Page 5385 – Christianity Today (2024)

A new inclusive-language lectionary, funded by a division of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC), is encountering a storm of protest.

During last month’s meeting of the NCC’s governing board, a caucus of Orthodox delegates disavowed the lectionary, calling it “a new apocryphal canon.” The Orthodox delegates asked the governing board to pass a resolution that would make it clear that the lectionary was “produced only by a committee of interested groups and individuals” and that the translation “is neither a product nor a consensus” of the NCC. Last month’s meeting was the first opportunity for governing board members to raise questions about the document.

The lectionary—Scripture readings for use in public worship—attempts to eliminate what translation committee members call “male bias” in Scripture. The Orthodox delegates agreed that the generic Greek word anthropos, often translated as “man” in English Bibles, can accurately be rendered as “person” or “human being.” But they said the lectionary goes too far in its attempts to remove male bias.

Any change in the biblical text that refers to God as both male and female implies “a false theology and substantially alters crucial biblical witness to the church’s understanding of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” the Orthodox statement said. In response to the Orthodox appeal, the governing board approved a resolution that recognized “divisions within and among” NCC member communions regarding the project. Besides the Orthodox church’s opposition, the head of the NCC-affiliated Lutheran Church in America advised his denomination against using it. Recently, NCC headquarters in New York City received a death threat against members of the lectionary committee.

The lectionary was produced by an 11-member committee appointed by the NCC’s Division of Education and Ministry. It is intended for voluntary and experimental use, and did not require approval of the governing board.

Much of the controversy (CT, Nov. 11, 1983, p. 50) revolves around such references to God as “Father (and Mother)”: the substitution of “Sovereign One” for “Lord”; and “the Human One” for “the Son of Man.” Lectionary committee members at the governing board meeting defended their translation as a document in which “the whole congregation is being addressed in its Scripture.”

Committee member Burton Throckmorton. Jr., professor of New Testament at the Bangor (Maine) Theological Seminary, and a minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), expressed a view that departs even further from traditional understandings of the written Word of God.

“The Scripture is the church’s book. It was written by the church [and] for the church,” Throckmorton said. “There’s no reason … that I can see why the church can’t add to its Scripture—delete from its Scripture. I think the church can do with its Scripture what it wants to [do] with its Scripture.”

The Division of Education and Ministry so far has spent about $25,000 on the lectionary project. David Ng, head of the agency, said sales of the lectionary are projected to recoup that investment within three to four years.

The lectionary includes readings for “Year A” of a three-year cycle. Two more editions—for years B and C—are being prepared by the committee. By 1985, when the project is completed, some 95 percent of the New Testament and 60 percent of the Old Testament will have been retranslated.

Nobody except his academic review committee at Johns Hopkins University would read Ronald Graybill’s doctoral dissertation on Ellen White for at least five years. Or so he thought. In August, two copies were released by mistake, and now Graybill is in danger of losing his job as associate secretary of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Ellen G. White Foundation.

The central controversy in the Adventist church is summarized by the words “Ellen White.” (CT, March 18, 1983). Revisionist Adventists, including most of the church’s theologians, contend that the founder and prophet of Adventism would not approve of the high authority her writings are accorded in church circles today.

Before she died in 1915, White established the foundation that bears her name for the purpose of controlling her writings and distributing her assets.

Partly because of his high position with the White Foundation, Graybill was thought to hold a traditional view of White. His dissertation has challenged that perception. Last month he was ordered by the foundation’s board of trustees to take an administrative leave of absence.

In his dissertation, Graybill excerpts from her personal letters, some of which have never been published. He discusses the problems White had with her husband and children.

Whereas conservative Adventists have cited White’s meager formal education as evidence that her writings were inspired, Graybill shows that she may have been better educated and simply more intelligent than most have realized. In short, Graybill’s account has spawned the notion that he is the latest prominent Seventh-day Adventist to come out of the closet against Ellen White.

But Graybill says it’s not true. “People who think I’m repudiating what I’ve stood for, or breaking with the church or with the estate,” he says, “are wrong.”

Graybill explains that he was writing for a secular reviewing committee at Johns Hopkins. Thus, the dissertation was “written consciously from a nonsupernaturalistic perspective.”

Because he planned to elaborate on the doctrinal implications of his work, Graybill arranged with University Microfilms, a storehouse for dissertations from major universities, not to release the manuscript for five years. The organization has apologized to Graybill for violating the agreement.

“I’ve written an incomplete statement,” Graybill says. “But there’s nothing in it that’s inconsistent with the [Adventist] church’s understanding of Ellen White.” That’s what Graybill now has to prove to the foundation’s board of trustees.

Graybill’s ordination is not at stake, unlike the cases of other Adventists who have spoken against church doctrine. “Nobody feels that Ron is a disloyal Adventist,” says Kenneth Wood, chairman of the foundation’s board. “The issue is whether he can continue as a credible representative of the White estate.” Graybill damaged his credibility by violating foundation procedures for the release of White’s writings. Wood says he realizes Graybill did not intend for the dissertation to be made public until 1988, but the reality is that a large segment of the Adventist church has been exposed to what Graybill wrote.

Douglas Hackleman, editor of the magazine Adventist Currents, which holds the nontraditional view of White, calls the issue of Graybill’s procedural violations a “red herring.” “The real problem,” Hackleman says, “is that for most Adventists, the dissertation will have the effect of demythologizing Ellen White.” Hackleman asserts that a decision by the foundation not to retain Graybill would testify to its tendencies to hide the facts about White.

“Accountability is the glue that holds the society together. It is the common agreement by the members of any society that they will be responsible for their dealings with one another. Accountability is having to answer to someone for what one does,” wrote Richard DeVos (Believe!, Revell, 1975).

Chief Justice Gregory Evans of the Supreme Court of Ontario, Canada, apparently agreed with that contention. On November 10, he levied a fine of $25 million dollars against the Amway Corporation, and Amway of Canada, Ltd. DeVos is president and cofounder of the Amway empire.

The firm has acquired a Christian image and enlisted many Christians among its one million international distributors. The fine levied against it was the largest in Canadian history and, according to court documents, was imposed to penalize the firm for the largest fraud in Canada’s history.

The police investigations revealed that Amway had defrauded the government of as much as $148 million dollars of customs charges between 1965 and 1982. The Crown attorney told the court that the company had been cheating the Canadian government and lying to Canadian customs officials on “almost a daily basis” during that period.

It had been expected that the case would involve a lengthy trial because Amway officials initially had insisted the firm was not guilty. The guilty plea came as a surprise. The final statement, signed by DeVos and Amway chairman Jay Van Andel, stated that the two officials and the company “assumed full responsibility for the acts of all officials or agents of the corporation and their declarations made to Canada Customs and their agents.”

DeVos and Van Andel admitted that “they were acting illegally and beyond the scope of their legitimate and lawful authority.”

In return for the guilty plea, the Canadian government dropped personal charges against DeVos, Van Andel, and two other Amway officials. The government, however, is seeking a further $148 million for recovery of customs revenue from the firm through civil actions.

Otto Stolz, Amway vice-president and general counsel, was present at the Supreme Court hearing in Toronto. He told reporters that Amway’s co-owners and executives “were filled with remorse,” but that Amway still regarded the fraud as little more than a “misunderstanding.”

“The provisions of the Customs Act are extremely complex,” Stolz told the newspeople “They [Amway officials] referred the whole matter to their legal advisers, and they relied on the advice they received.”

The company’s published statement insisted on offering that explanation of inadequate legal advice, adding that legal costs in the case were running $2 million annually.

But Crown attorney Paul Lindsay contended that the fraud was a direct result of company policy. The government’s case documented an elaborate customs scam that involved a web of fictitious invoices and price lists at a dummy company to conceal the fraud. Amway’s auditors objected to the scheme, and the company’s chief financial officer had resigned in protest, but the dimensions of the operation began to emerge only when, in 1979, Amway’s customs broker resigned in protest and, as required by law, reported the company’s noncompliance with customs regulations. Lindsay contended that DeVos and Van Andel were intimately involved with most of the arrangements. Chief Justice Gregory Evans described the company’s guilty plea as a “deathbed confession of guilt.”

After the legal settlement was disclosed, Amway ran a full-page advertisem*nt in several newspapers, in defense of its executives. It read in part: “Why … would Amway pay a large fine and let its lawyers submit a statement describing past company mistakes in harsh terms? For 15 years, Amway management relied in good faith on their understanding that an agreement had been reached in 1965 with two Canadian customs officials. Amway’s cofounders relied consistently upon the advice of various responsible corporate officers and legal counselors that the agreement existed and that the company was acting in full compliance with the law. The Canadian authorities now assert that their understanding of the events in 1965 differs significantly from that of the Amway officials who participated at that time.”

Amway was founded in 1959 by DeVos and Van Andel, and the Canadian company was incorporated in 1962. The international corporation has had phenomenal growth and now has 7,000 employees and about one million distributors. The firm has extensive holdings, including ownership of Mutual Broadcasting Company, the world’s largest radio network. DeVos is a personal friend of President Reagan and was, until last year, finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.

A member of the Christian Reformed Church, he has identified himself with the evangelical cause. “I am a Christian by faith and by experience,” he stated in Believe!, “and in no aspect of my life can I make major decisions or take positions which are not compatible with my discipleship.”

LES TARRin Toronto

Protestant organizations will try to prevent it.

In a surprisingly swift and almost unnoticed action. Congress repealed a 116-year-old ban against establishing full diplomatic ties with the Vatican. Congressional gratitude for the role Pope John Paul II played in foreign affairs, most notably in Poland, prompted the move. It appears to have been generated spontaneously on Capitol Hill with little outside pressure.

The repeal was proposed by Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) as an amendment to a State Department appropriations bill, and it passed the Senate by unanimous voice vote. Lugar said, “Diplomatic relations with the Vatican are consistent with American tradition, have been carried on in substance if not in form by most administrations since the 1930s, and, in my judgment, should be regularized.”

President Reagan, although he has not lobbied for this change, greatly admires Pope John Paul II for his courageous foreign policy. In particular, the lifting of martial law in Poland is credited to the influence of the Catholic church there. Because the United States would not intervene militarily to halt communism in Eastern Europe, Catholicism is viewed as a highly significant deterrent.

When the appropriations bill was sent to a House-Senate conference committee to iron out differences, the Lugar amendment was classified as “noncontroversial,” meaning no further discussion was needed.

However, Rep. Mark D. Siljander (R-Mich.) brought it up for consideration after being pressured to do so by Protestant opponents, led by the Seventh-day Adventists.

They believe it violates the First Amendment by clearly preferring one religion over others and entangling church and state. A letter sent to all House and Senate conferees from Forest Montgomery, counsel for the National Association of Evangelicals, said, “The Senate vote, without hearings, caught the religious community by surprise.” The result, Montgomery wrote, will be “totally at odds with the First Amendment religion clauses.” Despite Siljander’s plea, the amendment was adopted.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), one of 20 cosponsors, kept quiet about his support of the amendment both on the floor of the Senate and during the conference committee meeting. A Southern Baptist, Helms stirred opposition from leaders of his denomination in North Carolina, where the editor of the state Baptist newspaper took a strong editorial stand against it.

Richard Cizik, legislative researcher for the NAE, said, “We hoped someone would see the light if this was brought out in the open, but that didn’t happen. Lugar really put a knife in our backs” by preempting hearings on the subject that had been promised by Rep. Clement Zablocki (D-Wis.). “Hearings could have derailed this,” Cizik said.

Gary M. Ross, congressional liaison for the Seventh-day Adventists, said he will continue to press for hearings on whether the President should appoint a Vatican ambassador. He hopes to raise enough public opposition that it would be politically unwise for Reagan to do so. The President has not said whether he will actually name an ambassador.

Complicating the issue, however, is the fact that Reagan, like many presidents before him, already has a personal representative at the Vatican with a federally funded staff and office. (All presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, except for Eisenhower, have had them.) No federal funds are used to pay his salary, and he holds no official diplomatic status. Lugar termed this “an awkward charade.”

Last June, Lugar, an active Methodist layman, met with the Pope in Rome. Reagan’s envoy to the Vatican told Lugar that the lack of official status causes protocol problems. More than 100 other countries have formal diplomatic missions there, a Lugar aide said, so “our people are the low men on the totem pole.” This helped convince Lugar to sponsor the repeal.

The ban against formal diplomatic ties was challenged in 1951 by President Truman and again in 1977 by members of the Senate. Both times, opposition from Protestant groups squelched the attempts. When Truman appointed Mark Clark as ambassador to the Vatican, NAE’s first Washington office director, Clyde Taylor, played a key role in getting the decision reversed.

NAE opposes Lugar’s amendment because it allows the government to “give appearance of the imprimatur of the United States upon the head of a church,” according to Montgomery. “While the NEA recognizes that the Vatican is engaged in many meaningful political and diplomatic exchanges, the central function of the Vatican is to serve as the headquarters of a church. Diplomatic relations with the World Evangelical Fellowship and the World Council of Churches would be equally inappropriate.”

Other groups opposed to the Lugar amendment include the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, the National Council of Churches, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The unusual speed at which the amendment passed the Senate prevented any momentum from developing among grassroots constituents of these groups.

In some quarters, the issue did not rate much concern. An NCC spokesman limited his criticism to calling the action “unwise and unnecessary,” and James Dunn of the Baptist Joint Committee said “it is not as immiment and obvious a threat as tuition tax credits or a prayer amendment that would recast our traditional understanding of the First Amendment.”

Dunn also said he has been “yelling and screaming” about the amendment and counting on state Baptist newspapers to interpret the issue to their readers.

All the opposing groups took care to distance themselves from any taint of anti-Catholicism. They concede that the Pope’s popularity and the presence of an all-but-official envoy already at the Vatican make it difficult to mobilize a ground swell of concern.

BETH SPRING

Correction

Christianity Today reported in its September 16 issue that a professor from King’s College was one of a group of Christian educators who toured Nicaragua last summer and issued a report complimenting the Sandinista government. One of the professors on the tour was from King College, not King’s.

On the evangelist’s 65th birthday, a plaque and a tribute at the site of his first crusade in 1949.

Flanked by nearly all of the same team members and many of the officials who stood with him in 1949, Billy Graham returned to Los Angeles on his 65th birthday last month (Nov. 7) to preach from the same text and the same spot where a tent-revival crusade launched him into international orbit as the world’s leading evangelist and one of its most famous men. A plaque was unveiled at the site during a nostalgic and sometimes emotional ceremony—the first plaque dedication sponsored jointly by the City and County of Los Angeles.

As he did at that 1949 crusade, Cliff Barrows led appreciative Graham fans in singing. His wife, Billie, played the piano, and Lorin Whitney, the organ—just as they did at the 1949 meeting. And George Beverly Shea sang—what else?—“How Great Thou Art.” A host of evangelical figures and civic dignitaries gathered on the platform and pressed around the smiling and sun-tanned evangelist to offer congratulations and exchange “God-bless-yous.” Robert Schuller, pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, and Trinity Broadcasting Network’s show-host, Paul Crouch, were in the front row. Graham associates Walter Smythe, Russell Busby, and Grady and T. W. Wilson were there. So were Bill Brown of World Wide Pictures, Decision magazine’s founding editor, Sherwood Wirt, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor emeritus Harold Lindsell.

Southern California’s Jewish community fixture, Rabbi Edgar Magnin, and fiery black Baptist preacher E. V. Hill led in prayer. Evangelist Luis Palau, sitting unnoticed in the crowd until the final moments, was introduced. And, in order not to slight anyone, World Vision’s Ted Engstrom and actress Dale Evans Rogers, among others, were asked on the spur of the moment to take part: Engstrom to extend greetings and Rogers to lead the crowd of several hundred in singing Happy Birthday to “Dear Billy.” Ruth Graham beamed proudly and the Grahams’ son Franklin drew comments such as, “Isn’t he handsome?” from onlookers.

Graham noted that the press had focused world attention on the 1949 crusade and said it had been “a major turning point in my ministry.” Warning that America must repent of its sins or face the judgment of God, he preached from the same text he used on the first night of the 1949 campaign:

“As I did 34 years ago, I must give the same message today as Isaiah gave 3,000 years ago. Whether we like to admit it or not, the whole world is in trouble. Most nations are running huge deficits; small wars are raging in many parts of the world. The nations of the world stand at the very brink of Armageddon with weapons of mass destruction that could make a cinder out of this planet in a matter of hours. Crime, drugs, and p*rnography have invaded our country and are destroying hundreds of thousands of old and young alike. If ever there was a time to have national repentance and a turning to God, it is at the end of 1983 and the threshold of 1984.”

Graham’s latest book, Approaching Hoofbeats: The Four Horsem*n of the Apocalypse (Word), was published the week before the ceremony and is considered to be his most candid and hard-hitting work. Its main point, Graham said, is the warning of judgment for disobedience and the promise and hope held out to the faithful.

Graham said he believes the United States is both “far more religious and irreligious” today than it was in 1949, with good and evil—“the wheat and the tares”—growing together. But, the evangelist added during an interview, more people are attending his crusades now than ever before, and the number who come forward to make decisions for Christ “is the largest by far in my career.”

Reaching age 65 is no signal for retirement, Graham declared; in fact, he will embark on a strenuous three-month evangelism campaign in six major cities in Great Britain next year as well as hold crusades in Vancouver, Canada, and in Alaska. Appearing slim and healthy, the grandfather of 16 said only illness will slow him down.

Graham promised to avoid political discussions through the 1984 elections, but he seemed pleased to receive congratulatory messages from four of his well-known friends—living U.S. Presidents Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon. Some 60 Hollywood film and entertainment stars also sent birthday greetings on autographed photographs of themselves. “65? Happy birthday, kid,” said George Burns, who is 87. “Dear Rev. Billy,” wrote comedian Buddy Hackett, “When you talk to your boss, put in a good word for me.”

RUSSELL CHANDLER in Los Angeles

The Unification Church’s marriage system symbolizes its break with Christianity.

The family is under assault. The divorce rate, while tapering off last year due to the economic situation, still approaches 50 percent. But the Rev. Sun Myung Moon believes he has the answer to the problem—marriage Unification style. To demonstrate his solution, the Unification Church that he founded in 1954 rented Madison Square Garden, and on July 1, 1982, he married some 2,000 couples—half of his American following—in one massive ceremony, matching up the couples himself. Then three months later, on October 14, in a less-publicized ceremony (at least in this country) he eclipsed his own record by marrying 5,837 couples in Seoul, Korea. Some Americans who missed the New York ceremony traveled to Korea for this latter ceremony.

Quite apart from the matter of arranged marriages, the Unification Church breaks with traditional marriage patterns. Only by understanding the role of marriage in Moon’s thought can we penetrate into the heart of Unification thought and hope for the world. The “blessing” (marriage) symbolizes better than any other aspect of Unificationism the absolute break it has made with traditional Christian faith. Far from being merely a heretical sect of Christianity, the Unification Church has created a whole new religious gestalt that just happens to draw upon Christian symbols and materials. Unlike orthodox Christianity with its focus upon repentance, forgiveness, and salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, Unificationism has built its entire life and faith around the blessing and the blessed life. In Moon’s view, man and woman together reflect the image of God. Jesus is believed to have failed—failed to marry and bear children. Moon demonstrated his cosmic role by marrying and fathering 12 children to reverse the effects of the act of adultery, the original sin of Adam and Eve. (Soon after the birth of his twelfth child, Moon assumed the title “Lord of the Second Advent,” the equivalent of the Christian Messiah. Altogether, Moon has 16 children, two by his first wife, one illegitimate child whom he fathered as a young man, and 13 by his present wife.)

To enter the world of Moonie marriages is to enter a semisecret world, a world little discussed outside the higher echelons of the Unification Church, and revealed to unmarried members only in steps. Only recently, as a result of the mass marriages of 1982 and Unificationism’s increasing openness to outside observers, has the nature of the marriage covenant and ritual process become visible.

Marriage Unification Style

The Unification Church impresses on the new member from the day he joins the importance of the marriage process, or blessing. Without the blessing no one is saved or qualified for the kingdom of heaven. Everything prior is mere preparation. Single members must demonstrate their readiness to assume the responsibilities of the blessed life. During their first years they must work with other single members to overcome racial prejudices, resolve personal conflicts, and become comfortable with individual relationships. They attempt to bring spiritual children into the church (i.e.,) recruit new members) as a model for the eventual parenting of physical children. They master the very sophisticated and often complicated Unification theology. They live with hardship and privation, spoken of within the church as “paying indemnity.”

After two to seven years of preparation, when the member feels ready, he or she initiates the marriage process proper by making a formal application to be matched. For the application to be considered (though there is some flexibility), the members must meet some minimal requirements—two years of church membership and the age of 23 (female) or 24 (male). The church also requires two years of celibacy. The application goes to the blessing committee composed of older members appointed by Moon. For the application to be approved, the candidate must have recruited three spiritual children and be judged “mature” and ready for the blessed life.

If the application is accepted, the committee will notify the member of the next matching session. Sessions have been held at irregular intervals every few years. Prior to the matching sessions the members will meet again with the blessing committee to express any preferences either for a particular individual or type of person. Many ask for a particular kind of interracial or intercultural partner, and in many cases the preferences are honored. For example, in the matching prior to last year’s wedding in Korea, Moon specifically singled out those individuals who had asked for Western-Oriental or Western-African matches.

The final decision, as is well known, is up to Moon. (The majority go to the matching expressing no particular choice at all.) Members will gather in a large hall with others who are to be matched. As soon as they are paired, the new couples spend some minutes alone and decide either to honor Moon’s choice or to reject it. Overwhelmingly it is accepted, though Moon has been known to have matched an individual as many as three times before an acceptable spouse was found.

After the matching, the couple pass through the first of three important rituals in the blessing process. In Unification theology, the wine ceremony, the closest parallel in the Unification Church to the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist, begins the reversal of the Eden events. It changes the satanic blood lineage of the couple and restores them to the heavenly lineage Adam and Eve had before the Fall. In the wine mixture, which contains over 20 ingredients and takes three years to prepare, is blood from Moon and his wife. The women receive the cup first. Since Eve fell before Adam, the women are the first to be restored. They lead their husbands-to-be in that restoration. Also, after this ceremony until the marriage is consummated, the men view their future spouses as “mother” figures who lead them to their full status in the kingdom. The wine ceremony binds the couple as surely as marriage. The bond can only be broken by one partner’s leaving the church or committing adultery.

After the engagement (except in those cases that occur immediately before a blessing ceremony), the couple separate and build their relationship through letters, phone calls, and occasional visits. The church is quite explicit about the subordination of romantic love to the larger goal of sharing a spiritual relationship to God, Moon, the church, and the creation of a stable home. The engagement may last for a few days or a few years. Many of those who participated in the 1982 blessings were matched just days before the ceremony.

The second major step in the marriage process is the blessing ceremony itself, in which vows are taken in public. Moon, as God’s representative, conveys God’s blessing on the union. This is the ceremony that was held in Madison Square Garden.

Although couples reach the high point of the process in the blessing ceremony, it is by no means the end of the procedure. In spite of what has been said about the ceremony, it was not even a legal wedding for the majority of those who participated. Until recently. Moon had not gone through the formality of obtaining a license to marry (required of all ministers in New York City), and until 1982 none of the “blessings” he performed in America were legal marriages. The several licensed ministers in the church performed a private ceremony, or the couple sought out a justice of the peace to make the wedding legal. Many couples in the 1982 blessing “married” several years ago (though they followed the church’s rules against cohabitation), especially in cases in which a marriage could stop an attempted deprogramming. Many other individuals (and almost half of the participants in the July 1 wedding flew in from out of the country to participate) did not arrive in time to get the legal papers (license, blood test, etc.) required for a legal marriage. A few couples are not legally married even yet.

But for those who came out of the blessing ceremony legally married, the final stage had begun. The day after the ceremony they gathered with one of the church’s older members for a lengthy lecture. For example, many of the seminary students listened to David S. C. Kim, the president of the Unification Theological Seminary. He explained that they were to begin a 40-day separation period to allow for some prayerful meditation on the seriousness of the blessed life. After the 40 days, if all other requirements had been met, the couple would consummate the marriage in a private three-day ceremony. This ceremony also completes the restoration to pre-Adamic conditions. The ceremony begins with the acknowledgment of the woman as dominant—the relationship assumed at the wine ceremony—but ends with the man assuming the dominant role he will have as head of the family.

Having finished the blessing process, the couple is ready to found a home and raise a family. It is at this point that the church has failed to live up to some expectations. Many couples looked forward to a home life resembling their image of normalcy—an apartment, a job, family life. However, the ideal Unification marriage is an ordered existence in which leisure time is given in service to the church and world.

Many couples accept this idea. Kevin Barbazon, who lives and works with his wife, Maria, in Harlem in New York City, says, “I can see that our struggles actually pulled Maria and I very close. Rather like the early pioneers in America who fought it out together!”

When such service requires a spouse to undertake a mission across the country or even around the world, tremendous strain is placed on the most stable, happy home. The loss of some prominent married members for just that reason has led the church to cut the practice to a minimum.

Living The Blessed Life

A full year has passed since the marriage of the 4,000 in New York and 10,000 in Korea. What has happened to the church since then? The immediate effect was disastrous. The marriage of half of the church’s American membership in July disrupted its life at every level. As members turned their attention to marriage and spouse and the practical problems of setting up homes, they neglected the day-to-day maintenance of the church. (Church members are expected to work for the church in exchange for small stipends, or to work elsewhere and donate all but their living expenses to the church.)

The cash flow was so disturbed that the World Mission Center (the former New Yorker Hotel) was closed during the hard winter weeks to save fuel costs. I visited the center last December and found it more like a tomb than a beehive of activity, which it customarily is. Program budgets were cut to the minimum, and a recovery did not occur until the spring of 1983. The long-term effects of the blessings may well be more positive for the church. Prior to 1982 it had relatively few Americans who had been through the entire blessing process and who could testify to the reality of the blessed life. It now has a firm foundation upon which to move into the next generation.

Married couples, previously bonded by their experiences as singles, now share a common wedding date, so they can join together for large anniversary parties. In the spring of 1983 the first babies from the 1982 blessings arrived. The church heralds each newborn with a picture in the Blessing Quarterly, a church journal for married couples only. Couples then become even more closely intertwined as together they learn the joys and pains of parenthood.

Will the Unification marriages enable the church to reach its long-term goal of bridging racial, cultural, and national barriers and unifying all people? Only time will tell. However, that success will depend upon the church’s ability to lower the extreme hostility now directed against it.

The weddings’ next accomplishment may be to quell that hostility, based as it is in the anger and hurt of parents who feel the church has taken their children from them. Some parents used the blessing ceremony as the occasion for reestablishing broken relationships. “In our case, what the blessing did not accomplish, the arrival of our first baby did,” one previously blessed couple said.

On Living With The Unification Church

It seems obvious that we need some alternative to the marriage-on-demand/divorce-on-demand pattern within which Western culture has become increasingly trapped. It is also just as obvious that the Unification Church’s utopian option is unworkable for even a significant minority of the public. About 90 percent of those who become Moonies drop out sooner or later. Of those who remain, only one in ten completes the blessing process.

The Unification marriage process is not acceptable as a Christian alternative. Christians would have to abandon the essentials of biblical faith and adopt the Unification Church’s theology before it could begin to make use of the few attractive aspects of the marriage system.

I hope the marriage crisis in our society will be resolved. I am convinced that the churches of Jesus Christ will be a major factor in that solution, not as we move into a utopian and tighter structure, but as we adopt a more realistic attitude toward the pressures on contemporary marriage, provide more support for single adults, and strengthen our educational efforts with the youth under our care.

J. GORDON MELTON

Our earliest description of christmas from C. S. Lewis is a bitter one. The year was 1922. As usual, C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren spent the holidays with their widowed father in his big house outside Belfast.

“It was a dark morning with a gale blowing and some very cold rain,” Lewis reported in his diary. Their father Albert awakened his two sons, both in their midtwenties, to go to early Communion service. As they walked to church in the dawn light, they started discussing the time of sunrise. Albert irritated his sons by insisting that the sun had already risen or else they would not have any light. He was an illogical and argumentative man.

Saint Mark’s church was intensely cold. Warren wanted to keep his coat on during the service, and his father disapproved. “Well, at least you won’t keep it on when you go up to the Table,” Albert warned. Warren asked why not and was told that taking Communion with a coat on was “most disrespectful.” Warren took his coat off to avoid an argument. Not one of the three Lewis men had any interest in the meaning of Communion. The two sons hadn’t believed in Christianity for years.

“Christmas dinner, a rather deplorable ceremony, at quarter to four,” Lewis continued in his diary. After dinner the rain had stopped at last, and Albert urged his two sons to take a walk. They were delighted to get out into the fresh air and head for a pub where they could get a drink. Before they came to the pub, however, some relatives drove by on the way to their house for a visit and gave them an unwelcome ride right back home.

After too much sitting and talking and eating and smoking all day in the stuffy house, Lewis went to bed early, dead tired and headachy. He felt like a flabby, lazy teenager again. It had been another bad Christmas.

In 1929 Albert Lewis suddenly died of cancer. There would be no more coming home for Christmas. Within a couple of years of their father’s death, both Warren and C. S. Lewis privately made some major shifts in their ideas about religion. They were separately moving toward Christian faith.

It was 1931. In Shanghai, where he was serving as a British military officer, Warren got up at 6:30 on Christmas morning. There was bright sun, frost on the ground, and what Warren called a faint keen wind. For the first time in many years Warren went to church to take Communion. He was deeply excited about it.

Warren couldn’t help thinking about the old days when he had attended Christmas Communion at home in Ireland. “The kafuffle of the early start, the hurried walk in the chill hal flight, Barton’s beautiful voice, the dim lights of Saint Mark’s and then the return home to the Gargantuan breakfast—how jolly it all seems in retrospect!” It hadn’t seemed jolly at the time. Warren felt great sorrow about the past, but his sorrow was outweighed by gladness and thanks that he was once again a believer in the Christmas story.

On that very day, Christmas of 1931, C. S. Lewis sat down in Oxford to write an eight-page letter to Warren. He began by warning that because of his teaching duties he had done, read, and heard nothing for a long time that could possibly interest Warren. Then he proceded to write one of his usual entertaining letters full of humor and ideas and bits of news. In the middle of the letter he mentioned that it was a foggy afternoon, but that it had seemed springlike early that morning as he went to the Communion service. That is how he admitted the big news that he had taken Communion for the first time in many years.

At that point in the letter, C. S. Lewis recounted a few things that he had heard in recent sermons. In a sermon on foreign missions the preacher had said, “Many of us have friends who used to live abroad, and had a native Christian cook who was unsatisfactory. Well, after all there are a great many unsatisfactory Christians in England too. In fact I’m one myself.” In a different sermon, that preacher had declared that if early Christians had known they were founding an organization to last for centuries, they would have organized it to death. But because they believed that they were making provisional arrangements for a year or so, they left it free to live. Lewis thought that was an interesting idea.

A less helpful preacher had said shortly before Christmas that he objected to the early chapters of Luke, especially the story of the Annunciation, because they were indelicate. Such prudery left Lewis gasping.

That Christmas letter from C. S. Lewis found its way to Warren on January 19, 1932, and he wrote in his diary, “A letter … today containing the news that he too has once more started to go to Communion, at which I am delighted.” Had he not done so, Warren reflected, they would not have been quite so close in the future as in the past.

From 1931 to the end of his life, C. S. Lewis looked at Christmas from a Christian point of view. In 1939 Warren was on duty away from home again, and on Christmas Eve C. S. Lewis wrote that he had been thinking much that week about Christmas cards. Aside from the absurdity of celebrating the nativity at all if you don’t believe in the Incarnation, “what in heaven’s name is the idea of everyone sending everyone else pictures of stage-coaches, fairies, foxes, dogs, butterflies, kittens, flowers, etc.?”

Warming to his topic, Lewis asked his brother to imagine a Chinese man sitting at a table covered with small pictures. The man explains that he is preparing for the anniversary of Buddha’s being protected by the dragons. Not that he personally believes that this is the real anniversary of the event or even that it really happened. He is just keeping up the old custom. Not that he has any pictures of Buddha or of the dragons. He doesn’t like that kind. He says, “Here’s one of a traction engine for Hu Flung Dung, and I’m sending this study of a napkin-ring to Lo Hung Git, and these jolly ones of bluebottles are for the children.”

Aside from thinking about Christmas cards, Lewis had enjoyed himself in two ways that week. He was back at work on his book The Problem of Pain, and he was able to enjoy good winter walks. The pond on his property had a thin skin of ice. The beautiful frozen days had been of two kinds: “those with bright yellow suns, turning at sunset to red cannon balls, and those with deep dark-grey fog through which the ridges of the grass loom up white.” Near the end of his letter he said, “Well, Brother, (as the troops say) it’s a sad business not to have you with me to-morrow morning …” That meant church.

During World War II C. S. Lewis gave a series of talks about Christianity on BBC radio, and later he brought these out as his book Mere Christianity. In that book Lewis summed up Christmas and Christianity in one memorable sentence: “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become the sons of God.”

In his 1950 book for children, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis made it clear that he was all for merry times and good gifts and Christmas pudding. The land of Narnia was under the spell of a wicked white witch who made it always winter and never Christmas. When the great gold lion Aslan brought the thaw that spelled her doom, Father Christmas came at last.

In 1954 Lewis published a very different kind of fantasy about Christmas, “Xmas and Christmas.” It is an essay about the strange island called Niatirb (Britain spelled backwards) and the winter festival called Exmas that the Niatirbians observe with great patience and endurance.

One of the customs that fills the marketplace with crowds during the foggiest and rainiest season of the year is the great labor and weariness of sending cards and gifts. Every citizen has to guess the value of the gift that every friend will send him so that he may send one of equal value whether he can afford it or not. Everyone becomes so pale and weary that it looks as if calamity has struck. These days are called the Exmas Rush. Exhausted with the Rush, most citizens lie in bed until noon on the day of the festival. Later that day they eat far too much and get intoxicated. On the day after Exmas they are very grave because they feel unwell and begin to calculate how much they have spent on Exmas and the Rush.

There is also a festival in Niatirb called Crissmas, held on the same day as Exmas. A few people in Niatirb keep Crissmas sacred, but they are greatly distracted by Exmas and the Rush.

On December 17, 1955, Lewis wrote to an old friend that he was pleased by the card the man had sent him, a Japanese-style nativity scene. But, he continued, Christmas cards in general and the whole vast commercial drive called “Xmas” was one of his pet abominations. He wished they would die away and leave the Christmas observance alone. He had nothing against secular festivities. But he despised the artificial jollity, the artificial childlikeness, and the attempts to keep up some shallow connection with the birth of Christ.

In 1957 C. S. Lewis published “What Christmas Means to Me.” He claimed that three things go by the name of Christmas. First is the religious festival. Second is an occasion for merry making and hospitality. Third is the commercial racket, a modern invention to boost sales. He listed his reasons for condemning the commercial racket. First, it causes more pain than pleasure. Second, it is a trap made up of obligations. Third, many of the purchases are gaudy rubbish. Fourth, we get exhausted by having to support the commercial racket while carrying on all our regular duties as well. “Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter …?” Lewis demanded plaintively.

Two years later C. S. Lewis was featured in the Christmas issue of the Saturday Evening Post. The issue, dated December 19, 1959, bore on its cover a 15-cent price, a picture of a man struggling clumsily to get a package wrapped, and the announcement of a new Screw-tape letter by C. S. Lewis. Inside was a life-size, close-up photo of Lewis’s face and his essay “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” This was a kind of Christmas gift to the public from the editors.

In 1963 the Saturday Evening Post featured C. S. Lewis in its Christmas issue for the second time. This time the price on the cover was 20 cents and the picture on the cover was of a children’s choir. Inside was Lewis’s article “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” with the heading, “Is happiness—in particular sexual happiness—one of man’s inalienable rights? A distinguished author attacks the brutality of this increasingly common notion.” In the upper right-hand corner is the announcement, “As this article went to press, its author died at his home in Oxford, England. The article is his last work.”

Since Lewis’s death on November 22, 1963, a number of his writings from earlier years have become more widely available. A few not published at all in his lifetime have now found their way into print. One of these is his undated poem “The Nativity,” available in his book Poems. In this brief poem Lewis shows what the nativity scene meant in his own prayer life.

First, Lewis likens himself to a slow, dull ox. Along with the oxen he sees the glory growing in the stable, he says, and he hopes that it will give him, at length, an ox’s strength. Second, Lewis likens himself to a stubborn and foolish ass. Along with the asses he sees the Savior in the hay, and he hopes that he will learn the patience of an ass. Third, Lewis likens himself to a strayed and bleating sheep. Along with the sheep in the stable he watches his Lord lying in the manger. From his Lord he hopes to gain some of a sheep’s woolly innocence.

One of the earliest photos of C. S. Lewis shows him as a very little boy posed with a Father Christmas doll. The half-smile caught forever on his plump young face seems balanced between anxiety and pleasure. He looks thoughtfully attentive. It is fitting, because he half-smiled at Christmas the rest of his days. We might do well to pause in the “kafuffle” and “Exmas Rush” and look into the manger with C. S. Lewis.

There are certain sights and sounds one automatically associates with this time of year: snow (in many regions); carols and hymns in the streets, as some attempt to keep Christ in Christmas; crowded banks and stores, as others attempt to keep money in Christmas; and bells, both of the sleigh variety and those rung by Salvation Army officers and soldiers standing beside kettles, often stationed outside the shrines of consumerism.

The Christmas kettles are a visible reminder that, above the fleeting seasonal rhetoric about the poor and underprivileged, some people are actually doing something about it. They have been doing so, in fact, for so long that their work is often taken for granted. Who are these uniformed people ringing the bells?

The official pamphlet, “This Is the Salvation Army,” states: “The Salvation Army is an international, multi-cultural Christian community which combines joyous religious faith with a practical world-wide service.… Because Salvationists believe that the organization, discipline, mobility, and esprit de corps of a military body can, and should, be adapted to a militant Christian Movement, they know from experience that the evil in the world will not yield topious exhortations, but needs to be outfought and out-loved by people who are single-minded in their Christian charity.… Their goal? The world for God.”

A Worldwide Battleground

Assessing the extent of Salvation Army works, one feels himself in the same statistical league as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Over 25,000 officers and cadets and 53,000 full-time employees operate in 86 countries, using 112 languages. Their periodicals run to 123 editions and over 10 million copies annually. Army schools provide education for more than 260,000 pupils; their hospitals and clinics treat 157,000 patients and over 2 million outpatients. Over 243,000 people B are accommodated daily, and 8,000 missing persons are traced annually. The Army serves approximately two billion meals each year. All this is in addition to disaster relief, homes for orphans and unwed mothers, alcohol rehabilitation, training farms, half-way houses, employment services, institutes for the blind, seamen’s and servicemen s centers, youth camps, rescue and antisuicide patrols, goodwill centers, thrift shops, day-care facilities, leprosariums, homes for the aged, and many other works.

The Army is well known for its work with alcoholics. Its position on alcohol states, “The Salvation Army believes that experience has shown a direct connection between (1) the incidence of addiction and (2) the easy availability of alcoholic beverages and the increasing social acceptance of their consumption.” Alcoholism is described as a “bondage” and officers refer to it as a result of sin, but the Army also “recognizes the value of medical, social, and psychiatric treatment for alcoholics and makes extensive use of these services at its centers.”

The Army position on abortion “favors allowing pregnancies to terminate with the normal birth of a child but recognizes that conditions arise under which a choice must be made between early termination (abortion) or full-term pregnancy. It is important that counseling services are available when making such a choice. A decision in any given situation should be adaptable to individual need with full consideration of the fundamental spiritual values which are the foundation of Salvation Army belief.”

While this statement is perhaps not as strong as some evangelicals might like, the Salvation Army has not merely debated the issue of abortion. The numerous facilities for children and unwed mothers give women contemplating abortion some very real alternatives that the evangelical church in general has not been swift in supplying along with its efforts to combat capricious abortion by legislation.

Natural and man-made disasters have led to rapid Army deployments. When an earthquake devastated the Azores Islands, the Army, though it has no work there, sent 25 tons of food and 50 tons of clothing. A quarter-million people were evacuated due to a chemical spill in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada; there the Army served thousands of meals. The eruption of Mount Soufriere on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent forced thousands from their homes. The Army took charge of four camps, feeding 1,200 people three times a day. Relief work was also performed in Nicaragua during and after the civil war in that country. A CT editor recalls a friend of rather liberal views serving in the Illinois National Guard during the Chicago race riots of the sixties who could not get over the fact that the Salvation Army was there ministering to the troops before the Red Cross, or anyone else, arrived.

General Booth And The Early Battles

The movement now spanning the globe started in London with William Booth. Born in 1829, he was orphaned at age 13 and worked in a pawnshop before becoming a Methodist minister. The squalor of London’s East End—what Matthew Arnold described as “these vast miserable, unmanageable masses of sunken people”—moved him to establish a rescue mission. Victorian England, which spoke smugly of “godly poverty” and upheld a kind of Christian caste system, did not approve. Even Booth’s Methodist colleagues were uneasy. And the downtrodden masses themselves were not receptive; they mocked preachers and generally raised havoc. The police offered little help. About 600 Salvationists went to prison for preaching in the open air. It was a “war against sin” (the line was a prelude to the name “Salvation Army”).

But Booth was not fighting alone. He was supported by his wife, Catherine. Like him, she had achieved against great odds. A brilliant student, she spent the greater part of her youth on her back because of spinal problems. She died of cancer in 1890.

In the book In Darkest England and the Way Out, Booth wrote, “Lord, you shall have all there is of William Booth—and thereafter God blessed me.” Among his many reforms, he fought prostitution (“the career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice”), advocated a missing person’s bureau, a shelter for lost women, and legal and banking services for the poor. He continued to preach the gospel and to reach the multitudes who would not enter a place of worship. Open-air meetings and marches were organized. Flags, brass bands, and spirited singing were means of attraction. Booth charged the devil with monopolizing “all the best tunes,” and used them himself.

Journalists sent to interview Booth discovered a man with great powers of organization that could have made him fabulously wealthy. But he was described as a man who, passing the stock exchange, would stop and say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Under his leadership, the movement spread throughout the world, becoming accepted and esteemed, as it is today. The 1965 centenary celebrations were held in Royal Albert Hall, London. Speakers testifying to the Army’s record of good works included Queen Elizabeth and Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, who commented that he had “never seen a gloomy Salvationist.” The Army had come a long way from those early slum meetings, held in raggedy, naptha-lit tents.

Although Booth gained respectability—honorary doctor of Oxford, guest at coronations, speaker at the U.S. Senate—there were problems, including rifts over the alleged “Americanization” of the Army. Booth was accused of fleecing the flock, but he agreed to an independent investigation and was exonerated completely. Two sons and a daughter defected because of personal differences and disputes over discipline. (They are absent, nonpersons, in official Army geneologies.) His fourth daughter, Evangeline, was one of the bright spots.

The Salvation Army yearbook states, “The position held by women in the Salvation Army is unprecedented in history. Even in eastern lands, women Salvationists have played a great part in keeping with the Army’s principle of equal opportunity of service for both sexes.” Evangeline seems to bear this out. She was the first woman General of the Army (perhaps of any army), feted by dignitaries and celebrated in musicals. She led the fight for the repeal of laws against open-air preaching. Her philanthropic service during the First World War led to a decoration from Woodrow Wilson. She died in 1950.

Chain Of Command

Still based in Britain, the Salvation Army prefers to call itself a “movement” or a “community” rather than a church. Official publications state that the primary aim is “to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to men and women untouched by ordinary religious efforts.” Whatever the label, the Salvation Army is, in the true sense of the term, an army, with a strict chain of command.

The current general is Jarl Wahlstrom, a native of Finland. All appointments are made and all regulations are issued under his authority. Previous generals have been mainly British and Canadian, with the exception of Gen. Erik Wickberg, a Swede.

The general is elected by the High Council, composed of the chief of the staff (the second in command), all active commissioners, and colonels of two years’ standing who also hold territorial commands. Once in command, she or he serves until the retirement age of 68. The High Council votes shortly before this age is attained, unless there is a death or health problem. Deaths in the Army are referred to as “promotions to Glory.”

Converts above age 15 who have been sworn in are known as “soldiers.” Before enrollment, they are required to sign the Articles of War, an eleven-point doctrinal statement and seven-point rule of conduct. (Salvationists, in keeping with the Army’s claim to be the world’s largest temperance organization, are total abstainers from alcoholic beverages.) The Articles of War also entail a promise to be “a true soldier of the Salvation Army til I die.”

Salvationists who aspire to full-time service are known as “cadets.” They attend a two-year School for Officer’s Training, the equivalent of a Bible school or seminary. They graduate as lieutenants, a rank they hold for five years. A favorable review after this period leads to a promotion to the rank of captain, which must be held for 15 years. From that point, based on service, there may be promotions to major, lieutenant colonel, colonel, and commissioner. There is only one active general.

It is expected that officers will remain in the Army for life. Chosen to Be a Soldier states, “No one must become a soldier as an experiment or with mental reservations as to the length of his ‘service for the salvation of the whole world.’ Only those who are fully determined, by God’s help, to be true soldiers of the Salvation Army til they die can rightly take the holy vows involved in the swearing-in ceremony.” Efforts would be made to discourage officers from even an amiable parting with the Army, but such a one, spokesmen say, would not be excommunicated. Officers have no personal autonomy; they obey the orders of their superiors. They are paid a modest allowance according to their needs. An officer of lower rank with a large family could receive more than a superior with fewer needs.

As far as lay ministry is concerned, there are other designated ranks: auxiliary captain, corps sergeant major, and sergeant. These are also called “local officers.” Members who make the Salvation Army their place of worship, but do not sign the Articles of War, are called “adherents.”

Salvation Army worship halls are known as “citadels.” Prayer meetings are “knee drills”; monetary contributions by soldiers to the Army are “cartridges.” A vehicle used to distribute literature is a “field unit.” And there are military-style decorations: The Order of Distinguished Auxiliary Service, the Order of the Founder, and the Order of the Silver Star. The official periodical is the weekly War Cry magazine.

Army Doctrine, Views, Practices

Salvationist literature describes their creed as “that of the great Christian Communions.” Few evangelicals or fundamentalists would quarrel with their doctrinal statement, with the possible exception of two points.

First, the Army is staunchly Arminian. One of the Articles of War states, “Continuance in a state of salvation depends upon continued obedient faith in Christ.” The book Chosen to Be a Soldier interprets this as a warning against “mistaken notions” and “deadly errors.” It dubs Calvinism “the terrible doctrine that God has predestined some souls to be eternally lost.” In spite of this rather aggressive language, there are references to the Army as not seeing it as “their God-given task to protest against the doctrines and practices of other Christians, but to attest the gospel message” (emphasis theirs).

Second, the Articles allude to believers being “wholly sanctified.” Chosen to Be a Soldier (which in places quotes Kierkegaard) speaks of a “crisis of sanctification,” a second work of grace. The obvious question—Does the Army believe in sinless perfection?—receives no direct answer in official literature, although regulations state, “The Salvationist will never claim for the Army that it is perfect in every respect.” Christians of other traditions might conclude that this also applies to all soldiers not yet promoted to glory.

But Army regulations are not all questions of doctrine. There is a strong emphasis on love. Concerning human relations we read, “People we may find difficult are often unhappy people. They may seem to us to be deliberately nasty. But their past history is imperfectly known to us. It may be that they have never experienced true kindness. Perhaps they had to suffer humiliation and harshness or deliberate injustice in a critical period of development. Whatever the reason, kindness and love coupled with firmness are likely to work a cure.”

The section on hom*osexuality states, “This psychological leviance, so long as it does not express itself in hom*osexual acts, is not blameworthy, nor should it be allowed to create guilt. Such persons need understanding and help, not condemnation.”

Whether an official “church” or not, the Salvation Army holds regular services, or “holiness meetings.” The buildings (like countless evangelical places of worship) are not architecturally distinguished, and the soldiers in their dark uniforms are less than sartorially resplendent. But the services are joyous and lively, featuring spirited singing and the participation of many members, who often represent a wide cross section of races. Below the platform is a “holiness bench” where repentant members may publicly confess or be reconciled one to another.

Music has played a large role in the Salvation Army since its inception. A brass band plays in services, and efforts are being made to use contemporary music, including rock, in outreach. Emmy award-winning Hollywood composer Bruce Broughton is a Salvationist. He has written scores for the “Quincy” television series, as well as for World Wide Pictures’ The Prodigal. He says, “Music was in our family because music is part of Salvation Army life. I believe that my background playing hymns was a very good foundation for my current work, because it gave me a solid background in basic musical forms and techniques.” (See also Refiner’s Fire, p.49.)

One of the chief distinguishing features of the Army is the absence of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, both practiced by virtually all Protestants in one form or another. When William Booth was questioned as to what they would offer in place of Communion, he replied, “Farthing breakfasts for starving children.” The current position is that “the Salvation Army does not believe the sacraments to be essential to salvation and therefore, while not opposing their use, does not observe them.”

An official book, The Sacraments, states that there were sacramental observances in the early days of the Army, but they were dropped for various reasons. It was (and is) thought that there are no specific New Testament injunctions to practice baptism and Communion (technical, textual arguments are used against “This do in remembrance of Me” from Luke 22:19). Booth seemed to hold that sacramental observations smacked of sacerdotalism. With many converts being reformed alcoholics, the use of wine was thought unwise. In addition, The Sacraments warns that outward symbols can snare believers into a merely formal religiosity. The aim of the Army, the text states, is “to make the whole of life sacramental.” The book denies that the wearing of uniforms and Army swearing-in ceremonies are in any sense substitutes for the sacraments, but another chapter urges soldiers to “recognize uniform wearing as a way of witnessing for Christ.”

The Army would also seem to avoid Falwell- or Sojourners’-style political activism (the current American commissioner says the Army is “nonpartisan”), but some of its members are politically involved. Maj. Paul Kelly recently testified to the Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development that “it is essential that actions be taken now” to help those with basic needs. Derek Foster, British Salvationist member of Parliament, has written, “I am a politician because I am a Christian. I am not a politician who happens to be a Christian. I am in full-time service for God with every fiber of my being and I am endeavoring to do what God wants me to do.”

Contemporary Battles

The Army is not affected by the disputes over biblical inerrancy or prophecy that have rocked some denominations. With men and women on an equal footing in ministry, there are no divisive debates over “Christian feminism.” (Verses such as 1 Cor. 14:34 and 1 Tim. 2:12, often used to argue against the ministry of women, are considered culturally relative and applying mainly to biblical times.) They seem to have avoided internal dissension and all traces of scandal. But there have been controversies.

On August 24, 1981, the Salvation Army withdrew from membership in the World Council of Churches. (It is not a member of the National Council of Churches.) The issue was a grant of $85,000 to the Patriotic Front Guerrillas in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia. This came two months after eight Christian missionaries, including two from the Salvation Army, were murdered in that country. The late Commissioner John Needham told Morley Safer earlier this year on CBS’S “60 Minutes,” a show watched by an estimated 43 million people: “The suggestion was that money from the World Council was being given to feed, to take care of medicines, that sort of program. But after all, the end result was, they were guerrillas about their work, which resulted in death and violence.” The WCC, predictably, said that Rhodesian troops were responsible. Needham also answered a charge that the Army left the council under pressure from large corporations. “Nothing could be farther from the truth,” he told Safer, adding, “I don’t know where people get those kinds of ideas.”

The only other criticism of the Army this writer could find comes from evangelical quarters. The March 1983 issue of The Other Side reviewed various organizations to whom their readers send money, and wrote of the Salvation Army that it was “supportive of the political status quo, and makes no attempt to deal with the root causes of today’s problems.” When asked if the Salvation Army should support the political status quo in Cuba and Nicaragua where it also operates, Mark Olson, author of the article, replied, “If they saw some non-biblical situations, they should speak out. “Olson cited Bread for the World as an organization that, unlike the Army, deals with root problems by working through the political process for grain reserves, increased food stamp programs, and a stipulation in Reagan’s Caribbean Initiative plan that would make poor countries meet their own needs before any of their food could be exported.

Current National Commander Norman Marshall states, “In the 86 countries in which the Army carries out its ministry, it works under many forms of governments in order to benefit the people of those countries meeting basic personal needs.”

The most serious charges concerned finances: “The Salvation Army’s four territorial divisions report fund balances of $965.2 million (151% of their annual budget); in 1981, these four territorial offices took in $22.4 million more than they spent; the Salvation Army appears to need less income, not more” (parenthesis and emphasis theirs). The latter part of this statement does not mean that, in the view of The Other Side, the Salvation Army is unworthy of financial support, but that more money should go to organizations that are “more poverty stricken.” Olson, who also denies that the Army makes audits available, obtained his information from the Philanthropic Advisory Service of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) in Washington.

The Army, as it happens, has been publishing independently audited statements of its income for 116 years. The New York Times of November 7, 1982, ran 800,000 copies of a Salvation Army supplement, complete with an operating budget and the notation, “Copies of the audited financial statements will be made available upon request from The Salvation Army.” But does the Army, as The Other Side alleges, have multimillion-dollar surpluses? Commissioner Marshall, in direct reply, writes:

“Possibly, a nonaccountant was responsible for the section of the magazine report concerning ‘Finances and Financial Accountability’ since the total clearly identified in the BBB report from which the information was taken as ‘Fund Balances’ is described in the magazine article as ‘Cash and Securities on Hand at End of Fiscal Year.’ The footnote in the BBB report, however, correctly defines Fund Balances as ‘All operating, endowment, land and buildings, board-designated, donor-restricted, and live income and annuity funds.’ This observation also relates to the Fund Balances of the four territories which are included in the independent audits and represents all resources, including land and buildings, for all Salvation Army Centers and activities in the United States” (emphasis mine). He adds, “All funds are raised in and reported to the local community: the Salvation Army does not conduct a national fund-raising appeal. The captions are somewhat misleading when related to the National Headquarters financial statement.”

Other evangelicals might share The Other Side’s contention that the Salvation Army often functions as “a secular social service entity with little or no overt connection to Christianity.” Is it weak on evangelism? “Evangelism and human services are obverse sides of the same coin,” says Commissioner Marshall. Officers in Los Angeles signal new outreach to Hispanics and Koreans as evidence of renewed evangelistic vigor. The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, 1982 cites a 28 percent growth in Salvation Army ranks between 1970 and 1980. Many officers, though, are not drawn from the ranks of new converts but rather are children, even grandchildren, of other officers. This trend would seem to be similar to the “being born into the faith” of the catholic tradition, as opposed to the “baptist” style (see Martin Marty on “Baptistification”; CT, Sept. 2, 1983).

Still Loving The Unlovely

One thing the Army certainly cannot be accused of is using the poor to further its own ends. Many, especially bureaucrats who administer government poverty programs, have discovered that there is money in poverty. Jacques Ellul points out that there are different kinds of poor people. There are the “interesting poor” through whose plight partisan aims can be achieved and one’s political enemies can be denounced. For example, by championing the boat people, conservatives can discredit the Communist government of Vietnam, while liberal supporters of Central American refugees use the civil-war situation and its victims to denounce the Reagan administration, a kind of moral form of war profiteering.

Then, as Ellul writes, there are the “uninteresting poor,” whose difficulties concern only themselves. Certainly, skid-row derelicts and other forgotten people of society with whom the Army does so much are in this category. Unlike seals and whales, they have no high-profile advocates among celebrities, and no observer at the UN. And there is no Drunkard Liberation Front—that is, other than the Salvation Army itself.

Former President Jimmy Carter said, “We are a better nation because of the constructive work of the Salvation Army, and we are closer to the ideals our Founding Fathers envisioned as guide-posts of American life. The Army’s mission has gone hand in hand with our national progress and development. Its programs have strengthened our faith in God and our determination to perform good works in His name. I hope that in the decades ahead the Salvation Army will retain its position of spiritual, moral, and social leadership in our society. More than ever we need its steadying influence as we face the critical challenges and opportunities of the years ahead.”

In spite of such encomiums, the Salvation Army is often taken for granted. Few people have stopped to think of the torrent of problems that would be unleashed if the Army were to disappear. But, fortunately, it is still around and shows no sign of capitulating in its battle against sin. Its hand cleaves to the sword. Although the Army is more visible at Christmastime, outfighting and outloving evil is not seasonal work.

At age 14, nothing was wrong. Barbara Cummiskey would reach for the gymnastics ring and, like it was supposed to, her hand would close on it. At age 15, the hand began to take on a life of its own. Sometimes it would not grasp the ring, and Barbara fell, as she remembers it, “from the rafters to the floor.” But to the adolescent, much of the body seems to veer out of control. The face grows acne like a perverse and independent garden. A strange, willful sexuality is alarmingly born. Barbara decided the falling was part of growing up, the teen-ager’s normal awkwardness.

Still, it was bothersome. At Campus Life meetings, Barbara was a championship Bible quizzer. Leaders asked questions about the Bible, and on jumping from a chair, quizzers would switch on a light, qualifying the quickest jumper to answer the question. Barbara still knew many of the answers, but as she shot from her chair she often ended up lying on the floor. She stumbled down stairs. From time to time, her vision blurred. Then the left hand clenched into an involuntary half-fist. By age 19, her doctors were all too sure. Barbara Cummiskey had the “young person’s disease”: multiple sclerosis (MS).

MS is an unpredictable ailment. It is a degenerative disease that attacks the central nervous system, hardening tissues in the brain and/or spinal cord. It can result in paralysis of different degrees. It can mean an early death. But it may mean only periods of disablement or discomfort, and no effect on the life span.

Barbara’s choice was no different than any other MS victim’s. She could only wait to see what the disease did each week, each month, and cope with it as best she could. She was frequently bedridden. She learned to type with one hand. From 1972 to 1974 she was healthy enough to attend college as a handicapped student. Sometimes she could walk without a cane.

The Ravages Of Ms

Leaving college, Barbara managed a job as a secretary. But by 1977, her diaphragm was paralyzing. Breathing was already a problem, then she developed a chronic lung disease unrelated to MS. Her weaknesses caused constant pneumonia and asthma. A year later, one lung collapsed and the other labored at half its potential.

MS struck the bowels next, confirming Barbara’s case as the rare severe MS that attacks the body’s organs. An ileostomy for the bowel and catheter for the bladder were necessary. In 1972, breathing was so difficult doctors did a tracheotomy—cutting a hole in Barbara’s neck so a respirator could be attached. Her vision worsened to the point of technical blindness. She was absolutely confined to bed, and she spent nearly as much time in the hospital as out. There were several surgeries, and three times Barbara had respiratory and cardiac arrest. Her brain received inadequate oxygen and she was sometimes mentally confused—it was as if not only her body but her mind was reeling out of control.

The most dreadful pain was an unceasing ache in the middle of Barbara’s chest. She felt like desperately pounding her chest, just as child bangs his head against a wall to knock out a headache. The long, attractive blonde hair was still there. But the green eyes were useless (a patch covered one), the legs spindly and dangling, the arms and hands turned in on themselves, and frequently the twisted body was connected to machines. As if fate were adding a final grotesque stroke, tumors unrelated to MS grew on her hands and feet. Barbara was admitted as an outpatient at a nearby hospice. She and her family were preparing for her to die. Barbara Cummiskey was 31.

Twenty-two years before, at nine, she had said to Jesus: “My life is yours. Take it.” In her late teens, watching friends bound effortlessly into life, a sick Barbara questioned God. Although she never turned away completely, church and God became unimportant. But by her mid-twenties, that changed. About the only thing Barbara could do was pray, and she prayed not only for herself, but for others. She talked, out loud and unself-consciously, to God. A nurse would walk into her hospital room, and Barbara would be talking to God as if he were a physical visitor. She remembers those simple, childlike conversations as some of the best times of her life. She was physically wrecked, but spiritually whole.

A Healing

So came June 7, 1981. Days before, a local religious radio station mentioned Barbara’s plight, and suggested it for prayer. Nearly 450 cards and letters flooded her. On this summer day, a Sunday, Barbara sat in bed as two women from her church read cards to her. Barbara (but not the other two women) heard a voice over her shoulder. It was not a booming voice, but a calm one, and it said, “My child, get up and walk.” Barbara assumed it was God, at last answering in kind after all those hours of her audible address. She told the two women she was going to walk, and that they should go alert her family. Since Barbara had not walked in two years, the women were confused. But they left the room.

Barbara could not wait for her parents. She says she “jumped” out of bed. Elated, she started down the hall, where her mother met her. Barbara’s legs, atrophied from lack of exercise, now had muscle tone and firmness. Her mother’s first words were a shout: “Calves! You have calves!”

Her father, when Barbara met him downstairs, could summon no words. He grabbed his daughter and danced around the living room with her. After waltzing with her father, Barbara did ballet steps—standing on her toes, leaping, and laughing. A friend, who is an occupational therapist, was also at the home. “You know,” she told Barbara, “you just wrecked everything I learned in school.”

MS is an incurable disease. Barbara Cummiskey, her doctors admit, should never have gotten well. But not only did the MS leave (conclusive spinal taps show no trace). Barbara’s caved-in lung, dormant for years, should have been no good. It was completely healthy and functioning. The chronic lung disease, also “incurable,” was gone. So were the hand and feet tumors. Even if the woman somehow recovered from MS, there should have been permanent nerve damage. There was none. Fortunately, the surgeon performing Barbara’s ileostomy had not removed the entire bowel. Now the bowel was functioning, so the ileostomy was reversed. Likewise the trachaeostomy. Health was entirely restored, instaneously.

Today Barbara is training to be a surgeon’s assistant. A man she trains under was one of her doctors. He delights in introducing her to classes. “Here is a woman who used to lay under my knife. I said she would not live. I said she would never walk. Now she hands me the knife. You can see how good my predictions are.”

RODNEY CLAPP

“Even now, therefore, many miracles are wrought, the same God who wrought those we read of still performing them, by whom He will and as He will.”—Saint Augustine of Hippo.

Every time i have peayed for healing—miraculous, extraordinary healing—it has not come. I started at a young age, with animals. We had a Boston terrier who was prone to accidents. Popeye had broken both his hind legs. Once, riding in the back of a pickup truck, he saw a jack rabbit and bounded out to chase it. That broke a leg. Another time, my sister thought Popeye would enjoy the view from our treehouse. She got him halfway up and dropped him. That broke a leg.

One day Popeye disappeared. He was gone for several days, and my parents guessed that someone had run over him and dumped him in a ditch. I prayed to the contrary, but, sitting high in a tractoras I drove home from a field, I saw a little black-and-white body in the ditch. My brother, sister, and I had a cemetery for our pets. We laid Popeye to rest beside some rabbits, turtles, a ground squirrel, and a duck. It was a proper Christian burial.

I have prayed for an outright miracle for two people I cared about. When I was a senior in high school my grandfather went into the hospital to recover from the flu and abruptly lapsed into a coma. The doctors were somber. The second or third day I squeezed my motionless granddad’s hand and told him I loved him. He squeezed back and I jumped, reluctant after that to touch his hand again. It was as if death had pressed my flesh. Granddad never came out of the coma.

Seven years later, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He lived a year, and nearly every day of that year we prayed God would do what the doctors couldn’t: kill the cancer. There were victories of sorts—victories of faith and longsuffering—but no victory over the cancer. There was a proper Christian burial.

For some, a belief in the Christian faith itself has ended with such defeats of health. As Paul Brand and Philip Yancey so ably demonstrated (CT, Nov. 25, 1983), the distortions surrounding faith healing are many and dangerous. Authors Mark Twain and Somerset Maugham suffered unanswered prayers for healing, and spoke of them as serious reasons behind their abandonment of the faith. As children, they were led to expect that God would answer all prayers for healing with completely restored health. Today, decades after Twain and Maugham, some faith healers still make such exaggerated claims. But do all? To find out what contemporary faith healers believe and practice, I first traveled to Milwaukee, where an itinerant faith healer was hosting a crusade.

The literature on hand was what could mildly be called silly. One pamphlet read: “I WAS A CANNIBAL—ATE RAW WHITE MEN—Whipped Mountain Lion—Swam River with Alligator—Ate Raw Snakes and Chickens—Walked Power Line to U.S.A.” (The last is especially puzzling, suggesting an unquestionably unique form of trans-Atlantic transportation.) And available by mail was the “Jesus 8 Personalized Health Club Kits,” consisting of herbs, trace minerals, vitamins, acids, cell salts, supplements, and the “7 ‘magic’ minerals of youth.” The health kits promised to cure everything from AIDS to impotency.

The meeting itself was a lesson in showmanship. The faith healer roamed the aisles with a cordless microphone, sometimes breaking into silky, soporific song, a Perry Como of gospel. Between songs he called men and women from their chairs. One young woman could not rise from hers: it was a wheelchair. The healer prayed for her, asked her if she was well (“Yes! I am, I am!”), and told her to get out of the wheelchair. He sat down in the wheelchair and told her to push him, and not to walk, to run. Leaning on the wheelchair, she started forward, then gained speed and a smile. But her knees gave substantially and a little slowly as she moved, so that she looked like she was running under water, in mud. It was unconvincing.

I went through the prayer line (a sort of assembly line for laying on of hands) anyway, wondering if there might be any effect, emotional or otherwise. The faith healer had emphasized in his sermon that praising God was essential to healing. He compared God to his father, who, the faith healer said, was more likely to increase his allowance if he praised the way he dressed or looked. God was the same, flattered into action by our praise. So the prayer line proceeded with hand clapping and song. When it came my turn, the healer gripped my forehead with one hand, shook it, and patted my back with the other hand. There were no unusual sensations. If I were to be healed of anything, I would hope it would be predisposition to anxiety and depression. On the way home, I could not find the correct ramp to enter the freeway. The predisposition was not gone.

There are infinitely more tragic cases, such as the recently publicized Faith Assembly, pastored by Hobart Freeman and located near Fort Wayne, Indiana. Freeman teaches that God will directly heal all of a believer’s ills, and physicians need not be consulted. More than 50 members of the church, including babies, have died after medical treatment was rejected.

The Controversy Of Healing

But the experiences of Maugham and Twain, and the teachings of Faith Assembly, are not all that can be said about Christianity and healing. Let me introduce the case of Marie Hermann. Marie is a winsome woman of 61. Her husband, a medical doctor, recently took an early retirement to enjoy life with his wife after something extraordinary happened.

In March 1980, the Hermanns lived in Evansville, Indiana. Marie had a football-sized metastatic tumor in her abdomen, and others in her neck, liver, bones, and chest. Reacting adversely to chemotherapy, her thyroid and adrenal glands had failed. In the next six months she lost 82 pounds and, with her husband and doctors, believed she was weeks from the grave. On September 28 of that year she went to church at the noncharismatic Bethel Temple. On that particular Sunday, the pastor told the thousand members in his church to join hands and pray for healing of themselves or others. Marie Hermann prayed.

She says she would have been pleased to hold down her supper that night. She did not. But the next morning, her nausea inexplicably lifted. She ate breakfast, then a bacon and tomato sandwich for lunch, with no problems. Her husband (who then worked as a research scientist for a pharmaceutical manufacturer) was skeptical of any spectacular or miraculous recoveries. He probed Marie’s abdomen and was surprised that he could feel no tumor. Ten days later, Marie saw her oncologist. No cancer was found anywhere in her body. The doctors were baffled. Spontaneous remissions of cancer are well documented, but the rapidity of this cancer’s disappearance made Marie’s case remarkable. Was it at least a miraculous remission?

Marie Hermann and Barbara Cummiskey (see sidebar) got well. That alone is irrefutable. They, and a good many Christians they have spoken to, believe God miraculously healed them. Some of their doctors are Christians, and they believe they witnessed a miracle. Others of their doctors are not Christians: they believe something unexplainable happened, but no miracle. All see the same facts, but reach different conclusions. The starting point—faith in God, or no faith—is the difference.

Yet the striking thing about miraculous healing in our time is not that agnostics reject it. It is that Christians cannot agree on it. In fact, Marie says, more Christians than non-Christians challenge her about her healing. Apparently the non-Christians, without highly structured theological or philosophical beliefs, can accept something out of the ordinary. “I’ve always believed there is some kind of power,” they tell Marie. Christians, those who believe God closed the canon on miracles at the same time he closed that of the New Testament, are ironically driven to look for a more “natural” explanation than the out-and-out agnostics.

A Balanced View Of Healing

Clearly, faith healing can be attacked without building straw men. But a moderate, more balanced, view and practice of healing appears to be emerging in the church. It owes much, but is not restricted, to charismatic Christianity. It is developing from one coast (Virginia Beach, Va.) to the other (Pasadena, Calif.) in institutions as disparate as the “700 Club” and Fuller Theological Seminary. In visiting places like the “700 Club” or Oral Robert’s City of Faith hospital, I detected the unfolding of what I call a centrist view of healing. Centrist healing is not given to the extremes mentioned above, yet it shows a marked openness to the possibility of God directly intervening in the natural process to heal. It stands in the stream of a long if interrupted history.

Christian healing has not always been abberational. Observing present-day extremes and dismissing the Christian tradition of healing by prayer and faith would be rash, since examples can be chosen selectively. We would want no history of Christianity that skipped over Genesis and Exodus, the Psalms and Gospels, then concentrated on the Inquisition or witch hunting in Salem.

As William Barclay observes, “The Church never altogether lost [its] gift of healing.” Healing is near the heart of Christianity. Christ and the apostles were healers, and this could not help but affect their followers. In addition, the Christian ethic is a positive one. Some religions ask only that their adherents not do anything harmful to the neighbor; Christianity goes an extra step and says, “Do good to your neighbor.” It is natural, then, that Christians not only refrain from injuring a neighbor, but try to heal him whenever he is hurt. This is why religion scholars say Christianity has been the major impulse toward healing in history.

Healing in the Christian tradition includes not just Hobart Freeman, but Augustine, Irenaeus, Chrysostom, and Francis of Assisi (not to mention Jesus Christ, and the apostles Peter and Paul). The sacrament of unction was for healing until the ninth century—only then did it become the sacrament of extreme unction, a preparation for death. Early Christian liturgies regularly included a place for healing, such as one from the year 400 asking God to send on the anointing oil the power of his “good compassion, that it may deliver those who labor, and heal those who are sick.”

After the early centuries of the church, the teachings and practice of healing waned. But there were bursts in the Middle Ages: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century, Saint Francis Xavier in the sixteenth, George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, worked quietly (then, as now, healing could be controversial) in the seventeenth century. The Pentecostal revival late in the nineteenth century and early in this one ignited the healing movements with which most Christians are familiar today.

New Movements For Healing

The centrist view of healing is emerging in the context of this long history of healing. In Judeo-Christian history, there have been lengthy periods of relative dormancy in the alleged occurrence of miracles. “A renewal of these phenomena, however, seems to be occurring in both Protestant and Catholic circles,” the Los Angeles Times (Aug. 7, 1983) suggests. Faith healing is spilling over its accustomed charismatic boundaries. Harold Lindsell, former editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, writes in his latest book that there are “a few people here and there who receive the gifts of healing or miracles. These gifts have not ceased. They are still there even though they occur with less frequency than some people suppose.” Fuller Theological Seminary, of Presbyterian and Reformed origin, now offers course MC510: “Signs, Wonders, and Church Growth.” One of the seminary’s most popular courses, it includes a “ministry time” of prayer for healing. Of the 279 students who took the course last year, 278 were convinced healing should be part of the church’s ministry.

Within its accustomed charismatic boundaries, healing is being significantly moved away from extremes. The Assemblies of God, America’s fastest-growing denomination, publishes “The Believer and Positive Confession,” a level-headed statement advising Assemblies members that “doctrine based on less than a holistic view of Bibilical truth can only do harm to the cause of Christ.” Five years ago Pat Robertson decided his televised “700 Club” ought to be careful about publicizing bogus healings. He now has a staff of three researchers (including a registered nurse) and five reporters investigating purported healings. According to head researcher Karen Thomson, only about one-third of the reported “healings” pass a screening that includes interviews of involved physicians and reviews of pertinent medical records.

Unquestionably, the boldest experiment in centrist healing is in Tulsa. There, Oral Roberts has opened his City of Faith Medical and Research Center. Rising 62 stories from the Oklahoma prairie, the clinic building is the state’s tallest and is (to say the least) a far cry from Robert’s old revival tent. It is flanked by a 30-story hospital and a 20-story research building. If it reaches capacity, the $150 million complex will house medical, nursing, and dental teaching schools, 777 beds, 200 laboratories, 318 physicians, 850 nurses, and more than 3,000 other employees. Its purpose is an all-out fusion of science and religion. Prayer partners (the rough equivalent of chaplains) visit each patient at least once a day for prayer and counsel. They are considered part of the healing team, with doctors and nurses, whose members consult one another about helping the “whole person.” Bringing in the spiritual dimension, then, does not mean pushing out what a publicist calls “the most advanced medical hardware for the diagnosis and treatment of human disease.”

The City of Faith staff promises patients no miracles. According to Duie Jernigan, director of the prayer partner ministry, “There are no more miracles at the City of Faith than any other hospital. Just as many patients die.” Jaspar McPhail, chief of surgery, affirms, “Almost always the Lord heals through the natural process.” McPhail has a relaxed manner, half his hair, and is tall enough that when he chooses to rest his arm on a sofa’s back, the entire sofa is occupied. He specializes in heart surgery and has studied with Michael DeBakey. The surgeon’s credentials are not atypical at the hospital. Paul Kosbab, chief of psychiatry, is thoroughly and respectably trained and, with a thick Viennese accent, sounds like Freud reincarnated. Like all five of the City of Faith doctors I talked to, Kosbab has rigorous criteria for what constitutes a direct supernatural act of healing. His is not given to pronouncing every disappearing wart a miracle, and wryly suggests the closest thing to it he has seen is that, in 25 years of practice, none of his patients has completed a suicide. The head administrator of the City of Faith is James Winslow, who, before joining Oral Roberts University, had one of Tulsa’s most lucrative practices in orthopedics. It is obvious that Roberts has not gathered a crowd of snake handlers.

What sets apart the City of Faith’s approach is its openness to the occasional miracle, and the recognition that faith can be an important factor in healing whether or not a miracle occurs. (Interestingly, surgeon Paul Brand, coauthor of the previous issue’s article on healing, has been considered for a position at the City of Faith. Brand had other commitments and thus never joined the staff, but he thinks Robert’s hospital is “wholly admirable … a very real and sincere effort to bring together the different elements of healing.”

“Faith is a healing factor not usually sanctioned by the medical establishment,” says administrator Winslow. “But medical science has begun to realize that treatment of the whole patient—mind, body, and spirit—is the best way to approach real wellness.”

Foundations Of Centrist Healing

This concern for “real wellness” has been, as we have seen, important to Christianity throughout its history. The rudimentary medical science of Augustine’s day left prayer as his only choice in dealing with many ailments or injuries. Even since the development of sophisticated treatments there have been awkward moments when some Christians insisted on relying on “faith alone” and refused the benefits of medical technology. But now we are seeing the circle close into a whole. Faith and medical technique work together, and both are seen to derive from a single divine source. These are all element’s of what I have called centrist healing. Four points may roughly summarize its foundation. Centrist healing is rational, but not rationalistic; it attempts no absolute formulas about divine healing; it is ultimately concerned with “real wellness,” and means to include the best medical technology available to achieve that healing; and it does not pretend to eliminate suffering. Each of these points deserves separate attention.

• To say that centrist healing is rational is to say that it is realistic. It gives no guarantees. The cancer or heart patient is clearly in danger of his life. “Patients may live or die,” says one of Jernigan’s colleagues at the City of Faith. “Either way, we stand by and walk with them to the end, for better or for worse.” The centrist healer can agree with the dictum of Charles Williams, “The glory of God is in the facts; and those devoted to the glory have to deal with the facts.”

Yet the centrist healer is not rationalistic: he believes there is a God capable of operating beyond his understanding. This God can choose to heal through the instrument of medicine, or directly and dramatically. Statistically, it is clear he does not do the latter often. Yet the centrist healer cannot pretend to know God’s sovereign and free will, and the next patient he prays for may be changed. Psychologically and spiritually, the patient needs hope. The odds are against every new business, even every new marriage, but something deeply human pushes people to risk and hope—their business will succeed, their marriage be unbroken. As psychiatrist Karl Menninger has said, “man can’t help hoping even if he is a scientist. He can only hope more accurately.”

This realistic but hopeful approach to healing was apparent when my father was diagnosed with cancer. His minister grieved with him in facing the grim reality of the situation, but also set aside three days for fasting and special prayer for healing. No healing came: the cancer proved terminal. But the pastor’s action gave my father hope that speeded his recovery from surgery; it assured him that his pastor believed in the free power and love of God; and it demonstrated the pastor’s true empathy, opening a door to sensitive counseling as death appeared more and more inevitable.

• Centrist healing also attempts no absolute formulas about divine healing. Sometimes people who are healed have great faith; sometimes they have none at all. They may avidly praise God, as the Milwaukee faith healer exhorted, or they may sullenly hate him. They may not even have been praying for healing, as in the case of Barbara Cummiskey. But others may have been praying for them, as in the case of Barbara Cummiskey. The healer may or may not speak in tongues. C. Peter Wagner, originator of the “Signs and Wonders” course at Fuller, says his wife is used for healing by God more than he. Yet she doesn’t speak in tongues, and Wagner does.

A comprehensive formula of spiritual healing eludes us at every step. Nothing can explain why multiple sclerosis mysteriously left Barbara Cummiskey and not John Koys, another Christian afflicted with the disease. Barbara certainly claims no superiority. She finds herself questioning almost as much as she did when she suffered for 15 years. Finally, “I just leave it. God never promised me I’d understand everything. Not when I was sick. Not now. He just says, ‘Love me, my child, and accept me.’”

• Because it is ultimately concerned with healing, centrist healing will seek and use any means to achieve that healing. It is not a question of God getting the credit if the healing is direct and instantaneous, and medicine getting the credit if it is gradual and chemical-related. Nor is it a question of the pastor or physician taking credit. The pastor, physician, and chemicals are all instruments of healing. Anointing oil and penicillin can both be sacraments of health. No means are to be denigrated or denied their place in attempting to get the patient well. As physician Paul Tournier has written, the interaction between medicine and prayer is often unclear. “Faith and technology work together. Psychoanalysis explores the problems in order to bring them out into the daylight. Grace dissolves them without our ever knowing exactly how” (emphasis added). In the same vein, prayer partners and physicians at the City of Faith want to cooperate, not compete. Lack of clarity in a single source of healing helps credit to be given where it belongs: to God.

• A centrist view of healing does not pretend suffering will be eliminated. Marie Hermann may have been visited by a miracle in losing her cancer, but she still knows the pain of multiple sclerosis, which did not leave her body.

And three years after the unusual disappearance of Marie’s cancer, it has returned. Two nodes on the back of her neck have been found to be malignant. A biopsy showed the cancer is the same one that so nearly killed her three years earlier. The prognosis is mixed, but Marie’s attitude remains the same. On the day she calls to tell me the bad news she comments on the bright fall weather. She says God is still God, that she has had three “wonderful” years, and that she may have many more yet.

The oddness of Barbara Cummiskey’s case also did not end with her being healed of MS. Only months later doctors did a fairly simple operation to remove a cyst that had grown in Barbara’s lower abdomen. A freakish infection developed and she almost died. Only intensive medical care saved her, and her recovery was gradual and quite “natural.”

We might also note that Barbara suffered 15 years before her healing. Marie Hermann suffered more than 10 years with various cancers, and knew the pain of a radical mastectomy before she was healed. If God miraculously healed these women, he obviously was not merely eliminating pain: that could have come much sooner. Yet Barbara and Marie both look back on their times of pain with some fondness. They recall a closeness to God that is difficult to maintain in the hubbub of a busy, healthy life. P. T. Forsyth once commented that too often so much of our moral energy is “engrossed with healing or preventing pain, that it is withdrawn from the noble enduring of it, from the conversion and sanctification of wounds incurable.”

When Marie Hermann was sick, she conducted Bible studies and talked on the phone for hours with distressed friends. Her counsel was valued and appreciated, and she admits that when she got well some of the same friends misunderstood her—she was not always home, always available. She had almost endured pain too nobly, had surely converted and sactified a wound incurable.

“Chiefly For This End …”

Among the galaxy of wonderful scenes in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, I especially like one. The timid hobbit Sam Gamgee has survived goblins, giant spiders, thirst, and hunger in a perilous journey through a dark land. Then he awakes from a sleep he thought was death and gasps at his friend, “Gandlf! I though you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? The Christian God is no mere wizard, and in this marred though beautiful world we live in, not everything sad is going to come untrue. There is pain. There are no absolute guarantees, no formulas (no sorcerer’s spells), but room for faith and hope.

The centrist approach to healing is cropping up in a variety of traditions, but almost always in the setting of community. (It is not an accident that Robert’s hospital is named the City of Faith.) Pastor Dick Rasanen, of Hope Evangelical Covenant Church in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, describes a simple Sunday evening service. Anyone desiring prayer was invited forward, one at a time, for laying on of hands. The service was conducted quietly and in order—no histrionics, no extravagant claims. “The service provided a special opportunity for the body to minister to one another, to give and receive God’s healing love, to realize again that each of us is hurting in some way,” says Rasanen.

It is quite likely that the extremes of faith healing are due in some measure to the organized church’s neglect of it. The hope of faith can arouse desperate and profound emotion. As with many other things, Scripture prefers that healing be practiced in community (see 1 Cor. 12 and James 5:13–16). In community the lunatic fringe can be moderated, and healing practiced with dignity and caution. Finally, it is in community that we can remind one another our ultimate purpose is not to escape pain, but to glorify Jesus Christ.

Richard Sibbes, a seventeenth-century Puritan pastor of unusual grace and sensitivity, said: “This is a sign of a man’s victory over himself, when he loves health and peace of body and mind, with a supply of all needful things, chiefly for this end, that he may with more freedom of spirit serve God in doing good to others.” If this is the object of all prayers for healing, all our efforts at health, whatever healing is achieved will be healing indeed.