Page 4529 – Christianity Today (2025)

Despite a groundswell of protest, the United Methodist Church (UMC) council of bishops has rejected a request to hold a special session of the denomination’s top legislative body to deal with the issue of same-sex “marriage.”

The bishops, however, may already be taking a stronger stance. Bishop Joel Martinez of Nebraska announced on May 6 that he will not reappoint Jimmy Creech as pastor of First United Methodist Church in Omaha. Creech had been acquitted by a jury of UMC pastors in March for performing a same-sex marriage (CT, April 27, 1998, p. 14).

Martinez indicated Creech has lost support from his congregation in the aftermath of performing the lesbian ceremony. Last month’s announcement pleased conservatives in the denomination, including Patricia Miller, executive director of the Confessing Movement (CM), an evangelical organization representing 1,100 UMC churches and 500,000 members. “It says that there will be repercussions if the United Methodist doctrine is not upheld.”

Creech told CT he is extremely disappointed with Martinez’s decision. “I will continue to celebrate covenant ceremonies,” Creech says. He does not believe that removal will stop the UMC from becoming “a more inclusive and open church.”

SPECIAL SESSION SOUGHT: The only special session of the general conference, the denomination’s highest legistlative body, took place in 1970, when Methodists considered issues relating to the union with the Evangelical United Brethren. General conferences consist of 1,000 delegates, half laity and half clergy, elected by the annual conferences. The general conference meets every four years, with the next session scheduled for 2000 in Cleveland.

Nevertheless, there has been pressure for a special session to consider the Creech verdict and the issue of same-sex marriages. Those advocating such a move include Asbury Theological Seminary president Maxie Dunnam (a theological adviser to CT), North Carolina bishop Marion Edwards, Georgia bishop Lindsey Davis, the evangelical magazine Good News, and the CM.

In addition, the south-central College of Bishops, one of five such groups in the UMC, has requested that the judicial council, the denomination’s top court, consider whether a statement in the denomination’s Book of Discipline prohibiting same-sex unions is a punishable offense. The judicial council will consider the issue August 7-8 in Dallas.

Among all the objections, the most serious came from the evangelical CM, which met in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in April. At the conference, about 1,000 CM members unanimously adopted a statement to be sent to all UMC bishops “to hold each other accountable in teaching and defending the doctrinal and ethical standards of the Book of Discipline.”

In a separate statement to the UMC on homosexual rites, the movement warned, “If there is any weakening of these biblical and disciplinary standards, we will be forced to reconsider our commitments to the existing structures of the United Methodist Church.”

The bishops, however, indicated calling a special session would be unwise in light of the imminent judicial council meeting. The bishops also vowed to proclaim and defend the doctrine, order, and mission of the church, including the statements on homosexuality in the denomination’s Book of Discipline that prohibit homosexual-union ceremonies. Despite requests from prominent denominational leaders, bishops made no reference to the Creech trial.

PULLOUT RUMBLINGS: Even with reassurances that the denomination’s views on homosexuality have not changed, the CM warned that unless the church’s stance on same-sex marriages is clarified during the judicial council meeting, then “we are fearful that there will be a radical hemorrhage of members leaving the denomination.”

“We’re disappointed that they did not deal with the Creech issue,” Good News editor Steve Beard told CT. “The church needed something far more decisive on Creech.” Beard also wonders why at least three bishops who are outspoken supporters of homosexuality agreed to abide by the Book of Discipline. He notes that one of these bishops, Melvin Talbert of California, allowed same-sex marriages to be performed by pastor Karen Oliveto of Bethany United Methodist Church in San Francisco.

Beard is also concerned about 184 UMC clergy who had signed a declaration in support of conducting same-sex marriages.

SEISMIC SHIFTS? The denomination is likely to grapple with fallout from the Creech affair. Some United Methodists call the recent events an unprecedented crisis. Others are leaving the denomination, organizing protests, or withholding funds.

“The failure of our judicial system on this one case has spread life-threatening frustration and confusion in our church,” Georgia bishop Lindsey Davies says. “Our people deserve to have this issue clarified as soon as possible. To wait until 2000 would only result in spiritual damage to our church.”

At least 300 demonstrators met UMC bishops as they left a service at Saint Paul United Methodist Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 26. The demonstrators urged the bishops to uphold the Book of Discipline and carried placards reading, “God’s law, not man’s law.” Bishop council president Emerito Nacpil of Manila indicated that the demonstration was the first he had witnessed in 18 years of attending council meetings.

The May/June issue of Good News displays a cover picture of a sinking Titanic with the headline, “Will homosexuality sink United Methodism?” Editor Jim Heidinger says United Methodism is reeling amid unprecedented waves of distress and turmoil because of the Creech trial.

DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTURES: The fallout from the Creech issue is also leading to an exodus of committed evangelicals who believe they can no longer remain in the denomination. While some former members of Creech’s congregation are attending other United Methodist churches, 300 former members are holding an alternative service in an Omaha high school.

Another 22 evangelical UMC ministers in California and Nevada have asked to separate from the denomination, stating they are “beyond reconciliation” after some of the conference’s leaders expressed support for Creech.

Two congregations in Georgia are withholding monies to “churchwide” causes while waiting for further developments in the case. Churchwide causes include supporting the work of bodies such as the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. A third Georgia congregation approved a similar move due to problems with the denomination’s “doctrinal integrity,” not merely because of the Creech verdict.

WAKE-UP CALL? William Abraham, professor of Wesley Studies at the Perkins School of Theology in Dallas sees the verdict as a wake-up call to UMC moderates and conservatives. “They realize for the first time what their church will look like if those committed to theological and moral revisionism get their way,” Abraham says.

According to Abraham, the Creech trial “triggered awareness of a network of differences concerning revelation, mission, and theology. For the first time these differences are being squarely identified and faced.”

Abraham does not know how—or if—such vital divisions will be resolved. “Many believe that the differences can be contained within the one body over time,” he says. “This consensus is now being challenged by liberals and conservative incompatibilists who argue that it is impractical. Only time will tell how the debate will play itself out.”

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

It’s 4:00 p.m. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?” asked Newsweek in its April 27 issue. Late afternoon—not late night—is when kids are most likely to get into trouble or be victimized by others, said the magazine as it tried to provoke concern for kids who are home alone after school with little or no adult supervision. “Three out of four mothers of school-age children work outside the home. So it’s not so surprising that by the time they are 12 years old, nearly 35 percent of American children are regularly left on their own,” the report said.

Many kids fill this time alone by watching TV—1,500 hours a year, on average, compared to 900 hours a year spent in school. Good parenting includes passing on our faith and values, but where is support for biblical values on TV? The entertainment media teach our youth that sex outside marriage is routine, and homosexual relationships are normal. In films and news shows our children see violence used to resolve conflicts or to get one’s own way—and senseless violence is glamorized. They learn from advertising that happiness can be found through acquiring material things. These messages eat away at the foundations of our culture like termites, and our young seem to be especially vulnerable to the appetites of these voracious insects. Media critic Michael Medved goes further, arguing that TV as a medium (never mind the content) inculcates short attention spans, encourages a gloomy outlook on life, and teaches self-gratification by projecting fun as the highest goal of human existence. There is good reason for the uneasy conscience of American parents.

Lack of adult supervision is just one deprivation that plagues our children today. Just as frightening is a lack of moral guidance. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, who usually champions liberal causes by scorning conservatives, now lauds social conservatives for “leading the current renaissance in character education—those [school] programs … that emphasize the development of virtue, ethical thinking and moral behavior. Children don’t magically acquire such things any more than they magically learn long division.” Writes Zorn, “A kid who grows up without a good moral education is disadvantaged, too, just like a kid who grows up poor, who gets lousy medical care, who attends shabby schools.”

Tough job assignmentThere never has been a Golden Age of Parenting. Yet our culture seems particularly unfriendly to families and children. “One of the best-kept secrets of the last thirty years is that big business, government, and the wider culture have waged a silent war against parents, undermining the work that they do,” Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West argue in their recent book, The War Against Parents. This is especially true because our society measures everything by the bottom line. Children don’t earn their keep as they did in an agrarian society. Instead, they cost money and threaten personal liberties and career goals in an age of individualism. As a result, Hewlett and West conclude, parenting has become a countercultural activity.

It would help, of course, if the culture supported our values. We wish for government leaders to emulate biblical virtues, for schools to teach our children right from wrong, and for mass media to portray positive role models of people who really do work hard and play by the rules. But we haven’t time for that kind of cultural turnaround. It will take a generation or more, waiting and working, for that to happen. Christian parents must do something for their children now.

Should we even expect our culture to prop up our values and serve as moral nanny for our kids? The biblical way, from Israel to the church, runs in the opposite direction—the people of God are a light to the world, salt and yeast in the dough of our culture. We are to influence the world and its structures positively, not clamor for government or the public schools or the dollar-driven media industry to be a light to us. Ironically, this disparity of values is an opportunity, as Rodney Clapp put it, for “the Christian family to be Christian, to live freely and unabashedly out of its particular story.”

Job description postedChristian parents who want to swim against the tide need to be especially intentional in several areas:

Time in. Values are like viruses: they are caught in the environment in which they reside. But how are children “catching” Christian values if the significant adults in their lives have so little time for them and with them—after school or any other time?

Newsweek‘s interest in the kids who are home alone after school seems aimed at creating public interest in after-school programs that engage children in wholesome, safe activities. But Newsweek did not ask the more radical questions that Christian families should be asking themselves: Is it really necessary in all cases that both parents work outside the home? And if so, is it because we are chasing the American dream of a big home in the suburbs with two late-model cars in the driveway?

This is not to argue that a woman’s place is only in the home. In a child’s earlier years, Mother usually has to be the primary nurturer; but many couples find creative ways of sharing responsibility after their children’s infant years. While some couples must have dual incomes just to put bread on the table and a roof over their heads, Christian parents who are willing and able to live on less than two full salaries are to be commended for putting family ahead of career or lifestyle.

Preach what we practice. Besides spending time with their children, Christian parents also need to teach them to discern right from wrong and the biblical reasons behind the differences. Our children need more than injunctions; “Just do it” is not sufficient motivation for doing the right thing. As they grow older, children must have explained to them the biblical logic of the commands to love God, neighbor and enemy, the common sense of the Golden Rule, and the sanctity and sanity of sex within a lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual relationship. The commands of God are not just law; they are also grace, for when we live within the ways of God we grow and thrive, personally and together. No wonder David said that God has placed the boundary lines at pleasant places (Ps. 16:6). He should have known since he transgressed them numerous times (see “Bathsheba-Gate,” p. 38).

Extend the family. Aristotle believed that the good society was one in which the moral education of the young was shared by the whole society through its laws, practices, and mores. It was a task too important and too encompassing to be left to schools or families alone. If it doesn’t take a village to raise a child, it at least takes a church.

In the absence of a supportive society, Christian families need this communal effort in the corporate life of the church. Parenting cannot be left to two adults, much less to one in the case of single parents. Children need the mentoring of other adults in their lives, while parents, too, need the support of older adults who can pass on their wisdom about parenting or give them respite from the strains of child care.

Most evangelicals do not name godparents—sponsors who take a special interest in the growth and development of those being baptized. Yet something like that is happening with congregational mentoring programs that match children with adults who commit themselves to relating one on one to a particular child, giving him or her another adult model to emulate, someone to whom the child can turn when communication breaks down between parent and child. Perhaps churches also need to consider “godgrandparents”—senior adults who can provide support and relief to parents.

In our mobile society, when so many nuclear families are removed from their extended, biological families, the community of faith must function as an extended family. Through this family of God—through its corporate worship and service and nurture—children take on an identity and choose a God-oriented way of life.

Time spent well“Child rearing is not some mysterious process,” write Hewlett and West. “At the heart of the matter is time, huge amounts of it, freely given.” Based on national research they conducted, they claim that a majority of parents realize that most of what their children need, such as love and character development, cannot be delegated to others.

Lamin Sanneh, professor of missions and world Christianity at Yale University, understands this well. As an African living in Western culture, he senses very keenly the tension between child rearing and professional involvement. In a recent dinner-table conversation, he told CT what “family values” have meant for him and his wife: “We believed two things were necessary in raising our children: showing them unconditional love, no matter what. And being there for them. One of us always arranged to be home after school, not just to look out for them, but also to talk with them about their day, to process what went on at school.”

That is parenting worth emulating. And it’s an investment of time that no government or private funding can buy.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Michael B. Bennett has heard the accusations many times: Mormons are not Christians. But to Bennett, who converted at age 18, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has provided answers he did not find as a Southern Baptist.

Bennett grew up in the heavily Baptist region of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His parents and grandparents had been active Baptists and he was baptized at age 12. He attended youth rallies and Billy Graham crusades. “I was about as active a Baptist as you can be,” recalls Bennett, now 39.

Yet he found the behavior of some churchgoers inconsistent. His friends at youth group fervently testified about Christ one week, then smoked dope the next. An adulterous deacon continued to hold office after a hasty confession. Gossip and backbiting preoccupied many churchgoers.

Bennett was ripe for a change. When a high-school friend told him that his church had unpaid leaders, it sparked Bennett’s interest. After attending several weekly LDS sacrament meetings and seeing a community that seemed genuinely to care and love, Bennett, now a lawyer in Salt Lake City, felt “compelled by the spirit” to be rebaptized as a Mormon. As a counselor to his congregation’s bishop, Bennett devotes 20 hours a week to church activities.

While LDS theology is what separates Mormonism from orthodox Christianity, it had little to do with Bennett’s attraction to America’s most successful homegrown religion.

Sandra Tanner, 57, codirector of Utah Lighthouse Ministry in Salt Lake City, says, “You join Mormonism because of friendship ties, a sense of belonging, a hope for your deceased family. It is a religion that gives the best of both worlds.”

Though evangelicals generally concede that Mormons are good neighbors who promote family values, the theological chasm is wide. Mormons profoundly distance themselves from orthodox Christianity in that they:1. Do not interpret canonical Scripture as being solely the Old Testament and New Testament. They add the Book of Mormon and founder Joseph Smith’s other works, The Pearl of Great Price and Doctrine and Convenants. 2. Do not believe in the Trinity. Mormons believe God the Father and God the Son have fleshly bodies and that the Holy Ghost is a spirit man. 2. Teach that God was once a finite being who achieved his exalted rank by “progressing.”

Based on supernatural visitations in the 1820s, Smith believed he was called to restore the true Christian church that had been lost 16 centuries earlier. According to this great apostasy, God told Smith that all churches—with specific reference to Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians—were wrong, and to join none.

While evangelical and Catholic theologians have been able to agree on such unofficial initiatives as “The Gift of Salvation” (CT, Dec. 8, 1997, p. 34), it is unlikely there will be an equivalent Mormon-evangelical document anytime soon. “Their theology has declared us to be an abomination,” says Mike Gray, 47, pastor of Salt Lake City’s Southeast Baptist Church. “It’s hard to do joint projects when they claim to be the only true church.”

“On every major doctrine, the fundamental teachings of evangelical Christianity and Mormon doctrine are diametrically opposed,” says Norman Geisler, dean of Southern Evangelical Seminary.

Protestant leaders have limited official contact with the LDS church. The Presbyterian Church U.S.A. is typical, calling for openness to interfaith dialogue with Mormons and telling members they “should not hesitate to share the gospel with people of Mormon background.”

In February in Salt Lake City, the first formal discussions on theology, polity, and sacramental practice occurred between Mormons and United Methodists. “The two have historically looked upon each other with suspicion, or at best disinterest,” says Doug Slaughter, a United Methodist minister in Ogden. “With the growth of the LDS community into a world religious influence there has come more interest to understand this faith.”

Tanner, who left Mormonism at age 19 and has written more than 40 books on the religion, says, “All Christians should be concerned about the growth of Mormonism. The Jesus of the Bible is different from the Jesus of the Mormons.”

THE BAPTISTS ARE COMING: Few denominations are eager to hold a national convention outside the comfort zone of their membership. But Southern Baptists—who have one of the largest career missionary forces with 5,000 workers in 147 countries—are gathering June 9-11 for an annual convention on the Mormons’ home turf of Salt Lake City. The state of Utah is about 2 percent Baptist and nearly 70 percent Mormon.

In Utah, the SBC will be using pages out of the LDS playbook for mass evangelism. Around 2,500 Baptists—including 1,000 college and seminary students—are expected to knock on 150,000 doors. Starting for a week on June 3, Southern Baptists will run 500 radio commercials, 150 television spots, a dozen newspaper advertisements, and six billboard advertisements urging residents to rethink their commitment to Mormonism.

“In the end, salvation is not a marketing issue,” says SBC president Tom Elliff. “It depends on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Direct mailings containing testimonies of local Southern Baptists are also being sent to 390,000 households in the region. All the media and mail efforts carry a toll-free number offering a hand-delivered free copy of the Jesus video produced by Campus Crusade for Christ. The total cost of the one-week blitz is $260,000.

An estimated 9,500 messengers, or delegates, are expected to attend the convention. With spouses and children in tow, there could be more than 30,000 Southern Baptists visiting the state where only 6,000 Baptists live.

Every four or five years the convention meets in a pioneer area where the membership is comparatively small. The purpose is to encourage SBC churches in such areas and to let others in the region know the SBC is not just a Southern phenomenon. For example, in Las Vegas, several hundred Southern Baptists marched down the city’s strip of casinos and hotels handing out Bibles and tracts (CT, July 14, 1989, p. 50).

Utah Baptists have had significant success with Mormon-focused outreach. At least once a year, Southeast’s pastor Gray hosts a local conference on understanding Mormonism. Southeast’s membership has grown from 120 to 1,000 in Gray’s 14 years there, making it the largest Southern Baptist church in the state. About one in five members is a former Mormon.

READY TO TANGLE: However, Southern Baptists are not likely to win converts simply by knocking on doors and leaving tracts in Salt Lake City. “It’s like going to minister among Muslims,” says Tanner, now a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. She says former Mormons are often isolated from their cultural heritage and families.

Southern Baptists have prepared their pastors and lay leaders for outreach to Mormons with a 75-minute video, The Mormon Puzzle. In all, more than 50,000 videos and accompanying study guides have been distributed. In addition, during the week of June 1 the six SBC seminaries are jointly sponsoring workshops on Mormon theology and effective witnessing to Mormons. Jim Harding, the top SBC executive in Utah, sees the convention visit as a “divine appointment.”

“For Southern Baptists, Utah is a mission field,” Harding says. He is recommending that messengers not engage in a doctrinal shouting match, but simply “share the truth of Jesus Christ.”

R. Philip Roberts, 47, director of the SBC North American Mission Board’s interfaith witness evangelism team, says, “Accountability before God is the most important issue. Before you have a harvest you need to plant the seed of the biblical gospel. It’s our duty to do all that we can to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them.”

If the SBC evangelism blitz becomes too overwhelming, LDS headquarters may issue advice to local church leaders, according to M. Russell Ballard, 69, a member since 1985 of the Council of the Twelve, the church’s ruling body. Ballard says, “We won’t get into bashing over doctrine.”

Likewise, SBC president Elliff is gracious. “There’s no reason for any of us to be caustic and uncharitable in our speech,” Elliff says. “But we won’t compromise our beliefs.” Ballard, a car dealer before being called as a full-time ecclesiastical leader, says The Mormon Puzzle is “relatively positive” because it introduces essential LDS teachings such as restoration of priesthood authority. Ballard says he traces his authority as an ordained apostle directly to Christ: Jesus ordained Peter, James, and John, who, Mormons believe, transferred authority directly to Joseph Smith by laying hands on his head in an 1830 appearance. The authority has been transferred in an earthly manner to LDS apostles since then.

NEXT WORLD RELIGION? Mormons, who were much maligned and persecuted in nineteenth-century America, are in some ways unrivaled in spiritual seed-planting. Worldwide, there are 56,530 LDS missionaries, three-fourths of them young males, knocking on doors in 162 countries. Last year, 318,000 people converted to Mormonism, primarily from Christian groups.

The LDS church is experiencing rapid growth, with 10,070,500 Mormons worldwide. Seven out of ten Mormons live in North, Central, or South America. “At any given moment, the majority of Mormons are first-generation converts,” says Rodney Stark, author and University of Washington sociologist. Most have significant attachments to non-Mormon relatives and friends, who then are ripe for conversion themselves. Stark projects that Mormonism will become the next world religion, with a membership of 267 million by 2080.

This month, the fifty-second LDS temple in the world will open. Another 46 are under construction or on the drawing board, including one in Nashville, headquarters of the SBC.

LDS missionaries have had the greatest success in countries with sizable Christian populations, where Christian missionaries have blazed the trail. The key LDS doctrine of restoration of the church is more easily grasped by people who have already been introduced to Christianity.

LDS missions efforts are well-financed, in part because all but 85 top church leaders are volunteers. Also, Mormons are the most generous donors of all American church members, giving on average nearly 7.5 percent of income.

While 95 percent of Mormons in the United States are white, the church is growing elsewhere by appealing to a multitude of racial and ethnic groups, aided by the acceptance of blacks into the priesthood in 1978. Latin America is the fastest-growing region, with 3.4 million members, 2 million more than a decade ago.

The Book of Mormon has a strong American appeal with its narrative about an early American civilization and the appearance of the risen Christ to the ancient Americans. Stark predicts there will be 60 million Mormons in Latin America alone by 2010.

Tanner notes that LDS membership does not necessarily translate into lifelong commitment. Weekly sacrament meeting attendance is between 40 and 50 percent in the United States, and only around 25 percent in Latin America. Infants are counted as members as soon as they start attending, and adults who stop attending may still be counted.

SHEEP-STEALING? Mormons live in a subculture immersed in their own books, magazines, hymns, organizations, and conferences.

New releases at the 34 LDS Deseret bookstores include Isaiah in the Book of Mormon; Joseph Smith: Martyr, Prophet of God; and The Genealogist’s Handbook: Plain and Precious Truths Restored. There are “Mormon fiction” sections that appeal to women, with titles such as Sunset Across the Rockies and Hannah: Mormon Midwife. They even have their own board games such as Missionary Impossible.

Yet Mormons have increased their numbers largely by slowly exporting their subculture around the globe.

“Members of our church are constantly looking for opportunities to share the message of the restored gospel with friends, family members, neighbors, and anyone else who will listen,” LDS leader Ballard writes in Our Search for Happiness (Deseret Book Company, 1993).

While Mormons unapologetically see themselves fulfilling their purpose, the SBC’s Roberts sees it as sheep-stealing. “Mormons shamelessly proselytize members of Christian churches, encouraging them to leave their own denomination and renounce the validity of their former group,” Roberts writes in Mormonism Unmasked, released last month by Broadman & Holman.

John L. Smith, a 78-year-old Southern Baptist who has written 10 books on Mormonism and is the founder of Utah Missions, warns Christians not to let door-knocking Mormons enter the house. Smith, who served as a pastor for 17 years, says Baptists are especially susceptible because they are eager to engage in theological discussions.

INTENSE MISSIONS FOCUS: From the moment of their children’s birth, many LDS parents hope to send them out as missionaries. In a world of shifting values, a fresh-faced, well-attired, neatly groomed, smiling, confident teenager can be a persuasive advertisement for the church.

Two years ago, Matthew R. Tate, then 19, reached the age where tens of thousands of Mormons radically alter their lives. Although raised in an LDS family in Salt Lake City, he did not fully commit to the church’s teachings until just before his mission trip. “I had to decide whether this church was real or not,” Tate explains. “Deep in my heart I felt it was true.” Mormons cite Moroni 10:3-5 in the Book of Mormon as evidence. In that passage, a resurrected angel, Moroni, exhorts seekers to ponder in their hearts and ask God whether the claims are true; then the power of the Holy Ghost will make it clear.

LDS prophet and president Gordon B. Hinckley and his two counselors pray about where to send each missionary. For Tate, the two-year assignment was New York City. Beforehand, he spent a month in preparation in Provo, site of the largest of 15 LDS missionary-training centers. Recruits live in a cloistered, dormlike atmosphere, where they learn LDS doctrine. Many learn a foreign language.

While the church paid Tate’s airfares to New York and back, his family had to provide daily living expenses. Once on assignment, the schedule is arduous. Tate spent 12 hours a day, six days a week, trying to proselytize. Another two hours each day he prayed and studied the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Tate lived in an apartment with three to seven other missionaries, and he could telephone home only on Christmas and Mother’s Day.

“All I’ve done for two years is eat, drink, and sleep religion,” Tate says. “You don’t worry about yourself. You worry about other people.”

A WIDE DIVIDE: As LDS church growth has accelerated, orthodox Christian scholars have refocused on Mormon teaching and practice.

Last year’s publication of How Wide The Divide: A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation (InterVarsity Press) has done more to raise the profile of Mormonism among evangelical leaders than any other effort in the past decade.

In the book, Stephen E. Robinson, Brigham Young University (BYU) professor of ancient Scripture, and Craig L. Blomberg, professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary and also an ordained Baptist pastor, concluded the divide is not as wide as they once believed. But it still is significant. How Wide the Divide? did not attempt to discuss irreconcilable differences such as baptism for the dead, the premortal existence of souls, or the early history of the Americas. Rather, the book provides a forum to measure potential common ground.

Evangelical critics contend Blomberg showed too much respect for LDS beliefs, and that he should not have written a book with “the enemy.” They also say Robinson is not representative of true LDS doctrine.

“Robinson mops up on Blomberg,” says John L. Smith, whose ministry in Marlow, Oklahoma, was under the auspices of the SBC North American Mission Board until last year. “The book is a great evangelism tool—for Mormons.”

Tyndale College and Seminary professor James Beverley says How Wide the Divide? provides a necessary first step for dialogue. But he says Blomberg failed adequately to rebut some of Robinson’s charges. “The book suffers from a dialogue that doesn’t lay all the cards on the table,” Beverley says.

At an April conference, “Mormonism and Christianity: How Great the Divide!” Southern Evangelical Seminary’s Geisler asserted, “Robinson said things that were definitely contrary to historic Mormon teaching.”

Blomberg notes, however, that LDS authorities often lack academic theological training, so the church often turns to BYU leaders such as Robinson for official theological comment. Robinson and Robert L. Millet, 50, dean of religious education at BYU, are key LDS spokespersons in The Mormon Puzzle.

Blomberg concedes he could have asked several more specific questions and that more articulate wording could have deflected some criticism, but he says overall he is pleased with the effort.

EMBRACING THE MAINSTREAM: Although Mormons have moved toward the cultural mainstream of American Christianity, they continue to insist the LDS faith represents the purified and true church. At the LDS semiannual general conference in April, LDS president Hinckley said, “There are some of other faiths who do not regard us as Christians. How we regard ourselves is what is important.”

Mormons believe that spiritual darkness covered the earth for 16 centuries after the death of Jesus’ apostles until the restoration through Joseph Smith. At the conference, Hinckley also stressed there would be no compromise on the idea that the LDS church is true—and others are not. “This is a restoration of that which was instituted by the Savior of the world,” Hinckley proclaimed. “It is not a reformation of perceived false practice and doctrine that may have developed through the centuries.”

Mormons are gaining respectability from some unlikely sources. Last November, former President Jimmy Carter, who still teaches Sunday school at his SBC church in Georgia, said Mormons do not need to be evangelized. He criticized Southern Baptists for “trying to act as the Pharisees did” in defining who is “considered an acceptable person in the eyes of God.”

The SBC’s Roberts says, “Mormons want to be fully Mormon and fully Christian, but they can’t be both.” Ex-Mormon Tanner agrees. “Its theology is as close to Christianity as Hinduism,” she says. “It’s a totally different view of man and God and Creation.”

LDS apostle Ballard told CT, “We believe God, the eternal Father, is literally our father. He’s a man glorified, exalted, perfected, resurrected.”

Millet says, “Human spirits were born sons and daughters of God before this life, and if they will be born again now, they can be empowered and transformed by Jesus Christ, becoming eventually as he is. We believe in the ultimate deification of man.”

WHERE ARE THE ARTIFACTS? One of the most persistent critiques of doctrine focuses on the teaching that ancient Hebrews immigrated to the Americas.

LDS doctrine says that in 1827 Moroni, a resurrected angel, instructed Smith to unearth golden plates buried in New York. For two years, Smith translated the “reformed Egyptian,” which told of the migration of Israelites to this continent. Their descendants divided into Lamanites, the ancestors of today’s Native Americans, and Nephites. Mormon, the last surviving Nephite leader, inscribed the race’s history before their demise. Moroni, Mormon’s son, whisked the plates back to heaven after Smith’s translation.

Faith plays a large role in believing the accounts in the Book of Mormon, because Smith’s version is the only written record of Israeli immigrants living in the Americas between 600 B.C. and A.D. 400. Tanner says no archaeological evidence supports the existence of such a culture.

“There may be some things we’ll never find simply because the vast majority of human artifacts disappear,” says Daniel C. Peterson, 45, chair of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies at BYU, which, at 29,000 full-time students, is the largest privately owned campus in the United States.

While Smith’s Book of Mormon is considered infallible, the Bible is not. “We accept the Bible as the Word of God as far as it is translated correctly,” Ballard told CT.

“The Bible has been through countless translations from the time its chapters were originally penned to the present,” Ballard writes in Our Search for Happiness. “Along the way there have been changes and alterations that have diminished the purity of the doctrine.” On the other hand, “the Book of Mormon offers pure, concise doctrine that hasn’t been tampered with by religious philosophers, councils, panels, and kings.”

But LDS scriptures are not so pristine, Tanner says. She cites Smith providing different versions of his visions in 1833 and 1835. “Revelations are suddenly twice as long as before, bringing in new concepts such as the priesthood,” says Tanner. “Why would he have to rewrite it after only two years?”

ONGOING REVELATION: Among Mormons, the restoration of the true church means that their top leader is a living prophet, able to clarify, modify, or enhance existing doctrine.

And new revelations can reverse earlier LDS teaching, the most famous example being the 1890 discontinuance of polygamy, which 47 years earlier Joseph Smith declared had been commanded by the Lord. “Latter-day Saints believe the canon of Scripture is open, flexible, and expanding,” Millet says.

“What God has said to apostles and prophets in the past is always secondary to what God is saying directly to his apostles and prophets now,” Robinson writes in How Wide the Divide?

Subsequently, LDS revere their president as God’s mouthpiece on earth, the “prophet, seer, and revelator.” When the president of the church dies, the member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles who has served the longest automatically succeeds him, usually leaving an aged leader to head the religion founded by a 24-year-old prophet. The last three presidents have started service at the average age of 86. Hinckley turns 88 this month.

In the LDS church, males confer everything required for a family to gain eternal exaltation. At 12, boys begin through the Aaronic priesthood offices of deacon, teacher, and priest. Males in the higher Melchizedek priesthood can advance through the offices of elder, high priest, patriarch, seventy, and apostle.

“The patriarchy—the loss of the priesthood—is one of the fears of people leaving Mormonism,” Tanner says. “For instance, the husband is the one who can pray for a child if he gets sick. Men are the connection to make sure that, at whatever level, things are done the way God wants them to be done.”

Advancement in church leadership is dependent on individual accomplishment, Tanner contends. “To reach the celestial kingdom you must go to the temple,” she says. “In order to go to the temple, you have to be a full tithe payer and do everything the church asks you to do. There is control to get to that end reward.”

Not only are there earthly incentives for faithful Mormons, but more important, there are many eternal bonuses, based on individual merit.

“We don’t believe in a heaven and a hell,” Ballard told CT. “We believe in degrees of glory. People are not going to live into the eternities in misery.”

The LDS doctrine that husbands and wives are married “for time and eternity” allows some high-achieving Mormon couples to have eternal offspring and create and populate their own world.

Those Mormons who aspire to the top of three tiers of heavenly paradise must be baptized according to the LDS priesthood and live a worthy life.

Among Mormon leaders, temple activities are focused in part on the controversial practice of vicarious baptisms and marriage in which living members stand in proxy for the deceased.

“How do we know whether or not your great-great-grandfather, who never heard the gospel as it was restored, nor ever had the opportunity to be baptized by the priesthood, is going to accept?” Ballard asks. “We don’t. But we do the work anyway.” Under LDS doctrine, not just baptism, but salvation itself is available to the dead.

“The person may have heard the gospel a hundred times, but it never really clicked,” Peterson says. “So maybe that hundredth time is the chance. That can happen in this life or the next.”

LDS doctrines about baptism, salvation, and the afterlife place them at odds with centuries of Christian teaching in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions.

BEFRIEND, NOT ATTACK? Despite vastly different theology, Mormon and evangelical leaders at times work together against common foes such as gambling, pornography, and abortion. A Baptist and a Mormon are congressional sponsors of legislation to protect churches from creditors seeking to confiscate donations made by members who went bankrupt (CT, April 27, p. 14.)

The works of C. S. Lewis have emerged as another area of religious common ground. “He is so well received by Latter-day Saints because of his broad and inclusive vision of Christianity,” says BYU dean Millet, who spoke about Lewis at an April theology conference at Wheaton (Ill.) College.

Blomberg, among others, holds out hope that projects such as How Wide the Divide? can be an initial step in Mormons moving to orthodoxy, as happened when the Worldwide Church of God founded by Herbert W. Armstrong altered its unique teachings (CT, July 15, 1996, p. 16). “I still believe in respectful, courteous dialogue,” Blomberg says. “As LDS church membership continues to increase, and friends and relatives convert to Mormonism, it will behoove evangelicals to befriend rather than attack.”

Yet deep disagreements remain over bedrock truth. “We have a prophet that receives direction from the Lord Jesus Christ,” Ballard says. “We simply say to the world, ‘Keep everything you have that is true and add to it the fullness of the everlasting gospel as it’s been restored.’ “

Roberts counters, “The gospel does have a cutting edge. It can be offensive when you explain there’s no such thing as celestial heaven.” Roberts and Tanner are coauthors of the new Harvest House book The Counterfeit Gospel of Mormonism.

Recent rhetoric from Baptist leaders referring to Utah as a “stronghold of Satan” and a “spiritual cloud of oppressiveness” may motivate Baptists, but alienate Mormons.

In the meantime, Mormons persist in their own media outreach. In April, the LDS church bought a commercial on the Gospel Music Association’s nationally televised Dove Awards program.

For Bennett, the former Southern Baptist, there is great eagerness to share his new faith. “I feel more dedicated and closer to the Lord than I’ve ever felt,” Bennett says. “The confluence of cultures and religions will be good for both the Mormons and the Baptists.”

But for evangelicals, a faithful follower of LDS doctrine is at eternal peril. “Mormonism is either totally true or totally false,” Utah Mission’s leader John L. Smith says. “If it’s true, every other religion in America is false.”

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Wherever there is a growing number of Latter-day Saints, church headquarters authorizes construction of a new meeting house for a ward, or a local congregation. In the burgeoning suburbs between Ogden and Provo, where there are nearly 3,500 wards, buildings are erected often. The unadorned buildings typically have a spire, but no crosses or stained-glass windows.

Mormons attend a three-hour block of Sunday gatherings: the sacrament meeting, Sunday school, and finally, a gender-segregated “gospel doctrine” Priesthood meeting for men and Relief Society meeting for women. The starting time is decided by headquarters, which also selects the bishop, the presiding leader, from within the local ward. The bishop’s role is largely administrative. While he does not preach, he will counsel parishioners and perform weddings. The bishop may earn his livelihood in a career such as a lawyer, banker, or department store manager, while devoting up to 40 hours a week in unpaid church duties. A bishop’s term typically runs between three and five years.

A recent sacrament meeting in the Salt Lake City suburb of Draper has the appearance of a Baptist worship service in many respects. There is an organ prelude, a choir on the platform, an opening hymn and prayer followed by announcements, leather-bound Scriptures carried by attendees, three church leaders seated on stage. But differences are soon noticeable.

The Scriptures that members tote include three additional LDS canonical books. The opening hymn, “Families Can Be Together Forever,” is a confirmation of the LDS belief in eternal marriage. Babies are blessed according to the Melchizedek priesthood, with petitions that the boys will one day be worthy to go on a church mission, then find a faithful wife to marry in a temple for time and eternity. Boys age 12 and older who are ordained to the Aaronic priesthood distribute the sacraments of bread and water; Joseph Smith wrote in Doctrines and Covenants 27:2 that substituting another drink for wine is permissible.

Because of the strong belief in family, children are not taken to a nursery during the service. Many mothers are preoccupied with trying to keep jabbering toddlers quiet.

One Sunday a month, instead of a teaching session, LDS wards have a fast and testimony meeting (money that would have been spent on two meals of the day are given to the needy). Any member of the ward may testify. The faith-building talks frequently reinforce the worth of the LDS system: thankfulness for the prophets and their closeness to God, appreciation for the power of the priesthood, declarations that “I know this church is true.”

The closing hymn, “Home Can Be a Heaven of Earth,” reiterates the idea of church as family and family as eternal. The most significant difference that Protestant visitors are likely to spot is hanging in the foyer: a painting depicting Joseph Smith’s first vision. Two nearly indistinguishable bearded personages are portrayed: one Jesus and one God—in the flesh—appearing to a 14-year-old farm boy who has just uttered his first vocal prayer.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

I met Cal DeWitt, the environmentalist, some years ago at a conference on world population. He was expounding eloquently on the need for living in harmony with God’s creation when I asked him, in an offhand way, whether he had seen any place that would serve as a model.

My question was not, I admit, entirely innocent. In my experience, environmentalists can be very clear on what aspects of modern life they are against, but when asked what kind of society they admire, they may refer to the way Native Americans once lived on the land, or to some remote tribe in Central Africa. I am looking for an environmental vision that applies to modern America, suburbs and cities and all.

So DeWitt’s answer surprised me. “Yes,” he said cheerfully, “Dunn, Wisconsin.”

“Dunn? Where’s that?” I asked, suspecting a commune in the northern woods that raised organic vegetables for the farmer’s market.

“Just south of Madison,” he told me. “It’s my town.”

Dunn, the un-townI visited Dunn in late spring last year. Leaving the freeway behind me, I took a meandering road through Wisconsin farm country, cornfields covering easygoing hills patched with black and brown oak woods. I was looking for a town to appear, but it never did. The first thing I learned about the town of Dunn, Wisconsin, is that it’s not a town. In Wisconsin, the place where you find stores and schools and inevitable taverns—what I call a town—is a village. A town in Wisconsin is a subset of the county, a square of open country six miles on a side.

That doesn’t imply, however, that there is no “there” to Dunn. At one time few residents thought much about the locale. They lived in the country “just south of Madison.” That has changed quite dramatically over the 25 years since DeWitt came to live there. Now the 4,000 citizens say proudly what town they live in. They note the difference (perhaps not so visible to others) when they cross over the town line into other towns. DeWitt says that one of the most notable developments of recent years is the expansion of the town cemetery, previously overgrown and almost forgotten. People in Dunn feel they belong to the place and plan to plant their bones there.

Eyes to seeCalvin DeWitt is a wetlands ecologist who teaches in the University of Wisconsin’s interdisciplinary Institute for Environmental Studies. He’s also director for the Au Sable Institute, a Christian study center in the Michigan woods that offers summer field courses for Christian college students. He is a formidable scholar, recognized by the university as one of its best teachers. Ron Sider says he is “Mr. Evangelical” regarding the environment—the person with the scholarly credentials, the outspoken faith, the long track record.

What he is best at, though, is field trips. He has a way of taking students into the most ordinary landscapes and showing them a creation they hadn’t seen. He is good at explaining complex features of the terrain and its living creatures, and he conveys a sense of wondering joy as he does it. DeWitt sees the world as a scientist and as a Christian, and he puts remarkably little space between those two. He is committed to preserving nature, but it isn’t humanity against nature for him. Rather, he sees nature serving humanity by offering testimony to the glory of God.

It is one thing to proclaim God’s glory on field trips. It is quite another in the vexed and politicized subject of land-use planning. Dunn’s north boundary runs a mere stone’s throw from Madison, a city that is spreading fast into the dairy, corn, and soybean farmland all around. When the DeWitts bought their home in 1972, the familiar process of turning farmland to suburb was well under way. Small subdivisions and five-acre “farmettes” were spreading across the landscape. Farmers whose children showed no interest in farming could foresee selling out to home builders for a bundle.

Calvin DeWitt sees the worldas a scientist and as a Christian,and he puts remarkablylittle space between the two.

DeWitt was studying rural land-use decisions and, as part of his research, went to observe a meeting of the Dunn town board, an elected council of three. The discussion was over a new hot-mix and rock-crushing plant that the town council had approved. Some of the neighbors were upset at the prospect of the plant polluting their environment, but the supervisors were in no mood to listen. One of them rudely told the dozen attendees that they were wasting time trying to argue the issue; if they didn’t like the decision they should elect somebody else, but in the meantime, just go home.

DeWitt had come to observe, but these comments drove him to his feet. He spoke passionately to the small gathering on the nature of democracy. He spoke of an active, involved citizenry, not a passive electorate that votes every few years on who should make decisions for them.

The talk made an impression, and shortly thereafter he was invited to a meeting in a local farmer’s living room. The purpose was to recruit a slate to run for the town board, to throw out the old, unresponsive supervisors. DeWitt was new to Dunn, but he was asked to stand for election.

DeWitt the politicianIt is not easy to imagine Cal DeWitt running for elected office. He seems too idealistic for the grit of governance. “I often use Rembrandt for an illustration,” he says. “Is it conceivable that we could give acclaim to the artist but not to his masterpieces? Is there anyone who honors Picasso without any reference to his paintings?” Our proper relation to God’s creation is awe and wonder, DeWitt says. This does not sound like a land-use stump speech.

Once, he told me, he stopped his car on the Interstate freeway near Gary, Indiana, and tried to read Psalm 19 aloud. “I looked up into the night sky and couldn’t see any stars because of all the lights and pollution. The noise of traffic was deafening. Semitrailers slammed by, literally sucking at my car. The psalm made no sense at all there. I thought, ‘Here is a community that has been deprived, and has deprived itself, of nature’s testimony.’ “

DeWitt worries when human creation entirely supplants God’s, when the natural world is so blotted out by city as to be unknown. He worries, too, about mental deprivation. “For some of my students, Star Trek is more real than the biosphere. They can tell you more about the starship Enterprise but don’t know the boundaries of the town they live in. We even abstract nature in science, so it doesn’t provide for awe and wonder.”

In the world of politics, the Dunn town board sat very near the bottom of the food chain. Most planning decisions rested with the county. The town government was responsible for plowing snow and repairing local roads, and little else. Furthermore, many Dunn residents were vague on whether they lived within Dunn’s boundaries, as their mail was addressed through one of the local villages. There was no cafe or post office where the people of Dunn gathered. Few paid attention to town elections.

Nevertheless, DeWitt approached his campaign with all the verve of a military assault. He helped mobilize a large pool of volunteers and dedicated himself to visiting every home in the town personally. He is an affable, easygoing conversationalist who treats even his enemies like old friends. His style of campaigning is perhaps best captured by his conversation with pike fishermen.

Some of Dunn’s constituents, DeWitt explains, have settled in the area strictly for the pike. So, as DeWitt tells the story, he greets one such fisherman outside his home and asks cheerily, “How are things going with the pike nursery?”

The man looks confused, so DeWitt repeats the question.

“What’s a pike nursery?” the fisherman asks.

“You like to catch pike?” DeWitt says. “I understand they get pretty big in this lake.”

“Yeah, they do. Real big.”

“Well,” says DeWitt easily, “they don’t start out that big. They start out as little ones. The place the little pike come from is what you call the pike nursery. I figured if you were a pike fisherman you would be able to tell me how things are going in the pike nursery.”

The guy summons his neighbor, also a fisherman, and asks if he knows where pike come from. His neighbor doesn’t know. DeWitt suggests they ask some more of their buddies. By now they’re curious. Eventually there are eight pike fishermen standing around in the yard, none of whom knows where pike come from. So DeWitt explains that mature pike go into the marshes to spawn, and the little pike live in the shallow safety of the marshlands until they’re big enough to venture out into the lake. That’s one of the reasons DeWitt is running for town council, because the marshes are getting spoiled. If there isn’t a marsh, there isn’t a pike nursery; and without a pike nursery, there soon won’t be any pike.

Needless to say, DeWitt won the pike-fisherman vote. He believes firmly that “when people really know their world, they will take care of it.” A lot of his neighbors love the country—that’s why they live in it—but they didn’t really understand it. For DeWitt, loving the country and understanding its ecology go naturally together. His goal was not merely to win an election but to build a broad understanding of and involvement in town decisions.

The moratorium on developmentDeWitt won his election and was able to scuttle the hot-mix plant. (“He did it with a filibuster,” says supervisor Eleanor White. “Cal kept talking and talking. … He wore them down.”)

Two years later, DeWitt was elected town chairman, and an ally, Ed Minihan, became a supervisor with him. Their two votes controlled the board, but it took some clever work for them to figure out how to use their power effectively. They learned that every new construction site needed town permission for access off the town roads. They used that as the choke point to control development.

There was a certain “last-one-in-close-the-door” quality to these restraints, as most of DeWitt’s allies were recent arrivals from the city who wanted the countryside preserved as they had found it. Rosalind Gausman, who married into an old farm family, told me that DeWitt and his group were seen as “new people coming in and taking over our town. I had [Cal] pegged as an outsider and a troublemaker.” Old-time farmers felt their property rights slipping away.

Their alarm grew when the town board slapped a two-year moratorium on all property subdivisions. Dunn had never had a land-use plan, and the continuing surge of applications for land divisions meant the council couldn’t get its head above water. The debate was often framed in terms of development: Are you for or against it? But DeWitt noted that when people said “development,” they only meant housing tracts. “We said, ‘We’re for development. We want to develop farms.’ ” They wanted Dunn to grow in a way that would make sense to its citizens and preserve the qualities that they loved. A moratorium would give them time to think through a plan.

Housing developers sued the town, which managed to survive through some good legal counsel and a $100,000 surplus built up by not building any roads for a year. Gausman says, “Cal is so amazing—how he could have a room full of hostile people, and he could calm the crowd. He would let them talk, would really try to understand them. Then he would start explaining his side. He would just calm things down. He always listens to people.”

Prairie fire DeWitt also likes to talk, and when he talks, his love for nature and his awe toward its splendors always comes through. When I first arrived in Dunn, Cal and Ruth DeWitt welcomed me to their home, set on a drumlin nearly surrounded by marsh. Cal was busy at his computer, manipulating images from a digital camera he had just acquired. He enthusiastically showed me how the software could be used to extract environmental data from a photograph of daffodils blooming on his lawn. Then, while Ruth prepared dinner, he walked me around the drumlin.

A drumlin, as DeWitt explained to me, is a cigar-shaped pile of rock and soil left by an ancient glacier. DeWitt pointed out the glacier’s path, from Lake Waubesa just out of sight to the north, down the silver marsh at his front door, and on to Lake Kegonsa south and east. A mile away, on the other side of the marsh, ran a thin strip of black. “That’s prairie,” Cal said. “It’s just been burned a few days ago.” Fires are set in the marshlands at regular intervals, he explained, one section at a time, for both prairie and marsh depend on wildfire to sustain their balance.

Over dinner, we talked more about fire. “People ask me why I have a lawn around the house instead of prairie,” Cal said. “I used to want to bring the prairie in a lot closer, but I learned that’s not the most practical thing to do.” He told how, lighting backfires to burn the grasslands on his property, he underestimated the power of wildfire. The fire department arrived just in time to save the house.

Suddenly Cal got up out of his seat, a look of excitement on his square, Dutch features. By his porch light, he pointed out the characteristic features of a burr oak tree growing near the door. A burr oak has thick, fire-resistant cork bark, which expresses itself in knife-edged ridges running up and down the trunk and along all but the thinnest branches. DeWitt took some time explaining this to me, telling me the relation of this oak tree to the cork trees of Spain, making me punch my fingers into the firm resiliency of the bark. I was not sure why he was excited until he began to talk about fire again.

“An oak savanna like this one is an island in the fire,” he said, his voice full of awe. “When the marsh and prairie burn, the fire will usually peter out in the oak savanna, because the tall grasses don’t grow in the shade of the trees. Occasionally, though, a fire will get into the crowns of the trees. The oak savanna would be destroyed except for the burr oak, which won’t burn through. These cork ridges will light, and glow, but the heat won’t penetrate to the life of the tree. If you see a burr oak after a wildfire you see every branch outlined in red, glowing with fire.”

The budding naturalistDeWitt grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the child of devout Christian Reformed parents. His father was a house painter who encouraged his son to pursue whatever he loved. What Calvin loved was studying God’s creatures. He had a pond in his back yard where he kept all nine species of Michigan turtles. He maintained a zoo with other wild creatures, including an extensive aquarium in the basement. Their home was on an ordinary 40-foot-wide city lot, but DeWitt used his bicycle to explore nearby fields and forests.

Educated in Christian Reformed schools, including nearby Calvin College, DeWitt never conceived of science as opposed to God. The book of nature was God’s other book, a revelation of his nature.

When DeWitt went for doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, he expected a rigorous challenge to his faith, but he found that if his professors were materialists, they weren’t dogmatically so. He was surprised to find a secular university such a congenial place for a Christian.

That’s characteristic. Where others see sharp divisions, he finds it easy to unite his faith and his science. When it was popular in his field of ecology to blame Christianity for the degradation of the natural world, he established the Au Sable Institute with its explicitly Christian basis. He enthusiastically speaks of the Christian faculty and graduate students that he works with at the University of Wisconsin, a place hardly known as a bastion of faith.

DeWitt is reticent when asked his thoughts on evolution. He finds the whole discussion of origins very bookish, quite removed from the actual observation of God’s handiwork. “Whatever God did is what God did. Whatever means he is using to create is okay with me,” he says. Evolution has never been a cutting issue for him, he says. “Sometimes [it is] for two or three days, when I’m with people who think it is very important. Then I’m out in the field, singing psalms, enjoying God’s marvelous work, and the discussion doesn’t seem so significant.”

Land-useThe plan for Dunn, Wisconsin, began with taking inventory. That’s a natural approach for DeWitt. He hoped that when people got a firm understanding of their land, they would find that they mostly agreed on how to treat it. Taking inventory gave time to defuse the winners-and-losers mentality that land-use decisions often create.

A newly formed plan commission compiled a detailed description of their town’s geology, water resources (including lakes, rivers, and streams), woodlands, wetlands, wildlife, fisheries, historic and cultural resources. They mapped bird flight patterns and assessed pollution in all surface water. They studied how locations for homes and businesses affect their surroundings. The University of Wisconsin and governmental authorities provided all kinds of expert testimony. Eventually, the town published their study so that every citizen could become familiar with the town’s natural resources.

“Coming to know their place, they liked what they found and decided to care for it and keep it.” That is DeWitt’s published summary. The land-use plan the town wrote into law essentially tried to keep Dunn the way it is by severely limiting new subdivisions and businesses. It enabled property taxes for farms to be set on a basis that assumed agricultural use (rather than on a higher basis assuming the land’s use for housing). Plans for parks and trails were made. Roadsides were replanted to prairie. Preserves were plotted out. And every detail of the plan assumed the active involvement of its citizens.

For example, community parks are planned and developed by the neighborhood they are in, not by a town parks department. Someone building a new home can live in a trailer on the property while he builds—to encourage families on a limited budget—but only if they personally get the okay from all their neighbors.

“We’re for development,”says DeWitt. “Wewant to develop farms.”

The plan, in fact, was adopted by a referendum, even though the town board had legal authority in itself. The idea was to involve as many citizens as possible in discussions about the plan.

You can certainly argue over the plan. By limiting building, the planners have made Dunn a kind of park land for Madison. Housing in Dunn is bound to grow expensive, simply by the law of supply and demand. Other locales will have to carry the burden of providing housing and jobs for a growing population. (Nearby villages will continue to expand, and Madison itself will push in other directions.) Dunn isn’t everybody’s solution.

Clearly, though, it’s the favored plan of the people of Dunn. In the early days there were lawsuits and meetings where people shouted, and one election where the reformers were voted out of office. (Two years later they were voted back in.) In recent elections, there hasn’t even been opposition. Most of the old-time farmers have come to see that, as town clerk Rosalind Gausman says, “these guys are not out for their own good.” In fact, one of the clearest objectives of the Dunn plan is to create conditions where farming can be a viable way of life forever.

In a 1996 referendum, Dunn voted to raise its taxes, the money to be used to purchase development rights for crucial parcels of land. The idea is to lock in the land-use plan permanently. It helped that a frugal approach to town government had kept their taxes lower than anywhere else in the area.

User-friendly environmentI concluded a day-long tour of Dunn standing with DeWitt in a small oak grove overlooking the northwest corner of the town. Looking north, we could just make out a ribbon of cars and trucks moving on the Madison beltway. Otherwise, the scene was an American pastoral, now preserved permanently as farmland and park. Through complicated negotiations, Dunn officials had succeeded in using their new tax dollars to buy a large tract of the land there, then reselling it, stripped of its development rights, to a local farmer. DeWitt told me about the pig farmer who had increased his farm’s economic viability, about the heirs of a large tract who had agreed to sell to the town for a reduced price, and about others involved in delicate financial negotiations. Just a few days before, the town had celebrated with a picnic on the grounds where we stood.

I noticed a stand of small conifers, aliens in the landscape, growing on the northern edge of the oak grove. I asked DeWitt whether they would be removed.

“No,” he said. “If we were the Nature Conservancy [an environmental preservation group, which has bought land for preservation in nearby marshes] the conifers would go, because they aren’t indigenous. But they make a good wind screen for picnickers, so we’ll leave them.”

In a small way, that captures DeWitt’s philosophy. He’s not such a purist that human concerns have to get out of nature’s way. Rather, he seeks ways for the natural world and the human world to live as neighbors. That’s good for the natural creation, because when humans live with it and get to know it, they love it and want to take care of it. And it’s good for humans, because through the natural world they get a dose of the reality of God’s reign. Community is a natural result. Picnics—an expression of community—are a result. DeWitt takes a serious interest in picnics.

Lessons learnedDeWitt really thinks we can find common ground between environmental concerns and humanity’s needs when we experience the creation (as distinct from arguing about it). That’s why, in his university classroom, his chief objectives are “awe and wonder” and “developing community.” He takes his students on field trips to develop both. He believes, in fact, that the natural world offers the best resource for saving the university from its factionalism, its rigidity, its inhumanity.

It’s the same with Dunn. People scattered in a country setting, commuting elsewhere, often live isolated lives. Dunn has no gathering place where they bump into neighbors—not even a school. (Dunn’s children go to school in nearby villages.) Yet Dunn’s environment brought its citizens together. Through the long, ongoing process of figuring out how to care for Dunn and to keep it, they came to know and value each other.

Does Dunn offer anything to the rest of America, cities and suburbs and all? Two things, I believe. First, it reminds us that God’s beautiful creation can exist harmoniously on the very border of a large city. Madison will have Wisconsin marsh and farm a bike ride away, perpetually.

Second, it suggests that the beauty around us really can help us find common ground. Not, of course, that decisions about the land are easy to make. Differing political and economic ideas, applied to the environment, can make for heated combat. Yet when people take a break from arguing and actually look at the world God has made, they generally want to keep it and care for it. It’s a rare person who doesn’t value parks, whether they are as grand as Yellowstone or as ordinary as a prairie path reclaimed from an old railroad. It’s a rare person who feels no sense of loss in seeing condos line the Gulf Coast, or hearing of the extinction of any species. Dunn, Wisconsin, is one small example of how people can come together around such deep, instinctive responses. It is an example not just of preserving nature. It is also people and community who are being preserved.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The allegations against President Clinton have unsettled many American Christians. He holds a position we honor and uphold in prayer; and he professes to be a Christian. But the trial by mass media—all the talk of moral impropriety and criminality—has led many to believe he betrays the very values and office for which we pray.

We Christians should be accustomed to leaders whose private behavior and public words and actions appear to be at odds. We've been dealing with them for a long time now.

We want our leaders to be above reproach. We project our fantasies onto them, and soon they loom larger than life. David is our premier biblical instance. Michelangelo sculpted in marble what many Jews and Christians have carved in their imaginations—a flawless David, the spirited human body in perfection. But the biblical text does not give us a flawless David. Putting people on pedestals is a way of not having to deal with who they really are (and who the God working in them really is).

The biblical narrator insists on telling us everything bad about David: he married many women, kept a harem of concubines, was an indifferent father, and capped his moral dossier ingloriously with adultery and murder. The narrator refuses to idealize or glamorize him to show that God's sovereignty works through just such a mixed bag of human failure and sin.

We Christians should be well trained through our Bible reading to see how God's sovereignty is worked out through the lives of frail, willful, disobedient—sometimes repentant and sometimes not—men and women who are created to live to God's glory. That is what keeps us reading this story over and over again and finding it "good news."

In the moral maelstrom of our age, people ask, "How do we keep our moral equilibrium with a story like this in the middle of our Bibles?" and the answer is this: "By keeping it in the middle of our Bibles."

In an age of diminishing respect for life, accelerating violence on all fronts, and widespread moral mayhem, we accept the seemingly unembarrassed inclusion of David as part of the salvation story. What then happens is that we give our glamorizing, celebrity-glossed concepts of leadership a thorough biblical chastening. Our flawed ideas of leadership need chastening quite as much as our flawed leaders.

The Bible is not a story of moral uplift. We would much prefer Abraham without his self-serving lies, Jacob open and above board, Moses without his impulsive anger, Samson without his Philistine whore, Samuel with a better track record in child-raising, Solomon without all those women, and Peter without his cussing. There is a long history in the church of pious readings of the Bible that overlook or suppress behaviors in our honored ancestors that don't match our best ethical norms.

But there is no hint of that in the narrative itself. This is unlaundered history: unholy men and women with whom God works to fashion his holy work in history. They turn out to be no better nor worse than the people with whom he works still, the very ones we meet in daily newspapers and on television screens, and whom we face in the mirror each morning.

The age of the Bible was not a moral golden age that we are now trying to reproduce; it is rather a presentation of the conditions and people that God in Christ uses to work salvation. The biblical story, from beginning to end, is told in the terms of the social, cultural, political, and ethical world as it is, not as it should be.

God's holy kingdom is not a moral or spiritual utopia that descends into our midst in which Christians are put to work as moral policemen, arresting and jailing anyone who violates the holiness. God works from the inside, taking whatever the world hands him as stuff to be worked on by his kingdom presence and saving will. That he used David is a continuing source of wonder. Morality, it seems, is not a precondition for salvation.

Charles Williams, in a brilliant exposition of the coming into being of the first Christian community (The Descent of the Dove), wrote that Jesus was born under three conditions: Roman power, Greek culture, and human sin. Williams insisted that the Holy Spirit is always at work in these conditions. These conditions don't limit the Spirit's work; instead, our Lord chooses to work within the limits. Nor does the Spirit baptize the conditions; not many of us look on first-century Palestine, for example, as an ideal we seek. What we understand here is twofold: there are virtually no conditions that preclude the Spirit's work, and the Spirit never works apart from conditions. God can use any conditions at hand in the making of his kingdom.

The conditions out of which David's life was lived and narrated were made up in large part of Philistine culture and Canaanite morality, which is to say, violence and sex. The Philistine beer mugs and Canaanite fertility goddesses that archaeologists dig up from old Iron Age ruins symbolize the two cultures. It is hard to imagine a more uncongenial time or more unlikely conditions for living to the glory of God than tenth century B.C. Canaan—except, perhaps, twentieth-century America.

And yet, here it is: David—born, living, and dying in Iron Age violence and sex, not exempt from their influence but not confined to it either—in quite incredible ways transcending them so that it is possible, and common, for us to read the story and hardly notice the conditions. But we must notice them, for we live under conditions that are equally and similarly unfavorable.

The cultural embodiments of violence and sex, war and promiscuity don't seem to have changed much. And because they are human conditions, they're the only conditions in which a holy life can be lived by the men and women who continue to pray as Jesus taught us, "Thy kingdom come."

The entire biblical story never lets us forget that it is a God story of our salvation, not a collection of moral achievements for use as a moral handbook. This is the narrative of what God does to save us, not what we do to please him. We are always wanting to take over this story, finding ways to do it on our own so that God becomes a pleased spectator to our finely wrought lives.

This doesn't mean that there is nothing we can do to please him; there is much—our human believing and obedience is insistently and constantly worked into the story of what God is doing; and our unbelieving and disobedience is forever introducing needless pain and difficulties for others. Still, it is clear enough that what the Bible reveals is a world of God's sovereignty and salvation, not a showcase for displaying human achievement in politics or art or religion.

As we read these narratives, we learn not to "take sides" too quickly but rather discern God's presence coming into view and his will being worked out all over the place, often in persons and places we least expect.

We Christians cultivate skill in understanding the ways of the world within the far larger context of God's sovereignty, depending on our biblical writers to give us the "sovereignty" perspective. If we get our theology—that is, our understanding of what is really and eternally God-important—from the journalists, we get a few facts, almost no truth, and nothing at all of God. But a biblically trained imagination accustomed to dealing with flawed leaders, discerns our sovereign God working out his salvation purposes in our history. This counters cynicism and even despair as we are handed daily bulletins documenting the failures of our leaders in government and church.

That's what Israel did. Israel developed a most impressive theology of God as king, God alive and present in sovereign justice and mercy during the very five-hundred-year period (from 1000 to 500 B.C.) when their daily experience of kings was most unsatisfactory. "The Lord reigns!" was the key motif in their theology (Pss. 93:1; 97:1; 99:1). Also, the early church cultivated a habit of intercession for the rulers of the day (1 Tim. 2:1-2), most of whom were either ignorant or defiant of the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Neither Israel's God-anointed kings nor Rome's pagan emperors ever gave evidence of a moral life that was much to write home about. One of our ancestors put it so graphically: "God rides the lame horse and draws straight lines with a crooked stick."

The way a leader lives, of course, has enormous effects on a society and culture. Sin cannot be contained in the sinner—it spills out of the self into society, making a mess. And when that happens the rest of us have the job of mopping up, and we are understandably angry. But mopping up is honorable work, this moral cleanup that Christians are called to engage in generation after generation.

Christians have a long history of passionate concern for God's rule that gets expressed in the social and political world in which we live. But we have never gotten much help from our leaders, whether ecclesiastical or political. And so we are not especially upset or dismayed when they turn out to be less than advertised.

Eugene H. Peterson is the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and author of Leap over a Wall: Earthy Spirituality for Everyday Christians (Harper San Francisco, 1997).

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

When Catholics debate evangelicals, the most common question they have is, Do evangelicals have a doctrine of the church? If so, what is it? Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University and a senior adviser for CHRISTIANITY TODAY, found himself answering just those questions last year before a group of Catholic theologians, including representatives from the Vatican. His talk at this meeting of Evangelicals and Catholics Together addressed what many consider an oxymoron—evangelical ecclesiology. Here is a radically condensed version of that talk, which shows that evangelicals have good answers to these questions.

On July 29, 1928, a young evangelical pastor began his sermon on Paul’s teaching on the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians with these words: “There is a word that, when a Catholic hears it, kindles all his feeling of love and bliss; that stirs all the depths of his religious sensibility, from dread and awe of the Last Judgment to the sweetness of God’s presence; and that certainly awakens in him the feeling of home; the feeling that only a child has in relation to its mother, made up of gratitude, reverence, and devoted love . …

“And there is a word that to Protestants has the sound of something infinitely commonplace, more or less indifferent and superfluous, that does not make their heart beat faster; something with which a sense of boredom is so often associated. … And yet our fate is sealed, if we are unable again to attach a new, or perhaps a very old, meaning to it. Woe to us if that word does not become important to us soon again. … Yes, the word to which I am referring is Church.”

So spoke Dietrich Bonhoeffer to a small German congregation in Barcelona. These words present both a diagnosis and a challenge for evangelicals today who are called to set forth a clear, compelling doctrine of the church in their new conversations with their Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, and who need it to help them sort out their loyalties in a bewildering bazaar of denominations, parachurch ministries, and independent congregations.

As a global, transdenominational fellowship of one-half billion believers, evangelicalism is an amazing ecumenical fact. As a theological movement, however, evangelicalism has been slow to develop a distinctive understanding of the church. There are several reasons for this:

First, evangelical scholars have been preoccupied with other theological themes such as biblical revelation, religious epistemology, and apologetics. For example, Carl F. H. Henry’s six-volume magnum opus, God, Revelation and Authority, extends to more than 3,000 pages with little ink spent on the doctrine of the church.

Second, as an activist movement committed to evangelism and missions, evangelicalism has not made reflective ecclesiology a high priority. As some might say, “We are too busy winning people to Christ to engage in navel gazing.” This objection should not be quickly dismissed, for as missiologist J. C. Hoekendijk observed, “In history a keen ecclesiological interest has, almost without exception, been a sign of spiritual decadence.”

Third, evangelicalism is a splintering movement representing a bewildering diversity of congregations, denominations, and parachurch movements. Their shared identity is not tied to a particular view of church polity or ministerial orders.

Amidst such variety, is it even possible to describe one single, or even central, evangelical ecclesiology? The evangelical witness emerged not only as a protest against abuses in the church but also as a testimony for the truth of the gospel (we are protestants). How evangelicalism maintains the centrality of gospel truth within ostensibly weak structures of church authority is perhaps its greatest challenge today. However, within the evangelical tradition—in its confessions and hymns no less than its formal theological reflections—there exists a rich reservoir for articulating a strong doctrine of the church. One resource we share with the broader Christian tradition is the Nicene Creed. I would like to explore here what evangelicals mean when we affirm our belief in the church as “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.”

The church is oneIn his letter to the Ephesians, the Magna Carta of the church, Paul urges, “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (4:3-6; all references taken from the NIV). Thus the unity of the church is based on the fact that we worship one God.

Neither Luther nor Calvin intended to start a new church, but to reform the church. As Calvin put it, “To leave the church is nothing less than a denial of God and Christ.” By contrast, Continental Anabaptists, English Separatists, and biblical restorationists sought not so much to purify the church as to restore it to its original New Testament condition. Thus by gathering new congregations of “visible saints,” these radical reformers believed they could restore, as one of them put it, “the old glorious face of primitive Christianity.”

The result was the proliferation of numerous denominations and sects, “separated brethren,” who were often more separated than brotherly in their relations! This little ditty from the early nineteenth century describes the resulting confusion:

Ten thousand reformers like so many moles,
Have plowed all the Bible and cut it in holes;
And each has his church at the end of his trace,
Built up as he thinks of the subjects of grace.

At the same time, we must realize that the restorationist impulse was itself motivated by a concern for Christian unity. In the early nineteenth century, Alexander Campbell wanted his followers to be called simply “Christians” or “disciples of Christ” as a way of overcoming denominational disharmony, even if in the end his movement too added still another competing note to the Protestant chorus.

Evangelicals today are heirs of both reformational and restorational models of ecclesiology. Their approach to church order, ministry, and ecumenism often depends on which of these two paradigms they more identify with.

The fact that most evangelicals are less than enthusiastic about the modern ecumenical movement in its liberal Protestant modality does not mean that they have no concern for the unity of the church. It does mean, however, that the question of the church’s unity cannot be divorced from the question of the church’s integrity. The call to be one in Christ rings hollow when it comes from church leaders who either themselves deny, or wink at others who do, the most basic Christological affirmations of the faith, including the virgin birth, bodily resurrection, and actual return of Christ himself.

Thomas Oden speaks for many evangelicals when he declares: “Too many pretentious pseudoecumenical efforts have been themselves divisive, intolerant, ultrapolitical, misconceived, utopian, abusive, nationalistic, and culturally imperialistic. … Hence modern ecumenical movements are themselves called to repentance on behalf of the unity of the Church.”

But evangelicals too are called to repentance. We too have sinned against the body of Christ by confusing loyalty to the truth with party spirit, and kingdom advancement with self-aggrandizement. We need the wisdom of the Holy Spirit to know when, like the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, it is necessary to stand against schemes of false church unity and compromised theology to declare, “Jesus Christ, as he is testified to us in the Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we are to hear, whom we are to trust and obey in life and in death.”

The church is holyOf the four classic attributes of the church, holiness is the one best attested in the most primitive versions of the baptismal creed: “I believe in the holy church.”

The church on earth is holy not because it is set apart in its external organization, as though it were a sanitarium in the midst of contagion. It is holy only because it is animated by the Holy Spirit and joined with its heavenly Head, Jesus Christ.

Evangelicals insist, however, that the holiness of God be clearly distinguished from the holiness of the church. The holiness of the church on Earth is entirely derived, emergent, and incomplete. God’s is eternal and unbroken by imperfection and finitude. Thus we take exception to the statement of Yves Congar that “there is no more sin in the church than in Christ, of whom she is the body; and she is his mystical personality.”

Luther, though insisting that the one crucial mark of the church was and remained the gospel, also said much about good works and growth in holiness as the fruit of having been declared righteous by God through faith alone. Later Reformers placed more emphasis on the “marks of the true church” (Word and sacrament for Luther and Calvin, discipline as well for later Reformed confessions, English Separatists, and Anabaptists). Calvin, in particular, is clear about the function of the marks: “For, in order that the title ‘church’ may not deceive us, every congregation that claims the name ‘church’ must be tested by this standard as by a touchstone.”

The evangelical marks—proclamation, worship, and discipline—are thus distinguished from the Nicene attributes because they are not merely descriptive, but dynamic: they call into question the unity, catholicity, apostolicity, and holiness of every congregation that claims to be a church. In this way, as Calvin says, “the face of the church” emerges into visibility before our eyes.

By elevating discipline as a distinguishing mark of the church, Puritans, Pietists, and the early Methodists defined the true visible church as a covenanted company of gathered saints. It is separated from the world in its organization and through its congregational discipline of erring members.

Such disciplinary measures weren’t meant as punitive. They were intended to underscore the imperatives of life and growth within the church. The church, in turn, was understood as an intentional community of mutual service and mutual obligation by which “the whole body, bonded and knit together by every constituent joint … grows through the due activity of each part, and builds itself up” (Eph. 4:16). The strenuous use of church discipline sometimes degenerated into petty legalism. But at its best, it provided a context for Christian catechesis, nurture, and outreach that stands in marked contrast to the kind of casual Christianity so prevalent in our own day.

The church is catholicMost evangelicals are happy to confess that the church is one, holy, and apostolic. These are, after all, not only biblical concepts but also New Testament terms. But in what sense can evangelicals affirm “We believe in the catholic church”? Many contemporary evangelical churches have long abandoned the word catholic. Some have gone so far as to alter the traditional wording of the creeds to avoid even pronouncing the word! But none of this changes the fact that evangelicals are catholics. They believe that in its essence the Christian community is in all places and in all ages the one, holy, universal church.

The Reformers of the sixteenth century and the Puritans of the seventeenth, not excluding Baptists, were happy for their churches to be called catholic. Indeed, they opposed the Church of Rome not because it was too catholic, but because it was not catholic enough. They spoke of the evidence for catholicity in three ways: in its geographical extent (the church is spread over the whole world); in its inclusive membership (the church is gathered from all ranks of society); and in its indefectibility (the church is built on the promise of the risen Christ: “I will be with you always, to the very end of the age” ).

Evangelical expositors, however, were careful to point out that historical continuity, numerical quantity, and cultural variety do not themselves constitute true catholicity. The true church may be quite small: Where two or three of you are gathered together in my name, Jesus said, there I am in your midst. This “I” is the only basis of true catholicity. As Barth wrote, “The Real Church is the assembly which is called, united, held together and governed by the Word of her Lord, or she is not the Real Church.”

Perhaps evangelical catholicity today is best seen in its worldwide missionary vision. Indeed, what ecumenism is to post-Vatican II Catholicism, world evangelization is for evangelicalism: not an added appendix, but an organic part of its life and work. The effort to share the gospel with those who have never heard was at the heart of William Carey’s mission to India in 1793, an event that launched what Kenneth Scott Latourette called “the great century” of Protestant missions. This witness continues today through the mission boards of evangelical denominations and a vast network of international parachurch ministries such as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Campus Crusade for Christ, World Vision, and Prison Fellowship.

The church is apostolicBecause the church is one, holy, and catholic, it is also apostolic. This word was added to the Nicene description of the church in 381, but it was clearly expressed already in Paul’s metaphor of the church as God’s house, “built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets” (Eph. 2:20). That church is apostolic which stands under the authority of the apostles, whom Jesus chose and sent forth in his name.

Evangelicals, no less than Roman Catholics, claim to be apostolic in this sense. But the two traditions differ sharply in understanding the transmission of the apostolic witness from the first century until now. Catholics believe that the church continues to be “taught, sanctified, and guided by the apostles … through their successors in pastoral office: the college of bishops, assisted by priests, in union with the successor of Peter, the church’s supreme pastor.” As heirs of the Reformation, evangelicals do not define apostolicity in terms of a literal, linear succession of duly ordained bishops. They point instead to the primordial character of the gospel, the inscripturated witness of the apostles, and the succession of apostolic proclamation.

Perhaps evangelical catholicitytoday is best seen in itsworldwide missionary vision.

While the church is indeed built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, there is something even more basic: the message they proclaimed—Jesus Christ and him crucified. This is a constant note throughout the ministry of Paul, who wrote to the Corinthians, “For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5).

As the authorized representatives of Jesus Christ, the apostles have faithfully and accurately transmitted their authoritative witness to their Lord in the divinely inspired writings of Holy Scripture. The teaching authority of the apostles, evangelicals believe, thus resides in the Old and New Testaments, the self-authenticating Word of God.

Evangelicals and Catholics differ about which books are included in the canon of Scripture and also about the role of the early church in its formation: Was the canon the creation of the church, or was the church the place of reception for the canon? Both, nonetheless, share a common commitment to the Scriptures as the divinely inspired Word of God. (Indeed, documents in both traditions appeal to the Bible as “inerrant.”)

For evangelicals, the principle of sola Scriptura means that all the teachings, interpretations, and traditions of the church must be subjected to the divine touchstone of Holy Scripture itself. But sola Scriptura is not nuda Scriptura. While evangelicals cannot accept the idea of tradition as a coequal or supplementary source of revelation, neither can we ignore the rich exegetical tradition of the early Christian writers whose wisdom is vastly superior to the latest word from today’s guilded scholars. The consensus of thoughtful Christian interpretation of the Word through the ages—and on central issues of faith there is such a thing—is not likely to be wrong. Evangelicals have much to learn from the way the Bible was read in ages past.

For evangelicals, public preaching of the Word of God is a sign of apostolicity. Through the words of the preacher, the living voice of the gospel is heard. The church, Luther said, is not a “pen house” but a “mouth house.” The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) goes so far as to say that “the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” But evangelicals should not let the almost sacramental quality of preaching in our tradition obscure the importance of the “visible words” of God in baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Evangelicals, no less than Catholics, should strive for a proper balance among these constituent acts of worship. In doing so, of course, evangelicals must not compromise the priority of proclamation, for as in the time of the apostles, “God was pleased through the foolishness of what is preached to save those who believe” (1 Cor. 1:21).

A worthy maid“I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church,” Archbishop William Temple once remarked, “but regret that it doesn’t exist.” To which the evangelical responds: If by exist we mean perfect, complete, unbroken, infallibly secure, verifiably visible in its external structures, then it is clear that such a church does not exist in this world. In this world the true church is always in a state of becoming. It is buffeted by struggles and beset by the eschatological “groanings” that mark those “on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come” (Rom. 8:18-25; 1 Cor. 10:11).

In 1525, Luther wrote a lyrical hymn praising the church:

To me she’s dear, the worthy maid,
and I cannot forget her;
Praise, honor, virtue of her are said;
then all I love her better.

On earth, all mad with murder,
the mother now alone is she,
But God will watchful guard her,
and the right Father be.

To the eyes of faith, the church is a “worthy maid,” the Bride of Christ. But by the standards of the world, she is a poor Cinderella surrounded by many foes. Wrote Luther: “If, then, a person desires to draw the church as he sees her, he will picture her as a deformed and poor girl sitting in an unsafe forest in the midst of hungry lions … in the midst of infuriated men who set sword, fire, and water in motion in order to kill her and wipe her from the face of the earth.” In God’s sight, the church is pure, holy, unspotted, the Bridegroom, Christ: “hacked to pieces, marked with scratches, despised, crucified, mocked.”

As evangelicals and Catholics pursue theological dialogue, moved by our love for the truth and for one another, we must not forget this ecclesiology by opting for an easy armchair ecumenism, heady and aloof. All our plans will ring hollow unless we stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Christ, who live under the shadow of the cross and whose faithful witness is leading many of them to the shedding of their blood for the gospel.

Several months ago on a visit to Germany, I was taken to what remains of the concentration camp at Buchenwald near Weimar. Here more than 65,000 people were put to death by a totalitarian regime which saw in the Christian faith, in both its Catholic and Protestant expressions, a threat to the ideology of death. At Buchenwald there was one block of cells reserved for especially “dangerous” prisoners.

In cell 27 they placed Paul Schneider, a Lutheran pastor, who came to be called “the Preacher of Buchenwald.” From the small window in his cell he loudly proclaimed Jesus Christ in defiance of the orders of the Gestapo guards. In cell 23 they placed Otto Neururer, a Catholic priest, whose work on behalf of the Jews and other so-called undesirables had made him a threat to the Nazi war lords. He too ministered to the prisoners in Jesus’ name.

Together, a son of Rome and a son of the Reformation, separated no longer by four centuries but only by four cells, walked the way of the cross and together bore witness to their Lord. Their common witness does not remove all the differences between their respective communities of faith. But we remember them and thank God for them as well as for the countless others who have and will share a fellowship in the sufferings of Jesus. For today, as in ages past, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church—the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Many adults can recall a certain childhood feeling that has now pretty much faded away. Unhappily, one of the things that fades away is a childlike feeling of security in the nest. It’s a sense that you are loved, protected, and perfectly safe. It’s a sense, above all, that somebody else is in charge. In properly functioning homes, children often have this feeling. Adults do not, and they miss it.

Years ago, on the old Candid Camera television program, a very large and dangerous-looking truck driver—a man of about 50—was asked in an interview what age he would be if he could be any age he wanted. There was a silence for a while as the trucker contemplated the question. What was he thinking? Was he hankering for age 65 and retirement so he could trade his Kenworth four-and-a-quarter semi down to a John Deere riding lawn mower? Or was he yearning for age 18 and the chance to go back and take some turn he had missed?

Finally he turned to the interviewer and said that if it was up to him he’d like to be three. Three? Why three? the interviewer wanted to know. “Well,” said the trucker, “when you’re three you don’t have any responsibilities.”

When I first heard the interview I thought this man was trying to be cute. I now think he said something wistful. What he knew was that when you are a child, and if your family is running the right way, your burdens are usually small. You can go to bed without worrying about ice backup under your shingles. You don’t wonder if the tingling in your leg might be a symptom of some exotic nerve disease. You don’t wrestle half the night with a tax deduction you claimed, wondering whether a federal investigator might find it a little too creative. No, you squirm deliciously in your bed, drowsily aware of the murmur of adult conversations elsewhere in the house. You hover wonderfully at the edge of slumber. Then you let go and fall away.

You dare to do this not only because you fully expect that in the morning you shall be resurrected. You also dare to do it because you are sleeping under your parents’ wings. If parents take proper care of you, you can give yourself up to sleep, secure in the knowledge that somebody else is in charge; somebody big and strong and experienced. As far as children know, parents stay up all night, checking doors and windows, adjusting temperature controls, fearlessly driving away marauders. They never go off duty. If a shadow falls over the house, or demons begin to stir, or a storm rises, parents will handle it. That’s one reason children sleep so well. Their nest is sheltered and feathered.

I think children might be alarmed to discover how much adults crave this same sense of security. Adults need to be sheltered, warmed, embraced. Some of us have been betrayed. Some of us have grown old and are not happy about it.

People get betrayed, or they get old or sick. Some are deeply disappointed that their lives have not turned out as they had hoped. Others have been staggered by a report that has just come back from a pathology lab. Still others are unspeakably ignored by people they treasure. Some are simply high-tension human beings, strung tight as piano wire.

To all such folk, the psalmist speaks a word of comfort. It is one of the great themes of the Scriptures: God is our shelter. He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge.

The image here is that of an eagle, or maybe a hen; in any case, it’s a picture of a bird that senses danger and then protectively spreads its wings over its young. An expert on birds once told me that this move is very common. A bird senses the approach of a predator, or the threat of something falling from above, and instinctively spreads out its wings like a canopy. Then the fledglings scuttle underneath for shelter. The move is so deeply instinctive that an adult bird will spread those wings even when no fledglings are around!

And the psalmist—who has almost surely seen this lovely thing happen—the psalmist thinks of God. He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge. The point is that God is our shelter when the winds begin to howl; under God’s providence we are defended, protected, perfectly safe—someone else is in charge—someone big, strong, and experienced, who never goes off duty.

In one of his books, John Timmer, my former pastor, tells of his experience as a boy in the Netherlands at the start of World War II. German troops had invaded Holland a few days before, but nobody knew just what to expect. Then, on the second Sunday of May 1940, as the Timmer family was sitting around the dinner table in their home in Haarlem, suddenly they heard the eerie whining of an air-raid siren and then the droning of German bombers.

Of course, all of them were scared out of their minds. “Let’s go stand in the hallway,” John’s father said. “They say it’s the safest place in the house.” In the hall, John’s father said, “Why don’t we pray? There’s nothing else we can do.”

John says he has long ago forgotten the exact wording of his father’s prayer—all except for one phrase. Somewhere in that prayer to God to protect his family from Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Mr. Timmer said, “O God, in the shadow of your wings we take refuge.”

God spreads his wings over us. Here is a picture that all the Jewish and Christian generations have cherished, in part because it invites us to recover our childhood feeling of security in the nest. Or, to discover it for the first time if we have had a terrorized childhood. It’s a picture that offers sublime comfort, and only a pretty numb Christian would fail to be touched by it.

How trueis the picture of asheltering God?How secure are we in the nest?

Still, a disturbing question pricks us. How true is the picture of a sheltering God? How secure are we in the nest? I wonder whether in 1940, on the second Sunday of May, some other Dutch family begged God to spread his wings over their house. I wonder if the bombs of the German air force pierced those wings and blew that house and its people to rubble.

You read Psalm 91 and you begin to wonder. It offers such comprehensive coverage. He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge. … You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday.

Really? I need not fear any of these things? I can sleep in a dangerous neighborhood with my windows open? I shall not fear the terror of the night? My child’s temperature soars and his white blood count plummets: I shall not fear the pestilence that stalks in darkness? I can plunge into my work at an AIDS clinic: I shall not fear the destruction that wastes at midday? Really? Is there a level of faith that can honestly say such things even after all allowance has been made for poetic exaggeration?

In his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas L. Friedman writes of his years in the Middle East. One of the terrors of life in Beirut during the civil war there was the prospect of dying a random death. Long-distance sniping and shelling made it hard to tell where bullets or shells might land, and the people who launched them often didn’t care. You never knew whether the car you walked past might explode into a fireball, stripping trees of their leaves so that in the terrible silence that followed, scores of leaves would come fluttering down in a soft shower on top of the dead and the maimed.

No one kept score. Police would even lose track of the names of the dead. “Death in Beirut had no echo,” says Friedman.

I shall not fear the grenade that flies by day. Could a believer say this in Beirut?

Let us face the truth. Faith in the sheltering wings of God does not remove physical danger or the need for precaution against it. We cannot ignore Beirut tourist advisories, or feed wild animals on our camping trips, or jump a hot motorcycle over a row of parked cars and trust God to keep us safe. We cannot smoke cigarettes like the Marlboro man and then claim the promises of Psalm 91 as our protection against lung cancer. A person who did these things would be a foolish believer and a foolish reader of Psalm 91.

You may recall that in Matthew’s gospel Satan quotes this psalm to Jesus in the temptation at the pinnacle of the temple. “Throw yourself down,” says Satan. After all, it says right in Psalm 91 that “God will give his angels charge over you.” And Jesus replies that it is not right to put God to the test. God’s protection is good only for certain events, and restrictions may apply. Jesus was teaching us that we cannot act like a fool and then count on God to bail us out. God may do it—and some of us can recall times when we acted like fools and God bailed us out. But we may not count on it.

But, of course, some believers get hurt, terribly hurt, by no folly of their own. Suppose a drunk driver smashes into your family car. Suppose an I-beam falls on you in a storm. What if you make the mistake of visiting a great city during tourist-hunting season?

Or suppose you are a devout middle-aged Christian woman who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One June you start to feel sick. So you visit your primary-care physician, who sends you for tests, and then a visit to a specialist, and then more tests. Finally you go back to your own physician, and she says, “Ma’am, I’m sorry to say that you had better get your affairs in order.” She says more, far more, about treatments and research and making you as comfortable as possible—on and on with all kinds of stuff that is well-meant. But you have grown deaf. All you can think is that you are 46 years old and you are going to die before your parents do and before your children get married.

Whatever happened to the wings of God? Can you get brain cancer under those wings? Get molested by a family member? Get knifed by some emotionless teenager in a subway in New York? Can you find, suddenly one summer, that your own 17-year-old has become a stranger and that everything in your family seems to be cascading out of control?

Where are those wings?

What troubles us is not so much the sheer fact that believers suffer along with everybody else. C. S. Lewis once pondered this. If the children of God were always saved from floods like believing Noah and his family; if every time somebody pointed a gun at a Christian, the gun just turned to salami; if we really had a money-back guarantee against hatred, disease, and the acts of terrorists, then of course we wouldn’t have to worry about church growth. Our churches would fill with people attracted to the faith for secondary reasons. These are people who want an insurance agent, not a church. For security they want Colin Powell, not God. We already have people becoming Christians because they want to get rich or get happy. What would happen to people’s integrity if becoming a believer really did give you blanket protection against poverty, accident, and the wages of sin?

No, it’s not the fact that we have to take our share of the world’s suffering that surprises us. After all, our experience and the rest of Scripture have taught us to expect hardship. What worries us is that Psalm 91 tells us not to worry. It says “a thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” This is advertising that sounds too good to be true. In fact, the psalmist says, “Because you have made the Lord your refuge … no evil shall befall you.” And the statement troubles us. What about Paul? What about Stephen? What about our Lord himself? He wanted to gather the citizens of Jerusalem as a hen gathers her chicks. What some of those citizens did was to take him outside of town one day and nail his wings to some two-by-fours.

So what is going on in Psalm 91? How are its extravagant promises God’s Word to us?

What Psalm 91 does is express one—one of the loveliest, one of the most treasured—but just one of the moods of faith. It’s a mood of exuberant confidence in the sheltering providence of God. Probably the psalmist has been protected by God in some dangerous incident, and he is celebrating.

On other days, and in other moods—in other and darker seasons of his life—this same psalmist might have called to God out of despair and a sense of abandonment. Remember that when our Lord was crucified, when our Lord shouted at our God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—when Jesus shouted this in astonishment, and with maybe even a note of accusation, remember that he was quoting another psalm (22). Despair or astonishment at what can happen to us under God’s providence—that too is natural and biblical.

Psalm 91 gives us only part of the picture and only one of the moods of faith. With a kind of quiet amazement, the psalmist bears witness that under the wings of God good things happen to bad people. You need another psalm or two to fill in the picture, to cry out that under those same wings bad things sometimes happen to good people.

Psalm 91 says no evil shall befall us. When we have cashed out some of the poetry and then added in the witness of the rest of Scripture, what we get, I believe, is the conclusion that no final evil shall befall us. We know that we can believe God with all our heart and yet have our heart broken by the loss of a child or the treachery of a spouse or the menace of a fatal disease. We know this is true—everyone in the church knows it. And yet, generation after generation of bruised saints have known something else and spoken of it. In the mystery of faith, we find a hand on us in the darkness, a voice that calls our name, and the sheer certainty that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God—not for this life and not for the life to come. We may be scarred and shaken, but, as Lewis Smedes says in one of his luminous sermons, we come to know that it’s all right, even when everything is all wrong.

We are like fledglings who scuttle under the wings of their parent. The forces of evil beat on those wings with everything they have. The pitchforks of the Evil One, falling tree limbs in the storm, merciless rain and hail—everything beats on those wings. When it is finished, when evil has done its worst, those wings are all bloodied and busted and hanging at wrong angles. And, to tell you the truth, in all the commotion we too get roughed up quite a lot.

But we are all right, because those wings have never folded. They are spread out to be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. And when the feathers quit flying, we peep out and discover that we have been in the only place that was not leveled. Yes, we have been bumped and bruised and hurt. Sometimes badly hurt. But the other choice was to be dead—the other choice was to break out of the embrace of God. If we had not stayed under those wings we could never have felt the body shudders and heard the groans of the one who loved us so much that those wings stayed out there no matter what came whistling in. This is the one who protects us from final evil, now and in the life to come—the life in which, at last, it is safe for God to fold his wings.

He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge. It’s not a simple truth, but it is the truth. And we ought to believe it with everything that is in us.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., is dean of the chapel at Calvin Theological Seminary and author of Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Eerdmans).

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Q: A friend of mine recently read The Five Gospels, which I understand was written by the “Jesus Seminar.” She tells me that the fifth Gospel is the Gospel of Thomas and that it is as authentic and trustworthy as the Gospels in the Bible. Is this true? What is this Gospel of Thomas and where did it come from? Why isn’t it part of the New Testament?

Norma Erickson PolingScottsdale, Arizona

A:One hundred years ago, three Greek fragments of what is called the Gospel of Thomas were found in the dry sands of Egypt. They dated to the third century after Christ. Then, shortly after World War II, a complete manuscript of Thomas was found, also in Egypt. It was written in the Coptic language and dated to the middle of the fourth century. This complete Thomas is made up of 114 sayings with no narrative framework and no mention of Jesus’ Passion or Resurrection.

Scholars have studied this text with great interest since its discovery. The Jesus Seminar places high value on the historical basis of the Gospel of Thomas—that it recovers for us words Jesus actually spoke that are not found in our four Gospels. But many other scholars, conservatives and liberals alike, view this document more cautiously. Most think that it is no more than a second-century collection of sayings loosely based on the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and other writings, and that it offers nothing that is original or older.

So why does the Jesus Seminar interpret it differently? This group of scholars and pastors—which does not represent a broad cross section of biblical scholarship—continues to be in the news and popular media. On the basis of ten years of deliberations over the sayings of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels, they have color-coded the words of Jesus according to their reckoning of authenticity (red = Jesus really said it; pink = close to something Jesus said; gray = Jesus probably did not say it, or the members of the seminar were sharply divided; black = Jesus definitely did not say it). Their work is conveniently displayed in the book you mentioned, The Five Gospels (Macmillan, 1993).

Thus, the seminar claims to have deduced what Jesus actually said and didn’t say. According to its thinking, however, the New Testament Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas contain a relatively small amount of authentic material. Virtually nothing in the Gospel of John is rated red or pink, while only about one-quarter of the Synoptic Gospels is favored with these colors. By minimizing the authenticity of the four Gospels and elevating the authenticity of at least some of the sayings in Thomas, the seminar not only calls into question the traditional understanding of the biblical canon but also how we should view the historical Jesus.

The Jesus that emerges in the writings of the Jesus Seminar is an itinerant philosopher who calls for justice and the implementation of egalitarian principles. In itself this is not objectionable. But it stops conspicuously short of answering why the earliest Christians claimed Jesus was God’s Son and Israel’s Messiah whose death on the cross fulfilled Scripture and whose resurrection from the grave vindicated his claims and gave humanity new hope.

This may explain the seminar’s preoccupation with the Gospel of Thomas. As in the case of many of the authors of postcanonical writings (consider, for example, just those apocryphal pieces using Thomas’s name: Acts of Thomas, Apocalypse of Thomas, Infancy Gospel of Thomas), the author or compiler of the Gospel of Thomas wished to present Jesus in a way that was compatible with his views. Jesus appears as a mysterious figure, strangely aloof from his world. He speaks in riddles, has anti-Semitic tendencies, has no positive interest in Israel or her Scriptures, and has embraced some aspects of early Gnosticism.

With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other earlier writings from Palestine, scholars are recognizing, in the light of the Hebrew Scriptures, the complete Jewishness of Jesus, which makes the use of Thomas for understanding Jesus even less tenable. The Jesus of Thomas is indeed very different from the Jesus of the New Testament Gospels. And it is not surprising that the early church, guided by the Holy Spirit, passed over Thomas, just as it passed over many other writings, in the long process of deciding what belonged in the New Testament canon and what did not. Although serious scholars will continue to study Thomas, it is unlikely that they will ever embrace the eccentric views of it espoused by the Jesus Seminar.

WANTED: YOUR QUESTIONS. Send questions to be answered by evangelical scholars to “What We Believe” at cteditor@christianitytoday.com; or CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Dr., Carol Stream, IL 60188.

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The gods feel no love for humans, Aristotle taught. “God so loved the world,” Christians answered. That response changed the standard of living in this world, says Rodney Stark, author of The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton) and a professor at the University of Washington. His article is condensed from CT‘s sister magazine CHRISTIAN HISTORY. A little-known fact is that Christians in the ancient world had longer life expectancies than did their pagan neighbors. In fact, many pagans were attracted to the Christian faith because the church produced tangible (not only “spiritual”) blessings for its adherents. These benefits included:

Social services. In a world entirely lacking in social services, Christians were their brothers’ keepers. At the end of the second century, Tertullian wrote that while pagan temples spent their donations “on feasts and drinking bouts,” Christians spent theirs “to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined to the house.”

Similarly, in a letter to the bishop of Antioch in 251, the bishop of Rome mentioned that “more than 1,500 widows and distressed persons” were in the care of his congregation. This charity was confirmed by pagan observers, too. “The impious Galileans support not only their poor,” noted the emperor Julian, “but ours as well.”

Health services. When two great plagues swept the empire in 165 and 251, mortality rates climbed higher than 30 percent. Pagans tried to avoid all contact with the afflicted, often casting the still living into the gutters. Christians nursed the sick, even though some believers died doing so. We now know that elementary nursing—simply giving victims food and water without any drugs—reduces mortality in epidemics by as much as two-thirds. Consequently, Christians were more likely than pagans to recover.

Women’s rights. Women greatly outnumbered men among early converts. However, in the empire men vastly outnumbered women because of female infanticide. “If you are delivered of a child,” wrote a man named Hilarion to his pregnant wife, “if it is a boy, keep it, if it is a girl, discard it.” Frequent abortions “entailing great risk” (in the words of Celsus) killed many women and left even more barren. Christians, however, practiced neither abortion nor infanticide and thus attracted women.

Women also enjoyed higher status and security than they did among their pagan neighbors. Pagan women typically were married at a young age (often before puberty) to much older men. But Christian women were older when they married and had more choice in whom, and even if, they would marry. In addition, Christian men could not easily divorce their wives, and both genders were subject to strongly enforced rules against extramarital sex. The apostle Paul indicates that women held positions of leadership within the church, as was confirmed by Pliny the Younger, who reported to Emperor Trajan that he had tortured two young Christian women “who were called deaconesses.”

Urban sanctuary. Greco-Roman cities were terribly overpopulated. Antioch in Syria, for example, had a population density of about 117 inhabitants per acre—more than three times that of New York City today. Tenement cubicles were smoky, dark, often damp, and always dirty. On the street, mud, open sewers, and manure lay everywhere. Newcomers and strangers, divided into many ethnic groups, harbored antagonism that often erupted into riots. For these ills, Christianity offered a unifying subculture, bridging divisions and providing a strong sense of common identity. To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity and hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate fellowship. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family.

Close-knit community. Because the church asked much of its members, it followed that it gave much. Because Christians were expected to aid the less fortunate, they could expect to receive such aid, and all could feel greater security against bad times. Because they were asked to nurse the sick and dying, they too would receive such nursing. Because they were asked to love others, they in turn would be loved.

In similar fashion, Christianity mitigated relations among social classes, and at the very time when the gap between rich and poor was growing. It did not preach that everyone could or should be socially or politically equal, but that all were equal in the eyes of God, and that the more fortunate had a responsibility to help those in need.

Behind tangible motives Christians believe the Holy Spirit prodded and persuaded pagans to believe. Christian conversion, after all, is ultimately a spiritual affair. But it is not too much to think that God used the tangible to influence the spiritual.

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