Page 4544 – Christianity Today (2024)

Even though the United States has failed to oust Fidel Castro from power after nearly four decades, most Cuban Americans support U.S. policy efforts against the dictator. But not 57-year-old Jose J. Basulto, president of Brothers to the Rescue, an organization that conducts humanitarian searches for refugee rafters in the Florida Straits.

His ministry has seen the inert side of U.S. policy firsthand. On February 24, 1996, Cuban jet fighters without warning shot down two unarmed Cessnas in the Florida Straits, killing four Brothers to the Rescue volunteers: Mario de la Pena, 24; Pablo Morales, 29; Carlos Costa, 29; and Armando Alejandre, Jr., 45. Basulto later found out that U.S. radar had been tracking the Cuban MiGs for nearly an hour, but federal officials did nothing to warn Brothers’ pilots.

Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Rafael Cespedes told CT in Havana, “We had our reasons. They had violated our territory 25 times.” But Basulto contends the planes were over international waters.

“They had been practicing to kill us,” says Basulto, who flew a third plane and eluded fire before he returned safely to Miami.

Rather than apologize for failing to warn the pilots, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) revoked Basulto’s pilot’s license for violating Cuban airspace. He sued the FAA, spending $75,000 in legal bills in an effort to get the license back. A judge ordered the license to be reinstated after 150 days, but the FAA has continued to enforce the revocation in what Basulto believes are political motivations to keep him from provoking Cuba.

But Brothers to the Rescue flights continue at least weekly because Cubans are still fleeing on crudely constructed rafts. The pilots drop food, potable water, and medicine to keep rafters alive. Those picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard are returned to Cuba and face up to five years in prison.

With a core group of 70 pilots, observers, and volunteers, Basulto founded Brothers to the Rescue in 1991. “Our people were dying,” Basulto recalls. “Some wars are won not by killing people but by saving people.”

Brothers to the Rescue has conducted more than 1,800 aerial search missions and has been directly responsible for saving 4,200 lives. Yet as many Cubans in search of freedom die as are rescued. They drown in storms, wither in the scorching sun, or are maimed by sharks.

Since the early 1960s, Cubans have been forbidden to emigrate from the island. In 1994, President Clinton announced that Cubans, who had traditionally been allowed automatic entry into the United States if they escaped, would be returned. The United States ended its open-door policy of accepting boat people after 30,000 refugees wound up at Guantanamo Bay and eventually were resettled in the United States by World Relief (CT, April 3, 1995, p. 92).

“The U.S. government is culpable by neglect,” says Basulto, who has criticized U.S. policy since the Bay of Pigs. Basulto joined the underground against Castro in 1959 and participated in the failed 1961 invasion after being recruited by the CIA. These days, Basulto, a Catholic, has pictures of peacemakers in his modest Miami office: Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Unlike most Cuban Americans who are apprehensive of criticizing Castro, Basulto holds the dictator directly responsible for the deaths of his fellow pilots.

“Castro can kill me,” Basulto says. “I’m living on spare time. I have been dead since 1996.” The eyes of the father of five mist as he remembers his dead colleagues. “They were like my own sons.”

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The most widespread form of religion in Cuba today is neither Protestant nor Catholic, but a syncretistic belief system called santeria—”way of the saints.”

Santeria is the largest of the Afro-Cuban religions brought by slaves as a way to trick slave owners. While publicly confessing Catholic saints, the slaves privately venerated animistic gods and goddesses of their homeland. Believers worship these African gods, orishas, through plant, food, and animal sacrifices offered during chants and dancing initiations.

Santeria worship is conducted in homes, and as many as 3 million Cubans may be involved. Some Catholic priests welcome it as a way to attract parishioners to Christian teachings while others see it as demonic. Though evangelicals believe santeria is evil, the movement has found its way into mainline Protestant denominations.

Pablo Oden Marichal, vicar general for the only Episcopal diocese on the island and head of the Havana-based Cuban Council of Churches, sees no contradiction in mixing the beliefs, goat and chicken sacrifices notwithstanding.

“Why should I view santeria as a threat?” Marichal asks. “In one of my Episcopal congregations, three santeria people come with [ceremonial] dresses and preach.”

There are more santeria priests in Havana than Catholic priests in all of Cuba. But with no hierarchy or centralized leadership, the religion has never been a threat to Castro. Santeria has spread throughout the Caribbean and to the United States, where there are an estimated 800,000 devotees of different nationalities.

In the United States, the Supreme Court in 1993 struck down a city ordinance and ruled that live animal sacrifices in religious rites are constitutionally protected. Residents in the Miami suburb of Hialeah had complained about the stench from animal sacrifices at the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye.

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One Cuban who does not miss his native land is Noble Alexander, a Seventh-day Adventist youth pastor from a Havana suburb who spent 1962 to 1984 in nine Cuban prisons.

Two armed G-2 agents, the Cuban equivalent of the KGB, arrested the 28-year-old Noble after he preached at a service in February 1962. His crime? A sermon about original sin.

Prisoners would be his congregants the next 22 years. Many fellow Christian prisoners submitted to Castro-style re-education, which included renouncing faith in Christ. Alexander refused. He received a sentence of 20 years of hard labor for conspiring to assassinate Castro, aiding and abetting the flight of counterrevolutionaries, and distributing opium—that is, Christianity—to the people of Cuba.

Throughout his incarceration, Alexander endured physical and psychological torture. His cellmates included rats, co*ckroaches, snakes, and lizards. Prison authorities slapped Alexander so hard he still hears ringing in his ears. He suffered food poisoning from eating maggot-ridden gruel. He lost consciousness being dunked in an icy lake while bound. He passed out three times from the pain of being whipped with electrical cables. He sustained gunshot wounds in his hand, leg, and thigh.

“No one can be truly certain of his faith and endurance until he is forced to test them,” Alexander says.

Despite the abuse, Alexander organized underground churches in prison. “Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic—our fellowship recognized no boundaries,” Alexander writes in I Will Die Free (Pacific Press, 1991). “Though chained by hatred and deprivation, our pitiful group of Christian brothers declared themselves free in Christ.”

When uncovered, his religious activities brought further punishment. Possession of a Bible resulted in a 90-day sentence inside a coffinlike box where he could barely move. After being caught possessing a hymnal, he was forced to stand in a showerlike stall for 42 days with water dripping unceasingly on his head and nails protruding from the floor at his feet.

For refusing to work on the Sabbath, Alexander was dunked into a cesspool of rotting debris and putrid excrement for three hours. Officials reclassified him as a “dangerous religious fanatic” and moved him to a section with psychotic murderers and the mentally ill.

But Alexander says the worst agony he experienced involved his Christian wife, Yraida, who divorced him in 1965 in order to marry a Cuban army captain. When he went to prison, he and Yraida had been married three years and had a two-year-old son, Humberto. Slowly Alexander recovered from his despair, and the prison church became his new bride.

When his scheduled release date came in 1983 authorities told him he could go—as soon as he submitted to the government re-education program.

Meanwhile, Alexander’s mother and sister in Salem, Massachusetts, enlisted the support of their Methodist pastor, Willis P. Miller, to organize a prayer group and public campaign for his release. Tom White of the Voice of the Martyrs, a fellow prisoner for 18 months, convinced Jesse Jackson to seek Alexander’s freedom when Jackson met with Castro. Cuba deported Alexander to the United States in June 1984 as a “humanitarian gesture.”

Many of Alexander’s dreams have gone unfulfilled, and he has bittersweet memories of Cuba. His son, now 36, remains a Communist stalwart. Ex-wife Yraida has rededicated her life to Christ and begged—and received—Alexander’s forgiveness.

Alexander and his Puerto Rican wife, Carmen, have been married four years. At age 63, he is pastor of Hispanic Seventh-day Adventist churches in Cambridge and Chelsea, Massachusetts. His first sermon in the United States dealt with the origin of sin, the topic that he had preached as a free man in Cuba. Alexander has learned that God is his sustaining joy.

“I have no plans for retiring,” Alexander says. “Preaching is my life.”

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

January 22 marks a grim anniversary: 25 years since Roe v. Wadelegalized abortion. A generation has passed since the first wave of unbornchildren fell, and the accumulation of each year’s toll totals nearly 37million. During those years one child was aborted for approximately everythree born. Their names would fill the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial wall over700 times.

Abortion has been a disaster, first for the children who died and secondfor those who survived to grieve a lost child, grandchild, or sibling. Ithas damaged us all. How can we even measure the spiritual cost levied ona country that pronounces the killing of its own children a celebrated right?It is tempting to avoid thinking about it, and when we do think of it, itis tempting to stew in helpless fury.

Avoidance and fury—neither response has pushed us forward. As a movement,the pro-life cause has stopped. We are stuck, mired, at an impasse. We havehad small gains and small losses, but the bottom line is the same: 1.5 millionabortions a year. I suggest we use this morbid anniversary as an opportunityto reassess our strategy.

BECOMING LISTENERSThe pro-life movement has succeeded in keeping people uncomfortable withabortion but not in translating discomfort into a firm will to oppose it.That is why I have adopted the unconventional approach of listeningmore carefully to the objections to our cause.

I have a personal interest in conversation between the opposing sides: Imyself have championed both positions. Back in my college days I was yourbasic bad-tempered, male-bashing, hairy-legged women’s libber, activelypro-abortion. Abortion, I believed, was essential to liberation. Women wouldnot be able to enjoy the same success as their male counterparts unless they,too, could be unhampered by pregnancy and childrearing.

Then, in 1976, a few years after Roe, I read an essay inEsquire magazine titled “What I Saw at the Abortion Clinic.” In itsurgeon and essayist Richard Selzer described watching a 19-week abortionby an injection procedure no longer in use. He described the abortionistsliding the needle of the syringe into the woman’s belly, and then, he writes,“I see something other than what I expected here … it is the hub of theneedle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Thento the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbledby a sunfish.”

The image horrified him, as it did me. I had never considered that the beingin the uterus was more than a blob of tissue, that it could be a human lifethat wanted to go on living. Selzer concludes his essay: “Whatever else issaid in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense will not vanishfrom my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. Forwhat can language do against the truth of what I saw?”

The truth of what he saw affected me deeply. I could no longer say that abortionwas right—and yet, somehow, I couldn’t jump on the anti-abortion bandwagon.I knew that unplanned pregnancy could wreak havoc in a woman’s life. Thedilemma seemed irresolvable.

I eventually worked my way out of this dilemma, but that is why we mustlisten carefully to pro-choicers in order to understand their reasoningand, we hope, break through the deadlock.

For several years I have participated in pro-life/pro-choice dialogues, andI now serve on the national steering committee of an umbrella organizationthat unites grassroots dialogues, the Common Ground Network for Life andChoice. A dialogue usually will begin when members of a community grow wearyof miscommunication and hostility and want to get people together on neutralground just to talk. More ambitious goals may emerge after trust has beenbuilt up, but in many cities, “just talking” is all that is accomplished.Thus, Common Ground (CG) is not for every temperament; manywill find the lack of concrete action frustrating.

Those who enjoy it, however, will reap several benefits. In a typical smallgroup, moderated by a trained facilitator, a pro-lifer can describe whatshe believes and why, and what life experiences have formed that belief.Pro-choicers may ask clarifying questions, and then they are asked to restatewhat the pro-lifer believes to assure that the sentiment has been properlyunderstood. They are not permitted to criticize or try to convince her thatshe’s wrong.

In return, the pro-lifer assumes the same role as listener to pro-choicersand gains new insight into the thinking behind this position. For example,I have learned that while most people are pro-life because of the centralconviction that abortion kills babies, pro-choicers can harbor a broad rangeof reasons for their belief. For some it is the fear that “unwanted” childrenwill be abused; for others it is the specter of deaths from illegal abortion;still others may be concerned about overpopulation. I learned that a pro-lifeapproach that insists “It’s a baby!” may be answering a question none areasking and missing the questions they are.

In either case, knowing that they have been truly heard is a healing experience.

CG gives an opportunity to hear and be heard, educates pro-liferson the real concerns that need to be addressed, and demystifies the “badguys,” turning them into real individuals. If these “bad guys” are our enemies,CG gives an opportunity to love our enemies in a safe andrespectful setting.

Formal dialogues like these are not intended to be opportunities for persuasion.Nor is CG aimed at negotiating a compromise, though thereis always a hope that unexpected areas of agreement may emerge—like theunexpected consensus that resulted in a position paper issued jointly soonafter CG’s founding, supporting increased awareness of adoption.

Both sides of this debate are plagued with distorted impressions of whatthe other side believes. This venue helps overturn those assumptions. Onepro-choice friend recently said, “I always thought pro-lifers only wantedto shore up the patriarchy and oppress women, but sometimes I think youreally do care about babies.” I was shocked; I thought pro-choicersbelieved we only cared about babies (arguing that we didn’t supportpregnant women). Likewise, I’ve found the caricature of pro-choicers aschild-sacrifice devotees to be wildly off-base. Many are deeply troubledabout the death of the unborn but fear some worse catastrophe if abortionis outlawed. The CG dialogues help clear away misunderstandings.They don’t promise we will agree, but they help us arrive at genuine, evenrespectful, disagreement.

BECOMING PERSUADERSAfter we listen, then we persuade. Persuasion needs to become themain strategy for pursuing the pro-life cause. While CG servesto advance the discussion between warring camps, it does little to persuadeadvocates on either side to “cross over.” That is better suited for whenyou have coffee with a friend over your kitchen table.

The first step in adopting the persuasion model may sound surprising:Put the question of making abortion illegal on the back burner. I believeabortion should be illegal because it is violence against the smallest membersof our human family. But one of the reasons we’re stuck in a deadlock isbecause political posturing has overwhelmed the moral discussion. The abortionissue has become something like a football game where yards gained by oneside are by necessity yards lost by the other, and neither side is ever goingto be willing to give up the fight. This polarization makes it less likelythat we can arrive at a resolution; and without resolution, consensus, andpeace on this issue, there will be no lasting protection for the unborn.Even a great victory, like an amendment to the Constitution explicitly protectingunborn life, would immediately be attacked by our opponents. They would notrest until they tore it down, just as we haven’t rested in combatingRoe v. Wade for 25 years. A deeper agreement must be reachedbefore legal justice can be permanently won.

These are my recommendations for advancing a pro-life position thatpersuades.

First, the pro-life side has had but one simple message: “It’s a baby!” Inseason and out of season, through weeks and years and decades, we have persistedin saying that the life in the womb was a human child, showing sonograms,repeating that the heartbeat begins at 21 days, declaring that every thirdchild dies from abortion.

I’ve found the caricature of pro-choicers as child-sacrifice devoteesto be wildly off-base. Dialogueshelp clear away misunderstandings.

This is an effective message. It is the message that converted me. It isthe most significant argument we have to convince and galvanize, and forthat reason I uphold it as the primary factor in a persuasion stance. Butit carries a cautionary proviso: The “It’s a baby!” message, used alone,can backfire.

In the first place, the unhappily pregnant woman who hears us describingher beautiful precious baby might stir up vestiges of childhood sibling rivalry:“They like the baby better than me.” She gets a pretty clear picture: sheand her baby are at odds, and we’re on her baby’s side. Who’s on her side?Abortion advocates. When she turns to the embrace of those sympathetic armsshe takes her baby with her.

Also, the “It’s a baby!” message alone strikes the muddled middle as failingto take seriously the woman’s plight. Our apparent willingness to dismissthose difficulties as “inconvenience” strikes many as either callous or wildlynaive.

Additionally, our opponents interpret this appeal as personal attacks onthem. When we say, “Abortion is an immoral choice because it kills a baby,”they hear, “People who favor abortion are immoral people.” I had long wonderedwhy, at debates, I would attack abortion, and my opponent would not defendabortion but attack me.

I came to realize that the “It’s a baby!” message, important as it is, doesnot offer all the solutions we’d hoped it would, and in some instances, createsmore misunderstanding. It is a baby, and that ought to be the firstpoint in presenting the pro-life position persuasively. But the conversationneeds to move beyond that point.

WHAT WOMEN WANTWhen reiterating that “It’s a baby!” the listener is likely to balance thescale: Yes, but women still want abortions. So the second point to make inthe persuasion model is to challenge that line of argumentation,asserting, instead, that abortion hurts women.

It is important to press the point—in what sense does a woman want this?No one saves up, hoping one day to have an abortion. It costs hundreds ofdollars, money anyone would surely prefer to spend elsewhere. The procedureitself is physically unpleasant, humiliating, and often painful. Do we reallybelieve that women want this?

Beyond that, the procedure does not heal a physical problem but subvertsa healthy, normal process. We get confused by the fact that doctors performit; usually doctors are called in when a natural process goes wrong. Butjust as our bodies are made to breathe and digest food, women’s bodies aredesigned to sustain a pregnancy and deliver a baby. It is a delicately balancedecology, and when something disrupts it as violently as abortion does, itis not surprising that damage can result.

Some studies have shown the rates of postabortion miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy,and sterility rising sharply. More recently, connections have been suggestedbetween abortion and breast cancer.

Women don’t want abortions. They are expensive, awkward, humiliating,painful, and potentially dangerous. And we have not yet considered the mostcompelling effect: abortion breaks a woman’s heart. At some level, she knowsit is her own child who is dying, a son or daughter who looks as much likeher as any she will carry full term.

I once received a letter from a man whose wife had an abortion; afterward,he said, she drifted into depression and found it difficult to cope withdaily life. “They told her that it would give her control of her body,” hewrote. “But what kind of tradeoff is that, to gain control of your body andlose control of your mind?” The cruel irony is that abortion has been presentedas something that would set a woman free.

This brings to mind the gypsy in Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore. Outragedby the count’s cruel injustice, she stole his infant son and, in a crazedact of vengeance, flung him into the fire. Or so she thought. For, in turningaround, she discovered the count’s son lay safe on the ground behind her;it was her own son she had thrown into the flames. Abortion can present itselfas glittering liberty, a defiant way to cast off the shackles of injustice.That illusion lasts only until you realize who it was that you threw intothe flames.

So the second point to make when trying to persuade is that abortion hurtswomen; it does not deliver on its promise to liberate them.

THE PRACTICAL QUESTIONOnce we get people to recognize that abortion both kills babies and hurtswomen, we can then pose the practical question: How could we live withoutit?

Abortion is part of a complex machine of interlocking social realities, linkedto expectations about women’s sexual availability, men’s freedom fromresponsibility, and women’s duty to be economically self-supporting. Thepressure of these social forces cannot be minimized: they create a demandfor 4,000 abortions every day, making it the most frequently performed medicalprocedure.

Pro-lifers need to think beyond the single goal of making abortion illegal.People “in the middle” on this issue imagine that, if all the clinics werepadlocked tomorrow, we’d just see 4,000 women pounding on the doors and crying.What needs to change in order for this ravenous demand to be quelled?

Speaking very broadly, there are two problems to solve to advance the casethat we can live without abortion. The first is preventing unplanned pregnanciesin the first place, and the second is giving women support when they do becomepregnant so they will opt not to abort.

Our friends on the other side are also very interested in preventing pregnancy,and so they put much faith in contraception. Contraceptives became broadlyavailable in the early sixties, and forms of “sex education” appeared evenbefore that. Contraception is not a new idea. The use of condoms, in particular,has been touted as nearly a patriotic act. People are neither ignorant aboutcontraception nor unaware of where to get it. Yet the rate of abortion remainsnear 1.5 million a year. Whatever else all this educating andcontraceptive-pushing is doing, it’s not bringing down the abortion rate.

When sex occurs between two people who have no lasting commitment to eachother, a resulting pregnancy is likely to be “unwanted.” Recovering an ethicof commitment-based sexuality will mean rediscovering the value of chastitybefore marriage. The True Love Waits movement is a good example of how thisnew sexual ethic can be held up and encouraged.

But for the woman who is already pregnant, vows to work for sex education,contraception, and chastity before marriage offer cold comfort. When I waswriting Real Choices: Listening to Women, Looking for Alternatives toAbortion (Conciliar Press, 1997), I spent a year studying the problemsof pregnancy, seeking to discover the reasons most women choose abortion.I expected to find practical problems heading the list: financial needs,child-care woes, pressure to drop out of school. Yet after reviewing severalstudies and conducting my own, no clear pattern emerged.

But when I spoke with groups of postabortion women, a nearly unanimous consensusappeared. Women had abortions, in nearly every case, because of relationships.Most often it was to please the father of the child, who was pressuring forabortion. (In a couple of cases, the woman spoke of lying on the abortiontable praying her husband would burst in and say, “Stop, I changed my mind!”)The second most common reason was pressure from a parent, most often thegirl’s mother.

In the vast majority of cases, I found a woman is most likely to choose abortionin order to please or protect people that she cares about. Often she discoverstoo late that there is another person to whom she has an obligation: herown unborn child. The grief that follows abortion springs from the convictionthat, in a crisis, this relationship was fatally betrayed.

Supporting women with unplanned pregnancies means continuing what pregnancy-carecenters have been doing all along: providing housing, medical care, clothing,counseling, and so forth. But we should also be paying attention to becominga steadfast friend (this is more important than any material help we cangive) and to doing whatever we can to repair relationships in the familycircle.

Rather than dismiss the baby’s father as a cad, we should explore whethermarriage is a possibility. He is, after all, the one appointed by God toprovide for and protect mother and child. “Shotgun” marriages have a higherrate of success than expected: in one study, 50 percent of black teen marriagesto legitimize a pregnancy were still intact 10 years later. (With a nationaldivorce rate of 50 percent, their batting is average.) White teen couplesdid better: 75 percent were still together 10 years later. If a marriagefails, there is the financial benefit of child support from the father.Sixty-four percent of divorced and separated mothers receive child-supportpayments; for women who never married, that rate is only 20 percent.

At a recent conference of crisis-pregnancy centers I was told that thereis no brochure a counselor can give a prospective dad that challenges himto accept the responsibility of fatherhood. This time next year I’d likefor there to be a dozen.

Pregnancy-care centers can also help improve relationships with parents.The Pregnancy Aid Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will go with a girl to breakthe news to her parents, meeting them on neutral ground, like a restaurant.If adoption is one of the options included when parents are involved withthe girl in discussing abortion alternatives, the girl is six times morelikely to make that choice.

In thinking about the best resolution to unplanned pregnancy, care-centerstaffers must avoid the temptation to encourage the girl toward single-parenting.This may appeal to her emotionally, but the overwhelming evidence is thatit is devastating to children, contributing strongly to poor school performance,delinquency, and another generation of unwed mothering. The mother also findsherself in financial troubles that she may never fully rise above; she isless likely to finish school or to marry. The mother should be encouragedto consider either marriage to the baby’s father or adoption.

AGAINST THE LAW?These three points—abortion kills babies, it hurts women, we can live withoutit—summarize an approach to the abortion debate that can be effective andpersuasive. It is important to note that none of these arguments mentionsGod. None uses religious or biblical citations to carry its point.

I find that it is nearly always ineffective to use religious arguments withpeople who are not religious. When you say, “God says abortion is wrong,”they don’t slap their foreheads and exclaim, “By golly, you’re right! I neverthought of that!” Instead, they think, “Oh—you’re one of those. ”Whatever you say next will be dismissed.

When these three points are covered, listeners will often say, “I agree withyou; I just don’t think it should be illegal.”

Since there is no present opportunity to make abortion illegal anyway, whenthe topic does come up, let’s avoid the temptation to let the conversationget hijacked into a polarizing discussion that offers no practical application.A more realistic goal for pro-life advocates is to bring about, through bothactive listening and gentle persuasion, a gradual dawning of the convictionthat we can live without abortion. Eventually that may result in a culturalconsensus to make it illegal once more.

So our ultimate goal, in all of this reevaluation, remains the same: to endlegal and social acquiescence to this atrocity. In America there is anirreducible core of laws that we could not live without, without which wewould have barbarism. These are the laws against violence—child abuse, rapeand murder, spouse-battering. These laws are sometimes the only thing thatstand between the small and weak and the strong and powerful. And abortionlaws are that kind of law. Unborn children are the smallest members in ourhuman family, and they deserve that protection.

We have 25 years of evidence of what happens when legal protection is repealed:these children are being killed at the rate of 4,000 a day. Humanitarianism,goodwill, and compassion are not bubbling up from some mysterious sourceto protect them; only the force of law can do that. It will do it imperfectly,to be sure; but these children deserve whatever protection we can win them.

Opponents of abortion laws tend to envision a perfect society where womenare empowered and free, arguing that a few legally permitted abortions (37million?) is the price we must pay to get there. But can a just society reallybe founded on the death of children? How many deaths can we tolerate in pursuitof this utopian vision?

Frederica Mathewes-Green is a commentator on National Public Radio andthe author of Real Choices: Listening to Women, Looking for Alternativesto Abortion (Conciliar Press).

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Norma McCorvey could outcuss the crassest men; she could outdrink many of the Dallas taverns' regulars; and she was known for her hot temper. When pro-lifers called her a murderer, she called them worse. When people held up signs of aborted fetuses, Norma spit in their faces.

She had a reputation to protect, after all. As the plaintiff in the infamous Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, Norma's life was inextricably tied up with abortion. Though she had never had one, abortion was the sun around which Norma's life orbited. She once told a reporter, "This issue is the only thing I live for. I live, eat, breathe, think everything about abortion."

Then the fiery pro-life group Operation Rescue moved in next door.

An Unlikely Friendship

Operation Rescue has had a tumultuous history. Founded by Randall Terry, OR made international headlines in the late eighties by staging "sit-ins" at abortion clinics across the country. Almost immediately, the pro-life movement was split between those who supported OR and those who thought they were doing more harm than good. A few people stood in the middle, but not many.

Terry stepped down from OR in 1990, and his successor, Keith Tucci, followed suit a few years later. Flip Benham became director in 1994. By this time, federal legislation and extreme penalties for a first-time offense made the well-attended rescues largely a thing of the past. OR's influence was clearly on the wane, but their move next door to Norma's abortion clinic, A Choice for Women, would change that overnight.

Norma called Flip Benham, the brash and bold OR leader, Flip "Venom." Flip called Norma "responsible for the deaths of 35 million children." They were supposed to be sworn enemies, but due to the persistence of a local real estate agent, they became next-door neighbors whose offices shared a common wall in a building off the LBJ highway in the Lake Highlands area of North Dallas.

After OR moved to this location, the Dallas police settled down to an almost hourly routine. The bleep-bleep of a police siren and flashing blue lights could be heard and seen several times a day for the next few months as the two sides clashed out in the parking lot.

Occasionally, the clashes would collapse into conversation. During one friendly exchange, Norma goaded Flip, "You need to go to a good Beach Boys concert."

"Miss Norma," Flip answered, "I haven't been to a Beach Boys concert since 1976."

The innocuous response shook Norma. "All at once," she says, "Flip became human to me. Before, I had thought of [Flip] as a man who did nothing but yell at abortion clinics and read his Bible. The thought that he was a real person—a guy who had once even gone to a Beach Boys concert—never occurred to me. Now that it had, I saw him in a new light." As they chatted outside on the bench between their offices, however, Flip began sharing some stories of his past, and out of this vulnerability an unlikely friendship was born.

Other OR volunteers also began reaching out to Norma. In return, Norma explained her crystals and book of Runes. It wasn't exactly Elijah and the prophets of Baal, but in both minds it was clearly a case of "may the true God win."

A Mother’s Heart

As Norma's mind was challenged to consider the truth of the gospel, God began working on her heart through a seven-year-old girl named Emily, the daughter of OR volunteer Ronda Mackey. Quite understandably, Norma had difficulty relating to children. She had given birth to three, all of whom had been placed for adoption (one of them against Norma's will). And because she worked in an abortion clinic, Norma was fearful of bonding with anyone so young. "It was part of my denial," she explains. "When you know what is happening to the children behind closed doors, it's difficult to become attached to them outside."

Emily's blatant affection, frequent hugs, and direct pursuit disarmed Norma. The little girl's interest was all the more surprising considering Emily made it very clear that her acceptance of Norma wasn't an acceptance of Norma's lifestyle. Early on in their relationship, Norma explained to Emily, "I like kids and wouldn't let anyone hurt little kids," to which Emily responded, "Then why do you let them kill the babies at the clinic?"

This childlike innocence cut open Norma's heart. Norma wasn't won over by compelling, intellectual arguments. While the OR adults targeted Norma's mind, Emily went straight for the heart. Over time, Emily began to personify the issue of abortion—especially when Ronda broke down and told Norma that Emily had almost been aborted.

Ronda was engaged when Emily was conceived, and nobody was very happy about the pregnancy. Ronda's future in-laws, her mother, and her fiance all pressured her to get an abortion during the first trimester. Ronda admits that she gave abortion serious consideration, at one point even saying she would pursue it. Yet memories of a high-school friend's emotional devastation following an abortion strengthened Ronda's resolve to let Emily live.

Shortly after Ronda told Norma this story, the two were shopping with Ronda's girls. Norma, who has a decidedly mystical bent to her nature, was stunned when she saw Ronda's bumper sticker, "Abortion Stops a Beating Heart," which has a vivid, red heart on the side.

Norma saw Emily's heart in that sticker; it just about destroyed her when she realized that "my law" (as she once fondly referred to Roe v. Wade ) made it legal to snuff out young Emily's life. Norma asked to be taken home immediately, but later that afternoon she spent over an hour on the phone with Ronda and their deep friendship was solidified.

Norma was forever changed by this experience. For her, abortion was no longer an "abstract right," because it had a face in a little girl named Emily.

Blue Collar, Ivy League Clash

Emotionally, Norma was ready for a change. Her alienation from the abortion movement was practically legendary, even before she became a Christian. Most of the abortion advocacy movement was afraid of her blue collar, tough talking, and unrefined ways. Norma was raised as a poor Louisiana girl who spent a good part of her childhood in reform schools. She ran away from home when she was ten and spent several decades supporting herself with odd jobs—as a carnival barker, a waitress, a bartender, apartment cleaner, construction worker, and the like.

Norma spoke her mind, and the abortion movement's leadership kept as wide a hedge around her as possible. Norma wasn't asked to address the huge 1989 march in Washington, nor was she even invited to the 1993 twentieth anniversary celebration of Roe v. Wade.

Such a blatant snub had understandable roots. She frequently caught abortion clinic directors off guard by openly questioning the morality of some (particularly late-term) abortions. And she had experienced a raucous falling out with her attorney, Sarah Weddington, whom Norma believed had "dumped" her.

The falling out with Weddington hurt Norma the most. Explains Norma, "I was chosen [to sign the affidavit] because Sarah Weddington needed someone who would sign the paper and fade into the background, never coming out and always keeping silent. Ideally, in their minds, I would have just stayed quiet, gotten on with my life, and quietly suffered, eventually committing suicide. I would have been much more useful to them, not to mention famous, if I had died young. As long as I was alive, I was a danger. I might speak out. I could be unpredictable. And I was."

"I no longer felt the pressure
of my sin pushing down on my
shoulders," Norma remembers.

As Norma's friendship with Benham drew national attention, Norma started receiving even more ridicule from her abortion advocate "friends." She soon found herself in the uncomfortable situation of being increasingly alienated from those on her side of the issue and befriended by her alleged enemies. Before long, Norma started coming to work simply so she could talk to the rescuers. She was scheduled to work just two days a week, but, she says, "I couldn't wait that long to get one of Emily's hugs."

Norma felt torn apart by the fact that four days a week she and Ronda—not to mention the other rescue volunteers—were best friends, while on the other three days—when abortions were actually performed—they were bitter enemies.

During one abortion-day confrontation, Norma charged up to Anne Hollacher, an OR volunteer who was holding a picket sign, and yelled, "You can't park on the same place you're picketing. Move the car!"

"No, I'm not moving my car," Anne responded. "This is our parking lot, too."

Norma called Anne every name she could think of, which was usually enough to make the toughest protesters wilt, but Anne maintained her composure. When Norma saw that Anne wouldn't budge, she spit in her face.

Anne smiled.

Norma was furious. "How dare you look at me like that?" she screamed. "How dare you smile at me?"

Anne politely wiped the spit off her face with her sleeve. "Jesus loves you, and so do I," she said. "And I forgive you."

It would have taken several clinic workers to pull Norma away from Anne except that Norma suddenly experienced severe chest pains and had to remove herself from the scene to catch her breath.

Five minutes later, Ronda and the girls showed up, the girls eager to give Norma a hug, and Norma was overwhelmed by such a generous display of love after she had nursed so bitter a hatred.

The confusion inside Norma became intense. She couldn't stand the thought of losing Ronda's friendship, and she wasn't about to let Emily be taken out of her life. But how long could they maintain a friendship when abortion stood between them?

The Little Evangelist

"Miss Norma," Emily cooed one afternoon, "it would be so-o-o cool if you would come to church with us."

Norma didn't want to disappoint Emily directly, so she answered, "Well, Emily, we'll have to be cool another time. I can't go to church with you this weekend."

If Norma didn't want to offend Emily by an abrupt denial, she needn't have worried. Not about to give up, Emily kept asking Norma to come with her to church.

Finally, Norma said yes—not out of a sudden need for God in her life, but because she was tired of telling Emily no.

Ronda was skeptical, but when they went to pick up Norma, she was dressed and ready to go. One sermon was all Norma needed. Pastor Morris Sheats of Hillcrest Church ended his sermon with a compelling evangelistic call, asking, "Is anyone here tired of living a sinner's life?" and immediately Norma felt overwhelmed by her need to respond.

"How could I say no?" Norma recalls. "I had been tired of it for years, but it was the only life I knew!" Norma cautiously raised her hand, then opened her eyes "and looked up to see if that really was my hand raised up high. It was. I couldn't believe it."

Ronda recalls Norma repeating over and over, "I just want to undo all the evil I've done in this world. I'm so sorry, God. I'm so, so sorry. As far as abortion is concerned, I just want to undo it. I want it all to just go away."

Finally, Norma stopped crying and broke into the biggest smile of her life. "I no longer felt the pressure of my sin pushing down on my shoulders," she remembers. "The release was so quick that I felt like I could almost float outside."

When Norma's conversion became public knowledge, she spoke openly to reporters about still supporting legalized pregnancy termination in the first trimester. The media were quick to use this to downplay the seriousness of Norma's conversion, saying she typified the "general ambivalence" of our culture over abortion.

But a few weeks after her conversion, Norma was sitting in OR's offices when she noticed a fetal development poster. Explains Norma, "The progression was so obvious, the eyes were so sweet. … It hurt my heart, just looking at them."

Norma ran outside. "Finally, it dawned on me. 'Norma,' I said to myself, 'They're right.' I had worked with pregnant women for years. I had been through three pregnancies and deliveries myself. I should have known. Yet something in that poster made me lose my breath. I kept seeing the picture of that tiny, ten-week-old embryo, and I said to myself, 'That's a baby!' It's as if blinders just fell off my eyes and I suddenly understood the truth—'that's a baby!' "

Norma felt "crushed" under the truth of this realization. "I had to face up to the awful reality. Abortion wasn't about 'products of conception.' It wasn't about 'missed periods.' It was about children being killed in their mother's wombs. All those years, I was wrong."

A New Life

Two years after her conversion, Norma left Operation Rescue. After a grueling 11-day encounter in San Diego in 1996, she began having serious reservations about whether she was "cut out" for the intense confrontations that often face rescue volunteers. She also had a difficult time operating under Benham's leadership, eventually believing that they made better friends than co-workers. Because of her loyalty and affection for the people involved in rescue, however, it took her until the early summer of 1997 to complete the break.

Ronda Mackey has joined Norma in leaving OR, and the two women have set up a ministry to handle Norma's increasing invitations to speak and appear at pro-life events. Instead of being under the OR umbrella, Norma now reports regularly to the pastors at Hillcrest Church.

Norma's conversion is one for the ages. The timing was precise—OR was next door to Norma's clinic for less than a year, but it wasn't until Norma had a regenerated heart that the truth of what abortion does could find a place in her intellect. Once that truth took hold, there was no turning back.

"I'm one hundred percent sold out to Jesus and one hundred percent pro-life," she likes to say. "No exceptions. No compromise."

Gary Thomas is a coauthor with Norma McCorvey of Won by Love, the story of Norma's conversion, published this month by Thomas Nelson Publishers.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Will my mother be in heaven?” ten-year-old Lexi asked her adoptive parents. Lexi wanted to know whether her birth mother, who was from India and had died without ever having heard the gospel, would be saved. Lexi had an obvious personal reason for asking this question, but it is one that most Christians encounter at some point: Can anyone be saved who has not heard and accepted the gospel?

Recently I attended a meeting at my son’s middle school where parents were introduced to sex-education materials for our children. There are students in this school from over 30 countries, composing a mosaic of the world’s religions. It occurred to me that most of those people from other religions who sat beside me that night maintain high sexual standards that are far closer to my own views than are those of the “average” secular American. I felt strangely positive about and even grateful for the presence of believers of other faiths in my community.

These two encounters with other religions pose two different challenges—one theological, the other political. Lexi’s question poses the issue of theological pluralism and is religious in nature: Is there truth in other religions? Can an adherent of a non-Christian religion be saved? Lexi’s question is foreboding, for the very heart of the gospel is at stake in how we answer.

The other challenge of world religions is cultural pluralism, and the issues raised are political: How can people of widely divergent faiths live peacefully together in society? My sex-education experience filled me with gratitude about the presence of non-Christian, religious allies on a crucial moral issue.

How do we sort out these questions?

MANY GODS, MANY LORDSA smorgasbord of religions is not new. It is precisely what we find in Scripture. The radical monotheism of Israel (Deut. 4:35) developed amidst Egyptian polytheism. Who could forget Elijah’s fiery encounter on Mount Carmel with Jezebel’s prophets of Baal and Asherah to determine the one true God (1 Kings 18:17-40)?

In the New Testament era, Paul proclaimed that Christ alone provided the only true gospel (Gal. 1:6-9); he alone was the only worthy Lord among the “many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’ ” (1 Cor. 8:5, NIV) of Greek and Roman polytheism. At Ephesus, home to the cult of the goddess Diana, Paul provoked a riot when he declared that ” ‘gods made with human hands are not gods’ ” (Acts 19:23-26, NRSV).

Yet, while the idea of a cornucopia of human religiosity is very old, our awareness of its challenge to Christian faith is rather new. We are in a fundamentally different religious environment from what our grandparents or even our parents encountered. We can no longer think and speak in terms confined to Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish categories. The world we live in has changed.

One reason is immigration. In 1994 there were about 22.5 million foreign-born people in America. In my home state of California, for example, one-quarter of our residents are foreign-born. My son’s middle-school teacher had 11 nationalities in a class of 30 students. While America has always been a nation of immigrants, what is new is where today’s immigrants come from. More and more they come from culturally non-Christian nations, and they bring with them the religions of the world. Our nation is becoming less and less a religiously hom*ogeneous country. Islam will replace Judaism as America’s second-largest religion in about 20 years; already 3 to 5 million Buddhists live in America; and Hindu temples dot the landscapes not only of Chicago and New York, but also of Aurora, Illinois, and Springfield, Virginia.

Living in religious isolation is almost impossible. Most people can name colleagues they work with every day who are of other religions. Through this interaction we discover that people of other faiths are very much like us. They laugh at weddings and cry at funerals, are as moral as we are, and carry the same hopes, fears, and dreams as we do.

The evangelistic efforts of some world religions have also heightened their visibility. Who has not been approached by a Hare Krishna devotee passing out literature in an airport? At a Stanford University meeting of campus ministers, we were asked to identify our intended audience and scope of activity—to which a Muslim campus minister responded with a bashful chuckle, “the entire world.”

Over the last hundred years, many departments of theology and philosophy have encouraged nonjudgmental attitudes toward other religions, precluding the judgment that one faith is superior to another. Some people now insist that “right action” (ethics) is the criterion of “true religion,” whereas “right doctrine” (orthodoxy) is divisive. And so adherents of other religions are viewed as potential partners in actions of ethical goodwill rather than as lost people who need to be saved.

Radical relativity has invaded our cultural consciousness. Any absolute claim is disdained as idolatrous, illusory, and bigoted. Choice in and of itself is deemed good, and the only choice that cannot be tolerated is one like ours: namely, that some beliefs are true and good while others are false and wrong.

Pressure to rethink the relationship between Christianity and the world religions poses some very painful questions. A main one is the suspicion that one’s religious identity is really an accident of geography, so that people of Kuwait are primarily Muslim, those in Japan Shinto, people in India Hindu, and so on. Are we not Christians simply because we were born and raised in America where, until recently, the Christian faith has dominated?

The vast majority of people who have ever lived and are living today are not Christian. Does it make sense, therefore, to believe that God wants to save people only through Christ? Exact figures are hard to come by, but even rough estimates are disturbing. In A.D. 100, about a half percent of the world population was Christian, in A.D. 1000 about 19 percent, and today—after 2,000 years of missionary effort—only about 30 percent of the world identifies itself as Christian. What can we say about the eternal destiny of this vast horde who never named the name of Christ?

Taken together, these factors help to explain our new awareness of a very old challenge: The vast diversity of world religions pose competing claims and offer “gospels” other than that of Christ alone as Savior and Lord.

BEDROCK TRUTHSWith this pluralistic, religious context in mind, we can begin to craft a Christian response to the world religions by reminding ourselves of five important truths. However we respond to Lexi’s question and my public school experience, we must hold fast to these clear truths of Scripture:

First, all God’s work is perfect, void of even the faintest tinge of unfairness (Deut. 32:4; Zeph. 3:5). Christians can be absolutely confident about the character of God when we deal with the problem of religions. While denying that all religions are equally valid or that all people will be saved, we remain utterly confident that God will treat every person with perfect love and justice. Elihu stated this most eloquently: “Far be it from God to do evil, from the Almighty to do wrong” (Job 34:10, NIV). For the Christian, it is unthinkable that God will treat any person of any time, place, or religion unfairly. So to Abraham’s ancient question, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25, NIV), Christians respond with a resounding yes!

Second, Jesus Christ is the definitive and fullest revelation of God. All three major branches of Christianity—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—affirm, in the words of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (A.D. 374), that Jesus Christ was “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made.” Our doctrine of natural or general revelation allows us to affirm that God has partially revealed himself in creation, in conscience—and perhaps even in some non-Christian religions. Yet, God has fully and most definitively revealed himself in Christ, who alone will judge all other claims of revelation.

Third, there is no other means to salvation apart from what God provided through Christ’s vicarious and sacrificial death on the cross. As evangelicals we remain committed to the necessary and all-sufficient atoning work of Christ on the cross. This is unquestioned. What is debated among some Christians, including evangelicals, is whether Christ’s atoning work of salvation can be efficacious for people who have not known and accepted this provision of salvation, such as people who lived before Christ, infants who die, mentally challenged people who do not have the intellectual capacity to understand the gospel, and people who have no opportunity to hear the gospel. More on this later.

Fourth, whereas God is infinite and beyond comprehension, we humans are finite and sinful, often far too quick, theologically speaking, to speak of things we don’t understand (Job 42:3). We need to cultivate a measure of theological humility. Humility is not skepticism, agnosticism, or even the refusal to argue for a bold position. Rather, it is the recognition that “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:9, NIV). Paul was reduced to doxological humility when he marveled at “how unsearchable are his judgments and inscrutable his ways!” (Rom. 11:33, NRSV). It is natural and even good to long for definitive answers to life’s most difficult questions, but some of our questions will go unanswered—at least in this life.

Only about 30 percent of the world isChristian. What can we say about theeternal destiny of this vast hordewho never named the name of Christ?

Even our reading of Scripture gives us cause for theological humility. Evangelicals rightly insist that Scripture is God’s normative self-revelation, but this does not mean that it answers every question we have. The Westminster Confession (I.7) observes that not all things in Scripture are equally clear, nor equally clear to all believers. But through the “due use of ordinary means” (study, prayer, the counsel of others, etc.) we can attain a sufficient if not perfect understanding of all that is necessary for salvation. Although it is sometimes frustrating, we need to remind ourselves that while the Scriptures are infallible, our understanding of them is not, and that a high view of inspiration does not automatically lead to accurate interpretation. Hence, there is reason enough for theological modesty, especially about a matter as nettlesome as the relationship between Christianity and the world religions.

Fifth and finally, we remain under the mandate of the Great Commission to make disciples among every people and nation. Christ himself issued this command four different times (Matt. 28:19-20; Luke 24:45-48; John 20:21; Acts 1:8). Evangelicals must guard against any loss of nerve in proclaiming unapologetically the truth of the gospel. Thus, to confidence about the character of God, the fullness of God’s self-revelation in Christ, the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement for humanity’s sin, and theological humility about what we do not or cannot know, we add the criterion of practical obedience to what we do know—the evangelistic imperative.

How should Christians respond to the world religions? These five affirmations should help us steer a path between saying too much, which could lead to a needlessly harsh position that drives people into radically pluralistic viewpoints, and saying too little, which could lead to denying the uniqueness and normativeness of the gospel.

THE PLURALITIES OF PLURALISMThe term pluralism can function in a variety of ways, and it is important to keep them straight. At one level, pluralism can describe simple demographic facts, the way things are. In this sense, Stanford University is “pluralistic” since there are 24 religious groups on campus that work under the auspices of the university’s Memorial Church. Or again, Singapore is “pluralistic” since it is roughly 41 percent Buddhist, 18 percent Christian, 17 percent Muslim, 17 percent secularist, and 5 percent Hindu. It is a demographic fact that the United States, once a religiously hom*ogeneous country, is rapidly becoming more “pluralistic.” This is simply the way things are.

There are two other meanings of pluralism that have to do with world-views. One of these is theological pluralism, the belief that all religions are more or less able to provide salvation. This is theologically destructive and needs to be refuted.

The other is the belief that political or cultural pluralism (social diversity) is an ideal. I considered my school experience of cultural pluralism as socially positive, good, and to be promoted.

Learning to distinguish between theological and cultural pluralism is essential to developing a Christian view of other religions. All too often we merge and confuse the two. An excellent example of this comes from the Hindu Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), a prominent participant at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, who proclaimed that he was “proud to belong to a religion that has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions to be true.” Promoting political toleration and universal suffrage for people of any and all religion is one thing, even a good thing; but believing that all religions are true and lead equally to salvation is quite another matter.

Now we are ready to return to Lexi’s question. To answer her we need to hold two biblical principles together: one, God desires that no one should perish, but rather that every person be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9); and two, Christ alone is the only way to the Father, the only name under heaven by which we can be saved (John 14:6; Acts 4:12).

So are all people not of the Christian faith eternally lost? Here we seem betwixt and between. To answer yes, when roughly 70 percent of today’s world population is non-Christian, seems to cast a dark shadow of doubt over the first truth. To answer no apparently contradicts the equally clear truth of the second point and cuts the nerve of the missionary imperative to make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19-20).

Three centuries ago John Bunyan (1628-88) admitted in his classic autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, that the Devil assailed him with questions like these:

How can you tell but that the Turks had as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet the Saviour, as we have to prove our Jesus is; and could I think that so many ten thousands in so many Countreys and Kingdoms, should be without the knowledge of the right way to Heaven … and that we onely, who live but in a corner of the earth, should alone be blessed therewith? Everyone doth think his own Religion rightest, both Jews, and Moors, and Pagans; and how if all our Faith, and Christ, and Scriptures, should be but a think-so too?

Bunyan’s language may sound quaint, and Lexi’s question to her parents full of childlike innocence, but the force of their perplexities hits us like a karate chop to the back of our theological necks. How should evangelicals who believe that Christ alone is the only way to God respond to the wildly divergent truth claims of the world religions?

In general, Christians have adopted one of three basic paradigms to answer this question, which I will call pluralism, exclusivism, and inclusivism.

THEOLOGICAL PLURALISMFor two hundred years, Christians have defended their world-view against the attacks of atheism that argued all religions are false. How ironic that we now face the opposite extreme, a theological pluralism that claims all religions are true. Theological pluralism is not entirely new, nor is it a single position, although it has been vigorously championed in the last decade by a growing number of prominent scholars. The pluralist agenda has been set by Paul Knitter’s landmark volume No Other Name? (1985) and a book edited by Knitter and philosopher of religion John Hick entitled The Myth of Christian Uniqueness (1988). Their goal was a radical reconception of traditional Christian beliefs, and in this they more than succeeded.

Despite important differences among its various advocates, theological pluralism entails both a positive and a negative judgment. Negatively, pluralists categorically repudiate the traditional Christian position that Christ is the only way to the Father; they view this as outrageously absurd, chauvinistic, and as morally, politically, and theologically disastrous. According to Hick, “only diehards who are blinded by dogmatic spectacles can persist in such a sublime bigotry.” Thus, pluralists sharply reject the idea that any one religion is absolute or normative.

Positively, whereas atheism declares that all religion is false, the pluralist affirms them all as true. The many world religions are all limited but valid human apprehensions of the one, true, infinite Divine Reality. Hick often summarizes his position by quoting the Bhagavad Gita (4.11): “Howsoever men may approach me, even so do I accept them; for, on all sides, whatever path they may choose is mine.” In other words, the one Divine Reality has many different names.

According to the theological pluralists, people may be savingly related to God through any number of vastly different religions because God is actively revealed more or less equally through all of them. Behind all the wildly divergent human religions, there is some basic, shared core, a universal essence or common denominator that allows us to say that they are all really the same or aiming at the same goal.

Despite the current prestige of theological pluralism, and even its apparent appeal—who would not want to affirm that all religions are equal?—this paradigm contains significant flaws.

First, we have all heard the cliche that “all religions teach the same thing.” Is that true? At a superficial level we might answer yes. It would be easy, for example, to document versions of the Golden Rule in a number of otherwise very different religions. But at a deeper level, a universal essence or common denominator is precisely what the world religions do not have. Once we move beyond superficial similarities, we discover that the many religions of the world present to us very different and sometimes contradictory pictures of God and the world.

In his excellent book Dissonant Voices, evangelical philosopher Harold Netland compares the way Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Shinto answer three basic questions: the nature of the religious ultimate, the human predicament, and salvation. What we discover, of course, is that these religions offer radically different perspectives on these basic questions. For example, Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, confesses one creator God as ultimate, whereas a number of different concepts within Buddhism make it hard to locate a single idea for the ultimate. Or again, Shinto is polytheistic whereas Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are monotheistic. To take one more example, in Hinduism and Buddhism the fundamental human problem is not sin against a righteous God, but “rather a profound ignorance, blindness, or confusion regarding the true nature of reality.” With differing conceptions of the human predicament, then, the world religions propose differing concepts of “salvation.”

Furthermore, to insist that the world religions all make essentially similar claims distorts what they actually do teach and is blatantly patronizing. Imagine how a Muslim or Hindu feels when she is told that the central affirmations of her religion are no different from those of a Christian or Buddhist. As Netland writes, “So long as the meanings of the doctrines within the respective religious communities are preserved, they cannot be jointly accepted without absurdity.”

Second, according to the religious pluralists, god or the “Ultimate Real” is in itself unknown and unknowable. All that we do know are the very human and relative religious expressions of this Real, which are accepted as equally valid. Says Hick, the Real remains “forever hidden, beyond the scope of human conception, language, or worship.” The world religions then speak symbolically and mythically about the Real, but not literally. But if this is so, why are the pluralists so confident about their own pronouncements about religion? By their own standard, these too are merely relative descriptions of the Unknowable, but in fact, they propose to inform us about the way things “really” are. If the Real is unknown and unknowable, why argue that all the religions are more or less true? Why not argue that they are all false? Or again, why does the pluralist argue that there is only one Ultimate Real? Why not many? In short, in theological pluralism the Real has become an empty referent that has no clearly assignable content, and it is self-contradictory to claim that its own religious world-view is not a contradiction.

Finally, while with atheism it is impossible for a religionist to be right, with theological pluralism it is apparently impossible to be wrong. If the pluralist is correct that all the religions are more or less equally true, then it is impossible to make a mistake, either morally or cognitively. But do we really want to say this? What about the Christian Crusades, Hindu widow burning, female genital mutilation, temple prostitution, or Aztec human sacrifice? Are these religious expressions really as valid as Islamic almsgiving or Buddhist self-denial? Do we not want to distinguish between a religion whose symbol is a stone phallus and a religion whose symbol is a cross?

It seems clear that some religious practices and beliefs are false and evil. But this is precisely what the pluralist cannot say and remain consistent. Without some absolute standard by which to judge, it becomes impossible to say that Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Mercy are any better than the Heaven’s Gate cult; or that David Koresh’s compound at Waco, Texas, was any worse than an Amish community. Simply put, consistent pluralism tolerates the intolerable.

THEOLOGICAL EXCLUSIVISM AND INCLUSIVISMEvangelicals rightly reject the theological pluralism of Knitter, Hick, and others, while continuing to explore the adequacy of two other theological models of relating to the world religions: exclusivism and inclusivism. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and both have their advocates within evangelicalism.

Exclusivism has been the historic position of much of the church, and for that reason alone it merits our deepest respect. In its simplest form, exclusivism is a logical claim: When two religions make logically incompatible truth claims, they cannot both be true. For example, some Eastern religions hold that life and death are an endless, recurring cycle, whereas Christians believe that after death comes judgment. To be sure, when we die, one of these views will be proved false. Thus we see how silly it is to claim that “all religions are equally true.”

We need to hold two biblical principlestogether: one, God desires that everyperson be saved; and two, Christ aloneis the only way to be saved.

More important, exclusivism is a theological claim that, in order to be saved, people must intentionally place their faith in Christ alone as the only way to God. Indeed, if Jesus is truly God incarnate, then some form of exclusivism is necessary. Christian exclusivism need not claim that all the beliefs of other religions are false or have no value. We can affirm that non-Christian religions contain some truth. Non-Christian beliefs are rejected only when they contradict clear Christian teaching. Exclusivism finds expression in the classic statements of Origen (c. 185-254) and Cyprian (c. 200-58) that “outside the church there is no salvation.” In its purest form, an exclusivist would argue that there are no exceptions to the rule that salvation requires an explicit acceptance of Christ’s redemptive work through faith. Evangelicals who tend toward a “hard” exclusivist position include Harold Netland (Dissonant Voices) and D. A. Carson (The Gagging of God).

Many Christians, including some exclusivists, want to make at least some exceptions. It seems likely that some people have been saved exclusively by Christ even though they have not explicitly called upon Christ—for instance, Old Testament saints, infants who die young, and the severely mentally challenged. By analogy, some would add a fourth category of possible exceptions, some people of other religions. This is the inclusivist position.

C. S. Lewis illustrates inclusivism in Mere Christianity when he writes, “We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.” In his final Narnia classic, The Last Battle, despite having followed the false god Tash, the pagan Emeth (whose name is the Hebrew word for “truth”) is welcomed into the kingdom of Aslan. So in inclusivism, salvation is exclusively by Christ alone and not good works, even though a person has not explicitly called upon Christ. Evangelical inclusivists today include Clark Pinnock (A Wideness in God’s Mercy) and John Sanders (No Other Name).

Certainly caution is in order here. We must not assume that God has put us in a position to answer questions beyond the scope of our own personal sphere of obedient responsibility: that is, the fate of those who through no fault of their own do not hear the gospel or because we Christians through no fault of our own were unable to take it to them. J. I. Packer says that “we have no warrant to expect that God will act thus in any single case where the gospel is not known or understood. Therefore our missionary obligation is not one whit diminished by our entertaining this possibility.” We do better to redouble our efforts to obey what we do know is clear—the Great Commission—rather than to speculate or worry about what is unclear.

THE CHARGE OF INTOLERANCE—NOT GUILTYOddly enough, the theological affirmation that Christ alone is the only way to salvation brings us to the question of cultural pluralism, which was illustrated by my sex-education experience. There is a clear link between the two. Theological pluralists like Hick and Knitter accuse traditional Christians of bigotry and arrogance when we proclaim the exclusivist gospel in the public square. They maintain it is wrong to proselytize and to try to convert people of other religions to Christianity. How should Christians respond to charges of intolerance toward other religions?

One way to address these concerns, as Netland has shown, is to distinguish between several related but different types of toleration. First, there is legal toleration, a tradition championed in the West and painfully absent in many other parts of the world. Legal toleration refers to what we call our First Amendment rights—freedom of speech and press, freedom of and even from religion without compulsion or government interference, protection of minority opinion and dissent, and so on. Social toleration refers to the promotion of attitudes of respect, esteem, humility, modesty, and the like. Christians should always be in the forefront of promoting and protecting both legal and social toleration for all people, regardless of their religious beliefs. This is simply a human right that we all cherish.

Another level of toleration is intellectual, which is the relativist belief that we should accept whatever another person sincerely believes as “true for them.” Legal toleration commits us always to protect people’s political rights to follow any religion or no religion at all; and social toleration advocates charity toward people who think and believe differently from the way we do; but this does not necessarily commit us to intellectual toleration if that means we should never conclude that a person holds to false ideas and, consequently, try to convince them that they are wrong and should change their views. Vigorous debate can occur in a civil and charitable manner.

The current cultural climate often fails to distinguish legal and social toleration from intellectual toleration so that if you criticize a person’s ideas you are charged with bigotry and intolerance toward that person. Proselytizing becomes the worst social sin imaginable. Because of this current climate, evangelicals need to give renewed vigor and attention to promoting cultural pluralism, which encourages the legal and social toleration of a multiplicity of religious voices while vigorously rejecting theological pluralism, which practices intellectual toleration in its claim that salvation is equally accessible through all religions. In other words, we can love those we disagree with (by practicing legal and social toleration) while trying to convince them that they are wrong.

So are we being hypocritical by wanting to protect and promote the rights of people of other faiths while, at the same time, declaring them to be wrong and in need of conversion? No. There are at least three reasons for such a stance.

First is the recognition that legal toleration is just that, the law of the land, and for this we should be thankful. The alternative is some form of totalitarianism. In this sense, all American citizens should enjoy an equal protection of First Amendment rights. Christians should not expect any privileged status. For example, legally mandating a specifically Christian prayer in public schools is not a good idea, whereas supporting the right of an atheist against religious repression is a good idea.

Second, as my sex-education experience indicated, even when we disagree with people theologically, there are often practical reasons to join with them in a moral alliance to resist evil trends in culture.

Third, a Christian anthropology affirms that God has given all people rational minds and free wills that even God honors. Practically speaking, as John Stuart Mill noted in his classic text On Liberty (1859), it is virtually impossible to use any sort of outward force to compel inward conviction. In fact, using compulsion often backfires. Rather, with Paul, we seek to woo people, with all of our passion and persuasion, but never by manipulation or force.

WHY WE WITNESSChristians should champion political or cultural pluralism but categorically reject theological pluralism in favor of the exclusive work of Christ. Thus, to the other parents of children in my son’s seventh grade, I extend grateful partnership for our shared moral concerns, a promise always to honor them with the civil grace that we all cherish, but also the promise of a vigorous discussion about the most important question anyone can ever ask—what must I do to be saved? (Acts 16:30).

To Lexi’s question about whether her birth mother would be in heaven, I’d respond with an honest “It’s possible” or better, “I don’t know.” But why then witness to her mother if she might be saved by Christ without calling upon Christ? As Packer suggests, it is impossible for us to know how God is dealing with any given individual who does not know or understand the gospel. The ordinary way of salvation entails an explicit act of faith in Christ, and any exceptions to this are best understood as extraordinary. To be saved, as it were, “by the skin of your teeth” is one thing; but to experience “abundant life” in Christ (John 10:10) in all its fullness requires an explicit knowledge and experience of the gospel in all its depth and breadth. The latter is the better and more sure way to heaven and the one we attach our labors to.

Finally, we witness because we must exercise practical obedience to what God has clearly commanded, even if we do not understand everything. Rather than some flimsy excuse that results in evangelistic timidity, here our theological humility results in a doxological response to God whose ways are sometimes unsearchable (Rom. 11:33-36) but in whom we can certainly trust.

Daniel B. Clendenin is a graduate staff member for InterVarsity at Stanford University and author of Many Gods, Many Lords: Christianity Encounters World Religions (Baker, 1995).

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

He is not yet a household name among evangelical Christians worldwide, but he could well become one. At 48, Vishal Mangalwadi is India’s foremost Christian intellectual. The author of seven books, including Truth and Social Reform and Missionary Conspiracy: Letters to a Post-Modern Hindu, Mangalwadi is also an inveterate evangelist and political activist in his home province of Uttar Pradesh in India’s north. He has been held briefly in prison several times for his evangelism and social activism among India’s rural poor. Educated at Allahabad University and Indore University, Mangalwadi served in the national headquarters of India’s ruling Janata Dal party, overseeing agricultural reform.

It was through reading Francis Schaeffer’s book Escape from Reason that he became a convinced Christian. He studied for a short time under Schaeffer in 1973, then continued investigating Hindu gurus and dissecting everything from ufos to tantric sex for his masterly book When the New Age Gets Old (InterVarsity).

Mangalwadi’s most recent work, India: The Grand Experiment (U.S. distributor, The MacLaurin Institute), coincides with India’s ongoing celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of its independence from Britain. In it, he provocatively maintains that India would never have been able to develop institutions and a self-understanding capable of sustaining independence without the social, political, educational, and judicial reforms forced upon the subcontinent by the British, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century when the British evangelical revival had profoundly influenced attitudes in the British Parliament. (In a recent ironic salute to history, Mangalwadi lectured on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India in the author’s alma mater of Eton College, where Princess Diana’s son William is a student.)

Mangalwadi was interviewed for CHRISTIANITY TODAY by former Time magazine senior correspondent and the author of Hope: The Heart’s Great Quest (Servant, 1995), David Aikman.

Despite all kinds of problems, India has somehow managed to keep its democracy functioning for half a century. Why are you so pessimistic about India’s democratic future?For all practical purposes, democracy (as an ideal) is finished. There is hardly anyone who would fight for democracy now. It continues because there is no consensus on what to replace it with. Essentially, the days in which we are living resemble the end of the Mogul era (1707-57) when the British Empire began in India. The human-rights violations in India are pretty terrible. A Punjabi superintendent of police not long ago committed suicide because it was about to be revealed that he had actually killed up to 3,000 people.

But what about the popular image outside India of Gandhian nonviolence and India’s democratic ways?Gandhi in the movie is fictionalized. Even Mrs. [Indira] Gandhi, the prime minister who suspended democratic freedoms during 1975-77, said, “We wrote the constitution, and we can change everything in it.” She and others considered knowable moral law as an absurd thing that liberal democracies believed in, not realizing that the system worked as well as it did in America because of the impact of the pulpit on the habits of ordinary people. Human rights may seem “natural,” but Mrs. Gandhi said that human rights are what the state gives.

I see the idea of human rights and human dignity as being a peculiarly biblical concept. In Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, a Catholic Italy, a Lutheran Germany, an Orthodox Russia succumbed to totalitarianism because of liberal humanist ideas that man can create a utopia. Joseph Campbell [the late renowned scholar of comparative mythology] and Carl Jung were both shocked after they came to India. They realized that the natural law is not natural. The fact is there are consequences to teaching that human beings are nothing but animals. This “truth” destroys the entire basis of civilized political life.

How did you become a Christian?My parents were both Christian, but it wasn’t until my last year of college that I became convinced of Christianity. At first, I didn’t feel that I could believe the Bible as God’s Word. The turning point was reading Schaeffer’s Escape from Reason. By the time I had finished college, I knew that the philosophers knew that philosophy didn’t know the truth and couldn’t know the truth. Truth only comes through revelation. It seems a foolish idea, after all, that we can speak but that the Creator cannot say anything.

The two Books of Kings and Chronicles in the Bible really began to hit me—this was God’s Word written from God’s point of view. God was telling his people how their society was disintegrating. Here I was, an Indian reading Jewish history, but it made sense that God had promised that all the nations of the world would be blessed through the seed of Abraham. It was Jewish history written for me to bless my nation. I began to see that it was my only hope. Eventually I wrote to Doctor Schaeffer and asked to study under him, which I did for six months in Switzerland in 1973. He became a model to me of how someone can be a blessing to the whole world.

Why did you return to the countryside rather than, say, try to influence the next generation through teaching?I wanted to understand how the gospel related to poverty and to understand how young people could serve the poor. I founded an association for cooperative rural assistance. This involved both church planting and socioeconomic development. When it became apparent that there was a real possibility that we might be developing a mass movement after we had baptized 100 converts, we had a number of conflicts with the local Hindu establishment. I was jailed for a few days four different times. Each time the press stood up for me, and the authorities had to let me go. I started writing Truth and Social Reform while in prison.

Your name is associated with the fight to stop the practice of widow burning. How did that happen?In the 1980s, I talked to a German follower of the Hare Krishna movement who was glorifying sati [the traditional Hindu practice of burning widows alive after the deaths of their husbands; while officially outlawed under the British, it is still practiced]. I had never heard a man defend widow burning before. I then wrote a story for the Indian press about how half a million people in one Indian province were lionizing a widow for having submitted to sati. In this case, the outcry forced the prime minister to arrest the family members, but they were acquitted in 1997. I resigned from the Janata party on the issue of widow burning, which some party members approved of. I was then invited to join the party of the lower castes, Bahujan Samah Party (BSP) and organize its wing in our part of the country.

What was the beneficial impact on Indian economics after the British began their rule that you write about?British evangelicals brought to India the intellectual, moral, legal, and technical resources needed for economic emancipation. Before the British came, we did not even have the concept of banking or usury in India. Indians buried their money under the floor. The moral and spiritual transformation that Christianity brought about created a situation where you could trust a bank with your money. But there has been a decline of trust in Indian society since.

What is the condition of Christianity in India today?In some pockets we have a vital church which could become a real hope for India, though much of the institutionalized leadership doesn’t have the credibility because of corruption. My one prayer is that we would see that same sort of phenomenon happening in India that we all see in South Korea. That is essentially what I am working for and praying for. Even my sitting down and talking to you threatens a number of Indian Christian leaders. When they come here they are raising money for their projects. But I don’t have an empire, and I don’t raise any money.

Do you have any hope for democracy in India?Not without the gospel. The breakdown of liberal democracy and the new fascism of Hinduism is leading them toward a German-style “nationalism.” We have religious sects importing planeloads of arms for civil war [a reference to a planeload of arms brought to India by a Hindu sect from Pakistan]. There is enough high- explosive material stored up in every Indian city to blow up all of India.

I am hoping that my book will reawaken people. India’s future is as great as the promises of God. Ultimately, the hope comes from faith in a transcendent God. As you look around India and see the failure of the institutions, you can sink into despair, but as you look at God, then you have a basis for hope.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

American revivalist preachers have been evangelical Christianity's most visible spokesmen over the centuries. What does their record on race relations show? This article by Edward Gilbreath, excerpted from CHRISTIANITY TODAY's sister publication CHRISTIAN HISTORY, paints a mixed but improving picture.

Eleven o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America," declared civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in a well-known line. What is not so well known is that the statement was also made by someone else in a 1960 Reader's Digest article on racism—Dr. King's friend, evangelist Billy Graham.

To better appreciate the uniqueness of Graham's concern for racial reconciliation, we need to set him in the historical context of a long line of nationally known American evangelists who faced the problem of racism. Their record is mixed.

Consider George Whitefield, the father of America's Great Awakening. In the 1740s, Whitefield won countless souls to Christ—both black and white. Early in his ministry, he questioned the morality of slaveholding. Yet later he approved buying slaves to help work in the fields of his Georgia orphanage. Whitefield justified the move in part because enslaving blacks, he reasoned, exposed them to Christianity.

Like Whitefield, many Christians were opposed to the oppression of blacks but believed the church's main function was to win souls, and secondarily, to perform acts of mercy—but certainly not to change social structures like slavery.

An exception was Charles Finney, who was both an influential evangelist and an outspoken abolitionist. In 1851 he was elected president of Ohio's Oberlin College, a leading stronghold of the antislavery movement. Eleven years later, through Finney's efforts, Oberlin student Mary Jane Patterson became the first African-American woman in the United States to receive a bachelor's degree.

While the nineteenth century saw increased concern over social issues, not every Christian was convinced about the need to abolish slavery. The controversy divided America's largest denominations—Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian.

After the Civil War, southern Christians still balked at integration, as evangelist Dwight L. Moody discovered. In 1876, during revival meetings in Georgia, the popular evangelist attracted both black and white audiences. The meetings were originally unsegregated. But soon whites began complaining, and those sponsoring the rally divided the seating according to race. From then on, whenever Moody preached in the South, he either addressed audiences that were segregated or held separate services for blacks and whites.

By the early 1900s, evangelist Billy Sunday had become America's pre-eminent preacher. Sunday, who began as a Bible teacher with the Chicago YMCA, had been sensitive to the plight of minorities since the start of his ministry. In the fall of 1917, during his Atlanta crusade, Sunday held special meetings for African Americans and visited several black churches. When it came to holding integrated meetings, however, Sunday drew the line. He knew that any national Christian leader who wanted to maintain his public image could not upset the social mores of the day.

Four decades later, evangelist Billy Graham found himself in a similar bind. Early on, Graham freely accepted the custom of segregated seating at his southern crusades. By 1952, however, the young preacher, now a national figure, began to speak out against racial prejudice in the church. "There is no scriptural basis for segregation," Graham told a crusade audience in Jackson, Mississippi. "It may be there are places where such is desirable to both races, but certainly not in the church." Graham's words were greeted with enthusiasm by blacks and a few whites, but provoked criticism from many.

Though the statement was ahead of its time, Graham was still tentative. When pressed by his critics, he softened his views. "We follow the existing social customs in whatever part of the country in which we minister," he said. "I came to Jackson to preach only the Bible and not to enter into local issues." But he soon discovered that was no solution. He had to decide where he was going to stand publicly.

In 1953—three years before Martin Luther King hit the national scene and more than a decade before the 1964 Civil Rights Act—Graham stunned the sponsoring committee of his Chattanooga, Tennessee, crusade. At a meeting of the committee, Graham railed against the practice of segregated seating. And then before one of the crusade meetings, Graham personally took down the ropes separating the black and white sections.

In 1957, Graham integrated his ministry internally by adding his first black team member, Howard O. Jones, a young pastor from Cleveland. Soon Graham was working regularly with African-American churches where his crusades were held. That same year, at a black church in Brooklyn, Graham said publicly for the first time that antisegregation legislation might be necessary to bring an end to discrimination. Graham's actions stirred the wrath of many of his supporters who derogatorily labeled him an "integrationist" and a "nigg*r lover."

The evangelist held a steady course, consistently speaking out against racial injustice and gradually adding more African Americans to his organization. "His preaching of reconciliation and his call to repentance," said the late Samuel Hines, a nationally known black pastor, "have had a direct impact on the alienation and polarization which have afflicted our land." For his part, Graham today simply says, "Of all people, Christians should be the most active in reaching out to those of other races."

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Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

THE JUST SHALL LIVE BY FAITHO that I might the power receiveThe simple life of faith to live,A stranger by the world unknown,To live, shut up with Christ alone!Jesus, my real Life Thou art,Inspire Thyself into my heart,And fill'd with purity divineI live, thro' endless ages thine.

—Charles Wesley inThe Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley, Vol. II

WHEN GOD GIVES EXAMSThe wonderful thing about God's schoolroom … is that we get to grade our own papers. You see, He doesn't test us so He can learn how well we're doing. He tests us so we can discover how well we're doing.

—Charles Swindoll inGod's Provision in Time of Need

GIFT EXCHANGEFor one who has made thanksgiving the habit of his life, the morning prayer will be, "Lord, what will you giveme today to offer back to you?"

—Elisabeth Elliot inLove Has a Price Tag

A PRAYERLord, like the star, the Christian is the light that belongs to the Master, leading others to him, glad to be at his bidding. May this be true of me throughout the coming year.

—Alan Redpath inThe Life of Victory

WHEN GOODNESS ISN'TWe must never be self-righteous in goodness. How harmful is the so-called Christian who harps on about his goodness. How little does he realise that the man who is furthest from God is the man who thanks God he is not like others.

—William Barclay inDaily Celebration

PRIDE IS ITS OWN REWARDA worldly spirit loves to talk a lot but do nothing, striving for the exterior signs of holiness that people can see, with no desire for true piety and interior holiness of spirit. It was about people like this that our Lord said, Amen I say to you, they have received their reward (Matthew 6:2).

—Saint Francis of Assisi inThe Wisdom of Saint Francis

THE POWER OF WORDSPoets are caretakers of language, the shepherds of words, keeping them from harm, exploitation, misuse. Words not only mean something; they are something, each with a sound and rhythm all its own . …

I also am in the word business. I preach, I teach, I counsel using words. People often pay particular attention on the chance that God may be using my words to speak to them. I have a responsibility to use words accurately and well. But it isn't easy. I live in a world where words are used carelessly by some, cunningly by others.

—Eugene H. Peterson inLiving the Message

THE HARDER PATHCriticism is easy; achievement is more difficult.

—Winston Churchill inChurchill on Courage

THE SECRET OF GOD'S LOVEWhy did God create a world? God created the world for something like the same reason that we find it hard to keep a secret! Good things are hard to keep. The rose is good, and tells its secret in perfume. The sun is good, and tells its secret in light and heat. … But God is in-finitely good, and therefore infinitely loving. Why therefore could not He by a free impulsion of His love let love overflow and bring new worlds into being? God could not keep, as it were, the secret of His love, and the telling of it was creation.

—Fulton J. Sheen inFrom the Best of the Angel's Blackboard

GOD'S THOUGHTSHoly Spirit, think through me till your ideas are my ideas.

—Amy Carmichael inThe Doubleday Prayer Collection

WHICH CHOICE?There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."

—C. S. Lewis inThe Great Divorce

HOLY HANDKERCHIEFSIn his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

—Frederick Buechner inWishful Thinking

THE POWER OF CHRIST"I can't get Jesus Christ out of my mind," he said. "If I dismiss him as a person he haunts me as an idea."

—Earl Palmer in The 24-Hour Christian

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CHRISTIAN EDUCATION: A READER ON THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIAN EDUCATION, edited by Jeff Astley, Leslie J. Francis, and Colin Crowder (Eerdmans, 464 pp.; $34, paper)

CHANGING THE WAY SEMINARIES TEACH: GLOBALIZATION AND THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION, by David A. Roozen, Alice Frazer Evans, and Robert A. Evans (Hartford Seminary Center for Social and Religious Research/ Plowshares Institute, 206 pp.; $13, paper)

THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION IN THE EVANGELICAL TRADITION, edited by D. G. Hart and R. Albert Mohler, Jr. (Baker Book House, 320 pp.; $24.99, paper). Reviewed by Robert W. Patterson, a frequent contributor to CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

In his autobiography, Kenneth Taylor, the man who gave life to the Living Bible, recalls his first semester as a student at Dallas Theological Seminary in the fall of 1940. To his astonishment, his Greek professor could not remember all the letters of the Greek alphabet the first day of class, another professor simply read from the class textbook, and a third teacher hounded his students with outlines to memorize. This half-hearted approach to theological education, Taylor says, led several of his classmates to transfer to Princeton Theological Seminary at the end of the semester.

That was then. Today, Ken Taylor's classmates would have no educational reason to transfer to a mainline seminary. Dallas Seminary is the sixth-largest institution accredited by the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). Its standard curriculum for students preparing for the ordained ministry is in many respects the most rigorous of any seminary in the country, demanding four years of graduate study (not three years as most other seminaries require), including three years of Greek, two years of Hebrew, and a senior thesis. Its well-kept, engaging four-block campus not far from downtown Dallas represents a model of educational facilities and resources.

Perhaps more than any other school, Dallas represents the metamorphosis of evangelical theological education since the early 1940s. No longer does anyone need to lament, as did Carl Henry in his autobiography, the "modernist takeover" of Protestant seminaries on the eve of World War II. According to the ATS, evangelicals in the 1990s lay claim to 63 divinity schools and theological seminaries in North America, enrolling more than 30,000 students. In fact, the six largest accredited schools, which account for 20 percent of seminary enrollment nationwide, are Southern Baptist institutions or seminaries with northern evangelical roots (Fuller, Trinity, and Dallas).

Ironically, at the very moment evangelical theological education appears to have come of age, some influential parachurch and megachurch leaders are questioning the whole idea of formal theological education. The observation is made that if men who never spent a day in seminary can build successful ministries like Prison Fellowship, Focus on the Family, and Willow Creek Community Church, why have seminaries at all? In fact, a seminary degree will actually disqualify a candidate from a staff position at some megachurches.

From one angle, this bold questioning of theological education resembles the same concerns William Tennent and George Whitefield expressed about overly educated ministers during the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. But seen in the context of modern evangelicalism, the growing antagonism toward divinity schools, even conservative ones, represents a sharp departure. Indeed, in the evangelical resurgence that began in the 1940s, the Presbyterian model of a "learned ministry" was advanced with great effectiveness by Harold John Ockenga and Carl Henry, an emphasis that helped balance the more democratic, lay-oriented character of evangelicalism with its dislike of formal structures and penchant for heart knowledge over head knowledge.

Three new books represent widely differing approaches to the role of theological education in the life of the church. From across the Atlantic comes Theological Perspectives on Christian Education, a collection of 29 previously published journal articles, many from a decidedly liberal viewpoint, woven together into one volume by two British ecclesiastical foundations. Issues facing theological education in the wider church are addressed in seven essays, but the focus of the book is Christian education, broadly defined. The volume caters to the mainline crowd, complete with sections exploring trendy approaches to Christian education, including postliberal, liberationist, and feminist. While a few essays are commendable, and while some insights are tucked away in the book here and there, the volume as a whole is disappointing. It will most likely serve as a reference tool, perhaps gathering dust in some library, providing a perfect illustration as to why Alister McGrath found spiritual emptiness in the religious Left of the Church of England.

Nor is the discussion advanced by Changing the Way Seminaries Teach, a volume that deals more with the Christian education of ministers. Produced jointly by two New England think tanks, the Hartford Seminary Center for Social and Religious Research and Plowshares Institute in nearby Simsbury, this extended report assesses a five-year program funded by the Lilly Endowment and the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust to improve the educational program at 12 North American seminaries, including two evangelical schools, Gordon-Conwell in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and Conservative Baptist in Denver. The program, however, was not aimed at reducing class size, raising faculty salaries and competence, or exploring the relationship between Christian character and ministerial skills. No, this project was none other than a "global" consciousness-raising effort at these schools, challenging what it claims is their provincialism and isolation from the resources of the Third World church.

While the book accurately gauges what happened—and what more needs to be done—in terms of the ethos, curriculum, and faculty at these seminaries as a result of the project, what globalization really means is anyone's guess. Its trendy, anti-Western, anti-white-male rhetoric and its utopian vision, in the words of the Plowshares Institute, for "a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world community" divert attention away from what might be called the indigenous challenges of theological education in the United States today. Those needs can be no more served with "immersions" of Third Worldisms than seminaries in Korea or Kenya can be improved with "immersions" of Americanisms. An exotic fascination with the Third World is every bit as problematic as alleged Western ethnocentrism; in fact, as William Willimon and Thomas Naylor of Duke University suggest in their new book, Downsizing the U.S.A. (Eerdmans), "localization" more than "globalization" may be the crying need of the times.

Whatever Changing the Way Seminaries Teach and Theological Perspectives on Christian Education lack, however, is more than compensated for by the strong showing of Theological Education in the Evangelical Tradition. This collection of papers presented at a Lilly Endowment-funded conference at the Institute for Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College provides penetrating insights into theological education from some of the nation's finest theological educators, including Timothy George, Richard Mouw, and David Wells. Also contributing essays are the volume's editors, two promising educators under the age of 40: D. G. Hart, the prolific writer-librarian at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia—one of the first "evangelical" institutions north of the Mason-Dixon Line—and R. Albert Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, the first divinity school chartered by Baptists in Dixie.

The book's strength is articulating the conceptual unity that holds evangelical theological education together. Whether exploring the spiritual formation of ministers, the tensions between church and academy, or the place of women in formal educational settings, the book explains how the evangelical approach to training ministers differs from both old-line Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions. That difference, the book illustrates, relates not so much to institutional or formal arrangements but rather to a distinctive set of expectations. "Evangelicals," the introductory essay summarizes, "have been especially wary of religion that appears to be automatic or routine, and they have desired ministers and leaders who have experienced firsthand a vital and deep encounter with God's grace and who could instill and reproduce such characteristics within other believers." This holds true of every stripe of evangelical institution, from the fundamentalist Prairie Bible College in Three Hills, Alberta, Canada, to the academically demanding West-minster Seminary in Philadelphia.

The volume highlights the historical dimension of that conceptual unity, contending "that the problems seminaries face today are not dramatically different from those that confronted evangelical theological educators in the past." So as evangelicals struggle to understand the tensions between clergy and laity, or seek a more parish-based approach to ministerial training—moot issues among Roman Catholics and old-line Protestants—the volume explores how those same issues have defined evangelicals since Jonathan Edwards. As evangelicals seek to understand how the life of the mind should inform vital piety and gospel zeal (and vice versa), the book reveals how Enlightenment empiricism has been a common element in evangelical education, including William Tennent's "Log College," the old Princeton Seminary, and Charles Spurgeon's "Pastor's College" at Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. The volume even suggests that many of the difficulties facing evangelicals today are rooted in the past; James Bradley of Fuller Seminary, for example, illustrates how the English-Puritan tradition of "practical divinity," with its goal of subduing scholarship to the professional training of pastors, did little to prepare evangelicals for the onslaught of critical and scientific thought in the nineteenth century.

While strong on historical analysis, Theological Education in the Evangelical Tradition is weak on prescription. The concluding four essays, "The Future of Evangelical Theological Education," are brief, reflecting more afterthoughts than serious discussion. Granted, no one knows how evangelical seminaries will change a generation from now, but the insights offered in this book would seem to lead quite naturally to some "definitive guidance," perhaps some kind of standardization of ministerial preparation to guide evangelicals in the twenty-first century.

The time for raising or rethinking standards could not be better. As David Wells outlines in No Place for Truth, the pastoral vocation today is in crisis. Ministers, who in Puritan New England and colonial America were critically important leaders in their communities, have become, in Wells's words, "dislodged from the network of what is meaningful and valuable in society." The structures of modern life, he says, "offer no plausibility for the work they do." The Gordon-Conwell professor could have added that ministers have even lost standing in the Christian community, especially its evangelical expression. The bonds that tie pastors with congregations are weaker than ever, as the average tenure in a pulpit is rarely more than three years; traumatic "forced exits" of pastors (AOL Link), according to a study in LEADERSHIP journal (AOL Link), have reached epidemic proportions. Like Rodney Dangerfield, ministers get no respect. Most public-school teachers have far greater stability and workplace protection, higher salaries, and more generous benefits than ministers enjoy, including a decent pension at retirement.

The pastoral crisis will not be solved overnight, but perhaps the seminaries and the denominations they serve could begin with attention to quality rather than quantity. This shift will not be easy; it would cut the fuel line that has fostered the proliferation of evangelical seminaries in the past 25 years. But the hard questions need to be asked. Do evangelicals in North America really need 63 divinity schools educating 30,000 potential ministers? Has the mass of these institutions really enhanced pastoral quality and effectiveness? Because they compete with one another for market share, evangelical seminaries are not very selective in their admissions policies, admitting virtually anyone with a bachelor's degree. The result is a pool of graduates who do not measure up academically or personally with corresponding professions as well as an oversupply of candidates who struggle to receive a call from a particular congregation or ministry.

This situation will not change unless the churches and the seminaries become genuine stake-holders with students, working together to sponsor and accept only promising candidates, subsidizing their education and funding residency programs, and helping them secure calls. Because the churches today could not realistically commit themselves to 30,000 students, this approach would significantly lower seminary enrollments, but it might reap revolutionary results.

While the popular nature of evangelicalism will resist recommendations like these, the time has come for bold yet respected voices in church and academy to wean evangelicals from the thoroughgoing pragmatism that has contributed to the crisis in the pastoral vocation. For without single-minded devotion to preparing, strengthening, and upholding qualified pastors in their ministry of Word and sacrament in the context of local, healthy congregations, the evangelical faith can only face an uncertain future.

Short NoticesSUBVERSIVE SPIRITUALITYBy Eugene H. PetersonEerdmans263 pp.; $18, paperSubversive Spirituality is a wide-ranging collection of Eugene Peterson's occasional writings spanning a period of some 25 years. The volume is divided into five sections: "Spirituality," "Biblical Studies," "Poetry" (consisting of one longish poem, "Holy Luck"), "Pastoral Readings" (ranging from Revelation to mystery writer Rex Stout), and "Conversations" (a collection of interviews), valuable for Peterson's reflections on the pastoral vocation.

"Spirituality," Peterson writes, "is not the latest fad but the oldest truth," and indeed there is nothing trendy about his account of the spiritual life.

From this assortment two themes or qualities or traits stand out. First is a certain manner—earthy, plainspoken—that most readers would associate with "working men" rather than with pastors. Granting the enormous range of legitimate preaching styles, we need to ask why this down-to-earth manner is so rare in the pulpit today. Second is a literary sensibility that informs everything Peterson writes—and this, too, is increasingly rare among pastors. What a strange and wonderful combination of gifts—and no wonder that this is the man who has given us The Message.

Complete this sentence: "The first book on pastoral care that meant anything to me personally or vocationally was _____." If you are Eugene Peterson, the answer is James Joyce's novel Ulysses. For many more such surprises and useful provocations, read Subversive Spirituality.

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