Page 5320 – Christianity Today (2024)

Braving temperatures indistinquishable from those that gave inaugural parade planners cold feet a day earlier, at least 70,000 undaunted prolife protesters made their annual January 22 descent on Washington and the Supreme Court. They came to mark the twelfth year since the Court declared a constitutional right to abortion—a year of escalating violence at abortion clinics and “family planning” centers.

Episodes of violence were and are justly condemned. But to understand the perpetrators and why the term “terrorism” is generally misapplied to their acts, one must also clearly understand the routine violence that occurs daily within abortion clinic walls.

A $500 million-a-year abortion industry has sprung up around Roe v. Wade—an industry exponentially more violent than any of the attacks to date on its facilities: By seven weeks gestation, about the time most women know they are pregnant, the fetal heart has been beating for a month, and the brain is emitting brain waves. The fetus has a delicate face, and hands are already emblazoned with unique fingerprint patterns. By the end of the first trimester, during which 85 percent of America’s 1.5 million annual abortions occur, the fetus is sexually differentiated, her major organ systems are functioning, and ultrasonography reveals that she can suck her thumb and swim almost as freely as a fish within her dark, amniotic confines.

But this is no phylogenetic throwback to the Devonian age—as some abortion rhetoric based on debunked ontogenic theories once suggested. Neither is the fetus a “mere blob,” “mass of tissue,” or simple “product of conception.” For all who have eyes to see, the infant’s form is undeniably, unmistakably human.

And to watch her die, as I did in a recent viewing of a suction curettage abortion via ultrasonography, is a numbing experience. It happens nearly 4,000 times a day in this country, and prudence has not restrained its practitioners from pressing to the limit the expansive legal parameters drawn by the Supreme Court. By 1980, according to the Centers for Disease Control, at least 50,000 abortions annually were occurring in the fifth and sixth months of gestation.

Most empathic Americans represented by Washington’s prolife marchers express their opposition to abortion’s brutality by supporting the efforts of their movement’s lobbyists, political action committees, and courtroom activists. Focusing on the two lives involved each time a pregnant woman enters an abortion clinic, many attempt to dissuade through sidewalk counseling and offerings of housing and help from a growing network of crisis pregnancy centers. Increasing numbers are picketing abortion clinics and the homes of those who operate them. And on the fringes of a movement frustrated for more than a decade by governmental recalcitrance and 16 million abortion deaths, some are building bombs.

To call them terrorists, at least in most cases, is overbroad. Dictionaries define terrorism as efforts calculated to inspire fear. Yet as abortion-rights leaders admit, the clinic assailants have apparently gone to great lengths to ensure that no one is hurt by their actions. Such circ*mspection runs counter to terrorism’s aims. The obvious primary aim of these individuals is not to intimidate abortionists or their often troubled clientele, but to save concrete, individual lives. For this group, letters to Congress and the editor are not enough; the most helpless members of their communities are dying daily with state sanction, and they cannot tolerate it. For them, destroying the local clinic and its suction aspirator with a firebomb simply means no unborn babies will be killed there the next day. It is as justifiable, they would likely say, as destroying a Dachau or an Auschwitz.

Such thinking is, however, shortsighted. It ignores the fact that the totalitarian system that gave rise to Dachau and Auschwitz provided no institutional means for dissenting citizens to alter its violently unjust policies. The American system does provide such means, however slow the processes of change through them may be.

For prolifers to resort to violence before exhausting the alternatives—including nonviolent civil disobedience of the sort seen in the civil rights movement preceding this one, and lately made chic by proabortion congressmen like Senator Lowell Weicker in the seige of South Africa’s embassy—is to jeopardize both the cause and the nation. The moment someone the whole country recognizes as human dies in an abortion clinic blast, the battle lines may be drawn irrevocably.

Those on the violent fringe of the movement must realize that America’s constitutional democracy and rule of law, even when it has dehumanized, is too precious a system to put at risk. Those who defend the Supreme Court’s radical decision of taking human rights from the unborn must realize the need for reform. There are millions of lives at stake, on both sides of the womb.

¹Steven Baer is executive director of the United Republican Fund of Illinois.

A building consensus could at least put an end to abortion on demand.

An American consensus is shaping up on what to do about abortions. It is not what most evangelicals like. Rather, it poses a serious moral dilemma for them, and it calls for some hard decisions.

There is increasing evidence for this new consensus, which opposes abortion on demand, and especially all abortions of convenience. According to a current poll, its size has reached 58 percent. This is despite consistent support by public media of the prochoice movement’s view (90 percent, according to a study by Samuel Rothman and Robert Lichter).

This new consensus is formed primarily of conservative Roman Catholics, conservative evangelicals, a sprinkling of Mormons, conservative Jews, and a growing body of ethically conservative blacks (generally evangelical, though not sailing under that banner). It also includes not a few liberals concerned over the growing erosion in Western culture of any commitment to the sanctity of life, and also some others not identified with any of these groups.

The presence of this broad consensus sets the stage for a dilemma among conservative evangelicals because most of them (66 percent, according to a Gallup poll taken in fall 1984) hold an absolutist or near absolutist opposition to abortion. (They oppose all abortions, or all except those where the mother’s life is endangered, or, possibly, where rape or incest has occurred.) In this they have been able to count on traditional Roman Catholics and some others, but they have lacked the necessary support to secure a constitutional amendment for what they believe is right.

Their dilemma arises because, based on this broad national consensus, they could probably now get a stricter law than the one currently in force, but the new law would not be as strict as they believe to be morally justified. Can they honorably settle for less—on the ground that half a loaf is better than none?

The growing national consensus against abortion on demand rests in part on the broad heritage of Judeo-Christian values—still lively in Western culture and in America. The vast majority of Americans have always affirmed that their own personal and private conviction was opposed to abortion on demand, and a slight majority have gone on to state support for laws restricting it. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University, writes: “If, given a choice between the present law of abortion-on-demand, up to and including viability, or a more restrictive law, … the majority of Americans polled consistently have supported the more limited option.” He acknowledges that “there is not a consensus in America for the absolute prohibition of abortion.” But “there is and was a moral consensus … for a stricter abortion law. A remarkably well-kept secret is that a minority is currently imposing its belief on a demonstrable majority.”

Before considering whether half a loaf is acceptable, we need to see the main factors leading to the rise of the prochoice movement in the sixties and seventies, and the subsequent resurgence of the prolife movement.

Prochoice Upsurge

We have to admit that many more Americans today than, say, half a century ago or even 20 years ago, will defend the morality of abortion on demand (though this does not mean a majority, since the view started with little support). The movement away from the more traditional view first gained wide acceptance during the sixties.

In 1962 the American Law Institute published a study advocating a change in abortion laws to allow for abortions before viability in cases of rape, incest, the mother’s health, or deformed and mentally retarded fetuses. (“Viability” occurs when the fetus can live outside the mother’s body.) Five years later the American Medical Association endorsed these recommendations and reversed a medical history reaching back to Hippocrates. Planned Parenthood, NOW (National Organization for Women), and the ACLU joined the chorus of approval.

State legislation kept pace with this new attitude toward abortion. California, Colorado, and North Carolina repealed their strict laws in 1967, and state after state followed in quick succession. Finally, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973 ruled unconstitutional most state laws that made abortions before viability a legal offense punishable in one way or another. This radical change in moral climate led many to conclude that, on moral grounds, Americans had generally come around to supporting abortion on demand.

Yet the result of this swift change in the law did not, in fact, mean this. Quite the contrary, most continued to affirm their own personal rejection of abortion except in extreme circ*mstances. But the will to support laws against abortion seemed to disappear.

At the same time, the church-state issue was heating up. Opposition to abortion is a private religious conviction, it was argued, which must not be written into a law that would violate the First Amendment with its guarantee of separation of church and state. Such a law would establish a religious viewpoint; further, it would deny the free exercise of religion to anyone who had no religious scruples against abortion, or whose religious convictions favored aborting children who would become a burden to society. Many Democrats in the election of 1984 objected strenuously to a plank in the Republican party platform demanding that appointed judges agree to the sanctity of human life. This, so they argued, was to make a religious viewpoint a requirement for office, and therefore violated our Constitution.

Further, many argued that it was unwise to pass such a law in present-day America because of the lack of a consensus supporting it. Unpopular laws cannot be enforced. In any case, it would affect only the poor and uneducated, and would inevitably, so it was said, lead to the scofflaw attitude of the latter days of Prohibition.

Gov. Mario Cuomo, in a speech at Notre Dame University, was typical of politicians taking this position. As a loyal Roman Catholic, he affirmed his own agreement with the traditional position of his church. But he said that as a responsible office holder representing the American people, he could not support laws the people did not want.

Finally, the most central argument supporting abortion on demand rested on the rights and freedom of women. No woman, it was felt, should be forced to go through an unwanted pregnancy. That would violate her inalienable right to privacy and her freedom as an independent citizen.

Turning Of The Tide

Yet the traditional support even for laws against abortion was by no means completely eroded. In fact, the prolife forces, especially among evangelicals, began to gain momentum. In 1975, as a result of a meeting in the home of evangelist Billy Graham, the Christian Action Council was formed to combat the trend. Right-to-life organizations sprang up in almost every state. In seeking to bring America back to its moral heritage, Moral Majority made abortion a primary concern. Writers like Surgeon General C. Everett Koop (The Right to Live: the Right to Die) and the film by Dr. Koop and Francis Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, aroused many lethargic evangelicals to active support of the prolife position.

Roman Catholic opposition to abortion was also stepped up. In a widely advertised position paper, the American bishops linked abortion on demand with nuclear war as a primary moral issue of our day.

Archbishop John O’Connor of New York has been especially outspoken for more stringent abortion laws; he has called Roman Catholics to act consistently with their faith. In what some felt was a direct attack on vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, he pointedly expressed his disagreement with statements made by her and other Roman Catholics on the matter of abortion. He believed it was impossible to be a consistent Catholic and prochoice.

The influence of Roman Catholic leaders and the newly active evangelicals has significantly buttressed the prolife position. Their antiabortion stand is well thought out, and it obviously stems from the deep moral and religious conviction of people who care. No doubt the growing consensus occasionally received a temporary reversal from irresponsible extremists who bombed hospitals, or, drifting at the fringe of moral responsibility, seemed more concerned to gain headlines than to advance the prolife cause. Yet such setbacks were momentary, and the consensus is still growing.

Statistics Of Mayhem

Undoubtedly, however, the greatest impact on the attitude of the American public did not come directly from these traditional sources. Rather, it arose from the growing awareness of what is really going on. From 8,000 legal abortions in the United States in 1966, the number grew to 400,000 in 1971 and has now soared to 1.6 million annually—about half as many abortions as live births. At least 14 major cities scattered across the United States are recording more abortions than live births, and the total number of abortions for the last decade has reached well over 15 million—two to three times the number of deaths in the ovens at Hitler’s Auschwitz.

As the awesome statistics came bit by bit to public attention, many Americans, though not willing to identify themselves either as conservative Roman Catholics or evangelicals, became appalled. What originally they had seen as part of a broad movement toward freedom they now saw to have gotten completely out of hand.

What further disturbed those who were neither Roman Catholic nor evangelical concerned the increasingly trivial reasons for abortion. John Brown III, president of John Brown University, writes: “Abortions have become a matter of convenience, not of conscience. A pastor told me of a couple who chose to have an abortion because the unexpected pregnancy interferred with vacation plans.” The life of an unborn child is all too often reckoned to have little intrinsic value, and to be disposable at the convenience of the mother. But the twisted morality that leads to such a conclusion has become revolting to many Americans.

On To Infanticide?

The killing of unborn infants, moreover, is by no means the end of the matter. The logic that leads to abortion on demand also leads straight to infanticide. Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse, a medical team writing in the New York Review of Books, declared: “The Prolife groups were right about one thing: the location of the baby inside or outside the womb cannot make such a moral difference. We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus the week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive.” Mary Tedeschi, writing in Commentary, points out where this leads: “Thus, infanticide presents the champions of abortion on demand with an uncomfortable choice. They can either describe events that seem increasingly arbitrary—like ‘viability’ or birth—as the points at which a fetus or baby attains its rights, or they can allow, as the more outspoken ‘ethicists’ already have done, that infanticide, or at least certain instances of it, is as justifiable as abortion.”

In this regard, Joseph Fletcher, the liberal who has long favored situation ethics, writes, “Why stop with the unborn? The only difference between the infant and the fetus is that the infant breathes with its lungs.… If through ignorance or neglect or sheer chance … the damage has not been ended prenatally, why should it not be accordingly ended neo-natally?”

Probably the most famous American case of infanticide is “Baby Doe” of Bloomington, Indiana. He was born with Down’s syndrome, and with a detached esophagus (the latter easily remedied by a simple operation). Lawyer Carl Horn III notes that though many parents petitioned to pay for the necessary medical care and to adopt him, the baby’s parents and the courts rejected all offers. As a result, Baby Doe starved to death.

So the logic that leads to prenatal abortions leads also to freedom to kill newborn babies. It will, in fact, lead to the right to put to death any human being of whatever age if that person becomes a burden to society.

Further, science is more and more making nonsense of the Roe v. Wade guideline on abortion, which many accepted as the enlightened standard for the future. That decision was predicated on the right of the mother to choose to abort up to the time of viability—the sixth or seventh month of pregnancy. But as Sandra Day O’Connor in a dissenting opinion (Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health) notes, “The Roe framework … is clearly on a collision course with itself.” Medical progress is pushing farther and farther back into pregnancy the time at which the fetus is viable. Eighteen-week-old fetuses frequently live outside the womb today, and University of Tennessee researchers predict that in several years they will have perfected an artificial womb capable of sustaining a fetus only a few weeks old. Accordingly, the mother’s freedom to choose whether to bring her child to birth or to kill it is shrinking. Her choice based on the Roe v. Wade principle could soon be practically eliminated.

Politics And Morality

Finally, a conviction is growing on the part of many that it is, indeed, morally right and truly American to make certain moral demands on politicians. A separation between church and state is assuredly guaranteed by our Constitution. But for the good of the state as well as of religion, that separation must never become complete. “Thou shalt not murder” is a religious conviction of all Christians, but it is not wrong to impose it on society. It is the moral duty of conscientious religious citizens to seek to impose certain moral requirements on society—to advance not their own personal religious viewpoint, but the good of society as a whole.

During the last presidential election, Archbishop O’Connor argued for the right of citizens to question a candidate about his stand on abortion, and for the right of a candidate to state his opposition to abortion and his intent to work within the law to bring about a change in the law. There is nothing either un-American or unconstitutional about that. O’Connor asserted: “You have to uphold the law, the Constitutions says. It does not say that you must agree with the law, or that you cannot work to change the law.” He called on Roman Catholics to ask candidates to state that they opposed abortion on demand and were committed to work to modify the permissive interpretations of the Supreme Court.

So the renewed opposition of conservatives and the growing reaction against the excesses of proabortionists have created a significant change of attitude toward abortion and the freedom-of-choice movement that grew so rapidly in the sixties and seventies. A sense of moral outrage is emerging. Things have gone too far too fast. Matters have gotten out of hand. Something must be done.

Denominational Second Thoughts

Consequently, many Protestant groups are taking another look. The Southern Baptist Convention had in 1974 supported the prochoice arguments. But in 1980 it reversed itself, and in June 1984 it passed a resolution opposing abortions even in cases of rape and incest.

In the late sixties and early seventies the United Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Protestant Episcopal Church all passed resolutions favoring a freer attitude toward abortions. But in 1983 the Presbyterian Church (USA) sent study materials to its member congregations urging a review of a statement that had earlier called abortions not only a right but sometimes an “act of faithfulness before God.” In May 1984 the United Methodist Church voted to tighten its previous statement on abortion. This year the Episcopal Church faces a convention battle over abortion; leading the fight will be a new body calling itself the National Organization of Episcopalians for Life (NOEL). Last summer the African Methodist Episcopal Church reaffirmed its opposition to abortions except in cases of rape and incest; and in August 1984 the Lutheran World Federation passed a resolution deploring abortions of “preborn children.”

In May 1984 the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod published an official report (Abortion in Perspective) calling Lutherans back to their biblical moorings against abortion, as reflected in writings of the early church fathers and in the Reformation heritage.

A Question Of Strategy

This new stirring in the older mainline denominations indicates their growing realization that the Christian moral sense extending across the centuries may have been right after all. It may now be possible to reverse the position that has developed over the last two decades. A new consensus is forming. It is clearly against abortions for convenience, and all abortions on demand. There is even some evidence from polls, as President Hesburgh has noted, that the consensus might include laws against abortion except for rape, incest, and serious danger to the mother’s life. (It is estimated that these exceptions account for only ½ of 1 percent of all abortions.)

But there is also abundant evidence that the American people are unprepared to approve any constitutional amendment or any law banning all abortions.

This poses a serious dilemma in strategy for all fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals, and traditional Roman Catholics—that is, for all antiabortion absolutists or near absolutists. Such conservatives agree that most—if not all—abortions are wrong. And so they fear, and rightly so, that any law insufficiently strict will be taken as approval of many morally offensive abortions. In fact, they suspect that such a law might preclude eventual passage of a more just law barring almost all abortions.

Yet Americans now clearly have it in their power to pass legislation outlawing the vast majority of abortions. Meanwhile, the deaths of over a million-and-a-half unborn children take place every year. In this case there appears literally to be a “moral majority” of antiabortionists. If they could agree on a course of action, much of this moral curse on our nation would be removed immediately.

Surely the path of moral and spiritual wisdom would dictate support for a second best. We would refuse to compromise moral conviction, however, because we would still hold our more stringent prolife views. But we would support a less-than-the-best law for the present since it is all that can now be passed. And we would pledge to work for a better law. Not only is this a legitimate area for immediate Christian action, but it would seem a moral imperative for evangelicals in view of the lives hanging in the balance. Accordingly, on more than one occasion the Reverend Jerry Falwell has publicly maintained his willingness to support any law that will reverse the abortion-on-demand, prochoice position now enforced by our courts. We applaud his strategy and warmly commend it to all evangelicals who are more interested in saving lives than in winning a point.

In summary, careful appraisal of the American scene makes evident that no absolutist law or constitutional amendment has the remotest chance of passing in the near future—certainly not in the next four years. But some sort of law that would at least eliminate one of the most frightening issues of our day in its most extreme form—abortion on demand—is within our reach.

Soil is life. Can we preserve it for future generations?

I grew up in the mountains of South India. My parents were missionaries to the tribal people of the hills, and our lives were about as simple as they could be—and as happy.

There were no roads. (We never saw a wheeled vehicle except on our annual visit to the plains.) There were no stores, no electricity, no plumbing. My sister and I ran barefoot, and we made our own games from the trees, sticks, and stones around us. Our playmates were the Indian boys and girls, and our lives were much the same as theirs.

Rice was an important food for all of us. And since there was no level ground for wet cultivation, it was grown all along the streams that ran down the land’s gentle slopes. These slopes had been patiently terraced hundreds of years before; and now every one was perfectly level, and bordered at its lower margin by an earthen dam covered by grass. Each narrow dam served as a footpath across the line of terraces, with a level field of mud and water six inches below its upper edge and another level terrace two feet below. There were no steep or high drop-offs, so there was little danger of collapse.

Those rice paddies were a rich soup of life. When there was plenty of water there would be a lot of frogs and little fish. Egrets would stalk through the paddy fields on their long legs and enjoy the feast. Kingfishers would swoop down with a flash of color and carry off a fish from under the beak of a heron. And it was here I learned my first lesson on conservation.

I was playing in the mud of a rice field with a half-dozen other little boys. We were racing to see who would be the first to catch three frogs. It was a wonderful way to get dirty from head to foot in the shortest possible time. Suddenly, we were all scrambling to get out of the paddy. One of the boys had spotted an old man walking across the path toward us. We all knew him as “Tata,” or “Grandpa.” He was the keeper of the dams. He walked slowly, and was stooped over a bit as though he were always looking at the ground. Old age is very much respected in India, and we boys shuffled our feet and waited in silence for what we knew would be a rebuke.

He came over to us and asked us what we were doing. “Catching frogs,” we answered. He stared down at the churned-up mud and flattened young rice plants in the corner where we had been playing. I was expecting him to talk about the rice seedlings we had just spoiled. Instead, the elder stooped down and scooped up a handful of mud. “What is this?” he asked. The biggest boy took the responsibility of answering for us all.

“It’s mud, Tata,” he replied.

“Whose mud is it?” the old man asked.

“It’s your mud, Tata, this is your field.”

Then the old man turned and looked at the nearest of the little channels across the dam. “What do you see there, in that channel?”

“That is water, running over into the lower field.”

For the first time Tata looked angry. “Come with me and I will show you water.” A few steps along the dam he pointed to the next channel, where clear water was running, “That is what water looks like,” he said. Then we came back to our nearest channel, and he said again “Is that water?”

We hung our heads. “No, Tata, that is mud.” The older boy had heard all this before and did not want to prolong the question-and-answer session, so he hurried on. “And the mud from your field is being carried away to the field below, and it will never come back, becausemud always runs downhill, never up again. We are sorry, Tata, and we will never do this again.”

Tata was not ready to stop his lesson as quickly as that, however. He went on to tell us that just one handful of mud would grow enough rice for one meal for one person, and it would do it twice every year for years and years into the future. “That mud flowing over the dam has given my family food since before I was born, and before my grandfather was born. It would have given my grandchildren and their grandchildren food forever. Now it will never feed us again. When you see mud in the channels of water, you know that life is flowing away from the mountains.”

The old man walked slowly back across the path, pausing a moment to adjust with his foot the grass clod in our muddy channel so that no more water flowed through it. We were silent and uncomfortable as we went off to find some other place to play. I had experienced a dose of traditional Indian folk education that would remain with me as long as I lived. Soil is life, and every generation is responsible for all generations to come.

The Hand Of Man

I have been back to my childhood home several times. There have been changes. A road now links the hill people with the plains folk, but traditional ways still go on. The terraced paddy fields still hold back the mud. Rice still grows. And the old man the boys call “Tata” is now one of the boys I used to play with 65 years ago. I am sure he lays down the law when he catches someone churning up the mud, and I hope the system holds for years to come. I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

The Nilgiri hills, or Blue Mountains, were a favorite resort in the hot season for missionaries from the plains. They were steep and thickly forested, with few areas level enough for cultivation, even with terraces. The forestry service allowed no clearing of the trees except where tea, coffee, or fruit trees were to be planted. These bushes and trees, in turn, held the soil—and all was well.

Thirty years after my encounter with “Tata” I was back in India, a doctor and a missionary myself, with a wife and growing family. We began going to the Nilgiris for every summer holiday, and our children reveled in the cool air and lush forests. But something was different, or soon became so.

A new breed of landowners had begun to take possession of the land. These new “farmers”—former political prisoners who, following India’s independence, were given tracts of land—had not farmed before. They had never been exposed to a Tata teaching them the value of mud. They wanted to make money, and make it fast. They knew the climate was ideal for potatoes, and that there was a market for such a crop. Forests were thus cleared on sloping land, and potatoes planted. Two and even three crops could be harvested per year, and money flowed freely into their purse.

But harvesting potatoes involves turning over the soil, and monsoon rains often came before a new crop could hold that soil. Not surprisingly then, as my family and I returned to those mountains of boyhood memory, the water now looked like chocolate syrup. It oozed rather than flowed. We were seeing rivers of mud. I felt sick.

I went over to ask old Mr. Fritschi and his wife, a dear Swiss couple living in Coonoor on the Nilgiri hills, about the havoc that was being wrought and to find out if there was anything we could do. They had been missionaries of the Basel Mission but were long retired and now owned a nursery of young plants and trees. They loved to help and advise farmers and gardeners about ways to improve their crops. It seemed to me that these devoted people would know if there was some way to advise the landowners about ways to save their soil.

Mr. Fritschi’s eyes were moist as he told me, “I have tried, but it is no use. They have no love of the land, only of money. They are making a lot of money, and they do not worry about the loss of soil, because they think it is away in the future, and they will have money to buy more.” Besides, he continued, they can deduct the loss of land from their income tax as business depreciation.

Thirty more years have passed and we have left India. But every year I go back to visit Vellore Christian Medical College and take part in the leprosy work there. I do not, however, enjoy going back to the Nilgiri hills. I look up to those slopes and see large areas of bare rock of no use to anybody. Those deforested areas that still have some soil look like gravel. And the clear streams and springs that ran off from these areas 60 years earlier are dry today. When the rains come they rush in torrents and flood, then they go dry.

Oh Tata! Where have you gone? You have been replaced by businessmen and accountants who have degrees in commerce and who know how to manipulate tax laws. You have been replaced by farmers who know about pesticides and chemical fertilizers, but who care nothing about leaving soil for their great-grandchildren.

A Worldwide Drama

Outside of India I have seen another drama involving trees, soil, water, and human starvation working its tragic sequence. The place is Ethiopia.

I first came to Ethiopia in the early 1960s when I went to Addis Ababa on behalf of the International Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled. My task was to negotiate the establishment of an all-Africa training center for leprosy workers, with an emphasis on rehabilitation. I met Emperor Haile Selassie and his minister of health, as well the ministers of agriculture and commerce, the dean of the then-new University Medical College, and representatives of American AID and the Rockefeller foundation. Later I went to work in the new training center as a surgeon, teaching reconstruction of the hand and foot. But, as had happened so often in my life, it was the land that caught my attention. Most of our leprosy patients were farmers, and their future had to be in farming if they were not to be dislocated from their families and villages.

The emperor was very gracious as we talked about the problem. He gave us the use of tracts of the royal lands to farm. The Swedish churches had sent farmers into Ethiopia to teach the patients how to farm more efficiently; and it was a joy to see acres of tef, the local food grain, growing to harvest. Patients with leprosy were learning how to work without doing damage to their insensitive hands. We were grateful to the benevolent old emperor, and all seemed to be going well. Gradually, however, we began to see the real problems of that tragic country.

Camping out in the countryside, while visiting distant treatment centers, we were impressed with the way the countryside was fissured with deep canyons where streams had eroded the soil on their way to join the Blue Nile. Farms on the edges of these canyons were having to retreat year by year as their soil slipped away into the rivers. There had once been trees and forests on this land, but the trees had been felled for timber and firewood, and also to make way for grazing and cultivation.

What impressed me most, however, were the poor crops and stony fields that were cultivated by the peasant farmers. Every field seemed to be covered with great stones and boulders. Many of these stones were of a size that could have easily been levered up and rolled away to the edges of the fields where they would have made useful walls to hold the soil in and keep marauders out. As it was, it must have been a constant irritation to have to till and harvest between these rocks.

It did not take much inquiry to find out why such simple improvements had never been made. The peasants knew, and were frank to tell us, that if ever they made their fields look good they would lose them. The ruling race of Amharas, based in the capital city, contained all the lawyers and leaders of the country. Any good piece of land could be claimed by one of the city-dwelling Amharas simply by stating that it had belonged to his ancestors. Supporting documents were easy to obtain. In court the peasant had no chance. His only hope of being allowed to continue farming his land was to make it appear worthless.

Both the Ford foundation and the Rockefeller foundation had considered sending help to teach good farming methods and to halt erosion, but both insisted to the emperor that land reform had to come first. Only if the land were owned by the people who farmed it would it be taken care of in a way that would preserve it for generations to come. The peasants had to have confidence that their handful of mud would still be there for their children. If not, why not let it go down the river?

I believe the emperor wanted to introduce land reform; but if he tried, he failed. The Amharas were too strong for him. The established church, the old Ethiopian Orthodox church of which the emperor was head, had vested interest in the status quo, and was on the wrong side of real justice. This has happened so often in the past, when churches got comfortable and wealthy. We need to be watchful and aware today.

On a state visit to Egypt, Emperor Haile Selassie walked down to the river Nile and kneeled to scoop up two handfuls of the rich fertile mud on its bank. Raising his hands, he said, “My country.” The Blue Nile had carried Ethiopia to Egypt, and the old emperor knew it. He could not send the mud upstream again and he did not have the courage to make the changes that would have arrested further loss.

Today the emperor is dead. Every cabinet minister with whom I negotiated for our training center is dead—they were killed by the firing squads of the revolution. There might not have been a famine today if the trees had not all been cut, if the land had not eroded away, if the absentee landlords of Ethiopia had not been so greedy, and if the church had insisted that justice should prevail.

I did not like the revolution or the foreign invaders who brought it about, but they would never have succeeded if the people had not been laboring under a sense of injustice. The new Marxist government has not suceeded in bringing back the trees or the land, and it has spent its energy in war. But the roots of Ethiopia’s problems stem from generations ago—even before the leaders who have now died for their collective sins.

Kindred Sins

Today I live in Louisiana. I have no soil or water problems. In fact, my topsoil is so deep and so rich that I would not even try to plumb its depth. And the land is so flat that even when it floods my soil stays where it is.

But I cannot be at peace. My home is right beside the Mississippi River. I could probably throw a stone into the water from my roof. My house is an old one and built up on piles. At the time it was built, the occupants would expect to sit on their porch and watch the muddy waters of the Mississippi swirl under the house for a few days each year. If I were to analyze my garden soil, I would find that most of it came from Kansas and Ohio and Iowa and other states upriver. A farmer from Iowa could come to my garden, as the emperor of Ethiopia did in Egypt, scoop up a handful of mud, and say, “My farm!”

But no mud comes from Iowa to my garden now. The corps of engineers has built a dam, or levee, all along the bank of the river, so the mud runs straight out to sea. During the spring floods, I walk along the levee and look at that mud. They tell me that many whole farms flow past my house every hour. I know that Iowa has lost more than half its topsoil just in the hundred or so years since Americans started farming that land.

Because I am haunted by the mountains of India and by the erosion of Ethiopia, I have to ask why American farmers still lose soil. They tell me they know all about contour plowing, but say modern farming machinery is so big that it is impossible or uneconomic to plow around contours. So they just go straight up and down. They get it done faster—and lose the soil faster. This all gives better returns to the shareholders, and improves all the market indicators. Shareholders and members of the board are today’s absentee landlords of the farm. They are not farmers. They tell me that only small family farms still do contour plowing, but they are going out of business. Big companies are buying them up, so they can use “efficient” methods.

They tell me that the American forests are replanted when they are cut, and I think that is probably true. But I also understand that wide clear-cutting is practiced even on steep slopes. It is a matter of pride that every part of every tree is used for timber or pulp or chipboard when it is cut. But then, nothing goes back into the land. There is no building of the soil, just depletion.

My Mississippi River is also the site now of scores of petrochemical plants and herbicide factories. I have chemical plants to my right and industrial plants to my left. (The proximity of the river is convenient for getting water to cooling towers and receiving effluents.) All the trees downwind have turned white and died. They tell me it was fluorides, but it could have been any one of the effluents that have given parts of Louisiana the highest incidence of cancer in the country. Ten years ago all the cattle in this area were declared unfit to sell for beef because of unacceptable levels of tetrachlorme thane in their fat. I wonder what the levels are in me and my family.

I look at the great Mississippi and think back to the days of Huckleberry Finn and his raft, when the river was largely water and fish. I look down now at the swirling mud and see it as no better than the Blue Nile, or the Cauvery River in India that carries mud from the Nilgiri Hills. Is there a common thread? It is not ignorance in all cases. Nor is it dire poverty (although that sometimes leads to the cutting of the trees for fuel). No, there would be enough for all if it were not for greed. More profit. Faster return on investment. A bigger share for me of what is available now, but may not be available tomorrow.

God has something to say to us about this. And he said it repeatedly by his prophets. Moses described in detail the care of the land in Leviticus 25. It was to be nurtured and given a regular sabbath year of rest. It was never to be sold on a permanent basis but regarded as a trust from the Lord. “The earth is [the Lord’s], … and you are sojourners …” (vs. 23). Later, Isaiah pronounces God’s judgment: “The earth dries up and withers, the whole earth grows sick; … the earth itself is desecrated by the feet of those who live in it, because they have broken the laws … and violated the eternal covenant (24:4–5, NEB). Hosea adds: “Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying” (4:3, NIV). God is concerned about his creation and looks to us whom he put in charge of it. We are to share in its redemption (Rom. 8:21), not be agents of its destruction.

My Legacy

I would gladly give up medicine tomorrow if by so doing I could have some influence on policy with regard to mud and soil. The world will die from lack of pure water and soil long before it will die from a lack of antibiotics or surgical skill and knowledge. But what can be done if the destroyers of our earth know what they are doing and do it still? What can be done if people really believe that free enterprise has to mean absolute lack of restraint on those who have no care for the future?

I cannot, however, conclude without a small balance of joy and an indication that God still has a church that produces people who care. In the final analysis it is not knowledge or lack of it that makes a difference, but concerned people. The sense of concern for the earth is still transmitted by person-to-person communication and by personal example better than by any other method. Old Tata still lives on. He lives in the boys who played in the mud, and they will pass on his concern for the soil and his sense of its importance to future generations.

Old Mr. Fritschi still lives on through his son. The love of trees he tried to promote in the Nilgiri hills is now being promoted by his son on the plains at Karigiri. A single dedicated person giving a good example is better than a lot of wringing of hands and prophecies of doom.

Ernest Fritschi was born in India and lived there long enough to love it, take Indian nationality, and marry a lovely Indian wife. He studied in Madras University, became a doctor, and then an orthopedic surgeon. Working with leprosy patients, he joined the Leprosy Mission and worked in many countries, including Ethiopia, and then became director of the Schieffelin Research and Training Center at Karigiri near Vellore.

The land for the center had been barren gravel with not a tree anywhere, and water had been hard to locate. I remember walking over the large acre-age before we started to build and thinking that it was no surprise the government had donated it so freely. It was good for nothing else.

Ernest, however, had faith in the land and was determined to prove that it could be productive of more than buildings and a hospital. Other directors had made a good start, but Ernest made a rule for himself that every year he would plant trees. He collected seeds and seedlings from everywhere and nourished them in his own garden until they were strong. Then he would plant them out just before the rains, and have them watered by staff and patients until they had root systems deep enough to survive. The hill that formed one border of the Karigiri land was bare and rocky, and the rains would send a rushing flood of water over the gravel of the hospital grounds. So Ernest built contour ridges of gravel and soil to hold the water long enough for it to soak in.

I remember the hospital and its surrounding staff houses and chapel as they grew. They were grey and white and stood out on the skyline. They could be seen for miles as the only structures breaking the monotony of the gravel slopes. Today, as I approach that hospital, it is hidden in a forest with trees higher than the tallest buildings. The place has been declared a sanctuary by the environmental department of the state government in recognition of what already exists. The whole area is full of birds; we counted and identified over 40 species in one afternoon. The water table, falling in most places, was rising last year under the gravel at Karigiri. Soil is building, not being lost.

What is a few acres among the millions where the reverse is true? It is important to me because it sounds a message. One man can make a difference. Dedication is what is needed. And faith. It is important, too, because the man who made this little revolution is not a professional farmer or a government official. He is a doctor who loves trees, soil, and water. He was sometimes criticized by his board of governors who said his goals and objectives should be to treat and rehabilitate leprosy patients. Money, they argued, should not be diverted to other goals, like farming and reforestation. But he proved that concern for soil and trees benefits patients too. Buildings do not need air conditioning when they are shaded by trees. Patients who see and participate in good practices on the land learn to reproduce the same when they go home.

Not far from there is the Christian Medical College, founded by the beloved American doctor Ida Scudder. She insisted on building the college on an extensive piece of land where there would be room for gardens and trees. She was followed by others who had the same view, including the first Indian director, Dr. Hilda Lazarus, who doubtless had claims to fame in her own medical specialty but whom I remember for her love of trees.

Dr. Lazarus is long gone, but her trees and philosophy remain. In my day we used to get excited and concerned about new drugs and new diagnostic equipment, but today when I visit the Christian Medical College, I find the director more likely to be excited about preserving the water table, and growing the right kind of crops and preserving the soil. This is health, and this is hope for the future. There is still life in the land, and God still blesses those who recognize “the earth is the Lord’s.”

I am a grandfather now. My grandchildren do not call me Tata, but I rather wish they would. It would not mean much to them, but it would remind me that, in addition to the immortality of our spirit, we all have a sort of immortality of our flesh. If the kids called me Tata, it would remind me that, down the centuries, there may be many generations of people who will bear my humanity, who will enjoy life, or who will suffer in proportion to the care that I now take to preserve the good gifts that God has given us. Part of that care is in teaching and in example.

My grandson is called Daniel, and the next time he comes to visit me I shall take him out into my garden and scoop up a handful of mud. I shall ask him, “Daniel, what is this?”

The “Moral” Land

As I read the neglected book of Leviticus recently, I was struck by the fact that Levitical laws on the Sabbath also applied to the land—as much for the land’s sake, it appears, as the people’s. What turned out to be good agriculture is in fact presented as an act of worship: “The land itself must observe a sabbath to the Lord” (Lev. 25:1–7).

Astonishingly, numerous passages in Leviticus portray the land as having almost a “personal relationship” with God. It is even sometimes personified with its own moral nature. For example, God explained to Moses that the Canaanites had defiled the land so greatly that he had to punish it for its sin! The land responded by vomiting out its inhabitants (18:25; 20:22). “And if you defile the land,” God warned, “it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you” (18:28). (Interestingly, the prophet Hosea also describes a travailing land: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land … because of this the land mourns” [Hos. 4:1–3].)

In contrast, if the Israelites did not defile it, the land would respond with fecundity, and overflow with milk and honey (20:24). In his final summing up, as God swore that he would remember the Abrahamic covenant, he added,” and I will remember the land” (26:42). The remembrance would continue even after the children of Israel had been expelled from the Promised Land: “For the land will be deserted by them and will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them” (26:43).

Checks And Balances

God gave Moses an extraordinary reason why he wouldn’t let the Israelites conquer the inhabitants of Canaan all at once. It would take some time, he said, because otherwise “the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you” (Exod. 23:29). In other words, he didn’t want to disrupt the ecological balance of the land.

Handling With Care

Some of the laws in Deuteronomy express a gentle respect for nature. For example, a person who happened upon a bird’s nest with a nesting mother could take the young bird but not the mother “so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life” (Deut. 22:6). Also, contemplate the phrasing in this regulation to an army laying siege to a city: “Do not cut them [trees] down. Are the trees of the field men, that you should besiege them?” (Deut. 20:19).

Creation Laughter

Unfortunately, the creation/evolution debate, with its emphasis on scientific detail and theory, has tended to obscure one of the most basic facts about Creation: it was a time of great joy in the heavens. Nowhere is this better expressed than in God’s magnificent speech in Job, chapters 38–41. There, God reveals Creation as a time when “the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy” (38:7).

One by one, God calls forward examples of his wildest creations: the lioness, the mountain goat, the wild donkey, the wild ox, the ostrich, the horse, the hawk. He seems to take greatest pride in their very untameability. The wild donkey, for example, “laughs at the commotion in the town” (39:7). As for the wild ox, will he be “content to serve you? Will he stay by your manger at night?” (39:9). And of the mysterious leviathan, God says, “Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?” (41:5).

We would do well to consider these words, and what they reveal about our Creator, as we risk the extinction of “useless” species.

He Keeps investing in unworthy stock—take Mozart.

The film Amadeus presents Mozart as a superlatively gifted jerk. He preens and wenches and giggles absurdly. He scorns the dullness of other people’s music and praises the brilliance of his own. He uses his wonderful mind for such inventive crudities as talking dirty backwards. And day after day he creates music of such soaring, yearning, seamless beauty that it splits his rival Antonio Salieri into two persons—one of them wanting to worship and one wanting to kill.

For Salieri is the prince of mediocrity, the patron saint of every epigone who must live with the knowledge that by comparison with genius he is outstandingly so-so. Salieri knows that Mozart is a sun to his candle, a torrent to his trickle. By a classic irony of envy, Salieri is in fact just gifted enough to appreciate and thus to resent Mozart’s greatness.

He resents it especially because he had wanted such a gift for himself. Half devoted to God, half to himself, Salieri had ached for a sublime talent that would reflect back to God the effulgence of the divine beauty and simultaneously make the reflector celebrated and immortal. Salieri, that is, had run for election as the voice of God. God’s response was to place his treasure in an obscene brat. Thus the musical incarnation of the glory of God (“Amadeus” means, of course, beloved of God) prances through the film with a coprophagous grin on his face; the smaller rival must wear what Angus Wilson once called “the painful grimace of sour good loserliness.”

Envy is poisonous enough when it peevishly refuses to concede that a rival has earned his success. But what if the rival hasn’t? What if the staggering greatness of another is a sheer gift?

A pervasive theme of Scripture is that God’s choice of vessels is incalculable. He elects the shifty, tainted Jacob rather than his more dependable brother. He elevates an eventually lustful, murderous David over an understandably envious Saul. He chooses Israel, prompting the puzzled jingle of un- and anti-Semitic observers: “How odd of God / To choose the Jews.” Augustine and Calvin speak with similar wonder about Jesus Christ: “Whence did that man deserve to be the only-begotten Son of God?” Their answer? He didn’t. He was graciously elected to the position through no merit of his own. It has to be admitted that Augustine and Calvin’s Christology sounds suspiciously adoptionist or Nestorian at this point. It sounds either as if the person Jesus Christ had been promoted from mere humanity to divinity or else as if somehow the man Jesus were at one time a different person from the Son of God. Still, the general theme runs deep in Scripture: Where humanity is concerned, God keeps investing in unworthy stock.

One of the great mysteries of divine grace is that it lodges itself in stables; it packs its treasures into earthen vessels; it makes itself heard here and there in the midst of four-letter words. And it chooses for Incarnation a humanity “without beauty or majesty to attract us.” How odd of God. We do not understand his choices or his ways. How much more fitting if he had chosen one of us! How much more edifying if God’s gift had been properly packaged! From Joseph’s brothers to Herod to the Pharisees to Judas, our response to God’s greatness incarnate in other human beings is curiosity turning to envy turning to murder.

Toward the end of Mozart’s life, Salieri works up a scheme. He will trick Mozart into writing a great requiem mass, kill him, and then pretend authorship of Mozart’s wondrous music when it is played at the great man’s funeral. At a stroke Salieri can thus vindicate himself as a composer and take revenge on God who had chosen an undeserving vessel. In order to triumph in this way Salieri must concede defeat. He must seize and use and take to himself the very greatness that has made his life hell. But once more a surprising God intervenes. Mozart dies before completing the mass. Salieri’s bitter conclusion: God chose to kill his beloved son rather than let him share his gift with another.

Here is half a gospel for all of us who reverence the Incarnation. Like Salieri we can profit from it only vicariously, only by magnificent defeat of our own pretensions and by humbling attachment to this other person, this truly incarnate one, this truly godly one. His godliness, his Christ-life, his divine beauty must become ours. We are only candles to his original light.

But then, in fact, God’s gift does become ours. The advent and death of God’s beloved Son does open the treasure house for all God’s children. Salieri was bitterly wrong. The gospel he missed is trumpeted by Paul: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift.

They do not force their lessons on us, so we often fail to learn from them.

These days, couples who have decided against having children are often strikingly can did about it. We may be shocked at the casual way they measure the value of children against winter sports, trips to Europe, and careers.

It was the moment it dawned on our three-year-old that everybody dies that put the matter into perspective for me. An old friend had died suddenly, and Beth had been told about Ollie Mae going to heaven. For a few weeks Beth could be heard praying out loud, “God I love you and please don’t die me until I’m very old.” Once at the dinner table she blurted out, “I don’t want to go to heaven; I just want to stay in this world with you and Mommy forever.” In moments like those it comes home to you what you’ve brought into the world: a soul like yourself, caring infinitely for life, categorically hating the idea of not existing—a being absolutely not to be compared with ski trips and flexibility of schedule and career continuity.

Children signal a change in your life from which you will never wholly recover. Initially it is a change from being footloose to being able to go out only rarely—and only then with the hassles of finding a decent baby sitter, and of having your “free” time at home reduced to that evasive hiatus between the moment you get the last child cajoled, pajamaed, peed, tucked in, storied, kissed, watered, and prayed with, and the time, 45 minutes later, when you flop exhausted on your bed and sink into that similitude of death from which you will not rise until the wails from the crib commence at about 2 A.M. Yes, if you’ve been used to spur-of-the-moment outings for pizza, visits with friends, and trips to the hardware store, there is no doubt that having children represents a radical change in your life.

In one degree or another, this change is both inevitable and obvious to everybody. But there is another kind of change that children can bring on—not inevitable, and not so obvious. It is a kind of spiritual growth that, if it occurs (and it doesn’t always occur), is a blessed by-product of parenthood, a debt of deepened humanity that parents owe to God for the privilege of being given children to rear.

Jesus dares to commend to us the lilies of the field and the birds of the air as spiritual teachers. They are there, for those who have eyes to see, as reminders of truths that often evade us. Like the lilies and birds, children do not force their lessons on us; witness the fact that so many of us fail to learn from them. And yet they are not like books of wisdom that sit silently on the shelf waiting—maybe for years and then finally in vain—for us to open them. Nor are they like lilies that present themselves only at one season of the year and then perhaps only if we go out for a walk. Having children in your house is like having books that climb down off the shelves, jump into your lap, and demand to be read daily, nay hourly and by the minute. It is like having lilies and birds that sit at your table and interrogate you year-round about your soul.

The avoidance of children, so greatly facilitated by birth control, abortion, and day-care centers, is not the unmixed blessing that some take it to be. Indeed, as a basic outlook and policy, it is a deathly curse. Some couples, after falling into spiritual laxity, have scurried back into the bosom of the church upon the wife’s pregnancy. Children enhance our sense of vulnerability, and so may incline us toward greater dependence on God. Knowing that in our children our stake in the well-being of this planet extends beyond the years of our own life may provoke a greater sense of responsibility about the environment. And of course, child rearing is an excellent school—even better than Harvard—for learning the virtues of patience and self-control. But right now I want to dwell on just three of the countless ways the presence of children among us can be a force for deepening our spirituality, transforming our vision, and fitting our hearts for God’s kingdom. Children can remind us of the fundamental importance of love, of our kinship with every human being, and of our need for eternity.

One reason we flee the company of children is the pursuit of achievement—the doing of business, the building of careers—in short, “becoming something in this world.” If you let children become a serious part of your life, they will inevitably “slow you down.” But as Christians we know that this pursuit is at best secondary and at worst the formula for loss of selfhood. The apostle Paul, thinking of church-related powers and achievements, even some enormously heroic ones, warns against their emptiness:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:1–3).

If spiritual emptiness and loss of self are possible for the most eloquent evangelists and preachers of the gospel, and for Christian prophets and miracle workers and martyrs, how much more for people who give themselves without reservation to money making, intellectual brilliance, medical and political careers, fame, and influence? And being a Christian business person or politician is no guarantee against the danger. As Paul makes abundantly clear, even if these things are done in a Christian context and for Christian goals, the danger remains that in God’s eyes, they may amount to absolutely nothing.

If you live with a three-year-old, it is more difficult to fall into thinking of life as the pursuit of one or another achievement. A three-year-old does not judge her worth by her achievements or by her parents’ achievements; she judges this fundamentally by whether she is cherished. This is what she “demands,” what her unenculturated nature wants from life. When her daddy looks into her eyes, centers down into her presence and converses with her, his achievement mentality fades into the background, and life is focused in something more like the perspective of God. In the presence of this child, who so simply desires to be cherished, the daddy whose heart meets her need momentarily becomes “something”—the opposite of the “nothing” to which the apostle refers.

Of course, your humanity can be achieved without children; you might, for example, try loving your neighbor. But my point is that children are an especially compelling object of love. Despite the resistance we sometimes put up, there is something natural to us about loving children. And so they become a primary focus of our humanity in a world where there is so little of it. Our homes, where our children dwell, are like oases and special schools in which love is learned, love for its own sake, from which, with effort, we can go out into the world and see it more humanly.

We are sometimes told that Christian love is not a matter of liking people; after all, we are called upon to love “neighbors” with whom we have no natural ties of affection, and even enemies. And so we get a picture of Christian love as a kind of gritting our teeth and doing our cold duty toward people who mean nothing, or less than nothing, to us. You are supposed to love without having your heart in it, and if you care too much about people, there is even the suspicion that your love is not genuinely Christian. But this picture is false to the New Testament. Jesus is said to have had compassion on a mixed crowd (Mark 6:34) and on a presumably unknown leper who came to him (Mark 1:41). His demeanor toward people is in general not that of a man doing his cold duty, but one of affection. And the apostle tells us to be “tenderhearted” to one another (Eph. 4:32).

There are few places in life where being tenderhearted is as naturally powerful in us as in our role as parents. The psalmist, wanting to describe God’s compassion for his people, chooses the familial image: “As a father pities his children …” (Ps. 103:13). In the New Testament there is no writing that more exudes tenderheartedness than the First Letter of John. It is infused with the affection this old man feels for his disciples. Nor is it an accident that he repeatedly addresses them as “my children.” It is as though John’s family life has given him a way of “seeing,” an emotional matrix through which to perceive his friends. We take a natural joy in the well-being of our children, and a natural sorrow in their troubles. Here, if anywhere in life, we feel that organic connection with other human beings that means that we suffer when they suffer and rejoice when they rejoice (1 Cor. 12:26).

These facts suggest a spiritual exercise. Let us say that you come in contact with a morally disreputable person, a selfish, calloused, militaristic, and deceitful person—you who are a parent. He is not one toward whom you are naturally disposed to be “tenderhearted,” but in Christ you are called to love him. And this means, in part, to be tenderhearted toward him. The exercise is this. Contemplate him (that is, look at him, listen to him, or just think about him) with your child’s help. Thinking of your own child, remember that this man was once a child, one who desired above all else acceptance, security, warmth of affection. Look at him now, but picture him as the age of your own little one.

In doing so, you will see through the calluses to that central core of personality around which so much thorny growth has accumulated. You will see beyond the cruelty and ruthless ambition to the essential human passion of which it is so ugly a perversion—the passion for acceptance and love, for an identity of his own. A certain tenderheartedness—of your human kinship with even this person—will supervene upon you when you remember where this man has come from: he has come from a childhood, in essential ways like the one in which your little boy is now sojourning. As Franz Kafka put it, “A man’s embittered features are often only the petrified bewilderment of a boy.”

This past Christmas we took our annual trip to Wichita to visit my parents. My 78-year-old father renewed his acquaintance with my one-year-old daughter. The human distance between these two close relatives was, of course, striking: the fresh, soft-skinned young one, plump as a transparent grape, just starting out in life; and my father, the raisin, with so many years behind him—“many years” by a certain myopic human way of reckoning things, that is. In a short time (as the history of the world goes), my little daughter will herself be an old woman, bouncing a beaming baby upon her knee.

“A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever” (Eccl. 1:4).

With our modern machines of war we are less certain than the Preacher that the Earth will remain “forever.” But that the generations pass away—of that there is no doubt. And the coming of the new generation, those little bunk dwellers and Hot Wheels riders who soon will take our place as the “productive members of society,” remind us of our own passing, and also of theirs. In reminding us, they also make the fact more poignant by the beauty of their enthusiasm, their heedless zeal for life, their astonishing aptitude for wisdom and folly, their sheer lovability. Indeed, to love children is to love life, not like an egoist who cringes in the face of his own annihilation, but like a connoisseur who appreciates the treasure for its intrinsic worth. And so, finally, children can help us learn a right appreciation for the gospel of Jesus Christ, the message of redemption and eternal life. Without that message the beauty of children would compel another conclusion:

“All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.… I have seen everything that is done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl. 1:8, 14).

Clinging to Christ we are not forced, in beholding the unutterable value of life, to conclude that all is vanity, and that creation—at least from our point of view—is a colossal bad joke. In him the delectable goodness of human life, so vividly exampled in our children, becomes something in which we can take joy without reservation.

I’d been working hard clearing brush for several hours in the mountains and decided to reward myself with a sandwich. Sitting down on a log, I unwrapped the sandwich and surveyed the rugged scenery around me. It was a familiar scene of natural beauty, and one of which I never tired. Two turbulent mountain streams joined to form a clear, deep pool before roaring down a cataract into a heavily wooded canyon. My idyll would have been perfect had it not been for a persistent bee that became attracted to my sandwich. She was of the common variety that plagues picnickers and buzzes around open garbage containers. Without thinking, I brushed her away. Not in the least intimidated, she came back and settled on the exact spot on the sandwich that I was about to bite. This time I shook her off and batted her to the ground. Before she could recover, I ground her into the sand with my cleated boot.

A few moments later, I was startled by a minor explosion of sand at my feet, and my tormentor emerged from what I thought had been her final resting place, with her wings buzzing furiously. This time I took no chances. I stood up and ground her into the sand with all my 210 pounds. Satisfied that this was indeed the coup de grace, I once more sat down to enjoy the rest of my lunch.

After several minutes, I became aware of a slight movement near my feet. A broken, but still living bee was feebly emerging from the compacted sand. Beguiled by her remarkable survival, I leaned down to survey the damage. As she weakly flexed her broken wings, I could see that her right wing had several fragments missing from the edges, though it was relatively intact. The left wing, however, was crumpled like a crushed piece of paper and had gaping holes in it. Nevertheless, the bee kept exercising her wing slowly, up and down, as though she were assessing the damage. Her thorax and abdomen were still encrusted with sand. She began to groom herself. Next, she turned her attention to the crumpled left wing, rapidly smoothing it out by running her legs down the length of it. After each straightening session, she buzzed her wings as if to test the improvement in the lift. This hopeless cripple thought she could still fly!

By now the bee had completely captured my attention, and I got down on my hands and knees to see better her futile attempts at rehabilitation. Closer scrutiny confirmed my earlier assumption. She was finished. She must be finished. I reminded myself that my judgment on these matters was not to be taken lightly. After all, I was a veteran pilot myself and knew a good deal about the principle of wings. I had experienced a thousand flights beyond the understanding of her rudimentary senses. But the bee paid no attention to my superior wisdom. If anything, she seemed to be gaining strength and increasing the tempo of her repairs.

By repeatedly stroking her crumpled left wing, she was gradually restoring its original shape. The broken veins that stiffen the gossamer wing were nearly straight now. But I saw no way for her to restore the gaping holes. But then she did a remarkable thing. She flattened the wing out on the sand and by contorting her lower abdomen over it, began to emit a clear, thick fluid. Like a model plane enthusiast doping fabric over wing spars, she carefully glazed over the missing portions of the wing. The emitted material must have dried quickly because she began to trial buzz her wings almost immediately. Time after time she added a bit of her special adhesive here and there to correct what she sensed was needed for strength and balance.

At last the bee felt sufficiently confident to attempt a trial flight. With an audible buzz, she released her grip on the earth and flew straight into a slight rise in the sand not more than three inches away. She hit so hard she actually tumbled. More frantic smoothing and flexing of the wing followed. She continued to twist her stinger over the wings to deposit the fluid, but in noticeably more delicate dosage. Once more, she lifted off and flew parallel to the ground for about six inches before she hit another small mound of sand. Apparently she had regained the lift in her wings, but had not mastered the unfamiliar feel of the directional control.

Each flight was straight ahead, and she hit objects that could have been easily avoided by a slight change in direction. Like a pilot learning the peculiarities of a strange airplane, she experimented with short hops that ended ignominiously in rough, unplanned landings. After each crash landing, she worked furiously to correct newly discovered deficiencies in the wing structure.

Again she took off, this time clearing the small irregularities in the sand, but headed straight for a stump. Narrowly avoiding the stump, she checked her forward speed, circled, and then drifted over the mirrorlike surface of the pool as if to admire her own reflection. I realized that I was still on my knees.

And I remained on my knees for some time.

Several current cases may well result in greater latitude; an analysis by Samuel Ericsson.

My son Ryan and I build scale models together, following step-by-step directions to the letter and producing a replica that looks just like—well, almost—the picture on the box. In our computer age, you can build a model of almost anything, even if it exists only in the imagination of the designer. However, there is one famous image in the collective American consciousness that has defied model makers for 200 years: it is the “wall of separation” between church and state.

That may change this year, however, as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a record ten cases involving the separation of church and state. The cases deal with religious rights issues, including questions of religious expression in public life, but none of the cases relates to abortion, infanticide, or euthanasia.

The shape of a new church-and-state model is not fully discernible yet. But recent decisions point toward greater accommodation of religious expression in American life. The religion clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution say: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The words appear so simple. Yet there is a growing concern—and abundant confusion—as to just what those 16 words mean.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that tensions exist between the two clauses, known as the “establishment clause” and the “free exercise clause.” In the first 150 years following the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the high court reviewed only four cases involving these clauses. The ten church-and-state cases on the Court’s docket this year signal that significant changes have been occurring. In order to understand the current tension better, and the changes that have brought it about, we need to examine American history, much of which has been forgotten or misconstrued.

Three God-Ordained Institutions

The Bible teaches that God has ordained three primary institutions for society: the family, the church, and the government. Since God designed and established these institutions, each is intended for our use and for his glory. But sin corrupts institutions as well as men. And so these institutions often compete for turf, intruding into the domain of the others.

Our perception of how these institutions should relate to one another will determine how we respond to issues in the church-and-state arena. If our perception is askew, the results may be devastating.

Some argue that the ideal model is one of “absolute separation” of church and state. That model is flawed because it fails to acknowledge that government, church, and family must coexist and interrelate. Society is best served when relationships and interactions among the three institutions are harmonious and in balance.

The absolute separation mindset leads inevitably to polarization. Soon we have two camps that are deeply antagonistic to each other. The family, as the weakest of the three, often becomes the rope in a tug-of-war between the two stronger institutions of church and state. Strident separationists have spoken up vigorously in recent years, yet their model has never been favored in America, nor could it work in practice.

Another option for a church-state-family model places one institution in a dominant role over the others. Advocates of this approach favor it only so long as their own institution is on top.

Early in our nation’s history, the church in many cases was given a dominant position. At least eight states were colonized in part by people fleeing religious persecution. What often is forgotten is that in some colonies, and even some states, the persecuted became the persecutors once they gained a dominant position.

In 1606, for example, the Virginia colony’s charter made the practice of Catholicism and Quakerism capital crimes. And Boston, founded by Puritans fleeing persecution in England, banished religious dissidents like Baptist Roger Williams. They even hanged some banished Quakers who dared to return.

Patrick Henry, a lawyer, represented many Baptist preachers in northern Virginia who were thrown in jail about the time of the American Revolution. The clergymen were jailed for refusing to get a license to preach from the official state church, the Episcopal church, which also demanded a tithe from the Baptists.

Nine of the 13 original colonies recognized official state churches. After the Revolutionary War, the original 13 states did not seek to disestablish the five state churches that remained even after the U.S. Constitution was adopted. The official state church model finally vanished from the American scene with the Congregational church giving up its preferred status in Massachusetts in 1832.

From Statehood To Nationhood

The Civil War settled the question of whether we were a nation united or merely a conglomeration of separate states. The Thirteenth Amendment struck down slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, sought to assure procedural equality for all Americans through our legal system. As America moved into the twentieth century with the Industrial Revolution at full speed, factors such as our increasing mobility and exposure to national communications media began to mold us into a nation of Americans. As we became less regionalized and more Americanized, our political, social, and economic institutions became more centralized.

Law also became more centralized and standardized as the Supreme Court sought to adjust to the societal changes that were taking place. The Court began to focus on the “liberty” portion of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The high court was asking which liberties are so fundamental to each American that no state may take them away without proper legal process. The logical place to find such a list, of course, was in the Bill of Rights. Over the past 60 years, the Supreme Court nationalized basic freedoms such as those of speech, press, and assembly, declaring that all levels of government—federal, state, and local—may not tread on these basic rights.

The Supreme Court began to focus on the religion clauses in 1941, declaring that the rights we enjoy under the First Amendment’s free exercise clause shall not vary from state to state. In 1947, the Court declared the same to be true for the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Prior to these key decisions, each state had free rein, restrained only by its state constitution, to develop its own law regarding church and state. Some states were more tolerant, while others clearly preferred certain religious labels.

Federal court judges soon found themselves with their hands full as they began to apply federal First Amendment standards to relationships that had developed over decades and even centuries between state and local governments and religious institutions. The results have not always been consistent, and changes have not always been eagerly embraced. Nonetheless, church-and-state law had entered a new era by 1947.

The Supreme Court as well saw an increase in the number of church-and-state cases following its 1941 and 1947 rulings. Those cases generally fall into three areas: government aid to religion, public acknowledgement of religion, and claims of individuals or religious groups to be free from state regulation. The first two categories are considered establishment clause cases, while the last category comes within the orbit of the free exercise clause.

The Elusive Wall

In the 1947 case holding that all levels of government are bound by the First Amendment’s establishment clause, Justice Hugo Black wrote the famous lines that soon became the standard for examining future cases. Black introduced the “wall of separation” metaphor in the most frequently quoted paragraph of any Supreme Court religion case:

“The First Amendment means at least this: neither a state nor the federal government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.… No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they might be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the federal government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between church and state.’ … The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. The wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”

From the outset, however, the wall was neither high nor impregnable. In the case that introduced the “wall” metaphor, Justice Black did not find that wall breached by allowing public funds to be used to pay transportation costs of children enrolled in church schools.

The church-and-state model that the Supreme Court has based its decisions on over the past 40 years recognizes areas of shared responsibility among three institutions: family, church, and government. Each of these institutions has exclusive areas of responsibility. For example, the family alone has the right to determine its own size; the state has the right to bear the sword and establish a police force; and the church should be left free to determine its own doctrine and choose its own leaders.

In some areas, two institutions may share jurisdiction. For example, the family and the church have a shared responsibility for evangelism and spiritual nurture of the faithful. The government does not share that responsibility. However, on issues such as health requirements and child labor laws, family and state interact.

There is a cluster of issues in which all three institutions claim a legitimate interest. Those issues define our sense of community—that which we have in common unity, such as education, morals, values, civil and human rights. It is in this cluster of issues where the conflict over turf and influence heats up most intensely.

In large part, the Supreme Court’s decisions on religion in the past four decades have tried to recognize that the three God-ordained institutions are to remain separate, even though they inevitably interact with one another on many issues. There are several guidelines or tests the Court applies to make this model work. These tests usually make good sense.

The First Test

In cases involving the free exercise clause, the Court requires an individual or group to show a sincerely held religious belief that is burdened or infringed upon by government action. Once these facts are established, the government must justify its action by proving that it has a “compelling state interest” that outweighs religious belief or exercise.

A classic free-exercise case is before the Supreme Court this term, pitting the Ten Commandments against the First Amendment in an interesting duel. The case involves Frances Quaring, a Nebraska woman who refuses to be photographed. She holds to a literal reading of the Second Commandment, which forbids any “graven image or likeness.” The state of Nebraska refuses to give her a driver’s license until she submits to a photograph.

The sincerity of Quaring’s belief is not an issue in this case. She does not own a television, has no family photographs, and will not allow into her home any pictures, drawings, or graphic designs based on any animal or other living creature.

Lower federal courts agreed with Quaring, saying Nebraska must make an exception to the photo requirement in order to respect her religious principle. They reasoned that such exceptions will occur so infrequently that they will not unduly burden the system. But Nebraska argues that obtaining a driver’s license is a privilege, not a right, so people like Quaring may properly be asked to choose between the inconvenience of not having a driver’s license and the stress of behaving contrary to their beliefs. It seems likely that the high court will find the state of Nebraska to have the weaker argument, and will require the state to accommodate Quaring’s beliefs.

The Three-Part Test

Most religion cases arriving at the Supreme Court’s counter involve the establishment clause. Justice Black’s use of Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” metaphor may have revived an old phrase, but it has not been very helpful in making decisions. Instead, the test applied most consistently by the high court in deciding establishment clause cases is known as the “three-part test.”

The first question it poses is whether a law or state action has a secular purpose. The second test is whether the primary effect of the action either advances or inhibits religion. The third prong is whether the law or state action results in excessive entanglement between religion and government.

The results of this test are somewhat ambivalent, because the Supreme Court has ignored the test in a number of key cases where tradition and notions of historical accommodation won out. In 1983, the Court upheld a Nebraska tradition of paying for a chaplain to serve in its state legislature. It would seem that programs where the state pays the salary of a chaplain whose primary function is religious would violate all three prongs of the three-part test. Yet the Court did not mention the test at all in reaching its decision, noting that the “unique history” of the chaplaincy program preserved its constitutionality.

The historical exception approach may be one way the Court will seek to accommodate traditional activities that are not generally perceived by Americans as a breach of the “wall of separation.”

Accommodation: Model Of The Future?

The first clear signal of a shift toward more accommodation of religion came in the landmark case of Widmar v. Vincent, decided by the Court in 1981. The case involved a group of Christian students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City that was denied the right to meet on campus for a student-initiated and student-led Bible study. The university claimed that the wall of separation prevented these students from enjoying the same privileges as all other student groups, including a gay group that had won the right to meet by court order. The Christian group, Cornerstone, sued, and the Supreme Court ruled that public universities may not discriminate on the basis of the religious content of speech if it allows other groups to meet.

Widmar sent this signal: Religion may not be denigrated to second-class status in the public forum of ideas. Religion is to be on an equal footing as long as the state does not put its official imprimatur on a particular brand of religion. Thus, after more than three decades of focusing on separation, the Court began to consider concepts of accommodation and equal treatment.

This shift was apparent last year in a Supreme Court case involving a city-sponsored nativity scene in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The crèche was displayed each year along with a variety of other exhibits, including a Santa Claus house and a Christmas tree. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Court virtually dismantled the “high and impregnable” wall of an earlier era. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “Judicial caveats against entanglement must recognize that the line of separation, far from being a ‘wall,’ is a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier depending on all the circ*mstances of a particular relationship.”

Rejecting a rigid, literal approach to the separation of church and state, the Court ruled, “In our modern, complex society, whose traditions and constitutional underpinnings rest on and encourage diversity and pluralism in all areas, an absolutist approach in applying the Establishment Clause is simplistic and has been uniformly rejected by the Court.”

The strongest signal the Court sent in this case may be Burger’s conviction that the U.S. Constitution “affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility toward any.”

Which Model Suits Today’s Docket?

The establishment clause cases that face the Court this term include the following:

• Observing The Sabbath

May the state of Connecticut prevent a private employer from firing an employee who refuses to work on the Sabbath? This ruling will be a close one, but employees have done well in discrimination cases in recent years. Their Sabbath rights probably will continue to be accommodated, unless the Court concludes that this discriminates against the nonreligious.

• Equal Access

Must a public high school in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, deny equal access to a small, voluntary, student-initiated, and student-led group wishing to meet for religious speech during an activity period? The Court already has ruled that public universities must not deny equal access. Most Court observers and scholars believe equal access will be extended to secondary schools.

• Silent Prayer In School

May the state of Alabama initiate a school-sponsored and teacher-led moment of silent prayer and meditation? This differs from the prayer cases of the early 1960s where the state provided the religious content. Here the state and its teachers merely supervise the place and time in which religious thoughts may take place. Most Court observers believe this accommodation will be allowed.

• Nativity Scene On Public Land

Must a city allow a nativity scene to be displayed if it does not want one? Last term, the Court held that a city may do so. But the board of trustees of the Village of Scarsdale, New York, says that city prefers to outlaw its crèche. The issue may hinge on whether a city can say “no” to all forms of symbolic speech in its parks, such as billboards and posters. One thing appears certain: a city cannot discriminate against religious content in posters, billboards, or displays once it allows symbolic speech into its parks. The Court may well conclude that symbolic speech is a permissive, not a mandatory, accommodation, but that all such speech must be given equal play.

• Wages For Service To The Lord

Must a religious organization engaged in commercial business pay the minimum wage to its workers, who view their jobs as “service to the Lord”? Many exceptions to minimum wage laws already are allowed, and the Supreme Court may conclude that this exception is legitimate as well.

• Aid To A Church School

May a public school district pay the salary of a teacher who teaches “secular subjects” in a classroom owned by a church school but rented out to the public school during the class period? This case is too close to call. In the past, when the issue has involved tax funds, the Court usually has said “no” to the religious group involved.

The thread that may tie future decisions together probably will consist of accommodation and equal access. A benevolent neutrality that gives religion equal accommodation in the public square is perceived by many as balanced and proper. If President Reagan has an opportunity to appoint new justices to the Supreme Court, accommodation probably will become more firmly entrenched in future church-and-state cases. Five of the nine justices are past 75 years of age. If any should retire, Reagan would appoint justices whose philosophy in the church-and-state arena is more inclined toward moderation and balanced treatment than toward strict separation. That mindset prevails in the thinking of Reagan’s only Supreme Court appointment to date, Sandra Day O’Connor.

An Evangelical Perspective

Perhaps the Court’s church-and-state rulings hit closest to home when they affect religious expression in public schools. Advocates of a school prayer amendment to the U.S. Constitution like to accuse the Supreme Court of expelling God from the public schools. However, the high court rulings are not as sinister as some suggest.

In a number of decisions, the Court has upheld the constitutionality of religious rights in the educational arena. In 1983 the Court upheld a state law allowing tax deductions for certain school expenses, including tuition, paid by parents for children in both public and private schools. In 1981 the Court ruled that public universities must give students who wish to meet for religious purposes access to facilities on an equal basis with other student organizations. Over the past three decades, the Court has ruled that public schools may accommodate the spiritual needs of children by adjusting school schedules to allow participation in religious holidays, released-time religious instruction, and other religious observances.

The rulings that receive the most attention, however, are the famous school-prayer decisions of 1962 and 1963. In those cases, the Court said states could not compose prayers for public-school children. It also ruled that state-initiated, school-sponsored, and teacher-led devotional exercises during the public-school day violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment. In other words, teachers may not act as ministers or priests in the public-school classroom. Although those rulings have been misinterpreted and misapplied in many public school districts, the Court did not make it illegal for students to pray or read the Bible in a public school.

In most cases, the Court has paid serious heed to the integrity of the church as an institution distinct from government and fully capable of ensuring spiritual nurture for people of faith, without federal assistance. The Court’s current docket reflects avid interest in refining a model of church and state that will balance the overlapping spheres of government, church, and family. The high court’s decisions, by and large, reflect the priorities of our society. By exercising the wealth of religious liberties we enjoy, Christians will help preserve them.

The Supreme Court’s model-making task is an intricate one, and the justices must devise their own “directions” as they proceed. Christians can help by doing their own modeling, bringing their faith to bear on every aspect of their lives and not attempting to return to the days of established “state” churches. Since there are no limitations on prayer, petitioning God on behalf of the nine Supreme Court justices is a right that we need to exercise. That is one right no court or government can ever take away from us.

¹Ericsson directs the Washington, D.C., office of the Christian Legal Society and coordinates its Center for Law and Religious Freedom. He serves as lead counsel for the Williamsport, Pennsylvania, equal-access case, accepted for review by the U.S. Supreme Court later this year. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School.

One hundred-thirty years after his death, Sören Kierkegaard’s life and thought remain much discussed. Evangelical philosophers such as C. Stephen Evans argue that Kierkegaard is an unrecognized and underappreciated ally to evangelicals (CT, Sept. 21, 1984). Other evangelical thinkers, such as Harold O. J. Brown, find good and bad in Kierkegaard (CT, Dec, 14, 1984). Yet even the Dane’s severest critics, such as the late Francis Schaeffer, consider his devotional writings challenging and meaningful. The following is a prayer that completes Kierkegaard’s Training in Christianity, and is evidence that, as biographer Walter Lowrie put it, Kierkegaard ultimately “found his refuge in ‘grace.’”

“But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.”

—John 12:32.

To you, Lord Jesus Christ: we pray that you will draw us entirely to you. Whether our life passes calmly in a cottage by a tranquil lake, or we are tried with life’s storms upon a troubled ocean; whether we lead a quiet life or we struggle in abasem*nt—do draw us, and draw us entirely, to yourself. If only you will draw us, then indeed all is won, even if, humanly speaking, we win nothing; and nothing is lost, even if, humanly speaking, we lose everything.

We pray for everyone:

The tender infant whom the parents bring to you, that you may draw him to yourself. And if at a later time the parents exert such an influence upon the child that it is led to you, bless, we pray, this work of theirs. But if their influence is disturbing to the child, we pray that this disturbance may not draw the child away from you, but will itself serve to draw the child to you. Indeed, you called yourself “the Way,” and you have more ways than there are stars in heaven, ways everywhere, ways which lead to “the Way.”

We pray, too, for them that have renewed the convenant made with you in baptism—a covenant we have made, which most of us also have renewed, which most of us also have broken. Draw these young ones to yourself, you who do not only accept vows and keep promises, but who also aids us to keep our vows to you. Draw these young people to yourself by the vow, and if that is broken, do draw them again and again by vows again and again renewed.

We pray for lovers, who have experienced that which in an earthly sense is the most beautiful meaning of this earthly life. We pray for them, that they may not promise one another more than they can perform, and, even if they could perform it, that they may not promise one another too much in love, lest their love for one another might become a barrier to hinder you from drawing each to yourself. Rather, let their love assist in drawing them both to you.

We pray for the aged in the evening of life, that now, when the season of labor is over, thoughts of you may entirely fill their souls. We pray for the aged at the brink of the grave, that you will draw them to yourself.

We pray for all, for him who at this instant first hails the light of day, that the meaning of his life may be that he is drawn to you; and we pray for those dying, for him who has much and many to hold him back, and for him who has nothing and nobody that cares—we pray that it may have been the meaning of their lives to be drawn to you.

We pray for the happy and the fortunate, who for their very joy do not mind wherever they are going, that you will draw them to yourself and let them learn that it is to you they should go. We pray for the sufferers who in their wretchedness do not know where to turn, that you will draw them to yourself—that both the fortunate ones and the sufferers, however unlike their lot in life, may in one thing be alike: that they know nowhere else to go but to you.

We pray for them that are in need of conversion, that you will draw them to you, from the way of perdition into the way of truth. For them that have turned to you and found the way, we pray that they may make progress in the way, drawn by you. And since, in the way of truth, there are three ways of going wrong (by losing the way, by stumbling in the way, by deviating from the way), we pray that you will draw the erring to you from the wrong way, support the stumbling, and bring back the bewildered to the way.

Thus we pray for all. Yet no one is able to mention every individual. And who, indeed, can mention even all the various classes of people? So in conclusion we mention only one class. We pray for them that are ministers of your Word, whose work it is, so far as a man is able, to draw men to you. We pray that you will bless their work, but that at the same time they themselves may be drawn to you. Do not let them, in their zeal to draw others to you, themselves neglect you. And we pray for the simple Christians, that, being themselves drawn to you, they may not think poorly of themselves, as though it were not granted also to them to draw others to you, insofar as a man is able.

Insofar as a man is able—this must be said. For you alone are able to draw to yourself, though you can employ all means and all men to draw all to yourself.

Quick takes at some recent titles.

More Dollars Than Sense

The Smoke Ring, by Peter Taylor (Pantheon Books, 1984, 330 pp.; $18.95).

During the Carter administration, then HEW Secretary Joseph Califano warned that cigarette smoking was responsible for the premature deaths of 320,000 Americans annually. Every year since then, the evidence against cigarettes has mounted. And yet the United States and British governments (to mention only two of the principal smoke-ring leaders) continue actively to support the tobacco industry by subsidizing its growth and production.

British journalist Peter Taylor shows why: The tobacco industry brings in money—and lots of it. Weakening it would put thousands out of work and skew the balance of trade. Most governments, therefore, have consciously decided to place wealth before health, says Taylor—and feel they cannot afford to do otherwise.

Taylor shows various strategies used by the tobacco industry to ensure a market for cigarettes, from sponsoring televised sports events to blocking the distribution of antismoking educational materials.

One tobacco industry strategy is to start at the top. According to Taylor, popular presidents and congressmen from John F. Kennedy to Jesse Helms have repeatedly bowed to tobacco industry pressures to gain votes. Wrote Ronald Reagan to a group of tobacco farmers during his 1980 campaign: “I can guarantee that my own Cabinet members will be far too busy with substantive matters to waste their time proselytizing against the dangers of cigarette smoking” (p. 228).

The tobacco lobby appeals to states’ rights and freedom of choice. And these are important philosophical considerations, Taylor argues. But the bottom line is more dollars than sense. He reports this conversation with one tobacco farmer:

An Excerpt

“After addiction, advertising is the industry’s most powerful ally in its battle for the hearts and minds of the smoker and in its drive to seduce more recruits into the Smoke Ring. That is why, when the link is attacked, the industry will do all in its power to defend it, especially when the aattack comes from the media which normally carries its message.

“Many newspapers and magazines are heavily dependent on cigarette advertising which they are loathe to jeopardize, particularly in times of economic recession.… An article in the Columbia Journalism Review, examining coverage which leading magazines had given cigarettes and cancer in the 1970s, concluded it was: ‘… unable to find a single article in 7 years of publication that would have given readers any clear notion of the nature and extent of the medical and social havoc being wreaked by the cigarette-smoking habit … one must conclude that advertising revenue can indeed silence the editors of American magazines.’”

“As I left, I asked him if he thought smoking was dangerous. ‘We can’t say that,’ he said with a smile. ‘We need people to smoke more so we can make more money’” (p. 254).

The book’s significance lies in its graphic depiction of the power of money—a deluding power that, in this case, puts public health second to production quotas and gross national products. Its lessons, however, extend far beyond corporate agreements and national policy making. Indeed, they touch individuals, Christians and non-Christians, whose motives in business and personal relationships are based more on selfish gratification than concern for “the other guy.”

In the end, Smoke Ring is an appalling picture of just what happens when we sell our allegiances to Mammon.

More Tales From Ages Past

The Archeology of the New Testament, by E. M. Blaiklock (Thomas Nelson, 1984, 186 pp.; $6.95 pb).

Treasures from Bible Times, by Alan Millard (Lion Pub., 1985, 189 pp.; $14.95).

Traces of God’s presence in the dust of millenia past make archeology of special interest to all people of the Book. It provides a timeline linking our timeless faith with believers from age to age.

Both Blaiklock’s revised and updated Archeology and Millard’s visually stunning Treasures are highly readable commentaries on finds that have given moderns a better understanding of life as it was from the beginnings of recorded history. They also bring to light recent discoveries destined to enrich individual Bible study—such as the great 4,000-year-old temple tower at Ur, tomb pictures of brick making in Egypt, palace ivories, letters, and ancient inscriptions suggesting the presence of one who was God in the flesh.

Because he has limited himself to a specific time frame (that of the early church), Blaiklock’s life and times of nascent Christianity is especially gratifying. Of that time the author writes: “The world in many ways was not very different from the world of today, anxious, war-ridden, disillusioned.”

Among the more interesting discoveries documented here (and unlike Treasures, pictured in black and white) are artifacts dealing with the worship of Mithras, the Persian god of the sun. Shrines and worshiper inscriptions recently discovered across what was once the Roman empire indicate that the strength and attraction of this cult was second only to Christianity. In fact, in the fourth century, with Christ’s real birthday long since forgotten, the Christian church laid claim to Mithras’s birth-date, December 25, as Christ’s own.

Reviewed by Lavonne Neff and Harold Smith.