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* I too was at the 1972 Explo. I don’t remember a lot about the event other than learning that different states don’t have our wonderful weather. I do remember, however, going door to door with the Four Spiritual Laws and reading the book with little or no expression to a woman in a poor neighborhood. I remember her reading the prayer with me. I don’t remember her name or anything else about her. I just felt I had accomplished my task and went on my way. Since then I have occasionally wondered what became of her. After reading your article, I am at least hopeful. While I cannot agree entirely with the Brights’ approach, perhaps I at least was allowed to plant a seed in this woman’s heart. And, dear woman, if you are by chance reading this, I was one of those 15-year-old girls with very long hair and glasses who came in and out of your life in less than 15 minutes. God knows your name; I would love to know it too.

Patricia MitchellSan Jose, Calif.

We would like to clarify a fact for the record about the La Jolla Valley Project. CCCI was not “forced into Chapter 11 protection.” CCCI sold University Development, the company that was developing the property, around 1986. Sometime later the new owner caused University Development to file for reorganization under the Federal Bankruptcy Act. In short, CCCI has never filed bankruptcy.

Sid WrightCampus Crusade for Christ InternationalOrlando, Fla.

AFFIRMING SINGLES* Bravo! on Dean Merrill’s article “Not Married-with-Children” [July 14]. As a never-married single woman, I have too often heard the subtle (or not-so-subtle) message, “This church is for families,” and therefore, “This church is not for you.” For me and for many singles I’ve talked to, Sunday morning can be the loneliest time of the week. Church may be the only setting in our lives in which we do not feel included, respected, valued—or loved.

As the percentage of singles in the U.S. rises steadily, churches need to learn how to affirm and include families and singles. If they do not, they will miss a huge portion of the population, a group that not only needs a church family, but that has inestimable time, money, and talents that could enrich the whole congregation.

Susan MaycinikColorado Springs, Colo.

UNATTRACTIVE DOESN’T MEAN SPIRITUAL* I really appreciated Karen Lee-Thorp’s article [“Is Beauty the Beast?” July 14] on the subject of beauty. I have encountered very little teaching on this subject in the church, almost none from a positive perspective. It is a relief to know that I don’t have to imagine myself as unattractive in order to be spiritual.

Neil MillerToronto, Ont., Canada

THE LOVE OF BALLETThanks so much to Piper Lowell for the wonderful “Leaps of Faith” [Arts, July 14]. My youthful striving for a ballet career ended with a loving husband and the raising of three priceless children—but the love of ballet has never left me. Having become a Christian while involved in ballet, I’m so glad to see this article on Ballet Magnificat! I hope to see Kathy Thibodeaux dance sometime.

Elaine HoganBismarck, Mo.

GOD’S WORD FOR THE WHOLE CHURCHThe decision by the International Bible Society—under pressure—to cancel the use of more inclusive language in future revisions [“Hands Off My NIV,” June 16, and “Focus Dumps ‘Inclusive’ Bible,” July 14] saddens me deeply.

I am sad for my 9-year-old granddaughter, Christine. She might have read (in the NIV-based Adventures in Odyssey Bible now withdrawn by Focus on the Family) in Paul’s words, “Teach … some people you can trust,” a version of 2 Timothy 2:2 more correct than the current “Teach … some men.” She might have said, “Oh, I am a person. So I want to be one who can be trusted.” Now she will have to wonder if that role is meant only for her brothers, Graham and Benjie.

I am sad for the many outstanding young women leaders who come to our evangelism leadership programs, drawn not so much by an agenda of feminism as by a deep longing to have their gifts fully used by God and the church in sharing the Good News. We have learned how important it is to make them feel included by using language that unobtrusively includes them, not just the “guys.”

And I am sad for the evangelical church. Critics of the proposed NIV revisions call it a “feminist seduction of the evangelical church” and say they oppose any form of language that would serve a “particular cultural agenda.” It strikes me that many of the critics are themselves serving their own cultural agenda: that of preserving the position and privilege of one gender—men in power. In so doing they are holding the scholarship and faith of the NIV translators hostage to the critics’ own entrenched version of culture, as well as to the seduction of market share.

The heading of CT‘s first story—”Hands Off My NIV!“—truly highlights the issue. Is it “my” Bible—that of a Western male—or is it God’s Word for the whole church, women and men, worldwide?

Leighton Ford, PresidentLeighton Ford MinistriesCharlotte, N.C.

* We are identified as “inclusive language opponents” in your July 14 coverage of the May 27 meeting on gender language in translation. The article and Inside CT left much to be desired in terms of fairness and accuracy. The article mentioned none of the over 4,000 Bible verses whose translation is changed to something less accurate in inclusive-language Bibles. You cited ten people or groups who disapproved of our position and only one who approved. The evaluative statements in the article and Inside CT were imbalanced 37 to 1 against our position. Of the 13 translation guidelines adopted at our meeting, you cited only 4, and 3 of those were cited incorrectly. You cited none of our 6 guidelines that approved certain kinds of inclusive language which retain accuracy in translation. Perhaps most disappointing was the failure to mention the grace of God at work to bring a peaceful resolution and a unanimous statement from a meeting of 12 people at the heart of the recent conflict over a planned (and now canceled) inclusive-language NIV.

Tim Bayly, Joel Belz, James Dobson, Wayne Grudem, Charles Jarvis, Vern Poythress, R. C. SproulFor the news story, our reporter called the principals affected by the decision and concisely recorded their responses. We did not keep a scorecard for how they responded. As to the substance of the debate, in our next issue Trinity Evangelical Divinity School professors Wayne Grudem and Grant Osborne will offer opposing answers to the question “Should Bible Translators Use Inclusive Language?”—Eds.

* After 16 years of studying and using the original biblical languages, I rarely use any translation for my daily devotions, and I often preach and teach straight from the Greek N.T. We must never forget that every translation of the Bible takes us one step away from the language in which it was first written, read, and heard. No translation can ever be fully adequate. However, most people have not had the opportunity to learn the original languages, and it is a great gift that scholars have carefully translated the sacred texts into secondary languages, including English.

Women used to know that they were included in such English words as man, brother, and brethren, which rendered similar expressions in Greek. This is no longer the case. Thinking and compassionate Americans have become sensitized to the male-dominated past of the English language. Our language has changed, and we must make an effort to be sure that the original intention of Scripture is what people grasp when they read a translation today. I find it interesting that the lively and growing British churches have embraced the gender-inclusive NIV.

Amy AndersonStirchley, Birmingham, England

* I read Michael G. Maudlin’s “Accusing the Brothers (and Sisters)” [Inside CT, July 14] and feel he completely missed the point of the NIV controversy. It is not, as he states it, “fundamentalist political correctness.” You do a disservice to a number of evangelical groups to paint this controversy as a “PC” battle.

Dale R. YancyMerrimack, N.H.

* I can’t remember an issue that’s been more disheartening to me as a Christian woman in America than this furor over the new NIV. Thanks, Ed Dobson, for a reasoned, sensible statement of what’s really involved here.

Carol WilsonCharlotte, N.C.

Brief letters are welcome. They may be edited for space and clarity and must include the writer’s name and address if intended for publication. Due to the volume of mail, we cannot respond to individual letters. Write to Eutychus, Christianity Today, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188; fax: 630/260-0114. E-mail: cteditor@christianitytoday.com ( designated by * ).

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Although sexual abuse cases involving clergy often provoke national media attention, new research points toward church volunteers and other staff as being more likely to sexually abuse church members.

Volunteer workers are the most frequent abusers, constituting half of all sexual misconduct offenses in churches, according to a profile last year by Church Law and Tax Report. Paid staff members represent 30 percent of the perpetrators, and 20 percent are committed by another child.

Churches typically are caught off guard. For example, former youth minister Bryan Buckley of Christ Community Church in Saint Charles, Illinois, was sentenced in February to a seven-year prison term after being convicted of sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl in the congregation.

Kane County judge Philip L. DiMarzio declared that Buckley “preached abstinence and practiced indulgence.” Larry Breeden, staff coordinator at Christ Community Church, says Buckley had excellent references, including having once been named youth minister of the year at Liberty University.

Buckley’s references had been checked by staff members, and a criminal record check also had been conducted. “There was no indication that Buckley had any problems,” Breeden says.

Breeden says Buckley managed to sidestep a church policy that forbids staff members from being alone with members of the opposite sex. “You can always find a way to circumvent church policies if you’re determined,” Breeden says. “We can only pray that God will protect his church.”

SCREENING RECOMMENDED: James Cobble, publisher of Church Law and Tax Report, told CT that churches are not going to be able to screen out every pedophile. “But a screening program in the church is like putting a spotlight on the church and saying to anybody who’s predatory, ‘You’re going to be exposed to screening, and people will find out.’ “

Cobble, who also is director of Christian Ministry Resources, which has published a “Reducing the Risk of Child Sexual Abuse in Your Church” kit, says a screening program demonstrates that the church has taken preventative steps and is a safeguard in court cases. Background checks on a church employee’s criminal record and employment history are the most effective forms of screening, Cobble says.

The number of allegations of sexual molestation against children is rising among 1,700 congregations surveyed by Church Law and Tax Report. In 1995, 0.8 percent of those churches reported allegations of sexual molestation. The rate rose to 2 percent last year.

Litigation is also becoming more commonplace. By 1993, approximately 1 percent of churches in the publication’s survey had been involved in sexual misconduct suits, compared to none a decade earlier.

NO NEW SIN: The problem of inappropriate sexual behavior among clergy is not new. A 1984 Fuller Seminary survey of ministers in four denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, and Assemblies of God—showed that 12.7 percent had engaged in sexual intercourse with a church member. The study reported that 38.6 percent had made “sexual contact” with a church member.

And in a 1993 survey of Southern Baptist pastors, 14.1 percent confessed to “sexual behavior inappropriate to a minister.”

Despite a steady track record of allegations and lawsuits, only 27 percent of the 1,700 churches surveyed by Cobble in 1996 conducted criminal-record or employment-history background checks on prospective workers. About 36 percent of the churches surveyed reported doing some form of screening. Some insurance companies, such as Brotherhood Mutual and Church Mutual, began to require screening of church employees in the early 1990s.

Dealing with lawsuits can also be expensive for churches. According to Cobble, more than 60 percent of lawsuits are resolved for between $100,000 and $150,000. However, the average total cost, when legal expenses and other costs are taken into account, is $1 million. “Most churches have either no insurance or minimal insurance coverage to cope with these costs.”

Cobble strongly recommends that churches screen both volunteer workers and paid employees. He suggests that an employment verification agency carry out background checks.

Pinkerton Services Group, the largest provider of background screening, has organized a department to deal with churches. Philip Langford told CT that churches often contact local police before hiring employees, but officers can only provide information in their jurisdiction. Pinkerton checks the areas where a person has lived and worked for the past seven years. “Almost 75 percent of the churches we have talked to have not done any checks.”

COUNSELING RISKS: While screening programs help in dealing with abuse of children by adults, the growth of peer counseling among adults in churches presents another difficulty.

In small-group settings, intimate personal matters may be under discussion among group members who rarely have the training to cope with their own feelings in sensitive situations.

“Counseling is an incredibly intense experience, and people need to learn how to deal with the issues of sexual attraction in counseling,” says Mark McMinn, chair of the Wheaton College psychology department. McMinn supervised the surveying of 900 Christian counselors last year and found that only 41 percent of these counselors reported never experiencing sexual attraction toward a client.

The high standards of sexual purity that Christians strive to achieve make it more likely that they will deny feelings of sexual attraction, McMinn says. “Our assumption is that if the issue of sexual attraction is not discussed or is a closed topic, then it makes people vulnerable,” he says.

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The marble pillars of the Supreme Court building rise imperiously across the street from the U.S. Capitol—as though these two branches of government were staring each other down, the better to keep the balance of power.

But this summer, in Boerne v. Flores, the Court tilted the balance dangerously, precipitating what may be the greatest constitutional crisis of our age.

The primary issue in Boerne was the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment. For some 35 years, the Court had held that religious practice could be curtailed only if the state showed a “compelling state interest” (e.g., protection of public health or safety). But in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) the Court dropped the “compelling interest” test, demoting religion to the level of a personal preference. Congress responded with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), restoring the “compelling interest” test. And in Boerne, the Court retaliated, striking down RFRA.

This unprecedented tit-for-tat raises two fundamental issues. First, religious liberties are once again vulnerable. In the interim between Smith and RFRA, an Ohio fire marshal threatened to fine Christmas Eve worshipers for carrying sacramental candles, an Illinois county forbade Orthodox Jews to wear yarmulkes in courtrooms, and a Maryland ordinance instructed a Catholic hospital to train its interns to perform abortions. Under Boerne, such violations of religious liberty will begin anew. Already it has been cited in a Texas case where Catholic schoolboys were forbidden to display rosaries around their necks, and in a Los Angeles case where an Orthodox Jewish congregation was ejected from a neighborhood where it had met for two decades.

But Boerne also raises a profound constitutional question: Who determines what the Constitution means? RFRA was based on the Fourteenth Amendment, which gives Congress the power to enact legislation enforcing constitutional rights—applying, interpreting, or modifying them. But the Court argued that RFRA did more than enforce rights, it expanded a right. Congress has no power “to decree the substance” of a constitutional right, the majority huffed; it is the judiciary’s prerogative to define what the Constitution means.

But this is sheer bluster. Contrary to what most Americans think, the Constitution does not give the Supreme Court final say on constitutional questions. And the Founders resisted the idea. If we gave “judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional,” Jefferson warned, they would become “despots.”

It was in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, that the Court assumed the power of judicial review. Even so, three Presidents have resisted Court orders: Thomas Jefferson refused to execute the Alien Imposition Act; Jackson spurned a Court order in a banking case; Lincoln rejected the Dred Scott decision.

Lincoln even asked Congress to overrule the Court —which it did, passing a law that reversed Dred Scott (1862). Congress likewise overrode Court decisions dealing with child labor (1938), prohibiting Orthodox Jews in the air force from wearing yarmulkes (1986), and requiring the Amish to pay social security taxes (1988). The Court’s claim to an exclusive right to interpret the Constitution has no basis in law or history.

Worse, it is an assault on the very notion of self-government. The classical ideal of liberty is a people governing themselves—writing their own laws and hence ruled by their own vision of a good social order. To quote from “We Hold These Truths,” a statement signed by 42 Christian leaders (including myself) this past July 4, “Our nation was constituted by the agreement that ‘we, the people,’ through the representative institutions of republican government, would deliberate and decide how we ought to order our life together.”

If there was ever an example of a people deciding together, it was RFRA. The act won widespread popular support, passing unanimously in the House and with only three dissenting votes in the Senate. But no matter. The Court simply swept aside the national consensus. Unless Congress resists, it will be reduced to the role of traffic cop, merely making procedural laws to enforce what the Court says. And America will degenerate into what Harvard professor Michael Sandel calls a “procedural republic,” where our laws no longer reflect a moral consensus but consist merely of pragmatic rules for managing the body politic.

In Boerne, the Court myopically defended its own turn at the expense of democratic principle. Congress is already rallying the troops for a legislative response, with hearings in the House Judiciary Committee on the Constitution. And none too soon: If the representative branch of government is denied the right to reflect the people’s moral vision in substantive laws, the moral underpinnings essential to a free society will be eroded, a subject so crucial that we will devote our next column to it.

It is time to vindicate the right of the people, acting through their representatives, to have a voice in determining the meaning of our fundamental law.

(For a free copy of the statement “We Hold These Truths,” write to Prison Fellowship, P.O. Box 17500, Washington, D.C. 20041-0500, or call 1-800-995-8777.)

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Evangelical worship is in transition. In much of the current discussion and argument, we focus too often on whether or not forms are seeker-friendly or on the merits of contemporary praise songs (as contrasted with traditional hymns). But there is a core issue at stake in how evangelicals understand worship, writes Gary Burge: how we encounter God in corporate worship.

Burge uses his varied experience—raised Lutheran, enlivened in the Jesus movement, ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), worshiping at an Evangelical Covenant church, and teaching New Testament at the interdenominational Wheaton College in Illinois—to offer a personal plea for addressing what is wrong with our Sunday mornings. Not everyone’s faith tradition is reflected in his assumptions about worship, but we believe everyone will benefit from wrestling with the questions he raises.

Say “liturgy” and my evangelical college students have a reflex akin to aninvitation to take a quiz. Say “mysticism” and they are drawn, fascinated,eager to see what I mean. They want spontaneity yet drift toward the Episcopalchurch. They carry NIV study Bibles but are intrigued by experiments in prayer,Christian meditation, spiritual disciplines honed in the medieval world,and candlelit sanctuaries. Some play the Chant CDendlessly. Os Guinness, Saint Teresa of Avila, and Richard Foster might allinhabit the same book bag.

Karen is typical of these students. She grew up in a large, independent Biblechurch in the Midwest where she attended every youth camp and mission tripher family could find. Her role models came from the glossy pages ofCampus Life. When she came to WheatonCollege, she attended a large, influential, conservative evangelical church.But after a year, her mind began to wander. “There was no imagination, nomystery, no beauty. It was all preaching and books and application,” shetold me. Now a senior, Karen is attending an Episcopal church nearby witha sizable group of her best friends.

Ask her if she likes liturgy and her eyes narrow: “Liturgical? Like in robesand candles and that sort of thing? Of course not.” But I press, asking whatshe likes about the Episcopal church. “I truly worship there. It’s the wonder,the beauty I love. It feels closer to God.”

In reading my semester exams, I discovered that one particularly insightfulstudent, Amy, wrote about worship: “I think that much of modern society haslost a sense of divine, holy space. This becomes obvious to me in our churcharchitecture. The splendor and holiness of cathedrals which created the ultimatefeeling of divine space has been replaced by gymnasiums and impermanentbuildings. A sanctuary should be a place that is completely separate—thatradiates the holiness of God. Plastic cups and folding chairs aren’t enough.There has to be an environment that communicates God’s holiness to my sensesand to my spirit.”

What is going on? What deficit, what paucity of experience in their worldis not being met? What drives this irony, this rejection of “liturgy” andthis embrace of things that undergird every liturgy? What leads countlessstudents to attend a breakaway Episcopal church (The Church of the Resurrection)where waving banners, the Book of Common Prayer, dance, guitars, ornateliturgical decor, and healing all work together? One Wheaton colleague whoattends there commented, “At last a place where I can find intelligentcharismatic worship—with dignity.”

A new Greek Orthodox church opened in Wheaton just last year. Already a sizablenumber of our students are passionately committed members. Chrismationis a new word on campus. Some of us are predicting a small migration there,with icons soon to follow in Fischer dormitory.

And I just received a copy of Rediscovering the Rich Heritage ofOrthodoxy (Light & Life, 1994). What amazed me is that it was writtenby an old friend, Charles Bell, with whom I studied at Fuller Seminary. “Ihave finally come home,” he penned on the inside cover. And in the book hedescribes how this centuries-old, high liturgical church attracted a classicalPentecostal like him—a former chaplain at Oral Roberts University who holdsa Ph.D. in theology from Scotland and was ordained by the Vineyard Fellowship.

My pilgrimage is less dramatic but shares a common thread. I grew up in theformer Lutheran Church in America, chiefly through the inspiration of mySwedish-Lutheran family. I still remember serving as a young acolyte, tendingthe mysteries of candle and altar and Communion table. My Catholic high-schoolfriends wore “Saint Christopher” chains, but I had my own “I am a Lutheran”medallion.

But when I entered the University of California I met the “Jesus movement,”a spiritual counterpart to the 1960s counterculture. I followed them to CalvaryChapel in Costa Mesa, California, and witnessed something no Lutheran boycould imagine. It was a world of rock ‘n’ roll healing services in Hawaiianshirts, leather Bibles, and speaking in tongues by the thousands. I beganto question my liturgical Lutheranism. When I entered Fuller TheologicalSeminary in 1974, the charismatic renewal was in full swing, and again, thediversity of the church and nonliturgical emphases on personal decision,power encounter, and healing swept me into their orbit.

It has been a long journey, but along the way I left the Lutheran churchbehind. Calvary Chapel, too. I even keep my hair cut. And now I swim in themainstream of evangelicalism. Soul-winning, hard-hitting sermons, and revivalhymns have become a staple of my diet. And deep inside I know that somethingis terribly wrong. Something is missing. My friends bravely announce thecertainty of evangelical orthodoxy, but somewhere the mystery of God hasbeen lost.

Evangelicalism is not a monolithic environment. I have been many places wherethe profundity of spiritual life and the numinous character of worship arecelebrated. My Pentecostal/Holiness friends will be quick to point out thatin their sanctuaries the sermon is secondary to a holy encounter with God.

Still, I suspect that there is a growing dissatisfaction in evangelical ranks,and nowhere is this pain felt more deeply than in the context of worship.

These migrations and impulses among my friends and students have forced meto ask new questions about what we are doing when we worship. In our zealto be practical and relevant, perhaps we have missed something. We areparticipatory—including testimonies and prayers and choruses from thecongregation—and yet some are saying their experiences seem hollow. Theyare not participating. We engineer “worship experiences,” and yet heartfeltneeds still go wanting. As a friend recently said, “I’m tired of sittingon my hands during worship.”

So what is worship? Worship, I believe, is a divine encounter that touchesmany dimensions of my personhood. It is an encounter in which God’s glory,Word, and grace are unveiled, and we respond, in songs and prayers ofcelebration. Worshipers seek an encounter with the glory of God, the transcendentpower and numinous mystery of the divine—and in so doing, they recognizea Lord whose majesty evokes strong praise, petition, and transformation.

But my evangelical training has emptied Sunday’s worship hour of God’s majestyand mystery. Divine encounters seem few. Two factors have stood in our way.

First, we have been taught that the sermon must exposit the biblical texts,and that immediate and timely application should follow every message. Whileall of this is true, nothing has been left to our imaginations. Little hasbeen left to our hearts except postsermon feelings of conviction and exhortation.We leave the hour heavy, thinking more about what we must do than wonderingabout the mystery of God and his doings on our behalf. Therefore we haveevolved an experience that is at best intellectual, a worship that studiesthe Bible. Homilies evolve into 30-minute teaching sessions. And when ittouches our emotions, it weighs us down, convicting us of wrongdoing andinadequacy.

I believe evangelicals are yearning to recaptureworship that lifts us—as a medieval cathedrallifted the eyes of the fourteenth-centuryworshiper—to truly meet God.

To reinforce this we have created our own liturgy, a friend once told me,and its rhythm goes like this: we sing, pray, sing, pray, preach, pray, sing,pray. Before long the monotony of its cadence leaves us numb, wondering ifthere is no new form, no new dance that can be written for us. Even benedictionshave become nothing more than reminders of the sermon’s three points. Theseobservations have forced me to question our role as ministers and worshipleaders; to question the function of the sanctuary, the aesthetics of ourmusic, and the content of our prayers.

There is a second barrier. Paul suggests that worship includes the mundaneaffairs of living, that we should “present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice,holy and acceptable to God, which is [our] spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1).Some of us have used this verse to distort the principal meaning of worship.Rather than encountering God, our worship has become ethical.

Good Christian behavior has become the expression of true, spiritual worship.Sunday worship hour has become an equipping/training station for the world.Rather than being an “otherworldly” encounter reminding us of our heavenlyidentity, it has become “worldly” in the sense that its focus is horizontal,sharpening our discipleship in the world.

I see this horizontal emphasis symbol-ically in our use of the sacraments.In what sense is the Lord’s Supper a unique meal with Christ? What has becomeof the church’s historic interest in “divine presence” in these elements?Does this meal emphasize fellowship and confession (namely, our efforts),or does it represent communion and encounter (God’s efforts)? I see liturgicalroutines that speak paragraphs of this “horizontal” theology, routines thatgradually shape worshipers who have never known Eucharist as encounter. Thesame is true with infant baptisms and child dedications that become platformsfor talking about better parenting. I have actually left such baptism servicesdespairing over being an inadequate parent rather than contemplating thewonder of my childlike dependence on the generous mercy of God.

Thus two handicaps stand in our way. We have reduced our worship serviceto intellectual exhortations and ethics. Don’t get me wrong. Both of theseare good. But they do not evoke the sort of divine encounter many of us yearnto find on Sunday morning at church.

I believe evangelicals are yearning to recapture worship that lifts us—asa medieval cathedral lifted the eyes of the fourteenth-century worshiper—totruly meet God. Some will object, saying that this yearning is gnostic (“suchworld-denying behavior!”) or narcissistic (“such emphasis on personalgratification!”). But it is neither of these. Incarnational theology demandsthat we emphasize encounter.

The mystery of our faith is the eruption of God’s divine presence in thecommonplace things of this world. But if it is only the commonplace thatwe see, we may fail ever to see God at all. What will facilitate this eruptionof divine encounters for me as I worship? And can evangelicals find meritin something that is neither intellectual nor ethical?

For a number of years I served on the staff of a Presbyterian church in Evanston,Illinois. Among my many excellent memories, worship stands out. Its splendorhad to do with many things: the architecture of the building (towering stainedglass that paraded the heroes of the Bible; woodcarvings of angels and saintsadorning wall and pillar), the music (instruments, organ, voice), the dignityof its liturgists (their dress, speech, and demeanor), theologically informedliturgies (crafting space for confession, silence, Word, and response alike),and the attitudes of the congregation (expectant, responsive, hushed as worshipunfolded). Even our lighting was intentional, aimed at enhancing visual stimulithat would direct men and women to God. Our organist worked hard to buildartful transitions between events in the worship service.

I recall sitting in the sanctuary next to our (then) nine-year-old daughter.Each Sunday we would pick a window and tell the story of who was representedthere and what the symbols meant. They were beautiful and powerful andinstructive. And they were densely theological, using eye-gate as vehiclefor inspiration. The effect was disarming when one Sunday I asked her tostand and turn to count how many “stained glass” people were watching usin the pew. She realized that we were surrounded by a “host of witnesses”who had been faithful to God despite their circ*mstances (Heb. 12:1). Onanother Sunday our talk of a window was interrupted by bells. The bell choirhad surrounded the sanctuary, and from every wall, complex and delightfulnotes swelled, calling us to worship. It was unworldly. Heavenly, perhaps.And it was intentionally theological.

Recitation is a reminder of what isprofound and important. Recitationcarries us with familiarity whensometimes we cannot carry ourselves.

I tell this story only to suggest that many worshipers come looking for morethan fellowship, exposition, and exhortation. They seek an experience of“the holy.” They come looking for awe and reverence, mystery and transcendence.Furthermore, many of their sensory faculties need to be engaged: Their sensesof sight, sound, touch, and smell are powerful avenues of communication.One glance at the Old Testament directions for orchestrating temple worshipwill remove all doubt that this is our task. Fire, incense, tapestry, andgold joined with ritual activities that reminded worshipers of the reverentawe demanded of them. Bells and breastplates provided a visual feast evokingimages of God’s presence. Even the temple’s architecture did this. One climbedhigher as steps led “up” to the Holy Place.

Evangelicals need to reclaim their Old Testament heritage. We need to unburdenourselves of those reflexes forged during the Reformation and Enlightenmentthat shunned the pageantry and visual media of medieval Catholicism. Butas we head down this road, we must hear a warning that speaks to us out ofthe centuries. Spiritual transcendence does not occur simply through aesthetictechniques. Bells and glass and pageantry will not in themselves bring thespiritual reality we seek. Mysticism is not a magic act. It is an outgrowthof a genuine and vibrant relation with God. Gourmet recipes should alwaysbe served on expensive china; but exquisite china in itself can never supplya meal.

My evangelical roots have reminded me in no uncertain terms that the pastoris “one” with the people. We uphold Luther’s “priesthood of all believers.”In Presbyterian parlance the pastor is one of the elders—a teachingelder—alongside so many other elders. And so our demeanor, our dress, ourparticipatory leadership style have evolved to communicate that there isno hierarchy in our congregations.

I now disagree with this model. I am not suggesting that pastors have privilegesin the grace of God or the economy of the church unavailable to others. ButI am suggesting that in worship, the pastor must become priest. The pastorplays a role—a significant role—in the divine encounter offered in worship.The pastor assumes the role of mediator, incarnating God to the people, forgingan atmosphere and image that men and women will absorb when they contemplatedivine things.

When I go to my kitchen hungry, I often take the food that is most easilywithin reach. When we go to worship empty, we assimilate those images thatare most accessible. I have seen this at work again and again. One pastorI have watched is serious and severe. One seems to be “going through themotions.” Another exudes grace radiantly and powerfully. As they conductworship, they set patterns in place that form the image of God in worshipers’minds.

I remember when one of our daughters was baptized. She stood near the baptismalfont as our pastor bent over, asking her questions of faith. His dignity,his well-prepared words, his touch, and his gaze all entered the archiveof her experience. Later she said, “I remember Pastor coming near, and Iwas covered and lost in his long, black robes, and he baptized me.” Responsesfrom a standing congregation and a thundering hymn cemented images that havenever gone away.

If it is true that we forge images for our people, that we are priests andmediators of God’s encounter with his people, that congregants look to usand pattern their mental images of God from us, we must be intentional abouteverything we do as we lead worship. In a word, we must be leaders, strongleaders. We must be architects of worship because it is through our craftthat we will be able to enrich and build the spiritual lives of our people.Through our craft, we will facilitate worship.

In our evangelical tradition we are comfortable saying that our words mustbe true because as we preach, we speak for God. Now more is required. Ourtotal leadership, our complete conduct must be true because (like it or not)all that we do speaks paragraphs about God and his desires.

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But there are no gimmicks. Priestly leadership is not a set of learned theatricalskills. As pastor-priest, we bring to the congregation the glory of our encounterwith God. Having spent long, enduring time in the Lord’s presence, we speakto our congregations out of those encounters. As I think carefully how Itranslate the elements of this encounter to my people, I create forms thatexpress where I have been. A friend described to me his experience worshipingat All Souls Church in London when John Stott was preaching. For the entireservice until the sermon, Stott was on his knees in prayer. And then whenhe spoke, he brought to his leadership the freshness of being in God’s presence.

Evangelical exhortation and ethics now demand a supplement through worshipthat facilitates divine encounter. It must evoke deeper mysteries. It mustlift us. And as we worship, liturgists and leaders become a priesthood, mediatingGod, showing the depth of their own experiences, radiating God’s glory, pointingweary souls heavenward.

But I think there is another element to this worship experience that cannotbe missed. Our evangelical tradition has taught us to champion spontaneityand to make a virtue out of informality. Some of us are sure that God cannothear written prayers. Corporately spoken creeds, prayers, and liturgies stifleus and the Lord, or so the argument runs.

Here I have again changed my mind. Yes, there are liturgies that are memorizedand meaningless. But what I have in mind are repetitive speech-forms thataccompany every service. That is, when I introduce worship, when I offerthe Eucharist, when I baptize, even when I bury, I employ familiar, dignifiedforms that evoke a history and an importance among my listeners.

I have noticed, for instance, that both the marginally churched and the faithfulChristian want to hear the Twenty-third Psalm recited at a funeral and 1Corinthians 13 at a wedding and the hymn “Amazing Grace” sung at thresholdsof crisis. There is something reassuring in this recitation of old things,something that links us with history and tradition. It is like holding abook well worn by your grandparents’ fingers. In some mysterious way, wefeel strengthened.

I recall a pastor who created his own liturgy for every infant baptism. Hewould hold the child aloft and introduce him or her to the congregation,saying, “This is your new family.” But then he would begin to recite an artful,dignified paragraph about this child’s vulnerability and God’s love. He spokeabout how God loves us before we are even able to know him, before we cansee beyond our own fingers. He recited this verbatim for every baptism, andeach time it sounded as if it was his first time. Imagine the wedding ofimagery and theology here! People looked forward to these baptisms, for theyspoke not just of cute babies, but of us, our vulnerability and ournear-sightedness, and God’s redeeming, forgiving love.

The same is true for benedictions. Recitation is a reminder of what is profoundand important. Recitation assures us that we are where we should be. Recitationcarries us with familiarity when sometimes we cannot carry ourselves.

I started a tradition in one of my theology classes that now won’t die. Ilearned that our students had never heard of Israel’s great Shema Isra’el:“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love theLord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all yourmight” (Deut. 6:4-5). So we began reciting it in Hebrew at the start of eachclass period. At first they thought it was odd. Then they knew that theyhad inherited it. And then they would not let me begin class without it.Was it novelty? Not by the twelfth week. It set the rhythm, it moored ustheologically, it centered us in a tradition as old as Moses.

My students and colleagues arelooking for worship that wedsdignity and spontaneity, worshipthat is theologically informedand liturgically intentional.

I also see it on the faces of students when I lead them on trips to Israel.When we stand near the Sea of Galilee and recite the Beatitudes near whereJesus said them, I am anchoring them. I am giving them a treasure, a giftof vision and sound to which they may turn in memory for many years. I alsoprepare them in advance. Perhaps I will have them memorize the Twenty-thirdPsalm and then hold it in abeyance until they enter the desert, only thereto recite it alone as biblical shepherds often did. To sit in the desert,to feel the jeopardy of a sheep in the wilderness, and to recite an ancienthymn of God’s provision is to cultivate divine words that will serve forlife.

Therefore, my plea is for worship that becomes familiar but not trite, thatemploys dignified language but is not stilted, language that is planned butis not mechanical. As a child, I grew up in a Lutheran tradition that stillstays with me today. After 40 years I can still recall the melodies of theliturgies, the cadence of the Nicene Creed, even portions of the set Eucharisticprayers. When I have little else to fall back on, these deep-set foundationsbecome my security. Evangelical worship must begin building immovablefoundations.

All of this—worship that is a divine encounter, pastors with priestly skills,language that is liturgically rich—means that we build a service that iscentered on God rather than the human community. This sort of worship doesnot merely tell people about God, it invites them to meet and engage Godin his presence. This worship makes us less aware of the people sitting nearbyand more aware of God who is above. Above all, this worship is creative asit permits men, women, and children to express themselves through theirgiftedness. And it employs numerous avenues of expression: from creativeuse of sound to expressive uses of color and movement. But the aim is neverto entertain or inspire the congregation. The aim is worship with abandon,worship that solicits no spectators.

My students and colleagues are looking for worship that weds dignity andspontaneity, worship that is theologically informed and liturgically intentional.My students and friends are migrating to new spiritual homes. They are lookingfor pastors who can be priests, liturgists who can evoke the divine Wordand vision, worship services that do not push them into the world merelyto be better Christians, but services that become a divine refuge—a divineencounter that lifts their lives and souls to an entirely new plateau. Andto that I say amen.

Gary M. Burge’s most recent book is The NIV ApplicationCommentary on the Epistles of John (Zondervan, 1996).

SIDEBAR: Beyond the Battle for the Organ

Robert Webber calls a truce to the ‘worship wars.’

by Richard A. Kauffman

Call it the 30-year wars. Ever since the 1960s, churches in North Americahave been struggling over worship. The battles have been over style of musicand use of nontraditional instruments, freer versus more fixed forms of worship,and even the reintroduction of ancient liturgies. Some churches have triedto bring peace by holding two services, one traditional and the othercontemporary. But this tends to divide a congregation in two, sometimes alonggenerational lines, each of which really needs the influence of the other.And it can be a way of mere conflict avoidance. According to Marva Dawn,“the war between ‘traditionalists’ and those who advocate ‘contemporary’styles often becomes a subtle battle for power rather than a communitarianconversation that could result in a blending of the old and the new treasuresto be found in the Word and in music” (Reaching Out Without DumbingDown, p. 53).

Onto the battlefield marches Robert E. Webber, professor of theology at WheatonCollege for 30 years, prolific writer, and the guru of what he calls “blendedworship,” a convergence of traditional and contemporary forms. Webber isnot brandishing weapons of war, however, but waving a white flag, callingall sides of the conflict to a truce.

Since 1995, this Bob Jones University grad turned Episcopalian has traversedthe land, giving his “Renew Your Worship” workshop over 100 times—52 timesin 1997 alone—preaching the good news about blended worship. (By 1999 heplans to have covered all major cities in the United States and Canada.)He has found church leaders eager for direction.

These workshops, he claims, are not just about worship. “I have the convictionthat worship is the key to the renewal of the church,” says Webber. He alsoperceives a deeper revolution in Protestant worship than the debate overtraditional and contemporary forms. “Ten years ago, when Christians movedinto town they asked, ‘Where’s the best preaching?'” he says. “Today, whenthey come to town they say, ‘Where’s the best worship?'”

The older, traditional style, especially in free and evangelical churches,Webber explains, tended to be pedagogical. The sermon, which was either didacticor evangelistic, was the focal point. The approach was performance oriented:certain persons (the pastor, the choir, the organist) performed for thecongregation, which was largely passive. Blended worship aims toward theparticipation of all the people by using a proclamation/response format.Blended worship, in Webber’s mold, attempts to strike a balance betweenemphasizing the mystery and awe we feel in relation to God’s transcendenceand the relational intimacy we feel with God’s immanence.

Blended worship is not intended as a hodgepodge of the old and the new (althoughsome charge Webber is not discriminating enough in choosing what he “blends”).Yet Webber is critical of a consumer-oriented approach to worship that attemptsmerely to satisfy the aesthetic tastes of a particular audience.

To be faithful to Scripture and to the early Christian patterns of worship,he maintains there are three aspects of worship that must be considered:content (the gospel), structure (the order and forms of worship), and style(the particular cultural forms in which worship finds expression).

The content of worship is the nonnegotiable aspect, which focusesupon God’s acts of redemption in history, from Creation to re-creation,especially the liberation of the people of Israel and their covenant relationshipwith God, and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Webber likesto talk about worship as “the gospel in motion.” It is event oriented: weremember, proclaim, enact, and celebrate the mighty deeds of God in the pastthat were for our salvation.

For structure, Webber draws upon a simple fourfold pattern that hedetects in early Christian worship: gathering (we joyfully enter into thepresence of God), Word (proclamation in which we hear God speak), Eucharist(we respond with thanksgiving), and dismissal (we are sent out to love andserve others). Word and Table are the centerpieces of worship. And whereashe advocates greater prominence of the Eucharist than is typical of manychurches, Webber recognizes that some traditions simply are not going tocelebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. For them, he suggests alternativeways to respond with thanksgiving to the reading, telling, and proclamationof the Word.

The style of worship varies according to cultural context. It canbe as different as singing Gregorian chants or an Ira Sankey gospel song,or hearing the Word proclaimed through an expository sermon or re-enactedthrough a modern drama. Style is really what all the fuss has been aboutin worship, and much of that has been about the music we use.

Webber looks for consensus at a deeper level, no matter the worship tradition,a consensus rooted in the proclamation, enactment, and celebration of thegospel, using the fourfold pattern of gathering, Word, sacrament, and dismissal.Only when content and structure are settled can we then talk about style,which is ultimately up to each group. Though Webber believes that a blendingof styles is needed in our pluralistic culture, he cautions against forcinga particular style upon people.

Whatever the style—or even order of worship—we would do well to put ourworship to Marva Dawn’s threefold test: Does it glorify God, build up thebody of Christ, and nurture us for God’s mission in the world? Anything elsewould be less than worthy of the worship due our God and necessary for ourfaithful discipleship.

Further resources on blended worship—Marva Dawn, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worshipfor the Turn-of-the-Century Church (Eerdmans, 1995). Dawn providesan interesting counterpart to Webber. She engages in more cultural analysis,not viewing culture as benignly as Webber, and highlights what is essentialto worship: that which puts God at the center, builds believers’ character,and upbuilds the community of faith.

—Robert Webber, Blended Worship: Achieving Substance and Relevancein Worship (Hendrickson, 1994, 1996). The primer for people interestedin the basics of blended worship. Chatty, anecdotal, very readable.

—Webber, editor, The Complete Library of Christian Worship(Hendrickson, 1993, 1994). This seven-volume encyclopedia deals witha breadth of issues related to worship. Written simply and organized topically(rather than alphabetically), it provides foundational materials (biblicaland historical) and practical aids to worship.

—Webber, et al., Renew! Songs and Hymns for Blended Worship (Hope,1995). This hymnbook is organized according to the fourfold pattern ofworship and includes both traditional and contemporary music. Available intwo editions, a paperback for singers and a spiral-bound one for accompanists.

—Webber, Worship Old and New: A Biblical, Historical, and PracticalIntroduction, revised edition (Zondervan, 1994). This volume coversmuch the same territory as Blended Worship, but with more depth, especiallyon the biblical and historical roots of Christian worship.

Persons interested in attending one of Webber’s one-day, Renew Your Worshipworkshops should write to Box 894, Wheaton, IL 60189.

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly?”Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, and later commented: “The very factthat you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeatedalready. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?” (1 Cor. 3:3and 6:7; all quotations taken from the NIV).

“Worldly.” “Completely defeated.” Would the apostle Paul use similar wordsto describe the vital, innovative, quarreling church in America today?

I was startled recently when I went through the news columns ofChristianity Today for 1996 and found over a dozen good-sized fights reported among American Christians. (No doubt hundredsof other fights were too local to make national news.) They included thefull gamut of quarrels over property, doctrine, money, leadership. Even thoughI had read all these stories as they appeared, I had not taken in theircumulative effect. The frequency of our fighting left me numb.

Fighting among Christians is nothing new, of course; it dates from New Testamenttimes. It’s hard to say whether we fight more than Christians in previousperiods. I suspect more, but I can’t prove it. I do know that we fightdifferently.

CASE STUDY NO. 1: ACALet me tell you what I know about a very public fight in a well-known evangelicalChristian organization, which I will leave unnamed since it could serve nopurpose for me to republicize these wounds. Plus, the unfolding of thecontroversy is so frustratingly common that any of a large number of groupscould be substituted for this one.

I stumbled into the beginning of this fight several years ago while researchingan article. The founding figure of the organization—I’ll call itACA, for A Christian Agency—had recently moved on. The boardhad turned over leadership to a new man from outside the organization.

I was not long in their building before I sensed a culture gap. The staffwere a bookish group, deeply dedicated to thoughtful, measured approaches.The new leader was a hard-charging crusader, eager to put his distinctivestamp on the organization. Most of the staff members lived on a pittance.They had grown up in the organization and saw themselves akin to missionaries.The new leader was accustomed to living well, and he had no sense that becauseothers had lived frugally he should do the same.

While I visited ACA, a strained cordiality reigned. Apparentlythat did not last long. Some staff left ACA voluntarily; agood number were “laid off.” After one particularly large group lost theirjobs, they made their complaints public. One laid-off staff member suedACA for wrongful dismissal. ACA filed acountersuit. This dispute was eventually settled out of court.

Meanwhile, other former staff members formed a committee to approach theACA president and his board with their questions and concerns.They got nowhere. Their entreaties, they say, were answered with threateningletters from ACA’s lawyers. They got neither a face-to-facemeeting nor answers to their complaints. When you listen to members of thisgroup, it sounds as though they did everything they could to reach a meetingof minds but got stonewalled.

ACA leaders say they willingly met with individuals. But theysaw the committee as a power tactic, intended not to facilitate communicationbut to force the board’s hand. ACA leaders were not willingto accord the committee the status it sought by granting a meeting. Nor didthey feel obliged to answer every charge the committee raised.

To this day, both sides consider themselves essentially blameless. They havenever met to try to resolve their differences, and they aren’t talking toeach other yet. Both sides grow frustrated at the very mention of the otherside’s names. It is a thoroughly nasty and unresolved quarrel.

AN OUT-OF-CHURCH EXPERIENCEMuch about the above fight is classic, especially the noncommunication betweenstaff and board. ACA’s case, though, represents several newtrends in how we Christians fight.

First, it is more likely today for Christians to turn to litigation. Of course,Christians have been suing each other at least since the time of the Corinthianchurch, but I believe it would be accurate to say that lawsuits have beenexceptional. Our grandparents would never have pondered their chances ofbeing sued as they steered their way through church quarrels. Today, it isa rare battle that doesn’t have a lawyer involved.

Steve McFarland of the Christian Legal Society (CLS) saysthat Christians go to court thinking they are going to get justice. Instead,they get incredible delays, terrible costs, and in the end, a very doubtfulchance at justice. In the case of ACA, the moment a suit wasfiled, lawyers were advising all parties not to talk to each other for fearof damaging their “case.” (Of course, this can be an excuse; after the suitswere dropped, the parties still wouldn’t talk.) Lawyers’ tactics arerarely designed to bring reconciliation.

A second modern distinctive: the parties to the ACA fightwere board members, staff members, lawyers. Church authorities—pastors andelders—did not play a significant role. No church or denominational structuresintervened or provided a place to air differences.

Sociologist Tony Campolo notes that over half of American Christians nowattend an independent church, detached from any intercongregational structurethat has the power to encourage reconcilation. And in many congregations,independent or otherwise, church discipline is weak or nonexistent.

Nonetheless, even independent churches retain one tool for resolving conflictthat was missing in the ACA example—namely, a real community.Parachurch organizations have grown dominant in missions and evangelism,in all forms of communication (print and broadcast), in service to the poor,in political and social advocacy, and even in defending doctrinal orthodoxy.The battles of parachurch organizations like the ACA arenecessarily outside the discipline of any church body. They are governedultimately by each organization’s constituents, who are often “constituents”only through the checks they write.

Many modern Christian fights carry on in this netherworld of independentdirect-mail-funded organizations, where fundraising and communication withdonors are the most pressing realities. (Modern American politics is carriedon in a similar environment.) They provide no nexus for resolving conflict,and no community to press the partisans to make peace.

There can even be an incentive to quarrel. If you can make the case in yournewsletter or on your radio show that you are fighting for principle (andwho isn’t?), then your “community of donors” may actually give more. Fightingtends to shut down contributions in a local church, but it may increase givingto parachurch organizations that successfully spin the dispute into a matterof honor or a point of identity.

EMPOWERING PEACEMAKERS“I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to agree with each other inthe Lord. Yes, and I ask you, loyal yokefellow, help these women” (Phil.4:2-3). Fighting Christians need help. They could make peace bythemselves—nothing stops them. Frequently, however, they need the pressureand assistance of other believers.

Who will give it? American Christianity is increasingly fragmented. QuarrelingChristians nowadays don’t meet accidentally, as people did in small townsor small denominations. The social structures that would make the other partydifficult to avoid are not there.

This is not to suggest that people in small towns don’t fight. They do, ofcourse. Euodia and Syntyche did in the first century. They needed someoneto step in and help them. Paul took their quarrel on and enlisted someonein the Philippian church to take an active, hands-on, peacemaking role.

What would that look like today? A peacemaker needs to have authority inboth persons’ (or both organizations’) lives. In ruptured modern society,such a person may not exist. That’s why structures need to be reinvented.

The leaders of Evangelical Ministries to New Religions (EMNR),an umbrella group of apologetic and cult-watching organizations, have triedto invent such a structure. They observed “an increasing number of disputesand unhealthy divisions” and so developed a detailed “Manual of Ethical andDoctrinal Standards.” The 45-page document (released this year) spells outstandards on such matters as plagiarism, self-representation, reporting onand criticizing other Christians, and divorce and remarriage. It also setsout a process for ethical complaints against other members ofEMNR, beginning with the private and church procedures outlinedin Matthew 18:15-20, going on to Christian mediation or arbitration, andfinally, if no successful reconciliation can be reached, ending with disciplinaryaction by the EMNR board.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether and how the process will be used.The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) have long had amuch-less-detailed code of ethics, including a process for bringing complaintsagainst other members. The climate of religious broadcasting has not beennoticeably peaceful, however, probably because broadcasters feel little concernover the censure of the NRB. Would their donors and viewersbe moved?

Nonetheless, we need umbrella groups that are willing to spell out rightbehavior and to provide an authority that insists that wrong be made right.No power on heaven or earth can force people to behave like Christians; youcan’t coerce reconciliation. Structures can, however, provide peacemakersand moral pressure. The more they are used, the more their significance willgrow.

This has become a hallmark of the work of the Evangelical Alliance in England(which has a mission similar to the National Association of Evangelicalsin the U.S.). When the “laughing revival”/Toronto Blessing jumped the oceanand landed in Britain, it threatened to divide evangelicals alongcharismatic/noncharismatic lines. EA’s then director, CliveCalver, now head of World Relief in the U.S., intervened by calling a meetingof various institutional heads of the conflicting groups. He locked themin a hotel room with instructions that they could not come out until theyissued a joint statement on the Toronto Blessing. Amidst some grumbling,the group eventually earned their liberation by coming up with a list ofaffirmations and warnings that they could all sign. The subsequent “laughingrevival” has been remarkable for its lack of controversy. Everyone knew thecriteria by which it would be judged.

While protest is not new, it hascome to be our first and mainreflex when something troubles us.

Another strategy for peacemaking is the use of mediation ministries. Evensecular corporations increasingly rely on mediation and arbitration simplybecause it saves time and legal expenses. In nearly all states, a contractcontaining a “conciliation clause” stating that disputes must be resolvedthrough mediation (voluntary agreement) and arbitration (a mandated settlementdetermined by an arbitrator after a formal hearing of evidence) will be enforcedby the courts.

Christians have an added incentive for using mediation and arbitration: theycan settle disputes in a Christian way. The CLS’s Steve McFarlandrecommends that every church and Christian organization include a conciliationclause in its terms of employment and other contracts. People fear, he says,that mediation will try to impose a kiss-and-make-up solution, bypassingthe facts that require justice. In reality, he says, properly conducted mediationand arbitration seeks justice as well as peace. Mediators can and shouldbe experienced and knowledgeable in the area of dispute. They gather factsand offer carefully constructed settlements.

Several national organizations offer trained, Christian mediation and arbitrationservices. Best known are Mennonite Conciliation Services, Peacemaker Ministries(a spinoff of the CLS), and the Alban Institute. Peacemaker’sKen Sande says that most of their work is at a local level, helping to resolvefamily and business disputes. Occasionally Peacemaker is asked to help with“major Christian figures,” but Sande has often found them resistant toconciliation. “They have a hard time believing there are people competentto deal with their cases. When threatened, they tend to go quickly to anattorney. They’re usually more comfortable with an attorney.”

CASE STUDY NO. 2: ECTAnother very different kind of fight was prompted by the 40-page statement“Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT), issued in Marchof 1994. ECT tried to define the basis for a working alliancebetween evangelical and Catholic Christians, particularly regarding socialissues such as abortion and family life. Prison Fellowship’s Charles Colsonand First Things editor Richard Neuhaus originated the idea and persuadedprominent Christians in both communities to sign.

The statement soon encountered strong opposition on the evangelical side.R. C. Sproul, Michael Horton, and other Reformed theologians complained thatthe statement compromised on basic theological positions, particularly theReformers’ creed of “salvation by faith alone.” The dispute became quitepublic, fittingly for a concern over foundational doctrine. But as oftenhappens, both sides grew entrenched in their positions, and emotions becamehot.

Then, wonderfully, peacemakers stepped in, asking the evangelical partisansto talk through their differences. After protracted negotiations, a meetingwas planned for January 19, 1995, at pastor D. James Kennedy’s Fort Lauderdalechurch.

It was an extraordinary all-day meeting of leaders. Campus Crusade for Christ’sBill Bright, theologian J. I. Packer, and Colson represented those who hadsigned the declaration. The anti-ECT faction included pastorJohn MacArthur, theologians Sproul and Horton, television host John Ankerberg,and Kennedy. Joseph Stowell, president of Moody Bible Institute, served asmoderator. John Woodbridge of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School came tofacilitate discussion.

Both Jesus and Paul spoke harshwords of truth on occasion,but they were best known forbuilding a new community of love.

The morning’s talks were brutally frank and highly emotional. By the endof the day, however, these leaders had come together. There were tears andembraces as they signed a statement clarifying the theology ofECT. Colson called the meeting “a beautiful example of howChristians should deal with their differences.”

Several participants said that Stowell had done a masterful job of moderating.I asked Stowell what such a peacemaking meeting required. He mentioned severalfactors:

First, he said, it is very important that all participants really want aconstructive result. The goal may be simply to understand each other. Butif participants aim only to vent their anger, to “get” or “reprove” the otherparty, reconciliation is unlikely.

Second, he said, you need something drafted ahead of time if you hope toemerge with an agreement. Packer had brought a statement to Fort Lauderdalethat served as a solid starting point. “If you have no predraft,” Stowellsaid, “then trying to write in a group like that is an excruciating thing.You’ll never get it done.”

Third, Stowell noted, a neutral meeting place is important. While Kennedy’schurch was not perfect (Kennedy’s sympathies were clear), it at least avoidedthe headquarters of one of the more outspoken battlers.

Fourth, Stowell felt it was important not to rush into a solution. “You haveto let people vent enough so that they actually get all the junk on the table.If guys have really been wounded, those wounds have got to show. It has toget personal enough so that guys really get honest about what they feel.”

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Part two of two parts; click here to read part one

All this was accomplished. The conferees left in a happy hopefulness. Unfortunately, the peace began to unravel in less than 24 hours. As most of the leaders caught planes for home, MacArthur and Sproul headed for a tv set to film a prescheduled John Ankerberg show critiquing the ECT statement. When this show was aired nationally, the ECT signers were shocked. They felt that the show renewed the attacks on ECT just as though the Fort Lauderdale meeting had never happened. From that point on, relations have gone from bad to worse.

It is a sad situation—not that the dispute continues, for there are profound and profoundly important theological issues at stake—but that evangelical leaders who share so much have become so alienated from each other. The story is not over yet. Attempts are being made to organize another meeting. But for now, the terrible irony is that an attempt at reconciliation probably made things worse.

It seems that in the flush of reconciliation, the principals thought they had accomplished more understanding than they really had. Those who had signed the ECT statement believed they had resolved misunderstandings. The critics thought otherwise. While they were glad that ECT signers would affirm Reformed orthodoxy, they still did not understand how they could also affirm ECT. As Kennedy told me, “We all felt that was not the full result that [we hoped for]. We would have preferred that they removed their names [from the ECT statement].”

Media exposure broke open these cracks. Michael Horton told me, “For these really sensitive topics, every word needs to be chosen. Emotional rhetoric, which comes easily when you are playing to an audience, needs to be kept to a minimum.” He pointed out that both sides have made public statements that upset the other. Television, never a subtle medium, particularly smashed their growing rapport. It is very hard to hold on to a developing understanding while arguing your point on TV.

I suggested to Stowell that the leaders had needed to go further at their meeting, discussing what they would do and say differently as a result of the meeting. They needed, that is, to agree not merely on doctrine but on conduct. He readily agreed. All the leaders, he thought, faced pressures from their own constituencies. It might have saved the meeting if they had made time (there was none, as they all had evening plans) to discuss how they would present the results of the meeting to their supporters. “What difference will this make? What pressures will this cause?”

“For me,” Horton says, “the meeting was like a seven-day tour of Europe. It was a blur. Everybody had said something, and we all remembered what we had said. Some of the people involved were so anxious to walk out with a contract that we didn’t really settle on what we had achieved.”

Nevertheless, Stowell talked about the breakdown as more than a lack of time or procedure. “We end up in the midst of an emerging controversy, talking to everybody on our side, rarely talking to our brothers on the other side. It’s kind of weird that Matthew 18 still doesn’t ring true in our lifestyles.”

The ECT battle shows all the marks of the disputatious style now dominating American discourse. Leaders who shared long histories and very deep agreement in theology, who represented much of the leadership of evangelical Christianity, could not achieve a conciliatory solution to their differences. Some expressed their concerns through cries of alarm and betrayal, while others were stunned by the attack. It was extremely difficult to get them to meet, and when they did meet, their agreement quickly fell apart.

Concern for unity brought the ECT partisans together to seek reconciliation. The urgencies of their particular constituencies, the sense that proclaiming prophetic truth from “outside the walls” is every leader’s first duty, the lack of deep community pressures toward reconciliation, even among leaders who have been friends and comrades for years, drove them apart.

WHAT THE SIXTIES REALLY TAUGHT USDoctrinal battles are nothing new. In this sense the ECT dispute is a throwback—it might have been fought in the sixteenth century.

This controversy, too, had little or no intersection with the institutional church. Broadsides were published in parachurch publications or on TV and radio shows. Compare this with previous doctrinal disputes of American Christianity, fought in church councils and denominational publications. Church splits occurred regularly, but they led to the establishment of new churches and new denominations. Churches have members. Parachurch organizations have donors.

The novelty of the ECT fight goes deeper than its institutional setting, though. Like many modern disputes, it is dominated by a style that the sixties made famous: protest.

Protest is a strong, often symbolic public statement aimed at shaping public opinion. While protest is not new (Luther started the Reformation by nailing a protest on a church door), it has come to be our first and main reflex when something troubles us. Everybody today pictures himself or herself as an embattled prophet, shouting the truth from outside the walls. Our motto might be Yell First, Talk Later.

Where once protest was the last resort of people with no other access to power—in 1955 blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, could not form a committee to visit the mayor—protest has become the first resort of those who are unhappy, even if they have substantial power. Protest is the preferred tactic of both sides of the abortion debate, of every wing of the political parties, of fundamentalists and antifundamentalists, of feminists and antifeminists. Protest is perpetual.

Protest also “works.” Many commentators lament the increased rancor of American politics, often bemoaning the bad manners of the people involved. Much more than character is involved, however. Rancor fits our circ*mstances. In a fractionated society, linked mainly by media and money, protest offers strong, clear gestures to attract like-minded people (donors). You can build a constituency around dissent, the feistier the better.

The media love protest. For reporters, it’s the easiest story to write, offering two neatly separated sides. Protest suits the talk-show format, while centrism and alliance-building are boring fare on tv or radio. Protest goes well on the Internet, too, where flaming charges and sourceless reports get traded in chat rooms. Accusations and counteraccusations can move faster and reach more people than ever before.

The career of Billy Graham is, by way of contrast, instructive. He forswore protest as a tactic. All his life he has felt deeply concerned about liberal tendencies in American Christianity. The launching of this magazine was, in part, a protest against them. Yet Graham’s ministry expressed those concerns in an overwhelmingly centrist way. He sought links to everybody from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Pope John Paul II. His crusades are known for their inclusive and unifying effects. It is this concern for harmony, as much as anything, that has won Graham such wide admiration. Yet, as much as Graham is admired, few leaders today seek to emulate his style.

CONSTRUCTING PEACEWe receive plenty of guidance from Scripture bearing on how we should handle disputes. “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Col. 3:13). “Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong” (1 Thess. 5:15). “[Love] keeps no record of wrongs” (1 Cor. 13:5).

There is a cost to conciliation. You must be willing to answer softly. You must be willing to give up the final word. You must be willing to lose your dignity, if it comes to that.

A person who seems not to remember that he was wronged, a person who returns love for hurt, does not seem very potent. Neither did Jesus, through most of his life. Jesus’ example stands behind Paul’s admonitions not to repay wrong with wrong, but to forgive. Paul certainly does not require compromising the truth or ceasing to speak strongly for it. Jesus did not; Paul did not. Yet love was preeminent. Its absence, Paul tells us, would make the greatest miracles meaningless (1 Cor. 13:2). Both Jesus and Paul spoke harsh words of truth on occasion, but they were best known for building a new community out of love.

How can we build this new community today in American Christianity?

More and better structures for resolving conflict would help. The attempts of groups like EMNR to clarify standards and develop accountability are admirable. So are conciliation efforts such as those that Peacemaker Ministries offers (largely through volunteers). Christians need others who will press them, gently but insistently, to seek reconciliation. We never seem to have enough such persons.

Structures work when they encourage and enable such personal contacts. Administrative machinery by itself is unlikely to reduce conflict, because each dispute is different (or seems so to the participants), and because reconciliation is a matter of the spirit more than the law.

Still, most of us do not participate directly in these controversies. But we do play a role. As controversies heat up, we are often asked to take sides, to act. Ordinary Christians can play a role in resolving quarrels by resisting beguiling versions of the truth and demonstrating wisdom in the way they respond to appeals for support. Many fights will die down if a broad Christian audience proves unsympathetic. While quarreling Christians claim they are fighting for principle, Christian constituents would be wise not to take this claim at face value but instead to ask the following questions:

1. Has there been a sincere attempt to make personal contact before concerns are aired publicly? Have the quarreling parties met and talked over their differences? This is especially important when the issue is one of personal conduct, but it applies even when differences in belief are being aired and the reputations of the people involved are at stake. Personal interaction does not, of course, guarantee agreement, but it does tend to limit the distortions and extremes we are prone to make when we only speak about each other, not to each other. Plus, Scripture demands it.

2. Would the other side recognize their position as fairly portrayed? Ten years ago Ron Sider wrote in Transformation, “There is a fairly simple way to check whether we have accurately understood and fairly summarized another’s views. We can ask the other person! I suspect that at least half of the current battles in church circles would end if the major contestants merely consulted each other personally and directly to see if the views they were denouncing were actually held by the other person.”

3. Are sensational crowd-pleasing formulations used as a substitute for measured analysis? Last April World magazine created a stir when they used terms such as “feminist seduction,” “unisex language,” and “stealth Bible,” in an article describing the International Bible Society’s plans to revise its New International Version. Such sensational language clouded, rather than clarified, this important subject. World came in for scrutiny as print journalism. How many donor letters and talk shows would be similarly censured if similarly examined?

4. Is guilt by association an important part of the charges? We do well to remember that Jesus was known to associate with people no one could approve.

5. Is evidence for the charges presented? If quotations are used, are they extensive, or are fragments strung together? Is the source cited so that anyone can look it up for himself or herself?

6. Have independent leaders whom you respect voiced their opinion about the dispute? Muted comments or silence from others may indicate reasons for caution. Other leaders often have information that is not generally known.

7. If expert opinion is relevant, how much are you hearing from such experts? If, for example, the concern is over book royalties, are legal and publishing authorities cited? If someone is accused of New Age sympathies, do reputable scholars support the allegations?

8. Does someone benefit from the controversy in terms of enhanced reputation, publicity, or greater power? Is it in his or her interest to keep the fires burning? Such benefits prove nothing, but they should inject a note of caution.

9. Does a generous attitude show itself in the way the dispute is presented? Is the other side given credit for good deeds or good intentions? Is there some attempt to distinguish between first- and second-level concerns? Does there seem to be a genuine wish for compromise or reconciliation?

By the grace of God we are what we are: a freewheeling, innovative, independent, and highly differentiated people. American Christians are not bound together by a church hierarchy or an ethnic consensus, but only by our call from Christ Jesus. The imperatives of the media and fundraising push us to define ourselves over and against others. By sociology, you might say we are bound to fight. But what are we bound to by the Holy Spirit?

We can, if we choose, create better structures for resolving disputes, and we can, if we try, become more discerning about the charges and countercharges we hear. More fundamentally, we who claim loyalty to Scripture need to heed what Scripture says. Again and again the Bible demands that followers of Jesus live together in peace. “All men will know that you are my disciples if you love one another” (John 13:35).

As American Christians, we need to ask God to make us a people who share his heart, not only in his love for the lost and for truth, but also in his love for unity in the family of God. “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46).

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Everything about the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests mystery.Collected by a radical Jewish sect, perhaps Essenes, who lived monasticallyin the arid and almost lifeless Judaean wilderness, the scrolls include over800 Jewish manuscripts—many biblical—dating from as early as 250B.C. The scrolls were hidden in the caves ofQumran, on the northwest corner of the Dead Sea, so that the Roman armieswould not destroy them on their way to conquer Jerusalem. The Essenes, ofwhom we know little, expected to liberate the scrolls when their communitywas liberated by the Messiah. The Romans prevailed, however, and so the scrollsstayed hidden for almost 1,900 years. But the mysteries don’t end with thescrolls’ discovery 50 years ago, which many label the archaeological eventof the century. Since then, the scrolls have been a pawn of Mideast politicsand the cause of an unusual number of academic scandals.

Which makes Trinity Western University in verdant British Columbia in Canadaan unlikely port into this cryptic world. A half a globe away from the cavesof Qumran, the campus’s spiraling western cedars and low-hanging utilitylines have nothing in common with the stark terrain of the Judaean desert.And when it comes to history, the school boasts only its Seal Kap House,where the sealable cap for milk bottles was invented.

But step through the front door of the Seal Kap House and you are transportedback to ancient Palestine. The languages of choice are Aramaic and its descendantSyriac, Hebrew (biblical, Qumranic, and rabbinic), Greek, and Latin. Theresidents are twentieth-century evangelical Christian scholars Peter Flint,Martin Abegg, and Craig Evans, who form the core of the school’s Dead SeaScrolls Institute, but the guests of honor are the Essenes.

If the scholars at the Seal Kap keep one eye focused on the past, they trainthe other on the late twentieth century. Two tabloids pinned to a bulletinboard outside Flint’s office proclaim “Startling Revelations from Dead SeaScrolls: 1997 Weather to Be Worst Ever,” and “Lost Prophecies of the DeadSea Scrolls: Christ Reborn—Woman in Idaho Will Be New Virgin Mother.” Nextto them a newspaper clipping announces the latest discoveries of the JesusSeminar—phrases from the Gospels they determined Jesus could never haveuttered.

While not intended as a most-wanted list, the bulletin board profiles thetrio’s top foes—sensationalism and biased scholarship. Armed with directaccess to the ancient manuscripts—Flint and Abegg are members of the officialteam of 70 Dead Sea Scroll editors worldwide—Trinity’s triumvirate is waginga new evangelical battle for the Bible. It is a war fought among mysterioustexts, tantalizing New Testament parallels, and theories as quirky as theexperts who conceived them. And so to solve the mystery of the scrolls wego to Langley, British Columbia.

BURIED TREASURE

I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me.
—Isaiah 65:1

Half a century ago this year a young Arab shepherd crawled into the mouthof a cave near the Dead Sea in Palestine and re-emerged with the oldest Biblemanuscripts now known. One was a complete scroll of the Book of Isaiah, copiedby scribes 100 years before the time of Jesus. Additional findings in tenother caves in the Qumran region over the next decade gave the world a jigsawpuzzle of 100,000 pieces of ancient Jewish religious texts that were theremains of about 870 distinct scrolls. Written in varieties of Hebrew, Aramaic,and Greek, 220 of these were biblical scrolls representing at least portionsof every book of our Old Testament except Esther.

The remaining 650 nonbiblical texts contained an intriguing assortment ofreligious prose and poetry, including plans for building a new temple thesize of Jerusalem (the Temple Scroll), a secret list of buried treasure (theCopper Scroll), and a prophecy of how the Sons of Light would defeat theSons of Darkness in the last days (War Scroll). In addition, there werecommentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures, books of the Apocrypha, calendar texts,rules for achieving ritual purity, and documents outlining community lifeand initiation rites. Some referred to a Teacher of Righteousness and a WickedPriest.

This Isaiah matches the A.D. 1000 MasoreticText upon which all modern translationsare based 99 percent of the time.

Taken together, they raised the question of who the members of this communitywere, and who the revered Teacher of Righteousness might have been. For overfive decades now, experts have offered a variety of colorful—if sometimesfar-fetched—answers. But until the early 1990s, those seeking to answerthese and other questions faced a handicap: the refusal of the official scrolleditors to release the remaining manuscripts to outside scholars before theyhad completed their own work on them.

By the late eighties, these outside scholars would mount a growing protestagainst what came to be labeled “the scrolls cartel” and “the academic scandalof the century.” The liberation of the scrolls, surprisingly, would beginwith the gutsy sleuthing of a young graduate student at Hebrew Union Universityin Cincinnati named Martin Abegg.

THE SCROLLBUSTER

From all tribes of Israel they shall prepare capable men for themselves to go out for battle …
—War Scroll, column 2

In the fall of 1991, Abegg rounded the corner of a convention booth at theannual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL)and came face to face with his former Jewish professor Emanuel Tov. He hadstudied for several years at Hebrew University in Jerusalem with Tov, whowas now chief editor of the international scrolls team. Mysteriously, Tovgreeted Abegg with the Hebrew phrase banim giddalti v’romamti (“Ireared children and brought them up”).

Abegg replied with an unsure thank-you; later that evening he looked up thephrase, which he recognized from Isaiah. In chapter 1 he found the versethat his mentor, in good rabbinic fashion, had left unfinished: v’hempash’u bi, “but they have rebelled against me.”

Rebellion, controversy, and outright war have surrounded the scrolls fromtheir ancient birth and burial in Palestine to their modern resurrectionin the high-tech presses of popular and academic publishing. Many scholarsbelieve that the scrolls belonged to a Jewish sect that lived communallyat Qumran near the caves where the manuscripts were found. The puritans oftheir day, they became disillusioned with the political corruption of thepriesthood in Jerusalem under the Jewish rulers known as the Hasmoneans.Around 166 B.C., the group withdrew to thedesert dwelling in Qumran, about 20 miles east of Jerusalem. There they ralliedaround a teacher they believed God had blessed with a special ability tointerpret the Hebrew prophets.

This Teacher of Righteousness, as the scrolls cryptically call him, saw inthe events of his day, and particularly in the calling out of the Qumransect, a prophesied division of the forces of darkness from the forces oflight. The pure remnant would soon wage a final and preordained battle againstthe Romans and their puppet Jewish temple leaders, and with the help of amessiah, they would victoriously usher in Israel’s redemption.

War against the Romans did come with the First Jewish Revolt inA.D. 66. But instead of giving rise to theirhoped-for messiah, it led to the destruction of not only Jerusalem and thetemple in A.D. 70, but also the Qumran settlementit*elf. Before its destruction, however, the members of the sect had hiddentheir sacred scrolls in the surrounding caves for safekeeping—expectingto reclaim them after their victory.

For nearly two thousand years the scrolls lay undisturbed in their dark,dry cavities. When uncovered shortly after World War II, the first moderneyes to read their scripts and recognize their antiquity were those of E.L. Sukenik, a specialist in Jewish paleography. Coincidentally, it was November29, 1947, the very day the United Nations voted to partition Palestine inorder to create a Jewish state. The timing was not lost on Sukenik as heread with awe these manuscripts he was sure dated to the time when Herod’stemple still stood proud.

One result of the UN partition was that when the team of eightscroll editors was formed in 1952, most of them were Catholic. By order ofthe Jordanian government, into whose territory the scrolls fell, none ofthe team could be Jewish. That would change, however, during the 1967 SixDay War when Israeli solders captured the Palestine Archaeological Museumin East Jerusalem, where the scrolls were housed. It was renamed the RockefellerMuseum, and Jewish scholars were added to the team.

While fighting sometimes erupted around the museum over the years, the editorsinside soon began having skirmishes of their own. As early as 1956, scrolleditor John Allegro, an agnostic who vowed he would one day undermine thefairy tale of Christianity, announced to the press that he had found a 100B.C. manuscript containing an Essene storyof a messiah’s crucifixion and resurrection. It showed, he claimed, thatthe Christian Gospels were nothing more than later adaptions of this earlierEssene story, and that Jesus was a fictional character derived from the historicTeacher of Righteousness.

Allegro also maintained that his Catholic colleagues on the team were suppressingscroll texts for fear of the damage they would wreak on the church. EvenJewish scholars roundly dismissed Allegro’s imaginative readings; nonetheless,the same basic theory of a Catholic conspiracy would resurface as late as1991 in a book by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh called The Dead SeaScrolls Deception (Touchstone).

Other specialists over the decades seemed equally eager to find the fantasticin the scrolls. In the 1980s, Barbara Thiering, an Australian scholar, claimedthe scrolls were encoded with secret messages; when the Gospels are readusing these codes, they tell us that Jesus was the Wicked Priest, was crucifiedbut kept alive with snake poison, and eventually married and bore two children.In California, historian Robert Eisenman found in the scrolls evidence thatafter Jesus was executed as a Zealot, his brother James became leader ofthe Qumran sect and then ousted the apostle Paul from the group for hisblasphemous teachings about Jesus.

Added to this volatile environment was the impatience of many mainstreamscholars with the slow pace of publication of the scrolls. While in the earlyyears scroll editions had come out in a timely fashion, as the editors sensedthe growing importance of the scrolls to the scholarly community they beganwriting comprehensive commentaries on the texts instead of simply publishingthe texts and photographs and thereby allowing other scholars to make theirhistorical and critical evaluations.

It was a situation Abegg saw from both sides in the late 1980s. He remembersthe instructions that his Professor Tov had given him as Abegg was preparingto leave Hebrew University in Jerusalem and move to Hebrew Union Universityin Cincinnati to complete his doctorate under Ben Zion Wacholder. As oneof the scroll editors, Tov had sometimes given Abegg and the other studentsunpublished scroll materials to work on. “He told me directly, ‘Don’t showthis to your professors back in the States.’ “

“That was the first of the bells that went off in my head,” says Abegg. “HereI am a master’s student, and I’m going back to work with men that have gonea whole generation before me, and I can’t show them this. That seemed strange.”

In the press, perceptions of a scrolls cartel were not at all dispelled whenJohn Strugnell, the chief editor of the scrolls, in 1991 called outside scholarswho wanted access to the unpublished manuscripts “a bunch of fleas who arein the business of annoying us.” Soon after, in a statement to a reporterfor an Israeli newspaper, he asserted that the Jewish faith was “a horriblereligion.” Having undone himself, Strugnell was replaced by Tov as chiefeditor. In Cincinnati, in the meantime, Tov’s former student had alreadybegun his deed of rebellion.

As early as 1988, rumors had circulated that a concordance existed for theunpublished Dead Sea Scrolls. In magazines such as Biblical ArchaeologyReview, these rumors were flatly denied, but when Abegg’s professor Wacholdermet Strugnell at a conference in Israel, he learned that the concordancedid exist, and that in the early years after the scrolls’ discovery the editorshad created 3×5 cards with transcriptions of corresponding fragments of themanuscripts. This helped them in their work and prevented them from overhandlingthe scrolls and scraps themselves. Wacholder, using his connections, eventuallysecured a copy of the secret concordance.

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Recalls Abegg: “I was hoping all the time Wacholder was doing these negotiationsthat it wasn’t just a word list, that it was a key word in context, likeStrong’s concordance. Actually, I found it was better than that, becauseif you looked up the last word in an entry or in a verse, Strong’s wouldn’tgive you the next word in the next verse; but this concordance did.”

Because the cards were keyed to each other, Abegg could type one card afterthe other into his word processor until he had reconstructed whole texts—textsthat had never before been published. When in 1991 the editor of BiblicalArchaeology Review, Hershel Shanks, who since the mideighties had beencalling for the “release” of the scrolls, caught wind of Abegg’s reconstructedtexts, he encouraged Abegg to let him publish them.

Abegg found himself facing an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, there wasthe academic protocol against publishing other people’s work—coding the3×5 cards represented hundreds of days of piecing the texts together. Onthe other hand, says Abegg, “we saw that this material had been done in thelate fifties and could have been published then. They had held on to thismaterial, were telling everyone it couldn’t be published because there hadbeen no transcriptions. And then we found out that, indeed, there had beentranscriptions back in the fifties—they were pulling the wool over our eyesall these years.”

The texts went to print in September 1991. The Huntington Library in Californiaquickly followed by making public actual photos of the manuscripts. And finally,even the Israel Antiquities Authority, which controlled the scrolls, ruledthat it now supported open access to copies of the scrolls. From the NewYork Times to Newsweek, Wacholder and Abegg were declared theliberators of the scrolls. “Andy Warhol talks about your 15 minutes of fame,”says Abegg, whose steady gaze and conventional haircut make the 47-year-oldfather seem anything but a publicity-seeking renegade. “I had my 15 minutesmany times over that year.”

The limelight has faded in the six years since. Abegg is now busy doing whathe loves best: teaching and working on the scroll texts themselves. And evenTov, whom Abegg always deeply admired, has apparently welcomed back his prodigalson: this past summer Abegg was invited to become one of Tov’s official scrolleditors.

OUR OLD TESTAMENT TO THE “T”—ALMOST

( … just as) it is written in the b(ook) of Isaiah the prophet …
—4Q265, fragment 2

Abegg and Flint, who together are codirectors of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute,are two of nearly a dozen evangelical scholars who have been added to theinternational team of scroll editors in the last decade. Not surprisingly,says Flint, their presence is influencing the scholarly discussion surroundingthe scrolls. “Just as Jews have helped focus on things like ritual purity,food laws, and things of interest to Jews, I think evangelicals have helpedfocus the interest on the reliability of the Bible, how we got our Bible,and also on the relation between Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” he says.

Flint, 46, believes that evangelicals have arrived late on the scene in exploringthe significance of the scrolls for Christian faith. So when Trinity Western—aschool of the Evangelical Free Church begun in 1962—called in 1995, askinghim to help begin the institute in conjunction with the school’s graduateprogram in biblical studies, he was more than ready. And more than qualified.

Flint is no journalist’s dream to interview—he is painstakingly methodical(try getting him to answer even one question out of the logical order ofthe discussion), contentedly introverted, and exasperatingly careful. Butit is exactly those qualities that make him a top candidate for editing somethingso intricate as the scrolls.

Raised in a Christian family in South Africa, he eventually came to the UnitedStates with the specific goal of studying with the best of the Dead Sea Scrollsscholars. His Ph.D. adviser at the University of Notre Dame was Eugene Ulrich,chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls for North America. After serving fora number of years as Ulrich’s research assistant, Flint was asked to jointhe official team of scroll editors in 1991. He brought with him his knowledgeof 11 modern and ancient languages.

Like the Jesus Seminar, which over the years has publicized its work on theGospels, Flint and his colleagues seek to educate both specialists and laypeopleabout their work. They do this by speaking in churches, participating inlearned societies such as the Society of Biblical Literature, presentingpapers at archaeological and ancient-languages seminars, and conducting anannual Dead Sea Scrolls symposium at Trinity Western. But in marked contrastto the shock tactics of their ideological counterpart, says Flint, the instituteseeks to instill in its audiences a reasoned confidence in the Scriptures.

At one level, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide a wonderfully affirming resourcefor this job. For years, biblical conservatives have pointed happily to theGreat Isaiah Scroll, which was among the original seven scrolls found inthe first cave in 1947. With all 66 chapters completely preserved, this versionof Isaiah—though copied down around 100 B.C.—matches the A.D. 1000 Masoretic Text upon which all modern Old Testament translations are based 99 percent of the time. Nearly the same level of accuracy is found in the other biblical manuscripts found at Qumran. “This confirms to us that our Hebrew Bible was wonderfully preserved,” Flint says.

When it comes to the 1 percent that does differ, Flint gives the discrepanciesa positive, pastoral take. “I’m happy to say in a rather dramatic fashionthat the scrolls often sort out problems that we’ve known about for ages.They give us in black and white a better reading of the biblical text.”

One example is an ambiguous Hebrew phrase in Psalm 22:16. Translators haveoften rendered it “They have pierced my hands and feet,” followingthe reading of the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures,the earliest complete manuscripts coming from the late third centuryA.D.). The more direct translation from theHebrew Masoretic Text, however, is “Like a lion are my hands and feet.”But in a technical monograph, just off the press in July, titled The DeadSea Psalms Scrolls (Brill), Flint shows that the “pierced” reading isindeed the preferred option in the Hebrew Dead Sea Psalms—dispelling chargesthat the phrase was a later Christian messianic misrendering. Other interesting“textual variants” include the following:

—Goliath’s height in a Hebrew manuscript of Samuel dated to the mid-thirdcentury B.C. (4QSam-b) is given as six foot,nine inches, not nine foot, nine inches, as found in the Masoretic Text (4QSam-bdesignates the text as being the second—or b—Samuel manuscript foundin Cave 4 at Qumran).

—The number of Jacob’s descendants who traveled with him to Egyptis 70 in the Masoretic Text, but 75 in 4QExod-a. This corresponds to thenumber Stephen uses in his sermon in Acts 7:14 as well as to the Septuagint,which Stephen may have been using.

—A new text found in 4QSam-a contains a paragraph at the end of 1Samuel 10 that explains that “Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievouslyoppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the right eyeof each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer.” These words, missingfrom our Bibles, provide the context for Nahash’s threats to gouge out theright eyes of the Israelites in chapter 11. The New Revised Standard Versionis the first translation to incorporate this new paragraph.

While leapfrogging back to a cache of manuscripts a millennium older thanour previous Old Testament texts has affirmed “our” Scriptures, it also landsus in a murky pond called canon formation. It is a subject, says Flint, thatsome of his lay listeners find unsettling.

A case in point is a slide Flint shows of himself in which he is scrutinizingthe original manuscript of 4QPs-a in the editors’ workroom at the RockefellerMuseum in Jerusalem. “I’m holding in my hands the oldest copy of the Bookof Psalms in the entire world,” he says with obvious emotion. “It’s datedto about 150 B.C., which is over 1,100 yearsolder than the Book of Psalms we use in all our seminaries. It is a veryhumbling experience as a biblical scholar.”

The consensus from almost allquarters of Bible scholarshipis that the Dead Sea Scrollsroot the Gospels inextricablywithin the Jewish tradition.

This particular set of psalms, however, contains only 89 selections—or thefirst three books of the five books found in our Masoretic-based Psalters.Other Qumran Psalters, by contrast, include Psalm 151, which appears in theSeptuagint but not in the Masoretic Text or our modern Bibles (which containonly 150 psalms). In addition, some of the scrolls contain psalms not previouslyknown. The different collections and varying orders in which the psalms arearranged, scholars agree, point to an unsettled canon of sacred Scripturein use by the Qumran sect.

For Bible historians, this evidence of canon formation at the time is nothingnew—the closure of the Jewish Scriptures is thought to have occurred atthe end of the first century A.D. What is neware the clues the Qumran scrolls give about varying textual traditions behindthe Jewish Scriptures. The clearest and most dramatic example of this canbe seen in the Qumran copies of Jeremiah.

Some of these Jeremiahs are direct ancestors of theA.D. 1000 Masoretic Text. The much-touted 99percent correspondence of the Qumran Scripture texts applies when theseproto-Masoretic versions are compared with their later medieval Masoreticdescendant. But critics soon found that other of the Jeremiah manuscriptsrepresented a distinct Hebrew text tradition—one that appeared to lie behindthe Greek translation of the Septuagint. As in the Septuagint, this separateHebrew Jeremiah presents material in a different order and is about an eighthshorter than the proto-Masoretic manuscripts. Which of these equally ancientbut independent Hebrew versions of Jeremiah is closer to what Jeremiah andhis scribe actually penned remains an open question.

“What the scrolls are telling us,” says Flint the scholar, “is that whenthe canon was incomplete, there were different versions of certain books:the Septuagints chose one version, and the Masoretics chose the other.”

But Flint the evangelical is careful to add: “While we know that at the timeof Jesus there were different canons of the Old Testament because the canonicalprocess was not yet complete, the glorious truth is that God has invitedhumans to be partners in the putting together of Scripture. I think theimplications are that you cannot have Scripture without the community offaith. It’s not just a private revelation. God gives us Scripture, but thenthe community of faith, by God’s guidance, has to choose what’s in and what’sout.”

DEMYTHOLOGIZING THE JESUS SEMINAR

If a prophet or interpreter of dreams arises among you and … says, “Let us go and serve other gods” … you shall purge the evil one from your midst.
—Temple Scroll, column 54

In the 1940s, just prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, EdgarGoodspeed wrote his scholarly opinion that “the Gospel is Christianity’scontribution to literature. It is the most potent type of religious literatureever devised. To credit such a creation to the most barren age of a neververy productive tongue like Aramaic would seem the height of improbability.For in the days of Jesus the Jews of Palestine were not engaged in writingbooks. It is not too much to say that a Galilean or Jerusalem Jew of thetime of Christ would regard writing a book in his native tongue with positivehorror.”

That’s the kind of quote that gets Craig Evans going. Professor of BiblicalStudies at Trinity Western since the early eighties, he was the drivinginspiration behind starting Trinity’s Dead Sea Scrolls Institute. Today heserves as the institute’s spokesman on the relationship of the scrolls toJesus and the New Testament. A strapping six-foot-two with a bushy mustacheand a charismatic personality, Evans, 45, is the most articulate of the Trinitytrio. He is also the most prone to hyperbole.

“One after the other, certain nonevangelical so-called critical hypothesesare being blown out of the water by tidbits of information that the scrollsprovide,” he says, showing a text of 4Q246. Its title—”The Aramaic Son ofGod Text”—is one that would have made Goodspeed blush. Aramaic, it turnsout, is the language found in one of every six nonbiblical Qumran scrolls.

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Document in hand, Evans moves in for the rhetorical kill: “Here we have a text written in Aramaic from first-century B.C. Jewish Palestine that envisions the coming of a figure, probably a messianic figure, in terms of being called the Son of God and Son of the Most High. Bultmann and other critics said that the Son of God language that shows up in the Gospels was evidence of further reflections outside of Palestine in the Greco-Roman world. It’s not Jewish—it’s reflecting the worship of the Roman emperors as gods and sons of gods. Christianity must have adopted that terminology and now applies it to Jesus, but it really doesn’t come from Jewish soil. Well, when you have a first-century B.C. Jewish text that uses the same language, what does that mean? And it happens to be in Aramaic, which we think was the language of Jesus and his followers.”

He cites another example—a phrase from 4Q521, one of the nonbiblical scrolls scholars could not access until the fall of 1991. On a first reading, the phrase seems but a familiar quotation from Isaiah 61, the same Isaiah passage Jesus alludes to when John the Baptist sends a message from prison asking if Jesus is the one who is to come. Jesus replies that the blind see, the lame walk, the poor have good news preached to them, and “the dead are raised.”

This last phrase—which Jesus speaks but which significantly does not appear in Isaiah 61—appears in 4Q521, written in Hebrew around 30 B.C. More important, the Qumran phrase is used in the context of explaining the wonders the Messiah will do when he appears—when “heaven and earth will obey his Messiah.”

For Evans, 4Q521 demonstrates that Jesus’ answer to John was a messianic one. “That’s what has been disputed in the past. Some have thought here was Jesus’ perfect chance to answer John, saying, ‘Yes, I’m the Messiah’; but he doesn’t do that. Instead, he allusively appeals to Isaiah 61. Is that the best he can do? Well, 4Q521 makes it clear that this appeal to Isaiah 61 is indeed messianic. So, in essence, Jesus is telling John through his messengers that messianic things are happening. So that answers his question: Yes, he is the one who is to come.”

If an evangelical arguing that the words Jesus spoke were not completely unique seems an odd approach to defending the historical Jesus, it seems less so when it is understood that the real affront to the gospel accounts over the years has come from scholars discounting the Jewish context of gospel portraits of Jesus and denying that Jesus understood himself to be Israel’s Messiah.

Today the consensus from almost all quarters of Bible scholarship is that the Dead Sea Scrolls do, indeed, root the Gospels inextricably within the Jewish tradition. If Bultmann and his ilk decried the Gospel of John as blatantly Greek (Gnostic) and of late origins because of its dualism between light and darkness, Miami University’s Edwin Yamauchi today believes it is “now shown by the Qumran parallels to be the most Jewish of the Gospels.”

While none of the scrolls names Jesus or any other New Testament characters, they do shed light on some previously contested passages. For example, New Testament specialists were surprised to find in the scrolls an argument that “the works of the Law … will be reckoned to you as righteousness, in that you have done what is right and good before Him … ” Located in 4QMMT, the phrasing is the same as that found in Galatians, where Paul writes that Abraham’s faith was “reckoned to him as righteousness” (3:6). Paul, in contrast to MMT, insists that “by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified” (2:16).

Until MMT became available to the scholarly community in 1991, Paul was considered by many to be making a straw man out of his opponents. What evidence was there in Jewish history that anyone seriously made the case for righteousness by works of the Law? In keeping with his conversion to Christianity, it was claimed, Paul had unfairly caricatured Judaism by arguing against a position that didn’t really exist.

“We don’t talk about a straw man any longer,” says Evans. “4QMMT seems to be the very argument that Paul is reflecting. He is definitely debating different aspects of Judaism and how it understood itself.”

On occasion, Evans has been called on to debate representatives of the Jesus Seminar. It is an opportunity he relishes, he says, because of the simple fact that his use of the Dead Sea Scrolls allows him to argue from Palestinian manuscripts preceding and overlapping the first century A.D., when the New Testament was composed. The Jesus Seminar, on the other hand, relies chiefly on manuscripts found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, which were composed in the centuries after the New Testament texts had already been written.

In one debate with John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar at an annual meeting of the SBL, Evans found that in making the case for the historicity of the trial narrative of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark he “had the overwhelming support of the audience. Crossan was basically shot down.”

This reaction from the crowd, Evans believes, reflects a larger moderating force within Bible scholarship, due in large measure to the Dead Sea Scrolls. If the SBL includes a true cross section of 5,500 members of every religious background, the Jesus Seminar by comparison is “this funny, quirky little thing” that “started out with 300 members but now only lists about 75, and that’s inflated since only about 35 are even active. Their numbers are dwindling. But the leadership—Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan and a few others—are movers and shakers. They like to persuade the media that they are cutting edge, that they are out in front of the rest of us. They also like to portray themselves as a very fair representative cross section of Jesus scholars. All that is illusory. And their infatuation with the Gospel of Thomas and other apocryphal gospels is just laughable. In Europe they’re just laughed to scorn. It’s looked upon as a silly American phenomenon.”

According to Evans, not only the scrolls but also the growing prominence of evangelical scholarship over the last several decades has changed the landscape of the profession. Seen historically, he says, when the modernists and fundamentalists split in the first half of the century, “the modernists ended up with the seminaries, libraries, and the endowments,” while the conservatives retreated to small, safe Bible colleges.

Today, by contrast, a significant portion of members in the profession’s SBL is evangelical. This is especially true in the Historical Jesus section of the SBL, the area in which Evans specializes. Additionally, he notes, “Almost all the chairs of the biblical studies sections at SBL are evangelical.

“Nonevangelicals have lost momentum because of a fragmentation of method. They’re into deconstructionism, and nobody can agree on anything. Does the Bible mean anything? Can you find out if the ancient texts mean anything? With authorial intent in question, it’s just fragmenting. In a lot of their seminaries, Bible isn’t even required any longer, and the biblical languages aren’t taught.

“The only seminaries that are still growing and healthy, with a few exceptions, are evangelical seminaries. And in terms of biblical studies, who are the guys emerging who take the Bible seriously? They’re predominantly evangelicals. They do their homework, learn the languages, know their critical stuff well, go to Israel and do the digs. They’re doing what the nonevangelicals used to do well 30 or 40 years ago. So we’re taking over, partly through getting better on our part and partly because of the abdication and irresponsibility of the nonevangelicals.”

By doing their homework with the Dead Sea Scrolls as their textbooks, Evans, Abegg, and Flint hope to do their part in shaping the modern history and interpretation of the scrolls and, indirectly, that of the Bible. “The scrolls don’t prove that the Gospels always have it right,” says Evans. “The scrolls don’t prove certain theological things like inerrancy. What they do is tend to corroborate and support what I would regard as responsible exegesis that interprets Scripture in the Jewish context, and it tends to run against the sensationalizing of the Jesus Seminar and others who want to drag Jesus into a different environment and say he was only a Cynic philosopher.”

Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls 50 years ago, few believed any Palestinian manuscripts from the time of Jesus had survived. Today some archaeologists point to the possibility of even more scrolls being uncovered—literally—when the next big earthquake in the region loosens rocks and exposes hidden caves. For now, though, the scholars at the Seal Kap are more than content studying the scrolls they do have. By scrutinizing each jot and tittle, they are gaining new glimpses into first-century Palestine, a world ready and waiting for Messiah.

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