Page 4444 – Christianity Today (2024)

While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. … But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
—ROMANS 5:6,8, NRSV

In 1996 James Van Tholen, then 31, and his wife, Rachel, moved to Rochester, New York, where Jim became pastor of a Christian Reformed Church. Members of the church found themselves drawn to Jim’s ministry, especially to his preaching, which gleamed with biblical intelligence and humane understanding.

Then, the unthinkable occurred: in the late winter of 1998, physicians identified and surgically removed a liposarcoma from behind Jim’s right knee. Within weeks Jim had another tumor behind his chest wall, and then spots on both femurs and one kidney. Recent tests confirm cancer up and down Jim’s spine, with the result that he now thinks about how he moves, always conscious of the risk of spinal cord compression (and paralysis).

From March until October, Jim struggled to recover from surgery and to absorb forms of chemotherapy that offered no cure but could prolong his life somewhat. By October, the chemotherapy had suppressed Jim’s cancer enough that he was able to return to his pulpit.

What follows is the sermon Jim preached from Romans 5:1–11 on the morning of his return, October 18, 1998. As the members of the congregation listened to their young preacher’s sermon, they understood something about dying and rising with Christ that they hadn’t known just that way before.

—Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.,dean of the chapel at Calvin Collegeand a former teacher of Van Tholen’s atCalvin Theological Seminary.

This is a strange day—for all of us. Most of you know that today marks my return to this pulpit after seven months of dealing with an aggressive and deadly form of cancer. Now, with the cancer vacationing for a little while, I am back. And of course I’m glad to be back. But I can’t help feeling how strange this day is—especially because I want to ignore my absence, and I want to pretend everybody has forgotten the reason for it.

But we can’t do that. We can’t ignore what has happened. We can rise above it; we can live through it; but we can’t ignore it. If we ignore the threat of death as too terrible to talk about, then the threat wins. Then we are overwhelmed by it, and our faith doesn’t apply to it. And if that happens, we lose hope.

We want to worship God in this church, and for our worship to be real, it doesn’t have to be fun, and it doesn’t have to be guilt-ridden. But it does have to be honest, and it does have to hope in God. We have to be honest about a world of violence and pain, a world that scorns faith and smashes hope and rebuts love. We have to be honest about the world, and honest about the difficulties of faith within it. And then we still have to hope in God.

So let me start with the honesty. The truth is that for seven months I have been scared. Not of the cancer, not really. Not even of death. Dying is another matter—how long it will take and how it will go. Dying scares me. But when I say that I have been scared, I don’t mean that my thoughts have centered on dying. My real fear has centered somewhere else. Strange as it may sound, I have been scared of meeting God.

How could this be so? How could I have believed in the God of grace and still have dreaded to meet him? Why did I stand in this pulpit and preach grace to you over and over, and then, when I myself needed the grace so much, why did I discover fear where the grace should have been?

I think I know the answer now. As the wonderful preacher John Timmer has taught me over the years, the answer is that grace is a scandal. Grace is hard to believe. Grace goes against the grain. The gospel of grace says that there is nothing I can do to get right with God, but that God has made himself right with me through Jesus’ bloody death. And that is a scandalous thing to believe.

God comes to us before we go to him. John Tim mer used to say that this is God’s habit. God came to Abraham when there was nothing to come to, just an old man at a dead end. But that’s God for you. That’s the way God likes to work. He comes to old men and to infants, to sinners and to losers. That’s grace, and a sermon without it is no sermon at all.

So I’ve tried to preach grace, to fill my sermons up with grace, to persuade you to believe in grace. And it’s wonderful work to have—that is, to stand here and preach grace to people. I got into this pulpit and talked about war and homosexuality and divorce. I talked about death before I knew what death really was. And I tried to bring the gospel of grace to these areas when I preached. I said that God goes to people in trouble, that God receives people in trouble, that God is a God who gets into trouble be cause of his grace. I said what our Heidelberg Catechism says: that our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own but belong to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

I said all those things, and I meant them. But that was before I faced death myself. So now I have a silly thing to admit: I don’t think I ever realized the shocking and radical nature of God’s grace—even as I preached it. And the reason I didn’t get it where grace is concerned, I think, is that I assumed I still had about forty years left. Forty years to unlearn my bad habits. Forty years to let my sins thin down and blow away. Forty years to be good to animals and pick up my neighbors’ mail for them when they went on vacation.

But that’s not how it’s going to go. Now I have months, not years. And now I have to meet my creator who is also my judge—I have to meet God not later, but sooner. I haven’t enough time to undo my wrongs, not enough time to straighten out what’s crooked, not enough time to clean up my life.

And that’s what has scared me.

So now, for the first time, I have to preach grace and know what I’m talking about. I have to preach grace and not only believe it, but rest on it, depend on it, stake my life on it. And as I faced the need to do this I remembered one of the simplest, most powerful statements in the entire Bible.

You may have thought that the reason for my choice of Romans 5 lay in the wonderful words about how suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Those are beautiful words, true words, but I’m not so sure they apply to me. I’m not sure I’ve suffered so much or so faithfully to claim that my hope has arisen through the medium of good character. No, many of you know far more about good character than I do, and more about suffering, too.

It wasn’t that beautiful chain with character as the main link that drew my attention to Romans 5; instead, it was just one little word in verses 6 and 8. It’s the Greek word eti, and it has brought comfort to my soul. The word means “yet” or “still,” and it makes all the difference between sin and grace. Paul writes that “while we were still weak Christ died for the ungodly.” He wants us to marvel at the Christ of the gospel, who comes to us in our weakness and in our need. Making sure we get the point, Paul uses the word twice in verse 6 in a repetitious and ungrammatical piling up of his meaning: “Still while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”

I’m physically weak, but that’s not my main weakness, my most debilitating weakness. What the last half year has proved to me is that my weakness is more of the soul than the body. This is what I’ve come to understand as I have dwelled on one question: How will I explain myself to my God? How can I ever claim to have been what he called me to be?

The center of my story—our story— is that the grace of Jesus Christ carries us beyond every cancer, every divorce, every sin, every trouble that comes to us.

And, of course, the scary truth is that I can’t. That’s the kind of weakness Paul is talking about. And that’s where eti comes in—while we were still weak, while we were still sinners, while we were still enemies of God, we were reconciled with him through the death of his Son. I find it unfathomable that God’s love propelled him to reach into our world with such scandalous grace, such a way out, such hope. No doubt God has done it, because there’s no hope anywhere else. I know. I’ve been looking. And I have come to see that the hope of the world lies only inside the cradle of God’s grace.

This truth has come home to me as I’ve been thinking what it will mean to die. The same friends I enjoy now will get together a year, and three years, and twenty years from now, and I will not be there, not even in the conversation. Life will go on. In this church you will call a new minister with new gifts and a new future, and eventually I’ll fade from your mind and memory. I understand. The same thing has happened to my own memories of others. When I was saying something like this a few months ago to a friend of mine, he reminded me of those poignant words of Psalm 103:15–16: “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.” For the first time I felt those words in my gut; I understood that my place would know me no more.

In his poem “Adjusting to the Light,” Miller Williams explores the sense of awkwardness among Lazarus’s friends and neighbors just after Jesus has resuscitated him. Four days after his death, Lazarus returns to the land of the living and finds that people have moved on from him. Now they have to scramble to fit him back in:

Lazarus, listen, we have things to tell you. We killed the sheep you meant to take to market. We couldn’t keep the old dog, either. He minded you. The rest of us he barked at. Rebecca, who cried two days, has given her hand to the sandalmaker’s son. Please understand—we didn’t know that Jesus could do this.

We’re glad you’re back. But give us time to think. Imagine our surprise. … We want to say we’re sorry for all of that. And one thing more. We threw away the lyre. But listen, we’ll pay whatever the sheep was worth. The dog, too. And put your room the way it was before.

Miller Williams has it just right. After only a few days, Lazarus’s place knew him no more. Before cancer, I liked Williams’s poem, but now I’m living it. Believe me: hope doesn’t lie in our legacy; it doesn’t lie in our longevity; it doesn’t lie in our personality or our career or our politics or our children or, heaven knows, our goodness. Hope lies in eti.

So please don’t be surprised when in the days ahead I don’t talk about my cancer very often. I’ve told a part of my story today, because it seemed right to do it on the first day back after seven months. But what we must talk about here is not me. I cannot be our focus, because the center of my story—our story—is that the grace of Jesus Christ carries us beyond every cancer, every divorce, every sin, every trouble that comes to us. The Christian gospel is the story of Jesus, and that’s the story I’m called to tell.

I’m dying. Maybe it will take longer instead of shorter; maybe I’ll preach for several months, and maybe for a bit more. But I am dying. I know it, and I hate it, and I’m still frightened by it. But there is hope, unwavering hope. I have hope not in something I’ve done, some purity I’ve maintained, or some sermon I’ve written. I hope in God—the God who reaches out for an enemy, saves a sinner, dies for the weak.

That’s the gospel, and I can stake my life on it. I must. And so must you.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Twenty-six years after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, the public debate on abortion seems to have reached a stalemate. The issue continues to be debated in Congress and state legislatures across the country, but, year to year, there seems to be little change in public opinion.

This does not mean, however, that the abortion issue is going to recede in intensity any time soon. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is simply that "the majority of Americans morally disapprove of the majority of abortions currently performed," as University of Virginia sociologist James Hunter concludes in his path-breaking 1994 book, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture Wars. Hunter's analysis is based on the 1991 Gallup poll "Abortion and Moral Beliefs," the most thorough survey of American attitudes toward abortion yet conducted.

The Gallup study found that 77 percent of Americans believe that abortion is at least the "taking of human life" (28 percent), if not "murder" itself (49 percent). Other polls confirm these findings. And yet, while many Americans—perhaps 60 percent in the middle—see legalized abortion as an evil, they see it as "necessary."

The Chicago Tribune aptly summarized the situation in a September 1996 editorial: "Most Americans are uncomfortable with all-or-nothing policies on abortion. They generally shy away from proposals to ban it in virtually all circumstances, but neither are they inclined to make it available on demand no matter what the circumstances. They regard it, at best, as a necessary evil."

If Middle America—as Hunter calls the 60 percent—sees abortion as an evil, why is it thought to be necessary? Although the 1991 Gallup poll did not probe this question specifically, it made clear that it is not because Middle America sees abortion as necessary to secure equal opportunities for women. For example, less than 30 percent believe abortion is acceptable in the first three months of pregnancy if the pregnancy would require a teenager to drop out of school (and the number drops below 20 percent if the abortion is beyond three months). Likewise, less than 20 percent support abortion in the first three months of pregnancy if the pregnancy would interrupt a woman's career (and that support drops to 10 percent if the abortion is after the third month).

Four "necessary" myths Instead, many Americans, therefore, may see abortion as "necessary" to avert "the back alley." In this sense, the notion of legal abortion as a "necessary evil" is based on a series of myths widely disseminated since the 1960s. These myths captured the public mind and have yet to be rebutted.

Myth #1: One to two million illegal abortions occurred annually before legalization. In fact, the annual total in the few years before abortion on demand was no more than tens of thousands and most likely fewer. For example, in California, the most populous state where it was alleged that 100,000 illegal abortions occurred annually in the 1960s, only 5,000 abortions were performed in 1968, the first full year of legalization.

Myth #2: Thousands of women died annually from abortions before legalization. As a leader in the legalization movement, Dr. Bernard Nathanson later wrote: "How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L. we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always '5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.' I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose that others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the 'morality' of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"

In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) statistics in 1972 show that 39 women died from illegal abortion and 27 died from legal abortion.

Myth #3: Abortion law targeted women rather than abortionists before legalization. In fact, the nearly uniform policy of the states for nearly a century before 1973 was to treat the woman as the second victim of abortion.

Myth #4: Legalized abortion has been good for women. In fact, women still die from legal abortion, and the general impact on health has had many negative consequences, including the physical and psychological toll that many women bear, the epidemic of sexually transmitted disease, the general coarsening of male-female relationships over the past 30 years, the threefold increase in the repeat-abortion rate, and the increase in hospitalizations from ectopic pregnancies.

A generation of Americans educated by these myths sees little alternative to legalized abortion. It is commonly believed that prohibitions on abortion would not reduce abortion and only push thousands of women into "the back alley" where many would be killed or injured. Prohibitions would mean no fewer abortions and more women injured or killed. Wouldn't that be worse than the status quo?

Middle America's sense that abortion is a necessary evil explains a lot of things, and, by giving coherent explanation to many disparate facts and impressions, it may provide a way beyond the stalemate to—as Hunter calls for—an elevation in the content and conduct of the public debate.

First, this notion of abortion as a necessary evil explains the seemingly contradictory polls showing that a majority of Americans believe both that abortion is murder and that it should be legal. The most committed pro-life Americans see legality and morality to be inextricably intertwined and therefore view the pol ling data as contradictory. But Middle America understands "legal" versus "illegal" not in moral terms but in practical terms—criminalizing the procedure. Based on the historical myths, Middle America believes that criminalizing abortion would only aggravate a bad situation.

Second, the myth of abortion as a necessary evil also explains the power of the "choice" rhetoric. For the most committed abortion proponents, "choice" means moral autonomy. But there are less ideological meanings. According to the choice rhetoric, Americans can persuade women to make another choice, but they can't make abortion illegal, because that would mean no fewer abortions and simply push women into the back alley. This explains why Middle America will support virtually any regulation, short of making abortions illegal, that will encourage alternatives and reduce abortions. In a sense, by supporting legal regulations but not prohibitions, many Americans may believe that they are choosing "the lesser of two evils."

The rhetoric of abortion as a "necessary evil" (though not the phrase itself) is a key tactic of abortion advocates. It is roughly reflected in President Clinton's slogan that he wants abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare" and is at the heart of the President's veto of the federal partial-birth abortion bill. In the face of polls showing that 70 to 80 percent of Americans oppose the procedure, the President says that the procedure is horrible (it's an evil) but contends that "a few hundred women" every year must have the procedure (it's necessary).

Indeed, the rhetoric of abortion as a necessary evil is designed to sideline Americans' moral qualms about abortion. For example, when Congress first began to consider the bill prohibiting partial-birth abortion, abortion advocates bought a full-page advertisement in the New York Times showing a large coat hanger and the caption, "Will this be the only approved method of abortion?" The coat hanger, reinforcing the image of the back alley, remains a powerful rhetorical symbol. It reinforces the notion that there are two and only two alternatives: abortion on demand or the back alley.

Finally, the myth of abortion as a "necessary evil" also explains why 49 percent of Americans may believe that abortion is "murder" without translating this into fervent social or political mobilization. While Middle Americans may view abortion as an evil, they view it as intractable. For this reason, they view fervent campaigns to prohibit abortion as unrealistic if not counterproductive, while they are drawn to realistic alternatives and regulations. They agree that there are too many abortions and would like to see them reduced. Abortion is not a galvanizing electoral issue for Middle America, because Middle America doesn't see that much can be done about the issue legally or politically.

The future of abortion The myth of abortion as a necessary evil has serious implications for future public debate. First, it means that abortion opponents have won the essential debate that the unborn is a human being and not mere tissue. In fact, the whole thrust of the "choice" argument admits this and seeks to sideline Americans' moral qualms by telling Americans that, even if it is a human life, the most that can be done is to persuade women not to have abortions.

Second, it means that the ideological arguments of both sides ("choice" versus "child") often miss the much more practical concerns of many Americans.

Third, it means that Americans balance the fate of the woman and the fate of the child. Although they understand the fate of the child to be fatal, they want to avoid the same result for women and believe that legalized abortion has been good generally for women.

This means that maximizing the fatal impact of abortion through, for example, graphic pictures of aborted babies is not a "silver bullet" that will transform public opinion alone. Instead, elevating the content and conduct of the public debate requires addressing both aspects—the impact on women as well as the impact on the child. Helping the public understand the impact on both, and the alternatives available, may contribute to a renewal of public dialogue that we so sorely need on this issue.

But a renewal of the public dialogue won't mean much if the people are not allowed to express the public will on this issue, as they usually do in our democratic republic. Twenty-six years ago, the Supreme Court claimed hegemony over the issue and created a nationwide rule of abortion on demand, preventing democratic debate and solutions. The public policy dictated by the Supreme Court collides with majority opinion and reflects the views of only the 20 percent who are committed to abortion on demand. Twenty-six years later, that is the main reason the pot keeps boiling.

Clarke D. Forsythe is attorney and president of Americans United for Life in Chicago.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last December, Janice Shaw Crouse traveled to Zimbabwe for the World Council of Churches Jubilee Assembly. As project vice chair for Proclaim Liberty: A Jubilee Appeal, sponsored by the Association for Church Renewal, Crouse is part of the effort to call the World Council of Churches away from syncretism and back to biblical orthodoxy. She is also the director of the newly formed Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society, which was created to oppose radical feminist inroads into mainline churches. “A Christian Women’s Declaration,” published by the organization, serves as a rallying point to bring mainline, Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical women together around a model for biblical womanhood that both “traditionalists” and “egalitarians” can affirm. Crouse served as White House senior writer on domestic issues during the Bush administration. She now heads her own public-relations firm, Crouse Communications, and serves on the board of trustees of Asbury College. Crouse lives with her husband in Manassas, Virginia.

In addition to being director of the Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society, you have also been part of an effort to bring renewal to the World Council of Churches.All of us who belong to the Association for Church Renewal are members of churches that are part of the WCC, but we’re all evangelical and biblically orthodox and are quite concerned about the direction that the WCC is going. This is the fiftieth anniversary of the WCC, and their literature has said, plain and simple, that they can go in one of two directions. Either they can incorporate all religions, so that Christianity be comes one of many different religions, or they can incorporate the people who have been truly marginalized—the Pentecostals, the evangelicals, the orthodox believers. The Association for Church Renewal exists to say: The latter is the path to real vitality. The WCC has declining membership and dwindling funds. Radical feminist ideologies are being pushed by the hierarchy. And at the same time, around the world—in Latin American and African and Asian churches—there’s a tremendous revival going on. But the more evangelical, alive branches are not in power.

Was the Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society formed to give a biblical response to radical feminism?We’re not out there saying that feminism itself is inherently bad; that is not our position. But the religious radical feminists go so far as to say that there are five genders, or that gender is fluid, or that you really ought to experiment with all the various types of gender. The bottom line is, our churches are being destroyed by the radical feminist ideology, which is a combination of heresy and paganism, and that is what we’re trying to combat.

Since the Re-Imagining conference of 1993, radical feminists have gone under the radar screen. I went to the 1998 conference and it was absolutely astounding. The center of their ideology is to take over churches, to have their ideology be the theology of the church.

Can you sum up what you consider this “ideology” to be and why it is dangerous?They take away the deity of Christ, and anything having to do with the centrality of Jesus Christ to the gospel is disputed, denied, debunked, and made fun of. For example, the Nicene Creed was mentioned at the Re-Imagining conference to hoots of laughter. So the very premise of the church is laughed at and denied. Instead, there’s a lot of Wiccan ideology woven in. It’s all about the earth, the moon, the stars. This is something the Association for Church Renewal deals with in our position paper on unity. We say that ecumenicism is a matter of unity, and we don’t have unity aside from Jesus Christ. With out Christ, we have nothing to unify us, so why would we have a World Council of Churches?

So these aren’t the attacks on the divinity of Christ we’ve become accustomed to from a scientific, positivistic point of view—that the Incarnation simply isn’t a scientific reality?No, it’s not, and you point up something that I think is really important. It’s a contradiction to me that you have these feminists who are so big on promoting women—supposedly—and yet their whole theology is so nonscientific and nonintellectual. It’s very mystical, supernatural, and experience-centered. They have this touchy-feely attitude about women. There’s a lot of talk about the mystery of the menstrual cycles, glorification of physical things like breastfeeding. But no mention of babies. There’s a real disconnect there, with the focus on the process and yet no sense of it resulting in a child that you’re responsible for. Some of the radical feminists talk about motherhood as antithetical to feminism. This ideology is infiltrating the literature of the mainline denominations very clearly. It’s more and more part of what’s being taught in the seminaries, so more and more people in the pulpit are espousing their views. And they will continue to have impact unless we band with other orthodox believers.

The Christian Women’s Declaration, which comes out against radical feminism, was signed by a number of ordained women. Do you find that this makes it difficult for you to rally some of the more conservative believers to your side?In the Christian Women’s Declaration, we followed C. S. Lewis’s ideas in the pre face to Mere Christianity where he says that you ought to focus on the central ideas of Christianity and keep your disputes among yourselves. With the evangelical branches, right now there’s a war going on between groups like the Council on Biblical Man hood and Womanhood, which is very traditional, and Christians for Biblical Equality, which says that women and men are coequal— women have a responsibility to their calling, and if they’re called to the pulpit, that’s where they ought to be.

Both groups are within our parameters, and they war with each other. But we’re all up against radical feminists who say that Jesus was not divine, that we identify with him only because he was abused and he suffered, just as women suffer. So it’s foolish to start arguing about the things that we disagree on. We have to agree on the central issues and respectfully disagree on those peripheral kinds of things.

What approach do you take to those who would affirm the divinity of Christ and also say that homosexuality is acceptable?The Bible is very clear about that. Sex is reserved for marriage, and that precludes premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexuality.

A lot of your possible allies among evangelical believers would say that the Bible is equally clear about women in leadership.I think that they err in looking at the Scripture. We worked very hard, in the Christian Women’s Declaration, to say that women have a responsibility to their calling, that they were created equal, and that the Bible has been the most powerful force in history for lifting women to higher levels of respect, dignity, and freedom. There’s a very high view of Scripture at the center of what we do, and that high view of Scripture says that women were created equal with men. And if you look at our signers, you see that we have many ordained women aligned with us. One of the things that the Ecumenical Coalition is trying to do is appeal to intellectual women. We are trying to encourage Christian evangelical women to study issues, and not just react emotionally to issues, and not just stay in certain preconceived boxes.

Christian women are grappling with the issue of feminism. They want to know: How can we incorporate a biblical view of marriage and a biblical view of family with the biblical view of equality of human beings? There are a lot of women out there who don’t identify with the radical feminist ideology, who feel that a mother’s first responsibility is to raise her children, yet who also want to stay alive intellectually, who want to discuss ideas, who feel that they have a responsibility to develop their talents and gifts to their fullest capacity. We really want to find these women who are well informed and can think their way through issues, so that we can band together and say: We’re going to do something about our culture. We’re going to do something about our churches, to return them to biblical orthodoxy. That niche hasn’t been tapped before.

Susan Wise Bauer is a writer and novelist. Her second novel, Though the Darkness Hide Thee, is published by Multnomah.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Q:Was Rahab justified in lying when she said the spies had already departed?—Randy Bishop, Lombard, Illinois

A: Rahab lied. That's the simple truth. The Bible condemns deception. That, too, is the simple truth. Even so, when Rahab's story is told in Joshua 2, and when she is celebrated for her faith in Hebrews 11:31 and for her works in James 2:25, the Bible—while not justifying her lie—does not condemn it. The same is true of the midwives' lie (Exod. 1:1521) and Elisha's lie (2 Kings 6:19). The fact is, Scripture offers no subtle philosophical distinctions to justify or to excuse such lies.

Many Christians, like Augustine and Calvin, have condemned Rahab's deception. Her lie, even though told "for a good purpose," Calvin says, is "contrary to the nature of God." Similarly, Augustine praised the midwives and Rahab for "the benignity of their intention" but condemned them for "the iniquity of their invention." Their point: It is necessary to condemn this and every deception because God is Truth. Other Christians, however, have been less ready to condemn Rahab's lie—or all other lies. Luther defended "a good hearty lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian Church, a lie in case of necessity, a useful lie." Such lies, he said, "would not be against God."

We are right to worry about Luther's readiness to accept deception. At the same time, two observations keep some Christian ethicists (including myself) from adopting Calvin and Augustine's rigorous rejection of all deception. First, God is Truth, but truth is not a second god—just as love is no god though "God is Love," and life is no god though God is "the Life." Devotion to God should lead us to speak the truth, to love the neighbor, to serve life. In this sad world, however, sometimes we find ourselves in situations where to speak the truth may harm a neighbor, or where a lie (as in Rahab's story) may be necessary to preserve the life of a neighbor. (Even the instruction not to "bear false witness" in the Ten Commandments is put in the covenant context of not harming one's neighbor.) We live the truth not for its own sake, but for God's sake and for the neighbor's sake.

Second, God is Truth, but when Scripture uses this image it does not refer simply to some correspondence between word and thought. It refers, rather, to something like troth, as in the trustworthiness and faithfulness that come with betrothal. When we read, for example, that "grace and truth came through Jesus Christ," the point is that, through Jesus, God is faithful to God's covenant promises. The test for our speech and our lives, then, is not simply whether what we say or do corresponds to what we think, but faithfulness to covenant. This test requires of our speech more than simply "telling the truth." The Devil may be the father of lies, but there is also, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "a truth which is of Satan." For example, when we pass along the gossip that injures a neighbor, we are not excused simply because it is true.

Sometimes covenants are broken by the demand that the truth be told. Consider a story Bonhoeffer told: "A teacher asks a child in front of the class whether it is true that his father often comes home drunk. It is true, but the child denies it." Bonhoeffer says the child is not wrong to lie. He suggests that it is the teacher who is at fault here rather than the child by abusing the relationship and the expectation that the truth be told within that relationship. The teacher exploits the obligation to tell the truth to force the student to reveal his father's weakness in front of the class and to violate his covenanted identity.

Consider Rahab. She covenanted to hide the Israelites from the tyrant who threatened to harm them. That same tyrant put her in a position of having either to break that covenant or to tell a lie. The tyrant was at fault here, not Rahab. A kind of violence had been done here, putting her in a situation of either violating covenant or telling a lie—and her lie, another kind of violence, may be permitted as a form of covenanted self-defense.

It is easy, however—and dangerous—to drift too close to Luther's approval of the "good hearty lie." We must remember that a covenant cannot be built on deception or sustained by it. A lie is parasitic on the expectation that the truth will be told, that it can destroy that expectation of truth telling, and that no community can exist without trust. We must remember our capacity for self-deception when we start justifying our lies as "harmless" or "necessary" or "useful" or "loving." As Christians we make decisions, including decisions about our words, not simply as rule keepers, and surely not simply as utility calculators, but as people disposed to truthfulness, prepared to regret even the justifiable lie as a mark of the "not yet" character of our life in the Spirit of Truth. In a broken world, sometimes a lie is justifiable, but every lie, even the justifiable one, is a sad reminder of our brokenness. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

Allen Verhey is professor of religion at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Next time you’re in church, count the number of adult heads and divide by the number of pairs of pantyhose. If the pantyhose contingent makes up more than half the total, there’s a word for your church: typical.

“Every sociologist, and indeed every observer, who has looked at the question has found that women are more religious than men,” writes Leon Podles in his new book, The Church Impotent. (Ouch; the stentorian title makes me wince. Once inside, however, it’s reasonable and well-written.) Podles cites a deluge of statistics: in 1986, church-growth expert Lyle Schaller observed 60 percent female to 40 percent male churchgoers, a split that has widened since. Jesuit theologian Patrick Arnold says he has found a female-to-male ratio ranging from 2:1 to 7:1, and “some liberal Presbyterian or Methodist congregations are practically bereft of men.” Even in churches that have an all-male ordained leadership, the inner circle of laity who actually run things is likely to be mostly female. Sociologist Edward H. Thompson states that “throughout all varieties of black religious activity, women represent from 75 to 90 percent of the participants.” These are observations based on attendance, but the last time a census of membership by gender took place was 1936. Even back then, women outnumbered men across denominations, with Pentecostals almost 2 to 1.

On the one hand, these figures are good news. The faith that raised the status of women in the ancient world still raises their spirits today, and it’s hard for anti-Christian snipers to claim that Christianity is antiwomen when women fill pews so enthusiastically. As John Updike wrote in a recent issue of the New Yorker: “It is not Christianity that in parts of Africa promotes clitoridectomy as a means to properly shaped femininity. It is not Christianity that inflicts upon women, as in Iran and Afghanistan, hysterical restrictions that inhibit their access to employment, education, social life, and even medical care.”

But why aren’t men there in equal numbers? It’s not quite accurate to say men aren’t as interested in religion, since they participate strongly in Islam and Judaism. Podles suggests that Christian congregations outside Western Europe and America enjoy better balance, and cites the Polish Solidarity workers who boldly displayed their faith. But somewhere along the line, Western Christian faith lost some of its manly appeal.

The Norman Rockwell painting Easter Morning depicts the problem: Dad slouches in his pajamas, awash in newspapers, while Mom and the kids march past him in their Sunday best. A hundred years before that, clergy were already being stigmatized as prissy and effeminate. In the late seventeenth century, Cot ton Mather complained that only women came to church. Following the evidence back through history, Podles arrives at the thirteenth century, when Saint Bernard of Clairvaux developed a mysticism based on imagining oneself the Bride of Christ.

Where Saint Paul had described a bridal role for the entire church, the nuptial bond was now imagined as me-and-Jesus alone, and as swooning and passionate. Women, then enjoying a period of in creased freedom, popularized this approach, but men found it harder to imagine themselves in Jesus’ arms. Yet the notion took hold, persisting through the centuries: even stern Cotton Mather taught that Jesus marries each individual believer, and Promise Keepers’ Bill McCartney said we should “be in a love affair with Jesus.” Passive receptiveness sup planted sacrificial obedience as the model for all Christians—a passivity many men found emasculating. Perhaps in reaction they retreated into ever-dryer forms of scholasticism, and so theology became divorced from devotion.

Men still feel the need for transcendent meaning, Podles says, but if the only faith they see is soft and sappy, they’ll seek it elsewhere: through career power, competitive sports, or, when particularly belittled or hopeless, through violence, drugs, and danger. As they slipped out the back door, more seats were occupied by women. In the fourteenth century, the rate of saints canonized that were women rose from 50 percent to 71 percent, and the remaining male saints were not laymen but monks and clerics.

The statistics above suggest the gap is widening, perhaps accelerated by the context of consumerism. Advertising leads us to think of our desires as important and precious things. We expect to be wooed. We assume that God’s relationship with us is based on his desire to console and reassure us, rather than our desperate need to be rescued from sin and conformed to his holiness. But throughout the New Testament, and for a millennium, the gospel message of consolation was matched by “masculine” calls to strive like an athlete and to lay aside sin.

Perhaps the church’s message needs to be gender adjusted. We can try changing the sign in front of the church from “We Care About You!” to “Faith Demands Things of You!” Then be prepared to include a choir budget item: you’ll need more music stands for the basses.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Gracious SpiritCome, Holy Dove,Descend on silent pinion,Brood o’er my sinful soulwith patient love,

Till all my being owns Thy milddominion.Spirit of grace,

Reveal in me my Saviour,That I may gaze upon His mirrored Face,Till I reflect it in my whole behaviour.

—Richard Wilton, quoted inYou Can Say That Again

No WaitingThere is no need for us to wait, as the one hundred and twenty had to wait, for the Spirit to come. For the Holy Spirit did come on the day of Pentecost, and has never left his church. Our responsibility is to humble ourselves before his sovereign authority to determine not to quench him, but to allow him his freedom. For then our churches will again manifest those marks of the Spirit’s presence, which many young people are specially looking for, namely biblical teaching, loving fellowship, living worship, and an ongoing, outgoing evangelism.

—John Stott inAuthentic Christianity

We Know the PowerWhen we know we have most of Christ, when we love Him most, live for Him most, we know that the Holy Spirit is within us in power.

—F. B. Meyer inA Castaway and Other Addresses

He Is a PersonSpell this out in capital letters: THE HOLY SPIRIT IS A PERSON. He is not enthusiasm. He is not courage. He is not energy. He is not the personification of all good qualities, like Jack Frost is the personification of cold weather. Actually, the Holy Spirit is not the personification of anything. He is a Person, the same as you are a person, but not material substance. He has individuality. He is one being and not another. He has will and intelligence. He has hearing. He has knowledge and sympathy and ability to love and see and think. He can hear, speak, desire, grieve and rejoice. He is a Person.

—A. W. Tozer inThe Counselor

Using the PowerWaste of power is a tragedy. God does not waste the great power of his Spirit on those who want it simply for their own sake, to be more holy, or good, or gifted. His great task is to carry on the work for which Jesus sacrificed his throne and his life—the redemption of fallen humanity.

—Alan Redpath inThe Life of Victory

It Keeps on BuildingWhen the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, it wasn’t dynamite, it was a dynamo! Dynamite makes a loud noise, kicks up a lot of dust, and it’s over. A dynamo is a continual source of power. It builds and builds and builds, and the power never stops flowing.

—Ken Hutcherson inThe Church: What We Are Meant to Be

Our TeacherThe Spirit will teach us to love the Word, to meditate on it and to keep it. He will reveal the love of Christ to us, that we may love him fervently and with a pure heart. Then we shall begin to see that a life in the love of Christ in the midst of our daily life and distractions is a glorious possibility and a blessed reality.

—Andrew Murray inEvery Day with Andrew Murray

Believing GodEvery time we say, “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” we mean that we believe that there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.

—J. B. Phillips inPlain Christianity

Soul LightImmediately the Holy Spirit comes in as life and as light, He will chase through every avenue of our minds; His light will penetrate every recess of our hearts; He will chase His light through every affection of our souls, and make us know what sin is. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin, man does not.

—Oswald Chambers inBiblical Psychology

All in AllDo not pray for more of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Third Person of the Trinity and is not in pieces. Every child of God has all of Him, but does He have all of us?

—Julia Kellersberger inPresbyterian Journal (May 11, 1983)

Natural WitnessIf a person is filled with the Holy Spirit, his witness will not be optional or mandatory—it will be inevitable.

—Richard Halverson inPentecostal Evangel (Aug. 12, 1979)

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To preach or not to preach? That is the question that Reese Roper, lead vocalist for Five Iron Frenzy, asks each time the band does a concert. “Instead of saying we are going to preach every night, we just say, ‘We’ll be led by the Holy Spirit,’ ” says Roper, a “not very charismatic” Presbyterian. “Our band is about being obedient to God. And God doesn’t want us to preach all the time.”

The band’s name, which comes from an offhand remark about how a golf club could be used as a weapon, reflects the band’s less-than-straightforward approach to ministry. Songs like “My Evil Plan to Save the World” and “These Are Not My Pants (The Rock Opera)” from the band’s most recent album, Quantity Is Job 1, could be considered confusing and silly.

The eight-member band plays a style of music called ska, which uses horns to transform the music’s edgy, punk energy into an upbeat, jubilant sound, like a nineties version of the band Chicago. Although ska has been around since the sixties, it has crept into mainstream music in the last five years.

Roper, 25, who writes most of the band’s lyrics, is joined by bass player and best friend since eighth grade Keith Hoerig; a horn section of Nathanael Dun ham (trumpet), Leanor “Jeff the Girl” Ortega (saxophones), and Dennis Culp (trombone); drummer Andy Ver decchio; and guitarists Micah Ortega and Sonnie Johnston.

Most people who come to the band’s concerts are older teens, according to Hoerig. Five Iron Frenzy’s performances often include goofy getups and Roper’s bizarre facial contortions. All this has led to misunderstanding and criticism by some Christians who come to concerts expecting to hear the band preach and do “serious” ministry.

Why would God want a Christian band not to preach? Because God reaches different people in different ways, suggests Roper. “It’s wrong to put God in a box, to say that he only works through bands that preach at shows. He’s so much bigger than that.”

Fans buy T-shirts, albums, stickers, and patches directly from the band members. “When we started, we couldn’t afford to have somebody doing merchandise for us,” says Roper. “But now it’s by choice. It’s a really cool way to meet and talk to kids.”

From some of these postconcert chats, Roper discovered that “some kids would have left if they heard us preaching. They would have just walked out.” But because they stayed, those kids got “encouraged” or even “saved.”

Fans also come to the merchandise tables looking for an autograph. Although the rest of the band will sign autographs, Roper will not. “My hope is that people would not put me on a pedestal. [I want them] to look past what we are doing and see the reason why we’re doing it, instead of all that rock star stuff. A lot of times when people ask for an autograph, it’s just an excuse to talk to you. The whole reason I’m in the band is to talk to kids, to share the hope of Jesus with them.”

Since its beginning, the Denver-based band has gone to places not normally found on the Christian concert circuit. A secular club in Denver needed an opening act for a band and asked Five Iron Frenzy to play. They were well received and kept getting asked back. “There weren’t many ska bands in town,” says Roper, whose music is keeping him from the one semester he needs to earn a college degree in biology.

In the spring of 1998, the band was invited on the month-long Ska Against Racism Tour, which featured one of the best-known secular ska bands, Less Than Jake, and six other non-Christian bands. Five Iron Frenzy sent out fliers to youth groups asking them to keep the band in their prayers as they took “the hope of the gospel where it is rarely heard.”

The group did very little preaching from the stage on that tour but played a song called “Fistful of Sand” at each show. Roper introduced the song each time by saying, “This song is about the Book of Ecclesiastes.” From that simple introduction, every member of the Blue Meanies, one of the other bands on the tour, read Ecclesiastes. “Somebody from every band came up and talked to us about God and Christianity,” says Roper. “It wasn’t trite talk. It was really deep, spiritual talk.”

During one of the last stops of the tour in Casper, Wyoming, Roper picked someone from the audience to join the band on stage. A young man wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt danced along for one song. (Marilyn Manson is a rock group well known for its blasphemous anti-Christian lyrics and actions.) Five Iron Frenzy played on without comment.

“I hope that guy felt loved,” says Roper as he reflects on the incident months later. “I’m glad he got up on stage, because I guess he wasn’t afraid of us.

“At a lot of Marilyn Manson concerts they get picketed, and there’s people yelling at kids telling them they are going to hell. It’s like they forgot what being a Christian is about, what Jesus is about. So often people take the easy path.

“I’ve seen God work through bands that hate God. A song about suicide or something touches a kid and scares him into going to church. God can work through whatever he wants. Like in the Old Testament, he spoke through a donkey.”

Last November, Five Iron Frenzy teamed up with the two best-known Christian ska bands, the Supertones and the Insyderz, for the 18-concert Ska Mania Tour. Roper found some differences as he compared the band’s two biggest tours.

Roper felt his devotional life was better during the secular Ska Against Racism tour in the spring. “My walk was better out of sheer terror,” says Roper. “We were the only Christian band. It made us fight really hard to keep God first. I didn’t want to do anything that I’d regret. I made sure I was praying every day and reading my Bible.

“On the SkaMania tour you knew all the guys around you were Christian and they weren’t going to take it the wrong way, so all of a sudden you start joking crassly. You start to slip up.”

Roper found Christian audiences’ expectations to be different. During Five Iron Frenzy’s performance in Denver the band appeared as they did throughout the SkaMania tour dressed in Star Trek outfits. Their between-song banter consisted mostly of Star Trek–related dialogue. At one point, some members of the audience began to chant, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

“If they were offended by the Star Trek thing, I apologize to them,” says Roper. “Our intent was not to offend anybody. It was to be funny, to entertain. I have a big problem with people who go to concerts to get preached at. That concert cost 20 bucks to get into. If you want to hear preaching, you can go to any church for free on Sunday.”

The criteria used by some Christians to judge a band’s merits is a concern to Roper. “In the Christian arena, you can be a terrible band but if you say Jesus five times in a show, kids love you.”

Roper saw different approaches to selling merchandise on the two tours. “Less Than Jake [the secular band] marks up their merchandise a dollar a shirt, so they have shirts for seven bucks. Then you go to a Christian concert and see them selling their shirts for 25 bucks because they know they can get away with it or because they have to pay for a tour bus. It really makes me wonder what it’s about to those [Christian] bands.”

Ken Steinken is a high-school journalism teacher and freelance writer who reviews Christian concerts for the Rapid City Journal (S.D.).

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

I first learned about Christians in the Visual Arts in 1993. I tagged along with seven CIVA members to Florence, Italy, as a diarist observing these artists as they produced the Florence Portfolio, a series of two dozen large etchings on the biblical theme of sacrifice.fdfsdfs

Along the way I heard a lot about the difficulties Christian artists face pursuing their vocation in the contemporary cultural landscape. Bruce Herman from Gordon College, for in stance, had recently had work rejected by the curator of a major gallery in the Boston area. Formerly a big fan of Bruce’s painting, this man now felt Bruce’s imagery had be come too seriously, too unironically “religious.” On the other end, painter Ed Knippers had a show removed from a Christian college gallery because the muscular, frontal nudity of his scriptural figures, including Christ, disturbed too many Christian viewers.

Though their talent was not in question, these artists often found themselves marginalized by both the secular art establishment and the Christian subculture, whose patronage and appreciation they might have hoped for. While the present cultural climate touts its openness to the pluralistic expression of “values,” it has often dismissed art that emerges from the deep faith of Christian believers. On the other side, many Christian communities harbor a deep-seated suspicion of powerful visual art.

Wayne Forte, a California painter, whose work was then represented by influential galleries on the west and east coasts, was once asked how he managed to “make a living” from his art. His paintings were collected almost exclusively by wealthy, often Jewish patrons interested in their investment value but largely unresponsive to their subjects and meaning. Forte noted, however, that “People in the church are complimentary, but when it comes to buying, it’s a different story.” Most CIVA artists would agree that waiting on the churched for patronage is an invitation to financial ruin.

A diverse groupInterestingly, CIVA, sponsor of the Florence Portfolio, was founded in 1979 as a supportive fellowship for artists embattled on both of these fronts-the secular and the Christian-at once.

Two decades after its unassuming birth in the living room of Minnesota potter Gene John son, CIVA has become a vibrant international organization, which has doubled its membership to over 1,500 in the past year. Its diverse constituency includes career artists of high training who create art full-time for a living, artists of amateur standing whose work is nevertheless centered on their faith, people of Christian faith with careers in the world of commercial art, professors of studio art in universities both Christian and secular, art historians, critics, those with careers in curatorship and museum administration, professionals in liturgical art and design, and members of Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox congregations; there are even a few Jewish members.

The first demand any workof art makes upon us is surrender.Look. Listen. Receive.Get yourself out of the way.There is no good asking firstwhether the work before youdeserves such a surrender, for untilyou have surrenderedyou cannot possibly find out.

-C.S. Lewis inAn Experiment in Criticism

Most of CIVA’s recent growth is due to the sheer persistence and volunteerism of its membership. For example, volunteers manage a growing set of “traveling exhibitions” that can be rented by churches, schools, and colleges or galleries and other institutions. These feature calligraphy, contemporary icons, tapestry art, Rouault’s Miserere series, and the Florence Portfolio project. Among funding strategies, an annual CIVA Codex calls upon ten CIVA artists to donate 50 issues of a work; compiled and packaged, these are sold to support CIVA’s programs.

Also, CIVA volunteers have researched a set of registries that connect individual artists to galleries with potential exhibition opportunities. A 12-page CIVA news letter is mailed regularly to 7,000+ readers and, while it continues to list members’ accomplishments, has developed into a thoughtful and handsomely designed periodical. CIVA’s latest directory, containing over 700 examples of members’ work, might well be one of the best American resources for contemporary religious art.

CIVA’s biennial conferences serve as the central gathering place for fellowship among peers and patrons. Key note speakers over the years have included such Christian and non-Christian commentators as Time magazine’s Robert Hughes, Hilton Kramer from the New York Times, and author Suzi Gablik, as well as scholars such as Berkeley art professor emeritus Jane Dillenberger, Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Orthodox apologist Anthony Ugolnik. The conferences, including this June’s twentieth anniversary event, “20/20 Vision: 20 Years of CIVA, 20 Centuries of Christians in the Visual Arts,” are packed with debate panels, workshops, exhibitions, exuberant slide shows of new work (which have often run into the early morning hours), visually attuned worship services, tours, and continuous networking-better known as fellowship. Casual conversations at CIVA conferences often lead to new collaborations, innovative projects, and lifelong friend ships.

Re-entering the public squareClearly, while CIVA still exists to encourage and support Christian artists, its ethos is no longer one of embattlement.

This is ostensibly due to a significant change in attitudes on the part of both the church and general culture in the past decade. A number of forceful defenses of the visual arts have emerged in new full-color Christian publications such as Image: Journal of the Arts and Religion, Christianity and the Arts, and Inklings. New generations of evangelical youth have grown up with less suspicion of the arts and, thanks to electronic media, an innate appreciation for visual imagery.

At the same time, the initial exuberance of postmodern art has dissipated. Instead of general hostility to religious institutions in art, increasing interest has surfaced that convincingly manifests the possibility of meaning and purpose in life, as well as in tradition. The earlier (often hypocritical) ostracizing of artists of faith from the so-called pluralist playing field seems to be running its course. Ironically, the erosion of Christianity’s position as dominant cultural “my thos” has allowed its re-entry as a voice in the public square.

All of this means that secular galleries are more amenable to exhibitions of the “spiritual” in art. Major museums-such as the Hirshhorn in Washing ton, D.C-occasionally sponsor high-profile exhibitions of artists with overtly scriptural themes. CIVA members have won significant grants, such as National Endowment for the Arts grantees and Fulbright scholars Chris tine Anderson in Berlin and William Swetcharnik in Honduras (see “Muddy Murals,” CT, Feb. 8, 1999, p. 74). Increasingly, CIVA art is found in prestigious collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York. In 1998, CIVA’s Florence Portfolio was received into the Vatican and UCLA’s Armand Hammer Museum collections. Moreover, many artists follow their works into discussions held at these elite venues-a form of missionary work. Perhaps the only segment of the culture that still needs to be convinced of art’s potential as a viable form of Christian communication to the culture is the church at large. As former CIVA president and sculptor Theodore Prescott theorized in the 1980s, if every Christian in America bought just one original work of art by a Christian, the resulting benefits would be unimaginable for all concerned. Perhaps CIVA will apply its formidable imagination to such a campaign in the next millennium.

By John Skillen, chair of Communication and Theatre Arts at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. Contact information: CIVA, P.O. Box 18117, Minneapolis, MN 55418-0117; CIVA Web site: www.civa.org; 20/20 Vision Conference in June: emvick@martin.cuw.edu, 414-243-4500 voice mail.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith
by Richard J. Foster, forword by Martin Marty, Harper SanFrancisco; 424 pp.; $20

A famous cover illustration from the heyday of the New Yorker showed a map of the United States, most of which was taken up by New York City. Evangelicals have been guilty of a similar kind of parochialism. In the mostly Baptist congregations where I grew up, we heard a lot about the first-century church. Then there was a huge historical blank until the Reformation; we heard a little—very little—about Martin Luther (not John Calvin) and a lot about Catholics, who had departed from Scripture. Oddly, there was almost nothing about how the Baptists started, how they related to the Reformation, and so on; we took another history-defying leap right into the twentieth century. Tradition? That was something Catholics bowed down to, a human creation usurping divine authority. We didn’t need tradition; we just read the Bible, plain and simple.

But of course we were kidding ourselves. We were a tradition: the Evangelical Tradition. In the typology proposed in Richard Foster’s new book, Streams of Living Water, this is one of six “great traditions” or “streams” that together constitute the rich heritage of Christian belief and practice. These include the Contemplative Tradition, focused on “a life of loving attention to God”; the Holiness Tradition, through which “we are enabled to live whole, functional lives in a dysfunctional world”; the Charismatic Tradition, focused on “a life immersed in, empowered by, and under the direction of the Spirit of God”; the Social Justice Tradition, calling us to “a life committed to compassion and justice for all peoples”; and the Incarnational Tradition, calling us to “a life that makes present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit.”

Together with the Evangelical Tradition, which mandates “a life founded upon the living Word of God, the written Word of God, the proclaimed Word of God,” these streams of faith offer a path to spiritual renewal. Each tradition has its distinctive strengths and weaknesses; none is sufficient by itself. All must be judged by the extent to which they en courage believers to imitate Christ; all must be judged by their faithfulness to the whole message of Scripture.

Foster presents each tradition with great immediacy, showing each as a “way of life” enacted by particular people in particular times and places. Never have I seen the full dimensions of our faith portrayed so clearly and persuasively. And following these chapters, Foster and his colleague Lynda Graybeal offer two appendices that make up a “book within a book”: first an overview of “Critical Turning Points in Church History,” and then an alphabetical annotated list of “Notable Figures and Significant Movements in Church History.” These added features enhance the already considerable appeal of the book for use in Sunday-school classes, small groups, and other such settings.

Foster’s introduction begins with a striking image that underlies the entire book:

Today a mighty river of the Spirit is bursting forth from the hearts of women and men, boys and girls. It is a deep river of divine intimacy, a powerful river of holy living, a dancing river of jubilation in the Spirit, and a broad river of unconditional love for all peoples. As Jesus says, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38).

Given the winsomeness of that vision, explored in depth in the chapters that follow, who could argue with Foster’s prescription for spiritual renewal? It seems so obvious, once he has laid it out for us. Of course we need all of these traditions.

But Foster’s book—and the outlook it represents—will not be universally welcomed. Far from it. Why not? Perhaps an example will clarify the problem.

Last night I read a booklet called Saint Raphael Kalinowski: An Introduction to His Life and Spirituality, by Szczepan T. Praskiewicz (ICS Publications, 1998). Here is brief account of the man:

Little known outside his native Poland, Joseph Kalinowski (Raphael of St. Joseph, ocd) was born in 1835 and became, by turns, an engineer, a military officer, a leader in the 1863 insurrection against Russian domination, an exile in Siberia, a tutor, and eventually a Discalced Carmelite priest. He died in 1907 at the Carmelite mo nastery he had found ed in Wado wice, the city where Karol Wojtyla—the future Pope John Paul II—was born only 13 years later. Today Raphael Kalinowski is remembered especially as a man of boundless charity in the Siberian prison camps, a restorer of Carmel in Poland, a skilled confessor and spiritual director, and a tireless promoter of Marian devotion and of unity between the Eastern and Western Churches. In 1991, he became the first Discalced Carmelite friar canonized since St. John of the Cross.

In this booklet, one can sense the currents of that “mighty river of the Spirit” to which Foster directs our eyes. And yet there are also troubling undercurrents. We read that when the Congregation of the Causes of Saints met in 1980 to discuss Raphael Kalinowski, the first person to speak on his behalf referred to Raphael’s maxim, “Mary always and in everything.” And while Foster rightly observes that we can see in Mary “the Incarnational Tradition in its fullness and utter beauty,” here—in the story of one of John Paul II’s “favorite saints”—is a potent instance of the way that tradition can go awry. Is this merely evidence of the way in which any tradition, uncorrected by the others, will surely wander, or does it suggest that the streams have yet to meet?

A Christian from one of the strongly sacramental churches might well ask the same question after witnessing the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in a typical evangelical fellowship. Are we really talking about the same God?

Richard Foster does not belittle such questions, but he asks us to put the emphasis elsewhere. He writes in conclusion,

I see a people … even though it feels as if I am peering through a glass darkly.

I see a country pastor from Indiana embracing an urban priest from New Jersey and together praying for the peace of the world. I see a people.

I see a Catholic monk from the hills of Kentucky standing alongside a Baptist evangelist from the streets of Los Angeles and together offering up a sacrifice of praise. I see a people.

I see social activists from the urban centers of Hong Kong joining with Pentecostal preachers from the barrios of Sao Paulo and together weeping over the spiritually lost and the plight of the poor. I see a people.

I see laborers from Soweto and landowners from Pretoria honoring and serving each other out of reverence for Christ. I see a people.

I see Hutu and Tutsi, Serb and Croat, Mongol and Han Chinese, African-American and Anglo, Latino and Native American all sharing and caring and loving one another. I see a people.

The kingdom Jesus proclaimed has room for us all, even for lovers of reggae and pitiless grammarians and gym teachers. Our God is a mighty fortress, a fallout shelter, and a house made of brick. Episcopalians and Nazarenes will meet at the rummage sale. And all will be well.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Our lives are built one small brick at a time, ordinary day by ordinary day. With each little expression of thoughtfulness we create something of immense significance—character, both our own and that of others.” So says author Donald McCullough, an ordained minister and president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, in Say Please, Say Thank You (Putnam). It is a witty, wise, and sometimes daring book (do you really want your teenager hearing McCullough’s counsel to “Tell white lies”?). The proverbial insights start in the chapter titles for the Table of Contents, reprinted here. Read them, and take their wisdom to heart. That is, please read them—and thank you.

01. Say Please: Respecting the freedom of others

02. Say Thank You: Acknowledging dependence on others

03. Tell White Lies (Occasionally): Protecting from unnecessary hurt

04. Don’g Let Your Fingers Do the Talking: Curbing the violence within

05. Don’t Show Up at the Wedding in a Baseball Cap: Showing respect with what you wear

06. Don’t Be Late: Guarding the time of others

07. Respondez, S’il Vous Plait: Being considerate of others’ plans

08. Wait Until Everyone Is Served Before You Pick Up a Fork: Observing the social significance of meals

09. Keep Your Feet Off the Coffee Table: Valuing the property of others

10. Keep Your Bumper Off My Tailpipe: Waiting your turn

11. Hold Your Wind: Trying not to offend with bodily grossness

12. Pay What You Owe: Rendering others their due

13. Keep Your Hands to Yourself: Acknowledging sexual boundaries

14. Be Quiet in Church: Cultivating a sense of reverence

15. Don’t Wear Red to a Chinese Funeral: Honoring our differences

16. Apologize When You’ve Blown It: Accepting responsibility for your failures

17. Use Nice Stationery: Attending to the forms of communication

18. Close Your Mouth and Open Your Ears: Learning to be a good listener

19. Be First to Reach for the Tab: Developing a generous spirit

20. Leave a Tip Worth Working For: Noticing those who serve

21. Go Home Before Your Host Falls Asleep: Not abusing the gift of hospitality

22. Hang Up the Phone During Dinner and Bedtime: Avoiding unnecessary intrusions

23. Kneel Down to Speak with Children: Meeting others at their own level

24. Respect Your Elders: Honoring those who nurture and lead

25. Watch What You Say: Understanding the power of words

26. Don’t Leave a Messy Campsite: Cleaning up after yourself

27. Keep a Secret: Earning the trust of others

28. Don’t Let Your Dog Romance My Leg: Remembering not everyone shares your interests

29. Stop Drinking While You Can Still Remember Your Mother’s Maiden Name: Bestowing the benefits of moderation

30. Stay Out of the Bay Until You Know the Difference Between a Starboard and a Port Tack: Learning and obeying the rules of the road

31. Don’t Tell Jokes at the Expense of Others: Forbearing humor that demeans

32. Keep Card Companies in Business: Remembering milestones

33. Tell Your Buddy His Fly Is Open: Speaking the truth in love

34. Pretend You Don’t Notice When Your Dinner Partner Drools: Strengthening the bonds of community

35. Wave to Motor Boaters: Strengthening the bonds of community

36. Once in a While, Be a Slob: Knowing when to break the rules

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