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Mission America, a coalition of 150 parachurch groups and 60 denominations representing more than 40 million people, aims to “pray for and share Christ with every person in America by 2000” through its evangelism initiative Celebrate Jesus 2000.

The outreach, based in Minneapolis, has a budget of $1.2 million financed by donors, foundations, and members. The program encourages churches to collaborate in communitywide evangelism.

Participating churches and ministries are carrying out Celebrate Jesus 2000 in four stages: last year was devoted to prayer; this year is for door-to-door evangelism; next year will feature public events where the gospel is proclaimed; and 2000 will involve follow-up and discipleship of new believers.

Mission America is distributing resource packets to churches that include guidelines on how to present the gospel by telephone and direct mail. Guidelines for initiating evangelism partnerships among local churches are also included. Celebrate Jesus 2000 has been endorsed by the Southern Baptist Convention, Assemblies of God, and the National Association of Evangelicals. Paul Cedar is Mission America chair.

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Because p*rnography is cited as a cause of spouse and child abuse, Wisconsin State Rep. Dean Kaufert thought taxing smut might be a good way to raise up to $1.5 million per year to help its victims.

Legislative colleagues agreed, and Gov. Tommy Thompson signed a law that would add a 5 percent tax to sexual products and services that are "harmful to children." But state officials had no guidelines on how to implement the law.

"We had some difficulty coming up with language that is going to meet the constitutional test in the eyes of the Department of Revenue," says Kaufert, a Republican from Neenah. "It's the first in the nation and we want to do it right."

The law did not cover p*rnographic movies or magazines because of First Amendment issues. It specifically targeted cover charges at strip clubs, but those businesses quickly devised loopholes. Kaufert wanted to include sex toys sold at p*rnographic video outlets, but lingerie dealers convinced lawmakers to back off.

The law was supposed to take effect April 1. On April 30, the Wisconsin Legislature Joint Finance Committee voted 16 to 0 to repeal the p*rn tax, citing difficulty in determining a definition. For now at least, p*rnography remains unfettered as far as state coffers are concerned.

Marvin Munyon of the Wisconsin Family Research Institute doubts that the legislature will resurrect the issue. "It will probably fizzle out because they can't figure out what is p*rnography and what isn't," Munyon says.

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Legislation that would prevent employers from discriminating against workers based on sexual preference has been reintroduced into Congress after sustaining a narrow defeat two years ago. Pro-family groups oppose the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), calling it a threat to religious freedom.

The bill lost in the Senate in September 1996 by a vote of 50 to 49 (CT, Oct. 28, 1996, p. 80). But now hom*osexual activists believe support from moderate Republicans in the Senate makes ENDA’s passage possible. Although the bill has 158 cosponsors in the House, support there remains too shallow to ensure its passage.

Kim Mills of the Human Rights Campaign says, “We need a federal law to make a level playing field,” even though more and more companies are offering “gay-friendly policies.”

“It’s not about civil rights, it’s about crushing dissent,” says Robert Knight of the Family Research Council. He says the most worrisome part of the bill is the religious organization exemption. The current wording exempts religious organizations except for their commercial or for-profit activity. Knight says the wording is too weak to protect churches and Christian businesses from being forced to hire individuals in violation of their beliefs.

Currently, ten states have laws similar to ENDA.

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Pro-life activists Joseph Scheidler, Andrew Scholberg, and Timothy Murphy, found guilty of racketeering in April in connection with their nationwide abortion protests, say the convictions violate their free-speech rights.

“I’m a racketeer because I don’t think cutting babies’ heads off is a good idea,” Scheidler says. “If this goes through, almost anybody who talks to someone or does something that hurts someone’s business, that could be extortion. That’s not America.”

The successful 12-year-old suit, brought by the National Organization for Women (NOW) and two abortion facilities, was the first against the pro-life movement filed under the Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, originally designed to target organized crime.

NOW attorney Sara Love says the First Amendment did not protect the protesters’ activities because they were forcefully “depriving women of their constitutional right and depriving clinics of their right to do business.”

The jury in NOW v. Scheidler awarded the two abortion facilities nearly $86,000 in damages. As a RICO conviction, the damage award will be tripled. Because of the suit’s class-action status, abortion facilities nationwide can seek damages as well. Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, says they will pursue an appeal of the verdict.

Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, originally named as a defendant in the suit but dropped because of a previous settlement with NOW, says he believes the pro-life movement will prevail in the end.

“If Joe Scheidler is a racketeer, then Martin Luther King is a racketeer,” Terry says. “This verdict, if it’s sustained at the Supreme Court, would spell the death of over 200 years of peaceful protest in America.”

Despite the verdict and the potentially behemoth damages, Scheidler has no plans to retreat. “The more they try to stop it, the more they galvanize the movement,” Scheidler says. “Jesus said to go out and teach. We have to take this truth out.”

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A prophet is without honor not only in his own town but equally in his own time. Only in hindsight can we appreciate the accuracy of his prophecies.

This summer we celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of C. S. Lewis, and in hindsight it becomes startlingly clear that this tweedy, pipe-smoking scholar was not only a clever author of children’s tales and a keen apologist, but also a true prophet for our postmodern age. Lewis might seem an unlikely candidate for the role, not being a theologian but an English professor, and what’s more, a convert late in life. What was it that made him such a keen observer of cultural and intellectual trends?

For me, the question has intense personal significance. Twenty-five years ago, my friend Tom Phillips read me “The Great Sin,” a chapter in Lewis’s Mere Christianity dealing with pride. The words pierced the heart of this White House hatchet man, and the book became instrumental in my conversion.

The ministry of Prison Fellowship is likewise indebted to Lewis. His essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1954) anticipated the failure of policies seeking to cure or deter crime. Such theories may appear humanitarian, Lewis argued, but they actually reduce the criminal to an object to be manipulated for social goals.

By contrast, a biblical understanding treats the individual as a moral agent, whose actions deserve either praise or blame. Punishment is not about pragmatic goals but about justice.

Lewis’s Miracles (1947) was likewise prophetic, penned before most Christians were aware of the emerging philosophy of naturalism, the belief that there is a naturalistic explanation for everything in the universe. Lewis demonstrated that naturalism is self-destructing: If nature is all there is, then life is nothing but a cosmic accident. Even our minds—and thoughts—are nothing but “accidental by-products of the movement of atoms.”

But if all thoughts are the result of atoms knocking about in our brains, there is no reason to regard them as trustworthy or true—including the thoughts of the naturalist. Thus naturalism leads to the conclusion that the philosophy itself is not true.

It also undercuts any objective morality, opening a door to tyranny. In The Abolition of Man (1947), Lewis warned that naturalism turns human beings into objects to be controlled, and turns values into “mere natural phenomena”—which can be selected and inculcated into a passive population by powerful Conditioners. He predicted a time when those who want to remold human nature “will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique.” Thus “man’s conquest of nature” in reality means “the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material.”

This prediction was fleshed out in That Hideous Strength, a portentous allegory about an institution called n.i.c.e., formed to carry out an ambitious utopian vision to “improve” humanity (by coercion if necessary). The theme is that the loss of an objective morality paves the way to despotism, for then there is no control over the rulers beyond their own impulses. In Lewis’s words, “The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.”

Why was Lewis so uncannily prophetic? The answer may be somewhat discomfiting to modern evangelicals: One reason is precisely that Lewis was not an evangelical. He was a professor in the academy, with a specialty in medieval literature, which gave him a mental framework shaped by the whole scope of intellectual history and Christian thought. As a result, he was liberated from the narrow confines of the world-view of his own age—which meant he was able to analyze and critique it.

Lewis once wrote that any new book “has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages” (“On the Reading of Old Books”). Because he himself was steeped in that “great body of Christian thought,” he quickly discerned trends that ran counter to it.

But how many of us are familiar with that panorama of Christian ideas “down the ages”? How many know the work of more than a few contemporary writers? How, then, will we stand against the destructive intellectual trends multiplying in our own day?

The problem is not that modern evangelicals are less intelligent than Lewis. As Mark Noll explains in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, the problem is that our sharpest intellects have been channeled into biblical scholarship, exegesis, and hermeneutics. While that is a vital enterprise, we rarely give the same scholarly attention to history, literature, politics, philosophy, economics, or the arts. As a result, we are less aware of culture than we should be, less equipped to critique it, less capable of being a redemptive force in our postmodern society.

Yet, in That Hideous Strength, Lewis encourages us not to lose heart: It is never too late. The forces of “Merlin,” roused from the tomb, will ultimately be victorious. The best way to celebrate Lewis’s one-hundredth anniversary is to be at our posts, as he liked to say—with renewed spirits and with probing and informed minds as well.

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Not I, but ChristTo close the gap between what I am and what God wants of me, I must empty myself and let Jesus come in and take over. I have prayed to understand his agenda for me . …

It is unsettling to pray to be emptied of self; it seems a challenge almost beyond our reach as humans. But if we try, I have learned, God does most of the work. I must simply let myself go in love and trust of the Lord.

—Joseph Cardinal Bernardin in The Gift of Peace

Perspective MattersOne sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

—G. K. Chesterton in The Hammer of God

Adults Under AuthorityAuthority and dictatorship are not the same thing, and all of us need authority; we need the authority of law, … the authority of parents, the authority of teachers. And this doesn’t mean blind obedience: it means … we all need guidance. … [W]e are children in the eyes of God. It’s very important in organised society that we are adults, making free choices, but we should have the humility to recognise that we are in many respects children . …

[W]e had a great party in the Sixties and thereafter over the destruction of authority, and now we’ve got the hangover. … [I]n the Nineties … we know we’ve got something wrong. We’re pessimistic. The Sixties was very silly in many ways, but it was … optimistic. Now we know that we have overthrown authority and we wish we hadn’t, but we don’t quite know how to re-establish it.

—Charles Moore in Third Way

Of Deeds and MotivesThe last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

—T. S. Eliot in Murder in the Cathedral

Praise God AnywayAuthentic praise of God acknowledges what is true about God; it responds to qualities that are “there” and not simply “there for me.” … In other words, God is to be praised because God is God, because of what God is and does, quite apart from what God is and does for me. Anyone can, and should, praise God when the Lord blesses one and keeps one. … Gratitude is indeed often expressed as praise, and rightly. But that does not make praise and gratitude identical. Or does God cease to be praiseworthy when gratitude has fled because the Lord seems to withhold blessing, when the divine face appears to be set against us, and when agony drives out peace?

—Leander E. Keck in theChristian Century (Dec. 16, 1992)

Be Not SilentA silent love is acceptable only from the lower animals. God has given us speech that we should call upon his name. Worship is to religion what fragrance is to the flower.

—Henry Van Dyke in The Upward Path

More Than LuvLove should cast out terror, but not awe. True love must include awe. This is one of the great truths about sex and marriage that our age has tragically forgotten . …

God is love. But love is not love. Love is a fire, storm, earthquake, volcano, lightning and hurricane. Love banged out the Big Bang and endured the hell of the cross . …

Next time you hear “All you need is luv,” think of the captain of the Titanic singing it to his passengers. As for me, I’d rather have a lifeboat.

—Peter Kreeft in New Covenant (July 1993)

In the Image of ManI think it says something that the only form of life that we have created so far is purely destructive. Talk about creating life in our own image.

—Stephen W. Hawking at a computer convention,quoted in World (Aug. 27, 1994)

Birds of a FeatherIf you’re going to care about the fall of the sparrow, you can’t pick and choose who’s going to be the sparrow. It’s everybody.

—Madeleine L’Engle quoted inContext (Jan. 15, 1995)

Live or RotIt may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

—C. S. Lewis, quoted inGood News (May/June 1995)

Navel GazingLook outward. You have been rightly taught Socrates’ dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living. I would add: The too-examined life is not worth living either.

Perhaps previous ages suffered from a lack of self-examination. The Age of Oprah does not. One of the defining features of modernity is self-consciousness: psychological self-consciousness as popularized by Freud; historical self-consciousness as introduced by Hegel and Marx; literary self-consciousness as practiced in the interior, self-referential, self-absorbed world of modern fiction.

—Charles Krauthammer inTime (June 28, 1993)

Fear Fosters ProgressFear is not a bad place to start a spiritual journey. If you know what makes you afraid, you can see more clearly that the way out is through the fear.

—Kathleen Norris in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

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Calvin’s First Catechism: A Commentary, by I. John Hesselink, featuring Ford Lewis Battles’s translation of the 1538 Catechism (Westminster John Knox Press, 224 pp.; $19, hardcover). Reviewed by Michael Horton, associate professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in California.

Why are we here? If God has planned everything, why pray? How do we know God’s will for our lives? What is God like? How can I be sure that I’m forgiven? Hardly academic questions, these form the warp and woof of Christian experience. How one answers them makes all the difference.

Although the ancient church provided manuals of instruction for new believers and children, only in the Reformation was the practice of explicitly “catechizing” the laity restored as part of a program to raise up a new generation of Word-shaped people. Among these catechisms, some became official standards (e.g., Luther’s Large and Small catechisms, the Heidelberg Catechism, and Westminster’s Shorter and Larger Catechisms). Despite the popular impression that such formal statements of doctrinal belief cause division, they have actually bound together diverse church bodies across geographical, historical, linguistic, socioeconomic, and ethnic lines.

Some catechisms, however, did not fare so well, usually because they were replaced. Such is the case with the first catechism of the Genevan reformer, John Calvin (1509-64). Not even rediscovered until 1877, it was republished in Geneva, in Germany, and even in Italy, but no English translation of the Latin text existed until now. Before his death in 1979, the distinguished Calvin translator-scholar, Ford Lewis Battles, agreed to have his English translation bound together with a commentary by the Reformed theologian I. John Hesselink, and the result is in many ways superb. English translations of both the French edition of this first catechism (Fuhrmann, 1949) and of Calvin’s later catechism, which has been in continuous circulation (the so-called Geneva Catechism [French 1541; Latin 1545]), make this joint effort something short of a landmark, but important nonetheless.

First, the catechism itself. Similar to his preface in the Institutes (1535), Calvin’s preface to the catechism announces both pastoral and polemical objectives, instructing children and new believers in the gospel as well as refuting false charges. Friends and family members were being imprisoned, tortured, and even burned for their confidence in the gospel, while Geneva swelled with refugees. These were hardly moments of calm, ivory-tower, academic speculation. And ordinary Christians were willing to give up everything for the beliefs that Calvin here summarizes.

Organized in a topical format that Calvin would later abandon for the more practical question-and-answer approach, this first catechism reads like a select anthology of the Institutes, which was still evolving at this time. Like Luther’s catechisms, it follows the pattern of Law (Ten Commandments) and Gospel (the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments). And, like the catechisms influenced by Calvin (Heidelberg and Westminster), it begins with the claim that all people are created for God; though being preoccupied with the immediate and with our own demands, we engage in idolatry and selfish ambition, failing to attain that true and saving knowledge of God for which we were created.

So how do we know God? Is it by stealing into God’s presence by speculation? “Now since God’s majesty in itself far outstrips the capacity of human understanding and cannot even be comprehended by it at all, it is fitting for us to adore rather than to investigate its loftiness, lest we be utterly overwhelmed by such great splendor.” Professor Hesselink marks Calvin’s contempt for speculation and his insistence that truth was chiefly aimed at the affections, not merely to “flit about the brain.” Thus, it is not by philosophizing but by actually paying attention to God’s works in history, narrated and interpreted by Scripture, that one gains the sort of knowledge that is of eternal value. “This is not something that keeps our minds in suspense with vain and empty speculations, but something that is beneficient for us to know,” says Calvin. And this knowledge has to do chiefly with two things: the depth of our misery and the depth of God’s grace in Christ (which is also the division of the Heidelberg Catechism).

Sections 4-7 contrast the majesty of humanity made in God’s image with the depravity of the fallen race. The will is in bondage to sin, but this does not mean that we sin involuntarily. On the contrary, the direction of our own fallen hearts leads us to rebel and resist God’s will. God’s Law reveals perfect righteousness and makes us aware of the painful fact that we are under its curse, incapable of attaining righteousness. And here Calvin, like Luther, introduces the Law, emphasizing its “first use” (namely, to drive us to Christ).

After briefly treating the Decalogue, he turns to the Gospel: “By Faith We Grasp Christ.” This introduction is followed by a statement on election and predestination. There would be fewer caricatures of Calvin’s theology if he were actually read, and this section (13) of his first catechism offers an excellent as well as typical opportunity. The doctrine’s pastoral importance is central: it emphasizes God’s steadfast grace, so long as the believer does not “seek to penetrate into heaven itself and to fathom what God from eternity decreed for us.” The Scriptures must be sufficient, and we must not avoid their clear teaching on these remarkable truths, but if we have life in Christ, “we have not business investigating anything beyond this concerning God’s eternal plan.” Christ is a sufficient mirror and pledge of our election.

Sections 14 through 16 treat faith and justification in rich terms, and here the clarity of Battles’s translation allows us to see the brilliance of the gospel: “Thus stripped of our own righteousness, we are clad with Christ’s righteousness; unrighteous in our works, we are justified by faith in Christ.” Calvin will pick up this theme again in his treatment of the Creed.

Section 17 concerns the inseparable relation between justification and sanctification, followed by the topics of repentance and regeneration and the connection between faith and works. Sections 20-21 cover the Creed, ending on what may be the most remarkable note in the entire catechism, “What Hope Is.” From the Creed, Calvin turns to the Lord’s Prayer (sections 22-25), giving a great deal of attention to the importance of prayer in the Christian life. Finally, the catechism closes with treatments of the sacraments and the power of the keys (i.e., the Ministry).

Professor Hesselink’s commentary provides rich historical insight, inviting nonspecialists into Calvin’s theological universe. He is less concerned with defending a hero against slanders than with demonstrating how Calvin’s teaching, minus the popular distortions, originates in Scripture and animates faith, hope, and love.

For instance, Hesselink notes the remarkable depth of Calvin’s ecumenical commitment: “In his lifelong quest for the unity of the church his first approach was to share doctrinal statements—quite different from some ecumenical efforts which concentrate more on organizational unity than doctrinal unity.”

A common bad habit, into which Hesselink sometimes falls, is to pit Calvin against the Calvinists, a practice that is (happily) coming under increasing criticism, thanks in no small measure to Richard Muller’s close study of the sources. For instance, Calvin says that we recognize the veracity of God’s Word by the Spirit’s inseparable testimony to it, but also by its evidences (fulfilled prophecy, etc.). Granted, the Westminster divines reverse the order: We recognize Scripture’s veracity by the evidences and the Spirit’s testimony. But the order in which each stated the terms is a slender thread on which to hang so much. Even the doctrine of total depravity is credited to later Calvinism, despite the severe sections 4-6 of this catechism, which Hesselink acknowledges as bleak.

Nevertheless, he offers useful distinctions where misunderstandings of Calvin’s theology thrive. For instance, he reminds us that for Calvin human depravity renders us ignorant of “things heavenly,” but it does not leave us without any wisdom, skill, art, or intelligence in “things earthly.” And there is a very good discussion of Calvin’s view of the will in contrast to determinism, as well as extensive treatment of the “three uses of the Law.”

In the discussion of justification, Hesselink is eager to defend Calvin’s doctrine from the (Roman Catholic) charge that it is a “legal fiction,” that is, a declaration without foundation: “It is clear that for Calvin justification is no mere forensic legal transaction or a formal technicality. It is an experiential reality, one of the greatest gifts of the gospel.” But Hesselink’s language here could give rise to confusion. While salvation in the broader sense (encompassing sanctification and glorification) is more than a “forensic legal transaction,” justification is not. In fact, Calvin is quite clear about limiting justification to “the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness” (Inst. 3.11.2). For Calvin, as for the other Reformers, although justification is inseparable from regeneration and sanctification, it is to be distinguished from these by its exclusively forensic character.

The author rightly stresses that Calvin’s doctrine of God is dominated by the notions of “gratuitous mercy,” goodness, love, and “fatherly tenderness.” This was a point that B.B. Warfield emphasized at the turn of the century against critics who claim that the notion of sovereignty is Calvin’s all-consuming motif. Such reductionism appears not only among critics, but also among some recent versions of Calvinism that lack the Reformer’s balance. Hesselink provides ample support for the centrality of God’s “fatherhood” in Calvin from recent studies.

There is also a superbly concise discussion of Calvin’s understanding of the Atonement, especially in relation to Anselm and Aulen’s Christus Victor motif, underscoring Calvin’s distinctive contributions to our understanding of this axis of Christian faith and practice. As God the Redeemer is known only in Christ, so every Christian truth is related somehow to the person and work of Christ. Neither the Word nor the sacraments gives us anything beyond Christ and his benefits. Baptism is “like a sealed document to confirm to us that all our sins are so abolished, remitted, and effaced that they can never come to his sight, be recalled, or charged against us” (Inst. 4.15.1).

And because this knowledge or “good news” is entrusted especially to ministers, Calvin has a high doctrine of the visible church. Hesselink emphasizes this with good reason, especially since American Protestantism seems to have such a low estimate of the visible church and its ministry.

One of the most fruitful contributions is Hesselink’s fresh evaluation of Warfield’s description of Calvin as “theologian of the Holy Spirit.” Hesselink observes that Calvin offers us no novel doctrine of the Holy Spirit but gives more attention to the Holy Spirit’s ministry of linking believers to Christ. Thus, union with Christ, faith and regeneration, as well as the sacraments become occasions for elaborating on the absolute necessity of the Holy Spirit’s work. Against those who would either confuse effectual grace with water, bread, and wine or separate it from these physical elements, Calvin emphasized the Holy Spirit’s role in uniting the sign to the thing signified. This had immense importance in the Eucharistic controversy. Poised against Zwingli’s symbolism and the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity, Calvin insisted that in the Supper believers receive nothing less than the body and blood of Christ, and yet not by the ascended Savior’s physical presence at the altar, but by the union with Christ in heaven which is effected by the Holy Spirit.

Professor Hesselink has fulfilled his goal of not only making accessible Battles’s English translation of Calvin’s first catechism but also providing a reliable introductory summary of the Reformer’s thought. And he is right when he says that Calvin “hated ‘frigid speculation,’ and always tried to show the relevance and ‘usefulness’ of a doctrine.” This is even more observable in Calvin’s final catechism with its question-and-answer form, especially when he occasionally asks, “But do you derive any benefit from this?” (Geneva Catechism). It is this spirit that pervades other Reformed symbols, as in the Heidelberg Catechism’s first question, “What is your only comfort in life and death?” Such examples should dispell the widespread fear that doctrine and life, faith and practice, theology and relevance are sibling rivals.

Hesselink’s pastoral motivations in preparing this work compare favorably with those of Calvin himself in preparing his first catechism. This commentary was not written for the Calvin scholar, nor does it offer any surprises for specialists. Hesselink cites the translator of the French edition: “The reader will find, moreover, that the thought of this Instruction is clear and definite, qualities sadly needed in current Protestantism, so foggy and cold in comparison with that faith which was then an illumination of the mind and a warming of the heart.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Norma Erickson PolingScottsdale, Arizona

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are those wings?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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