… Direct confrontation coupled with love and honest concern will almost always bring a positive response from the couple.

“If you sense that a couple is having problems and they do not come to you, go to them! It is your responsibility.… In most cases God will be able to work through you to save a marriage and family.… Let the church take the time and make the effort to reach out to the one lost marriage, rescuing it from destruction and divorce. Let us remain silent no longer.… People caring for people is necessary to heal relationships.”

We would not consider helping someone break laws against theft or murder, for example. Then why would a minister help someone break one of God’s laws like the prohibition against remarriage (except in certain cases) and adultery?

R. C. Sproul, head of Ligonier Valley Center and a renowned theologian, says in Discovering the Intimate Marriage: “Civil courts are disrupting the commandments of God in granting illicit divorces. In many cases the institutional church has sanctioned divorce (and remarriage) on grounds that are in clear opposition to the teaching of Christ. Clergymen and counselors through the land are recommending divorce (and permitting remarriage) where Christ has prohibited it. It means that not only is the sanctity of marriage corrupted by both state and church, but that the authority of Christ is flagrantly disobeyed in both spheres over which He is King. The word for such disobedience is treason.”

Let’s look at it from another angle. Most ministers refuse to marry two hom*osexuals because that would be against God’s laws. How then can they marry a man and a woman if at least one of them has divorced his or her mate without scriptural grounds, and is unwilling to work toward a reconciliation? How can ministers pick and choose which of God’s laws they will honor and which they will violate—even if their violation is motivated by a feeling of charity?

God’s laws are God’s laws. Man (even an ordained minister—especially an ordained minister) has no authority to break them, or even help break them.

Most ministers want to be compassionate toward those who are divorced, especially the truly repentant. This is as it should be. Our God is clearly a God of forgiveness toward those who repent. But does not genuine repentance involve a willingness to forgive and to become reconciled? Without that objective standard we try to judge hearts on a subjective basis. No man can do this.

If we have submitted our minds to the Scripture, we must be prepared to administer its guidelines with both straightforwardness and humility.

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Seminaries and churches are not promoting the preparation for or enrichment of family life.

Are we neglecting the Christian family?

Norman Wright notes that of 2,500 professional family life educators and marriage counselors surveyed, almost all felt young people are “not receiving adequate preparation for marriage from their parents.” Two-thirds also said that “churches are not doing an adequate job of promoting and maintaining family life as a contemporary concept.” There seems to be a gap in education both in the seminaries and in the local churches.

To secure necessary changes we must identify the kind of help that is needed. Three definitions will make our discussion more precise.

Marriage preparation: By this we mean whatever paid and lay ministers can provide Christian young people on the meaning of Christian marriage and how to practice it. This assumes that the most critical and therefore the most logical time is prior to engagement and in the immediate period after the honeymoon.

For instance, Philip Yancey, executive editor of Campus Life magazine, suggests we need “a good book on how to know what you’re getting into.” He quotes one couple as saying, “I think we spent more time picking out our wedding bands than thinking about our compatability.” And preparation ideally includes a thorough mutual understanding and plan of action in many more areas of marriage than compatibility: How do husband and wife complement one another? How do they resolve conflicts? What is unique to an evangelical marriage?

Enrichment: This term places the emphasis on growth so that a normal marriage may become better. In his book Marriage and Family Enrichment, Herbert Otto recognizes that a large proportion of marriages and families are “sub-clinical in the sense that they have problems with which they need help and that they are functioning much below optimum despite the couple’s love and dedication to each other.… The vast majority of these families will not seek help, because the problems are of the low level debilitating kind, never severe enough to precipitate a major crisis for which help must be sought.” We must, however, distinguish enrichment from a third concept:

Remedial or crisis counseling: Terms like this describe the major professional response to problems in marriage. As a result, many think of them as synonyms for “marriage counseling.” David and Vera Mace, who are among the acknowledged founders of the marriage enrichment movement, do not question the value of crisis counseling. But often, they say, “marriage counseling has concentrated on removing pathology rather than promoting growth, and has been content with restoring the [former state of affairs]. The new emphasis on preventive counseling is therefore very welcome.”

I will not quarrel with the use of the word “counseling” in connection with preparation for and enrichment of marriages so long as it is qualified as “preventive counseling” or “growth counseling.” Consider Norman Wright’s use of the word. He asserts that the purpose of his book, Premarital Counseling, is to build in-depth relationships and to provide information, correction, opportunity for Christian growth, and a framework in which to consider a final decision to marry. Moreover, he states that “probably more teaching occurs in this type of counseling than in any other.”

His title, however, may suggest crisis counseling. Further, the engagement period, charged as it is with emotional involvement, may be less appropriate for significant learning, except perhaps concerning a decision not to marry. (Such a decision in itself is significant and, according to Wright, occurs at the rate of between 35 and 45 percent of all engagements.)

In addition to counseling a couple, Wright advocates meeting with 4 to 15 couples in six weekly sessions of over two hours each in length. The scope of topics dealt with includes attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, role concepts, analysis of temperament, communication, finances, in-laws, child rearing and discipline, spiritual growth as a couple, and goals for one’s marriage.

In teaching a doctoral seminar, “Family Life Education,” I have noted that while pastors appear to see the need for such content in preparing couples for marriage, they still perceive such comprehensive coverage as an ideal not acceptable to many couples. (Perhaps the time when these sessions are conducted—the engagement period—causes part of the resistance.)

In a survey of 5,000 pastors, Larry Richards and his colleagues asked about churches’ greatest needs for strengthening. On a scale of 5 from a 25-item list, nearly 100 percent of the respondents gave a first or second priority to the following need: “Getting my lay people involved as ministering men and women.” Over 83 percent gave the same ranking to “developing the home as the center of Christian nurture.” Taken together these responses seem to say, “Develop parents to be ministers at home!”

Seminary Offerings

What is theological education in North America doing in the area of marriage preparation and enrichment? In the summer of 1979,I investigated this by analyzing 53 accredited Protestant American seminaries with enrollments from 129 to over 4,000.

The findings as to courses were not surprising. Eighty-three percent offered electives in marriage or family counseling; however, to my knowledge only one seminary required marriage counseling of their M.Div. students!

Second in priority was an elective course offered by 51 percent and titled either “Family Life Education” or “Ministry with Families.” Twenty-eight percent offered a class in “Human Sexuality,” and 21 percent offered one in “Sociology” or “Trends and Issues in Family Life Today.”

Of the 53 seminaries explored, only 5 percent—McCormick, Talbot, and Fuller—provided Master of Divinity or pastoral students with a class in theological or biblical foundations of the family. (Other courses described above are no doubt also designed to integrate biblical data and principles.)

These findings seem to bear out Kenneth Gangel’s assertion that “looking for a required Christian family life course in the evangelical seminary would be just slightly more difficult than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. But don’t worry, friends, we are still very strong on Church History and the writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers.”

What should be required in the curriculum for Master of Divinity or pastoral seminary students? Does today’s fractured family call for courses on marriage preparation and enrichment? If so, think what help seminarians trained in such courses could offer to local churches after their graduation.

Laying Plans

To improve marriage education we need to answer two questions: What outcomes or changes will be the hoped-for results of learning? What formal design of courses or informal experience should be provided for all ministerial students?

I hope the concept of prevention will be embraced. Training in ways to handle crises is crucial, but we must increase the number of courses that teach how to prevent problems, how to help avoid the crises. We see the idea of prevention widely accepted in the form of insurance policies, medical and dental checkups, and car inspections. Are our marriages less valuable to us than our automobiles or teeth? To join in marriage appears easier than to join a secret society such as the Masons, or the Order of the Arrow in Boy Scouts.

Before pastors and paid ministers agree to conduct a wedding, they should require couples to take a minimum number of assessment and teaching sessions. Some pastors use the traditional wedding vows (“To have and to hold …”) as a reference for five or six sessions on such topics as communication, planning for personal growth, money and other problems, love and sexuality, and spiritual heirship.

What is the appropriate content for seminary courses in marriage preparation and enrichment? Possibilities might include the biblical purposes of marriage in addition to cohabitation and procreation, as well as how to prevent problems. The one-flesh unity of Genesis 2; Matthew 19, and Ephesians 5 is significant. Partnership, equality, mutual submission, and joint heirship of the grace of God (1 Peter 3) are crucial biblical themes to understand and apply. The reconciling skills of listening, affirming, empathizing compassionately, forgiving, and loving (agape love) must be inwardly experienced in a Christian lifestyle.

Not least is what James Olthius describes as “troth” education. The heart of his book, I Pledge You My Troth, is a well-reasoned plea for a recovery of this factor in marriages. “Our churches … need troth education.… Troth is not an act which occurs now and then; rather marriage is a state in which troth ought to characterize all its many aspects.… Troth is an Old English word for truth, faithfulness, loyalty, and honesty. The single word troth captures the nuances of trust, reliability, stability, scrupulousness, ingenuousness, authenticity, integrity, and fidelity.”

Also supporting the scriptural approach is what Dale Doty of the Christian Family Institute of Tulsa calls “primary coping systems.” He considers these to be processes or skills more important than specific content or solutions related to such “secondary adjustment issues” as parenting, sex, money, and in-laws. The primary coping systems emphasize marital learning in the following areas: the couple’s intentional commitment to growth, an effective communication system, and a creative view of resolving conflict—plus acquiring the necessary tools to achieve it.

A recent Moody Monthly survey of parents reflects a concern for both primary and secondary issues. These parents wanted help most in three areas: family communication, teaching Christian values to children, and discipline of children. To meet these needs a church might make an excellent beginning by showing films such as the seven-part series by Dr. James Dobson, Focus on the Family. Also, members of a church can indicate interest for “in-house” opportunities, such as elective seminars, retreats, or workshops. Or they may request specific sermon topics like “Why Godly Parents Have Rebellious Children.”

Marriage preparation prior to engagement would consider the obvious subjects of dating, sex, engagement, love versus infatuation, selection of a wife or husband, marital expectations, and the uniqueness of Christian marriage. An excellent guide for leading discussions on these subjects is Norman Wright’s Preparing Youth for Dating, Courtship and Marriage.

It is clear that couples within the church and students in seminary need education on intimacy that goes beyond understanding physical relationships to learning the ability for each to disclose his deepest feelings and thoughts to the other. They need to be educated in a lifestyle of troth and reconciling relationships as well as taught practical answers in such problem areas as children, in-laws, and possessions.

Achieving this is no small task. Most seminary students have taken few courses forcefully related to this subject. Yet, according to a number of evangelical authorities, learning and understanding in this area will be an extreme necessity in the local churches of the 1980s. In a recent issue of its periodical, Theology News and Notes, Fuller Theological Seminary formulated several assumptions from a survey of reputable opinions:

1. The church of the 1980s must develop a priority ministry to the family.

2. The church of the 1980s must address the issues of marriage, divorce, and singleness.

3. The home must be trained to be the center of Christian education.

Commenting on this, Dr. Lester Hamish, of Third Baptist Church, Saint Louis, says, “The local church ought to place top priority upon ministry to youth in the area of the Bible and complete sex education; the lordship of Christ in love and courtship; premarital counseling; marriage enrichment and remedial family relations.”

Dr. Roger Frederickson of Third Baptist Church in Wichita also notes, “I believe if we are going to survive, the home and the family must become more and more a spiritual unit. Here is where we must consciously expect most of the teaching and Christian formation to take place. We are not now equipped at all as we should be to do that. So here we will have to learn from one another and help one another discover the way an institutional church helps the family really be the major source of spiritual guidance.”

How can a church help families if pastors have not learned these things in seminary? Let me venture a proposal. Pastors will need to augment the seminary learning they received a decade or two ago by setting a deliberate goal to improve their understanding of family ministry. They might take courses from seminaries or other institutions, passing from learner-participant to disciple or coleader, and then going solo. In turn, the pastor later can select elders, deacons, or other lay Christians as trainees in this ministry.

Classes and seminars on marriage preparation and enrichment use a variety of teaching techniques today. Even the “givens” are streamlined with overhead projectors, visuals, and videotapes. Formal teaching is supplemented with discussion of cases and structured experiences for individuals and couples. Some use the approach of sharing by the entire group, while others avoid requiring disclosure to anyone other than one’s own spouse. I have been personally excited by seminary students who have transported the case-teaching method “back home” and used it with groups of elders or deacons, Sunday school classes, or even with an entire Sunday evening’s congregation.

Norman Wright, a leading scholar in marriage enrichment, advocated an ideal at the Continental Congress on the Family in 1975. He proposed that every seminary offer a major or concentration in family education within the master of divinity degree program; minimally, he said, all who are headed for pastoral work should be required to take two courses, one in marriage and family counseling, and the other in church ministry with families. For pastors able to return for such additional seminary training, these two courses would seem to be minimal.

Wright’s ideal apparently had not been realized as of July 1979. At that time a study showed that his own seminary, Talbot, provided five two-hour electives in Marriage and Family, but did not yet have a major. Of the 53 seminaries investigated in this study, only two had majors in family ministry. According to its brochure, Lincoln Seminary of Illinois offered “both the Master of Religious Education degree and the Master of Divinity degree in Family Life Ministry.” It is a major containing nine two-credit courses, one four-credit course, and one unit of Clinical Pastoral Education. Eight of these courses are specifically family life classes.

But even more appealing to this author is a newly structured two-year major in marriage and family ministries at Fuller Theological Seminary. Sources there say the program “affirms the importance of the institution of the family in the Kingdom of God and commits itself to a ministry of building the church through strengthening its families. Consonant with this concern, the primary focus of the program is upon the preventive dimension of ministry to families which is shaped by the authority of God’s Word and the richness of the social and behavioral sciences.”

The appeal of Fuller personally is its relatively more balanced approach to preventive and corrective ministry to marriage partners and families. Five courses on preventing problems and five on corrective measures are required, plus a research course, practice, and much Bible and theology.

The Pastor Is the Key

We have all heard that the pastor’s stance is usually the standard of a local church, and that his leadership reflects his seminary training. Few pastors, however, are conducting “in-house” family ministries. One may find only Mother’s and Father’s Day sermons or an infrequent Sunday school elective study of a book other than the Bible. The pastor or church board may also endorse imported programs or retreats, such as Family Affair or Christian Marriage Encounter.

However, better results will occur when a seminary student acquires the strategy and resources necessary if he is to become a catalyst, a trainer, an enabler of indigenous lay resource people. As a pastor, he can perhaps even be an authority, biblically strengthening Christian families through formal preaching and with methods that involve both dialogue and lay involvement.

The pastor can take advantage of significant opportunities for “retooling” in marriage preparation and enrichment skills. Several evangelical seminaries offer busy pastors courses toward a professional doctor of ministry degree with a focus in this area. My own seminary has recently provided a master’s level concentration of 18 semester hours in Family and Adult Ministries, with a balance of electives for ministry to preengaged, engaged, childless, and parenting couples, as well as to singles, grandparents, and the aging. A required course in theology of the family will be foundational.

It appears that it is possible for a pastor to disciple elders, deacons, and Sunday school superintendents so that they can lead in marriage and family growth. This will happen when we get a clergy renewed in their own priorities, in attitudes of pastoral care, and in the requisite knowledge, skills, and resources.

Seminary leaders, students, and pastors must rethink the importance of the place of training for strengthening Christian families in their basic degree programs and in their continuing theological education. They must give greater priority to preengagement preparation and post-honeymoon enrichment, while maintaining a commitment to repair and reconstruction through crisis counseling. Seminary catalogs reveal that most schools now neglect preparation and enrichment, and give only modest attention to repair.

Three questions deserve serious consideration. First: What emphasis will seminary educators in the future give the two sides of the following statement: “It is better to prepare than to repair”? Second: what marriage and family courses should be required of every pastoral student? Third: How can local churches make use of lay resources and pastoral leadership to strengthen Christian families, without resorting to imported experts?

To paraphrase the words of our Lord, “What shall it profit an elder if he gain the whole world and lose his own spouse?”

“What shall it profit a pastor if he excel in exegesis, and lose his church families?”

“What shall it profit a seminary student if he gain straight A’s and lose his own wife?”

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

We stand under God’s authority to honor our parents.

As i sit at my desk writing, a number of eyes gaze down on me. They look out from several icons, three pictures of John Henry Newman, and a small ceramic figure of Saint Edward the Confessor.

This is all very august and alarming, this cloud of witnesses. I sometimes fancy that they are saying to me, “What are you doing?” or more narrowly, “What are you thinking?” or worst of all, “What are you?”

But ranged around the alcove where my desk sits is a frieze that is more alarming yet. In it are five huge photographs, and the gentlemen who look down on me from them are my father, his father, his uncle, and his two grandfathers.

Now it would all be very well if the interest here were merely genealogical; it is heady to point to power and glory in one’s forebears: but I do not belong to one of the families that can do much of that; there are no Cabots or Lodges or Winthrops there. So it is not a gallery of the noble and renowned under whose eyes I sit.

Or rather, not the renowned. But not noble? On two accountings at least I ought to reconsider that. First, being a Christian, I stand under the authority of the divine law that enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers. That may seem an oddity, indeed sheer mindlessness, in this era of orgiastic self-analysis, which eagerly and remorselessly begins by rooting one’s own “problems” in one’s parents’ shortcomings, thereby dismantling any honor supposed to attach to them. But for any serious Jew or Christian, a most solemn interdict lies across this path (see Exod. 20:12). Whoever it may be who bears the responsibility for pointing out a man’s faults, it is not his son.

But also on a second accounting I rescind the hasty comment that these fathers who look down on me are not among the noble. Oh, to be sure, you will not find them in Debrett (the list of peers). But their names and achievements are in a higher register, one kept with complete faithfulness by angels—at least so one might gather from the visions of Saint John the Divine.

What achievements? And in what way am I, middle-aged myself, obliged to pay honor to my fathers under this ancient and divine command?

No doubt a man may do this in any number of ways. Four occur to me: I can remember them; I can give thanks for them; I can follow their example; and I can speak of them, especially to my children.

Once more one feels obliged to protest rather awkwardly here, since the whole enterprise is so embarrassingly anachronistic. How is an activity like this to be kept alive when the thing that is dinned at us all with dazzling and deafening iteration, by every kilowatt and decibel available, is that we cut loose? To be authentically ourselves (we are told), we must not only declare our independence from whatever is past: we must positively disavow it. Whatever our fathers espoused or embodied is to be avoided like the pestilence. We must be “now” people (the adverb has, alas, apparently been dragooned into service as an adjective by the breathless zealots of contemporaneity. Alas for the poor word; alas for English syntax; alas for the sensibility that can spawn horrors like this).

But how shall I remember my fathers? Two of the five gentlemen looking down on me from above my desk I do not remember at all: they are the two great-grandfathers. Of these two, I know almost nothing of my father’s paternal grandfather except that I bear the surname he passed on to his posterity. But that is a heavy thing. What is a name? What is a good name? It is rather to be chosen than great riches.

What makes a name good? As far as the history books go, it would seem to be a matter of the bearer having exhibited some great valor or intrepidity or integrity or service to humanity. For most of us, the only throng witnessing what we are making of our name will be not the jostling multitude with klieg lights and video cameras, but only the host of saints and angels; but when you come down to it, that is as venerable a company as any we will find in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, or even in the audience at the Oscar presentations.

So, what duty do I owe to this man of whom I know next to nothing, this man with the high stiff collar and the thoroughly “manly” profile (that was a Victorian word, since rejected by more timorous generations), and the eyes in which you seem to see great gentleness and great reticence dancing oddly with great wit and humor—an amusing and fugitive business that I can see looking out at me now, more than a hundred years later, from the eyes of my brothers and sisters and their children.

I know more about the other great-grandfather, Henry Clay Trumbull. His eyes twinkle quite unabashedly, and an immense beard cascades down his chest. He was a chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War, and he seems to have had a hand in bringing the Sunday school movement to America during the nineteenth century. Christians who trace their religious lineage back through mainstream evangelicalism to good fundamentalism (the Moody-Wheaton-Dallas-Columbia Bible College-Scofield Bible-Sunday School Times connection, so to speak) know his name, if they are old enough. He was “illustrious” (another nice old word), and people looked to him for strong leadership and faithful teaching, which he gave.

He died some decades before I was born, but he existed for me not only in photographs in family houses but also in the stories kept vigorously alive in the family by the formidable array of grand-dame great aunts, all of whom were his daughters and all of whom seemed to be looking at you through lorgnettes, even though they weren’t. The main thing about this family seems to have been its explosive violence, which was always saved in the nick of time by merriment. Do not imagine bitter shouting matches such as you might see in TV soap operas: rather, there would be loud and frenzied bursts of polysyllabic frustration, vexation, or rage, going off like a Roman candle, and, like a Roman candle, dissipating in a shower of coruscating harmlessness.

Once, for example, when my father’s father was courting the young lady who was to become his wife (my grandmother, that is), he heard a stentorian bellow from upstairs. Hastening up in the greatest anxiety, and expecting the apocalyptic worst, he found my great-grandfather (his father-in-law to be) dancing in rage in his study, demanding to know why books always fell to the left when they flopped over in the shelves. This sort of thing has furnished generations’ worth of hilarity at family gatherings for us, not least because we all see this very volatile elixir boiling through our own veins. But it may be that same elixir, purified and made holy, that made this man so energetic and uncompromising a champion of godliness.

My father’s father, Philip Howard. Sr., I knew until he died when I was 11. He was terribly infirm, having had at least one severe stroke before I was born, and he was almost blind into the bargain. So my recollection of him is of his shuffling about, being cared for with infinite solicitude by my aunt, his daughter. Even to my young eyes, there was a tragic irony in seeing a napkin being tucked at dinner under the chin of this man whom the Christian world seemed to think, and whom I knew, was a great and noble man.

When he laughed, though, I saw decades of hearty male camaraderie, and of his beloved hiking and fly fishing in the mountains of New Hampshire, all coming out in their sheer, hardy good health and vigor. He seemed to move in an almost palpable aura of what I can only describe as the particular sanctity one associates with the orthodox past of Philadelphia Presbyterianism: gentlemanly, civilized, gracious, urbane, sober, and merry.

It is a brand of churchmanship that does not exist in our own time as far as I know, but I am glad to have seen it. My grandfather knew intimately all the early fundamentalists, in the days when there was no stigma other than orthodoxy attached to that word. It was only later that it came to be associated with the rather hectic, tawdry, and semi-Manichaean piety for which it seems to be blamed nowadays.

The fourth picture above my desk is of my father’s uncle, Charles Gallaudet Trumbull. He was the one son in the huge family of daughters over which my great-grandfather reigned. I remember seeing him once or twice in my infancy, but my main impression of him is from family stories, the earliest of which is of his smashing, as a small boy, a closet door to splinters.

One of his sisters had locked him in with the pledge that she would let him out the instant she heard his cry for release. The catch was that, once she had him locked in, she proceeded to run shrieking about the house with her ears stopped up so that she could not hear him, thus technically keeping her word. (They were taught a fierce standard of truthfulness in that family.)

It may be pointed out that his bursting with such violence from this entombment is to be attributed to a terrible plague of claustrophobia which gripped, and still grips, the entire family. I and my daughter still eye tight places nervously. This great-uncle became famous in the sector of American Christendom of which I am speaking on a two-fold accounting. For one thing, he was instrumental in importing from England the so-called Keswick teaching, which also went under the name of the “victorious life.” His two pamphlets, “The Life that Wins” and “The Perils of the Victorious Life,” were influential beyond all calculating in the life of early twentieth-century American evangelical piety. Second, he was for many years the editor of The Sunday School Times.

But this needs a paragraph to itself, since that journal is indistinguishable from, and indeed almost synonymous with, four of the five men of whom I am speaking (the only one not included being my father’s paternal grandfather, a physician whose interests did not lie along these lines). The Sunday School Times began in the mid-nineteenth century, and lasted just over a century. During its heyday it enjoyed an eminence probably unknown by any journal nowadays. It had a reputation for absolute integrity and trustworthiness, and for editorial purity, and for wise and sober Christian common sense that would be as out of date now as the statesmanship of Lord Palmerston.

My great-grandfather was the first editor, his son (my great-uncle) was the second, and my father the third (rather like Henry I, II, and III, whose reigns seemed to span century after century). My grandfather, Philip E. Howard, Sr., was president of the company. It was a dynastic affair to be sure, but no dynasty was ever less “dynastic”: there was nothing imperious or megalomaniacal about any of these men, strong though they were. I really do think that I have been given some glimpse of what is meant by that odd scriptural comment about Moses—the giant Moses—being meek, since I have known men like that—my forebears.

Which brings me to the last of the five, my father, Philip E. Howard, Jr. He was, I think, the meekest man I have ever known. Not the weakest: the meekest. There had been funneled down to him all these generations of orthodoxy and conviction and integrity, plus a passionate love for the outdoors and a wry humor. I suppose almost everything I think about God and the world and existence—especially about contemporary existence—has been shaped by my inheritance, and most especially by my father.

I don’t think he was aware of doing any particular “shaping” other than passing on faithfully, as thousands of generations of godly fathers have done since Abraham, the counsel of God. Or to put it another way: the thing which was supreme in his mind, taking precedence even over his responsibility as editor of The Sunday School Times, which weighed on him cruelly, was raising his six children to love and serve God.

As it happens, he accomplished this—we are all past middle-age now, and all remain within the pale of conservative orthodoxy, which is no credit to us: there is a heritage to which we are accountable. But not for one minute of his life would he have predicted success on this front. He prayed most earnestly for all of us at least twice a day, but first during his morning prayers. These began at five o’clock and included one to two hours of Bible study, Scripture memory work, some systematic reading in Matthew Henry’s Commentary (a seventeenth-century work), and then prayer. He prayed for his responsibilities, his friends, missions, Christians all over the world, and then his family.

We all knew we were prayed for by name. Once in a while if I happened to have tiptoed downstairs early and his study door was open, I could see him kneeling at the chair in his study with a blue afghan over his shoulders. I do not know what images young boys form of their fathers these days, but I for one cannot be grateful enough for this one.

I am sure that a good deal of his influence on his children came in the form of his own tastes and inclinations. To the eye of the 1980s, he would look austere and distinguished, although he never thought of himself as either. He wore dark blue or gray wool three-piece suits, dark ties with tiny dots or designs in them, and long, black, silk socks. He thought of himself as ungainly, and would regale the family with tales of his pratfalls and maladroitness. Social situations made him uneasy: he became edgy in the neighborhood of loud, back-slapping male bonhomie, or too much female burbling.

He loved to sit down at the piano like a great spider and play his favorite hymns, which ranged from William Cowper and Isaac Watts to “Praise Him! Praise Him!” or “All the Way My Savior Leads Me.” His soul turned to ashes in the presence of any sort of religious tomfoolery such as the high jinks of cheap preachers and the treacly words and worse melodies of the “choruses” that dominated fundamentalist piety in the forties (my earliest recollections). We never heard him scoff or rail at anyone’s piety, but we knew that a great deal of what was abroad agonized him.

And yet he remained absolutely faithful to the embattled minority of conservative Protestants known as fundamentalists who struggled and lived for biblical fidelity in those very dark days of the modernist ascendency. I myself would guess that one reason none of his six children has ever been inclined to leave the faith is that we had nothing to despise or rebel against in what we saw in our father (and, I may say, in our mother).

He loved very simple pleasures, too. The days of our upbringing were the decades of depression and war, so there was not much chance for luxury and waste in any event; but the simplicity of his tastes and preferences had a purity and integrity about it that was exquisite. He was an amateur ornithologist, so we all grew up in a world in which black-capped chickadees, winter wrens, tufted titmice, and hermit thrushes were important inhabitants, and you cannot go far astray with that crowd. He could imitate the songs of these birds almost perfectly, and if there are any residual and remote echoes of Eden left in our poor world, it must be these songs. Here again, his influence on our imaginations was not something he calculated.

Early in these brief reminiscences I mentioned four ways in which a man might pay honor to his fathers. In these comments I have touched on the first and the last of these ways, namely remembering my fathers and speaking of them. As for the second and third, those I must try to do myself, day by day. Insofar as I give thanks for these men it is a salutary discipline for my own soul, for it is an offering enjoined on me by the Most High, and all such offerings come back to the offerer multiplied a thousand fold.

The real rub comes in the third item: following their example. Alas. What a farce for me even to presume to place myself in this lineage. Ah—but that is not a matter of choice. My fathers, like everyone else’s fathers, are part of the given data, like the century in which one is born or the color of one’s hair. Well, then, heaven help me to follow their example well enough so that 30 years from now, if my own son has pictures like these five over his desk, he may not be ashamed to add a sixth.

Epithalamion For John And Betsy Genesis 2:21–23

As God removed the archetypal rib

for metamorphosis, John, so did he hone

from you some temporary joys

(from discipline he makes delight)

so that he might

give you back Betsy, bone of your bone.

And Betsy, waking from your

wife-initiation, knowing now truly,

for the first time, who you are,

remember, how, when the Lord God spoke,

that curving, warm bone woke

into a woman!

Lord, let now your word leap down

again, lift the old curse, restore

Eden, and innocence, and say once more

Good! Will you, who made one like

yourself and from that one made two,

join them in one again?

LUCI SHAW

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

To prohibit all things religious is to go beyond the separation of church and state.

Christian parents are concerned about secularism in the public schools. For many of them, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 banning government-sponsored prayer and devotional Bible reading in the schools were the last straw; they decided to enroll their children in private Christian schools. Others lobbied for bills that permit students and teachers to pray or meditate in public schools.

In recent months the prayer-in-schools issue has resurfaced in several states. In Buffalo, New York, students were denied the use of public schools for voluntary prayer sessions and Bible clubs. Similarly students at Guilderland High School in Albany were refused permission to gather voluntarily for prayer on school property outside of school hours. The New Jersey Board of Educators ordered a high school principal to quit holding prayer meetings for students in his office. In Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Oklahoma legislatures, school-prayer bills have been hotly debated. How should Christians view these developments?

First, we need to understand what the Supreme Court decisions mean. The court seems to be saying that the government may not sponsor religious exercises in the public schools, but it may permit them under certain circ*mstances: (1) as long as the end result does not favor one religion over another, and (2) as long as participation in the religious exercise is completely voluntary.

In Massachusetts, for instance, a 1966 law prescribing a period of silence for meditation or prayer in public schools was upheld 10 years later because it allegedly protected the rights of both students who wished to pray and those who did not wish to pray. But a law passed in that state last year (which took effect this February) that allowed classroom prayers only if students would lead them was struck down by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. Why? Because it forced students and teachers who did not wish to pray to choose either to leave the room, or to participate in a religious practice that made them feel uncomfortable. In other words, the law favored those who wanted to pray over those who did not want to do so.

C.R. Daley, editor of the Western Recorder, a Kentucky Baptist publication, highlights the problems inherent in this kind of legislation: “Imagine the atmosphere of most of today’s classrooms when the prayer period is announced; a volunteer leader is invited to take over, the teacher excuses the nonprayers and … the unsupervised nonprayers [madly rush] for the corridors and rest rooms. Disorder and lack of discipline are problems enough already for teachers without encouragement in the name of voluntary worship. A prayer meeting in such an atmosphere is more sacrilege than worship.

“Or imagine a Moslem student volunteering to lead the prayer one day and teaching fellow students how to bow toward Mecca and leading them in a prayer to Allah. The kind of religious service this legislation [a Kentucky bill similar to the repealed Massachusetts law] calls for could not justly deny a Moslem, a Hindu, a Buddhist or any other pagan from leading the prayer. Do we really want this?”

Good question. But on the other hand, a short period of silence (similar to that provided by the 1966 Massachusetts law) during which students could pray, meditate, rest, do homework, or any other silent activity they choose would cause no harm and might do significant good. It would at least be an open, public way for teachers and students to acknowledge the Deity. It could lend an air of seriousness and decorum to the classroom that is often missing. Children from unchurched families would have a formal period of time where they might begin to think about their relationship to God.

This period of silence avoids the danger of advancing the cause of any one religious group above others, or of perpetrating a meaningless civil religion. Since no person “leads” a period of silence, teachers will not be required to solicit volunteers, and students will not have to choose between praying and leaving the room, thereby avoiding practices that might legitimately be reckoned as in any way coercive.

The Supreme Court decisions, as we understand them, should also permit voluntary meetings of prayer groups, Bible clubs, or other student religious groups on school grounds. Again, the same rules apply: the school must permit all religious groups to meet, not just selected groups; and the meetings must be voluntary and must not infringe upon the rights of others. High schools in Buffalo and Albany, New York, and universities in Missouri, Oklahoma, Washington, and Nebraska are now in the midst of court cases dealing with this issue.

Legally, volunteer prayer meetings in schools are quite within the bounds of the Constitution. But zealous school boards and college administrations have gone overboard in their attempt to avoid the appearance of “favoring” one religion or another. The easy way out is always to prohibit anything whatsoever of a religious nature. The easy way, however, is not the best way in this case.

To prohibit all things religious is to go beyond the separation of church and state, to something that our forebears never intended: the separation of religion and state. The original American Constitution guaranteed separation of church and state in the sense of prohibiting the establishment of any particular church or religion. During recent years, the courts and the American public in general have come to interpret the Constitution to mean something quite different—that any support of religion by the state is illegal.

Are we really prepared to defend a complete separation of religion and state? This may become necessary as our only modus vivendi in a radically pluralistic society. Mr. Daley’s scenario can be applied with adjustments to prayer at governmental functions, by military chaplains, at current swearing-in ceremonies for court and public officials. It could also apply to the familiar “In God We Trust” on our coins, tax relief for church property, and housing allowances for the clergy. If we buy the principle of complete separation of religion and state, it is only a matter of time until our courts will remove all traditional supports for religion in a thoroughly secularized state.

Some evangelicals are convinced that this radical separation of religion and state is the right direction for us to go; but, if so, they must be prepared to accept the inevitable consequences. We think there are better ways. One is governmental support for religion that does not coerce or lead to the establishment or advancement of a particular religion. Our founding fathers certainly envisaged this path; our nation still follows this path. No doubt it creates tension; the boundary line between support of religion and coercion will vary from place to place and will always be open to debate. From an evangelical point of view, moreover, religion in general is often the worst enemy of true religion. But given the importance of religion to human culture and the dominant role of required education for children, tension may be preferable to the complete removal of all religious and moral support from the government.

We believe that a period of silence for prayer or meditation in public schools preserves this healthy tension between church and state. By forcing students to pray, we promote a state religion. By forbidding all religious activity we sell out to secularism. We much prefer the balanced approach that follows the true intent of our founding fathers and the actual practice in America up until the present time.

The time has passed for the trumpet calls of Communist slogans: “We shall seize God by the throat!” With all their totalitarian power Communists are now trying to squirm out of admitting that they are persecuting and burning out belief in God.

There has flowered in Russia an independent, courageous priest who is loved far beyond his own parish. Father Dmitri Dudko, who has not bowed his head before the standing KGB orders of the official church. He has renewed the age-old sermons to the hearts of the people, sermons which are forbidden in the USSR, and the people, pining for the word of God for half a century, come to him in throngs.

It is precisely for this reason that the Communists are destroying Father Dmitri today, but their mighty power is afraid to act openly—word has come from Moscow that the KGB is coaching false witnesses among the young people for a spurious trial with the vile allegation against the priest of hom*osexuality and drunken orgies, as his parish discussions with young people are portrayed, and which are closer to the government’s level of understanding of such matters.

Another independent, brave priest. Father Gleb Yakunin, who informed the world about Khrushchev’s persecutions of the church earlier than all others, who fearlessly defended all persecuted believers in the USSR for 15 years, will also be tried covertly for his Christian belief and Christian truth. Against him, however, they are preparing yet another false accusation: speculation in icons. The greatest marauder and speculator in Russian history—the Soviet government—comes forth with the accusation after having exported, and while still exporting abroad, immeasurable treasures of the Orthodox religion and of Russian art, for currency.

I have personally known both of these self-sacrificing, inspired priests for many years and I will testify for them in order that the world may hear beforehand about the baseness being prepared by the Soviets. Brezhnev’s total attack against religion is now under way. Members of the Christian Seminars, young people who have begun to see clearly, are being arrested, and they will be tried on false charges.

Communist leaders still have sufficient power to seize people, and even continents, but they lack the courage to look people straight in the eye.

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

Vermont

The Solzhenitsyn statement was released by Freedom House. New York. N.Y., through its Center for Appeals for Freedom, created last year to receive and disseminate information on conditions under repressive regimes of both the right and the left.

Good for What Ails You

At last, the faltering state of humor has an apologist, a man who can prove scientifically that laughter is good for you. I speak (in hushed tones) of Norman Cousins, the esteemed editor of Saturday Review. He tells his story in Anatomy of An Illness, a bestselling book that is currently raising eyebrows and blood pressures in medical schools.

The story is this: Cousins came down with a puzzling sickness and went to the hospital. He hurt all over; he had a hard time moving his limbs or even turning over in bed; at one point, his jaws were locked. A team of doctors (the medical version of “share the wealth”) informed him that he had a “collagen illness.” In laymen’s terms, the connective tissues in his body were coming unglued.

Well, the doctors’ first suggestion was to kill the pain, but Cousins decided he didn’t want to lie around in a stupor. One cheery day, they told him that only one patient in 500 ever fully recovered. That did it! Cousins exerted the old journalistic will power and decided to pull himself together and get well. Without drugs.

He imported a movie projector and a stack of old “Candid Camera” films and even older Marx Brothers movies. He seriously devoted himself to laughter. Guess what happened? He discovered that 10 minutes of “genuine belly laughter” brought him two hours of pain-free sleep! Often the nurse read to him from some book of humor, and the beneficent results were the same. Eventually. Cousins went back to the Saturday Review desk and also returned to golf, tennis, and even horseback riding. It didn’t happen overnight, of course; but that it happened at all is truly wonderful.

God’s people might become holier and healthier if they would just learn to laugh. Some of them don’t know the difference between being serious and being solemn. It would do a congregation good to have a few sanctified belly laughs. If the pastor needs material to help them, he might read them the minutes of the last board meeting. If anybody complains, sing the “Old Hundredth.” and note the refrain: “Him serve with mirth. His praise forth tell.”

Solomon said it best: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine …” (Prov. 17:22). The NASB margin reads, “A joyful heart causes good healing …” And Martin Luther daredto say. “If you’re not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.”

Yours for more healing laughter,

EUTYCHUS X

Pulling Out

It was my privilege to minister in Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church between the pastorates of Barnhouse and Boice (1961–67). I can only react to the news of the congregation’s withdrawal from the UPCUSA (“Rumbles of Realignment in U.S. Presbyterianism.” News, Apr. 18) with regret and rejoicing.

Regret—that hierarchical intransigence, theological liberalism, and moral relativism have made this decision necessary. The evangelical conservatives still in the denomination may comfort themselves with signs of “increased openness” on the part of the power structure. But the fact remains that the seminaries, publications, and central funds of the UPCUSA are firmly in the hands of those who deny the full inspiration, total trustworthiness, and absolute authority of the Scriptures.

Rejoicing—that an overwhelming majority in such a unique congregation has shown the courage to act consistently with its historic commitment to the faith of the gospel. Separation from entrenched heresy, however painful when one remembers the evangelical remnant within the UPCUSA, is not schism but faithful testimony to the truth.

REV. MARIANO DI GANOI

Department of Pastoral

Studies Ontario Theological Seminary

Willowdale, Ont.

hom*osexuality

This is to reply to your editorial, “hom*osexuality: Biblical Guidance Through a Moral Morass” (Apr. 18). The Bible condemns hom*osexuality as sin—period. There is no such thing as a professing Christian having a loving relationship with a sexual partner of the same sex. hom*osexuality and Christianity are incongruous. I attack your choice of labels attached to these hom*osexuals who attend church and profess to be Christians. You call them Christians; Christ would call them sinners.

You are right to condemn hom*osexuality as sinful; you are dead wrong to say that a Christian may be hom*osexual. Christians do not practice sin. Therefore, churches that toy with the idea of accepting—let alone endorsing—hom*osexuality are not to be commended. They are deceived.

MICHAEL KENT

Cleveland. Tenn.

Your editorial calling for both “compassion” for and the forced celibacy of all hom*osexuals stood in ironic juxtaposition to the news item in the same issue concerning the Dutch Reformed Church’s continued resistance to marriage and sexual relations between whites and blacks in South Africa. To support its position, the DRC uses “biblical” and cultural argumentation similar to the approach taken by CHRISTIANITY TODAY on hom*osexuality. To whatever extent you have moved beyond the DRC on mixed marriages, you have done so through enlightenment, both cultural and biblical.

I do not doubt that you intend to be helpful—and I must say that you have come some distance from where you were—but your effort at this stage is still hardly helpful to the many evangelical Christians who need to come to more realistic terms with both hom*osexuality and Christian discipleship.

RALPH BLAIR

Evangelicals Concerned

New York, N.Y.

I’ve grown tired of hearing ministers preaching against hom*osexuality and offering no hope to the hom*osexual. I heard one popular minister say it was impossible to be a Christian hom*osexual. I know better because I’ve met a number of them. Salvation adds to you, it doesn’t take anything away. If you are gay before your salvation you will still be gay after your new birth, just as an alcoholic will still be an alcoholic after his conversion. The main difference is that God gives you power to lay aside the sin that so easily defeats you.

THOMAS W. OTT

Duncansville. Pa.

While destroying three common myths, the editorial seems to endorse the great myth about hom*osexuality: that it is a condition one does not choose and for which one is not responsible.

A hom*osexual becomes one by a series of choices. These choices may seem imperceptible to him because they are not at first conscious choices to overt hom*osexual activity. Most frequently they are those of social attraction, for reasons other than sexual, to a person of the same sex. As the friendship becomes more intimate, some sexual stimulation occurs and if there is not a prior commitment to the wrongness—or at least undesirability—of hom*osexual conduct, this develops into overt acts.

The pattern, if not abruptly broken off, develops more rapidly if the person or persons with whom the novice associates is already practicing hom*osexual activity. As the friendship deepens, the values and lifestyle of his friends are accepted. Then one day he “discovers” that he really has a preference for hom*osexuality. This is entirely because of the conditioning that has taken place and has no basis whatever in his genetic, anatomic, or physiologic make-up.

LORNE E. BROWN. M.D.

University Health Center

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Lincoln, Nebr.

Missing Information

John Warwick Montgomery’s article “Truth in Transition: A Case Study” (Current Religious Thought, Apr. 18) delineates the painful disciplinary process undertaken by The American Lutheran Church against Central Lutheran congregation in Tacoma. Washington. Unfortunately, it fails to mention some rather essential pieces of information.

One is left with the impression that Central Lutheran, Faith Evangelical Seminary, and Lutherans Alert-National are unrelated institutions. Thus, one may indeed wonder why the ALC reacted so harshly to Central’s calling of a graduate of a Lutheran seminary who was “ordained” by a Lutheran entity.

Here are the missing pieces of the puzzle: Both Lutherans Alert-National and Faith Evangelical Seminary are products of Central Lutheran and the congregation’s pastor. Rev. Reuben H. Redal. They form a unit. Rev. Redal and his organization have established themselves as an ultraconservative watchdog unit within the ALC.

Such activities are, perhaps, at times called for within the life of the church. Lutherans Alert, however, has taken an adversary position. It holds its own national conventions, at which the primary activity is a “roasting” of the ALC. It publishes a magazine in which dissent and friction within the denomination are encouraged. And, finally, it has established its own seminary, rejecting, as mentioned in the article, the theological educational system of the ALC.

In light of such activities, the actions of the ALC are understandable. In spite of disagreements within a denomination, it is of crucial importance that the denomination retain control of the processes of theological education and ordination. Normal channels exist for the redress of grievances. Rev. Redal and his followers have chosen to take another route.

REV. JAMES C. BANGSUND

Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church

San Jose, Calif.

Clarification

I am writing to correct an error in your April 18 news article, “Evolution, Creationism Backers Tangle over Teaching of Origins.”

“Spokesmen for scientific creationism” do not “assert that all species were created separately.…” The author has most unnecessarily brought in the old canard of “fixity of species,” which even Linnaeus deemed wise to “desert” after his lengthy studies of hybridization. If anything, we modern creationist scientists make pointed assertions about the concept of “fixity of kinds.” And kinds most certainly must not be equated with species (which is possible only for humankind), as “kind” may relate to family, order, or other entry in the arbitrary scale of adopted classification.

JOHN N. MOORE

Professor of Natural Science

Michigan State University

East Lansing. Mich.

On May 9 the Evangelical Press Association held its annual awards banquet. The EPA, as it is affectionately known to its friends, has come a long way since it was created by evangelicals 31 years ago to upgrade the quality of their publications. When the chairman announced CHRISTIANITY TODAY as the winner of the first place Award Of Excellence in the general category, the entire CT editorial staff was positively delighted. As I sat there, my mind turned to a statement by Mrs. Fritz Kreisler. Of her world-famous violinist husband she said: “If Fritz would only practice, he would make a good violinist.” I was thinking (in a very unhumble frame of mind, I confess) that if only I knew more about editing and had had a little experience before coming to this job, we could really put out a good magazine. I never dreamed we might receive the coveted Periodical of the Year award. Maybe, I daydreamed, we could attain those dizzying heights five years from now—but not this year, or the next.

Then came the announcement of CHRISTIANITY TODAY as Periodical of the Year for 1980. We were immensely pleased. If ever an award was due to team effort, this one was. I know how much dedicated effort and sharply honed skill the staff working with me put into the production. The credit belongs entirely to them: Harry Genet, Ed Plowman, and John Maust in news; Carol Thiessen, Verne Becker, and Paul Fromer in editing and rewriting; Dave Singer, art director; Walter Elwell, book editor; and Jim Reapsome, managing editor—not to mention a superb supporting staff for production, advertising, and sales. I’m grateful to God for the privilege of working with such a group of dedicated professionals.

Perhaps this is an appropriate opportunity to remind our readers of CT’s purpose. It is not a family magazine. Neither is it a scholarly journal for specialists in particular fields. It is intended rather to provide for ministers, missionaries, and lay Christian leaders the information they need to guide the church and to advance the cause of Christ and true religion.