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In February 1994, CT's Philip Yancey and David Neff joined President Bill Clinton and a host of dignitaries in listening to a bracing moral lecture from the late Mother Teresa. Her passion for truth trumped any concern she might have had for the feelings of the powerful gathered in the Washington Hilton ballroom. Later that same day, Neff and Yancey interviewed the President in the Oval Office and the presidential limousine. In writing up that interview (CT, Apr. 25, 1994, p. 24), Yancey contrasted Mother Teresa's bold loyalty to truth with the President's perennial penchant for taking his cues from the crowd.

That interview in the limo was a metaphorical moment: as Neff and Yancey questioned him about his views on abortion, a distracted President scanned the sidewalks, waving to people. He seemed to need constant affirmation, and the likelihood was low that he would deal with Mother Teresa's bracing slap with the hand of righteousness.

In 1994 we saw a politician eager to give the people what they want. On August 17 of this year we saw the same thing: the President's polls showed that the people would forgive him for having sex with an intern, but that they favored impeachment for perjury. So the President gave the people what he thought they wanted—so he could get what he wanted. In a televised nonapology, the President owned up to the "inappropriate relationship" with Monica Lewinsky, but hid behind weasel words on the issue of perjury.

The President was wrong. When he offered the nation his grudging statement of regret and then proceeded to blame others for his troubles, he shed his last shred of moral authority. That moral authority had been based in part on his famous compassion. But that Clintonian compassion was hollow: having led his friends, staff, family, and supporters into lying for him, it was clear he had no feelings for anyone but Bill. We learned that he'd been operating several commandments short of a decalogue.

The prodigal president

The week the President "apologized" was also the week our editorial staff was putting the final touches on a series of essays on the parable of the Prodigal Son, which will appear in our next issue. It was profoundly disturbing to meditate on that wonderful parable of radical grace while hearing the President's attempt to excuse his stonewalling and his misleading of his wife, daughter, friends, and nation.

The President was no prodigal, limping home, hoping for some minimal acceptance as a servant. He was still in the far country, hoping somehow to make it on his own.

The parable of the Prodigal Son, like the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin also found in Luke 15, is about Jesus' joy in searching out sinners. The shepherd finds the lost sheep, the housewife finds the lost coin, the Father declares his son once lost but now found. But there is a huge difference between being found and being cornered. That difference, though, is in large part what the lost will make of their being discovered. Will they, as Kenneth Bailey writes in our next issue, "accept to be found"? (For that is the notion of repentance in these parables.) Or will they find in their moment of discovery that they are cornered?

On August 17, Bill Clinton acted like he was cornered. There was no mea in his mea culpa. He no sooner acknowledged an "inappropriate" sexual relationship with a female intern less than half his age, than he started blaming those who were doing their duty in pursuing the truth and upholding the law. Even his subsequent attempts at apology—to his cabinet, to party loyalists, to Democratic members of Congress—looked more like sandbagging operations to shore up crumbling support than like the fruit of personal reflection. For Bill Clinton, there was no openness to being found.

And the American people were not like the elder brother, refusing to forgive or to celebrate. Indeed, we are often eager to forgive. One of the fundamental religious narratives of Western civilization is repentance and restoration. This storyline undergirded the willingness of Jimmy Swaggart's followers to accept his weeping confession and restore him to their affections. Swaggart's sin, said Garry Wills in his book Under God, did not disillusion his followers but confirmed their belief that all are sinners, and his confession was the necessary next act in the drama of restoration. What amazes us is that though Clinton comes from a conservative Christian background, he doesn't seem to understand the fundamentals of remorse and repentance required to restore relations.

If, as some observers have suggested, Clinton's life bears the marks of addiction, this lack of remorse is understandable, since addictive personalities are skilled at denial and often refuse to acknowledge their problem even when cornered and confronted.

Trust busters

The President's failure to tell the truth—even when cornered—rips at the fabric of the nation. This is not a private affair. For above all, social intercourse is built on a presumption of trust: trust that the milk your grocer sells you is wholesome and pure; trust that the money you put in your bank can be taken out of the bank; trust that your babysitter, firefighters, clergy, and ambulance drivers will all do their best. And while politicians are notorious for breaking campaign promises, while in office they have a fundamental obligation to uphold our trust in them and to live by the law.

It is legitimate to debate whether Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit should have been allowed to go forward against a sitting President; it is reasonable to discuss whether Ken Starr's Whitewater inquiry should have been delayed and whether all the avenues he pursued were part of his mandate. But whether or not the President's legal problems should have been put on hold, unsavory dealings and immoral acts by the President and those close to him have rendered this administration morally unable to lead. Surely those close to him, who believed his denials and risked their own credibility for him, will have to work hard to trust him again. The rest of us may have lost less individually, but the public perception that the Establishment cannot be trusted, increasing ever since Watergate, has been solidly reinforced.

Bill Clinton missed a truly historic moment. August 17 could have been a great opportunity for national healing. A straightforward admission, with some evidence of contrition, would have brought openness and resolution. But while he had the nation's attention, he let his anger at Ken Starr get in the way, and he fumbled.

Unsavory dealings and immoral acts by the President and those close to him have rendered this administration morally unable to lead.

The President is no Prodigal Son, limping home toward reconciliation. But he is limping, and he will have more difficulty than any other lame duck administration commanding the respect and attention of the American people.

No doubt Bill Clinton has been counting on something other than his apology to carry him through the next two years. A booming economy has long propped up his popularity, and we are sure he did not foresee the precipitous stock market "correction" of late August. A big-stick foreign policy has also been a classic ploy to boost presidential ratings. But his attack on reputed terrorist sites in Sudan and Afghanistan left many with questions about timing and appropriateness. Did he minimize the extent of his apology in the knowledge that in a few days he would be diverting attention to Osama bin Laden?

Conservatives who have been combating religious persecution abroad were particularly vexed by the attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory. For several years, the administration has been minimizing the abundantly clear evidence of officially encouraged enslavement and crucifixion of Christians in that country's southern region. Fearing the disruption of trade relationships, the administration had been unwilling to make the Sudan into the international pariah it should be. But now, on the slimmest hint that precursors of chemical weapons were being produced there, they fired missiles that turned the Sudan into a martyr.

Can we put it behind us?

Amidst the widespread dissatisfaction with the President's apology and the calls for his resignation, some of the nation's most prominent religious leaders issued a pastoral letter entitled "An Appeal for Healing." Signed by the National Council of Churches' Joan Brown Campbell and Andrew Young, among others, the August 27 document pointed to our common sinfulness and the President's cursory "It was wrong" statement, and called us back to the business of government. "It is time once again to be led by our President. We need our country back," it said.

While the need for national healing cannot be gainsaid, this document tried to rush a necessarily slow process. Just as no one recovers from a divorce or a death in the family in six months, so no country can bounce back from presidential betrayal in ten days.

How much wiser was the Christian Century's Jim Wall, who spotted unfinished business. The simple "It was wrong" was not enough for Wall, who wrote that "a confession does not argue; it admits wrongdoing in a spirit of honest contrition." Wall also displayed a pastoral concern for Monica Lewinsky and her family, to whom, he said "the president owes … a public apology and request for forgiveness." The issue is not whether she was a predator, Wall said, but the President's abuse of power for personal gratification over an extended period of time.

At this writing, we expect Clinton to hang tough, to remain the comeback kid he is known to be. He has played that role well in the past, and we see little evidence that he will try a fresh approach. As we pass through a period of increasingly intense political struggle, we cannot help thinking what a difference true contrition could have made.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

In its fiftieth anniversary year, the State of Israel has no better friends than American evangelicals. So it seemed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed the Voices United for Israel Conference in Washington, D.C., in April 1998. Most of the 3,000 in attendance were evangelicals, including Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition, Kay Arthur of Precept Ministries, Jane Hanson of Women’s Aglow, and Brandt Gustavson of the National Religious Broadcasters. (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson supported the conference but did not attend.)

On the day before he met with President Bill Clinton, who urged him to trade West Bank land for peace with the Palestinians, Netanyahu told the conference: “We have no greater friends and allies than the people sitting in this room.”

To many observers, the close relationship between Israel and many American evangelicals seems baffling. Many American evangelicals pledge their love for the State of Israel, support its claims against those of the Palestinians, and resist anything that might undercut Israel’s security. But they also target Jews for evangelism and sometimes blame them for the mess the world is in. Israel eagerly accepts evangelicalism’s public support and aggressively courts its leaders. But many Jews bitterly condemn Christian proselytism and do what they can to restrict the activities of missionaries in Israel. Nevertheless, both sides seem to be getting more than enough out of their relationship.

The close tie between evangelicals and Israel is important: It has shaped popular opinion in America and, to some extent, U.S. foreign policy. To understand how it developed, one must know something about how many evangelicals interpret Bible prophecy and what difference their beliefs have made in the world of politics.

Why do evangelicals care so much about Israel? How did this special relationship develop? What has it produced? On the most basic level, evangelicals love Israel because of the Bible. Many evangelicals have vivid memories of sitting in Sunday school rooms, staring at maps of Bible Lands and listening to Bible stories week after week. Through such experiences, evangelicals came to view the Bible’s story as their own and the land of the Bible as a kind of home away from home. Israel is where the Lord Jesus was born, ministered, was crucified, and rose again. Every year thousands of evangelicals take what amounts to a religious pilgrimage to Israel to “walk where Jesus walked” and see for themselves places they have read about their whole lives.

Evangelicals’ view of the Bible gives them a proprietary interest in Israel. It is the Holy Land, the site of God’s mighty deeds. In a way, they think the Promised Land belongs to them as much as it does to Israelis.

Writing the end-times script

But there is much more to the evangelical-Israel connection: Most of those who gathered in Washington to show their support for Israel believe that the Holy Land will be ground zero for events surrounding the second coming of Jesus Christ. Such evangelicals read the Bible as though it were a huge jigsaw puzzle of prophecies, with Israel in the center. They believe that human history is following a predetermined divine script, and they and Israel are simply playing their assigned roles.

These beliefs come out of a complex system of biblical interpretation known as dispensationalism, which is a version of premillennialism (the belief that Christ will return before setting up his millennial kingdom). As the name implies, dispensationalism divides up the Bible and human history into various eras or dispensations, based on how God deals with humanity. Basic to the system was the way it detected two distinct divine plans, one for an “earthly” people (Israel) and the other for a “heavenly” people (the church). According to John Nelson Darby, the Englishman who shaped dispensationalism in the mid-1800s, biblical prophecies for one group do not apply to the other, and God deals with only one group at a time. Thus “rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15) means keeping the two peoples and programs completely separate.

God’s dealings with Israel are the key to the dispensational system. Through a series of covenants with Abraham, Moses, and David, God made Israel his chosen people and promised to establish Messiah on David’s throne forever. In Daniel 7-9, nineeenth-century dispensationalists believed, God spelled out the divine plan: because of its sin, Israel will be subjugated by four successive Gentile powers until, finally, the “times of the Gentiles” are complete. On divine cue, one of the Gentile rulers will issue a decree to rebuild Jerusalem’s fallen walls. Sixty-nine weeks later, Messiah will come to the Holy City but be rejected (“cut off”) by his own people. During the Seventieth Week, an evil ruler will try to destroy the Jews, but at week’s end Messiah will return to defeat him and re-establish David’s throne.

These dispensationalists believed that much of Daniel’s prophecy of the Seventy Weeks was literally fulfilled in the history of Israel and the first coming of Jesus Christ. But there was a major problem: why did Messiah not return to finish his work at the end of the Seventieth Week as predicted? To answer this question, those dispensationalists developed a “postponement theory.” When Jews rejected Jesus, as the prophecy said they would, God unexpectedly postponed Jesus’ return, started putting together a new people, the church, and unplugged the prophetic clock. Thus, for its entire history, the church has existed in a prophetic time warp, what dispensationalists call the “great parenthesis.”

A second question then needed answering: When and how will God resume the prophetic countdown? Dispensationalists answer, “At the pretribulation rapture of the church.” Since God had decided to work with only one group at a time, God must remove the church from the earth before focusing attention again on the Jews. After Jesus comes for his saints in the “Rapture” (1 Thess. 4:13-17), the prophetic clock starts ticking again. Once the church is gone, Daniel’s Seventieth Week (the “great tribulation” of Matt. 24, 2 Thess. 2, and Rev.) can begin, after which Jesus will return with his already raptured saints to defeat Antichrist, the great persecutor, and establish his millennial reign.

During the 1870s, Darby made a number of trips to the United States, where his dispensationalism got mixed reviews. Most evangelicals at the time were either postmillennialists (Christ will return after the world is Christianized) or amillennialists (the millennium should be taken figuratively). In an age of optimism, dispensationalism seemed too pessimistic for most evangelicals, some of whom labeled it a “heresy.”

Despite its minority status among evangelicals initially, dispensationalism gained a respectable following through prophetic conferences, Bible institutes, a plethora of magazines and popular books, and a committed clientele for whom it was the key to unlock biblical truth. Every major American revivalist since D. L. Moody has been a premillennialist of some kind; and Pentecostalism has more or less followed the dispensationalist line since its inception in the early twentieth century. The Scofield Reference Bible, whose notes explained biblical texts from a dispensational perspective, was published in 1909 and became an authoritative and effective recruiter for the movement.

By the twenties, many fundamentalists considered dispensationalism a nonnegotiable part of Christian orthodoxy. Since then, the system has been nurtured through an elaborate network of schools, publishing houses, mission agencies, radio and television programming, and the like. Channel surfers on cable TV know that dispensationalists are master communicators.

Dispensationalism’s sensational influence

Clearly, one does not have to be a dispensationalist to be influenced by one. In his recent study of prophecy belief in modern American culture, historian Paul Boyer found that in addition to the relatively small number of committed “experts” who study Bible prophecy and seem to have everything figured out, there are millions of others who are not so well informed but still believe the Bible contains valuable clues about the future. Such people are susceptible to popularizers who “confidently weave Bible passages into highly imaginative end-time scenarios, or who promulgate particular schemes of prophetic interpretation.”

Even secular people who normally ignore the Bible may, during times of crisis, pay attention to someone who uses the Bible to explain what is going on when the world seems to be falling apart. Boyer concludes that dispensational views about Israel and the course of history have influenced popular opinion far beyond the boundaries of the dispensational movement.

What dispensational beliefs have influenced a significant number of evangelicals and the broader American culture? For a hundred and fifty years, dispensationalists have been predicting something like the following:

1. After the “times of the Gentiles” are finished and the Jews are regathered in the Holy Land, human civilization will begin to unravel. Morals will decline, families will break apart, crime and anarchy will increase. Wars, political and economic unrest, natural disasters, unstoppable epidemics, shifts in weather patterns, and other calamities will increase suffering and despair. Organized Christianity will experience apostasy; religious leaders will abandon historic beliefs and behavioral standards and openly embrace heresy and immorality. Despite massive efforts to stop civilization’s demise, nothing can stop its downward slide.

2. After the rapture of the church, a charismatic leader will gain a following by promising peace and security. This Antichrist heads up a ten-nation confederacy in western Europe. Unaware of Antichrist’s true identity, Israel will sign a treaty with him to guarantee its security, then rebuild its temple in Jerusalem. After three and a half years, Antichrist will break the treaty, declare himself to be God, and persecute all who refuse to worship him and receive his mark on their foreheads. Antichrist will be helped by a False Prophet, a seductive religious leader, who will use miraculous powers and repressive measures to force compliance. For three and a half years, a remnant of God’s people who were converted after the Rapture (Rev. 7:4) will suffer horrible persecution in the Great Tribulation.

3. Despite Antichrist’s power, other nations will rise in opposition. Some time after Antichrist betrays Israel, a northern confederation of nations under Russian control will join with a southern confederacy to launch a devastating double attack against Israel. This move will prompt the intervention of Antichrist’s armies from the west and a 200-million-man army under the “kings of the east.” As armies from east and west converge on Israel, the Russian confederates will try to destroy Israel; but God will intervene to destroy them. With the northern confederacy annihilated, the forces of Antichrist and the “kings of the east” will do battle at Armageddon, a valley northwest of Jerusalem. While the battle rages, Jesus will return, wipe out the surviving armies, subdue Antichrist, and set up his millennial kingdom. Finally, the surviving Jews will accept Jesus as their Messiah. For a thousand years, King Jesus will rule the world from Jerusalem, while Jewish priests perform sacrifices in the restored temple. In the end, God will fulfill all the promises to Israel. The redemptive plan will be complete.

Obviously, the key to this entire prophetic plan is the refounding of Israel as a nation state in Palestine. Without Israel, the whole plan falls apart.

Reading the signs of the times

In the nineteenth century, most British and American evangelicals did not believe in the restoration of the Jews. They believed that God is essentially finished with the Jews as a people. According to this “replacement theology,” because Jews had rejected Jesus, God had rejected them and had transferred divine favor to the church. The church has become the New Israel and has received all the Old Israel’s promises and prophecies.

Dispensationalists (and a few nondispensationalists besides) insisted that God is not yet finished with the Jews, and while there was little movement in that direction, they looked for evidence that Jews were heading back to Palestine. A few Jewish agricultural colonies were established in Palestine in the 1880s and ’90s, but the number of colonists was small. The Zionist movement was organized in the 1890s, yet at first few Jews paid it much mind. Dispensationalists at that time seemed more eager for Jews to move back to Palestine than did Jews themselves.

Most dispensationalists were content to let God handle the details. It was their job to teach the truth and monitor the signs of the times. But not all dispensationalists were bystanders. A small minority wanted to help move things along.

No American dispensationalist beat the drum for a Jewish state more than William E. Blackstone (1841-1935). Born in New York and reared in an evangelical Methodist home, after the Civil War Blackstone settled in Oak Park, Illinois, and established himself as a successful businessman and lay evangelist to the Chicago business community. He became a dispensationalist and a close friend of D. L. Moody. In 1878 he published Jesus Is Coming, which went through three editions, was translated into 42 languages, and was dispensationalism’s first bestseller in America.

In the late 1880s, Blackstone visited new Jewish settlements in the Holy Land and returned to Chicago committed to helping the restoration of the Jews. In 1890 he organized the first conference of Christians and Jews in Chicago and used the occasion to push for a new Jewish state. Most participants, including the Jews, were not interested.

Undeterred, in 1891 Blackstone drew up a petition (or “memorial”) advocating the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In short order, he collected 413 signatures from leading Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the speaker of the House, the mayors of Chicago, New York, and Boston, and business leaders such as Cyrus McCormick, John D. Rockefeller, and J. Pierpont Morgan. Blackstone forwarded the memorial to President Benjamin Harrison, who ignored it, and later he sent others to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

In spite of his ongoing efforts to convert Jews to Christ, he became good friends with Zionist leaders and regularly sent them the results of his prophetic study. In 1918, at a Zionist conference in Philadelphia, organizers hailed Blackstone as a “Father of Zionism”; and in 1956, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his memorial to President Harrison, the citizens of Israel dedicated a forest in his honor.

A few of Blackstone’s Chicago friends took another approach. In 1881, Horatio and Anna Spafford and 16 others established the American Colony in the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem to watch at close hand the restoration of the Jews and the second coming of Jesus. The Spaffordites held all property in common and, at least for a while, made celibacy the house rule.

The Spaffordites went there primarily for prophetic reasons. As one settler put it, “We wanted to see the prophecies fulfilled.” One of the children of the community recounted years later how for a while the group “went every day to the Mount of Olives with tea and cakes, hoping to be the first to offer the Messiah refreshment.” When hundreds of penniless Jews from Yemen arrived in Jerusalem in 1882, the colony considered them part of the Ten Lost Tribes and a clear sign of prophetic fulfillment, so they provided them with food, shelter, and other support. The colony became a popular stopover for visitors to the Holy Land. Blackstone came; so did Moody. The colony prospered economically when over 100 Swedes from Chicago and the old country joined up in 1896.

For over 50 years the colony survived as a religious community, but subsequent generations lost their prophetic zeal and turned the colony into a business concern. By the 1930s, their perspective on life in Palestine had changed. The colony identified more with the needs of the indigenous Arabs and considered Zionism a threat to their legitimate rights.

Blackstone and the American Colony in Jerusalem were exceptions, not the rule. Most dispensationalists were content to study the Bible and scan the horizon for prophetic fulfillments. During the twentieth century, signs of the times multiplied. World War I gave a major boost to their hopes for the future. Dispensationalists used their Bibles to predict with uncanny accuracy the results of the war, including the redrawing of the map of Europe, which was necessary to get ready for their end-times scenario. But nothing brought them more pleasure than the disposition of Palestine.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Palestine was firmly in the grasp of the Ottoman Empire. By 1916, there was widespread speculation, even in the secular press, about the restoration of a Jewish homeland if the Turks could be vanquished. By late 1917, events were rapidly moving along those lines. As British forces fought their way into Palestine from the south, Lord Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, wrote to Lord James Rothschild, a leader in international Zionism: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best efforts to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Five weeks after the Balfour Declaration, the Turks surrendered Jerusalem to British forces, virtually without a fight. This sent shock waves through dispensationalist ranks. Here was the most concrete proof ever that the “times of the Gentiles” were coming to an end. It made little difference to dispensationalists that Jerusalem had passed from one Gentile power to another. The important thing was that the British had declared their intention to establish a Jewish state. If the “times of the Gentiles” were coming to an end, could the restoration of Israel be far behind?

Dispensationalists could barely contain themselves. Arno C. Gaebelein, editor of Our Hope, called the coming restoration of Israel “the sign of all signs.” In 1918, dispensationalists organized two well-attended prophetic conferences in New York and Philadelphia, where the real possibility of establishing a Jewish state got much attention.

The Protocols conspiracy

Despite such rising expectations, it would take 30 more years and another world war to establish a Jewish state. But the events of 1917-18 gave dispensationalists ample assurance that they were reading the Bible correctly; and further evidence was pouring in: Ecclesiastical wars between fundamentalists and modernists confirmed the rise of religious apostasy. The public schools were overrun by evolutionists and secularists. Personal and public morals took a nosedive, with increasing divorce rates, the obscenities of the “new woman,” and the open flouting of Prohibition laws. Dispensationalists watched the rise of fascism in Europe, the spread of communism, and growing anti-Semitism. Civilization was obviously spinning out of control, and for the prophecy pundits, everything fit and was right on schedule.

During the twenties and thirties, a number of leading dispensational teachers promoted right-wing conspiracy theories and even fell prey to Nazi propaganda. Shortly after World War I, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion started making the rounds in Europe and America, purporting to be the secret minutes of a group of Jewish conspirators plotting to take over the world by destroying Christian civilization. When Henry Ford serialized them in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, in the early 1920s, many people believed what they read. From then on, American anti-Semites made The Protocols “exhibit A” in their propaganda campaign.

Not all dispensationalists were fooled by The Protocols, but a number of leading Bible teachers were. In 1921, James M. Gray, president of Moody Bible Institute, called The Protocols “a clinching argument for premillennialism and another sign of the possible nearness of the end of the age.” Arno Gaebelein also believed that the plan outlined in The Protocols was consistent with Bible prophecy. Well known as an evangelist to Jews, Gaebelein obviously loved some Jews more than others. He liked Orthodox Jews because they still expected the coming of Messiah, read Bible prophecies with expectancy, and honored their traditions. But he had no use for Reform or secular Jews, whom he considered apostates capable of anything. Though he could not be sure, Gaebelein thought that The Protocols were “from the pen of apostate Jews” who were responsible for Russian Bolshevism, the illegal liquor traffic in the U.S., and the general decline in morals. “There is nothing so vile on earth as an apostate Jew who denies God and His Word.”

Most dispensationalists paid little attention to The Protocols until Gerald Winrod gave them a new lease on life. In 1933, Winrod, founder of the Defenders of the Christian Faith in Wichita, Kansas, published an elaborate expose to show that Jews were in charge of the world’s banking system and responsible for World War I, the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and just about everything else.

In 1934, William Bell Riley, who presided over a fundamentalist empire in the upper Midwest, published The Protocols and Communism to show that the same conspiracy that turned Russia communist was at work in Roosevelt’s New Deal. “Today in our land many of the biggest trusts, banks, and manufacturing interests are controlled by Jews. … Most of our department stores they own. … The motion pictures, the most vicious of all immoral, educational and communistic influences, is their creation.” Riley preached such views regularly from his pulpit at the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, which some Jewish leaders considered a major center of anti-Semitism.

Gray, Winrod, Gaebelein, and Riley strenuously denied that they were anti-Semites. They were simply explaining events in light of biblical prophecy. But most dispensationalists quickly figured out that using such arguments put them in very bad company. By the thirties, The Protocols were identified with the peddlers of virulent anti-Semitism, which dispensationalists said was a horrible sin against God.

Eventually The Protocols split the dispensational movement. Jewish-Christian believers objected to their use, arguing that it was not enough to distinguish between good Jews and bad: when people believed conspiracy theories, all Jews suffered, even Christian ones. Others concluded that some of their colleagues had been duped by Nazi propaganda. Harry Ironside, pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, was grieved “to find that the Protocols are being used not only by godless Gentiles, but even by some fundamentalist Christians to stir up suspicion and hatred against the Jewish people as a whole.”

In 1938, Keith Brooks, a former Winrod associate, founded the American Prophetic League in California to put as much distance as possible between dispensationalism and Nazi anti-Semitism. The next year Brooks published a “Manifesto to the Jews,” signed by 60 leading dispensationalists, which condemned the spread of pro-Nazi propaganda under the guise of biblical prophecy and disavowed further use of The Protocols. Three years later, Brooks was still trying to get fellow prophecy teachers to “clear the church at large from the charge laid against it by unbelievers, that it had been a tool of Hitler and the Jew-baiters.” Before his death in 1935, Gray swore off ever using The Protocols again; but Winrod and Riley never backed down. Some time after the “Manifesto” appeared, Gaebelein tried to get his name added to the list of signers. The fact that he never told his own constituency and continued to sell Conflict of the Ages until he died in 1945 made the gesture disingenuous.

Suffering with a purpose

Dispensationalism had a dark side that grew out of its beliefs about the Jews’ complex role in prophecy. Jews are God’s chosen people and heirs to all the prophetic promises; but present Jews are under the power of Satan and contributing to the decline of the present age. The glory of Israel is future.

It is no surprise that dispensationalists received news of the Holocaust with a combination of horror, resignation, and hope. They were among the first to warn the world of the coming catastrophe. In 1930, Gaebelein told his readers about Hitler and what might happen to Jews if he ever got control of Germany; and by the late thirties, premillennialist leaders had figured out what was going on in places like Buchenwald long before most people realized what the Nazis were capable of.

While dispensationalists condemned persecution of the Jews, they believed such things were inevitable and were happening for a reason. Just like Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians centuries before, Hitler and the Nazis were God’s instruments of judgment. God was using them to increase the Jews’ desire for a homeland of their own in Palestine. As Harry Rimmer observed, “By driving the preserved people back into the preserved land, Hitler, who does not believe the Bible … , is helping to fulfill its most outstanding prophecy.” Needless to say, once their awful work was done, God would judge the Nazis just as he judged the Babylonians.

Sometimes dispensationalists took comfort in their belief that persecution made Jews more susceptible to the gospel. Moody Bible Institute president Will Houghton claimed that Jewish youth in Warsaw turned to Christ en masse in the summer of 1939, immediately before the Nazi invasion. “Perhaps that is the reason the Devil saw to it that Warsaw was wrecked and the Jews scattered.”

Later the same year dispensational leaders called for an international day of prayer for the Jews. Interestingly, the organizers did not advise people to pray for the persecutions to stop, only that Jews might turn to Christ in their despair. The best thing people could do for Jews under the circ*mstances was send them more New Testaments and missionaries.

The State of Israel

As bad as things got, dispensationalists knew that the Nazis would never annihilate the Jewish people. After all, God’s entire prophetic plan hinges on getting a Jewish remnant back to Palestine to establish their own state in preparation for Armageddon and the Second Coming. Prophetically speaking, the most crucial point was not that millions were dying, but that some would survive.

In the thirties and forties, dispensationalists thought that the formation of a Jewish state was imminent. But the British were not so sure. For obvious reasons, the Palestinians, who greatly outnumbered Jews in the Holy Land, disliked the Balfour Declaration and mounted a massive resistance campaign. They went on strike, rioted, and occasionally committed acts of terrorism against the British and the Jewish population. The British did what they could to stop the protests, including restricting Jewish immigration and suggesting in the spirit of compromise that the Holy Land be partitioned into both Arab and Jewish states. But nothing worked. In 1939 the British issued a white paper that essentially abandoned the Balfour Declaration.

By the end of the war, not much had changed, except the Jews were now well armed and ready to force the issue of statehood, sometimes through their own brand of terrorism. Looking desperately for a way out, the British appealed to the newly organized United Nations. In August 1947, the UN Special Committee on Palestine also recommended that the area be partitioned into Arab and Jewish states; but Arabs refused to relinquish their land, so the UN abandoned the idea. By the spring of 1948 it was obvious to everybody that a political solution was not possible.

The British finally announced plans to withdraw their forces from the region on May 14, 1948. On that day the Jewish National Council declared statehood; and Arab armies invaded. Almost immediately, the U.S. recognized the new state. The fighting was fierce. By November the better-trained Israeli troops had prevailed, and a cease-fire was called. In May 1949 Israel was admitted to the UN.

Dispensationalists were ecstatic. This was the “sign of all signs.” Louis Talbot of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles declared, “I consider it the greatest event, from a prophetic standpoint, that has taken place within the last one hundred years, perhaps even since 70 A.D. [sic], when Jerusalem was destroyed.”

In the flush of prophetic fulfillment, most evangelicals showed little or no concern for Palestinian rights—which was ironic since there have always been more Arab Christians in the Middle East than Jewish ones. During the thirties and forties, a few evangelicals raised questions of justice, self-determination, and fair play for Arabs. After all, Palestinians had been there for centuries, much longer than the United States had been a nation. But most evangelicals believed that God’s prophetic purposes were more important than such local concerns. Their attitude seemed to be, “This is the fulfillment of prophecy; the Palestinians will just have to get used to it.”

Many evangelicals saw the establishment of an Israeli state as the beginning of the end. But there were unresolved problems: The new Israel occupied only a fraction of the land it held in Bible times. Therefore, dispensationalists were eager to see Israel expand its territory. In 1956, with French and English support, Israel attacked Egypt: the Israelis wanted the Sinai; their European allies wanted the Suez Canal. The U.S. government opposed the action. Most dispensationalists objected to the U.S. position because they considered it anti-Israel. For dispensationalists, not to support Israel was to align oneself against the purposes of God.

Evangelicals who thought this way were elated by the Six-Day War of June 1967. Fearing an imminent attack from Soviet-supplied Egyptian and Syrian forces, Israel struck first. In less than a week, the Israelis defeated the Arab coalition and occupied the Sinai peninsula, territory west of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. Now the modern State of Israel looked more like the “Bible Lands” maps on the walls of Sunday school rooms. The most important result of the Six-Day War was that Israel controlled all of Jerusalem. Nelson Bell wrote in Christianity Today, “That for the first time in more than 2,000 years Jerusalem is now completely in the hands of the Jews gives a student of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and validity of the Bible” (CT, July 21, 1967, p. 28). Here was an obvious fulfillment of Luke 21:24: “Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (NRSV).

For most evangelicals, the war for Jewish statehood and the Six-Day War were nothing short of miraculous. News reports on the wars of 1948 and 1967 read like excerpts from Exodus and Joshua. How could Bible believers complain or question what was happening? One did not have to be a dispensationalist to see that God was obviously in control and vitally concerned with Israel. After 1967, many people who had not given it much thought before were willing to consider Israel’s prophetic significance.

The late great planet Earth

The 1970s brought a major change in the evangelical-Israel relationship. The Israelis began to understand the importance of the American evangelical community. According to Paul Boyer, “As liberal Protestant support eroded, Israel played its fundamentalist card. Privately ridiculing premillennialist readings of prophecy … , they recognized an important political bloc and dealt with it accordingly.” On the American side, evangelicals realized that they needed to become more hands-on in their support of the Jewish state due to the increasing pressure on Israel to make peace with its neighbors by giving up occupied territory. Often this support turned into strong political advocacy, with right-wing political connections.

An intense courtship began. In 1971 Carl Henry, former editor of Christianity Today, announced a prophecy conference in Jerusalem. Fifteen hundred delegates from 32 nations showed up. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion greeted the delegates, and the Israeli government provided the meeting hall free of charge. That started a flood of favored treatment of American evangelicals from the Israeli government. The airport in Tel Aviv was quickly overrun by evangelical tour groups.

Entourages led by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, or Hal Lindsey were treated to briefings by Israeli cabinet officers, such as Defense Minister Moshe Arens or Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Every televangelist worth his Nielsen Ratings scheduled his own tour; and the Israeli Ministry of Tourism brought evangelical pastors to Israel at little or no expense so that they could return later with their own tour groups. In January 1998, Israel brought at its own expense a large contingent of American evangelical seminary presidents and deans to the Holy Land.

The more this relationship developed, the more blatantly political evangelical support for Israel became. Hal Lindsey is a perfect case in point. In 1970 he published what became the best-selling book of the decade, The Late Great Planet Earth, which introduced dispensationalism to the widest audience ever. Lindsey jazzed up the standard dispensational scenario by showing its connection to current events. The Antichrist’s revived Roman Empire was the European Common Market. The northern confederacy was the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The southern confederacy was an Arab-African coalition headed by Egypt. The kings of the east were the Chinese Communists. He translated “fire and brimstone” into nuclear explosions and showed the chaos of the sixties as signs of the times. He predicted that before Antichrist is revealed and end-times events accelerate, the United States will decline into a second-rate power, done in by materialism, immorality, addiction to drugs, and false religion—or possibly destroyed by a surprise nuclear attack.

It was scary stuff, and Lindsey said exactly what he wanted his readers to do about it: accept Jesus as Lord and Savior and escape the wrath to come. For all its prophetic razzle-dazzle, The Late Great Planet Earth was essentially an evangelistic exercise.

When Lindsey took another look at world conditions ten years later, his perspective had changed considerably. Though still interested in evangelism, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon contained a full-blown political agenda. He maintained his prediction that “the U.S. must fade from its place of leadership for the west and its former supreme superpower status,” but now he believed that if American Christians acted quickly, it might not happen until after the Rapture. His suggestions for slowing America’s downward slide sounded like a page from the political Right’s playbook. He blamed America’s ills on a group of conspirators (the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and other political liberals) who had dismantled the military and undercut free enterprise. ” … I believe that the Bible supports building a powerful military force. And the Bible is telling the U.S. to become strong again.” “We need to clean house in Washington, and elect a Congress and a President who believe in the capitalist system.” Only then could America give Israel the help it needed.

The politics of loving Israel

By the time Lindsey wrote The 1980s, conservative American evangelicals were finding their political voice. Concerned about what was happening to their country, they formed groups like the Moral Majority and the Religious Roundtable to help elect Ronald Reagan President in 1980. For the first time ever, premillennialists were becoming political insiders, and they liked it. In The 1980s Lindsey reported that the success of The Late Great Planet Earth had opened many doors for him. He had been invited to speak about Bible prophecy to Jamaican government officials, military planners at the American Air War College and the Pentagon, and to Israeli government officials.

It was becoming obvious to everybody that believing in Bible prophecy could have profound political consequences. Shortly after the Six-Day War, evangelicals organized Christians Concerned for Israel, which later changed its name to the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel. The NCLCI’s goal was to “educate the American public, and especially the Christians, in the political and religious significance of the close relationship between the United States and Israel.” The NCLCI opposed any attempt to internationalize Jerusalem or trade West Bank land for peace. It defended Israel’s invasion of Lebanon by putting on a pro-Israel rally at the White House and running a large ad in the New York Times.

No Israeli prime minister since Menachem Begin would think of making a trip to the United States without checking in with leaders of the New Christian Right in both public and private meetings. In April 1998, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to a National Unity Coalition for Israel gathering, which included Kay Arthur of Precept Ministries, the 700 Club‘s Terry Meeuwsen, Paige Patterson (now president of the Southern Baptist Convention), columnist Cal Thomas, and a host of politicians such as Senators Trent Lott and Sam Brownbach and Representatives Dick Armey, Dick Gephardt, and Tom DeLay. Jerry Falwell was there, too, and gave a speech against the internationalization of Jerusalem.

Falwell is a major player in the evangelical-Israel connection. When Netanyahu visited the United States in January 1998, Falwell helped arrange a meeting between the prime minister and a number of other evangelical leaders, including John Hagee and Southern Baptists Morris Chapman and Richard Land. Falwell and the others pledged to mobilize the evangelical community against the Clinton administration’s pressure on Israel to give up more land to the Palestinians. “There are about 200,000 evangelical pastors in America, and we’re asking them all through e-mail, faxes, letters, telephone, to go into their pulpits and use their influence in support of the state of Israel and the prime minister.”

Pat Robertson likewise uses his vast connections and his Christian Broadcasting Network to promote Israel. He regularly features news stories about the Holy Land on his 700 Club and invites Israeli officials to appear. During a January 1998 interview with Netanyahu, Robertson asked him, “What would you like our audience to do?” He replied, “I think they are already doing it … , letters to the editor, communications with representatives … to support Israel.”

The pro-Israel network

Examples of this kind of public advocacy by evangelical leaders are endless. But the real story in the last 20 years is the founding of scores of small, grassroots, pro-Israel organizations that rarely get into the headlines. They exist to educate and mobilize their local evangelical community to support Israel in the current crisis.

Some have rather specialized missions. Many help Israel by teaching Christians about the Jewish roots of their own faith. The Restoration Foundation of Atlanta puts on seminars, colloquia, and retreats to promote “the restoration of all believers to their rightful heritage in the Judaism of the first century church” and love for Israel and its people. The Arkansas Institute of Holy Land Studies in Sherwood, Arkansas, advertises itself as a “specialty college” and offers unaccredited bachelor’s and master’s degrees in “Middle East History.”

Some of these groups promote Messianic Judaism as the truest form of Christianity. Hebraic Heritage Ministries of Houston wants Christians to worship on the Sabbath (Sunday worship is a product of paganism) and observe the Jewish festivals. First Fruits of Zion Ministries is based in Jerusalem but tries to get American Christians to live like Jews: to keep kosher, study Hebrew, keep the Sabbath and the festivals, and learn messianic Jewish dances (see CT, Sept. 7, 1998, p. 62).

Some of the pro-Israel evangelical groups are more humanitarian than educational. The Tulsa-based Bridges for Peace is a charitable organization working in Israel. Its “Operation Ezra” provides food, blankets, kitchen and school supplies, home-repair items, and the like to new immigrants and others in need. It claims its food bank is the only one currently operating in Israel. Its pitch for support says, “Don’t just read about prophecy when you can be part of it!”

One of the most innovative humanitarian organizations is Christian Friends for Israeli Communities, which was founded in 1995 by Ted Beckett, a commercial real estate developer from Colorado Springs. He organized the CFIC to provide “solidarity, comfort, and aid” to Jewish settlements in Judea, Samaria, and the regions of Gaza by linking them with evangelical congregations in the United States.

At present 35 congregations are part of the program. Beckett’s goal is to provide an evangelical partner for every Jewish settlement that wants one, which he estimates to be 100 to 110 out of 150 settlements. Each congregation is taught how to “link” with its assigned community by identifying pen pals, making e-mail connections, helping with fundraising, sending books or other supplies. Churches are also expected to promote awareness of Israel in their own communities. Beckett knows that his work is also political because, he says, God is sending Jesus back to Israel to set up his kingdom. There is nothing more political than that.

In short, there is an enormous network of pro-Israel and Christian Zionist organizations. Most of them have their own Web pages on the Internet, and they usually have links to one another. Unlike many other evangelical groups, they understand the virtues of cooperation. An umbrella organization that tries to bring them together from time to time is the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. Founded in 1980, the embassy, which has no real diplomatic standing, opposes internationalizing Jerusalem and establishing a Palestinian state. It has offices in over 50 countries and does what it can to encourage and facilitate Christian Zionism. Over 1,500 people from 40 countries attended its Third International Christian Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in 1996.

Last things

Israel has needed all the friends it can get, and evangelicals have been loyal, productive supporters. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, no one defended it more strenuously in the U.S. than evangelicals. At one time, Israeli prime ministers could count on the strong support of both the U.S. President and the American Jewish community. But the present prime minister has neither. Netanyahu’s relationship with President Clinton is strained, and the Jewish community is deeply divided over some policies of Israel’s present government. Netanyahu was correct when he said that American evangelicals are the best friends Israel (i.e., his government) has.

But friendship comes at a cost. Supporting Israel has often meant that evangelicals must not be as evangelistic as they would like to be. Cooperation is difficult when one side is trying to convert the other. This does not mean that evangelicals stop believing that Jews need to be saved, only that evangelism must always be the first priority in their relationship. Evangelicals probably learned how to do this when they re-entered the world of politics in the late seventies. The Moral Majority welcomed Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and anybody else who shared common concerns. Falwell often said that since the organization was political, not religious, everybody could get along. Ted Beckett tells participating churches that people are always free to share their faith if asked, but they are not permitted to engage in any kind of overt proselytism. He says that he will “yank the charter” of any congregation in his project that tries to make a direct religious appeal to Jews in Israel. But old habits die hard.

For their part, Jews must learn to ignore what evangelicals believe about Bible prophecy and the need for all Jews to come to Jesus. Just as it is difficult for evangelicals to lay evangelism aside, so some Jews find it hard to ignore the motives behind evangelical support.

Rabbi James Rudin, interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee, complains that “some of the very same people who are most supportive of the state of Israel and its security and well-being don’t see Judaism as a full and valid religion. It’s like ‘Israel si, Jews no.’ ” Rudin is also critical of Jews who turn a deaf ear to such teachings in order to gain more allies for Israel. “Many American Jews will say: ‘Any port in a storm. If they support Israel, … don’t worry too much about the apocalypse.’ “

One Jew who prefers not to worry is Esther Levens. In 1990 she and Christian friend Allen Mothersill decided to start a pro-Israel, interreligious study group after the Bush administration started making loans to Israel contingent on not allowing new Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Levens was surprised to discover the level of support for Israel among evangelicals, so she decided to network as many evangelical and Jewish organizations as she could find. The result was Voices United for Israel, which currently enrolls two hundred organizations, of which two-thirds are evangelical.

In 1998, the Kansas City-based organization sponsored two conferences in Washington, D.C., at which Netanyahu spoke, and the group’s “media committee” has consulted with Israeli government officials in the development of new promotional and educational materials for use in American media markets. The organization faxes information about Israel to anyone who is interested and sponsors a speakers’ bureau of heavy hitters from think tanks involved in Middle East policy.

Politically, Voices United for Israel is fairly hom*ogeneous, but religiously, it is diverse. While the Christian contingent is almost all evangelical, the Jewish contingent ranges from Orthodox to Reform. What holds everyone together, says Levens, is their support for Israel and its current government and their willingness not to press religious differences. She knows about the prophetic views of the evangelicals in her organization and chooses not to dwell on them. For her, the important thing is that evangelicals love and support Israel. But still, Levens and her Jewish friends can get a bit mystified. A common joke in their circles is, “When the Messiah finally comes, my first question to him will be whether this visit is his first or second.”

Ira Nosenchuk of Brooklyn, who attended the Voices United for Israel Conference in April, summarized the spirit of cooperative compromise well: “When you have people supportive of your beliefs, … you have to go with them. … Sometimes I feel like there are more supporters for Israel among evangelicals than among Jews.” Supporting Israel makes the strangest bedfellows.

The evangelical-Israel relationship also raises important theological issues. Despite the widespread influence of their views, dispensationalists have always made up a minority of the entire evangelical family. But their prophetic beliefs raise important questions that all Christians need to think about seriously.

As Christian history makes clear, in the wrong hands the doctrines of providence, divine sovereignty, and eschatology become fatalism; and fatalism takes the significance out of human action. If the future is fixed, people are merely playing out their assigned roles, with no ability to alter the direction or outcome of the divine drama. If one is privy to the process, one can identify the players, evaluate their performance, and make judgments about them. When one knows how the drama is going to end, there are no surprises. At times, then, dispensationalist prophecy can be quite fatalistic.

Eschatological activism

So why are evangelicals working so hard to keep Israel strong and independent? Why bother when they know how things are going to end up? How do their prophetic views and their political involvement fit together? These are hard questions to answer because evangelical political activists and prophecy teachers rarely if ever reflect on such issues. They do say that Christians must “occupy” until the Lord comes and that supporting Israel is a basic biblical imperative, citing Genesis 12:3 as their proof text: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (NIV). But neither observation says anything about what constitutes responsible action when historical outcomes are essentially determined.

Obviously, many evangelicals do not want to do anything to put themselves at cross purposes with God over Israel and the end times. The tendency is for many evangelicals to idealize Israel and believe that it can do no wrong. Some evangelicals have demonized the Palestinians: because they are the enemies of the modern State of Israel, they are also the enemies of God and the servants of Satan.

When evangelicals force all the complicated issues in the Middle East through the tight grid of their prophetic views, they can lose the ability to think critically and ethically about what is really going on there. For example, many evangelicals are reluctant even to consider the ethical issues involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and their 1982 invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon. Many Christians—mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, and evangelicals among them—believe that Israel has some hard explaining to do.

While Jews have a right to be secure within their own borders, do they have the right to seize other people’s land, occupy their territory, ignore their rights of self-determination, and bulldoze or blow up the homes and businesses of Palestininan families? Certainly the relationship between Jews and Palestinians in Israel poses difficult questions, and people of good will may disagree about what is justifiable when survival is at stake. But for prophetic reasons, many evangelicals seem unable to entertain the possibility that Israel may be at fault in some way for the stalemate in the region. Evangelicals need to consider whether believing in Bible prophecy absolves them of grappling with issues of right and wrong. Does having a handle on the prophetic details allow them to turn a blind eye to injustice? Do the ends justify the means, just because the ends have been prophesied? Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals believes that most evangelicals simply have not thought through the issue of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories. Maybe it is time they start.

Of course, premillennialists are not the only Christians who struggle with issues of human responsibility and divine providence. These are tough issues and worth thinking through. Answers do not come easily. How do human beings participate with God in unfolding history? Drawing lines on a prophetic chart is easy in comparison to unpacking the complexities of the divine-human relationship within the historical process.

The most serious issue that grows out of the relationship between evangelicals and Israel is whether the connection has helped or hindered the peace process. Because of their prophetic views, evangelicals are often less than optimistic about the prospects for peace. For instance, Jerry Falwell sounded downright scornful of the Camp David peace accords that were brokered by fellow evangelical Jimmy Carter in 1979. “In spite of the rosy and utterly unrealistic expectations by our government, this treaty will not be a lasting treaty. … You and I know that there’s not going to be any real peace in the Middle East until the Lord Jesus sits down upon the throne of David in Jerusalem.”

Falwell and other evangelicals have a right to be skeptical. Agreements have been fragile. But 20 years is not bad for a Middle East peace treaty. Even so, no one really expects any human peace accord to be “lasting.” Most are only temporary. But that does not mean that they are worthless. The pessimistic attitude of many other evangelicals toward peace in the Middle East does not give even a temporary peace much of a chance. And it certainly does not honor Jesus’ words “Blessed are the peacemakers.” No peace is perfect; no peace lasts forever. But how can anyone be sure that we are so close to the end that peacemaking is a waste of time?

Part of the problem is the overconfidence evangelicals have about their prophetic views. Bible teachers are not inerrant; and they have changed their minds often. The history of prophetic interpretation shows that the Devil is in the details. Premillennialist prophecy pundits have been wrong over and over again about identifying Antichrist, setting dates for the Rapture, and a host of other things. Nobody anticipated the demise of the Soviet empire or most aspects of the Gulf War. When history takes unexpected turns, the experts have to make adjustments, redraw their maps, and come out with new editions. History is still full of surprises—so why make categorical statements about what cannot happen between Israel and her neighbors?

A new generation of dispensationalist scholars has toned down the excesses and sensationalism of its predecessors. “Progressive dispensationalists,” though seeing a future for national Israel, are less inclined to engage in map drawing and categorical predictions. When one is teaching or writing for a well-defined religious community, speculating about the future is one thing; but when one is engaging in political advocacy with far-reaching consequences, it is another. The future is in God’s hands; in the end, Jesus wins. But getting to that point may be more complicated and full of surprises than many people think. It is time for a strategy of humility and hope.

Timothy Weber is professor of church history and dean at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Lombard, Illinois.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Across the field from our residence in Jerusalem is Har Homa (Jabal Abu Ghneim in Arabic), the mountain that has caused so much conflict over the status of Jerusalem. On Easter morning 1997 we stood on the roof of our residence for a sunrise service. As the sun rose over the mountain, we celebrated the Resurrection with Scripture, song, and prayer.

Several days later we watched with pain as bulldozers cut a swath around the mountain, preparing the way for housing construction. Israelis insist this area is part of southeastern Jerusalem and that they have a right to expand there. Palestinians from the adjacent Christian towns of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour see this unilateral act as infringement on their right to expand their cities.

Jerusalem, the “City of Peace,” is a source of conflict and disharmony. Israelis insist that Jerusalem should remain the unified and eternal capital of Israel under the absolute sovereignty of Israel. Palestinians, native to East Jerusalem, are critical of the Israeli claim to sovereignty; they want East Jerusalem to be the capital of a Palestinian state. Jerusalem elicits the best and the worst in people, and it is being marred by those who claim to love her.

Just as Jerusalem incites the passions of three great religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—it also inspires pilgrims. As we approach the year 2000, there is a lot of euphoria concerning Jerusalem. Some Christians are enamored with Jerusalem because they anticipate the restoration of Jerusalem when the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled. Hence, they uncritically defend Jewish control of Jerusalem because it fits their end-times theories. Christian pilgrims are flocking to see the sites where they anticipate these end-times events will happen. Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert recently has even suggested setting up tent camps to accommodate the many Christian pilgrims.

I’ve been asked what I know about the Mount of Olives beginning to split (Zech. 14:4). Frankly, I’ve seen no evidence of that, nor is it my consuming passion. Some seem more interested in whether the mountain is beginning to divide than in the division of people living within the shadow of that mountain. Others seem more fascinated with the reconstruction of a third temple than with Jesus as temple or the believing community as temple. Groups of Christians have even contributed money for the rebuilding of the temple.

Several years ago in the Old City of Jerusalem I visited a Jewish group that is preparing for the eventual rebuilding of the temple. The man I interviewed was armed. The group was very guarded—literally and figuratively! This group does not indicate when or how the temple will be rebuilt, an assertion much too volatile. But they insist it is their task to prepare the ceremonial garments and utensils for that certain future event. Are groups like these the Christians’ allies in Jerusalem?

Jesus reinterprets Jerusalem

Many Christians seem to have an Old Testament view of land, Jerusalem, and the temple rather than a New Testament view. The New Testament is positive toward Jerusalem and the temple: Jerusalem is a “holy city” (Matt. 4:5; 27:53), the “city of the great King” (Matt. 5:35), and the temple is a “holy place” (Matt. 24:15). Yet Jesus and the New Testament have a radically new perspective on Jerusalem and the temple. As the temple needed to be seen in the light of Jesus (John 2), so did Jerusalem (John 4). And Jesus predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple because of the religious and moral failure of the people (Luke 19:41-44; 21:20-24). He called Jerusalem to repentance. A center of unbelief, Jerusalem killed its religious leaders (Matt. 23:29-24:2) and acted against the purposes of God (Luke 13:34). Because Jerusalem was using God for its own aggrandizement, it could no longer claim holiness.

When Jesus was asked, “Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6, rsv), he replied: “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority” (1:7). Rather, they are to witness to Jesus in Jerusalem—and throughout the whole world. Christians must focus more on Jesus than on Jerusalem the Holy City.

More important than the place of Jerusalem is the person of Jesus. Jerusalem is not the center for Christians; Jesus is. Jesus is also greater than the temple (Matt. 12:6) because Jesus took its place (John 2:21). Jesus’ own sacrificial death ended the need for the sacrifices of the temple (Heb. 9:1110:18). He is the divine presence symbolized by the temple. Believers in Jesus and the believing community are also the temple (1 Cor. 3:17; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16). If Jesus and the church represent the temple, is the reconstruction of a third temple—a Jewish edifice—essential to Christian faith?

Jesus’ agenda for Jerusalem

Still, we may have an affection for the Holy City, but love for it does not mean that we conform to Jerusalem’s agenda. Rather, we accept Jesus’ agenda for Jerusalem. Looking at Jerusalem through the eyes of Jesus must include Jesuslike involvement in the following ways:

Weeping. Jesus lamented that Jerusalem killed prophets and stoned messengers, refusing to be gathered together as a hen gathers her chicks (Luke 13:34- 35). Because Jerusalem did not recognize the things that make for peace or the time of God’s visitation, it would therefore be destroyed (Luke 19:41-44). Jesus’ tears expressed regret, compassion, and his reluctance to give up on Jerusalem.

Christians must feel the same anguish for Jerusalem. Sometimes the pain of Jerusalem is too deep for words. One can only weep. Weeping is the precondition for compassion, understanding, prayer. As Jesus prayed for Jerusalem, we are invited to pray for Jerusalem and the church in Jerusalem.

Prophetic critique. Jesus by prophetic word and action called Jerusalem to repentance. He did not criticize from a distance, but entered into Jerusalem’s daily life. Jesus rebuked Jerusalem because the Holy City had become unholy. Critique must be laced with mercy and compassion.

Christians are often reluctant to critique wrongs or injustice because they are seen as “signs of the times.” Yet Christians address issues of famine, social disruption, and apostasy, which are also “signs of the times.” Some Christians, instead of calling Jerusalem to repentance, only bless Jerusalem and emphasize God’s promises, ignoring the conditional nature of God’s promises. Jerusalem is not exempt from God’s will revealed in Jesus. Justice for all parties is more important than absolute sovereignty over Jerusalem.

Ethical discernment. The “sacredness” or “specialness” of Jerusalem blinds many Christians to ethical discernment. But devotion to Jerusalem without righteousness leads to unholy nationalism. Religious claims to the holiness of Jerusalem often lead to dispute and war rather than to ethical behavior. Holiness of space must not usurp the place of ethics. Holy behavior is more important than holy places. Where justice is lacking there is no holiness. Devotion to Jerusalem can become an idol. Instead of pointing toward God, it points away from God. Jerusalem must not take the place of God or be revered at the expense of the values expressed by Jesus.

Reconciliation and peace. Jesus wept because Jerusalem did not understand the things that make for peace (Luke 19:42). Can the “City of Peace” discover today the things that make for peace? Can Jerusalem be a place of blessing instead of a place of division? First-century Jerusalem was destroyed because it did not know what made for peace. Will Christian faith foster or hamper efforts for justice, peace, and security for all? Christians need to pray (Ps. 122:6), act, and hope for the peace of Jerusalem, a peace built upon the foundation of justice, a peace for all the people of Israel and Palestine.

Jerusalem is one of the few places in the world considered holy to several religions. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all see Jerusalem in a unique way, and often their religious perceptions clash. Justice and human rights call for a shared Jerusalem for Israelis and Palestinians—for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jerusalem is not only important for the religion of each, but each of these groups lives in Jerusalem. The claims of local people to Jerusalem should not be minimized. There will be no peace if some groups are excluded.

My joy in celebrating Holy Week events in Jerusalem is marred by the awareness that many Palestinian Christians are forbidden to come to Jerusalem to participate in the Palm Sunday walk or the Maundy Thursday procession from Jerusalem to Gethsemane. A shared Jerusalem insists that it be open for all. No one owns Jerusalem. It is God’s Jerusalem.

Unity of Christian presence. In Jerusalem Jesus prayed that believers might be one (John 17:2123). Churches need to transcend their particular histories, renounce prejudice, and work for mutual understanding. As a symbol, the mother church of Jerusalem can help Christians transcend their particular community affiliations. Today there are hopeful signs of increasing unity among Jerusalem churches, both among Palestinian Christians and between Palestinian Christians and Jewish believers in Jesus. Christians from abroad should help to heal division rather than increase fragmentation.

Palestinian Christians are a minority within a minority. The diminishing number of Christians in the region due to emigration is of great concern to the Christian community. Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, on a visit to Jerusalem in 1992, expressed hope that the diminishing number of Christians would not result in an “empty theme park.” How tragic if the church should cease to be meaningfully present in the city where it was born.

How can Christians be an authentic presence in Jerusalem? Surely the living Christian community (the temple of Jesus) is of greater significance than the Temple Mount. Community-centered faith is more important than site-centered faith.

Calvin E. Shenk is professor of religion at Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia. He and his wife, Marie, spend half of each year in Jerusalem on a Mennonite Church assignment.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Brother Andrew said once, “Show me a closed door and I will tell you how you can get in.” (He added, “I won’t, however, promise you a way to get out.”) Erstwhile “God’s Smuggler” (and author, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of the book by that name), Andrew goes to places most of us avoid to interact with people most of us dismiss in order to aid Christians in circ*mstances most of us know little or nothing about. He founded the (aptly named) Open Doors ministry to champion the cause of the suffering church around the world and to facilitate his enigmatic ventures of goodwill. Both he and the ministry have come a long way since the 1950s when he started smuggling desperately needed Bibles to Christians behind the Iron Curtain, hiding them in the back seat of his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle.

This year Brother Andrew turned 70, celebrated 40 years of marriage to his wife, Corry, and welcomed their first grandchild. He will tell you, looking back on his life, that his dreams have come true. Open Doors has made a significant impact and has grown into a force he never imagined: “The curtains have come down in the communist world. That is what I worked for. I am very happy about that.”

God’s Smuggler introduced his burden for Christians behind the Iron Curtain to fellow believers all over the world, which created a network of support that multiplied the reach of Open Doors. Today the ministry has offices in 20 countries and 200 full-time workers. (Brother Andrew serves as president emeritus.) Through Open Doors, Brother Andrew has brought Bibles and Christian materials to struggling churches in the one-time communist Eastern bloc, to China, Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, and Latin America. They have sponsored “congresses” (like the Love Africa Congress in the 1970s that brought together leaders from all over the continent for prayer and ministry support), prayer campaigns (such as Seven Years of Prayer for the Soviet Union that began in the early 1980s), and “projects” (Project Pearl delivered clandestinely a million Bibles to China in 1981 and Project Crossfire distributed Christian literature throughout Latin America in 1985).

In this decade, Open Doors has sponsored Project Samuel, which supplied a million schoolchildren in the former Soviet Union with their first Bibles; distributed 20,000 “unofficial” copies of a Chinese Study Bible to church leaders; presented the first complete Albanian Bible to the president there; and initiated Ten Years of Prayer for the Church in the Muslim World.

In 1997 alone, Open Doors distributed 814,041 Bibles; 210,908 New Testaments; 87,606 Gospels; 650,843 “spiritual books”; 387,050 other forms of Christian literature; and trained tens of thousands of pastors and lay leaders in seminars and workshops. (This does not include their visits to imprisoned Christians, emergency help for families of martyrs, church repairs, medical aid, legal support, relocation assistance, vocational training, and just plain being there. A church leader in Lebanon recalls the time when his home was bombed; as he staggered amidst the rubble, he saw Brother Andrew making his way through the wreckage just to be there with him.)

But there is one dream (with two parts) that remains unrealized: The church in the Middle East is dwindling, and the Islamic strongholds are not being penetrated with the gospel. “Communism proclaimed that there is no God, which is stupid and schizophrenic,” he says, “because they say there is no God, and then they fight him. The challenge now is not that proclamation; it’s the challenge of Who is God?

“Islam confronts us with that question.”

Colliding realities

When God’s Smuggler came out in 1967—powerful as it was in rallying support for the those languishing behind the Iron Curtain (it sold over 10 million copies in 27 languages)—it ended Brother Andrew’s access to these countries. “I could not go back there, and it caused me a lot of heartache to even make the decision [to do] the book.”

At that time, he took a trip to the Middle East. He foresaw a power shift taking place that he sensed would pose a critical challenge to the church: He anticipated the disintegration of the communist stronghold; he was witnessing the moral and spiritual collapse of the Western world; and he predicted the ascendance of Islam as both a world power and a religious force.

In 1973, during the energy crisis, the opec oil cartel doubled the price of a barrel of oil (from $2.55 to $5.09). Western nations gave in to the price hike, which sent the signal to these oil-producing nations that they had power. This, says Brother Andrew, became the defining moment in the realization of his prophetic insights. “Islamic eschatology teaches that in the end time, Islam will conquer and rule the world. In 1973, Islam woke up to the fact that Allah had put oil under their sand for ‘such a time as this.’ “

The challenge now is the question “Who is God?” Islam confronts us with that question.

Oil, it turns out, is the lifeblood of the West, which has placed these desert kingdoms in a position of near-apocalyptic importance. This has created a complicated network of colliding realities that Western Christians face when it comes to understanding the Middle East. This network consists (in broad strokes) of the following aspects:

• Oil is in high demand in the West;
• Demand has heightened the power and influence of these Islamic nations;
• Islamic power and influence have shaped American politics in the region;
• Politics is driven by the requirements of a consuming culture (“The moment we discover you can run cars on water,” says Brother Andrew, “we’ll drop the Saudis.”);
• Consuming culture has (to a greater or lesser degree) influenced the outlook of the Western church;
• The Western church has inadequately understood both the politics of the region and the religious sensibilities of Islam;
• Islam is asserting itself (both politically and religiously) and expanding its influence.

Brother Andrew says that Islam threatens the viability of Christianity in this region and internationally, not because these nations have oil (integral though that may be in this picture), but because Islam has forced the question Who is God? and Western evangelicals have been unable to answer that question.

He describes a conversation he shared with some leaders in Hamas (the fundamentalist Islamic resistance movement in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem whose aim is to reverse Israeli occupation and establish an Islamic state in Palestine):

“I challenged the Hamas leadership about the suicide bombers, and they denied that they had suiciders. ‘There is no suicide in Islam,’ they said.

” ‘Then what about the bombers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?’

“One man said with full conviction, ‘It is religious.’ “

They have an endless supply of “suiciders,” Brother Andrew says, because everybody wants to go to heaven. Crying ‘Allahu Akbar,’ they blow themselves up (and those around them) and are ushered straight to heaven proclaiming “God is greater!”

“Greater than whom?” Brother Andrew asks. “Than Jesus, than Jehovah, than the God of the Christians,” he says. “One Muslim terrorist, before he got himself killed, made a video recording of himself. He said, ‘Our love for death is greater than your love for life.’

“Unless we come willingly to enter into dialogue—not to win, but to witness to the point of laying down our lives—we won’t get anywhere. This is what I saw the Russian and the Chinese Christians do under communism: lay down their lives in the gulag, in the re-education camps, in the labor camps. That’s why the church won.

“We’ve entered a very difficult time of total misunderstanding, miscommunication, misinformation, hostility, and not talking to each other.

“I want to change that,” he says.

So his most recent—and perhaps most controversial—ministry focus has shifted to the Middle East where he witnesses boldly about Jesus (by invitation) in the gatherings of Hamas and Hizbollah (the latter—the Party of Allah—is a Lebanese fundamentalist movement within Islam) and extends encouragement and solidarity to the dwindling Christian population in the land where Jesus walked.

Fleet-footed troublemaker

Brother Andrew’s propensity to defy the odds has contributed to his being widely misunderstood. The answers to the many questions his activity provokes (What is he doing hobnobbing with terrorists? What about the ethics of smuggling? Why doesn’t he use a last name?) are grounded in who Brother Andrew is: he is a no-nonsense doer, with no patience for committees. This can be seen in both his nature and his nurture.

Brother Andrew is, by nature, unfazed by the prospect of dying. When his beloved older brother Bas lay dying of tuberculosis, the young Andrew (age 11) determined that “if Bas was going to die, then I wanted to die too.” He threw himself on top of his dying brother and “kissed him again and again on the mouth.” (Bas died a few months later while the young Andrew remained “healthy as ever.” He felt as if God had “betrayed [him] twice.”)

He is, by nature, spirited and adventurous. When the Germans bombed an airstrip four kilometers from his home in Holland on his twelfth birthday (May 1940), he acted out his self-confessed “fantasies of resistance” by sneaking out at night, taking the family’s highly treasured sugar ration, and dumping it into the gas tank of the “fat little German lieutenant.” “Everyone in the village was amused when the lieutenant’s staff car began to give him trouble.”

He is, by nature, a risk taker. On another occasion during the occupation, late at night he tossed a cherry bomb onto the lieutenant’s doorstep, purposefully waiting until the village patrol was in sight. (“I thought it would be fun to have these old men in their heavy boots run after me.” He was the fastest runner in his hometown.) In his fantasizing, he didn’t reckon on guns. When one soldier co*cked and aimed his, the young boy tossed the firecracker and bolted. Running in zigzags, darting over bridges, and taking cover in the cabbage patch, he evaded them and was “elated by this success,” which inspired him to start brazenly “discharging volleys” in broad daylight.

He is, by nature, stubborn and impulsive. At the age of 17, wanting to be treated like a man, he joined the army and broke his mother’s heart. (“She had seen enough of armies,” he said.) While in training, an officer asked him, on the spot, if he could drive a Bren carrier (a tank). Not wanting to appear weak and dumb (and feeling sure he could figure it out), he said that he could—failing to mention that he didn’t even know how to drive a car.

He was right when he thought he could drive it; he just couldn’t figure out how to stop it. The tank quickly picked up speed: “Arms flailing and feet flying, I tried every button and lever I could find. … [A]nd with one last surge of power we plowed into the row of Bren carriers parked at the curb. All seven of them bucked forward, each slamming against the other until we came to rest, hissing and smoking.”

But other external forces—what I refer to as his “nurture”—have tempered his extremes.

For example, by “nurture,” he has reckoned with calamity. The German occupation meant hardship and squalor for Andrew’s family: all electricity was reserved for the Germans, so the family’s oil lamps were fueled by oil they made from cabbage seeds; the Germans took all the vegetables from their gardens, so they ate tulip bulbs; the military took over Andrew’s school building when he was in the sixth grade, so he never completed his education.

By nurture, he has been softened by personal loss. On the day he left home for the army to serve in Indonesia after the war, as he said good-bye to his mother, she pulled her little Bible from her apron. Handing it to him she asked, “Will you read it, Andrew?” (She had taken him to church every Sunday as a boy, but he had always managed to sneak out and enjoy the morning skating the frozen canals or sitting in the fields.)

He put the Bible in his duffle bag “as far down as it could go” and promptly forgot it. That encounter was the last time he saw his mother.

He has, by “nurture,” been broken by his own misguided adventures. He found himself in a situation in the army when he realized that he had been wrong about this “adventure.” He and his company had been in combat in Indonesia for weeks when they entered a village that was riddled with land mines. When they stumbled into the mines, fatigued and disoriented, the company “went berserk:” “Without orders, without reasoning … we shot everything in sight”—including unarmed civilians.

“I wanted to kill myself after that,” he said. And he bought a bright, yellow straw hat that he wore into combat, making himself an easy target for enemy fire. He was eventually shot, but not killed, as he had hoped. The bullet shattered his ankle, making the fleet-footed, dare-devil Dutch boy more or less a cripple.

These external forces eventually broke him and precipitated an inner crisis. Standing at his mother’s grave after he returned, he said, “I did read your Bible, Mama. Not at first, but I did read it.

“Mama, what am I going to do now? I feel so useless. And guilty. Answer me, Mama.”

No answer came from the grave that day, but his answers did eventually come. At one point, during his weeks in occupational therapy at a nearby veterans’ hospital, a young woman invited Andrew to attend a tent revival. Motivated more by the desire to escape the hospital than by spiritual sensitivities, Andrew and a friend attended the meeting. By the time they entered, they were giddy with amusem*nt, having finished off half a bottle of alcohol they had snuck in. They sat in the rear of the tent so they could finish off the rest. They choked back the laughter when a “funny-looking man” took to the podium.

Andrew’s hilarity stopped short, however, when the speaker announced from the podium that “there were two people in the congregation who were bound by powers they couldn’t control.” Later in prayer the speaker prayed for “our brethren over whom foreign spirits have gained influence.” He ended the service with the song “Let My People Go.”

Andrew did not “go forward” that night. But the song’s words—”Let them go; let me go”—haunted him for days, to the extent that he picked up the Bible his mother gave him, which he hadn’t looked at in years. “All the passages that had seemed so puzzling when I struggled through them before read now like a fast-paced action yarn.”

He spent so much time in his bed reading his Bible that his father and siblings were alarmed. “Papa says it’s shell shock,” his sister said to him. He started attending church—this time to learn something (and not to mock the speaker). But as sincere as his newfound spiritual interest was, he couldn’t apprehend the faith in a way that made it seem real to him.

Then, during a winter night in 1950 (Andrew was 21) when a storm descended, he seemed to hear in the wind: “Let my people go . …” It was as if the wind was telling him what he needed to do. He prayed, “Lord, if you will show me the way, I will follow you.” In that moment, he says, “I let go of my ego,” and all those no-holds-barred attributes that he possessed “by nature” were under new command. (He opted not to tell his family about his conversion because, he said, “they were worried enough about me already.”)

Gospel with a G-O

He spent two years at the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade (WEC) missionary school in Glasgow, Scotland (1953-55), taking Bible classes, systematic theology, homiletics, linguistics, and car mechanics. As “an exercise of faith” the students (in groups of five) were sent out throughout Scotland on a four-week missionary tour with only a one-pound note. They were expected to pay for their transportation, lodging, food, any advertising, and renting of halls (plus refreshments); they were not allowed to take up offerings or mention monetary needs; and they were expected to remit the one pound upon their return. (Andrew’s team came back with enough extra money to send some to WEC missions overseas.)

As he prepared to return to Holland in 1955, after completing his schooling, he stumbled upon a magazine that advertised a youth festival sponsored by the Communist party to be held in Warsaw, Poland, that summer. He wrote and told them he was training to become a Christian missionary and asked if they would allow him to attend the festival to exchange ideas. (They would talk about socialism; he would talk about Jesus.)

“Most certainly,” was their reply, and the festival organizers gave him a student discount. This trip was to be the turning point in Andrew’s life.

He visited an unregistered (and thus struggling) Baptist church while he was there and was unexpectedly asked to bring a message. Afterward, the pastor said, “Even if you had not said a word, just seeing you would have meant so much. We feel at times as if we are all alone in our struggle.”

Andrew pondered the situation of this church, with hardly any young people, comparing it to the other more “successful” “state approved” churches he had visited. He also recalled a student march he had seen with the young, robust, clean-cut socialists marching eight abreast. “They marched singing, and their voices were like shouts.”

His heart ached for the Communist youth who had so zealously given themselves to this cause, and he was troubled by the lack of resources and support that the nonstate-approved churches faced, which diminished their numbers and stifled their ability to grow in spiritual maturity. He asked God, “What should I do?” He found his answer in the Book of Revelation. The words jumped out at him: “Awake and strengthen what remains, and is on the point of death” (Rev. 3:2).

From that moment to this, “serving the suffering church worldwide” has defined Brother Andrew’s (and later Open Doors’) mandate. This meant, he says, “We find out what a church needs, [and] we come back and supply it, whatever they ask.” In most cases, during the early years in the Eastern bloc, they desperately needed Bibles. He prayed before each border crossing: “Lord, in my luggage I have Scripture that I want to take to your children across this border. When you were on earth, You made the blind to see. Now, I pray, make the seeing eyes blind.” Sometimes he would lay a few Bibles in open view on the back seat of the car and answer honestly when officials asked what they were (to disarm suspicion that there might be more). As far as was possible, he chose to operate within the bounds of the law. When the civil law co-opted God’s law, however, he would “obey God rather than man.” (In 1981 he orchestrated the secret delivery of one million Bibles to China on a single night. The idea came from the Christians in China, and they told Brother Andrew’s team how, when, and where to do it. That was “very illegal,” he says.)

His desire to go to the suffering Christians (“you can’t spell the gospel or even God without first spelling go“) ultimately compelled him to stop using his last name. The more he traveled (and had an impact), the more difficult it was becoming for him to register at hotels and to cross borders. “Anonymity was becoming a problem. If I kept using my real name when I spoke, wouldn’t I jeopardize my freedom to come and go across borders?” Last names had “almost ceased to exist among Christians” behind the Iron Curtain. So for all these reasons, “God’s smuggler” decided to drop his last name. Henceforth he has been known only as Brother Andrew.

Where Jesus walked

His mandate to “strengthen what remains and is on the point of death” has led him to prisons, refugee shelters, and house churches in the farthest reaches of the globe. But most recently it has led him to the land of Jesus—specifically, to the churches that are struggling for survival in the West Bank and Gaza.

“I have never seen so much despair that leads to running away, and to violence, and to conversion to Islam,” says Brother Andrew of the Christians in Bethlehem. “There is one tiny evangelical church in all of Gaza, and I preach there every year. Every time I’m there the numbers are down. The last time I preached a couple of months ago, there were only 12 Christians.”

Fifty years ago the number of Christians living in “the Holy Land” (Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza) hovered around 30 percent, according to Brother Andrew (other sources estimate 10 percent). Today a generous estimate would put the Christian population at 2.3 percent of the 5.7 million Israelis and 2.5 million Palestinians. (Andrew thinks it is more like 1.8 percent.) Some of this is due to the massive influx of Jewish immigration in recent years, but there has also been a significant exodus of Christians, who endure severe hardship if they choose to stay.

“If a bomb goes off or a boy throws a stone, then they close all the schools,” he says. “The schools are closed most of the time. The [Bethlehem] Bible College was closed.” And even when they are open, very often students and staff cannot get to schools if they are coming from outside the area. So the cumulative loss of days adds up. The high unemployment rate in Gaza and the West Bank makes finding jobs very difficult. So, on one level, diplomas, when they are earned, “are worthless”—not academically so much as in the sense that many graduates feel, What is the use of having a diploma if I cannot get out of my ‘prison’?

“There is no electricity for long periods of time because they cut it off,” says Andrew. “They shut off the water, so they take their laundry to another village. They can’t travel—a farmer cannot go to his field because in between is a piece of Israel that he cannot cross.”

Unemployment in Bethlehem hovers around 50 percent, according to Jane Handal (quoted in the Religious News Service [RNS]), an architect and Catholic Christian who lives in Bethlehem. “All the younger generation want to leave. All who study abroad stay where they are and try to find work. Opportunities are rare here.” Many Christian families who have lived there for centuries (some since Pentecost) have decided to leave, “besieged by wars, unemployment, and the unstable peace between Arabs and Jews,” writes Steve Chambers (for RNS).

Heaped upon the church’s struggle for survival is the insult of Christian tourists and pilgrims “walking where Jesus walked” while sidestepping their hurting brothers and sisters in the West Bank and Gaza. “Pilgrims come and go. They visit churches, visit the stones, but not the living church,” says Claudette Habesch, who serves as secretary general of the Caritas Jerusalem charities office (quoted by Chambers). “Many pilgrims come and go without ever realizing there are Christians living in the Holy Land.”

But Brother Andrew’s concern for the dwindling Christian presence in the West Bank and Gaza encompasses only one aspect of his larger concern about the exponential and unchallenged rise of Islam in the Middle East. Muslims’ “influence is growing while [Christians] are declining in influence,” he says. “Christians are losing ground in the Muslim world.”

I tell them, ‘You don’t have to blow yourself to pieces. There’s another way.’

The rise of Islam has remained largely unchecked because of negligible Christian activity in this region. (“There is one missionary to every 250,000 Muslims,” says Brother Andrew.) Both of these phenomena (the rise of Islam and the marginal Christian response) can be understood in terms of a modification of the “network of colliding realities” mentioned earlier:

• Islam is asserting itself because of increased prosperity from oil and meager Christian activity by the Western church;
• The negligible Christian activity is due, in part, to the outlook aroused by the politics of the region and a general lack of understanding;
• The politics of the region exists to secure access to oil in order to accommodate Western lifestyle demands;
• Western lifestyle demands have distorted both the Western view (including the Western church’s view) of the Middle East and the Middle Eastern understanding of the West (including Western Christianity).

This is what Brother Andrew means when he says that Christians in the West and Muslims in the Middle East have “entered a very difficult time of total misunderstanding, miscommunication, misinformation, and hostility.”

As he has come into relationship with many Muslims, including leaders of Hamas and Hizbollah, he has found that they are surprisingly open to Christianity—that is, once they understand what it is really all about. He has been invited to speak at gatherings of both groups, and in one instance, drew a crowd of 400.

“You see,” he says, “every Muslim is afraid of the judgment day because, in their concept of good deeds and bad deeds, the bad angel is gloating: ‘Your bad deeds are a lot greater than your good deeds.’ Every Muslim lives under that condemnation and there is only one way out—and every Muslim knows it: to die in jihad.

“We must confront them with a greater determination,” he says. Like the time he told some leaders in Hizbollah that he wanted to exchange his life for a hostage they were holding. Brother Andrew said, “Chain me to the radiator in the dark basem*nt and let him go. He has suffered enough. Let him go back to his wife and children.”

The Hizbollah leader’s “eyes almost popped.”

” ‘I don’t know how you can say that,’ he said.

“That’s the spirit of Jesus,” Andrew said. “He gave his life to let me go. Now I come to give my life so he can go.” (“He did not follow my advice, but we became friends.”)

This same leader came back to Andrew later and said, “Andrew, you Christians have a problem.”

“What is it?”

“You Christians are not following the life of Jesus anymore.”

“What do you think is the solution?”

“You must go back to the book, the New Testament.”

“I figured if we Christians could go back to our book, we would obey the scriptural injunction: love your enemy. The moment I love my enemy,” he says, “I have no enemy.

“I have lectured officially at the Hamas University on the subject ‘What is real Christianity?’ Every time I mentioned the prophet Muhammad the front row of Hamas leaders would whisper, ‘Peace be upon him.’

“You can have that, I thought. But I am proclaiming Christ, and peace comes through him.

“I stand there and I open the New Testament and I read about the cross, about forgiveness, and this concept of God’s love. Forgiveness is unknown. Allah forgives or he does not forgive, according to his will. They know nothing about the assurance of salvation. They’re such uncertain people. Why are we not crying out with compassion and pity on a billion people like that? We’re not dealing with structures. They are human people that have the same fear and pain and anxiety and love that I have.

“According to 1 Peter 3:15, we’re supposed to ‘give an account of the things that you hope and believe.’ As we are transparent, and not political, they will accept you as their brother or sister, and together you can study the Scriptures and find out who God is.

“I tell them, ‘You don’t have to blow yourself to pieces. There’s another way.’ “

A plea to the church

Brother Andrew cites the last verse in Hebrews 11 to articulate his appeal to the Western church: “They [the suffering church] will not be perfect without us.” But he puts on an addendum: “Nor will we be able to survive in the so-called free world without them.” Why? Because the plight of our struggling brothers and sisters in conjunction with the rise of Islam is forcing the Western church to answer the question, Who is God?

Islam rises in strength and numbers and the Christian presence dwindles, either because of outright persecution and discrimination or lack of governmental support. And there is little or no advocacy asserted by Western Christians for their struggling fellow believers. So Islam proclaims the victory of Allah over the God of the Christians, whose people are weak and whose churches are dying.

Brother Andrew extends a two-sided plea to American Christians. First, he asks that we actively advocate on behalf of Christians in the Middle East and offer financial support to the floundering Christian institutions there. That means, for example, when Christians visit Israel, they should seek out and encourage struggling brothers and sisters, even if that means going off the standard tourist trail.

“Christian evangelicals could make a point of insisting at the tourist office that they go to places like the Bethlehem Bible College,” he says.

“I took a group to the Palestinian hospital on top of the Mount of Olives. The Muslim director was very helpful. We met a number of born-again Christian nurses in the hospital. It was the highlight of the whole trip.”

Christians will be flocking to the Holy Land, especially as the new millennium approaches, many enamored with end-times prophecies. But, Andrew says, “The end-times prophecies can never be fulfilled if there is no church in the Middle East. There is no ‘holy city,’ only ‘holy people.’ There is a living church, and so there is a responsibility.

“We have a surplus of liberty, of knowledge, of goods, of resources that fit exactly their need,” he says. “If we do not reach out to them, we are not fulfilling our God-given purposes for life. God gave us this for them. But keeping it, we commit spiritual suicide. I spoke at a prayer conference some years ago and said, ‘Stop praying for revival [in America]’ because God will not create a monster of the body of Christ by letting half of it grow huge beyond proportion and the other half shrivel into oblivion.”

Brother Andrew’s other plea involves becoming more aware of and concerned for Muslims. “Nothing will change until we begin to spell Islam ‘I Sincerely Love All Muslims.’ We Christians are not praying for Muslims. One [Christian] brother in prison told me that he was praying for his torturers. We are not even praying for our irs men or gang members. It’s one reason why America is in a mess—we’re not praying for those who are ‘enemies’ of our society. We have to learn that lesson from the suffering church.

“Get prayer letters, read books about persecution—make them bestsellers!—and begin to pray. Very soon God will say, ‘Why don’t you answer your own prayer?’ “

Not going to places that are more easily avoided, not interacting with people who are more comfortably dismissed, and not advocating for believers who struggle in situations we know little or nothing about will leave unanswered the question that Islam poses to the West. And going, interacting, and advocating can be, as Brother Andrew puts it, “a dangerous business.”

“But the doors are not closed,” he says. “Only when you are there can God tell you what you should do. Jesus said in Acts 1:8 to go. He didn’t say ‘Go, if the doors are open’; or ‘Go, if you have an invitation or a red carpet treatment.’

“He said, ‘Go,’ because people need his Word.”

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

One of the earliest prayers in the Bible is Abraham’s prayer for his other son: “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!” (Gen. 17:18). I believe that if more Christians will pray this prayer today, we will begin to have an impact for Jesus upon the world of Islam.

Today many of us have created an enemy image of the Muslims. They are all terrorists who hijack our planes, blow up our embassies, and take innocent people hostage. Not only is this untrue, but the very minute we view them this way we make it impossible to reach them with the gospel. God cannot use us.

Every trip I’ve made to the Middle East, beginning with my earliest visits to Israel and Jordan in the mid-1960s, has been an education. More often than not it has been a reeducation, because I’ve had to unlearn so many of the things I’ve been taught by Western church leaders. By being there, seeing the situation for myself, and talking with many people face to face, I’ve gained an entirely new perspective on this part of the world and its various peoples. Let me give a few examples.

• I learned that there are many Christians among the Palestinians. When I took time to speak with these fellow believers, they poured out their pain to me—specifically the pain of not being recognized by the Western church as part of the body of Christ.
• I learned that the percentage of Christians in the Middle East is shrinking at an alarming rate. For a variety of reasons, large numbers of them have emigrated during this century, and the trend continues.
• I learned that just as Christians come in many varieties, so do Muslims. There are many Muslim groups and sects, and they disagree and fight with one another in much the same way Catholics and Protestants have fought over the centuries. Some interpret the Muslim teaching of jihad, or holy war, to mean literal war and even terrorism, while others believe it simply means they should strive to obey qur’anic teachings.
• I learned that the church in the Middle East has not figured out how to handle Muslim converts. The problem is that in many Muslim countries, conversion to Christianity is illegal. Muslims who accept Christ can be dismissed from their families, can have their wives and children taken from them, can be sent to jail or to their death. As more and more Christian missions begin to reach out to the Muslim world, this matter of “convert care” will become a key issue.
• I have seen that there is a genuine openness to Jesus among some Muslim groups. The Qur’an considers Abraham, his sons, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus to be prophets, and it recognizes the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospels as holy Scriptures—though the Qur’an is considered to be the last revelation.

We’ve seen that there is a startling openness to the gospel among some of these people. But unless we go to them now in love and influence them in a Christian direction, the ongoing cycle of violence and revenge will force them to take hard-line, extremist positions. They will come to us—the “Christian” West—in judgment.

Though most of my recent travel has been in the Middle East, I have also visited other Muslim countries. Usually the body of believers I found was small and badly in need of encouragement, but very much alive.

The situation in Iran remains very tense, for example, because of the rise of Muslim fundamentalism and radicalism and polarization. And the church is learning how to resist fear and grow in boldness and confidence. Maybe because of all the suffering the country has endured, Iran will be one of the first countries to reap the benefit of the gospel.

A recent experience I had at the Israeli airport in Tel Aviv symbolized both the problem in the world today and the solution that can be found only in Christ.

“So where have you been?” the uniformed [inspector] said sternly.

“I have been to Bethlehem,” I said, knowing she wouldn't be happy about it. (Bethlehem is in the West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel.)

“Where else?”

“Kiryiat Arba.”

Her eyes flashed in disbelief. (Kiryiat Arba is a very rightist Jewish settlement.) “What were you doing there?”

“The son of a Dutch friend of mine lives there, and he was recently shot by a Palestinian terrorist. I wanted to console the family.”

“Bethlehem one day and Kiryiat Arba the next—that is quite a change in location, Sir.”

“Yes,” I said, “but they are both about people who suffer.”

Muslims are not a vast, faceless ethnic group to project our hatred upon, not a new enemy to replace the Communists, but children of Abraham, people created in the image of God, people in need of a Savior whose name is Jesus.

Excerpted from The Calling, by Brother Andrew with Verne Becker, published by Moorings, © 1996. Used with permission from Open Doors International, P.O. Box 27001, Santa Ana, CA 92799.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

You’re in the hospital. Your spouse has gone home to take care of the kids; the room is dark; you’re disoriented and doped with painkillers. Medical personnel have been doing strange and inexplicable things to you all day. You wake up at 2 a.m. and find an unfamiliar white-clad figure injecting something into your iv line. Do you (a) close your eyes and drift back off in childlike trust, or (b) sit up and bellow, “Stop! Stop!”?

It depends on what you’ve been reading. If you are planning a hospital stay anytime soon, don’t put a medical thriller in your overnight bag. The doctor as compassionate healer, worthy of unquestioning trust, has been taking a beating ever since Robin Cook’s Coma hit the shelves in 1977, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.

“When a doctor does go wrong,” Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Watson, “he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.” This view of the doctor as occupying a plane above common humanity (Holmes’s opponent in “The Speckled Band,” Dr. Grimesby Roylott, can bend a poker double with his bare hands) persists. But it is not the nerve or the poker-bending muscle that intimidates us layfolk; it’s the knowledge. Only doctors know all the secrets of the body, including the ones they aren’t telling us. We can only hope they put this knowledge to work for us instead of for themselves.

Greed: the great corrupter of the profession. Mainstream medical thrillers—those you are likely to find in what the book trade refers to as the “ABA market” (American Booksellers Association), in contrast to the “cba market” (Christian Booksellers Association)—are almost entirely centered on doctors who use their knowledge for gain. Cook, a physician who has been on leave from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary since he hit the bestseller list, pops out a thriller every year or so, and his string of novels provides a useful sort of index to the depredations of greed.

In 1987’s Outbreak, hemorrhagic fever appears in three separate chains of hospitals that provide an innovative service: managed care. Widespread panic and a sudden drop-off in business follow. Eventually, we discover that a right-wing group of private practitioners is to blame; they have conspired to spread disease in HMOs in an attempt to protect their own patient base. Marissa, Outbreak‘s perky CDC investigator, looks at the head bad guy and sees his “expensive silk shirt, the heavy gold cuff links, the tasseled Gucci loafers. … It all represented the conspicuous consumption of a wealthy doctor, now fearful of the new medical competition, of changing times, of medicine no longer being a seller’s market.”

Greed is also central to 1995’s Contagion, which is practically the same novel in reverse. This time the good guys are the private doctors who’ve been driven out of business by the managed-care giants: specifically, one Jack Stapleton, who lost his ophthalmology practice to the huge for-profit chain AmeriCare. AmeriCare sweeps through Middle America, “gobbling up practices and hospitals with bewildering speed” and destroying the quality of patient care. When odd epidemics start appearing in AmeriCare facilities, Stapleton hunts down the villain: another managed-care chain, spreading germs to put the competitor out of business.

Medical thrillers go through fashions—fetal-tissue research, euthanasia, Ebola, genetic tinkering, managed care—and the current fashion appears to be illegal transplant organs. Take, for example, the most recent novels of doctors-turned-writers Tess Gerritsen and Leonard Goldberg. In Gerritsen’s Life Support, doctors grow genetically altered embryos in the wombs of hired prostitutes. The embryos turn into blobs of tissue studded with dozens of pituitary glands; the doctors abort the pregnancies and then transplant these glands (for a substantial fee) into rich elderly patients who want their youth back. This would work fine, except that Gerritsen’s greedy doctors eventually step over the line by killing a couple of adults, which leads to their detection by a perky female doctor named Toby. And in Goldberg’s Deadly Harvest, a perky female doctor named Joanna goes searching for a liver for her critically ill sister. Instead, she discovers an organization that grows babies for organ donation. “Oh, my God!” screams Joanna. “The children … are being kept like animals, to be sacrificed when needed?” The villain, a greedy doctor, shrugs: “It’s a moneymaker.” Fashions come and go; greed always remains.

Mainstream thrillers show little awareness of the spiritual dimension of greed; Christian thrillers make the spiritual dimension all too visible.

Medical thrillers have only recently appeared in the cba market, and the greater number are written by nondoctors. Alton Gansky’s By My Hands and Marked for Mercy (1996 and 1998 respectively) are billed as medical suspense. By My Hands revolves around the hunt for a mysterious Healer who performs several cures at a local hospital and then disappears; Marked for Mercy deals with physician-assisted suicide. Gansky himself is a pastor, not a doctor, and it shows. In By My Hands, the putative central character is Dr. Rachel Tremaine, a woman surgeon who finds nurses a “chronic annoyance” and treats her patients with “impatience and disdain.” One of those patients turns out to be pastor Adam Bridger. Despite his emergency appendectomy, Bridger visits parishioners in the hospital, convinces a Jehovah’s Witness to accept a blood transfusion, outargues atheists and New Age philosophers, and even convinces the antagonistic Rachel that a minister’s training is just as rigorous as a doctor’s. (“A theological education is not a cakewalk. … Most ministers with doctorates have a working knowledge of Hebrew … Koine Greek … and at least one modern language.” “What’s your point?” Rachel inquires.)

Gansky’s point is clear by the end of the book, when the villain is unmasked: he’s the manager of a traveling word-of-faith evangelist, determined to find the mysterious Healer and make a mint by organizing gigantic healing services. He is, in fact, the ecclesiastical equivalent of an ABA thriller-villain: a man who uses his calling for personal gain. But the novel is church-centered, not doctor-centered. Gansky’s Marked for Mercy makes several good and sometimes unexpected points about physician-assisted suicide, but it’s not a true medical thriller either (even though the central character is a perky female doctor with fawn hair and blue eyes). Rather, it’s a mystery that happens to involve doctors.

Sigmund Brouwer’s Double Helix (1995), on the other hand, features many of the markers of an ABA thriller—an evil doctor who grows babies in surrogate wombs, a maverick independent hero (Slater Ellis), and a perky female investigator named Paige (she isn’t a doctor, but she has spectacular red hair, and legs that go “to her shoulders”). But while the ABA bad guys want money, Van Klees is trying to create a superrace. As he explains to hero Slater Ellis:

“Any genetic change you make in an embryo will be passed on to the next generation. I was laying the groundwork for future scientists to evolve us into superhumans. … In the long run, we can mold the human species to our own vision.”

Van Klees is a more chilling villain than his mainstream counterparts; he’s an actual zealot, driven by something other than gain. But Brouwer is a writer, not a doctor, and Double Helix has more adventure than medicine in it.

Harry Lee Kraus, Jr., a general surgeon who practices in Virginia, wrote the first cba medical thriller, the unfortunately titled Stainless Steal Hearts (1994). The title is supposed to serve as a pun; the villain of the story, cardiothoracic surgeon Michael Simons, is literally “stealing” the hearts of aborted fetuses for his research. The fact that this pun made it into the title of the book points up a difficulty with all of Kraus’s books: He needs a strong editorial hand. His medical scenes are vivid, and he plots well, but his point of view swings wildly back and forth, he inserts large chunks of backstory in the middle of his action, he steps out of his characters to editorialize, and when his bad guys swear, they emit annoying strings of %$#*&.

But Kraus’s medicine (and his capacity for creative paranoia) rivals that of his ABA colleagues. In Stainless Steal Hearts, evil doctor Simons theorizes that hearts from late second-trimester abortions could be transplanted into infants born with congenital defects. To test this procedure, he teams up with a local abortionist to obtain fetal hearts. Together, the two of them encourage women to wait as late as possible before aborting; Simons then experiments on the still-living fetuses.

What’s behind the evil? Like Brouwer’s Van Klees, Simons isn’t driven by greed alone. In fact, he’s developed an interest in New Age writings.

At first he began with some meditation techniques that he learned at a local university seminar. Occasionally during a time of meditation, or when he was envisioning himself in a position of great influence, he would gain the impression of an idea or thought that seemed to originate outside his body. Later he began having a strong sense of guidance in some of his research.

Money considerations aren’t completely absent from Kraus’s thrillers. In Fated Genes, pediatric surgeon Weber Tyson rations care for retarded infants, justifying himself with the explanation that “debilitated infants won’t have to live on as needless burdens on an already overtaxed society.” But it turns out that Tyson is being manipulated by Lenore Kingsley, president of United Biotechnical Industries. Lenore is also a Satanist who worships with a local coven, even bearing several children for sacrifice in Satanic rituals, and Tyson is simply an instrument for a demonic plan.

In Lethal Mercy, the spiritual evil gets even more obvious. As Simons (making a repeat appearance) operates on the son of his enemy, a demonic creature clings to his back and whispers in his ear; overhead, an angelic warrior stands ready to protect the child. And in The Stain, Kraus’s latest book, a rich philanthropist hires doctors to create clones. But the intent behind this high-dollar project is purely spiritual: to clone dna found on the shroud of Turin, to prove that Jesus was simply human, nothing more.

Like all too many cba novelists, both Gansky and Kraus tend to insert “anchor” characters, ideal Christians who don’t doubt, and who serve as a “normative” voice. Belle, the praying grandmother in Fated Genes, Kerri, the trauma nurse in The Stain, pastor Paul Carpenter in Marked for Mercy—they are capable of explaining God’s will, too virtuous to be real (“With Kerri Barber, prayer was like breathing. … She enjoyed an ongoing spontaneous consciousness of God’s presence in her life that many believers yearn for”), and far too ready to supply mini-Bible studies on demand (“Find Philippians chapter one,” Paul Carpenter tells a character, in the time-honored tradition of Christian fiction. “Do you want to read it out loud, or shall I?”).

But these books are, after all, thrillers. The characters are no more exaggerated than Cook’s wicked managed-care providers, happily spreading 1918 flu virus acquired from a frozen Eskimo corpse; or Goldberg’s spectacularly brilliant, beautiful, and courageous medical examiner, Joanna Blalock. The true distinctive between mainstream and Christian medical thrillers seems to lie in the deepest motivations of the evil doctors. In the ABA, the dollar is the ultimate villain. In the cba, Satan always lurks beyond the dollar.

This is perfectly good theology. After all, in the medical-thriller villain, we see the reflection of the serpent’s face. “Know enough,” he whispered to Eve, “and you too will have the powers of a god. Know enough, and you can satisfy your own desires.” The self-serving doctor, using knowledge to acquire instead of to heal, responds to this same temptation. The greedy physician—like the greedy lawyer, ad executive, or church administrator—is, ultimately, the servant of the Destroyer.

But how is this theme best worked out in fiction? Mainstream thrillers show little awareness of the spiritual dimension of greed; Christian thrillers make the spiritual dimension all too visible. The battle with greed is a spiritual battle, yes, but the battlefield is not the coven down the road. The fiercest skirmishes are not fought between angels and demons, hovering in the air above the operating table. The battlefield is the human heart; the war is fought out with human hands; and any novelist ignores the human face of evil at his own peril.

Consider Kraus’s The Stain, which begins (like Cook’s Contagion) with a managed-care giant taking over a private practice. Dr. Seth Berringer lands himself in a mess, trying to protect himself in the face of managed care’s unreasonable demands. Is this a spiritual battle? Of course it is. But Kraus subordinates it to the novel’s central plot, the demonic attempt to clone Jesus and destroy Christianity. As a matter of fact, when Berringer becomes a Christian, his managed-care problems seem to dissolve. He has been worried about finding work outside the Coast Care system; after his conversion, he says confidently, “I’ll be returning to work soon. This town hasn’t completely abandoned me. You’ll see. Besides, God is in control now.”

But surely a Christian medical thriller should deal, at least in passing, with the hard question: How does a Christian physician operate day-to-day in a system that defines itself by profit? Such a medical system may not have Satanists lighting candles in the corridors, but the serpent is certainly slithering through its halls. The recognition that greed, whatever form it takes, is itself a demonic force—this, in the end, is what will separate the Christian medical thriller from its mainstream equivalent.

Susan Wise Bauer’s second novel, Though the Darkness Hide Thee, was recently published by Multnomah. She teaches literature at the College of William and Mary.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Muriel Sparks’s third novel, the macabre but sharply witty Memento Mori (1959), has three epigraphs; the first two by Yeats and Traherne are about old age, while the third from The Penny Catechism is as follows:

Q. What are the four last things to be ever remembered?
A. The four last things to be ever remembered are Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven.

Sparks, who was 39 before she published any fiction, had converted to Roman Catholicism five years before, calling the church “something to measure from” rather than a direct source of inspiration. But the “four last things” are not listed as such in Scripture, as eschatology had been developed by that very church out of Jesus’ references to apocalypse (largely in Matthew 24-25), bits of Isaiah and Daniel, and especially the Book of Revelation.

Sparks might well have added an epigraph from the psychology of C. G. Jung, for in this novel all her characters are not merely old, but some are senile; and Jung held the view that anyone in old age who did not focus on the goal of death was probably neurotic. By Jung’s definition, most of Sparks’s characters are.

This aging circle of old friends and rivals lives in the quarrelsome past; they prolong old literary arguments and jealousies, jockey to inherit wealth, snipe at society and one another, employ silly substitutes for former sexual vitality, collect encyclopedic but insignificant research on the process of aging, and when blackmailed, either keep or reveal secrets the reader judges to be trivial. In short, these elders meditate on everything except their own imminent deaths.

Besides this cluster of superficial friends and kin in the 75 to 85 age bracket, 12 old ladies (called by nurses “the Grannies”) survive but wet their beds in the government-subsidized Maud Long Medical Ward. The dozen includes Miss Jean Taylor, formerly a maid-companion and acquaintance of that larger senior group still able to live independently outside old-age institutions. Both Taylor and retired Chief Inspector Henry Mor-timer receive the whispered fears of the rest as, one by one, they begin receiving phone messages from an anonymous caller who says only, “Remember you must die!” and then hangs up. To every person, the caller reveals a different tone, accent, apparent age, or class.

After Dame Lettie Colson is bludgeoned to death during a random robbery, police try to link these spreading telephone calls to some actual stalker preying on the elderly, but wiretaps and detective work fail. Both Mortimer and Taylor decide the strange caller must be Death himself, or else a personification rising from the subconscious of each victim on whom death is persistently laying claim, despite their denials of mortality.

During his own conscientious investigation, policeman Mortimer remarks that if he had his life to live over, he would “compose himself every night by practicing the remembrance of death,” because that practice intensifies life. “Without it,” he adds, “you might as well live on the whites of eggs.”

And when one visitor to the old ladies’ home, who is also plagued by the unknown caller, suggests that Jean Taylor’s quick mind with its history of sophistication must hate to be remanded by arthritis to this collection of drooling, incoherent wards of the state, she calls those other 11 grannies her own “memento mori—like your phone calls.”

Supernatural into natural

However gloomy this plot summary may sound, Memento Mori is an amusing novel in Evelyn Waugh style, affirming life by showing this last stage either deepened or wasted, produced by a writer who has always been preoccupied with metaphysical questions of good and evil.

Sparks often introduces the supernatural into everyday settings, as if (since the two planes coexist side by side) sometimes the membrane between them would be bound to break—a premise applied by Flannery O’Connor in her own fiction. Sparks, for example, brings Satanism into the suburbs in The Ballad of Peckham Rye. In one of her stories, as cynics are conducting a tawdry Nativity play, a real and irritable angel bursts in.

This intrusion of supernatural into natural seems, once permitted at all, to become recurrent with writers, and not simply in Frank Peretti’s sagas of demonic warfare. In my novel Souls Raised from the Dead, once I had written one scene in which a possible “ghost” (the dead Miss Lila Torrido) appears while Mary Grace Thompson is dying, it became inevitable that the restless spirit of Tamsen Donner should haunt many pages of the next novel, The Sharp Teeth of Love, as it is inevitable that death and love are every serious writer’s primary subjects. Ghosts themselves are contagious scene stealers, appearing, for example, in the novels of Reynolds Price, entire story collections by Alison Lurie and Edith Wharton, in Voltaire’s Semiramus, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, and the work of Toni Morrison, Randall Kenan, and many other African-American writers, even as a sense of the revitalized presence of the late Joy Davidman in C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed.

Whether readers decide such ghosts are actual spirits or only psychological projections matters less than the intended light the real as well as fictional death casts back onto life itself. Though one of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims warns that “Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily,” Socrates did not flee Athens despite Crito’s advice, and Jesus moved straight ahead to Jerusalem and Gethsemane. Jung’s opinion about confronting one’s own impending death is shared by Kierkegaard, who—finding an advantage in our normal death-fearing despair with all its risk of meaninglessness—suggests that from that precipice man might “leap” and “fall into the open arms of God.”

Two local deaths

On one Sunday in the spring of 1993, I was driving home from church down the narrow rutted road in Chatham County, North Carolina, that we shared with neighbors, when I was stopped by my husband’s waving arms. “Frank died,” he said tersely. “Can you sit with Lib till the undertaker comes?”

This couple had been our good neighbors ever since we had bought land here a decade before, land that had once been part of a larger tract owned by Lib’s father. When we moved into an existing small house on those acres of pasture and forest, we must have seemed helpless city folks; but their natural kindness embraced us nonetheless, advised us on well pumps and feed dealers, sent our loose dogs home, shared garden produce.

Lib and Frank, then in their seventies, had lived through a long marriage with its good and hard times. During these later, harder days, his emphysema sometimes frustrated a once-active Frank; nursing him while coping with her own ailments had also made Lib weary. When his condition worsened, I served as witness on the day he signed his living will to reject extreme resuscitation measures. On that day he seemed irascible, mistrustful, as if the paper gave permission for spouse and hospice to rush him to the grave.

Now he had died at home as he preferred. I went indoors to where Lib sat like a guard by the hospital bed, watching the sheet-covered features of her husband. Although as a child I had said farewell to grandparents who then died overnight, had hugged my recuperating father only to learn by phone that he did not survive to the next dawn, I had by now reached the age at which burgeoning cancers and waning hearts were killing my own former schoolmates; this was my first experience of sitting with the widow and the newly dead—a vigil that for a generation earlier had been commonplace.

For an hour or so we talked about Frank, who had “died so easily,” just between spoonfuls of Jell-O being slipped into his mouth. There were memories of early marriage, golf games, other houses and jobs in other cities, baseball, their inability to have children, special vacations, his love of chocolate, and his fatal love of unfiltered cigarettes.

Gone from this history was any recollection of how illness had lately made him cross. If the dying are said in the end to review their own lives, so survivors also sort through the years, and favorably, as if the corpse might overhear. Selectively, the slate is wiped clean, the sum of good increased. At one point, Lib suddenly leaned forward, pulled down the sheet, and kissed Frank’s cooling forehead.

We Christians still meditating on the last things draw comfort when we remember that Jesus himself was no stoic on the cross.

Then she said softly, “I have always loved you,” and covered his face again.

Afterward, in a buzz of crowded activity, the undertakers came to wheel out the body, hospice workers to flush prescription pills down the commode into the septic tank, men to roll away the rented bed and oxygen equipment, until the room was suddenly empty of the whole experience. Frank would be cremated, his ashes retained until the urn eventually could be propped between Lib’s embalmed hands—I do not know if this was done when she died 18 months later.

Neither had a dramatic death; neither took a stirring nor quotable departure toward Rabelais’s “great perhaps,” but they had left for me a local parallel to Goethe’s Baucis and Philemon, and a reminder of his words in Elective Affinities, “The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be charged through all eternity.”

How to die now

Montaigne once wanted to produce a book of real and literary deaths that “in teaching men to die should after teach them to live.”

In 1980, Norman and Betty Donaldson compiled 300 real deaths in How Did They Die?—an alphabetical chronology stretching from Socrates to Elvis Presley. Their pages primarily make readers contemplate the contrast between pre-antibiotic deathbeds at home versus today’s choices of high-tech hospitals (where 50 percent of Americans died in 1949 and 80 percent do now) or Dr. Kevorkian’s oxygen-stealing machine; choices among extreme unction, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages, or Raymond Moody’s near-death experiences (familiarly known now as ndes); between the mossy country churchyard and today’s perpetual-care parks where flat headstones make grass cutting easy for power mowers; between those who have died accepting God’s mystery and those others accepting some other metaphysic—reincarnation, New Age karma, whatever.

During the nineteenth century, physicians encouraged to prescribe narcotics for the dying were said to engage in “obstetrics for the soul”; today lawyers and doctors more typically argue over how much more humanely we euthanize dogs and cats.

Death and church

Let it be said straightaway that we children who grew up among Associate Reformed Presbyterians had memento mori impressed on us officially every seventh day and subliminally during nightly prayer: “if I should die before I wake.” We were admonished young to work, for the night is coming, to remember our Creator in the days of our youth, and so on. Although in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had not one word to say about death, and although our radio heroes regularly escaped death to fight crime again in next week’s sequel, Sunday school made vivid to us how Stephen went down under stones, made clear to us also that the head of John the Baptist could not be reattached.

My lifelong “remembering” since then has run the gamut. I tried the American Society for Psychical Research, but lost patience with Ian Stevenson and those reincarnated (previously wealthy) children in India. Bridey Murphy and the Fox sisters proved fake. Every photo of ectoplasm always looked like damaged film. Even now, when insomniac, I listen to Art Bell’s wee-hours broadcasts from Nevada, on which he frequently interviews time travelers, witches, ufo witnesses, Big Foot survivors, and alien abductees; but I do not phone in for details. Neither Houdini nor those whom I loved, once deceased, have ever come back bearing news. Of course, kin and old friends appear in my dreams, where they always seem healed, whole, and happy while they walk along tropical beaches—but so what?

No, after transmigration and Freud’s Thanatos; after the crystal balls, Ouija boards, hellfire preachers, eternal recurrence, Buddhist reabsorption, automatic writing, magnetic lees, druid monoliths, table tipping; after Hades, Sheol, and Gehenna; beyond J. B. Rhine, Colin Wilson, Edgar Casey, Hal Lindsey, and Shirley MacLaine; after Camus’s weary Sisyphus gives up; after Marcus Aurelius plus the stoicism of Ecclesiastes wears thin (these being the most appealing alternatives), there is no place for this aging Death-Rememberer to go but home to the New Testament.

Koheleth or Christ?

Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, concludes, “I think it is very hard for secular men to die.” He did die, of cancer, shortly after the book was published.

So did Dostoevsky die three months after finishing The Brothers Karamazov, which opens with a New Testament epigraph and closes with an affirmation of hope for eternal life.

Ars moriendi—the art of dying—and its parallel, the art of mourning the dead, still seem in the end to rely on secular stoicism or religious faith. For example, Sherwin B. Nuland’s 1994 bestseller How We Die is careful, scientific, even ethical; but it is not religious. And when in 1997 professional poet and also professional undertaker Thomas Lynch published his essay collection about life, death, and faith, the book was criticized in the New York Times Book Review from the viewpoint of a secular humanist who preferred Jessica Mitford’s version.

But we Christians still meditating on the last things draw comfort when we remember that Jesus himself was no stoic on the cross. He felt despair and dread before and during the crucifixion; he cried out his challenging question to God as have King David, Job, Ivan Ilych, and millions upon millions. Stoicism is not required of believers, but hope is offered. Jane Kenyon, dead before fifty, ends one poem thus: “and God, as promised, proves / to be mercy clothed in light.”

If I cannot refute the stoics, nor shrug off cosmic indifference, if I cannot cheer up Beckett’s lonely characters waiting onstage, not concur with Freud about the infantilism of religion, discard it, and then advance bravely into “hostile life,” neither can these refute my sometimes wavering hope. And my emphasis is on hope, hope in God’s mercy rather than fear of eternal punishment, which worried even ancient Egyptian kings and made Virgil separate the good from the justly punished dead. It is our sadism, not evangelical Christianity, that relishes medieval and hellish visions of torment, and it is our hubris that in imagination tests and tunes the personal harp and mentally tries on well-suited wings. Only if ends justify means can we (on the far side of the veil) take pleasure in separating sheep from goats forever, after we have finished (on the near side of that veil) making war on infidels and burning heretics at the stake.

Spiritual journeys into the beyond were nearly as frequent in the Middle Ages as those taken now during flat ekg moments before a defibrillator blasts the heart into rhythm again. In their context, medieval soul travelers often saw on their journeys ample fire and brimstone; in ours, the dying patient typically rushes through some final birth/death canal toward light. Doubters, of course, dismiss testimony about nde as a subjective response to oxygen deprivation. To them, such anecdotal evidence is as unpersuasive here as in second-hand, multiple translations of Saint Paul. Even Hans KŸng, in Eternal Life, distinguishes death as the final destination from the process leading to it, dying cell by cell, and believes most of Moody’s nde samples have experienced the first stage of that process but not the last condition.

Remember you must live

Memento mori, then, commands me not so much to dwell on heaven, hell, or the millennium, nor to contemplate the whole world’s eventual death in apocalypse, but to value today’s immediate gift of life against the backdrop of transience and God’s eternity. Though Jesus acknowledged an end time, his emphasis was on daily forgiveness and hourly love.

The earliest Gospel, Mark, takes only 11 verses to summarize all postresurrection events—in the long version of the ending—and it ends with the apostles at work in this world. The earliest New Testament Easter story (1 Corinthians 15) says little about the mechanics of how Christ died and then came back, but concentrates more on what his overcoming of death should mean in human lives. And that elaborator Luke, who will double everybody else’s angels at every opportunity, relocates Jesus’ ascension to Bethany but closes by emphasizing the praise and worship of the 11 left behind. (Naturally, he cannot resist adding more angels plus a spread of clouds in Acts 1:10, but the heavenly message puts a quick end to sky gazing; clearly the coming Pentecost is more important.) And gospel writer John shows no interest at all in postresurrection space travel. Jesus at the end of the Fourth Gospel is far too busy to take airy flight because, by patient repetition, he keeps trying to make one thing clear to Peter: “Do you love me? Feed my lambs.”

Memento which dying, then?

For me, as for some characters in my fiction, memento mori is an order to take life as seriously as its Creator did, to apply urgency, to view each day in an eternal context, to live right now the abundant and loving life Christ commanded—and to fail at all these but still to trust in mercy.

Except for this heightened commitment and purpose provided by our sure mortality, I believe that in ways beyond my understanding God has in Christ defeated the former annihilating power of death.

Oh, that’s easy to say. Too easy. Vague. Facile.

Such trust comes harder when tested against real dying. When Bob, my Early American Literature colleague in the University of North Carolina’s English Department—a friend of 30 years—progressed downward by slow medical degrees from finding a lump in the groin to lymphoma, then up by way of successful chemotherapies and optimistic MRI reports, he experienced all that intensity of life measured against the risk of death. He was free to retire, to write more essays on the books he loved, to travel to Spain.

But before too long, in disguise and by sabotage, the cells in his lungs went malignant. When no more cure was available, he received at home old friends and kin and former students. There was time to laugh and talk, to share many good memories, to omit any pretense that he would long survive.

Those good times ran out. When last I came, he had turned into a skeleton thinly wrapped in yellowing pastry, eyes already closed, the breath whapping in and out with a great suck and labored release. Having been told that hearing is the last sense to shut down, I sat by his shell through which air slammed in and out, and reminded his ear of affections and blessings. It was like trying to talk to a bellows.

The next day he was gone, having told us no more about death than all the 300 recorded in the pages of How Did They Die? And at the memorial service in a bland campus auditorium, I swallowed hard and read aloud as he had wished Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death.” Cole Porter recordings were played, the Lord’s Prayer murmured. By the podium, Bob’s color photo—pink and precancer, young and already long ago—was displayed.

Not a churchgoer, Bob was perhaps not technically a Christian except in his behavior, but I have continued to remember his particular death (and the bravery by which an excellent teacher continued to teach us who would outlive him) in the context of Goethe’s Faust. The play opens with a God-Mephistopheles wager much like the opening of Job, and it ends with Faust, who richly deserves all punishment, being granted mercy instead. When Goethe was 82, he emphasized that this salvation came not because it was earned but “by the divine grace vouchsafed to us.”

“Say to the moment, ‘Stay!’ Thou art so fair!” Goethe’s line captures the intensity with which we transient mortals who know we are transient must surely seize the day. And “He who strives mightily we are allowed to save,” speaks to that final and mysterious grace that runs to meet all of us prodigal sons and daughters.

Say to the moment, Stay! Strive mightily. Memento mori.

Doris Betts is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of many novels, including most recently The Sharp Teeth of Love (Knopf). This essay is taken from Things in Heaven and Earth: Exploring the Supernatural, edited by Harold Fickett, Copyright 1998 by Paraclete Press. Used by permission of Paraclete Press, P.O. Box 1568, Orleans MA 62653.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Belle Metcalfe stood on the steps of her cabin at Rocky Look Bible Camp and looked toward the dropped-down sun. A blue pickup shimmied along the valley road far below, fishtailing here and there on the loose gravel. Though she couldn’t see the truck, Belle heard it coming. She knew that her niece Jeanette was finally home from an all-day trip with Drew Parks, and she knew, too, that they’d been up to no good. About the only thing she didn’t know was that a hitchhiker sat in the back seat of their pickup, wondering what kind of weird fate had brought him here. The mountains to the east had turned dark purple. You could still smell dinner, though dinner was all done and the dining hall staff had finished washing up.

“What do you think about Jeanette and her boyfriend?” Belle asked her husband, Dean, who sat beside her on the steps having his after-dinner pipe before vespers. Belle was grey-headed, but Dean and his brother, Gratian, both had shiny curls of hair, black as you please. It grew down the sides of their faces like tree bark, and Fansher, the camp cook, liked to tell them they had African blood.

“There’s a Afro-American in your woodpile,” she’d say.

Could be true or could be not true. Most people said that Gratian looked like Abraham Lincoln, but poor Dean was too fat for that.

“I think it’s about time little Jeanette found herself a husband,” Dean said calmly. “She don’t seem to have nobody else interested in her.”

“That’s because she’s already dated every other man who set foot here! She’s run through most of the counselors, none’s good enough.”

“I can understand that,” said Dean. “The counselors are a little young for Jeanette, ain’t they? She’s past college age, she don’t want a younger man.”

“She’s not past 30,” said Belle. “She’s only 26, and that Drew Parks is younger than she is.”

“Oh, what you so worried about, Mother?”

“I’m worried about the way they act together.”

“How do they act together?”

Belle whispered something to her husband, something that had the words “tight clothes” and “temptation” and “desperate” in it. He looked around warily, then knocked the ashes out of his pipe and stuck it in a clean brass spittoon beside the door.

“Well,” he said, “she’s not the beauty in the family; you can’t blame her for trying to reel one in while her sister Delphi’s off to college. This is a Christian boy we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

“Dean, do you hear what I’m saying? I’m trying to keep Jeanette out of trouble. She’s so crazy for the boys. She reminds me of her mother.”

“Oh, don’t let’s get started on to that.”

“Get started on to what? Tell me your brother doesn’t need help raising two girls alone. I think you should say something to him about this.”

“I’m going down to the chapel. I’ll see you at vespers.”

“I wonder why God brings all these rascals our way,” she mumbled. “Can’t he bring just one decent fellow?” She watched her husband—so innocent, so trusting, too godly for his own good—pick his way down the hill toward the campground. When he was well out of sight she hurried jauntily after him. She slung past the pretty log cabin that belonged to his brother, Gratian—the cabin where little Jeanette and Delphi had been raised without a woman’s guiding hand (other than her own) since their mother ran off so long ago.

She took a trail that did not lead to the chapel. This trail cut off through the woods toward the playing fields. It was ferny and damp, strewn with boulders and pine straw. Down near the softball field lay Jeanette’s cabin, beside a row of pecan trees and a small parking lot with a sign thrusting up from the middle of it that said

ROCKY LOOK BIBLE CAMP
THREE FORKS, TENNESSEE
EST. 1955 FOR THE GLORY
OF GOD AND THE SALVATION
OF YOUNG AMERICANS

There sat the blue truck, empty, in front of Jeanette’s cabin. The hood made a clacking noise as it tried to cool. The air smelled like burning oil. Belle looked this way and that to make sure her husband didn’t come out of the trees and catch her snooping. Then she waved at some girls pitching a ball a hundred feet away and darted past the empty truck to the cabin.

She pulled slightly at the screen door, trying to be quiet, but it had swollen tight shut in the heat. She clenched her teeth and yanked the door open with a loud screech. “Jeanette girl, you home?”

“Huh?” A bare-chested boy jumped about a foot from a folding chair behind the door.

“Excuse me, ma’am!” He stood up, covering his white stomach with his elbows.

Belle’s mouth dropped open. “Son, what you doing in Miss Jeanette’s cabin? Don’t you know the rules? No male campers in the girls’ cabins.”

“Well, ma’am, I’m not exactly a camper.”

“No excuses. Come on out right now. And get you a shirt!”

The boy came outside as quickly as he could, smiling in what she thought was a stupid way. His jaw stuck out from his head; his face was red either with sunburn or shame.

“What is your name?” Belle asked, putting her head back through the door, “and who is your counselor?”

“My name’s Cecil Howard. I’m not a camper, ma’am. I got a ride out here from Georgia, see. These folks picked me up back on the road and I don’t mean to stop long, neither. I’m on my way to New Mexico.”

She had her mind on other things. “Do you happen to know exactly where my niece went?”

“Jeanette? I think she went thataway.” Cecil pointed to a path that led into the woods beyond the pecan trees.

Belle straightened up. “Was she with him? Drew Parks?”

“Yes, she sure was.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Well go on to vespers, son. Don’t be hanging around Miss Jeanette’s cabin any more.”

“No, ma’am, I won’t. Have no intention of it.”

“Good.” Belle hurried over to the path.

Cecil took a breath as he watched the trees close around her. She might have been a rabbit, the way she bent forward, her round tail sticking up. He looked back at the truck, figured there was no chance of getting any farther on the road tonight, and sat down on Jeanette’s porch to think about his plans.

In his back pocket was a letter from the girl he intended to reach before the end of the week:

Dear Cecil,
I am not very happy in this place, but when I think about you and how you are so kind, it is enough to make me cry with happiness. It is very hot and dry here. Even if I could have a garden I couldn’t bend over far enough to plant things but they don’t let us garden since there is not enough water and we already have to take three minute showers.

I’m getting out on June 1 if everything comes out all right (ha ha) and the address of the new place is Sunshine House, 145 Eureka Trail, Albuquerque. So come as soon as you can and I will be waiting for you, sans baby, since it will be in foster care. I promise I will not sign anything final until you get here.

All my love,

Maria

Cecil had never laid eyes on Maria, only written to her c/o the Branton, Georgia, Public Library Pen Pal Program, but he pictured her as a beautiful person about his age sitting beside a cactus in a hot desert garden, one soft hand across her swollen stomach. Now he was on his way to rescue her and her child. That was his plan, at least, though he’d already come out of his way just by accepting a ride to Tennessee. What would their meeting be like? He saw himself stepping in between Maria and the sun and saying, “I’m here. I’m going to take care of you and that baby of yours, and you won’t have to worry about a darn thing.”

“I really am coming, Maria,” he thought as he sat on Jeanette’s porch, “I really am coming, but this was the only ride I could get and now I’m stuck here for tonight.”

A bell began to ring. “Vespers!” shouted the softball players across the field, and they crowded together and began walking in the same direction. Cecil watched them go, then stood up and started after them.

He brushed against a shaggy apple tree, its leaves a mix of deep green and pale yellow, no fruit on its branches. Must not be any other apple trees about. Straight in front of him, right beneath a big hill shooting up from the ground like a man’s head, sat a little chapel.

“Hey you! Where’s your shirt?” asked a young man standing by the chapel bell. He wore a whistle around his neck. “You can’t go in to vespers like that.”

“I reckon I got it too dirty to wear.”

“Then go on get another shirt, boy. Don’t be coming down here half naked. Which cabin you in?”

“I—” Cecil gestured back toward the hill.

“Oh, up there in Enoch. Where’s your sense? Go in my cabin—it’s the one behind the latrine. Borrow a shirt from my dresser. Not my Vols shirt. And give me the shirt right back after vespers!”

Cecil moved through the crowd to the cabin. It sat in long shadows, under oaks and more pecans. He opened the screen door and slipped in quickly.

The bunks were simple mattresses on metal frames. Each one had a sleeping bag rolled up at the foot. Each one had a striped grey and white pillow. On a trunk at the far left end of the cabin sat a transistor radio playing something religious, and next to the radio lay a pile of T-shirts, size X-tra large, three pairs of rolled-up socks, and a pair of black sports sandals.

There were some pictures, too. One was of a girl. Cecil couldn’t see her well in the shadows. He hesitated for a second, then picked it up and walked back into the light. The girl was pretty. She had long blond hair and heavy bangs. Her eyes were sort of turned up, her teeth white. Could Maria look like this? On the back was written, “To Franklin, Love Delphi.” Cecil smiled at the girl and hated to set her back down alone in the dark on that guy’s trunk in this place. He put the picture in his pocket next to the letter from Albuquerque and went on to vespers wearing a plain white T-shirt he’d found at the bottom of the pile.

The chapel was a huge, dark, wood-paneled room with big screens for windows and a stone fireplace at the front. He sat down on a wooden folding chair near the back, next to a blond boy with a red face and cracked lips. You could see that he’d recently grown about a foot. The skin on his knees was pink and smooth. His hands looked too large for him.

“You like this camp?” the boy asked.

“Guess so. Never been to another.”

“This is the best I been to so far. What cabin you in?”

“Well, Jonah, I guess. I just got here.”

“I’m in Ezekiel.” The boy cracked his knuckles. “I’m glad I’m not in Jonah, ain’t y’all’s counselor that Franklin over there with the big stupid whistle? I heard y’all take those 4:30 a.m. hikes most every day.”

“Sounds nasty,” said Cecil.

“I’m in the Scouts. You in the Scouts?”

“Used to be,” said Cecil. “I hate the Scouts.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

The boy sighed, then looked around and started a similar conversation with the girl on his other side. While they waited, it turned dark outside. No light remained but the big hanging light inside the chapel, shaped like a globe.

“All right, young people,” said a pudgy black-headed man standing up to the polished wooden pulpit. “Brother Gratian’s going to deliver the Word of the Lord tonight. I’m just going to open with prayer. I want each and every one of you to pray that the Lord will speak something to your heart tonight, something that will change you forever. Pray with me now.”

A quiet fell across the room, a quiet like first sleep. The man prayed. Cecil didn’t really listen, except when the man said, “Lord, forgive our wandering hearts. Draw us to you, O Lord.”

“I ought to get on my way,” thought Cecil. “I ought to be getting on my way out West.” Outside, the frogs sang loudly.

The prayer stopped and the man raised his head and sat down. Then, from the back of the room came another man, just as black-headed but much taller, with broad, thin shoulders and a long neck and low-hanging belly.

“Thank you, Dean,” he said when he got up to the pulpit. “You know, it’s a little funny sometimes to hear Dean call me ‘brother’ and reflect on the fact that he is indeed my brother, my earthly brother, and yet that you all are my brothers and sisters. Am I right? Yes, I am right. Folks, young people, am I a good man?”

There was a nervous pause. “Yes, Brother Gratian,” said a girl in the front with braces on her teeth. “You are.”

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Kenna Drender.”

“Kenna, why do you think I’m a good man?”

She said something in such a low voice that Cecil couldn’t hear.

“Well!” Brother Gratian practically shouted the word. “That’s nice of you to say so, Kenna, but what if I was to tell you I’m a murderer? I killed a man. You still think I’m nice? No, I reckon you don’t. In fact, you want to run out that door, don’t you, so you can call your mama and tell her to climb in her automobile and come after you? Don’t want to be friends with me no more. Because I am a dangerous man. Am I right, y’all?”

Some of the boys laughed, but Brother Gratian paid no attention. “It happened quite a few years ago, you see. I killed a good man, tortured him and watched the breath and blood slowly ebb, ebb, ebb, ebb from his pain-racked body. I looked on without mercy, I turned away from him without regret. I thought I was innocent, but his blood is on my hands.”

Everyone in the room hushed. “I killed a man,” said Brother Gratian. His hands shook as he lifted them. “But so did all of you kill him. Kenna Drender and”—he pointed to a boy in the front—”that young man there, I don’t know your name yet, son, but I’ll learn it, and John Evan over there, and even my own two sweet baby girls, Jeanette and Delphi. We all killed him, every one of us. Drove spikes through his hands and feet. And the blood ran down his cheeks from the thorns of his mock crown.

“You say, ‘How, Brother Gratian? I was not there the day that Christ Jesus died.’ But I say to you, young people, we were all there. With our sin we nailed him to a cross. And with his death he paid out our debt to God for all that filthy, disgusting, murderous sin.

“You say, ‘How, Brother Gratian? I haven’t sinned that much.’ But listen, young people, you got to look in your heart. What’s there? What’s behind the face you show to the world? Is there rage? Is there jealousy? Is there lust? Is there a desire to be your own savior, to do works of righteousness in order to save yourself or your sister or your brother—when really we’re all doomed to perish without Jesus there to snatch us from the Devil’s jaws?

“Yes, there is, because we all have sin in our hearts. And when Jesus filled his burning lungs to gasp, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,’ who do you think he was talking about?

He looked around, raised his eyebrows for a second, and sighed. “And all you in this room. We all killed him. He forgave all of us.”

There was a sharp smell in the chapel, pine wood and young sweat. Cecil felt a pain at the back of his neck, as though someone had yanked him up like a cat. He stared at the preacher’s lips, which kept opening and closing, and for another moment all he could hear in the room was the slow whine of a girl beginning to cry.

Outside, an owl hooted. At the back of the chapel a door opened and Brother Gratian stopped in the middle of his sentence and took a deep breath. All the young heads in the room, those baby faces on grown bodies, turned to look. Belle came in, her short grey hair sticking up and her mouth set straight. Behind her walked Jeanette, staring at the floor. Where was Drew?

“Have a seat, honeybun,” said Brother Gratian. “Glad you finally decided to join us.” Jeanette nodded at her father and slipped onto a back row across from Cecil. She didn’t look at him, but he knew something was wrong. Her long hair was kinky and wet. She had grass on the backs of her bare calves and heels. She stared straight down, her mouth as tight as a seam in her white face. Cecil watched her until the sermon was over and the singing started. “This World Is Not My Home,” “Jesus, Name Above All Names,” “Beautiful Savior,” “We Are One in the Spirit.”

Jeanette didn’t sing. She sat as still as the dirt dug from a grave. Then suddenly she got up and walked to the front alone. She walked right to the pulpit all by herself and stood before her own father.

He pulled a piece of grass out of her hair and said something to her in a gentle voice.

Cecil felt a terrible, terrible need. He hardly knew Jeanette, he’d only met her that afternoon, and yet he couldn’t bear to see her alone up there kneeling. It was the loneliest sight he’d ever seen, her with her shoulders shaking and her daddy leaning over her. “Come!” something said. He stood up and jumped forward as if somebody had pinched him. He practically pushed Jeanette sideways to kneel beside her. She smelled like wet grass and crushed mint leaves. Their bare arms touched.

“Son,” said Brother Gratian hastily, looking down at him with lifted eyebrows while Jeanette began to sob and moan—”It’s all my fault! I drove my precious Drew away.”

“Son,” said Brother Gratian, beginning again, “do you come today to repent of your sins and accept the Lord Jesus?”

Cecil stammered. “Mostly, uh, yes sir, I believe I do.”

“Then pray this prayer with me.” Two heavy weights fell upon Cecil then, one pair of hands on his shoulders and another on his head. He closed his eyes and repeated Jeanette’s father’s words, and then he heard feet shuffling up behind him. Others had come to be saved.

After a few seconds the burden of hands lifted from his head and shoulders and he opened his eyes again. But Jeanette was no longer beside him. He twisted around and saw that the back door of the chapel stood open. She had slipped away, but he was trapped by the small crowd and couldn’t escape to reach her.

Even when the singing and praying had finished and he could go out in the dark to search for her—well, then he couldn’t get to her! He found her cabin windows lit, but the shutters were drawn and others were already inside talking. He heard snatches of their conversation: “By their fruits ye shall know them,” Jeanette’s aunt said, and Brother Gratian said, “It’s a good thing we found out about that Drew before it was too late, before he got our little girl in real trouble.” Below their voices he heard Jeanette’s soft crying.

Cecil figured he’d find a place to sleep, not far away, and help Jeanette in the morning. So he settled down on the ground again, next to a creek that cut its way down the hill above her cabin. All night he slept soundly, no longer thinking about Maria, not wondering when he’d reach Albuquerque, not remembering the photograph in his pocket nor even considering that he might now be bound for heaven. Yet Brother Gratian had said that he was—right after that brief prayer in the chapel: “Son, you have been redeemed and justified, signed, sealed and bound up for glory. Amen.”

Betty S. Carter is the author of two novels, I Read It in the Wordless Book (Baker) and The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave (Harold Shaw), and has just completed a third, from which this story is taken.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Nelson Malwitz was having a midlife crisis. At 50, he was at the top of his game. As corporate director of chemical research for Sealed Air Corporation in Danbury, Connecticut, the company that invented Bubble Wrap, Malwitz achieved seven patents for plastic foam technology. He served as an adult Sunday-school teacher at Walnut Hill Community Church, a congregation he helped found. He had a wife, Marge, and two teenage sons, Jonathan and David, who loved him. But something was missing. Then he remembered Urbana.

The year was 1967. Raised in the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination, Malwitz was 21 when he attended the InterVarsity student missions conference in Urbana, Illinois. Reflecting the idealism of the time, Malwitz wanted to change the world, so he committed his life to missions. But family, career, and mortgage payments soon got in the way.

Now with a view from middle age, Malwitz decided to revisit his dream and pursue a second career in missions. But he quickly found missions agencies were unprepared for a skilled professional in his fifties. “It was so difficult to get in, and I had no idea where the point of entry was,” Malwitz says.

Gene Shackelford, a friend from church, had a similar experience. At 59, he retired as a vice president of Union Carbide. He and his wife were active in Bible Study Fellowship and participated on his congregation’s missions committee, but it took them three years to find a position in missions. “I thought, That’s way too long,” Malwitz says. “The task is way too difficult for people to get a significant second career if the missions infrastructure is not ready to take people.” So Malwitz decided his contribution to missions would be to encourage others from his generation to consider second careers in missions and to help them through what he calls “the missions minefield.”

Malwitz founded Finishers Project in 1996 (finishers@compuserve.com). “As you hit 50, you no longer count your years from the time you were born, but you count the amount of time you have left,” he says. “The big idea has to do with finishing well.” The concept has captured the attention of more than 30 missions agencies, which are joining with Finishers Project to host an “Urbana-like” conference in Chicago October 1-3. Finishers Forum is addressing financial, health, and family concerns, and connecting an anticipated 600 boomer participants with 150 missions agency representatives.

Like Malwitz, who calls himself “the generic evangelical baby boomer sitting in the pew,” millions of boomers, identified as those born between 1946 and 1965, are approaching retirement with their nests empty and their 401(k)s full. In 2001, the leading edge of the 82 million-strong group turns 55, for an estimated total of 21 million boomers 50 years or older. Malwitz has determined that 4.6 million of them are evangelicals. If 1 percent is interested in missions, 46,000 individuals could be available for ministry.

They are the healthiest, wealthiest, and best-educated retirees ever. These evangelical boomer “finishers” (or “second-halfers”) may want to return to their Urbana roots and start second careers in missions. They have already achieved success in their careers; now they want to achieve significance. Their idealism—as well as their skills and money—could help revive flagging North American missions.

SEARCH FOR SIGNIFICANCE: Michael Darby, a senior vice president at Shearson Lehman, had been a stockbroker for 30 years, and his wife, Elizabeth, had owned a retail store for 13 years when they started feeling burned out. “We didn’t have the joy of going to work like we used to,” Michael says.

A teaching cassette by television preacher Charles Stanley about discovering God’s will and a job offer from a friend at Focus on the Family prompted the Darbys to consider career opportunities in ministry. A visit with friend Bruce Wilkinson at Walk Thru the Bible confirmed their call to missions.

But panic quickly set in. They had a business to liquidate, a house to sell, and a career to conclude—but at least their children were grown and they had no financial debt. The Darbys decided to let God take care of the details. “If it’s his calling, we’re not supposed to worry about those things,” Michael says. “We’re just supposed to obey.

In 1991, Michael retired early at 54 and Elizabeth, then 49, sold her store so they could work with CoMission, a cooperative effort by 80 organizations to teach Christian values in Russian public schools. After short trips to the country, the Darbys joined a team from Navigators to live in Rostov, Russia, for a year to disciple new believers. The Darbys exchanged a home on the Florida coast for university housing with no hot water, infrequent heat and electricity, and a view of a garbage dump; but they considered themselves blessed to have rediscovered God’s purpose. Now living in Georgia, the Darbys are working with Navigators on a new program to help other finishers determine their giftedness.

Ken and Pat Kingston assumed they would retire one day and move to Florida or Arizona. But retirement came sooner than they expected when Ken, a middle-school teacher in Crystal Lake, Illinois, for 29 years, had an early retirement option at age 59. In 1991, they seized the opportunity to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming missionaries with Wycliffe Bible Translators.

The Kingstons believe God orchestrated the timing. Pat’s mother, who had been living with the Kingstons, had died a month earlier. Their youngest son married the previous summer.

But credit card debt concerned them, along with leaving their four grandchildren, all of whom lived within two blocks of their home. Ken’s pension helped, but the Kingstons still had to raise support.

The Kingstons “adopted” many new grandchildren in Lima, Peru, where Ken used his experience as an educator to start a school for missionary children while Pat served in the Wycliffe office. After six years, the Kingstons returned home for a year, but they now are packing for a three-year assignment in Kenya. “[Retired] people are traipsing around the country in rvs,” laughs Pat. “I think that would be the most boring life I could ever imagine.”

Both the Darbys and Kingstons achieved success in their careers, but they wanted something more. Bob Buford would say they sought significance. Buford, whose book Halftime (Zondervan, 1994) is the unofficial guidebook for finishers, says that for retirees who choose service over leisure, “the payoff is blessedness.”

A recent survey of 600 evangelical boomers, sponsored by Finishers Project, indicates 61 percent would like to retire early and pursue a second career. Fifty-four percent say they would consider a second career in missions. Eighty-one percent want to be able to serve with their spouse. “They want to leave a legacy,” says Rod Beidler, director of international recruitment for Navigators.

MISSIONS DILEMMA: As early retirees search for significance in the second half of their lives, some missions leaders are wondering whether self-absorbed boomers are willing to make the costly sacrifices necessary to serve in overseas ministry. But with the leveling off of church commitment to foreign missions, agency leaders may have few alternatives to draw in a significant number of fresh missions candidates.

The Mission Handbook (MARC, 1997) indicates that by 2000, more than 1 billion people still will not have heard the gospel message. Yet as the world’s population increases, North American mission efforts have not.

“Basically, we’ve plateaued,” says Jim Reapsome, founder of Evangelical Missions Quarterly, commenting on the current numbers of full-time North American missionaries. By contrast, the number of short-term missionaries—on assignments as short as two weeks—continues to rise.

There are more available missions positions than qualified candidates to fill them. TEAM is recruiting for 700 positions. Wycliffe has 1,500 openings. Servant Opportunity Network, a computer matching service for retirees, lists more than 6,000 available jobs with more than 200 missions agencies.

Ralph Winter, general director of Frontier Mission Fellowship, estimates non-Western missionaries will outnumber Western missionaries in the next few years. Missions experts point to the new ranks of cross-cultural missionaries from developing-world congregations as the result of centuries of missionary commitment from the Western church.

But in North America, the church’s financial support of missions is steadily declining. According to Money Matters: Personal Giving in American Churches (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 10-15 percent of Protestant church budgets goes to foreign missions, roughly half the amount of what it was in the 1950s. The State of Church Giving Through 1992 (empty tomb, inc., 1994) estimates that Protestant church members each gave only $20 to foreign missions in 1991, compared to $164 spent on soft drinks and $103 for sporting goods.

“[The church] is losing its zeal,” says Larry Walker, southwest regional director for ACMC, which assists its 1,000 member churches with their missions programs. “The older generation understood missions more.” He says pluralism and materialism have changed the missions climate.

Christina Accornero, a board member of InterServe and Finishers Project, believes the church needs a missions revival. “We’re going through a crisis in missions,” she says. “Especially Americans, we’re pretty comfortable with our things. There are many missionaries coming home on furlough who don’t want to go back.” Finishers Project could be the catalyst for revival. “I think it’s a test—a God-directed test—to see if we are open to a new movement of the Spirit,” Accornero says.

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES: Missions agency leaders agree that they need to update their processes to accommodate boomers. Malwitz, as a test to see how agencies would respond to a finisher, forwarded the name of Indiana financial consultant David Ober to two dozen missions agencies. Sixteen of the agencies made no effort to contact Ober. Eight sent standard information packets—data geared to recent college graduates, not older professionals with concerns about health insurance and financial planning.

Navigators’ Rod Beidler says that when he started receiving calls from finishers looking for second careers, “we didn’t know what to do with them. We were caught very much by surprise.”

Ed Lewis, a recruiter with International Teams, says finishers know the primary need to spread the gospel worldwide. “They are up to the challenge and want to get involved,” he says. “We don’t want to put unnecessary obstacles in their path. And I think maybe, right now, we’re doing that.”

Mike and Linda Green, of Jupiter, Florida, shared a desire to use their skills in communications technology to further world evangelism. In 1994, Mike retired early at 58 from a 30-year career as a nuclear engineer and started his own business as a software consultant. Linda, then 49, worked as an editor of an online financial publication. Their passion for missions had been fueled by Urbana, which Mike first attended in 1957 and they both attended in 1996. But the missions agencies they approached would not accept them because they both had earlier been divorced—twice for Linda and once for Mike, while he was a Christian.

Mike and Linda applied at six agencies, all of which turned them down. Most agencies terminated their applications early in the process. “Some just come right out and say, ‘Sorry, we can’t have divorced people as part of our organization,’ ” says Mike. One agency said they “had to limit their damages, so to speak,” he says. The Greens’ worst experience involved a missions agency that accepted them after numerous interviews, but later retracted their offer after a staff member threatened to leave if the organization hired a divorced couple. “It was painful at times,” Mike says.

CULTURE CLASH: Both boomers and missions agencies are anticipating a clash of cultures. The attributes of boomers that make them so appealing—spiritual and emotional maturity, professional skills, and financial security—may also create problems that could hinder missions objectives.

The largest cross-cultural adjustment a boomer may have to make is between the corporate and nonprofit worlds, especially if the boomer has left a leadership position. “If a finisher is a high-powered, CEO-type, he’s not going to be prepared to sweep the halls,” says Winter.

Some finishers may expect a leadership position in missions, Lewis says, but it will take time for them to gain credibility with career missionaries who may feel threatened by finishers who seem to use missions as a hobby. He believes more finishers such as Michael Darby—who had no qualms about leaving a management position in finance to work as part of a discipleship team in Russia—are looking for a respite from the responsibilities of leadership.

Others, such as the Kingstons and the Greens, may want to use their professional skills in missions, but it may mean they will have to serve in a support role. If they are not wealthy enough to support themselves on retirement income alone, they may have a difficult time raising support. “We view missionaries as people going into hardship posts, maybe wrestling with co*ckroaches,” says Art McCleary, a finisher who left a career in human resources to work for Senior Ambassadors for Christ. “But when they are in an office setting in the West, it is difficult to see them as missionaries.”

Mike and Linda Green finally found computer positions with the Caleb Project in Littleton, Colorado, but they recently had to withdraw their acceptance because they could not raise enough support. After 15 months of raising funds, the Greens had only 15 percent of their $70,000 combined first-year support. By contrast, Mike’s oldest daughter and her husband, who are leaving to plant a church with a Mennonite missions team in Albania, have raised their full support. Mike and Linda Green sold their house in August in anticipation of their move to Colorado. “We’re back at square one in many ways,” says Mike.

Another potential area of frustration is recruitment and training. Finishers say the hiring process is too slow, taking several months to several years before a candidate is accepted, trained, and has raised support.

In most cases, finishers are mature in their faith but have not had the formal Bible training required by most agencies. TEAM, for example, requires 30 semester hours of Bible classes for its full-time missionaries. Finishers Project is looking to develop a “Bible sat” to accommodate those who are biblically literate but may not have the college transcripts to prove it.

The lack of a foreign language could also hinder a finisher’s effectiveness in missions by limiting options to support roles in the United States or reliance on an interpreter.

But altering the training requirements to meet the needs of boomers is an area of serious concern for Winter, who sees a growing “amateurization” in missions. “I don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in marketing, [a finisher] still needs to know what missions is,” he says. Otherwise, they will just be “sand in the machinery.”

DRIVE-BY-MISSIONS? Despite the eagerness of missions agencies to retool their processes to attract finishers, some missions experts are skeptical. They fear finishers could change the focus of missions by demanding short-term options, disregarding indigenous leadership, and posing a threat to career missionaries.

Winter believes finishers will not want to spend their last years of life overseas, instead choosing “drive-by missions projects.”

“For the most part, short-termers have given up trying to make a contribution to missions,” Winter says. “It’s kind of an expensive education, and almost a futile way of conducting missions.”

But short-term missions opportunities could help finishers verify their commitment to longer-term assignments, says Paul McKaughan, president of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association.

Missions experts herald the growth of indigenous leadership in missions and express concern over whether a new corps of Western finishers may be counterproductive to internationalization. “The role we played in the past is not the role we will play in the future,” says McKaughan. “We will not be calling the shots from the West.”

Ruth Tucker, visiting professor of mission at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, says, “Our fix-it-upper mentality—that we can do it—it’s passe.” Finishers Project is “wrong-headed,” she says, if nationals are not consulted first.

Bill O’Brien, director of the Global Center at Samford University, says finishers need to know the church in the Two-Thirds World is prospering, with an estimated 1,000 sending agencies and more than 40,000 missionaries. North American Christians still have a pivotal role to play in missions—especially in the training of national leaders—but O’Brien says finishers need to understand they are the students in this process.

The agencies’ eagerness to court finishers could be perceived as a slap in the face to career missionaries who bypassed opportunities for profitable careers. “Oftentimes, missionaries are a little bit offended by the fact that these people come in and ‘haven’t paid their dues,’ ” acknowledges Malwitz. “However, they’re just going to have to get over it.”

HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY: Despite the concerns, Finishers Project is taking advantage of a historic opportunity. Plans are under way for an adult educational video, a toll-free number with information on job availabilities, and a finishers magazine. The idea is spreading around the globe: Malwitz has received calls from boomers in Canada, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and Taiwan who want to start their own Finishers Project.

Thousands of boomers are approaching retirement and want a second chance to make a difference in their world; but a problem could arise if significance, not service, becomes their goal.

O’Brien warns that boomers’ desire to become finishers should have more to do with meeting missions goals than their personal goals. Missions is “not just a flash-in-the-pan that gave me a warm, bubbly feeling because I felt significant for a minute,” he says.

North American missions needs the energy that comes from a new corps of impassioned missionaries. Finishers need to find significance in their retirement years. But finishers must move from the pursuit of personal fulfillment to fulfillment of the Great Commission—sharing the gospel with a world desperate to hear —if they want to use their life skills to nurture a young, but growing, church.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Evolutionary psychologists are society’s new prophets, says CHRISTIANITY TODAY‘s editor at large, Philip Yancey, in the following article condensed from , a sister publication of CT. While their message would reduce us to mere survival machines, Yancey points out, their logic contains fatal flaws. Yancey’s most recent books are Church: Why Bother? and What’s So Amazing About Grace? (Zondervan).

The new science of evolutionary psychology attempts to explain all human thought and behavior as the unguided result of natural selection. As products of blind evolution, say these thinkers, we deceive ourselves by searching for any teleology other than that scripted in our DNA. We must look down, not up: to nature, not its Creator.

The hubris of this new science is breathtaking. Predicts Robert Trivers of Harvard, “Sooner or later, political science, law, economics, psychology, psychiatry and anthropology will all be branches of sociobiology.” He might have added ethics to the list.

Writers on evolutionary psychology are talented and entertaining, and they fill their works with vivid descriptions of birds, bees, and chimpanzees. They explain courtship displays, infidelity, maternal instincts, gossip, and social organization in arresting ways. Newsmagazines like Time hire these writers to interpret gang behavior in the inner cities or sexual indiscretions in the capital city, and the results are so winsome that evolutionary psychologists have become the new cosmologists, helping us make sense of ourselves and our role in the universe.

Philosophers are just now beginning to scrutinize the assumptions of evolutionary psychology, and I suspect they will have a field day with its epistemology. I am more concerned with its implications for what I have called “the crisis of unmorality.” As if in direct fulfillment of the apostle Paul’s predictions in Romans 1, scientists have relocated our primary source for morality and meaning in the beasts.

1. Evolutionary psychology relies on one principle—that of the selfish gene—to decipher behavior. I do what I do, always, to advance the likelihood of my genetic material perpetuating itself. Even if an individual act does not benefit me personally, it does benefit the “gene pool” I am contributing to. Evolutionary theorists herald it as the most important single advance in their theory since Darwin.

By their own admission, the new scientists propose a wholly deterministic understanding of the human species. As Richard Dawkins puts it, “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.”

Critics propose many anecdotal exceptions to the selfish-gene theory. What about gay people, or childless couples, who do not plan to perpetuate their genes—how to explain their behavior? Or consider Mother Teresa, who early in her life committed to a vow of chastity. On what basis can we account for such altruistic behavior? As if explaining algebra to a child, the evolutionary psychologists take up such thorny problems one by one and explicate them in terms of the selfish gene.

Like all monistic explanations of human behavior, evolutionary psychology has both the virtue and the defect of simplicity. When Robertson McQuilkin, who left a college presidency to stay by his Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife (CT, Feb. 5, 1995, p. 32), contends that he stands by his wife out of his love for her and because of his commitment to biblical standards of fidelity—why, of course he would argue that. He makes his living as a Christian writer and speaker, does he not? He is finding a way to propagate the ideas that have served him so well.

As if explaining algebra to a child, the evolutionary psychologists take up thorny problems one by one and explicate them in terms of selfish gene.

Robert Wright, one of the best expositors of evolutionary psychology to the general public, articulates the tautology: “We believe the things—about morality, personal worth, even objective truth—that lead to behaviors that get our genes into the next generation. … What is in our genes’ interests is what seems ‘right’—morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order.”

Carry the logic far enough, and any notion of good and evil disappears. In essence, the evolutionary psychologists have devised a unified theory of human depravity that would make John Calvin blush. Hard-wired for selfishness, we have no potential for anything else.

2. Morality springs entirely from our genes. Most evolutionary psychologists take their turn at accounting for the origin of morality. The sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson proposes that, over the course of thousands of generations, natural selection wired in certain tendencies that are “largely unconscious and irrational,” on the level of “gut feelings.” Morality must, of course, serve the monistic selfish-gene principle: “Human behavior—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.”

This, of course, raises important questions about human freedom and moral responsibility. Western jurisprudence assumes the right to judge a person guilty of criminal behavior if he or she (1) can discern the difference between good and evil and (2) was mentally competent to make a free decision when committing the crime. Sirhan Sirhan was sent to prison and John Hinckley to a mental institution over just this legal distinction. Evolutionary psychology appears to call both principles into question by claiming that none of our actions are free, and that the difference between good and evil is a social construct.

Robert Wright points to lust as a clear example of the selfish-gene principle at work. Lust developed as nature’s way of “getting us to act as if we wanted lots of offspring and knew how to get them, whether or not we actually do.” Following this line of reasoning leads Wright tentatively to endorse polygamy. After all, the practice addresses the basic sexual imbalance between what men and women want. If a man grows restless after a woman gives him a few children, why shouldn’t he “fall in love” and begin another family line without divorcing his first wife?

Lyall Watson takes on the case of Susan Smith, who rolled a Mazda containing her two infant sons, nicknamed “Precious” and “Sugarfoot,” into a lake. Infanticide is nothing new, says Watson, citing the statistic that in the U.S. alone, 1,300 children are killed each year by parents or close relatives. In a statement that could stand as a parody of the morally neutral stance of evolutionary psychology, Watson observes: “We have to be careful not to confuse the interests of parents and offspring, which often conflict where optimal fitness is concerned. Children nearly always want more than their parents can provide, and nice judgment is required to reconcile such disparity. In many situations, unconscious calculations are clearly being made, with every evidence of an evolutionary perspective coming into play.”

Trapped in philosophical naturalism, evolutionary biologists cannot embrace any external code, such as the Tao described by C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man. The Tao represents objective truth, the first principle beyond which we cannot argue; it allows us to make judgments; we cannot judge it. Without such a standard, modern science must constantly teeter on the edge of self-contradiction. Why choose one set of values over another, especially when you do not believe in free choice?

Some evolutionary biologists cheerfully acknowledge the problem. Concludes Robert Wright: “Thus the difficult question of whether the human animal can be a moral animal—the question that modern cynicism tends to greet with despair—may seem increasingly quaint. The question may be whether, after the new Darwinism takes root, the word moral can be anything but a joke.”

3. Nature gives mixed messages about morality. After demonstrating that we can look to the primates for early examples of sympathy, empathy, and justice, Frans de Waal writes, “We seem to be reaching a point at which science can wrest morality from the hands of the philosophers.” Examples of “ethical” behavior abound in nature: whales and dolphins risking their lives to save injured companions, chimpanzees coming to the aid of the wounded, elephants refusing to abandon slain comrades.

Well, yes, but it all depends on where you point your field binoculars. Where do you learn about proper behavior between the sexes, for example? Nature offers very few examples of monogamy and none of egalitarianism. Should our females, like the praying mantises, devour the males who are mating with them? Should our neighborhoods resolve their disputes as do the bonobo chimpanzees by engaging in a quick orgy in which they all have sex with one another? Should human males mimic the scorpion-fly by lying in wait to take the nearest female by force?

Mark Ridley sees sexual jealousy as a Darwinian adaptation for humans that enabled our ancestors to outreproduce their more relaxed contemporaries. But he quickly adds that he can “imagine a society in which people are conditioned to enjoy the thought of their spouse’s being unfaithful.” In his discussion, the morality of sexual fidelity is a value-neutral adaptation to social circ*mstances.

Or, consider violence. Lyall Watson admits he finds it “disturbing” that hyena cubs seem genetically programmed to attack and kill their siblings on sight almost from birth. Researchers such as Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall likewise react in revulsion and dismay when primates they have grown to love are murdered by others of their species. On what grounds? The animals themselves seem undismayed; they are acting “naturally,” in response to genetic messages. What gives an evolutionist the right to step outside of nature, endorse a moral concept of nonviolence, then apply it back to nature, of which we are all a part?

I do not worry about the morality of individual evolutionists, but I do worry about the morality of those who follow their doctrines to their logical ends.

The alternative is not just jarring but appalling. Some evolutionary psychologists, showing more consistency, look to nature to explain, and even justify, the most egregious human behavior. Lyall Watson, for example, though mysteriously disturbed by fratricide among hyenas, admits that he could not easily condemn headhunting, because such a practice keeps certain tribes in ecological balance.

In response to their critics, evolutionary psychologists are quick to argue, “Don’t go from is to ought. We examine nature to see what is, to learn why we behave the way we do. It does not necessarily follow that we ought to do what other species do.” Fair enough; but where do we go to get the ought? And another question: Where did this whole notion of ought come from, anyway?

4. A morality based in nature is vulnerable to large-scale abuse. Julian Huxley declared in 1963,

The population explosion is making us ask … What are people for? Whatever the answer … it is clear that the general quality of the world’s population is not very high, is beginning to deteriorate, and should and could be improved. It is deteriorating thanks to genetic defectives who would otherwise have died being kept alive, and thanks to the crop of new mutations due to fallout. In modern man, the direction of genetic evolution has started to change its sign, from positive to negative, from advance to retreat: we must manage to put it back on its age-old course of positive improvement.

The Western intellectual community, in the wake of Hitler, today finds eugenics repulsive and roundly condemns racism based on Social Darwinism. Yet its allegiance to philosophical naturalism leaves it vulnerable to abuse, especially now that advances in gene research allow for genetic “improvement.”

Any time a leading thinker uses phrases like “general quality of the world’s population” and “genetic defectives,” the rest of us should invest in home security systems. An engineered society or engineered individual must conform to some standard of correctness or normalcy, and here is where evolutionary psychology and social engineering break down. Who decides the standard or norm? Julian Huxley or Martin Heidegger? Bill Clinton or Pol Pot? I am still trying to think of a large-scale attempt to improve human society that has not led to catastrophe.

Trust us, say the new behaviorists. We’re kinder and gentler. We have your best interests—the best interests of the whole species—at heart. Oh? And what historical examples can you point to in which behavioral conditioning was used for benevolent purposes? Must we repeat history?

From a Christian perspective, the new science of evolutionary psychology founders on its anthropology, its basic understanding of the nature of humanity. The “trousered ape,” C. S. Lewis satirically called us in The Abolition of Man. Perhaps that should be updated to “untrousered ape.” Scientists are finding it increasingly difficult to claim any distinctiveness about being human. Stephen Jay Gould faults the view that places humanity at the top, as the pinnacle of evolutionary progress. We are instead, he says, “a cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted.”

Animal-rights activists seize upon the new paradigm as an endorsem*nt of their campaign against “speciesism.” Animals, being no different from people, should be treated accordingly. “There really is no rational reason for saying a human being has special rights,” says Ingrid Newkirk, cofounder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

Evelyn Pluhar takes that logic further down the same road, arguing that in certain cases, an animal’s rights should take precedence over a human’s. For example, as one reviewer of the book suggested, “Compare a normal chimpanzee to a severely retarded human child unable to take care of itself or to speak or to reason. Given that neither qualifies as a rational moral being, capable of asserting its rights, why do we allow vivisection of the chimp but not of the child? Surely, if moral significance attaches only to full persons, then the child should be granted no more protection than the chimp, or the pig awaiting slaughter.”

It takes an honest scientist indeed to acknowledge that all discussion about rights is irrelevant. Rights are, by definition, granted. As zoologist Paul Shepard admits, ” ‘Rights’ implies some kind of cosmic rule prior to any contracts among users, legislation for protection, or decisions to liberate. It refers to something intrinsic or given by God or Nature. … Wild animals do not have rights; they have a natural history.”

At least Shepard is honest about the moral vacuum at the center of evolutionary psychology. Books in this field by evolutionary psychologists tend to contain glaring contradictions. They call on us to respect the rights of animals without giving us a rationale for those rights. They inform us we have no claim to superiority over other species—though so far as I know, only humans will be reading their elegant arguments. After describing nature’s examples of gang rape, murder, and cannibalism, they urge us to rise above our genetic scripting. They call us to “higher” values of nonviolence and mutual respect, even though there is no “higher” and “lower,” and apparently we have no freedom to act anyway. They urge us to transcend the destiny of natural selection, to combat the cosmic process. Yet by binding us within that cosmic process, and by insisting that we have no other fate but natural selection, they deny our ability to act on such noble instincts.

I have met a few evolutionary psychologists, and they seem like cultured, well-mannered individuals who do not beat their children or murder their undesirable cousins. Yet the doctrine they promulgate, by undercutting any transcendent basis for morality, destroys our very ability to judge such behavior “bad” or “evil.” I do not worry about the morality of individual evolutionists, but I do worry about the morality of those who follow their doctrines to their logical ends. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise,” wrote C. S. Lewis.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the movement are cranking out books, writing cover stories for newsmagazines, and being feted at major universities. For the moment, at least, they hold the spotlight, and it illuminates a benign and knowing smile. At last we understand human behavior. At last we understand ourselves.

More than three centuries ago another scientist, Blaise Pascal, considered a premodern version of the loss of faith. This was his conclusion:

Now, what do we gain by hearing it said of a man that he has now thrown off the yoke, that he does not believe there is a God who watches our actions, that he considers himself the sole master of his conduct. … Do they profess to have delighted us by telling us that they hold our soul to be only a little wind and smoke, especially by telling us this in a haughty and self-satisfied tone of voice? Is this a thing to say gaily? Is it not, on the contrary, a thing to say sadly, as the saddest thing in the world?

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