Page 5340 – Christianity Today (2024)

The Gospel Flourishes In The Ussr’S Second Largest City

With 4.5 million people, Leningrad is the Soviet Union’s second-largest city. The city of the czars and of Lenin has a history of glory, heroism, and tragedy.

On the city’s north side, the Leningrad Baptist Church claims some 3,000 members plus perhaps twice that many unbaptized children and other adherents. One of more than 60 congregations in the northwest district of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), it is also the “mother church” for seven smaller churches in the Leningrad suburbs.

Two full-time pastors, a paid administrator, 27 “preachers,” 16 deacons, three choirs of more than 100 voices each, and several other music groups serve the congregation. The three Sunday services, each lasting two hours, are always crowded. Additional services are held on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evenings. A Bible-study session is held on Monday nights, and classes for new Christians and other nurture opportunities round out the schedule.

An estimated 95 percent of the members have Bibles, and just about everyone else has a New Testament, according to Pastor P. B. Konovalchik. Some 10,000 additional Bibles are due early next year when the AUCECB expects its latest shipment from West Germany. However, other Christian literature and study materials are in short supply. In neighboring Estonia, where “Russification” efforts affect the long-range use of the Estonian language, the shortages are worse.

Within the past seven years, the number of young people in the northwest district’s churches has grown fivefold, according to AUCECB district superintendent Sergei Nikolayev. Sunday afternoon, Tuesday night, and Saturday evening services are primarily youth affairs, as are the Monday night Bible studies and an informal evangelistic meeting on Wednesday nights. Nonbelieving friends are invited to the Wednesday night meetings.

New believers receive special training. Those aged 18 and older can be baptized and apply for church membership. Soviet law prohibits younger persons from joining. The converts first must pass the scrutiny of the church’s pastors and deacons. They must articulate an understanding of their Christian experience, demonstrate a changed life, and pursue personal Bible study.

Spiritual growth usually is rapid. Nikolayev said the northwest district’s pastors include young men who had not even heard the gospel as recently as five years ago. Women are excluded from leadership positions in the church.

Individual congregations try to determine which youths show evidence of a divine call to the ministry. Those selected are discipled by other leaders, enroll in the AUCECB’s three-year correspondence course (adaptations of a Moody Bible Institute series), and gradually assume preaching and other church chores. They must pass muster in personal and family life before being considered for ordination. Unlike earlier times, government approval is no longer required.

Nikolayev said young Soviet Christians take seriously the command to spread the gospel. He tells of a steady stream of them who relocate to some town or city, even thousands of miles away, where there is no church. After they settle into new apartments and jobs, he said, “a new church is almost always the result.”

The Communist government has stepped up its antireligious propaganda while loosening some restrictions on churches.

In September, the Soviet government helped facilitate the four-city preaching mission of evangelist Billy Graham. Last summer, the government provided limited assistance for a National Council of Churches—sponsored tour of more than 250 American Christians.

Those are recent examples of the Communist government’s recognition of religion within its own borders. In a country where atheism and the eventual evaporation of religious belief are government policies, many churches are thriving.

Young people have been turning to the church in large numbers despite stepped-up efforts to propagate atheism in Soviet schools and a media campaign aimed at stemming the religious tide. New churches are opening. Innovative one-on-one evangelism is working. Choirs have membership waiting lists. Churches are crowded during three or four services each Sunday.

Spiritual renewal is under way in some sectors of the Russian Orthodox church, which may claim the loyalty of more than 50 million of the USSR’s 270 million citizens. Orthodox leaders say they hope the movement will grow quietly and gradually. A sudden upsurge, they fear, would ignite extensive countermeasures by the government.

Most Orthodox churches hold services daily. They center on a liturgical observance of Communion. Many younger, educated members—careful not to criticize the liturgy—are asking for more Bible-centered preaching. Priests with a strong preaching ministry generally attract large audiences.

The going is slow among evangelicals, but more churches are opening. In southern Siberia, for example, the All Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB) has opened 45 churches in the past five years, according to AUCECB general secretary Alexei Bichkov. Agnostics, intellectuals, scientists, and other university graduates are among those becoming devoted followers of Christ, he says. Estimates of the number of AUCECB constituents, including children and unbaptized adherents, range from 1 million to 3 million. Official statistics are not kept.

The AUCECB was formed by Evangelical Christians and Baptists in 1944 in response to a Stalinist measure permitting churches to function within an organized joint body. A number of Pentecostal and Mennonite congregations joined in subsequent years, but others were not ready for such imposed unity. Those congregations continued to meet without government sanction, often suffering the consequences.

Evangelical leaders in several Soviet cities said that over the past decade, relationships between the officially recognized churches and the Council of Religious Affairs (CRA) have improved gradually. (The CRA is the government agency that regulates churches.) In addition, the CRA has been permitting the independent registration of congregations opposed to membership in the AUCECB.

Sources say there has been controversy within government circles over how far the authorities should cooperate in activities that boost the church. For now, those citing international-image and foreign-policy considerations have prevailed over Communist party hard-liners who would like to shut down the churches overnight. Observers are quick to point out that the government has not changed its ultimate policies regarding religion. Among other things, they say, as many as 300 Christians are in prison for running afoul of Soviet laws governing religious activities—a marked increase since 1982.

Under a crackdown by Nikita Khrushchev beginning in 1959, AUCECB leaders agreed to harsher restrictions of church activities in order to keep the doors of churches open. This capitulation provoked a split that persists, despite easing of restrictions and attempts at reconciliation by AUCECB leaders. The dissidents, advocating the complete separation of church and state, as well as a strong stand against worldliness and compromise within the church, organized the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists. That organization was denied government approval.

Known as Initiative or Reform Baptists, they and members of other unregistered groups carried on their ministries. As a result, their leaders were often jailed, their meetings were broken up, and their activities were suppressed. Still, they flourished, numbering as many as several hundred thousand, including unbaptized children.

In recent years, however, the Reform Baptist movement has weakened and split. With many of its key figures imprisoned or growing old and dying, leadership has fallen on less-experienced shoulders. Georgi Vins, one of the dynamos of the movement, was deported in 1979. Another, Gennadi Kriuchkov, has been in hiding for years, but still manages to direct much of the movement.

After the government expanded its provision for independent registration, some dissident Pentecostals and Reform Baptists (including Vins’s church in Kiev) signed up. Although some later deregistered in objection to certain reporting requirements, independent registration seems to be gaining momentum with an estimated 300 congregations in the fold and numerous applications pending.

A large number of separatist believers and pastors were among the multitudes of mostly German-speaking Russians who emigrated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Major quarrels and a split developed among the thousands who settled in West Germany, affecting loyalties of those who remained in the USSR.

In West Germany, the Baptist immigrants had a difficult time adjusting to their new freedoms and especially to the complex, materialistic-oriented culture. The Baptist churches in West Germany were not as “alive” as the ones they left behind, they felt, and the members were not as committed.

Only two of the nearly 30 congregations formed by Soviet immigrants have become officially aligned with the West German Baptist organization. Ten of the congregations, whose leaders have roots in the AUCECB, have decided to pursue only fraternal relations with the West Germans. One of their best-known leaders is Johann Martens, pastor of a large church near Hannover.

Reform Baptists in West Germany organized their own denomination this year, the Evangelical Baptist Brethren Churches. It is closely identified with Vins, now based in Indiana. One of its primary ministries is providing support and Christian literature to Reform Baptists in the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, evangelism is emerging as a prime concern of Soviet evangelicals. During his September visit, Graham voiced the sentiment of many of his Soviet brothers and sisters. Said the evangelist: “[I would] like everyone in the USSR to follow Jesus Christ, to have faith in God.”

EDWARD E. PLOWMANin the Soviet Union

“We feel overawed by the constellation of mysterious motives prompting Providence to send to our shores, out of all the millions who inhabited Europe, just those few thousand beings who had no music in their souls.”

Common misconceptions of the Pilgrims’ attitude toward music and toward life in general—such as the one above made in 1907 by Oscar Sonneck, then music director of the Library of Congress—impoverish our appreciation for their musical legacy. We owe an incalculable debt to these early Americans for their priority on worship in music, their emphasis on music in the home, their integration of secular music as part of a balanced Christian life, and their inauguration of music education in America.

We think of the Pilgrims primarily in relation to the Puritan work ethic, Plymouth Rock, and the first Thanksgiving. However, not only should we thank them for the Thanksgiving delicacies we enjoy so much (including fruit pies and popcorn!), but also for their love of music, which is an increasingly dynamic force in our contemporary society.

The Puritans “had a granite heart and a suspicious eye for music,” wrote Rupert Hughes in 1900. But there is no evidence that the Pilgrims and the Puritans hated music. True, they sang only the Psalms in church, rejecting the hymns of the German Reformation. But the Puritans actually enjoyed all kinds of fine music, giving a breadth of musical culture to early northeastern America. Gilbert Chase considers their Ainsworth Psalter “a document fully worthy to be the cornerstone of America’s music” (America’s Music; McGraw-Hill, 1966).

Music In Worship

Identical in theology, essentially two kinds of Puritans could be distinguished by their relationship to the Anglican church. The Congregational Puritans wanted to “purify” the church and grant autonomy to each congregation. The Separatists, or Pilgrims—they called themselves “Saints”—broke cleanly with the established church (the term Pilgrim was not applied to them until the 1840s).

When James I ascended to the English throne in 1603, the Puritans petitioned him to make certain changes in the church, including “church songs and music moderated to better edification.” Fed up with years of Presbyterian opposition in Scotland, King James responded by persecuting the Separatists. They fled to Holland in 1607 and 1608, where in Amsterdam they established the “First English Church of the Separation.”

The Ainsworth Psalter. In 1612 the Reverend Henry Ainsworth, who had escaped to Holland in 1593, published a 342-page psalter with the psalms set in both poetry and prose. A graduate of Cambridge—as were many of the early Puritan leaders—he was a Hebrew scholar, a musician, and the teacher of the Amsterdam Separatists.

Ainsworth’s psalter had 39 tunes of international origin: English, French, and Dutch, including some we still sing—the familiar “Old Hundredth Psalm Tune,” for example (“The Doxology,” or “All People That on Earth Do Dwell”). Louis Bourgeois, music editor of John Calvin’s Geneva psalters, had written the tune for the 134th Psalm; the Puritans adopted it for the 100th. Originally much more syncopated than the way we sing it today, it was considered a “lively and jocund tune.” In fact, many of the Puritan psalm tunes were so rhythmically alive and danceable that they were derisively referred to as “Geneva jigs”—even by Queen Elizabeth.

Longfellow mentions Ainsworth’s Psalter when he describes Priscilla Mullins singing “Old Hundredth” in “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (angular notes refers to their diamond shape):

Open wide in her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,

Printed in Amsterdam, the words and music together,

Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard,

Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses.

A raging debate of the time was the “Controversie of Singing.” A minority argued that singing and making melody “with the heart” meant that one was not to sing aloud. Besides, they argued, if everyone sings, there is no one to listen, hence no one is edified. The Reverend John Cotton defended vocal singing: “That singing of Psalms with a lively voice is an holy Duty of God’s worship now in the days of the New Testament.… As we are to make melody in our hearts, so in our voices also.” But some Puritans went so far as to stuff cotton in their ears so they could not hear the congregation!

Eventually, the controversy was settled, but as is so often the case, the damage already had been done. Much of the joy and enthusiasm in psalm singing had been effectively and permanently killed.

How the Pilgrims performed the Psalms depended on whether they were sung in church or at home. At church, they prohibited singing antiphonally (“We allow … not of tossing the Psalm from one side to the other”), in harmony, or, eventually, with accompaniment (they derisively called the organ the “devil’s bagpipes”). They considered these practices too reminiscent of popery, and merely ceremonial.

The Bay Psalm Book. When the Congregational Puritans settled at Massachusetts Bay in 1630 (now Boston), they brought the 1562 psalter of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, and the 1621 psalter of Thomas Ravenscroft. Ravenscroft’s work contains settings in four-part harmony by some of the finest classical musicians of the day (Thomas Tallis, John Dowland, and Thomas Morley, for example), and the tune “Dundee,” to which we sing “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.”

Determining that they needed a more faithful translation from the Hebrew, in 1640, 30 “pious and learned ministers” produced the first book printed in the English North American colonies: The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Faithfully Translated into English Metre, popularly known as the Bay Psalm Book.

Although its translators were more accurate theologically, they were “long on piety and short on poetry.” And whereas Ainsworth had used 15 meters in his psalter, the Bay Psalm Book had only 6. In fact, three-fourths of the Psalms were in Common Meter, the simplest rhythmic pattern. Since the book included no music (they had no facilities to engrave plates), the translators recommended the use of tunes from Ravenscroft’s psalter. It was not until the ninth edition of 1698 that a few tunes were finally included.

Although the first Puritan colonists read music skillfully, their descendents increasingly did not. As congregations knew fewer and fewer tunes and only a few simple meters, they adopted the English practice of “lining-out” (described in “Two Brothers Who Changed the Course of Church Singing,” CT, Sept. 21, 1984, p. 30). Having no accompaniment, they began to depend upon rudimentary choirs to help them respond to the leader. The results could be hilarious. In one recorded incident, possibly apocryphal, a deacon began to lead an unusually responsive choir. Discovering his eyesight to be failing, he apologized, saying, “My eyes, indeed, are very blind.” As this was in the requisite eight syllables of the first line of a common-meter hymn, the choir repeated the phrase.

The deacon elaborated, “I cannot see at all,” which fit the six syllables for the second line, and which the choir also repeated.

When the frustrated deacon exclaimed, “I really believe you are bewitched,” that, too, was dutifully repeated by the choir.

“The mischief’s in you all,” he concluded, and sat down to the accompaniment of the choir completing his impromptu “hymn.”

Some folk believed it was more spiritual not to read music. John Smyth, a General Baptist, said, “It is unlawful to have the book before the eye in time of singing a psalm.” A certain Pastor Walker described the effect of the resulting individual extemporization: “Like five hundred tunes roared out at the same time,” with people one and even two words apart, producing noises “so hideous and disorderly, as is beyond expression bad.” Such practices so destroyed the heretofore lively, fast nature of the Pilgrims’ singing that he said, “I myself have twice in one note paused to take breath.”

Music In The Home

Music for the Puritans was a family affair. Robert Browne, an early leader, was an exceptionally good lute player, and he taught his children to be performers. On Sundays “he made his son Timothy bring his viol to church and play the bass to the psalms that were sung.”

At home, the psalms were sung in harmony and with accompaniment, for the Puritans loved instrumental music. Famous Puritan music lovers included John Milton, who was an amateur organist; Oliver Cromwell, who had his own organ, and hired a 48-piece orchestra for his daughter’s wedding; and John Bunyan, who owned several string instruments, and who reportedly made a flute from a leg of his chair while in prison. Included in the library of Elder William Brewster (300 books; in number and cost they would equal over 30,000 volumes today) was a collection of psalms with parts for instrumental accompaniment. Contrary to a fabrication originating in 1781, which scholars consider malicious, the Pilgrims never passed any laws prohibiting instruments—a fact confirmed by John Cotton, who wrote in 1647 that “the private use of any Instrument of Musick” was not forbidden (Singing of Psalms a Gospel Ordinance).

Secular As Well As Sacred

Psalm singing was part of the total life of the Pilgrims. They sang psalms in the streets, at dinners, and at other social events. They used the psalms very personally, feeling there was a psalm appropriate to any condition or situation, and they sang them so constantly that many who came after 1621 “disliked the Pilgrims’ endless Psalm-singing.”

They sang psalms primarily for two reasons: (1) it was spiritually edifying; and (2) it was enjoyable. So lustily did they sing—and apparently through their noses—that a playwright satirized them with a character who “makes alum and sells it to the Puritans that have sore throats with overstraining.”

When the Puritan movement began, at the height of Elizabethan culture, an English gentleman was presumed to be able to sing his own part in a madrigal, which was often part of the after-dinner entertainment. The Puritans extended this ability from the gentility to the rest of their society. “It was the Puritans’ love of the Psalms and the desire to sing them worthily that first spread widely in the middle and lower (non-madrigal) classes the knowledge of musical notation and sight singing.” Singing tunes in consort, or in ensemble, was “the early New England variety of barbershop harmony.”

“The Puritans, who landed in 1620 at Plymouth Rock, brought with them their psalm-tunes and their hatred of secular music,” wrote one author in 1883. Actually, the Pilgrims had a genuine love of music other than psalm tunes. One of their favorite tunes, which we sing today, was “Greensleeves,” a secular ballad then nearly a century old. (The Christmas text we sing to this, “What Child Is This?,” is of nineteenth-century origin.)

The Pilgrims sang psalms throughout their odyssey to America. Edward Winslow described the scene when they left Delftshaven in 1620: “And when the ship was ready to carry us away, the brethren … that stayed at Leyden feasted us that were to go, at our pastor’s house, being large; where we refreshed ourselves, after tears, with singing of psalms, making joyful melody in our hearts, as well as with the voice, … indeed it was the sweetest melody that ever mine ears heard.”

Their psalm singing aboard the Mayflower irritated the sailors, whose leader began to mock the Pilgrims, calling them “psalm-singing puke-stockings.” Suddenly he came down with a mysterious fever and died the very same day—and the taunting ceased dramatically.

In a hymn written in 1833, Leonard Bacon portrays the Pilgrims singing psalms when they landed at Plymouth:

O God, beneath whose guiding hand

Our exiled fathers crossed the sea;

And, when they trod the wint’ry strand,

With prayer and psalm they worshiped thee.

American Music Education Begun

Attempting to undo the damage inflicted by lining out, the Puritans sought to restore the ability to read music. A Reverend Mr. Symmes wrote, “Would it not greatly tend to promote singing of psalms if singing schools were promoted?” Cotton Mather, in The Accomplished Singer, said in 1721, “We ought certainly to serve our God with our Best, and Regular Singing [by note] must needs be Better than the confused Noise of a Wilderness. God is not for Confusion in the Churches of the Saints; but requires, Let all things be done decently.” That same year, John Tufts published the first American music textbook, An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm-Tunes.

Singing schools did not reform psalm singing, but what they did achieve has affected us all: in their attempt to teach sight-singing, the Puritan ministers began music education in America, and they made singing a communal activity. By encouraging composition, they paved the way for the first generation of American composers.

The True Purpose Of Music

Music, to the Puritans, was an art to be loved and treasured. Its highest function was to be found in worship. It was not music they hated, but the abuses of it. As John Playford, England’s most important printer of the age, wrote in Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick in 1654, “I believe it is an helper both to good and evil, and will therefore honour it when it moves to Vertue, and shall beware of it when it would flatter into Vice.”

They also understood that music possessed psychological values. In 1684, Increase Mather praised “the sweetness and delightfulness of Musick” for its natural power to soothe “melancholy passions”—that is, it was an effective antidepressent.

But it is Playford who perhaps best expresses the Puritan view of the purposes of music—a view we might well claim for ourselves: “The first and chief Use of Musick is for the Service and Praise of God, whose gift it is. The second Use is for the Solace of Men, which as it is agreeable unto Nature, so it is allow’d by God, as a temporal Blessing to recreate and cheer men after long study and weary labor in their Vocations.”

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

Paul Tournier continues to share his unique blend of biblical, psychological, and very personal wisdom as he writes new books from the vantage point of being a widower in his eighties. The following selection, touching his own responses to his wife’s death, is from Creative Suffering (Harper & Row, ©1981), and used by permission.

Freud [made] this profound remark: “We can lose nothing without replacing it.” With what do we replace it? That is the question. With destructive rebellion, or with creativity?

This second way, however, is not an easy one to take. It requires courage, it requires a whole process of inner maturation, which Freud called the work of mourning.

On the subject of creativity, for instance, Freud writes modestly: “The essence of the artistic function also remains psychoanalytically inaccessible to us.” This … [sublimation] … is the idea of a particular psychic force which has come up against a painful reality, to rebound with equal force in a new direction, like a billiard ball. The cushion off which the ball has cannoned is deprivation.

Freud, then, seems to be saying that a certain restraint is the source of all creativity and all culture. Philippe Mottu mentions two writers, Pitirim Sorokin, professor of sociology at Harvard, and J. D. Unwin, who sought to verify this theory in social history. They were able to show that periods of sexual liberty were the poorest from the cultural point of view, whereas those periods when morality and social convention imposed restrictions on sexual activity were the richest in creative output.

This runs counter to what is claimed by the advocates of sexual license, which is sometimes attributed to the influence of Freud. It is an important lesson for all those who suffer from deprivation of sex life, a deprivation that is exacerbated by these very theories, so that even Roman Catholic priests get married and burden themselves with psychological problems. For Freud, sublimation is bound up with a deprivation accepted.

But what, then, is this work of mourning of which Freud speaks in Mourning and Melancholy? The word “mourning” is used very generally. We speak of “mourning a lost opportunity.” The term, therefore, can cover all kinds of deprivation, though, of course, it is most usually used in connection with the death of a loved one. Which brings me to my present deprivation—not the distant deprivation of my childhood, but the one I have experienced since my wife’s death several years ago.

As soon as I decided to write this book I realized that I should have to come to this moment. People talk of “widows and orphans.” I am both. I hesitated for a long time! Because what I have to say is that I have indeed felt a renewal of my creative urge since then. I believe this to be what my friends think too. What I am afraid of is that many of my readers will be shocked, or think that I could hardly have been very fond of my wife; that this renewal casts a slur on her, and that I am taking my bereavement lightly. I have often heard such criticisms leveled at widows and widowers who, instead of sinking into gloom, remain active and serene.

The truth is that this is quite the opposite of a denial of grief. It really is suffering that I am talking about here, and the creativity of which it may be the occasion. The greater the grief, the greater the creative energy to which it gives rise. I am sure that that is true in my own case. I am nearer those who suffer, and I understand them better. Ah! Growing old alone is quite different from growing old together! What I miss most is the rich dialogue that existed between us.

An important point here is that our dialogue took the form mainly of meditation, which we often practiced together. We could listen to God in silence, and note down our thoughts—whether they came from ourselves, from our subconscious, or from God—and read them to each other afterwards. It is the surest way to mutual discovery in depth. We used to say to each other things that we should never have said without those very special moments together. I have, of course, been practicing this kind of meditation on my own for nearly 50 years. The one does not take the place of the other. In the past I have often skipped my daily meditation, but since my wife’s death, I have not missed a single day—as if my rendezvous with God were also a rendezvous with her.

If she had lived, no doubt we would have accommodated ourselves to a quieter mode of life in our old age. I think that there is a certain amount of psychological overcompensation in my present activity, and in my writing so many books. All my work, in any case, could be interpreted as a “work of mourning.” But I find in it a sort of fellowship with Nelly: we did everything together, and in a way we still do. I have a strong sense of her invisible presence. But what lives in my heart is her new, today’s presence, much more than the old one. There are widowers who, as it were, suspend their lives, as if life had stopped at the moment of their bereavement. Their present thoughts have turned toward the past, whereas I live in the present and look to the future.

For some, therefore, it is, if anything, a retrograde and paralyzing presence, whereas my wife’s presence is living and stimulating. And not only for me. Yesterday my home help said something to me that I found very touching. She still comes on Saturday mornings as she has done ever since before Nelly died. Yesterday she said to me, “Oh, I do like coming to your house; I have the feeling that your wife is still there, and I keep asking myself how she would want me to do things.”

Since my wife’s death I have come to realize that I had lived all my life in mourning, waiting for reunion in heaven with my parents. Nelly had felt that this was so, because just before she died she said to me that she would meet them there. So I have lived my whole life in their unseen presence, in the atmosphere of faith, love, and poetry that characterized their own life. Now, with my new bereavement, my link with heaven is made stronger still, and that stimulates, rather than diminishes, my interest in the problems of this world. The human heart does not obey the rules of logic; it is constitutionally contradictory. I can truly say that I have a great grief and that I am a happy man.

Does that mean that I am, in fact, performing my work of mourning in Freud’s sense? I do not think so. With Freud it is a detachment, a disinvestment, to borrow a term much used by the psychoanalysts. It is, he writes, a matter of severing one’s attachment to the object that has been abolished. Thus Dr. Lagache, one of his most thoroughgoing disciples, was able to write that it was a matter of “killing the dead person.”

You will see that what I have done is the exact opposite.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

“I live in a vacuum that is as lonely as a radio tube when the batteries are dead and there is no current to plug into.” I remember Billy Graham speaking these words during his sermon on the first evening of a 1979 crusade in Tampa, Florida. The confession was not his own, of course. He was quoting the words of another to illustrate the desperation and alienation of twentieth-century man. He was quoting the late Ernest Hemingway.

Knowing details of Hemingway’s life story, I have since that evening wanted to flesh out the bones of Graham’s carefully chosen illustration. Evangelicals or literary critics would wince at the idea of holding Hemingway up to illustrate any practical truth of interest to Christians. Most people, after all, know Hemingway as the animal-killing, bullfighting tough boy; the boozing man of the world, married four times, who trotted the globe and made it his personal oyster, without conscience, without a moral code. They know him as the manic-depressed outpatient from the Mayo Clinic who, on a sunny Sunday morning in Idaho, disintegrated his head with a shotgun blast. There is, however, another Hemingway.

My interest in the writer began regionally. As a boy I spent my summers camping and fishing in the blue-green lake country of northern Michigan. My father and I trolled in the same waters that Hemingway had so exactingly written about in the 1920s. I did not know about Hemingway as a boy, but as a teenager I discovered his Michigan stories and found that through the simple arrangement of short words and lean, terse sentences, I could go back to “the far blue hills that marked the Lake Superior height of land” or gaze down into “the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watch the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins.” Hemingway had captured for anyone who had ever loved this part of the country the precise qualities of color, light, scent, flavor, and touch that make up an environment.

When I reread the same stories today, I can look past the landscape scenes and am not surprised by what I see: strands of Hemingway’s turbulent boyhood mingle with the stunted seedlings of religious confusion. His childhood was nurtured in a rich religious soil, an evangelicalism rooted in the geographical heart of modern evangelicalism—Wheaton, Illinois.

The archives of Wheaton College hold updates of the time-yellowed student records of Ernest’s paternal grandparents, Anson Tyler and Adelaide Edmonds Hemingway, who studied there in the early days of the college—during the 1860s. Anson Hemingway, descended from the first student at Yale University, entered Wheaton fresh after his honorable discharge from the 72nd Illinois Infantry during the Civil War. Adelaide Edmonds, born of a man—John Wesley Edmonds—who had been named after the founder of Methodism, was an intelligent, brown-eyed brunette majoring in botany and astronomy. She paid for her education by teaching school on the side, and when graduation came she gave the valedictory address and class poem at her class’s commencement exercises.

The couple married and moved to Oak Park, another conservative stronghold near Chicago, where Anson Hemingway joined the YMCA to serve as general secretary. Holding his eating utensils daintily at the YMCA dinner table, his fingernails smoothly manicured and his gray beard trimmed to perfection, he met the shoe-salesman-turned-evangelist, Dwight L. Moody. The two shared a binding friendship that lasted until Moody’s death in 1899, the same year Ernest Hemingway was born.

A living illustration of the biblical axiom—“be fruitful and multiply the earth”—the Anson Hemingways bore six children, each of whom studied at the conservatively Christian and highly academic Oberlin College in Ohio. One might have expected parents who had sat under the umbrella of Wheaton College’s Jonathan Blanchard to encourage their children toward lives of full-time ministry. And, indeed, one son, Willoughby Hemingway, served as a missionary physician in China. Other children entered business and education careers, and Dr. C. E. (Ed) Hemingway, Ernest’s father, set up shop as a general practitioner in Oak Park.

Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, writing after her brother’s suicide in 1961, described her paternal grandparents, commenting especially on the love her grandmother had for nature and how this affection filtered down to Ernest’s father and eventually to Ernest himself. She wrote: “Grandmother explained the reason for the golden pollen. She told how the bees helped to create new plants and flowers by carrying it on their feet as they visited the blossoms of other similar plants. She explained that God had given the bees a special sense so that they never carried the pollen of one variety of plant to a dissimilar one, but always kept to plants of a like variety or to tree blossoms of the same kind when they were on their honey-collecting rounds.”

Grandmother Adelaide Hemingway, whom friends described as “charming,” had prioritized her life, though, and never allowed her affection for nature to become a preoccupation. When one of her Oak Park neighbors—the folks Ernest would refer to one day as part of that “cheap, petty, vacantness of Oak Park”—protested that the Hemingways’ lawn was being chopped up by her sons who were playing ball on it, she replied, “I don’t mind a bit. You see, I’m raising boys, not grass.”

Anson Hemingway’s attitudes were identical. To his death, Ernest called him “my boyhood hero,” and it was Grandfather Hemingway’s round, bearded face to which Ernest’s own face bore a nearly identical resemblance late in the writer’s life.

If not as much loved as this grandfather was, Ernest’s maternal grandfather was even more revered for his godly spiritual leadership. Indeed, his grandchildren called him “Abba,” as if the Almighty himself were looking at the world through a mortal’s eyes and speaking with a mortal’s tongue.

Ernest Hall, from whom Ernest Hemingway received his name, anchored himself as a pillar of Grace Episcopal Church in Oak Park. Sporting puffy, porkchop sideburns that matched the white of his shirt collar and tie, he knelt each Sunday on the Brussels carpet at church to lead the evening prayer. “God was a person he knew intimately,” wrote Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, who along with her brother Ernest would watch their grandfather gaze upward when he prayed.

With his wife’s passing, Ernest Hall moved into the Hemingways’ home, where he could influence his grandchildren. “After Abba had read the lesson for the day,” Marcelline wrote, “we would all rise, turn, and kneel down on the carpet in front of our chairs, resting our elbows on the black leather seats, while Abba knelt at the center table. But instead of closing his eyes or bowing his head as the rest of us did, he raised his head, his eyes upward, as though he were talking to God right above him.”

He prayed in a thundering voice: “If we expose ourselves to the flaming purity of Jesus, we are forced to admit that we are in need of cleansing. We feel the sharp lash of his rebuke. Our conscience is forced to quiver in pain, in humiliation and in shame. We may turn from his fury and flee but there is no escape.”

I shudder to think of the emotional energy generated in a home where the Word is wielded with such a flaming hand. Apparently, so did the young Hemingways. “It was clear to everyone in the household that they were weak, that because of their weakness they needed the strength which only God could give,” wrote a close friend of Ernest Hemingway. “If and only if they made a true effort to gain strength from God, only then might they prove strong enough to fight sin.”

Emotional energy flowed, from whatever source, out of Ernest Hemingway, the boy. “He liked action,” a friend wrote of him, and Ernest’s Grandfather Hall was one of the first to recognize the energy of imagination surging from his young grandson. One day, speaking to his daughter Grace (Ernest’s mother), he made a prediction: “Mark my words, dear,” he said, “this boy is going to be heard from some day. If he uses his imagination for good purposes, he’ll be famous, but if he starts the wrong way, with all his energy, he’ll end in jail.” But Ernest Hall never knew how truthfully he had prophesied. Shortly after, on a spring day in 1905, he died.

I doubt, however, if this bit of family prophecy shocked Grace Hall Hemingway. A confident woman, she had high hopes for her brown-eyed boy. She had him baptized at Oak Park’s First Congregational Church, and after the ceremony wrote that Ernest had been given “as an offering unto the Lord, to receive His name and henceforth be counted as one of God’s little lambs.”

Ernest Hemingway’s mother practiced a sentimental faith that balanced out with her husband’s stern devotion to God and his church. “The robins sang their sweetest song to welcome the little stranger into this beautiful world,” she wrote of Ernest on the day he was born. Her wide, happy face reflected her outlook on life. “She loved the perfume of flowers,” a biographer wrote, “and she loved music; above all she loved them in combination. In her mind certain flowers went with certain operas. The smell of roses reminded her of Romeo and Juliet. The odor of violets reminded her of Aida, and the strong perfume of freesia recalled the great arias of Faust.”

By contrast, Dr. C. E. Hemingway, rigid and piercingly intelligent, was a hunter as well as a doctor, and where his wife was all perfume and flowers, he was sweat and nails—especially concerning his faith. He practiced a devotion to God, said Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, “in which there was no compromise between what he considered right and wrong. Daddy would have his arm around one of us or we would be sitting on his lap, laughing and talking, and a minute or so later—because of something we had said or done, or some neglected duty of ours he suddenly thought about—we would be ordered to our rooms and made to go without supper. Sometimes we would be spanked hard, our bodies across his knee. Always after punishment we were told to kneel down and ask God to forgive us.”

Dr. Hemingway condemned smoking, dancing, and card playing, warning that such activities led to “hell and damnation.” He forbade using the words “gosh” and “darn,” his strongest expression being “oh rats.” He taught Sunday school and stressed to his children that God had created the world in seven days, although nobody had ever explained how long a day was. And to drive home the unpleasantness of how sin and disobedience affects people, he once carted the Hemingway children off to the state prison in Joliet, Illinois, where they could see firsthand its iron bars, stone walls, and barbed wire fences.

It might appear, then, that Ernest’s later rebellion somehow had rooted itself in his father’s rigorous religious faith. One biographer writes of the boy Hemingway: “Sin scared the life out of Ernest. At night he prayed that he had been a good boy during the day. The trouble was, a boy could never be sure if he had been good; he might have done something bad and not known it was bad. It was so hard to obey every rule, so hard to please his mother, his father, his teachers, his minister, his God; so hard that sometimes it wasn’t worth trying, and a boy felt like giving up.”

But the truth is that Ernest loved his father—loved him more than he loved anyone else. For all of Dr. Hemingway’s hard-line ideas, he loved his children and lived an unhypocritical life. “He believed in doing the right thing,” a friend wrote. “He didn’t talk about good intentions, but he did take care of anyone who needed his help, and if a patient could not pay, Dr. Hemingway did not ask him to. He was a man who never drew the line between an Indian woman living in a shack and a banker living in Oak Park.”

Ernest loved his father for teaching him the rules of nature, and particularly because he made no attempt at softening or disguising technical explanations. “Wherever they went, he told Ernest the name of each thing they saw or touched, not a nursery rhyme name, but the real name. A hawk in the sky was called a hawk, never a birdie, and if it was a chicken hawk, the fact that the bird’s name came from its habit of eating chickens was made clear to Ernest,” a biographer notes.

His mother, on the other hand, chose to guard Ernest from his earliest moments with a sweeter, sheltered kind of life. Until he was three she dressed him in pink gingham dresses and white battenburg lace hoods, called him her little “Dutch Dollie,” and held his hand while they strolled away to society luncheons. When the boy was old enough to feel out of place as a doll, she wrote, “He grows indignant when I call him ‘Dutch Dollie.’” She described how he learned to shout that he was “Pawnee Bill,” and how he made his hand like a gun and pretended to shoot his mother.

He learned to see her as being distinctly different from his father. A biographer wrote: “Grace Hall Hemingway disliked anything which disturbed her beautiful world. She hated diapers. She did not want to see or smell the diarrhea and vomit of her children, and she did not want to clean house or cook. Even though he was a busy doctor, busy paying house calls and operating at Oak Park Hospital, Dr. Hemingway was forced to telephone home and say, ‘Time to put the roast in the oven, Gracie,’ if he wanted his and his family’s dinner served when he got home.”

She had sacrificed a career in opera to marry Dr. Hemingway and raise his children, and this gesture, she felt, gave her the right to demand her way and to expect that her demands be met. Holding to the glitter of Chicago’s opera scene, she refused to go to Guam with her husband when he told her he felt called to serve there as a medical missionary. And later, when he wanted to practice medicine in Nevada to escape city life, her answer was the same: “No.” Dr. Hemingway became the family cook and housekeeper as well as its breadwinner, and Ernest bitterly resented that his father had to take on domestic chores while his mother waltzed about the house in long dresses, performing her music for anyone who would listen. She designed a music room with a balcony, and neighbors were invited in to listen to Grace Hall Hemingway in person.

Though the Hemingway parents could not see eye-to-eye on foreign missions work, they did agree that each of their six children should grow up immersed in the evangelical churches of Oak Park. And with straight brown bangs, dimples, and a flowing white choir robe, young Ernest Hemingway fit into the mold of piety that had been stamped out for him.

He received an allowance of one penny per year of age each week and gave out of that a tithe to the Sunday school. Entering a Bible reading contest, he read every word of his King James Version and passed a comprehensive examination. When he was 14, the Third Congregational Church featured a Sunday school play with Ernest in the starring role. And after the Hemingways transferred their membership to First Congregational Church, Ernest assumed the duties of program chairman, treasurer, and speaker for the church’s Plymouth League youth group. Once, a man named Lloyd Harter asked Ernest to tell some of the younger boys of the church about the deeper truths of the faith. “Put your soul into it,” Harter urged, “and bring them a message they will never forget.”

I find it difficult at times to believe that this conservatively bred Oak Park boy actually grew up to be the man who equated his emptiness with a disconnected radio tube. But it was true enough. He would rebel against his Christian upbringing to such a degree as to castigate it one day as “that ton of s___ we are all fed when we are young.”

He had a normal adolescence and an uneventful life as a teenager. After high school, however, instead of entering college as was expected of the Hemingway children, he left home for Missouri, to work for the Kansas City Star. Away from Oak Park for the first time, he stopped attending church, complaining to his mother in a letter that he worked Saturday nights and was too tired to get up on Sunday. “Don’t worry or cry or fret,” he wrote, “about me not being a good Christian. I am just as much as ever, and I pray every night and believe just as hard.… You know I don’t rave about religion but am as sincere a Christian as I can be.… I believe in God and Jesus Christ, have hopes for a hereafter, and creeds don’t matter.” Strangely, though, as if he were protecting himself from future embarrassment should anyone but his mother read the letter, he added a postscript: “Don’t show this to anyone, and please get back to a cheerful frame of mind.”

His stint with the Kansas City Star ended a few months later when he enlisted as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I. In Italy he witnessed Caporetto, the battle front where the Italians lost 320,000 men, and was shot up himself. After returning to Oak Park during the summer of 1919 he was shell-shocked and could not sleep without a light on. He walked with a cane, his legs wobbly and ripped up by hundreds of tiny mortar shell fragments.

He stayed with friends of the family in Toronto, Canada, for a short time, but when he returned to the States, he seemed aimless and without motivation. Lying in bed day after day, he kept bottles of liquor stashed where his parents would not see them. He told his sister, Marcelline, that the whiskey helped to ease the pain of his wounds. When he offered her a drink one day and she refused, he told her not to be afraid to taste all of what the world has to offer just because Oak Park had labeled it sinful and off-limits.

Meanwhile, Dr. and Mrs. Hemingway grew restless, then impatient, when Ernest would not settle down to a job. His ambition to write seemed a cop-out from responsibility to them, and, feeling the pressure increase, Ernest took off for northern Michigan where he had spent his boyhood summers. But it was winter this time, and he spent the long months working on his writing in a freezing upstairs flat. He banged out short stories on a typewriter, sent them to magazines, and received rejection slips in return. When summer came he was still without a steady job, and this infuriated his parents even more. The Hemingways heaped upon him words of condemnation laced with biblical overtones.

Exerpts from letters exchanged between the parents while Grace was on vacation read: “I think Ernest is trying to irritate us in some way.… I have written him that I wanted him to get busy and be more self-supporting and respectful.… It is a great insult that he should take it for granted that he can lay down on the family as he has been doing.… I shall continue to pray for Ernest, that he will develop a sense of greater responsibility, for if he does not the Great Creator will cause him to suffer a whole lot more than he ever has so far.… We have done too much. He must get busy and make his own way, and suffering alone will be the means of softening his Iron Heart of selfishness.”

Ironically, while they were praying so hard for him, he was just beginning to put together stories that reflected bitter disillusionment about life, culminating in faith wounds that seemed tied up in war, Christianity, and family. In one story a wounded veteran has returned from the first world war; he is a Methodist, but his faith has been shattered and his motivation extinguished. The soldier’s mother, begging him to get busy and work at something, says:

“God has some work for everyone to do. There can be no idle hands in His Kingdom.”

“I’m not in His Kingdom,” the soldier says.

“We are all of us in His Kingdom,” she insists.

The soldier feels resentful and embarrassed.

“Would you kneel and pray with me, Harold?” his mother asks.

They kneel down beside the dining room table and the soldier’s mother prays.

“Now you pray, Harold,” she says.

“I can’t.”

“Do you want me to pray for you?”

“Yes.”

The mother prays for her son, but he is not touched by any of it.

In another story a similar mother figure is portrayed, but this time she is short on empathy for her husband, a doctor, who has been humiliated by a patient who owes him money. The doctor confesses this to his wife, and she says:

“Oh, I hope you didn’t lose your temper, Henry.”

“No,” says the doctor.

“Remember,” she adds piously, “that he who ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city.” She has been reading her Sunday school quarterly and studying the Bible.

By the time Ernest had celebrated his twenty-first birthday, the pressure between himself and his parents built until it split them apart. While Dr. Hemingway did not reject him entirely, Grace Hall Hemingway decreed from her personal cottage on Lake Walloon, Michigan, that Ernest, his loafing, and his present attitude about life were no longer welcome in her presence. Dr. Hemingway felt that her judgment was too harsh, but by that time his son’s wavering self-esteem had been flattened. What hurt the most was that Dr. and Mrs. Hemingway still did not understand or approve of Ernest’s one ambition—to be a great writer.

Another year passed, Ernest married Hadley Richardson from Saint Louis, and together they sailed for Europe where Ernest had been told it would be easier for a young writer to find his way into print.

It was in Paris that he published his first books, which shocked his parents by their uncompromising portrayal of worldly people. When he sent his first book of short stories home to his family, Dr. Hemingway shipped it back to the publisher because “he and Mrs. Hemingway would not have it in the house”, a biographer wrote. In one story Ernest had written about a person who had contracted venereal disease, a matter Dr. Hemingway felt never should be discussed outside the privacy of a medical clinic.

Then, when his novel The Sun Also Rises hit Oak Park, Dr. and Mrs. Hemingway assumed that Ernest had approved of the drunken, trashed-out characters in the story. They could not see that the novel—while far from being a positive Christian statement—had attempted to contrast the paganistic Paris crowd with the permanence of biblical Creation. Both sides of the contrast stare out from the book’s two opening epigraphs:

You are all a lost generation.

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose.…

Ecclesiastes

“The point of the book,” Ernest wrote to his publisher, “was that the earth abideth forever—having a great deal of fondness for the earth and not much for my generation.”

After the pressure had eased somewhat, he sent similar signals to his parents in Oak Park, hoping to win some approval. It was to no avail. Grace Hall Hemingway wrote back that her life was a “heaven on earth” because she had dedicated her life to beauty. That Ernest had written this “filthy book” shocked her; why would he choose to write about sin rather than virtue?

His mother’s rejection came as no surprise, but his father’s hurt him more, and Ernest worked at trying to patch up old wounds and win back Dr. Hemingway’s respect. “I know you don’t like the sort of thing I write, but that is the difference in our tastes,” he argued. “I know that I am not disgracing you in my writing but rather doing something that someday you will be proud of.… I feel that eventually my life will not disgrace you either.”

But Dr. Hemingway was slow to respond, and when Ernest’s marriage broke up, it upset his aging father even more. “Divorce was almost unknown in Oak Park,” a biographer wrote. “It was unchristian, a tool the devil used to destroy families.” Ernest was destroying his own life and disgracing his family in Oak Park, his father believed. Where had things gone wrong? What was happening to this family that had dedicated every ounce of toil and energy to the Lord? If Anson and Adelaide Hemingway, and dear Grandfather Hall, were still alive, how embarrassed and disgraced would they feel? What were the good Oak Park families thinking? What was being said in church about Ernest, about the Hemingway family?

To compound matters, Dr. Hemingway was sick and increasingly depressed. He had never managed his finances well, and now he was approaching bankruptcy. He had grown gray and thin, his body fidgeting nervously in clothes that once fit but now hung loosely like a monk’s robe.

Shortly thereafter, in despondency, Dr. C. E. Hemingway, a diabetic who had spent his life saving other lives, shot himself in his upstairs bedroom, using the pistol his father—the Wheaton College alumnus—had passed down to him.

The suicide crushed Ernest. “What makes me feel the worst is that my father is the one I cared about,” he wrote to his New York friend and editor, Maxwell Perkins. A few years later he published a story about his father, writing:

“Like all men with a faculty that surpasses human requirements, his father was very nervous. Then, too, he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused. Also, he had much bad luck, and it was not all of it his own. He had died in a trap he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died. All sentimental people are betrayed so many times.”

I believe that Ernest felt he had been a part of the betrayal of his father, and the knowledge of this was something too painful to deal with. It wrought a change in his life for the worse, and from that point on he tried to divorce himself completely from Oak Park and everything it represented—home, family, and his Christian heritage.

“He decided to fight Oak Park,” a friend wrote. “He fought with every word he wrote. Oak Park closed his eyes; Ernest opened his. Oak Park demanded obedience; Ernest made his own rules. Oak Park said flesh is evil; Ernest said enjoy.… But Ernest found it painful to fight Oak Park; it was like fighting against himself; Oak Park existed not only in Illinois but also in Ernest.”

The trouble was that he never stopped fighting. Over the next 30 years the sadness of his uprooted, disconnected life moved toward its eventual crescendo, increasing yearly until his own suicide in 1961. He married three more times—there probably would have been more had his last wife not been so devoted to him even amid his bullying. His drunken antics became the subjects of newspaper and magazine stories. His obsessions with war, hunting, and bullfighting fueled a disgusting lust for killing that seemed ritualistic in its intensity. And instead of ever trying to make peace with his mother, he chose to disparage her with a constant modifier—“that b___.” “She drove my father to suicide and I will not see her,” he excused himself bitterly. “I hate her guts and she hates mine.” He blamed his bad luck on her, and once, when she had mailed him a birthday cake with the pistol his father had used to kill himself, he told people her gesture was for him to do the same.

If any conscious religious practice survived, it was packaged in the form of a heavily diluted kind of secular humanism, summarized in a letter: “It seems as though we were all on a boat now together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know now will never reach port. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad, and especially because we know now that there will be no land-fall we must keep the boat up very well and be very good to each other. We are fortunate to have good people on the boat.”

It was said by close friends of Hemingway that in his late years he grew distant from everyone. He would not stand up straight, and he stopped communicating verbally. He lived inside bad dreams, said one friend, and every hour was filled with the pain of being truly lost and alone.

Hence the quotation by evangelist Graham.

Though Hemingway’s sad story evokes equal proportions of pity and awe, it certainly is not by its nature unique to our country’s literary heritage. Since Puritan times our best writers—Franklin, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Connor, Updike, and others, grew up in homes where the Christian faith stood as solidly as a ticking grandfather clock. In some cases, such as Hemingway’s and Mark Twain’s (the dominant literary figures of their centuries), the clock was forsaken for odd reasons; but the ticking remained deeply if unconsciously ingrained.

One only has to go to Hemingway’s last great work, The Old Man and the Sea, to witness this.

While the old man in the story is a fisherman, he is also a teacher. His name, Santiago, is extracted from the Spanish translation of Saint James, a fisherman himself and brother of Christ. A young boy looks to this teacher not only for instructions on how to fish, but also on how to live a life of humility and sufferance. “If I cannot fish with you,” he says, “I would like to serve in some way.”

The old fisherman hooks the great marlin at noon, and precisely at noon of the third day he kills it by thrusting a harpoon into its heart. During the struggle the fishing line scourges his back; he gets a stabbing thorn-of-crowns type headache; and during the first shark attacks on the fish, Santiago cries out “Ay,” a sound which Hemingway defines as “just such a noise as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hand and into the wood.”

After the struggle is over and the old man has returned to shore, Hemingway gives a very moving portrait of the long climb back to the old man’s shack. The suggestions of Christ climbing toward Calvary are unmistakable:

He unstepped the mast and furled the sail and tied it. Then he shouldered the mast and started to climb. It was then he knew the depth of his tiredness. He stopped for a moment and looked back and saw in the reflection from the street light the great tail of the fish standing up well behind the skiff’s stern. He saw the white naked line of his backbone and the dark mass of the head with the projecting bill and all the nakedness in between.

He started to climb again and at the top he fell and lay for some time with the mast across his shoulder. He tried to get up. But it was too difficult and he sat there with the mast on his shoulder and looked at the road.

Finally he put the mast down and stood up. He picked the mast up and put it on his shoulder and started up the road. He had to sit down five times before he reached his shack.

Inside the shack he leaned the mast against the wall. In the dark he found a water bottle and took a drink. Then he lay down on the bed. He pulled the blanket over his shoulders and then over his back and legs and he slept face down on the newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up.

Like many of the stories and novels that preceded it, the book overflows with Christian images and meanings, and it shows that Hemingway could never divorce himself completely from the Christian truths that were his heritage.

When The Old Man and the Sea was released in 1952, Hemingway’s publisher wrote: “One cannot hope to explain why the reading of this book is so profound an experience. Somewhere between its parabolical and its Christian meaning lies the book’s power to move us.” Other praises included those by novelist William Faulkner, who wrote: “Hemingway has discovered God the Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay. But this time he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all and loved them all and pitied them all.”

The details of Hemingway’s life make such a discovery of God seem dubious. But I have no trouble believing that no matter how far he traveled, nor how violently he disparaged his Oak Park upbringing, he never totally uprooted the theological seeds that were planted in his youth.

There ought to be some theologian or Christian expositor to quote here. But more appropriate still are the words of Hemingway’s friend and fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who seemingly spoke for so many American writers when he suggested: “We beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

Through Head To Heart

If you can’t think it, don’t believe it. Though Wesley emphasized personal experience, he never separated what he believed from what he thought. A tough-minded Oxford don, he read the classics while traveling on horseback, and relished what he called the “honest art of intellectual debate.”

Behind the tight logic of his sermons is his premise that the way to the heart is through the head. His converts were convinced of the truth of the gospel before they were converted to personal faith in Christ. Wesley would be the first to agree with Paul that we should “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5, NIV).

But today, thinking and believing are severed in Christian thought. Many liberals are guilty of thinking without believing, and many conservatives are guilty of believing without thinking. Kierkegaard warns against detached heads or detached hearts in his book Purity of Heart. The head, he says, is the source of critical thinking, and the heart is the center of conscious convictions. A detached head holds no absolutes and advances no convictions. The result is a secular subjectivism with its theological blur of pluralistic gods. A detached heart, on the other hand, embraces a blind belief exempt from critical thinking. The result permits the parishioner to unscrew his head whenever belief encounters thought.

Neither mistake is worthy of Wesley’s view of the mind, one that acknowledges God as the source of all truth, and his Word as the inspired and infallible revelation. Head and heart cohere in the adventures of critical thinking and in the affirmations of settled convictions. Wesley would join his brother Charles in the eighteenth-century hymn that becomes a prayer for the twentieth century, “Let us unite these two, so long divided, knowledge and vital piety.”

From Preaching To Singing

If you can’t sing it, don’t preach it. John Wesley is best known as the preacher for England’s Methodist revival; his brother Charles was its poet. They believed that “faith working through love” had to be sung as well as preached. When John and Charles climbed the steps of the market cross to preach the gospel in such cities as Bristol and Liverpool, they saw people in despair. A narrowed Puritan theology had led many to believe they were damned, and a false deistic philosophy convinced them that God did not care. Then, cutting through the gloom and rising above the curses, came the pure sound of Charles singing the hymn he wrote to celebrate the first anniversary of the Wesleys’ conversion to Christ, “O, for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer’s praise.” With the message of this melody, even the street people turned rapt attention to John Wesley as he preached.

Today, what we sing is not always what we preach. Great hymns are cancelled by pulpit platitudes of cheap grace, or strong biblical preaching is made ludicrous by musical love ditties. Our singing and our preaching must strike the same chord. As a consultant concluded after visiting an evangelical college in the Wesleyan tradition, “If you are what you say you are, this campus will be characterized by a note of joy.” Through the Spirit of God, this outside observer discovered the grace note of the gospel that Charles sang, John preached, and the people gladly heard.

Genuine Spirituality And Social Concern

If you can’t live it, don’t push it. Wesley connected the biblical truth of “being” and “doing” in the doctrine of personal and social holiness. To him, personal holiness meant the perfection of love for every conscious motive in the believer’s life. Wesley saw the extension of this as “social holiness.” After nonbelievers were convinced by Wesley’s preaching, they were invited to a class meeting where they could learn more about the gospel and also see if Methodists practiced the faith and love they professed. Once converted, then, even the poorest were expected to give a penny a week to help those who were poorer still. Commensurate with growth in grace, social holiness had two dimensions: increasing spiritual accountability to the body of Christ, and greater social responsibility to the needs of the poor. Maturing class members were expected to reach out in ministries to prisoners, widows, the aged, the sick, the hungry, and especially to oppressed children.

However, personal holiness has been separated from social holiness among Christians in our century. An unbiblical dichotomy identifies evangelical Christians with the personal aspect of holiness, and liberal Christians with its social dimension.

John Wesley would be dismayed by the division. He would warn those who lock arms with unregenerate protestors in a march for justice under the banner of social holiness. He would be equally dismayed by those who remain isolated from the problems of the poor in the name of personal holiness.

A special word, however, would be reserved for evangelical Christians who are venturing back into the arena of political action and social reform. Recalling his own experience in the eighteenth century, Wesley would remind us that he vigorously resisted public pressure to make him a social reformer as he gained prominence on the high tide of spiritual revival. Not until the movement of Methodism proved its credibility as a genuine spiritual force for personal redemption and social renewal in the culture did Wesley raise his voice to speak against slavery in eighteenth-century England. Then, when he spoke, his voice was heard.

In the middle 1970s the syndicated columnist James Reston asked, “What difference will the born-again movement make in the moral pigsty of our secular culture?” Only the verdict of history can answer his question. Is it possible that the current reaction against evangelical Christianity stems from our efforts at social reform without first providing adequate evidence of our redeeming influence? John Wesley would remind us of the inseparable link between personal and social holiness. Just as he made personal holiness the motive for social holiness, he made spiritual credibility the prerequisite for leadership in social reform. He would be quick to agree with Elton Trueblood, “One cannot give what one does not have.” Conversely, Wesley would add, “One cannot have what one does not give.”

After tracing the megatrends turning our twentieth-century world upside-down, John Naisbitt might have closed his book on a note of gloom and doom. Instead, he saw our time of parenthesis as the dawning of an age of opportunity. His final word is an exclamation of prophetic optimism, “My God, what a time to be alive!”

John Wesley and the people called Methodists faced their megatrends, too. And they led the way to spiritual revival and social reform in their nation with a reasonable faith, a joyous message, and a credible witness. Today, as heirs of that movement in the twentieth century, evangelical Christians need to bring the same message to an upside-down world with the jubilant shout, “Thank God, what a time to be alive!”

A GUEST EDITORIAL BY DAVID L. MCKENNA¹David L. McKenna is president of Asbury Theological Seminary, a multidenominational Wesleyan seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.

Our twentieth-century Western world is turning upside-down. John Naisbitt, author of the best-selling Megatrends, explains it as a time of transition between the dying Age of Industry and the dawning Age of Information.

As high technology and instant communication become our new wealth and power, repercussions jar the culture created by an economy based on heavy industry. And new information lays siege to traditional values and institutions. But Naisbitt turns these threats into “megatrends” that are inevitable when a culture is caught between worlds.

John Wesley would feel right at home. Eighteenth-century England, like twentieth-century America, hung suspended in a time of parenthesis. Under the stress of social revolution, the Age of Agriculture was giving way to the Age of Industry. Technology led the way with the new steam engine. Economics shifted from farm to factory. Political parties bitterly divided over the military protection of British commerce. Church-state issues flared as the divine right of kings was challenged. The family suffered at the center of the storm, breaking under the stress. Meanwhile, the church remained paralyzed without the theology or spirit to respond.

Into this time of parenthesis God sent John Wesley to give stability by means of spiritual revival that resulted in social reform. Historians such as Bernard Semmell still credit Wesley and the movement called Methodism for saving England from the revolution that almost mortally wounded France just across the channel.

Clearly there are remarkable parallels between eighteenth-century England and twentieth-century America. If that is true, does John Wesley have a word for us today? If we read his journal and other works with an ear tuned to the twentieth century, perhaps we can imagine his crisp counsel to us in our time of parenthesis.

Premeal Tribulation

Some people use New Year’s Day to evaluate their failings and to make resolutions. In a similar vein, I use Thanksgiving to update my ever-changing theology of prayer before meals.

I’ve long been an observer of the premeal prayer habits of people across the theological spectrum. I’ve seen the inconsistencies—a preprayer nibble on a carrot and a sip of water is acceptable, but stay away from the salad and the baked potato until they get blessed.

I’ve seen the variety, too. There are some who never pray before meals except at Thanksgiving. Even then the lot usually falls to children aged eight and under who still think the old “God is great, God is good …” is a pretty nifty turn of phrase. And then there are those at the other extreme who pray not only before every meal, but before popcorn or a candy bar; in short, prior to any oral ingestion of an edible substance, with the possible exception of liverwurst. Let’s face it: it’s hard to be genuinely thankful for liverwurst.

I’ve also witnessed variety in prayer length. I’ve heard four-word prayers: “Dear Lord, Thanks. Amen.” (He was hungry.) And I’ve heard prayers that were so long the food had to be reheated. When they brought it back, the guy thought it should be re-blessed. (He didn’t trust microwaves.)

I guess, like most people, I fall somewhere between the extremes. On the one hand, I realize that praying is important. But I just can’t bring myself to go to God before sitting down to a Pop-Tart, especially at 6 A.M. when there is nobody around to appreciate my spirituality. So where do I draw the line?

To pray or not pray? And how to pray? These are the questions. Should I pray as long over a hot dog as I would over steak? Do I have to close my eyes if it’s just a peanut butter sandwich? Does God understand those hurried times when I pray while chewing? These are the issues I try to resolve each Thanksgiving. Now that I have considered it, perhaps it’s more important just to be genuinely thankful. Maybe even for liverwurst.

EUTYCHUS

No ceremonial “magic”

I have no problem with the substance of Harold Myra’s editorial “The Glamorous Prostitute” [Oct. 5]. However, he condemns premarital and recreational sex whose victims “include thousands of pregnant junior and senior high girls, aborted babies, welfare mothers and families intertwined in a web of tragedies often lasting for generations.” This litany is just as applicable to married as unmarried persons.

If you wish to applaud a loving, committed relationship between two persons that is given empirical expression through the rite of matrimony, I am in agreement. But please don’t lend credence to the notion that some sort of ceremonial magic sanctifies mutual exploitation.

REV. DAVE LEMOINE

St. Matthew Lutheran Church

Sugar Grove, Ohio

I wonder why the author never mentions the dark side of physical “rewards” of promiscuity—for example, 1 million annually reported gonorrhea infections in the U.S., probably a fraction of actual new reinfections. I am always reminded of Paul’s warning words about “the wages of sin”!

PHILIPP R. AMLINGER, M.D.

Mountain Home, Tenn.

Certainly prostitution is not what a Christian should desire, but the results of criminalization are even more undesirable. In the fifties, a lady member of the French legislature pushed through a bill to close the brothels in Paris to “protect the dignity of French womanhood.” A few years ago I read that this same woman is in anguish as she has seen the horrible results of such action and is now seeking to reverse this law.

REV. HARVEY G. SCHLICHTER

Manchester Parish,

United Church of Christ

Manchester, Md.

Republicans and reelection

Beth Spring’s “Republicans, Religion, and Reelection” [Oct. 5], has an error and a few terms that reveal her proliberal position. Commenting on Richard Viguerie, she says, “both George Bush and Robert Dole denounced Viguerie by name for seeking to influence the party while not even enrolling as a Republican.” For Viguerie to do so is a political impossibility. Like Spring, he is a Virginia citizen, and there, as in most Southern states, registration is not by party.

She also refers to liberal Republicans as moderates, the implication being that if one is a conservative, one is immoderate. Why not refer to liberal Republicans as liberals? Perhaps her word moderate reveals her own political orientation. I always thought the half-way point between liberal and conservative was middle-of-the-road.

DAVID A. WILLIAMS

Arlington, Va.

Spring meant that Messrs. Bush and Dole were referring to the fact that Viguerie is not active in the Republican party.—Eds.

I have never been able to understand the furor over ministers being involved politically. It seems they are honored when they are liberally minded, but scorned when conservative.

NANCY M. BREWER

Ledyard, Conn.

Schuller’s spirit

I have never been an admirer of Robert Schuller. However, his letter to you [Oct. 5] left me with a new sense of respect for the man. I may not agree with his approach, but I cannot fault his spirit. I was overwhelmed by the irenic spirit of humility and love he expressed. May more of the leaders of Christianity in America evidence the same loving and gentle spirit.

REV. DAVID R. REAGAN

Plano, Tex.

In his letter Schuller implies that sin prevents faith in God (“The core of sin is lack of faith.”). Jesus Christ seems to agree in John 16:9. Yet God presents the gospel on the principle of faith: no faith, no gospel delivering from sin. How can this be? I first need deliverance from sin so I can have faith. But God says I must have faith before I can be delivered from sin. I am confused. Is there any theologian who can solve my dilemma?

CHARLES A. BAUER

Kent, Wash.

Authentic heroes

It was appropriate for CT to include “Where Have All the Heros Gone?” in the same issue as “Frank Gaebelein: Character Before Career” [Sept. 21]. In my mind, Hull [Gaebelein] effectively answers Poynor’s question. The church is fortunate that God does provide a few men and women who, by humility, faithful service, and a lifetime of commitment, are legitimate heroes. Frank Gaebelein was and is that kind of hero.

JOHN A. WEBER

Garland, Tex.

Frank Gaebelein was a wonderful encouragement and help to me right from the early days of my writing ministry. When I wrote my book on Billy Graham he not only gave much material but went through it carefully. Even more important to me personally, he did the same when I wrote The Apostle, my life of Paul. He made many excellent suggestions and took endless trouble.

REV. JOHN POLLOCK

Devonshire, England

I strongly object to Poyner’s statement about Christian leaders—“… of course they have sinned.… Nor would any of us really believe our minister to be sinless.” Jesus told the adulteress, “Go and sin no more”—not “Go and do it again.” This is a plea for equal time for the Wesleyan-Arminians.

EUGENE L. STOWE

Church of the Nazarene Headquarters

Kansas City, Mo.

Profundity or bias?

Richard Neuhaus appears blatantly to make creedal-style statements of his personal opinions [“The Naked Public Square,” Oct. 5]. He presents little to no factual support for his remarks, and his word choice reeks of bias and prejudice. Profundity does have its place in Christian thought. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, may we have men adept in discernment and apologetics.

L. J. WADE

Lincoln Park, Mich.

I was impressed with Neuhaus’s examination of “The Naked Public Square.” CT is dealing with the subjects on people’s minds, and from a distinctly evangelical Christian viewpoint. Best of all, you are doing it well.

ADON TAFT

Miami, Fla.

Neuhaus is wearing blinders and ear plugs if he does not recognize that the secularization of our society is well-nigh complete.

PAUL TRIPLETT

West Allis, Wis.

The crucial issue?

Excellent articles, such as “When ‘Infidels’ Run for Office” by Mark Noll [Oct. 5], could inadvertently lead to an acquiescence to secular rhetoric. This election year there is a clear choice between candidates supporting life and those supporting death (abortion on demand). If ever there was a single crucial issue set before God’s people, this is it.

DR. JEFFREY K. GREENBERG

University of Wisconsin

Madison, Wis.

This statement is made in Noll’s article: “For the first time in United States history, an ordained minister made a serious run for a major party’s presidential nomination.” May I suggest you review your history: James A. Garfield not only ran, but was the only ordained minister ever to be elected president of the United States (1880). After less than four months in office, a disappointed office seeker assassinated him.

CONRAD KITCHELL

Del City Christian Church

Del City, Okla.

Dr. Noll replies: “This was an oversight: it can be said, however, that Garfield’s ordination in the Disciples of Christ was more informal than other ordinations, and that he was by vocation a practicing lawyer.”—Eds.

On filmmaking and films

I thoroughly enjoyed your interview with producer Ken Wales [Sept. 21]. However, for the Hollywood film industry, the bottom line is creative and economic power. Christians have zero power there because for the last hundred years they have embraced both Pietism and “retreatism” as a theology. We stand on the outside looking in while others shape the minds of millions with the most powerful tools of communication the world has ever known, and Christian film companies release so-called evangelistic films that are predictable, boring, manipulative and reach only the already converted. Sharp, brilliant filmmakers like Coppola, Scorcese, DePalma, Carpenter, and Fonda influence millions. Christian culture discourages real creativity and drives the artist from its midst.

PAUL MCGUIRE

Hollywood, Calif.

Of all the tripe I have read lately in CT, Donn Wright’s article has to be the “best” [“Jane Fonda as Proverbs’ Virtuous Woman,” Oct. 5]. It is obvious Wright knows nothing about real Bible Christianity. If CT is going to continue such rubbish maybe it would be better to change the name to “Anything Today” or “Take Your Choice Today” or “You Name It Christianity.”

REV. DON SAMPLES

Bethel Baptist Church

Dearborn Heights, Mich.

Eutychus’s fans

I think Eutychus’s “The Holy Kiss” smacks of mere lip service [Oct. 5]. On the other hand, it does open up a new, exciting buss ministry whose potential ought to be embraced.

ROBERT L. HUBBARD

Denver Seminary

Denver, Colo.

I was sitting here in my office this morning, feeling sorry for myself. While trying to come to terms with the situations that helped cause my state, I started to read your section of gripes and praises. I started to feel uplifted. I am not sure why but: (1) Seeing a broader picture of the church, with all her various arms and efforts—and subsequent troubles, both major and minor—helped put mine into perspective; (2) Big guys (i.e., letters about Schuller, et al.) and little guys (i.e., me) all face adversity; (3) Though there are obvious disagreements, it put my mind into a cognitive mode, and out of the negative.

Now I sit here and wonder if I should even send you this letter, because it’s kind of silly, isn’t it? Aw shucks, your section helped me out, and I want to say thanks, and that is reason enough!

KIM CLARK

First Church of God

Salem, Va.

We have been disappointed in the stance taken by CT on the issues we confront every day. I spent time researching facts about the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, in response to your three articles. My letter was not published. I hope you get with it; CT has the potential to help turn things around.

R. C. WEEDY

Logan, Ohio

Addressing our errors

Addresses in the Editorial (Sept. 21, p. 13) are badly garbled. But I don’t expect to see a correction.

BERNARD R. DEREMER

Arlington, Va.

In every instance, the zip code should have read 20005. “Key Votes” is the name of the publication available from the Congressional Quarterly.—Eds.

Robert and Anne Todd are the parents of three children, ages 18, 16, and 10. They both want their children to have a college education, but they have never worked out any systematic plan to prepare for it. Their oldest child, Kerry, is now a high school senior, so Robert and Anne belatedly decided it was time to start looking at college costs.

To their shocked surprise they found that a year at most Christian colleges can easily cost between $7,500 and $10,000 a year. Secular institutions such as Stanford and MIT, they learned, now charge as much as $10,000 for tuition alone!

College has become an expensive commodity. If Robert and Anne expect to put their two older children through a Christian school, they can expect each of the typical four-year programs to cost them at least $35,000—provided costs do not escalate in the next few years, a most improbable situation. According to one respected source, average costs for 1984–85 for a four-year private college are $9,163; by 1986–87 they are projected to be $11,090. Since the likelihood is that the two older children will both be in college at the same time for two years (during the time Kerry is a junior and senior, Louise will be a freshman and sophom*ore), Robert and Anne will need to come up with an average of about $18,000 a year for each of those two years. Since Robert’s current annual income is a modest $25,000, he and his wife have a major problem. Even if Anne goes back to work and is able to increase that figure by about $15,000, college is going to stretch the family budget like a rubber band.

If the Todds live in certain sections of the country, their college costs may be higher or lower. According to the College Board College Cost Book, the national average of college expenses for tuition, books and supplies, room and board, personal expenses, and transportation in 1982–83 was $7,475. If you lived in New England, however, that cost jumped to $9,047. Other regional costs were: Middle States, $8,030; South, $6,500; Midwest, $7,021; and Southwest, $6,534.

To make things even worse, college expenses have been rising at record rates in the last two years. Although inflation dropped to about 6 percent last year, college costs jumped an average of 11 percent. For the current school year, the average student who lives on the campus of a public four-year college is paying $4,721 in tuition; his counterpart at a private college is paying no less than $8,440. Fortunately for the Christian parent, costs at a private Christian school are not yet that high.

To help others avoid the financial crunch Robert and Anne now face, CHRISTIANITY TODAY contacted people involved in the administration of several Christian colleges and universities who would be qualified to guide Christian parents and prospective Christian college students in their preparation for the college years. To provide information on ways to pay for college, we contacted vice-presidents for finance and business, directors of financial aid, and others in the area of college business affairs. And because we felt that preparation for college involves a lot more than money, we also contacted directors of admissions at several Christian schools.

To provide national coverage, we interviewed Christian college personnel in the north, east, south, and west. We included Christian colleges and universities, and Bible schools. We also contacted both denominational and interdenominational institutions. The results should therefore provide a fairly typical overview of what experienced Christian leaders feel parents ought to do to prepare their children for college in the most responsible way.

Remember, the cost of a Christian college, like the cost of a college education of any kind, is expensive. But it’s worth it. In no other way can you provide your children with the stimulation of their minds and the integration of faith and learning that is the unique contribution of that entity called the Christian institution of higher learning.

How To Get The Money Saved

College costs are no problem for the very rich and the very poor (if the latter are also very bright). Robert and Anne Todd, however, were like most of us, somewhere on the middle rungs of the economic ladder. Because they had not planned ahead, they had to scramble for all the help they could get.

One of the first questions every parent has to answer is, “How much of my child’s college education do I feel comfortable about paying?”

Most Christian colleges today work from what are called Financial Aid Forms, or FAFS as they are popularly known. These forms anticipate financial contributions from both the parents and the child. The average child should be able to save $900 each summer between his college years and earn an additional $600 while he is in school. If the combined total of Robert and Anne Todd’s income is under $75,000, which it was, colleges may use a table worked out by the U.S. Department of Education to determine how much they should provide toward the cost of educating their college-age child.

Another portion of the cost of tuition, room and board, and other college costs can often be made up from federal, state, and college grants.

If what parents and students can pay and grants provide still do not cover the cost of Kerry’s college education, Kerry can apply for a student loan. According to James T. Hakes, director of finance at Wheaton College (Ill.), the average student today graduates from college with an $8,000 debt, $2,000 a year for each of his four years in college. Some parents feel this is a terrible burden to put on the back of the new graduate, however.

Fortunately, if the student has a loan of $5,000 or more, the Student Loan Marketing Association in Washington will work out a loan consolidation program that will extend the repayment plan for up to 20 years without increasing the interest and cut the monthly cost to more manageable payments.

The two most common loan funds are the National Direct Student Loan and the Guaranteed Student Loan. Funds for the former, a need-based loan that charges only 5 percent interest, have been cut sharply in the last few years, so applications need to be made early. The latter, available through many local banks, is a much larger program. For a period of time anyone could apply for such a loan at 9 percent interest, but in 1981 an income ceiling was once again imposed. That ceiling is high enough, however, that families with quite high incomes who have more than one child in college can qualify.

In a helpful chapter, “Financing an Education,” in The Lifetime Book of Money Management (New American Library, 1983), Grace W. Weinstein suggests several ways of keeping the costs of college down that do not involve grants or loans. They include accelerated programs of study, cooperative education programs that alternate work and study, attending a school in the student’s home state, starting college years in a two-year community college, finding an employer-paid tuition payment benefit plan, enlisting in the armed forces to help pay college costs, taking accredited correspondence courses, and finding colleges that offer reduced costs for siblings or high grades.

Hakes makes the following seven recommendations to parents who have children who plan on going to college:

1. Consider opening a custodial account or Clifford Trust. Some grandparents give college fund gifts to their grandchildren at birth—or more precisely, to their children as custodians for their grandchildren. Anne Todd’s parents, for example, gave her $1,000 when each of her three children were born. Anne placed the money in a bank savings certificate, then transferred it to a money market fund. Interest rates are now about 11 percent. Her account lists her as custodian for each account under the Uniform Gift to Minors Act.

Each parent is also allowed to make a gift of up to $10,000 to each child. Robert decided to get a second job and deposit all his earnings into a money market fund for Kerry’s college costs. Since the account is a custodial account, Robert will not have to pay taxes on the interest—and Kerry’s income is too small to be taxable.

Trusts are a bit more complicated, but, Hakes says, lots of parents set them up for their children’s college funds. Under a trust, the child gets the interest and parents get their money back, usually after a period of 10 or more years. A trust is beneficial if children are younger and you get an inheritance from grandparents or other relatives. A local bank can provide information on setting up a Clifford Trust.

Option C, a more complex trust arrangement, involves the following steps: (1) parents borrow money from the bank on their equity in their home, (2) parents give money to a short-term trust at high interest rate with a banker or attorney as trustee, (3) parents borrow back from the trust fund to repay their bank loan, (4) parents pay the interest on the loan to the trust and deduct it from their income tax, (5) when needed, the trustee distributes the interest income to the child for education expenses. At the end of ten years the trust dissolves, parents have enjoyed a tax savings, and the child’s education has been financed. Hakes questioned the legality of this at first, but Wheaton College attorneys assured him it was perfectly legal.

2. Do not think of financial aid as welfare. Hakes said he once thought financial aid was a siphoning off of resources. Many of the people he meets are embarrassed to seek such aid. But colleges view such aid idealistically. A good college seeks diversity in its student body, and financial aid provides that diversity and thereby improves its educational product. If, however, parents have a lot of equity in their house and a good income, they are less likely to get much financial aid.

3. Parents should let political representatives know how they feel about financial aid to college students. Some politicians support financial aid to students; others do not. Parents should let them know how they feel about the subject. Letters can influence their stand.

4. Find out what a college’s net price is. College catalogs will list the gross price of a year at college, but one cannot tell anything about financial aid from it. Parents should call the college’s financial aid department or speak to the financial aid directors. Some schools offer a lot of such aid, even in some cases a “free ride”—total payment of all college costs.

5. If a child has good grades, find out about academic scholarships. For the last 10 years, Hakes observed, such scholarships have been out of vogue, with some people claiming that prestigious schools were “buying minds.” But many schools give $1,000 scholarships over and above need-based aid for the high school senior with outstanding grades. “It tends to be for the person who has an 800 score on his SAT in math, however,” Hakes added.

6. Don’t overlook unusual sources of scholarship aid. The college library will often have a list of scholarships with odd restrictions—for example, Methodists from New Jersey, or people who play the piccolo. Though such a search is not always helpful, it should not be overlooked.

7. Watch out for gimmickry in financial aid. “Some colleges overprice, then give everyone a dean’s scholarship,” Hakes said. “That makes parents think they’re getting something special and enables parents to say their son or daughter got a scholarship to the college. That makes them feel good.” But Hakes feels such gimmickry is ethically questionable.

Johnny Williams, newly appointed controller and assistant treasurer of LeTourneau College in Longview, Texas, noted that the college’s students are a bit different from those of many Christian colleges. “Most of our freshmen have enough money to pay for their first year of college, but then there are lots of ways to work, so they earn the money to pay for their last three years. For example, we have a contract with the city to operate their ambulance service that provides our students with a $500,000 payroll. All but three employees are students. Many of our students study in the ambulance’s mobile home units—and earn $1,200 in the process,” Williams stated.

How To Evaluate A College

William K. Stob, dean of student life at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, suggests that every parent should look at a number of additional factors when considering a college:

1. Look beyond the slick promotional materials and carefully evaluate colleges. “Some schools spend a lot of money on frills—extracurricular activities, athletic facilities, lavish building design,” Stob said. He advises parents instead to check out the quality of the faculty, the college’s accreditation, the size of the library, and the soundness of the buildings.

2. Find out how seriously the college attempts to integrate faith and learning. Make sure the college takes its Christian commitment seriously, not just as a frosting.

3. Visit the campus. You need to check out for yourself whether what is said on paper checks out. “I’d guess that about 80 percent of parents and prospective students do,” Stob remarked.

4. Talk to recent alumni and parents of present students. “You will probably know alumni and parents in your local church,” Stob said, “but if not, you can ask the college for the names of students in your area. The alumni office will be happy to do this for you.”

5. Start early. “Many parents start too late,” Stob said. “I’ve talked with parents who wait until March or April of their child’s senior year to start their investigation. That way they are late for all deadlines in financial aid. Our experience at Calvin is that a trickle of applications come in in the fall, and most arrive in January and February. If you apply in March or April, you’ll probably still get accepted if you qualify unless facilities are limited. But you’ll probably not get any aid.”

6. Go over the curriculum in the college catalog carefully. “A lot of parents don’t do this. As a result, their children go to schools that aren’t right for them. Those who want a premed, computer science, or business administration program sometimes go to schools that don’t even offer such majors, and others have weak programs in those areas.”

7. Don’t underrate a liberal arts college. “Our society is becoming overly concerned about careers—even when a child is 15, 16, or even 18,” Stob remarked. Yet employers everywhere are complaining that even M.B.A.’s can’t read and write adequately because their training has been too narrow. “You should get a good liberal arts education in your first two years,” the Calvin College dean observed. “You can specialize after that. The liberal arts train you for life; specialized training quickly becomes obsolete, and companies prefer to train you themselves.”

8. Find out the specific goals of the college. Parents should read the college’s statement of purpose. It should appear in the opening pages of the school’s catalog, at least if the college has a clear vision of those goals. One hopes that some day a son or daughter will catch some of the vision the clearly focused Christian college has.

9. Examine carefully the college’s extracurricular activities. “Not all learning takes place in the classroom,” Stob added. Parents should look in the college catalog to see what service opportunities the college offers. These opportunities offer leadership skills, occasions for public speaking, the possibility of impact on the local community and involvement with minorities, a chance to get involved in politics, church life, and missions. “Ask about the concern of the campus for world hunger, poverty, and community problems, too.”

10. Pray. “If you’re a Christian parent, you should pray with your prospective college student. Use good judgment, but let the Lord guide you and be open to his will,” Stob concluded.

What A Dean Of Admissions Looks For

Wynn Lembright, dean of admissions for Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, echoed some of Stob’s thoughts and added a number of his own. “Everywhere today there is a heightened sense of the importance of verbal and writing skills,” Lembright said. “Four out of six of our graduate students now working in Washington, D.C., recently told me writing skills were one of the most important things they learned at Taylor. The way you express yourself on your application form tells a lot about you. Some of those who apply have a hard time articulating their thoughts.”

Lembright added the following advice to the parents of prospective students:

1. A child should not overspecialize in high school. “Some high school students think they need to get all the physics they can get in high school,” Dean Lembright said, “and they neglect English. They forget that the material will be covered in college again anyway.” He has observed that increasingly the larger companies such as IBM and AT&T prefer liberal arts graduates they can send on for special training. They want generalists; specialization is becoming increasingly a postcollege program. This is a major change in the occupational community.

2. Don’t overemphasize athletics. Though he had been involved in physical education earlier in his career, Lembright feels athletics plays a larger part in our culture than in any other. “A number of students come to college thinking primarily of being involved in athletics, intoxicated by the aura of sports. If I were a parent I would do my best to diminish that emphasis. Students are not likely to be as involved as they think they will. We need to emphasize that college is basically for academics. Unfortunately, all the hype is on athletics on the college campus, but preparation for tests is ultimately far more important than practice on the field.”

3. Get children to a good Christian camp during the junior high years. Young people need a good role model, and Christian camps that use college students as camp counselors provide that role model. “Not everyone agrees with me on this point,” Lembright observed, “but a good Christian college student can teach your child what to look for in college, how to get along in the dorms with roommates, how to handle peer pressure, how to handle life when it isn’t perfect.”

4. Look for a college that offers something in career development. “Many colleges have little or no concern about what happens to their graduates. Students are so busy studying they don’t have time to look into career opportunities. “Taylor has an outstanding career development center that uses a lot of one-on-one counseling,” Lembright said. “We track all our students during all four years and help them with résumés and interviews. I think a college has an obligation to help place its students.”

5. Find a college your youngster wants to be “coached” by. “I see admissions as a mission,” the Taylor dean remarked. “God has a pilgrimage for each person who applies to Taylor. Our mission is to help them find what fits that person’s personality, financial abilities, personal needs, and goals. Choosing a school is like choosing a mate. We like to ask our prospective students, ‘Do you want to be coached by our kind of environment?’ For example, we emphasize residence prayer groups; if your son or daughter doesn’t want to participate, this is not the place to be.”

Through The Eyes Of An Academic Dean

Dean Ebner (Dean is his first name), associate dean for academic affairs at Bethel College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, focused more on the ideals of a Christian college education. His advice to parents included the following suggestions:

1. Students in high school should emphasize the solid academic courses. “The old distinction still applies,” Dean Ebner said. “You need four years of English and the humanities, a minimum of two years of math, and two years of science. Colleges are moving back to the basics, and too many students still avoid math, science, even history and the social sciences. That hurts them.”

2. Be aware that colleges are again emphasizing the basics. “At Bethel we have taken a fresh look at our goals. Instead of requiring so many hours of this and so many hours of that, we’ve adopted a program that makes sure such goals as writing, reading, speaking, listening, reasoning, and computational and study skills are emphasized in all courses.” Ebner said the way they hope to attain these goals is through a sequence of core courses in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Bible, creativity and the fine arts, science technology and society, physical wholeness, and contemporary Christian choice—a course for seniors that puts students from various majors together to discuss problems such as pollution.

3. Certain kinds of high school extracurricular activity help students get admitted. “Just being a member of a fun-and-games club won’t help you,” Ebner said. “But any kind of leadership in your church or school, especially in debate, language clubs, FFA, and business clubs will impress an admissions person.”

4. A high school student with basic Bible literacy has a real advantage. “My impression is that the churches are not doing as good a job of teaching the Bible as they used to. If most of our students have a good knowledge of the Bible, those who don’t know that Abraham comes before Daniel are handicapped.

5. A high school student who has been exposed to another culture has a real advantage. The person who has gotten out of his own little suburb and experienced other cultures—or at least is willing to study other cultures—is better prepared for college than the one who has not traveled, because he has a more global awareness.

6. Parents need to use the high school years to move children toward independence. “My kids are 18 and 20; we’ve had to learn a lot this past summer about taking our hands off,” Dean Ebner commented. “My 20-year-old daughter had to decide what summer job she was going to take. She chose one I wouldn’t have chosen, but it was her choice. Kids vary, of course. Some parents are too permissive, but others are too authoritarian. Some parents can’t leave mothering and fathering, even when their sons and daughters are in college. It’s sad to see parents forcing their college junior daughter to be a concert pianist when she doesn’t want to be one.

“Overly dependent kids can have problems in college. Some become so homesick they drop out and go back home. To prepare your son or daughter for independence, consider taking a vacation occasionally without the kids.”

Advice From A Bible School Vice-President And Treasurer

Donald P. Leach of Moody Bible Institute in Chicago notes that costs at a Bible school are lower than at a private secular college. If parents sense that a child is interested in the programs a Bible school offers, they can begin to plan their resources accordingly. “You will need to have the intuitive sensitivity to know whether your child is the kind that will work to help put himself through, or whether he prefers to be involved in extracurricular activities. What that child has done in high school is an indicator of possible future trends.”

Leach gave both the following financial and spiritual guidance:

1. Consider deeply discounted bonds as an investment for the college years. These bonds, an innovation of the last three or four years, can be purchased for as much as 50 to 60 percent off face value. “If you buy a $1,000 bond for $500 and it matures in five years, you’d be getting a 20 percent return. That’s a bit high,” Leach said, “but the point is that for a low capital investment you are forced to save your money and you can let the earnings accumulate.

2. The more serious investor can try land. “Land throughout history has appreciated at the rate of 10 percent a year,” Leach observed. “But a bad investment could hurt, so you have to be careful.”

3. If both parents work, save the second income for college. “The Bible gives instructions that family life not be upset by a wife who is away from her family. But when the kids are in college, the wife could go back to work.”

4. Make an intensive review of possible colleges a year or two in advance. In that way you can review the total packages offered. “You can’t do it three or four days before enrollment,” Leach smiled.

5. Teach young people the value of a dollar. “If they know how long it takes to earn money for college, they’ll be able to select a college more wisely,” Leach noted. “If your child wants to be a missionary, spending $16,000 for him to go to MIT will give him a good degree, but it will be almost worthless for his career objectives.”

6. Discuss education with a child in the most informal setting possible. “The supper table or the car while you are on vacation is a good place to discuss the pros and cons of college, whether a Bible college or a secular college is best, and whether Moody or Wheaton or Harvard would best meet the child’s needs. Don’t make your child go to college if he really would prefer to drive a truck.”

7. Don’t forget to include the geographicallocation of the college in your thinking. “If the college is a thousand miles from your home and you travel there in the fall, at winter break, and again at the end of the school year, don’t forget to add an extra $1,200 to $1,500 to the costs of a college education. And if you also visit the campus, as some parents do, at Thanksgiving and spring break, plan on increasing travel costs accordingly.”

8. Include college education in the dedication of your children to the Lord. “I believe the son or daughter from an evangelical, fundamental Christian home needs to be dedicated to the Lord in church during the first year of his or her life. And a college education should be part of that service.”

9. Start talking to your children about careers from the time they are five. “I recommend that parents start talking to their children periodically about what the Lord wants them to do. It can start as early as five years and continue through the junior and senior high years and beyond. You don’t want to force them to go to Bible school, but you should talk to them early about their options,” Leach concluded.

In Summary

Christian parents have a heavy responsibility in educating their children. The financial costs are staggering and promise to be increasingly so. Parents need to be sensitive to the individual needs of each of their children so they can advise them academically and spiritually with wisdom and insight. The number of possible careers is exploding and constantly expanding, so the alternatives have never been greater—or more perplexing—than they are today. Christian colleges and Bible schools have matured to the place that they offer a quality education unparalleled in their history. Now is the time for parents to begin planning for their children’s college years, whether they are 6 or 16. Christian stewardship suggests that only by starting now are they being responsible parents. Only if they start now can parents avoid being faced with the dilemma Robert and Anne Todd faced because they failed to think about college preparation until it was too late. Now is the proper time to lay your plans for your child’s future, spiritually, financially—and academically.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

In 1935, George Croft Cell’s book, The Rediscovery of John Wesley (Henry Holt), helped rescue the founder of Methodism from both single-issue conservatives and doctrinally indifferent liberals. It moreover marked movement into a new stage in North American Wesley studies. Twenty-five years later, the trickle of scholarly books and articles about Wesley turned into a flood that is only now somewhat abating. But this abatement has its compensation, as it were, in the growing number of more popular works about Wesley.

Today, the bicentennial of American Methodism has added to the already growing curiosity about Wesley. As revived popular interest and mature scholarly interest have begun to feed each other, Wesley, Methodism’s cult hero, appears in better, truer light as an innovative, constructive, still useful contributor to the life and thought of the church universal.

One place the pastor or thoughtful layperson can go to find out about this quintessential, eighteenth-century Anglican priest is to the man himself. Wesley created more literature for his followers than almost any other leader in Christian history. And not a little of it is autobiographical. He proposed to use publication to kindle and stoke fires of spiritual awakening and to nurture believers. Even in his lifetime, he saw to the printing and dissemination of his own works (letters, abstracts from his daily memoranda, sermons, tracts, and books) and the works of others.

A critical edition of these works is, at long last, on its way. Simply titled The Works of John Wesley, the massive project was originally to have been done by Oxford University Press, but economic factors interfered. Abingdon has now taken up where Oxford left off, although 4 volumes of the proposed 34 have been published by Oxford.

The first volume of this magnum opus came off the press in 1975 with Gerald R. Cragg’s The Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion and Certain Related Open Letters. This work was followed in 1980 and 1982 by two (of seven proposed) volumes of Letters, edited by Frank Baker, giving us an exhaustive collection of correspondence to and from John Wesley dating from 1721 to 1755. Franz Hildebrandt and Oliver Beckerlegge added still another volume (the last of the Oxford editions) with the publication of A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists. Coming soon from Abingdon will be the first of four volumes of Sermons edited by Albert Outler.

These volumes have illuminating introductions and reference notes, which help the reader understand Wesley’s context as well as the problems of technical editing. The Wesley they help us see is both more human, more subtle, and more useful, if you will, than he had been previously portrayed. From being merely the founder of Methodism given to superhuman projects and motivated by a simplistic theology, he has become a thoughtful teacher of the entire church.

Until the Oxford-Abingdon edition is completed, older editions can still usefully serve in any study of Wesley. The best of these is Thomas Jackson’s The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A. (14 volumes; London: Mason, 1829–31). Jackson worked with Wesley’s own corrected manuscripts and editions. Reprinted nearly 40 times, this edition is still available from Baker Book House in a 1958 photo-offset format done by Zondervan and Nazarene Publishing House.

By the end of the last century, discoveries of lost or unknown Wesley materials and critical analyses of the extant works had made Jackson’s edition somewhat problematic. So, in 1906–16, Nehemiah Curnock published The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M. (8 volumes; Epworth); Edward H. Sugden edited Wesley’s Standard Sermons (2 volumes; Epworth, 1921); and John Telford issued The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M. (8 volumes; Epworth, 1931). These so-called standard editions are still profitable reading, though the same sorts of advancement in knowledge that called them forth now call for their replacement.

Of course, reading entire collections is no easy chore. There are, however, healthy remedies and substitutes: anthologies. The best of an outstanding trio is Albert Outler’s John Wesley (Oxford, 1964). Outler’s introductions charm and inform. And his choices show the breadth and coherence of Wesley’s theology. Philip Watson’s The Message of the Wesleys, a Reader of Instruction and Devotion (Macmillan, 1964; reprint Francis Asbury Press of Zondervan, 1984) tunes itself to the Wesleys’ own intention in publishing through competent editing and abridgment, and through a well-directed introduction.

A third anthology is more workaday. Robert W. Burtner and Robert F. Chiles’s A Compend of Wesley’s Theology (Abingdon, 1954) presents the dicta of Wesley on the major topics of systematic theology. Here, the subtlety, continuity, and depth of Wesley’s theological thought suffer; that is, while the major points of Christian doctrine—such as salvation, sanctification, eschatology—are discussed individually, there is no attempt to correlate these understandings into a unified theology. Still, the breadth and sharpness of Wesley’s thinking on these specific points are admirably demonstrated.

Somewhat surprisingly, while good secondary sources illuminate Wesley, we lack a definitive biography. Nineteenth-century biographers labored to present Wesley as the founder and patron of Methodism, often from faulty or insufficient sources. Twentieth-century biographers often specialize—“Wesley and …” or “Wesley as …” and they, too, face the inadequacy of extant-source editions.

Nevertheless, there are some biographies useful to the pastor and thoughtful layperson. Weaknesses understood, two early biographies still serve well, and, thanks to reprintings, are accessible. They are: Henry Moore’s The Life of Rev. John Wesley, A.M. (2 volumes; London: Kershaw, 1824–25) and Luke Tyerman’s The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A. (3 volumes; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1870–71).

Among this century’s most adequate biographies is John Simon’s five-volume set, beginning with John Wesley and the Religious Societies (Epworth, 1921) and ending with John Wesley, the Last Phase (Epworth, 1934). This work is massive, but still parochial, giving us a Wesley narrower than he in fact was. On the other hand, C. E. Vulliamy’s John Wesley (London: Bles, 1931) is the first biography to give us a wider-than-Methodist Wesley.

Actually, the best biographies of Wesley are really theological in intent. Martin Schmidt, John Wesley: A Theological Biography (2 volumes in 3 parts; NY: Abingdon, 1962, 1972, 1973), is especially helpful in his first volume, which shows the effect of Moravian thought on Wesley’s theology. Schmidt’s later volumes depict Wesley’s break with this line of thinking (due primarily to the Moravian belief that grace does everything and that good works are not necessary in living Christianity), with the end result being a portrait of an almost tragic (theologically disillusioned?) Wesley. Robert Tuttle’s John Wesley: His Life and Theology (Zondervan, 1978) intends to show the social and religious context in which Wesley worked, to let Wesley speak for himself, and to allow Tuttle’s own theological analysis. The format demands a bit of the reader but yields solid dividends.

The leap from theological biography to theological studies is short—but from the few volumes to the many. Best of all, in spite of its narrow-sounding title, is Frank Baker’s John Wesley and the Church of England (Abingdon, 1970). Here is biography and careful theology, a believing and theologically acute Wesley. Cell’s work, already mentioned, shows Wesley’s kinship to Reformed theology. William R. Cannon’s The Theology of Wesley (Abingdon, 1946), emphasizes Wesley’s doctrine of justification but is attentive to the broader ranges of his theology as well. And Colin Williams’s John Wesley’s Theology Today (Abingdon, 1960) may overdo the ecumenical possibilities in Wesley’s thought, but it is a careful study that strikes sparks of personal reflection.

Two far more specialized works claim special recognition even in so cursory a survey. Evangelism, “spreading scriptural holiness,” was Wesley’s self-conscious mission. A. Skevington Wood’s The Burning Heart, John Wesley: Evangelist (Bethany House, 1967; reprint, 1978) gives us an excellent, even exciting, source-based study of this side of Wesley. And Harald Lindström’s Wesley and Sanctification (Epworth, 1950; reprint, Francis Asbury Press of Zondervan) helps us understand in full theological dimension what Wesley meant by “holiness.”

There are, of course, still other, more specialized volumes for the dedicated scholar. But for most of us, we must, until the Abingdon editions are completed, content ourselves largely with a parochial Wesley, narrow in focus (Methodism only), and simple in theology. Outler’s, Baker’s, and Williams’s efforts, however, are content models for future editions as they begin to move us beyond the Methodist “cult hero” to a John Wesley worthy of the consideration of the whole church.

Reviewed by Paul Merritt Bassett, a former Rockefeller Doctoral Fellow and past president of the Wesleyan Theological Society, and professor of the history of Christianity and director of the M.Div. program at the Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri.