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WAKING UP PRAYERO Comforter! Within me as I drink my teaJesus! Sunlight! Offering this new morningGod of all small pleasures! Present cheerilyThree-in-One in this glad day …

God of new beginnings,I embrace todayJesus! Healer! Friend!Come sit beside meSpirit give me power to danceYour merry WayO Gentle Three-in-OneMost Mirthful!

Ho! Ho! What a morning!

—Celtic prayer, by Sharon Morgan

TOO HARD FOR SOMEThe Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

—G. K. Chesterton inWhat’s Wrong with the World

BACKWARDS CREATION … you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

—Anne Lamott inBird by Bird

THE DESCENT OF MANArt is a reflection of a society’s most profound aspirations. … Cultures exalt their highest ideals. In the Middle Ages, it was the divine. For the 18th and 19th centuries, it was Man as Promethean hero. Today, it’s the depraved, life as a freak show. Our cultural mavens wallow in the sordid, celebrate the nauseating, dwell on their imaginary persecution.

—Columnist Don Feder in theBoston Herald(July 27, 1993)

CHRISTIANITY ISN’T COMPLICATEDJust think, every promise God has ever made finds its fulfillment in Jesus. God doesn’t just give us grace, He gives us Jesus, the Lord of grace. If it’s peace, it’s only found in Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Even life itself is found in the Resurrection and the Life. Christianity isn’tall that complicated … it’s Jesus.

—Joni Eareckson Tada inLamp Unto My Feet

LETTING GOD BE GODHumility is facing the truth. It is useful to remind myself that the word itself comes from humus, earth, and in the end simply means that I allow myself to be earthed in the truth that lets God be God, and myself his creature. If I hold on to this it helps prevent me from putting myself at the centre, and instead allows me to put God and other people at the centre.

—Esther de Waal inLiving with Contradiction: Reflections on The Rule of St. Benedict

TRUSTING IN THE UNREALCharacter is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

—Abraham Lincoln inLincoln’s Own Stories

THE HIGHLANDS OF HOLINESSWhen an observatory is about to be built, the site selected is always onsome high mountain. The aim is to find a place where there is a clear,unobstructed view of the heavens. Similarly, faith requires for its heavenly vision the highlands of holiness and separation, the pure sky of a consecrated life.

—A. B. Simpson inA Larger Christian Life

REAL FAITHFaith is not a contract. Faith is surrender. If no other relationship in our experience is one of self-surrender, it’s all contractual; people won’t know how to believe.

—Archbishop Francis George,from his 1990 doctoral dissertation (Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1997)

LIVING IN POVERTYWe leave our places of worship, and no deep and inexpressible wonder sits upon our faces. We can sing these lilting melodies, and when we go out into the streets our faces are one with the faces of those who have left the theaters and the music halls. There is nothing about us to suggest that we have beenlooking at anything stupendous and overwhelming. … And what is the explanation of the loss? Preeminently our impoverished conception of God.

—John Henry Jowett in“The Ministry of a Transfigured Church,” from J. H. Jowett

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Following complaints that the IRS is unfairly singling out for audits conservative groups and politically active churches, a congressional committee has launched a special inquiry into the tax agency’s policies and practices.

The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation is expected, by mid-September, to issue a report on whether politics is playing a role in determining whom the IRS audits.

“There is absolutely no doubt that the Internal Revenue Service has targeted conservative churches and conservative organizations for special treatment,” says attorney Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) in Virginia Beach. The ACLJ is defending the Church at Pierce Creek in Conklin, New York, which is appealing its loss of tax exemption after its 1992 newspaper ads declared that voting for Clinton would be a sin.

Intense controversy has developed in connection with the IRS practice of initiating tax audits on the basis of third-party allegations—from media reports, watchdog groups, or whistleblowers. IRS commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson rebutted, in a letter to Congress, the allegations against the agency, calling them “inaccurate and misleading.”

CONDUIT GIVING? Meanwhile, among religious groups, fresh concerns about IRS practices have surfaced within the past year.

In 1996, the IRS initially denied tax-exempt status to Great Commission Ministries (GCM), setting off alarm bells throughout the Christian parachurch community. Based in the Columbus, Ohio, area, GCM has about 120 staff ministering in 34 college communities.

At issue was the common practice known as deputation, by which missionaries raise support. During deputation, individuals solicit financial pledges, which are paid to a nonprofit corporation, such as a mission agency. Then the nonprofit uses those funds to pay ministry costs, benefits, and a salary to the individual engaged in ministry activity. Deputation is a principal means for mission agencies and ministry organizations, such as Campus Crusade for Christ, to raise tens of millions of dollars annually.

However, a 1995 IRS handbook warned field agents to be on the alert for conduit giving, a fraudulent activity. For example, conduit giving would occur if a parent gave a scholarship donation to a tax-exempt school, and the school in turn channeled that donation to the donor’s child for payment of school expenses.

In the GCM case, the IRS initially considered deputation as a form of conduit giving. The Washington, D.C., law firm Gammon & Grange helped coordinate the effort among Christian ministries to assist in GCM’s appeal of the IRS decision. More than 50 organizations signed on to the effort.

Gammon & Grange attorney Stephen H. King says, “We argued that so long as an organization can demonstrate that it—and not the donors or individuals being supported—effectively controlled its funds, this practice of raising support could not be considered conduit giving.”

GCM learned in April that its tax-exempt status had been granted.

Yet the process of receiving its exemption cost more than $50,000, compared to the typical $2,500. The coalition that formed around the GCM cause is now following up its efforts by working with the IRS to codify the principles that formed the basis of the decision. “We don’t want any organization to have to go through what GCM had to go through,” King says. “We want some guidelines that specify that this form of raising support will not endanger an organization’s tax-exempt status as long as the organization controls the money.”

PARTISAN POLITICS: Some Christian activists charge that the GCM case is symptomatic of an overall IRS campaign to single out for investigation politically partisan churches, certain conservative organizations, and parachurch agencies.

Organizations, including churches, that are classified under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code are prohibited by the terms of their exemption from participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, a candidate for office. There are more than 540,000 organizations with 501(c)(3) tax exemptions.

The IRS is getting plenty of help in its watchdog efforts from the Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which maintains that illegal, partisan political activity by tax-exempt organizations has been ignored for too long. Through a program called Project Fair Play, Americans United (AU) has reported potential violations to the IRS, including controversial ads sponsored by the Church at Pierce Creek (CT, June 19, 1995, p. 47).

AU was started by a Protestant pastor 50 years ago to oppose lobbying by the Roman Catholic church on behalf of government aid to parochial schools. Under the leadership of current executive director Barry Lynn, however, AU has become a bane to conservative Protestant churches and organizations because of its hard-line views on the separation of church and state.

Project Fair Play has resulted in AU’s submission of 11 formal complaints, including one that alerted the IRS to a letter distributed at Second Baptist Church in Lake Jackson, Texas, stating that people who vote for President Clinton are “guilty before God” (CT, May 20, 1996, p. 75).

Overall, the targets include seven churches, a Catholic archdiocese, a Buddhist temple, and the predominantly Catholic pro-life organization American Life League. Lynn says seven of the complaints related to support for Republican candidates, three for Democrats, and one independent.

“Clearly, the IRS has not been active enough in looking at nonprofits, including churches, who cross the line into politically partisan endorsem*nts,” Lynn says. How seriously the IRS is taking AU’s complaints is not known outside the federal agency.

AU warned churches around the country last year that distributing voter guides produced by the Christian Coalition could put them at risk of “having their tax-exempt status challenged and possibly revoked.” In order to meet federal nonprofit regulations, voter guides must be educational and informational in nature, not politically partisan.

Voter guides, for example, with color photos of one slate of candidates and unflattering black-and-white shots of the other would be suspect. Other considerations include fair representation of candidates’ views, balanced selection of issues, and timing of the distribution of the guides. Nonprofit tax counsel Milt Cerny advises that churches “carefully evaluate [voter guide] content and format, with legal counsel, to ensure that it complies with IRS requirements.”

To abide by the tax code, political involvement must not show a candidate preference. “I tell pastors that if they preach the gospel and the truth, people can figure out who to vote for,” says a certified public accountant, James E. Guinn of Irving, Texas.

Other allegations suggest that the IRS is singling out conservative political organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, and Fortress America, for audits. In the case of the Heritage Foundation, the IRS apparently initiated its audit after Democrats complained that Heritage, a leading tax-exempt conservative think tank, crossed the line into politics by using gop leader Bob Dole in a highly successful fundraising campaign in 1995.

IRS Commissioner Richardson has offered to share confidential information with appropriate members of Congress, claiming it would “demonstrate the IRS’s fair, impartial, and nonpartisan enforcement of the internal revenue laws in the exempt organization arena.”

The official denial means little to some conservatives, including Joseph Farah, executive director of the Fair Oaks, California-based Western Journalism Center (WJC), which is being audited by the IRS. WJC’s mission is to expose government waste, fraud, and corruption. According to Farah, the documents originally requested by the IRS focused on WJC’s journalistic challenge to the Clinton administration’s version of events surrounding the death of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster.

LIMITING CHURCH FREEDOM? An additional cause for concern in the nonprofit community has developed concerning the Taxpayer Protection Act, signed by Clinton last summer. This law empowers the IRS to impose financial penalties on individuals who receive what the IRS considers excessive salaries or benefits from nonprofit organizations. Sanctions also may be imposed on board members who knowingly approve excessive compensation (CT, Nov. 11, 1996, p. 110).

Prior to this legislation, the only punitive option available to the IRS was to revoke tax-exempt status. Opponents of the legislation fear that enhancing the agency’s sanctioning options may lead to unwarranted intrusion into the affairs of nonprofit organizations.

According to Guinn, the legislation’s proponents “point to the extreme excesses of a few ministers and ministries as proof that this law is necessary.” Guinn adds that, no matter how well intended, the law “demonstrates an increased willingness on the part of the federal government to meddle in the affairs of the church.”

A 1995 report by a House Ways and Means subcommittee reports that the IRS revoked 60 tax exemptions during 1991-92. Of those 60 revocations, 20 were for “unreasonable compensation” and 5 were for political activities.

CONSPIRACY REJECTED: While not wishing to defend all IRS actions, Richard Hammar, editor of Church Law and Tax Report and legal counsel to the Assemblies of God in Springfield, Missouri, maintains that “the idea of an IRS crusade against churches is ludicrous to anybody who’s been a federal employee.” Hammar, formerly employed by the U.S. Department of Defense, points out that the number of IRS agents assigned to tax-exempt groups has declined since 1990, as has funding for IRS oversight of exempt organizations.

Cerny, who serves as tax counsel for Campus Crusade and worked for the IRS from 1960 to 1988, predicts the agency will be vindicated by Congress. “The people who work for the IRS are high caliber professionals who adhere to their constitutionally sworn duty to uphold the law,” Cerny says.

This is not the first time that the IRS, churches, and nonprofits have tangled over tax exemptions. In 1975, the IRS revoked the tax exemption of Bob Jones University in South Carolina because the school banned interracial dating.

Also in the mid-1970s, independent Christian schools mounted a massive public protest over moves by the IRS to revoke the tax exemptions of those schools for “de facto segregation.” Paul Weyrich, a leader in the early days of the Christian Right movement, admits in William Martin’s With God on Our Side (Broadway Books, 1996) that the campaign against the IRS was a watershed event, galvanizing Christian conservatives to act in concert against what they considered government interference.

MORE THOROUGH AUDITS? Public criticism of the IRS comes at a time when the agency is shrinking.

The IRS expects in 1997 to trim its work force by 2,700 positions and lower its overall audit rate to 1.18 percent from 1.63 percent in 1996. Considering that the IRS handles 200 million individual and business returns annually, the rate reduction is significant.

In addition, the IRS reports that fewer nonprofits are being audited. Recent IRS reports show that exempt-organization audits peaked in 1990 at 16,205, declining annually to 1995 at 10,497.

The IRS says the decline is due in large part to the agency’s Coordinated Examination Program. With this program, agents conduct an extensive audit project on an entire system of economically related organizations, such as health-care systems or colleges. The result is fewer, but more thorough, audits.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, audits of exempt organizations in 1995 resulted in $126 million in assessments and penalties. The IRS reports that few penalties are based on outright scams. Most commonly, organizations are cited for failing to comply with employment tax laws and income from unrelated business activity. For example, the IRS and an organization may disagree on whether someone is considered an independent contractor or an employee.

While relatively few audited organizations are penalized, some of the groups are large, and the average penalty is $1.5 million.

In an in-depth interview with Christianity Today, a top IRS official, who asked not to be named, defended the agency’s track record as well as the new Taxpayer Protection Act. He says the new law “enables us to go directly to the bad transaction, undo it, and penalize the individual who engineered it, rather than the organization.”

The IRS official says the agency is not interested in usurping the autonomy of nonprofits but rather intervening only in cases of blatant abuse. “We won’t catch anybody by surprise,” the official says. “We’re probably going to be dealing with the same kinds of excessive payments that have always been front-page news when they’ve been made public, because they shock the populace. We’re not talking about the IRS setting precise salary levels.”

One of the conditions for nonprofit organizations to retain their special status has always been to make financial information public. Citizens may obtain such information, contained in Form 990, either from the IRS or now via a mail request directly from the nonprofit.

According to the official, this approach “recognizes the fact that the IRS never would—and frankly never should—have the resources to audit every organization every year. In order to keep organizations operating appropriately, the best way to encourage voluntary cooperation is to have books and records out in the sunshine.” The official adds that such entities as the IRS, state attorneys general, and charity regulators all depend on the public to report instances of possible illegality.

The IRS official says the fact that the congressional investigation is being conducted by the Joint Committee on Taxation indicates that lawmakers want “a fair but rigorous review. The citizens of the country deserve that, and I’m confident that it will happen and confident it will show that the IRS carries out its mission the best it can with its resources.”

QUESTIONING THE BOUNDARIES: As the IRS controversy has unfolded, more Christian leaders are asking basic questions about whether the agency has stepped over the constitutional boundaries protecting free expression of religion and freedom of speech.

In the Pierce Creek case, ACLJ attorney Sekulow maintains that the church did not violate the IRS code, in part because no political campaign benefited financially. Sekulow points out that the ads did not tell people whom to vote for, only that voting for Clinton would be a sin.

“I don’t think any church should be regulated by the IRS with regard to what pastors say from the pulpit or in their writings,” says Sekulow. “The IRS has gone way overboard and way outside its authority in this whole area, and they need to get out of it.”

Beyond the facts of any particular case is a debate over whether the IRS code is constitutional. Sekulow believes it is not, and he is not alone.

“The practice of churches and clergy engaging in political rhetoric and activity is something that predates the Constitution,” Hammar says. “The Church at Pierce Creek may have crossed over the line, but it’s a highly questionable line to begin with from a legal perspective.”

While some consider church-state separation the pinnacle of a free society, others hold that unfettered speech is paramount.

“The church should not be muzzled,” Sekulow says. “If a black pastor in Louisiana wants to say, ‘Don’t vote for David Duke,’ I think he has the right to say that and not to worry about tax-exempt status being revoked.”

AU’s Lynn, however, maintains that a ban on partisan politics adopted by Congress in 1954 is both wise and consistent with what the Constitution conveys about the separation of church and state. “It needs to be enforced with greater vigor,” Lynn says. “It’s unfair to have most churches abiding by the law and a few say they’re above the law.”

But how long that 1954 legislation will remain valid is another question. “Congress is looking at this [Pierce Creek] case very carefully,” says Sekulow, adding that if ACLJ’s appeal fails, the case “will go right from the courts of the United States to the halls of Congress.”

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

On the same day that he announced his departure as president of the Christian Coalition, Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) founder and board chair Pat Robertson, along with his 42-year-old son, Tim, struck a megadeal with media baron Rupert Murdoch for the sale of International Family Entertainment (IFE), parent company of the Family Channel.

The 67-year-old Virginia Beach broadcaster will remain active in both organizations in spite of the moves announced on June 11. The cash generated from the sale of IFE is a windfall for CBN, which started the Family Channel and another of Robertson’s Virginia Beach offspring, Regent University. Both organizations owned substantial amounts of IFE stock.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: The Robertson family sold IFE to News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch for $1.9 billion. The deal enables Murdoch to take over the Family Channel’s cable television audience for his subsidiary, Fox Kids Worldwide. Murdoch intends to transform the Family Channel, which is the ninth-largest cable television network in America, into a network of children’s programming that will compete with Time Warner’s Cartoon Network and Viacom’s Nickelodeon.

CBN agreed to sell its more than 3.8 million shares of stock in IFE to Murdoch for $136.1 million. In addition, CBN remains the beneficiary of a trust formed by Robertson and now valued at $109.3 million, which will be transferred to the organization in 2010.

“This transaction will position CBN on firm financial ground for the future,” says Robertson. “At the same time, this transaction will permit the ministry to move forward with our desire to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with billions of people around the globe—an enormously expensive undertaking.”

Under the terms of the sale, Fox Kids is required to continue carrying The 700 Club, which Robertson cohosts, at 10 a.m. Eastern time weekdays. The network also has agreed to keep rebroadcasts on at 10 p.m.

Pat and Tim Robertson, along with Tele-Communications Inc. founder John Malone, formed IFE in 1990 to buy out the Family Channel from CBN after the network’s profitability threatened the ministry’s tax-exempt status. While CBN programming originally had been heavy with Christian shows, The 700 Club wound up as the only overtly Christian show on the Family Channel schedule (CT, Oct. 2, 1995, p. 94).

Currently, evening programs on the Family Channel include The Waltons and Rescue 911. Murdoch’s Fox Network, with programs such as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Married … With Children, and Beverly Hills 90210, is not known for its family fare.

Also benefiting from the deal is Regent University, the graduate school Robertson established in 1977 as CBN University. Having agreed to sell its 4.2 million shares in IFE for $147.5 million, Regent’s total endowment will rise to $276.5 million, making it one of the 100 most highly endowed universities in the country. “It raises us to a new level and assures the longevity of the school,” says provost George Selig. He foresees the school eventually using proceeds from the sale to attract high-profile faculty, to fund educational think tanks, and to expand its international presence.

CHRISTIAN COALITION CHANGES: Robertson has relinquished day-to-day operations of his eight-year-old grassroots political organization, but he has become board chair, a new position. Don Hodel, 62, a secretary of energy and interior in the Reagan administration, succeeded Robertson as president and chief executive officer of the Chesapeake, Virginia-based Christian Coalition on June 16. He is a former board member and executive vice president of Focus on the Family.

Also on June 16, Randy Tate, a 31-year-old, one-term Republican congressional representative from Washington defeated in last fall’s election, succeeded Ralph Reed as the Christian Coalition’s executive director. Reed is starting his own political consulting firm.

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

A month after Focus on the Family President James Dobson blasted plans for a “gender-inclusive” New International Version (NIV) of the Bible, the ministry has withdrawn its sponsorship of a popular children’s Bible.

The Colorado Springs-based Focus announced June 3 that the Adventures in Odyssey Bible, marketed as “the world’s most kid-friendly Bible,” is being discontinued because translators used “inclusive language.”

Most Bibles today render gender-specific terms such as he or men with more accurate terms, such as they and human beings, when translators believe the text warrants it. Such translators believe this use of “inclusive language” reflects the fact that the Bible’s message is addressed to all people. Applying inclusive language to God has been tried in only a few cases, such as the New Testament and Psalms, Inclusive Version (Oxford).

“Upon our realization that the Odyssey Bible contained some unnecessary gender changes, we moved immediately to remove this Bible version from our resources for the family,” Dobson said. Focus spokesperson Paul Hetrick said the ministry had no further comment.

PROFESSOR FORCED OUT:

Meanwhile, a seminary professor who has served as a translator for the existing NIV has lost his job because of the ongoing controversy over inclusive language and Bible translation.

Larry L. Walker, tenured professor of Hebrew and chair of the Old Testament department at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Memphis, has acknowledged he will not return from sabbatical leave. Reliable sources say Walker retired under duress. Faculty and students at Mid-America are predominantly Southern Baptist, although the Southern Baptist Convention does not own the seminary.

B. Gray Allison, president of Mid-America, confirmed Walker’s retirement, saying the professor “has been a very important part of the seminary faculty and is recognized as one of the outstanding Hebrew and Old Testament scholars, not only among Southern Baptists, but among all evangelical Christians.”

Sources told Christianity Today that the seminary board and administration asked Walker to dissociate himself from the NIV’s Committee on Bible Translation (CBT), on which he has served for 30 years. Walker declined to do so. Allison would not comment on whether Walker was under pressure to resign from the CBT or face the loss of his job.

ODYSSEY ADVENTURE:

The Odyssey Bible joins the New International Reader’s Version—a simplified version of the NIV—as the second Bible scheduled to restore gender-specific language after translators had chosen accurate language.

Word Publishing will revise the Odyssey Bible, which has sold an estimated 500,000 copies since its publication in 1994. The Odyssey Bible is based on the International Children’ Bible (ICB), Word’s primary Bible for children. The ICB has sold an estimated 3 million copies since its publication in 1983, according to Byron Williamson, president of Nelson/Word Publishing Group.

Williamson says Word is reviewing whether to revise the ICB itself.

Word will continue selling its existing stock of the Odyssey Bible, but will not print more. “We will be rereleasing the Odyssey Bible in concert with Focus on the Family, probably in 1998,” Williamson says.

Focus will offer refunds on request to parents who bought the Odyssey Bible through its ministry. Word will not offer refunds.

Other than concerns expressed since May, “We have never received a letter expressing any concern about the issue,” Williamson says of the inclusive language in the ICB and the Odyssey Bible.

“We believe it is still a very accurate translation of the Bible, and that the issues floating around are issues of cultural sensitivity,” Williamson says. “We are very sympathetic to Focus’s concerns, because they are in effect the author of the notes in the Odyssey Bible.”

On a related note, Cook Communications Ministries of Colorado Springs announced it will delete quotations from the inclusive New International Reader’s Version within its popular Bible-in-Life Sunday school curriculum.

Amid the inclusive-language controversy, Cook published a supplement explaining that people could use the NIV if they were uncomfortable with the Reader’s Version texts, according to Carol Wilde of Cook.

Cook is also editing material for winter and spring quarters to delete the Reader’s Version verses. Wilde had no estimate of how much those changes cost Cook.

“I’m brokenhearted over it,” Wilde says of the NIV battles. “I see [this controversy] as putting a block between the children and Christ.”

GUIDELINES QUESTIONED:

Several publishers and Bible translators are looking askance at a list of “translation guidelines” issued by a dozen participants in a “Conference on Gender-Related Language in Scripture,” convened by Dobson on May 27 at Focus headquarters in Colorado Springs.

Dobson invited 11 men—four involved in translating or publishing the NIV, and seven critics of inclusive language—to the meeting.

Inclusive-language opponents at the meeting were Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) Executive Director Timothy Bayly, World publisher Joel Belz, CBMW President Wayne Grudem, Focus Executive Vice President Charles Jarvis, CBMW council member John Piper, Westminster Theological Seminary professor Vern Poythress, and Ligonier Ministries chair R. C. Sproul.

The group issued a statement praising the International Bible Society (IBS) for choosing to restore gender-specific language to the Reader’s Version and for offering refunds. “This throws into stark relief our wider concern with the translation of God’s Word among evangelical publishers at large and the necessity within Bible publishing for greater accountability to the church,” the statement said.

The panel’s 13 “Guidelines for Translation of Gender-Related Language in Scripture” include such directives as these: to retain “masculine references to God”; to use man as a designation for the human race or human beings; to make no changes in translation from singular to plural; and to prohibit changing brothers to brothers and sisters,son or sons to child or children, father to parent, or fathers to ancestors.

John Stek, chair of the NIV’s Committee on Bible Translation (CBT) and a retired professor from Calvin Theological Seminary, says the guidelines have not become policy for his committee’s ongoing work. “They have no standing with us,” Stek says. “We will look at them, as we look at all serious suggestions and proposals.”

CBT members Ken Barker and Ron Youngblood attended, but Stek says if Dobson “wanted official representatives of CBT he should have contacted me.” Barker has taught Hebrew and Old Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Capital Bible Seminary. Youngblood is professor of Old Testament at Bethel Theological Seminary, West, in San Diego.

Lars Dunberg, president of IBS, and Bruce Ryskamp, president and chief executive officer of Zondervan Publishing House, also attended the meeting.

Mark Taylor, president and CEO of Tyndale House Publishers in Carol Stream, Illinois, says the panel’s guidelines will not necessarily influence future work on Tyndale’s New Living Translation (NLT), which uses inclusive language in certain circ*mstances.

“I was very disappointed by the statement and disappointed by the list of translation guidelines it included,” Taylor says. “I highly respect some of the people at that meeting, and I’m surprised that they allowed their names to be associated with this statement.”

The translation committee of the NLT convened for its regularly scheduled meeting in June and discussed the guidelines, though no decisions have been announced. “We’re not going to be bullied into making changes,” Taylor says.

Taylor says that Tyndale and other publishers hope to convene a conference that would offer ten scholarly papers, responses, and possibly guidelines.

Mike Maus of the American Bible Society expressed similar skepticism about the Colorado Springs statement, saying it represented a small, ad-hoc group. “This may be a broader question that really needs to be addressed by a broader group of people.”

MORE CHANGES COMING:

Stek says that, contrary to an earlier announcement (CT, June 16, 1997, p. 52), CBT will continue making editorial changes that incorporate into the NIV new archaeological findings and new biblical scholarship. The IBS canceled only those changes that would have involved inclusive language.

“There are no plans for a further revised edition,” IBS announced May 27. But Gene Rubingh, vice president for translations, says that by “revised edition,” IBS means an update with enough changes—roughly 15 percent of the text—to require a new copyright. NIV last acquired a new copyright in 1984.

CBT convenes this month for its annual work meeting, and Stek says he hopes to retain all the members. “I don’t have any resignations on my desk, but I do have some very disappointed members,” Stek says. “There are some members who think that CBT has lost its independence through [the IBS decision].

“If there is any time that the text needs to be guarded by people who know it well and who have worked carefully on it, that time is now,” Stek says.

CBT members disputed World magazine’s repeated implication that an egalitarian or feminist agenda dominated their work.

“The majority would probably understand 1 Timothy 2:12 as prohibiting women from serving as pastors—and that’s where I stand,” says Barker, who serves as the CBT’s secretary.

Stek says, “I don’t bring an egalitarian or complementarian agenda to my work. I simply look at the text in light of contemporary culture.

“I’ve told my students for years: Don’t put a label on yourselves, because it boxes you in and it clouds your judgment.”

INCLUSIVE VERSION STILL AVAILABLE:

IBS is still negotiating with Hodder & Stoughton Publishers regarding the IBS request that Hodder withdraw the inclusive-language NIV now available in England.

There has been little controversy since publication of the NIV Inclusive last year, according to Charles Nettleton, Hodder’s managing director of religious books. “The inclusive language edition has been broadly accepted.”

Nettleton says Hodder has not withdrawn its supplies of the NIV Inclusive. Negotiations are pending and being “conducted in a spirit of complete goodwill on both sides,” Nettleton says.

Hodder sells the NIV Inclusive through such outlets as the Internet Bookshop (www.bookshop.co.uk) beyond the United Kingdom. Stuart Rivett, book sales director for Internet Bookshop, says the service has noticed increased inquiries about the NIV since the IBS decision on May 27.

Stek sees the NIV Inclusive’s continued availability—for now—as helping informed discussion. “It will be at least one avenue for people to handle such a text, to see what it actually says, rather than running with impressions of what demonic content has been inserted into the text.”

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The recent spotlight on black church burnings and racial reconcilation notwithstanding, African-American religious leaders are refocusing on improving relations with one another.

Many of the 5,200 ministry leaders who attended a Hampton (Va.) University gathering in June devoted their efforts at bridge building across the doctrinal chasms between eight historically African-American denominations with a combined membership of 26 million.

“I am concerned that the black church is very fragmented,” said conference president Jesse Battle, who organized the event. “The fragmentation [of denominations] has denied us the ability to have a leader within the black community. We have to forget our individual ambitions and programs and think in terms of the whole.”

“This is the most opportune time in the history of the world,” echoed Bishop Samuel Green of the Church of God in Christ. “We’re headed toward unity in the black church, where all our denominations will eventually come together, forget about our doctrinal differences, and work as one for the benefit of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

While a spirit of unity did mark the week-long conference, the meeting itself suggested that doctrinal differences among denominations will not be resolved easily. Denominations represented were African Methodist Episcopal (AME); African Methodist Episcopal Zion; Christian Methodist Episcopal; Church of God in Christ; National Baptist Convention, American; National Baptist Convention, USA; Pentecostal Assemblies of the World; and Progressive National Baptist Convention.

ECONOMIC REPRESSION? In opening statements, the leaders collectively described an African-American community filled with hopelessness and despair and a church in need of radical realignment.

“If we keep going the way we are going, and keep doing what we are doing, we are headed for crisis,” said Bishop Nathaniel Linsey of the 1.2 million-member AME Zion church. “Our people are legion, and they are crying out for help. God is in need of Moseses to go down to Egypt and liberate his people.”

But debate swirled around what form that liberation should take and around the mission of the church itself. Some leaders, such as Bennett Smith of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, argued that the church’s primary purpose is to be an instrument of economic liberation for African Americans.

Smith urged listeners not to fall into the same trap as New Testament believers who thought Jesus would return during their lifetimes. “We have our people walking around saying he’s soon to come, and we’re preparing to go home to be with the Lord and not being good stewards of our economic development,” he said. “We must use our resources in order to set our people free.” To thunderous applause, Smith advocated removal of African-American money from Caucasian-controlled banks, which he chided for denying loans and mortgages to black customers.

CHURCH LIMITATIONS: Bishop Thomas Weeks of the 1 million-member Pentecostal Assemblies of the World questioned such thinking. “The church only does what the church can do,” Weeks said. “The church can make loans, but the banks do that. The church can build houses, but the builders do that. The church’s primary focus ought to be the saving of souls.”

Reflecting two distinct visions of the mission of the black church, little common ground was established between the traditions more interested in redeeming society and those more interested in redeeming individual souls.

But that is to be expected, according to Roscoe Cooper of the National Baptist Convention USA, the largest black denomination—and fourth largest overall—with 8.2 million members. He emphasized that the black church is no monolith. “Sometimes I think we talk about it as if it were one entity,” Cooper said. “There has never been unity in the sense of uniformity within the black churches.

“The challenge that faces us as African-American Christians is to take seriously the fact that we are not just African, and we are not just American, but that we are African-American Christians,” Cooper said. “And our challenge is to be constantly struggling to discern—from the study of the Scripture, through prayer, through analysis of our cultural situation—what is required of us to be faithful, and to muster up the faith to do what it is to do what the Lord would have us do.”

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It took six months for a rebel alliance to march into Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, ending in May dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s 32-year reign. With Laurent Kabila now in charge of the country—renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo—Christians wonder how long it will take for church and missionary work to resume fully and freely after the looting, evacuations, and killings.

Starting last October from the eastern region bordering Rwanda, Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces swept through the former Zaire, swiftly capturing towns with little serious opposition from Mobutu’s unruly government army. It was an amazing military feat, given a dilapidated road system and great distances in Congo, a country of 45 million people that stretches across 905,000 square miles, an area roughly equivalent to the United States east of the Mississippi River.

As the rebels advanced westward, government soldiers retreated, attacking civilians and pillaging along the way. Western missionaries who did not pull out ahead of the revolution scaled back and evacuated as Kabila’s fighters began to score victories. Local church officials who bravely remained at mission bases often suffered maltreatment from Mobutu’s troops.

ON THE RAMPAGE: Near the end, desperate, greedy soldiers assaulted members of the Communaute Evangelique en Ubangi-Mongala (CEUM), a church with about 114,000 members in Mobutu’s native northwest region.

CEUM’s 872 churches and preaching points are supported by the Evangelical Covenant Church, which began missionary work in the country in 1937. Near CEUM headquarters at Gemena, soldiers put guns in the ears of national church president Luyada Gbuda and demanded that he give them “the dollars that the American missionaries had left,” according to Barbara Johnson, Covenant Church Africa missions director and a missionary nurse who served in Zaire for 23 years. When Gbuda explained no such money existed, they “hit him around the head with their guns,” Johnson said.

The troops stole the church leader’s truck, hit him again, and left. He and other Covenant church leaders fled to their home villages as more soldiers rushed through Gemena.

“We are in Mobutu territory, and we will definitely feel the results of the retreating soldiers who will now have no job, no future, and are going to take everyone else down with them,” Johnson told CT.

In the ensuing days, troops pillaged Evangelical Free Church residences and Wycliffe Bible Translators’ offices in Gemena. Headquarters of the Congolese Free Church, completed last year, sustained heavy damage, and a seminary at Goyongo, jointly run by the Free Church and Covenant Church, was destroyed. Looters peeled off the roofing and followed students into a nearby forest to steal personal goods the seminarians took with them. Renegade soldiers beat the seminary director.

The trials of Covenant and Free Church leaders are not unique in the crisis.

Steve Wolcott of Africa Inland Mission (AIM) reports that a Bible institute professor, A. Alege, died in March after being hacked to death by rebels.

Former soldiers beat Etsea Ang’apoza Kile, president of the AIM-affiliated Evangelical Community in the Center of Africa (CECA) church, and two teachers at a seminary in Bunia after AIM evacuated last December. Walcott says other pastors have been beaten in outlying areas, and at least one pastor in the Bondo area where Norwegian Baptists have worked was killed in January.

In Kinshasa, the capital, the evangelical relief agency World Vision reports that on May 17 armed Mobutu soldiers robbed and threatened country director Daniel Kawata Aji-Pash and his family just before Kabila’s forces arrived.

UNDER KABILA’S RULE: Throughout the conflict, many Protestant and Catholic churches have continued to worship. The country is estimated to be 36 percent Protestant and 42 percent Roman Catholic.

Johnson of the Covenant church reports that 75 percent of the people in territories held by Kabila’s forces have attended church on Sundays. And missionaries that have operated in the eastern part of Congo say rebels under Kabila have, for the most part, been well behaved. Some suggest that new officials may welcome if not encourage new church and missionary activity.

In March, Wolcott and other AIM church and mission leaders met Kabila.

“He was very cordial and invited us to resume our work in the then rebel-held territory,” Wolcott told CT. “He stated that the church has the responsibility for the moral instruction of the population.”

Wolcott says the rebel forces have in general been courteous, and the general population can move about freely without fear of coercion. However, he received reports in April of merchandise and vehicles being taken “for the war effort.”

Local officials are “very favorable to the return of missionaries” and have offered assistance in such matters as granting visas, according to Wolcott. He notes that many CECA schools have been reopened in former rebel-held territory, while medical work continues despite difficulties in obtaining medicines.

CHRISTIANS WARY, OPTIMISTIC: Glenn Kendall of CB International missions says he did not sense any restrictions on Christian activities in a recent trip to Congo. “The (eastern) Kivu area and Goma have had six months to settle down,” Kendall says. “They think it is time for people to cautiously come back.”

CB International, he adds, plans to send about 10 missionaries back to Congo this month to assist, among other things, with medical and pharmaceutical care and the education ministry of 135 schools affiliated with the Association of Baptist Churches of Eastern Zaire.

Bible translation is also continuing, reports Debi Eernisse of Wycliffe Bible Translators’ Eastern Zaire Group. “Through the adversity the church is growing stronger,” she asserts.

Zairian translators and their families faced difficulties in recent months because of their “association with expatriates who had material possessions,” Eernisse says. “Those possessions were sought by the looters,” she says. “We have not heard, nor have we reason to believe, that the churches are being harassed by the new government or their soldiers.” Wycliffe has not set a date for the return of missionaries to the country but believes there to be no problem with the new authorities in resuming mission activities.

Compassion International, which had 11,000 registered foster children in Zaire with 65 partner churches prior to the civil war, has continued child-development activities “pretty much the same as before” in most areas of the country other than Uvira near the border with Burundi, says spokesperson Janice Campbell. Many church partners in that region fled into neighboring Tanzania.

“Obviously, there is a great deal unknown about how the church will be treated by the alliance,” Johnson says. “We don’t have reason, based on early experience in the east, to anticipate mistreatment.”

Peter Ekstrand, Congo field representative for the Covenant church, told ct that calm has returned to the northwest region, and that his mission is planning to conduct a survey trip soon. Johnson says, however, that missionary families are unlikely to be posted to Congo before next summer.

One church source expressed concern about Kabila’s alliance being Tutsi-dominated. The source suggested the possibility of a “Tutsi federation” forming between Kabila and his friendly neighbors: Rwanda, Uganda, and possibly Burundi. It is feared that this grouping, for reasons linked to African traditional religious beliefs and power politics, could become “anti-Christian and anti-missionary.”

Kabila’s rebel movement is dominated by ethnic Tutsis or closely related tribes. He has also been accused of allowing his men to carry out ethnic cleansing in some areas of eastern Congo. Last month, an employee of Save the Children and four Rwandan refugees were killed by armed men in eastern Congo.

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The most extensive study ever conducted on home schooling reveals that the movement has more students than had previously been believed and shows no signs of peaking.

The new report, “Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America,” also indicates that the educational level attained by the parent teaching the child at home makes little difference in the scholastic achievements of the children.

The 103-page report is published by Brian D. Ray, president of the Salem, Oregon-based National Home Education Research Institute. Data were collected on 5,402 pupils. Ray reported that 1.2 million students were educated at home during the 1996-97 school year, up from an estimated one million two years ago (CT, July 17, 1995, p. 50).

“The growth rate appears to be 15 percent per year,” Ray says. “The main motivations for home schooling haven’t changed much.” The movement appears entrenched: 89 percent plan to continue through high school.

Patricia Lines, policy analyst with the U.S. Department of Education, concedes that the movement has grown to roughly 2 percent of 50 million students. But Lines cautions that the study only includes students whose parents volunteered the information—and those students might have tested as well in public schools. Lines also says, “Home schooling is not for everybody, especially parents who have limited social and financial resources.” The median family income for home schoolers is $43,000, according to Ray’s report.

All but 5 percent of the income in home schooling households is earned by fathers, although 16 percent of the mothers are working outside the home—an average of 14 hours per week. Mothers do the teaching 88 percent of the time.

MARKS OF THE MOVEMENT: The study reaffirms beliefs that home schooling is almost exclusively a white, Christian phenomenon. According to the report, 95 percent of those who participate are white and 90 percent are Christian.

Ray found no significant relationship between test scores and the highest formal education level attained by the mother, whether the mother is a certified teacher, the level of family income, or the amount of state regulation.

Students scored at the eighty-seventh percentile on standardized achievement tests. Mothers had an average of 2.7 years of college, with 15 percent of them certified teachers now or in the past.

One reason Ray believes home schoolers score so high is because they receive individual attention. “These parents accept and fulfill their responsibility to personally raise and educate their children,” Ray says. “They do not excessively depend on their villages.”

As for religious affiliation, 23 percent identify themselves as independent fundamental/evangelical (down from 26 percent in 1990), 19 percent as Baptist (up from 18 percent), and 9 percent independent charismatic (down from 14 percent).

Lack of socialization has been a factor in public educators’ arguments against home schooling. But the study shows that home-educated students are involved in outside activities, an average of five per week, including field trips (84 percent), group sports (48 percent), music classes (47 percent), and volunteer work (33 percent).

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Although some called the move “unchristian,” Southern Baptists meeting in Dallas last month approved a full boycott of the Walt Disney Company and all its affiliates, condemning the entertainment conglomerate’s “gay friendly” policies.

While the Disney boycott—a follow-up of earlier Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) criticism of Disney (CT, July 15, 1996, p. 66)—drew headlines, other actions of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination will have a more lasting impact.

Some 12,000 messengers approved resolutions to fight persecution of Christians around the world and against cloning human beings. Six seminary presidents pledged to teach an “inerrant” Bible. And the denomination finalized its “Covenant for a New Century” restructuring plan.

REORGANIZATION IMPLEMENTED: The most radical reorganization of the denomination since its founding in 1845 reduces agencies from 19 to 12 and is expected to save the denomination $40 million during the next five years.

The revamping does away with some familiar names: the Foreign Mission Board becomes the International Mission Board; the Christian Life Commission is now the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

A new North American Mission Board has been created, merging the Home Mission Board, the Radio-Television Commission, and the Brotherhood Commission. The plan abolishes the Education Commission, the Historical Commission, and the Southern Baptist Foundation and redistributes their roles among the remaining agencies.

Meanwhile, Baptists joined the American Family Association, the Assemblies of God, and the National Association of Free-Will Baptist Churches in sanctioning Disney.

But Disney spokesperson Tom Deegan says boycotts have had little effect. He says operating revenues for the media giant increased 35 percent last year.

Proponents of the boycott, including Tom Elliff of Del City, Oklahoma, re-elected to a one-year term as sbc president, believe the denomination’s stance is important. “This is not about bringing Disney down,” Elliff said. “It’s about bringing Southern Baptists up to the standards of God.”

BOYCOTT UNREALISTIC? Despite a 4-to-1 approval rate of the Disney boycott, many messengers called it hypocritical, unrealistic, and counter productive.

“We are straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel,” said Snellville, Georgia, pastor Rick Markham, who expressed skepticism that Baptists would actually carry out a boycott. President Clinton, the nation’s most famous Southern Baptist, said he would not abide by the boycott.

“If you approve this, you will have the moral obligation to go home and cancel ESPN, get rid of the A&E channel, stop watching Lifetime, and never watch ABC’s Good Morning America,” Markham said. “And I’ll have to tell my wife Regis and Kathy Lee are a thing of the past.”

The Disney boycott came a year after Baptists threatened a boycott if the company refused to change its “anti-Christian and anti-family” policies. Disney bought the ABC television and radio networks since last year’s convention.

Disney not only ignored Baptists but flagrantly accelerated its “gay friendly” policies, this year’s resolution stated. Fueling the Baptist ire, ABC aired an Ellen episode in which the title character revealed her lesbianism.

This year’s resolution urged Christians not to patronize Disney and its affiliates and accused the corporation of “increasingly promoting immoral ideologies,” such as hom*osexuality and infidelity.

Baptists objected in particular to policies that allow employee benefits for same-sex partners and the fact that its theme parks welcome hom*osexual groups.

“There is a time we must say ‘enough is enough,’ ” Jacksonville, Florida, pastor John Sullivan, chair of the resolutions committee, said.

DOES JESUS APPROVE? Dawn Bernard, a messenger from Saint Petersburg, Florida, said Baptists should imitate Jesus.

“Jesus didn’t boycott sinners,” she said. “He loved them. He ate with them.”

Former SBC president Jim Henry called the boycott an inappropriate response by a Christian organization.

“This will drive people away, not bring them into the church,” said Henry, who is pastor of the 10,000-member First Baptist Church in Orlando, which has many Disney employees in its membership.

“Will a Southern Baptist boycott change the Disney company?” asked messenger Lisa Kinney of Largo, Florida. “I don’t know. But it will change us. It will affirm to us and the world that we love Jesus more than we love entertainment.”

Disney’s holdings include two theme parks, 530 retail stores, five movie companies, the abc networks, all or part of four cable tv channels, two professional sports teams, a record company, and a general science magazine.

Baptists followed up the Disney boycott with a resolution faulting other major companies for providing health insurance and other benefits to domestic partners of hom*osexual employees.

“Businesses that recognize the moral legitimacy of hom*osexual relationships … are rejecting God’s true revelation regarding the sinfulness of hom*osexual conduct and the unique sanctity of heterosexual marriage,” the resolution declared.

The resolution mentioned IBM, AT&T, Sprint, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Time Warner, Microsoft, and Eastman Kodak.

In the convention’s final sermon, Argentine-born evangelist Luis Palau of Portland, Oregon, told Baptists that reaching out to people with the Christian message is more important than boycotting Disney.

EVANGELIZATION PLANS: Southern Baptists will hold their convention next year in Salt Lake City and are planning an evangelistic blitz of the Mormon-dominated region.

During the Dallas convention, scores of messengers lined up to view a video called The Puzzle of the Mormon Church, which bluntly states Mormons are not Christian.

“We are not offended by their coming here,” Latter-day Saints spokesperson Clayton Newell said. “But it’s always regrettable when they say we aren’t Christian.”

This year’s convention was a dramatic contrast to what happened the last time Baptists met in Dallas, when a record 45,519 messengers attended in 1985. That convention, in which conservatives narrowly won a presidential victory, began the ousting of moderates from power.

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Christa Raab, an Austrian mother of four and a schoolteacher for nearly half her life, has been banned from her classroom. Government officials in Aschach, a village of about 4,000 people west of Vienna, suspended her last year for her association with a new charismatic church. To authorities, Jedidja Church is a sect, and Raab has been accused of being a “fanatic,” scaring children with talk about the Devil.

Raab’s suspension because of her religious affiliation with Jedidja (Hebrew for God’s friend) is one of many indications that freedom of religious practice in Europe is under attack. “Storm clouds are gathering over Europe,” says Stuart McAllister, general secretary of the European Evangelical Alliance in Vienna.

In southern and central Europe, where the majority are either Roman Catholics or Lutherans, the sectarian or cultic label has long been applied to evangelical or charismatic Christians. But McAllister sees signs that Western Europeans are increasingly attracted to new laws restricting religious practice. “There is a strong lobby at work, and it won’t rest until new religion laws have been passed,” he says.

CHRISTIANITY A CULT? In April, the Belgian Parliamentary Commission on Cults issued a 600-page report identifying 189 religious groups as cults. Included were 21 evangelical denominations, such as the Assemblies of God, Evangelical Free Church, and Religious Fellowship of Friends (Quakers). Many Protestant congregations not belonging to the officially recognized United Protestant Church of Belgium are a part of the list.

Likewise, in March the State Secretariat for Cults in Romania issued a letter forbidding issuance of construction permits for any place of worship not recognized by the state. Romania identifies only 16 officially recognized religious groups, but about 30 denominations or other groups are active in the country.

Germany, Austria, and Italy, standard-bearers of the state church system, recently proposed a religion supplement to the Maastricht Treaty, the constitution of the European Union. The wording suggests that churches without a “constitutional” status—including evangelical and charismatic churches—could be discriminated against. Although it is unlikely that the supplement will be passed any time soon, McAllister says Christians must show “vigilant and active” resistance. “We shouldn’t passively allow frontiers to be pushed back,” he says. “We must pray and we must do what we can politically. The European Evangelical Alliance will seriously resist any new religion laws.”

The Rutherford Institute, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, will host its first European religious liberty conference August 2-3 in Paris to discuss growing religious discrimination on the continent.

“Europe, the birthplace of democratic liberties, has forgotten its roots,” declares Rutherford Institute President John W. Whitehead. “The result has been a return to authoritarianism in many countries, and religious people are suffering.”

SCIENTOLOGY PRECEDENT: Last December, the German government established an office to keep Scientologists from holding key public teaching jobs, branding the movement founded by the late American science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard as a money-making scheme that seeks world domination (CT, March 3, 1997, p. 68). And last month the government announced that the Church of Scientology will be under nationwide surveillance, including the possibility of tapped telephones and intercepted mail, for a year.

Norbert Kirsch of Berlin, cofounder of the German Association of Christian Lawyers, believes that constraints on Scientology will result in future laws against Bible-believing Christians.

“A government warning is more than a piece of information,” Kirsch says. “It may result in individuals or groups being banned from society.” Kirsch says the “sect hysteria” is causing even high-level lawyers to produce nonsensical reasoning.

Ralf Abel, a sect commission member, says government authorities are entitled to “warn the public” against sects, even without citing evidence. The mere suspicion that the activities of an organization might “endanger constitutional values” provides a sufficient basis for the issuing of a state warning, according to Abel.

NO UNIFYING CONSPIRACY: Yet McAllister detects no conspiracy targeting Christians. “What we are witnessing is a desperate reaction against the chaos of postmodern Europe.”

The broad spectrum of religious practices tolerated in the United States is unacceptable, McAllister says. “Europeans are afraid of losing control,” he says. “The multitude of religious expressions in today’s Europe confuses the authorities because they can’t control such diversity.”

The arguments for limiting religious freedom have gained weight with threats posed by extreme, even suicidal, sects. “What’s needed is not new religion laws but a much stricter application of existing criminal laws,” McAllister says.

Christa Raab, the suspended Austrian teacher, says she never mentioned the Devil or demons in her class. “For morning devotions, I used praise cassettes and told the children they could speak to Jesus about their needs.” Problems climaxed as the daughter of the school health official showed an interest in Raab’s faith and even testified twice about God answering her prayers. The doctor, a New Age activist, ended up suing Raab and her pastor. The state attorney dismissed the case for lack of evidence, but the suspension remains intact. School authorities claim the teacher’s faith provoked fear and distress in many pupils. Raab, by official order, had to undergo a psychiatric examination.

The Catholic Sect commissioner, traditionally called upon by the Austrian state as an “expert” in all religious matters, publicly stated that the intelligence of Bible teachers at Raab’s church compares with a “four-year-old, on the mature side.”

Gunther Schuster, the lay pastor at Jedidja church—and a full-time public school director himself—has a bleak view of future church-state relations: “The state will define religion, and if you don’t meet with the definition, there’ll be no freedom.”

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Stephen Hawking breathlessly reports in the new edition of A Brief History of Time that the publisher has sold one copy for every 750 men, women, and children on the planet. I finally joined that constellation of readers and came away awed at the vastness and complexity of our universe.

Science teeters between hubris and humility. Hawking’s book shows how much we have learned. Yet just in the last few years astronomers have admitted underestimating the number of galaxies by 50 billion or so (oops!) and missing the age of the universe by around 8 billion years—and, oh yes, there is that embarrassing “dark matter,” which no one has found yet but which may constitute 90 percent of the matter in the universe.

I remember the early Apollo missions, when engineers took pride in the spacecraft’s 5 million parts, all of which had to work together with precision. This, the greatest technological achievement of our species, gave the first real glimpse of our puny place in the universe. As Stephen Hawking describes it, Earth is “a medium-sized planet orbiting around an average star in the outer suburbs of an ordinary spiral galaxy, which is itself only one of about a million million galaxies in the observable universe.”

To the Apollo astronauts, though, that humdrum planet looked just fine. Jim Lovell, reflecting on the scene, said, “It was just another body, really, about four times bigger than the moon. But it held all the hope and all the life and all the things that the crew of Apollo 8 knew and loved. It was the most beautiful thing there was to see in all the heavens.”

Scientists have a hard time imagining how it all happened. As astronomer Chet Raymo puts it, “If, one second after the Big Bang, the ratio of the density of the universe to its expansion rate had differed from its assumed value by only one part in 1015 (that’s 1 followed by 15 zeros), the universe would have either quickly collapsed upon itself or ballooned so rapidly that stars and galaxies could not have condensed from the primal matter.”

For those of us who have trouble counting in billions, Raymo explains, “If all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth were possible universes—that is, universes consistent with the laws of physics as we know them—and only one of those grains of sand were a universe that allowed for the existence of intelligent life, then that one grain of sand is the universe we inhabit.”

Looking at the world through a microscope rather than a telescope, Douglas Hofstadter ponders in amazement the complexity of the dna genetic code:

A natural and fundamental question to ask, on learning of these incredibly intricately interlocking pieces of software and hardware is: “How did they ever get started in the first place?” It is truly a baffling thing. … There are various theories on the origin of life. They all run aground on this most central of all central questions: “How did the Genetic Code, along with the mechanisms for its translation … , originate?”

Both these scientists share Hawking’s religious agnosticism, and yet all three concede that the universe appears to be tuned with inconceivable precision so as to foster intelligent life on this planet. (Scientists call this observation “the anthropic principle.”) Why? That question lies outside the realm of science.

For an answer to the “Why?” question, Christians look to Jesus of Nazareth—who, the New Testament tells us, was present at the moment of creation. In a remarkable scene with his disciples the night of his arrest, Jesus pulled back the curtain, allowing a peek at his life before Bethlehem.

“And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began,” Jesus prayed. He is reminiscing about life before planet Earth, eternity before time. In this lengthy, astonishing prayer (John 17:1-26), he gives the answer to the “Why?” question. From the beginning—before the beginning—God willed to share with other creatures the same love lavished on the Son “before the creation of the world.”

Earth was indeed created with an anthropic principle. God’s grace, claims Paul, “was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time” (2 Tim. 1:9). Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf was “chosen before the creation of the world” (1 Peter 1:20). Similarly, our hope for eternal life was promised “before the beginning of time” (Titus 1:2).

Thus the essentials of theology—God’s love, election, grace, atonement, resurrection—are specifically grounded outside time and creation. Long before Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time and space, long before any notion of a Big Bang origin of the universe, the New Testament writers established these truths as, quite literally, timeless.

Stephen Hawking cites with approval Augustine’s notion that any God must exist outside time. We are confined to a space-time universe that began at a moment of time, but God is not. Our sun, now middle-aged, will burn itself out in 5 billion years. Eventually the universe itself may collapse. Yet from the lips of the Creator we have a promise that we will join him, and see his glory, and share in it for eternity.

The universe is not such a lonely place after all, for God’s love is longer than time.

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