Page 4822 – Christianity Today (2025)

Portraying someone as beloved as C. S. Lewis on film is risky. The performance can become overly sentimental, elevating the subject to mythological stature. On the other hand, it is easy to overemphasize flaws in a “warts-and-all” treatment that diminishes the true legacy of the author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Chronicles of Narnia.

In Shadowlands, director-producer Richard Attenborough travels a third and more difficult road, reminding us that regardless of fame, stature, or accomplishments, God is never finished with us in this lifetime. In Shadowlands, we see “Jack” Lewis as his associates might have seen him, a brilliant debater and beloved public figure who lived an emotionally isolated bachelor’s life.

Beginning with William Nicholson’s fine script, Attenborough directs Anthony Hopkins in the best performance of his career. Hopkins is best known to mainstream audiences as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, a gory movie inexplicably named best picture at the 1991 Academy Awards.

Hopkins’s greatest talent is in portraying men trapped within their own emotions. In Shadowlands, Hopkins moves Lewis out of the shell. By the end of the film, his Jack Lewis has progressed emotionally and spiritually.

As good as Lewis

The story of Lewis’s romance with Joy Gresham is as compelling as Lewis’s fiction. The cloistered life he built for himself at Oxford was an understandable reaction to the loss of his beloved mother at age nine and the horror of the trenches in the Great War, where he fought as a young man and was wounded. But protection led to isolation. To fall in love, Lewis once again had to risk great pain. Hopkins’s Lewis explores the forces that keep a man trapped inside himself and the forces that draw him out.

Joy Gresham was one of many readers who corresponded with Lewis, not only about his books, but also about faith and life. She visited Lewis with her young son as she approached the brink of a hurtful divorce. Their epistolary acquaintance slowly became a friendship. Over time, friendship developed into a grand passion that transformed Lewis and Gresham and drew them closer to their Creator.

Although Debra Winger’s Gresham is a highly intelligent woman who once shared a poetry prize with Robert Frost, it is her disarming, almost proletarian directness that wins Lewis’s heart and draws him from his carefully composed emotional cocoon. Gresham begins as an admiring fan and becomes a friend who is unafraid to challenge Lewis intellectually. But she is also a mother who understands that human beings are created—as Lewis said—for intimacy and ecstasy.

What separates Shadowlands from ordinary romances is that it is built upon eros rather than erotica. Lewis and Gresham slowly discover one another as human beings. They develop a chaste friendship based first on mutual respect, then on sacrifice. When they marry and finally acknowledge their love, it is not a “relationship” that binds them but a great love.

Not just a love story

When death ultimately separates them, it is the memory of eros, the true binding of two human beings in love, that sustains Lewis in his grief.

In later years, Lewis wrote to console his bereaved friend Sheldon Vanauken, “I think that we are meant to experience eros only once in this life.” In Shadowlands, we see two people who take great risks to experience great joy.

The central question addressed by Shadowlands is whether it is better to live safely or to risk all for transcendent love. The love affair is a reflection of the Christian life. Great faith must exist in tension with great doubt. Belief without the looming specter of doubt is not really faith, because nothing is at risk.

In an increasingly fragmented and cynical world, Shadowlands could not be more timely. Courtship, the cautious process of learning to know and then love someone, has been replaced by perfunctory sexuality and the fear of commitment.

While the filmmakers have taken some liberties with facts—for instance, one Gresham son, not two—and simplified some of Lewis’s complex musings for the sake of brevity and narrative line, the film is generally true to Lewis’s life. Douglas Gresham, himself a committed Christian, says he is pleased with the portrayal of his family.

Shadowlands is a credit to Lewis’s work and stands, without preaching, as a tribute to his life. It serves as a powerful counterpart to the bland rhetoric about traditional family values and as a compassionate reproof to the lovelessness of modern “relationships.”

By Stefan Ulstein.

Organizers of the seventeenth triennial InterVarsity Christian Fellowship missions conference in Urbana, Illinois, noticed a fundamental change in the makeup of the delegates.

“The baton has been passed to the next generation that is more savvy in how we are going to engage the world,” said Karen Mains, chair of the InterVarsity USA board. “This is a paradigm shift, a historic moment.”

Attendance at Urbana 93 was 17,000, the lowest since 1981 and about 2,500 below the last gathering. But nearly two-fifths of those attending represented ethnic minorities, an all-time high. More than 25 percent of those at Urbana 93 had an Asian-American background. Korean-Americans accounted for nearly one out of ten attendees at the weeklong gathering culminating on New Year’s Day. In all, more than 9,000 delegates signed pledges to participate in some type of future mission.

Dan Harrison, Urbana missions director, says the growing mission vision among Asian-American churches—a result of what he calls increased prayer and setting aside of differences—is responsible for the surge. “Praise the Lord for the increase in minorities. We’re more reflective of the world we’re trying to reach.”

“There’s a real readiness and desire to get involved in social justice, particularly racial reconciliation,” says Peter Cha, a Chicago-based Korean-American who led one of the more than 200 seminars at Urbana. “Many are already near the end of graduate school and won’t have to wait several years before going.”

“No matter where they go they start churches,” Food for the Hungry president Testunao Yamamori says of Korean Christians. “They’re tent makers par excellence.”

When Faith Kim attended Urbana 68, she could not find another Korean. She sees the sudden influx of Korean-Americans interested in missions as the grace of God. “Koreans are very aggressive toward goals,” says Kim, now on the faculty of Golden Gate Baptist Seminary in Santa Ana, California. “They see hardship and suffering as opportunities to make differences.”

Aggressive evangelism

But some fear Koreans may repeat the mistakes of some American missionaries in being culturally insensitive and failing to work closely enough with nationals.

“They think they have the answer for the world because of the massive growth in Korea, but often they fall flat on their faces because the culture is so isolated,” says Patrick Johnstone, author of Operation World. Many times there is a pride in the sheer number of conversions or congregation size, Johnstone says, and a lack of new Christians is viewed as failure.

Kim agrees that the strong Korean temperament may spur problems on the mission field. “Koreans would like to mold everyone into their mold,” Kim says. “They are likely to grab anyone they see, even in a foreign land, and ask, ‘Are you a Christian? Would you like to go to church?’”

The changing demographics in missions have broad implications.

“The down side is the decreasing number of Euro-Americans present,” says Kenneth B. Mulholland, dean of Columbia Biblical Seminary and Graduate School of Missions in South Carolina. “Have the Asians grasped the vision we are losing?”

“Missions is no longer a White person’s adventure,” says Christian speaker and author Gordon Aeschliman. “White students are going to have to learn what it means to work under the leadership of people who come from a radically different culture.”

Focus on Muslims

Urbana also devoted much time to the Muslim world. “A large percentage of the so-called unreached people groups are under Muslim influence,” says Yamamori. “They are the last stronghold resistant toward the gospel.”

Frontiers, a Mesa, Arizona, mission agency that evangelizes Muslims exclusively, sponsored a stirring presentation in which two of their mission aries—wearing Middle Eastern garb and using Middle Eastern accents—recited various objections to Christianity on moral and theological grounds. Not until the hushed crowd began to stir in frustration over the misperceptions being listed did the missionaries reveal their true identities.

“Muslims are not so much resistant as neglected,” says Richard D. Love, president of the U.S. Frontiers. “There are harvest areas now in the Muslim world that have never been open before.” (See CT, Dec. 13, 1993, p. 20.)

Lindsay Brown, general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, says students do not necessarily have to live in a foreign land to witness to Muslims. The 72,000 foreign Muslims attending U.S. universities are much more reachable.

Many of the 250 exhibitors at Urbana shifted their focus as well. No longer are missionaries going only to starving African nations for a lifetime. Downtown Los Angeles or Chicago is considered a short-term mission field now.

By John W. Kennedy in Urbana.

Although traditional hindrances linger, a new sense of openness is evident in Graham mission

“God’s Tears” was the sermon title at Kurume Christ Church on the outskirts of Tokyo on a cold, January Sunday, which was also the final day of the Billy Graham Mission 94 taking place in the 50,000-seat Tokyo Dome. Kurume’s pastor, Howard Blair, was part of the American occupation force after World War II and has been a teacher and preacher in Japan for more than 35 years. In his sermon on Jesus weeping over the death of Lazarus, he asked: “Why did Jesus wait?”

That difficult question of why God tarries when people are in great need has been asked countless times by Japanese Christians and missionaries who over many years have seen their best efforts produce modest results: 70 percent of Japanese churches have average attendances of fewer than 30 people, according to the missions handbook Operation World.

Yet Buddhists and ancestor-worshiping Shintoists successfully maintain deep roots in modern Japan. During January, Japanese fill the country’s temples and shrines, celebrating the New Year. And on January 15, Coming-of-Age Day, young people who have turned 20 are honored in a national holiday and special temple rites. Saito Takayo, a Christian woman who is a pearl dealer from Fukuoka City, says, “The real problem is that when a person becomes a Christian, she is cut off from the family.

“In Japan, we have idol worship. Lots of it,” Takayo says. “The Japanese people have this sense of spiritual blindness. I have watched the missionaries weep over the idol worship. The prayers and tears of the missionaries and others who have stood against idol worship are turning into tears of joy. I believe that each tear is a seed.”

After years of prayer and patient ministry by Japan’s Christians, the four-day Graham crusade saw the largest Christian-sponsored gathering in Japanese history when 45,000 crowded the indoor baseball stadium on the third night. The response rate was three times the average of recent American crusades, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) officials say. Another sign that the spiritual climate of the nation may be changing is that during a three-day mission last November, Japanese leaders successfully held a rare nationwide revival in Osaka, the country’s second-largest urban area.

Japan’s long recession

Three years of stubborn recession and rising unemployment in Japan have provoked a new level of searching for ways to solve the country’s problems. About two years ago, Japanese Christian church leaders, overcoming their initial reluctance to invite a “Western evangelist” to Japan, invited Billy Graham to return to Tokyo. His last crusade here was in 1980. Since the original invitation was accepted, political and economic conditions have steadily worsened to the point where the economy of Great Britain will grow faster than Japan’s for the second year in a row.

The infamous incidents of “salarymen” falling over dead on the job have been replaced by the prospect of unemployment as the country’s manufacturing firms trim bloated payrolls.

Political upheaval also has damaged the country’s self-image. The ouster of the party that ruled the nation since the end of World War II has added to the climate of uncertainty and a crisis of confidence, whereas five years ago many Japanese industrialists foresaw only uninterrupted growth into the next century.

Graham’S View From Japan

An unusually large number of journalists attended the Tokyo crusade opening press conference. What follows are excerpts from the 90-minute session with about 50 members of the Japanese and foreign press:

Why are there so few Christians in Japan?

The mayor of Osaka said that he did not think Christianity had been made simple enough or clear enough to the Japanese people. I also think that a distinction needs to be made between Christianity and Jesus Christ.

I am not calling people to come to the religion of Christianity. I am calling them to give their lives to the person of Jesus Christ and follow him. We believe there is power in the Cross because he put all our sins on the Cross, and because of that God can forgive us. It’s not easy to follow Christ; that’s why we need his help.

It would not be easy to follow all the sayings of Buddha or live the kind of life Confucius would have us to live. To follow Jesus may be difficult, but compared to the others it’s very easy, because Christ lives in our hearts, and he was raised from the dead.

Japan is in its worst recession since World War II. Unlike other recessions, this one is blamed on speculative excesses of the 1980s—the bubble economy. Do you expect that because the strong economy that people counted on has let them down, you will get a more serious hearing from the average Japanese?

When people face any kind of a crisis, they have a tendency to turn to religion or to God. I’m not saying Christianity [but] religion. Most people in the world look at Japan and do not think of recession. And they wish they had the standard of living and the income that the average Japanese has. But there has been a small drop in the economic situation, and people are concerned. Possibly, the greatest motivation, humanly speaking, is the fact that they are finding that materialism does not satisfy the inner longing of the heart.

This new era in Japan is being called a spiritual era. But isn’t it difficult to express spirituality in daily life?

In the Christian faith, maybe other religions as well, there needs to be a time every day that you set aside for meditation—in our case, to read the Bible, to pray, to ask God to lead us and direct us that day and keep us from the temptations of materialism or sexual temptations.

In the hotel room I am staying in they have a book: The Teaching of Buddha. And almost every day I have been here, I have read some of the sayings of Buddha. And many of those sayings are almost identical with the sayings of Jesus. There will be many things that we can identify with in other religions. [But] there is an exclusiveness to Christ.

The Devil is busy. There is a supernatural power of evil oppressing much of the world.

Japan has a less exclusive view of religion than Americans do. People tend to have two, or even three faiths here at the same time, with no particular problem. Is this acceptable to you when people accept Christ at your crusade? Is it okay for them to continue to think of themselves as Shinto or Buddhist as well?

Jesus did say, “I am the way, the truth and the life. And no one comes to the Father but by me.”

Has Christianity become too Americanized?

America is not a Christian country. It’s a secular country in which many Christians dwell. We are made up of all the religions of the world. We have thousands of mosques in America. We are a pluralistic society, so I could not say that Christianity has become too Americanized. If it became Americanized, I would fear for the future of Christianity.

What made you move from being a college president to evangelistic work?

I wasn’t a very good president. I felt called of God [to become an evangelist]. And my wife felt it even more than I did. The word gospel means “good news.” I think it’s good news when people begin to learn that there is a supernatural power called God, and that God loves.

He will forgive us of our sins. He gives us hope when we die that we will go to heaven.

Kaoru Kishida, general secretary for the crusade, says the Japanese people “are seeking and searching for a certain way” to solve their problems. While most proposals for change involve political or economic policy, Morihiro Hosokawa, the new prime minister, has spoken out for change in the Japanese mindset, advocating greater concern for individuals and quality of life. But thus far, his reform coalition has lacked the skill and power to bring about significant change of any kind.

Against this backdrop, some 1,300 churches joined efforts for the January 13–16 crusade. Since the 1980 crusade, the Christian church has grown and developed. But active church members still represent about 1 percent of the 123 million people. One church leader has described this as the problem of “the back-door church,” in which new Christians come into a church, but quickly fall away out “the back door.”

Koji Honda, an 82-year-old Japanese Christian evangelist, says, “We are not too strong, but I don’t think we should be disappointed. I am hopeful that evangelism with God’s power will overcome this poor statistic.

“We will overcome this barrier, and Japanese Christians are working together to exalt the name of God,” Honda says. “When God’s Spirit and the Cross are revealed to the Japanese, I believe Japan will change. This is a time of new birth.” Honda was the top leader for the 1980 crusade and has been an itinerant evangelist in Japan for 60 years.

Services were sent via satellite to 60 sites across Japan. At Tokyo Dome, the cumulative total attendance was 125,000. A frequent complaint was the poor quality of the sound, which technicians attempted to fine-tune.

Since Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to do business, crusade leaders put special emphasis on local fundraising. One tiny church of less than 20 members near Tokyo jointly contributed about 200,000 yen ($1,800 U.S.) to the crusade. Christians also poured their energies into inviting friends and family to the crusade. One pastor reported that a woman in his church invited every one of her contacts, and about 80 people accepted her invitation to services.

The crusade drew so many Koreans that a special FM radio broadcast was set up inside Tokyo Dome. Cliff Barrows, a crusade mainstay for more than 40 years, for the first time was unable to help lead a crusade, due to his wife’s life-threatening illness.

A painful past

Although Christianity was first introduced to Japan in 724 with a Persian physician’s visit to the Japanese emperor, progress has been painfully slow and marked by much persecution. The Roman Catholic Church notes 3,125 believers were martyred from 1597 to 1660. Christians in some cases were tortured, burned at the stake, or even boiled in sulphur for refusing to give up Christian beliefs. Those years of intense repression came after an initial widespread acceptance of Christian belief in connection with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries and Francis Xavier in 1549. Yet in 1613, the Tokugawa shogunate issued a prohibition against Christianity that lasted 259 years.

Modern-day Protestant missions to Japan got under way in the late nineteenth century. However, genuine freedom of religion did not occur until after World War II. Today there are 3,000 missionaries in Japan, yet Buddhism and Shinto continue to be preeminent, even though Japanese buy about one million Bibles annually and Western-style marriage ceremonies are in vogue.

Motoyoshi Tago, group vice president of Word of Life Press ministries, says Japanese people find no contradiction in adhering to more than one faith. To the contrary, they have much greater difficulty with the exclusivity of Christianity. Government statistics show that many individuals report themselves to be both Buddhist and Shintoist.

“There is prejudice against Christianity as a foreign religion,” Tago says. “The concept of God as sovereign and personal is a little bit foreign.” He says the cultural emphasis on group identity, harmony, and long-standing suspicion of foreign influences all have worked against the widespread acceptance of Christianity.

Others, however, see the rejection of Christian belief in terms of spiritual warfare. Col. Theodore Morris, head of the Salvation Army in Japan, says, “You can even sense and feel the presence of evil ones in evangelistic services. This is one of the strongholds of the Evil One, and he’s not going to let this country go without a real fight.

“I have never sensed the evil atmosphere as I sense in Japan, and that’s over 23 years [of ministry,]” Morris says. “In people’s faces, when they are considering accepting Christ as Savior, you can see a real battle. This country [has] 3,000 years of paganism. That’s why so few make that really definite decision. Théy have got to break with family ties—a very difficult thing for them.”

Churches around the country are becoming bolder in attempting more innovative methods, including starting hospices for the terminally ill and building Christian wedding chapels. Another Christian group has started ongoing “prayer walks,” marching with a cross around the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo.

Siegfried Buss, a Japan-born German and a language professor at Tokyo Christian University, says the crusade organizers were wise to use the slogan “Start with the Local Church, and End with the Local Church” because it encouraged lay involvement. “That is something very new for Japan. [Lay-people] had an active part in the crusade in training counselors and volunteers.”

What about the men?

One of the most longstanding difficulties for Japanese churches has been the lack of involvement by men. Japanese Christians are mostly women in small congregations, spread out across Japan’s four main islands. Men often find the business and cultural barriers against becoming Christian too difficult to surmount. Christian men’s-group ministry is still in its infancy.

However, in an important breakthrough, Graham officials noted Tokyo crusade reports revealed that 40 percent of the inquirers were men.

At one service, Tomoharu Kagami, 68, a Japanese man with advanced Parkinson’s disease, after hearing Graham talk about his own struggle with Parkinson’s, came to a decision to make a Christian commitment. An usher loaded Kagami on his back and took him piggyback down to the ballfield with his daughter and wife, along with 5,295 other inquirers.

Kagami’s right hand was shaking uncontrollably, a telltale Parkinson’s symptom. He was unable to fill out his commitment card, but a counselor helped. “I finally understand God’s grace,” Kagami said slowly. Yutaka Ikeda, a pastor from Fujisawa City, later said, “I prayed with them, and I looked up and they were all weeping and weeping. Every one of them.”

By Timothy C. Morgan in Tokyo.

TRADING CARDS

Holy Traders! Saints Get a Life

Holy Traders, a line of trading cards based on the lives of Catholic saints, soon will be going head-to-head with cards featuring baseball players, motorcyclists, and even criminals. Jim Shanley of Aziriah Company in Boynton Beach, Florida, was inspired to develop the cards after he heard about serial-killer trading cards.

Shanley, a Roman Catholic, says the project has relevance for all denominations. “The purpose is to move children to Christ. Here is an opportunity for a series of cards that will have really positive, solid role models and spiritual guides for the children.”

The cards, produced by Champs in Ohio, feature pictures and information about the lives and accomplishments of saints such as Mother Cabrini, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Mary the mother of Jesus. The first set was released in January and includes 40 cards for $7. Shanley hopes to have the second set available by Easter.

MISSISSIPPI

Baptists, Lesbian Campers Clash

The lesbian founders of a feminist education retreat—dedicated to fighting “homophobia, ableism, [and] fat oppression”—in rural Ovett, Mississippi, claim residents are harassing them. Locally, Baptists claim that the women intend to change their conservative community radically.

In July 1993, Wanda and Brenda Henson bought 120 acres in Ovett to start Camp Sister Spirit. In December, the Hensons and three critics faced off on the Oprah WinfreyTV program.

John S. Allen, pastor of nearby First Baptist Church and a participant on Oprah, says the show hurt the Hensons because they embraced a radical homosexual-rights agenda before a national audience. He says a compromise is unlikely. “The idea that there is some middle ground that we can accept that includes them going forward with their agenda in some way is just not there.”

SCHOOLS

Bible Reading Ends Years After Ban

For nearly 40 years, students in Pennsylvania’s Warrior Run School District began classes with Bible reading over the intercom system. In December, the practice stopped.

Since 1955, the 1,200-student district permitted public Bible reading and excused students who did not want to listen. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1963 such Bible reading was “indirect coercive pressure,” the recitation continued unabated until teacher Jay Nixon condemned it recently and the Silver Spring, Maryland-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State warned school officials that “your continuance with this practice will open the school district to a lawsuit and resulting attorney’s fees.”

Senior Janelle Smith read the last passage from Luke 1 in December. “It should have been ‘Jesus wept,’” says school board president David Hunter. He has received dozens of letters of support and is optimistic. “Now we have to see what’s possible within the law.”

By Michael R. Smith in Turbotville, Pennsylvania.

TELEVISION

Christians Protest Anchorman Firing

A grassroots, citywide boycott against Jacksonville, Florida’s WTLV-TV is in the works to protest the firing of popular news coanchor Lee Webb—ostensively because of his Christianity. Webb, a fundamentalist Christian and an eight-year veteran of the NBC affiliate, says the decision not to renew his contract comes as no shock.

As a result of the firing, Ken Dyal, pastor of Argyle Baptist Church, is calling for a boycott of TV-12 and is distributing copies of a petition asking other Christians to join. Several churches in the area as well as the Jacksonville Ministerial Association are lining up behind Dyal and Webb.

Sources inside TV-12 say there were many editorial disagreements between the station and Webb leading to his dismissal. One such incident involved Webb’s reporting on a lesbian film festival in which he questioned its relevance. The station refused to air the piece. In another altercation, the station was reportedly angered at Webb’s stand against a local theater showing simulated sex acts.

By Perucci Ferraiuolo.

HOMOSEXUALITY

Judge Rejects Amendment 2

Colorado’s Amendment 2 is unconstitutional, Denver District Judge Jeffrey Bayless has ruled.

Amendment 2, passed by 53 percent of voters in November 1992, prohibits laws that grant extra civil-rights protection on the basis of sexual preference or practice.

It was never in force because Bayless placed a temporary injunction on it in January 1993.

In his 17-page decision in December, Bayless ruled that homosexuals do not need special protections from discrimination, but that Amendment 2 was written too broadly.

Bayless declined to address whether homosexuals can change their orientation, writing that “is a decision for another forum, not this court.” Tony Marco of Colorado Springs, who drafted Amendment 2, predicted the U.S. Supreme Court eventually will overturn the decision.

“Judge Bayless has tried to protect one cheek of his hide from gay militant scourging, and the other cheek from scourging by the electorate,” Marco said, “and in the process has bent over backwards too far, and bitten himself on both cheeks.”

By Doug LeBlanc in Colorado Springs.

WASHINGTON

Condom Ads Air After Delay

Pressure from Christian and family-advocacy groups merely delayed the start of a much-publicized condom ad campaign created by the Clinton administration.

Touted as an effort to promote “safe sex” and AIDS prevention, the campaign was scheduled to start December 21, but was put off until January 4 due, in part, to pressure from Christian and family groups.

Donald Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, told CHRISTIANITY TODAY that condoms are unreliable 15 percent of the time and the government should not be in the business of promoting them.

ABC and CBS, however, both insisted that abstinence be mentioned somewhere in the condom ads before their networks would air the commercials, and ABC said it would not air them until after 9 P.M.

In one ad, a couple is kissing passionately when the woman asks the man, “Did you bring it?” When he replies, “Uh-oh. I forgot it,” she says, “Then forget it.”

By Joe Maxwell.

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS

Presidential Prayer by the Book

Southern Baptists throughout the United States are using a specially designed prayer pamphlet to intercede for President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore this year.

SBC president H. Edwin Young and executive committee chairman Morris Chapman got the idea for a 40-day season of prayer pamphlet after a meeting in September with the President and Vice President—both Southern Baptists.

The pamphlet outlines 40 days of Scripture readings and suggested areas of prayer for Clinton and Gore. It was produced by the SBC’s Brotherhood Commission and is being mailed out to SBC churches that want to participate.

Suggested prayers for the two leaders include petitions that they be a “model of Christian leadership” and “sensitive to the Holy Spirit,” and that they have “wisdom,” “faithfulness to Christ,” “love of liberty,” and the “peace of God.”

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

In Brief

A state investigator has ruled that a November fire (CT, Dec. 13, 1993, p. 65) that destroyed a dormitory and left 18 Lee College students injured in Cleveland, Tennessee, was caused by arson. The college is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the arsonist.

• The U.S. Supreme Court in December denied a request from Hinsdale, Illinois, youth Mark Welsh, who bad sued the Boy Scouts of America claiming a required promise “to love God” amounted to religious discrimination. Welsh, now 11, and his agnostic father, Elliott, sued the Scouts in 1990. But an appeals court ruled that the Scouts is a private club and could exclude boys who did not subscribe to its pledge.

• Paul D. Nelson became president of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability in Washington, D.C., on February 1, succeeding Clarence Reimer, who will continue in a management role. Nelson had been executive vice-president and chief operating officer of Focus on the Family for nine years.

• Dennis N. Baker is the new general director of the Conservative Baptist Association of America (CBA), headquartered in Wheaton, Illinois. He was previously responsible for overseeing 150 CBA churches in Southern California.

• Paul F. Robinson, 83, founder in 1946 of the Missionary Aviation Training Program of Moody Bible Institute, died December 31 in Carol Stream, Illinois.

• The Christian Broadcasting Network has expanded The 700 Club to a 90-minute format from one hour. The beginning of the revamped show contains 30 minutes focusing on news events of the day.

• Worldwide Evangelical Crusade (WEC) missionary and author Norman Grubb died December 15 at age 98. Under Grubb’s leadership, WEC grew from 30 members in 1931 to 800 members on 20 fields in 1965.

• David A. Grubbs has been appointed the new president of Cincinnati Bible College and Seminary. He served as a medical missionary in Africa for 15 years and had been director of Fellowship of Associates of Medical Evangelism.

• In an effort to attract viewers, the round-the-clock VISN/ACTS channel on 1,450 cable television systems, has been renamed the Faith and Values Channel.VISN (Vision Interfaith Satellite Network) is a consortium of 59 Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish groups, ACTS (American Christian Television System) is operated by the Radio and Television Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

• William M. Alnor has been appointed executive director of the Evangelical Ministries to New Religions, an umbrella organization that serves evangelical cult-watching and apologetics ministries.

• Robert Bollar has become executive director of the St. Paul, Minnesota-based Christians for Biblical Equality, an organization founded in 1987 “dedicated to the goal of equality for all believers.”

CORRECTION

The January 1994 news article “Homosexual Ordinations Cause Parish to Leave” (p. 44), incorrectly reported an action by the Episcopal Diocesan Convention in Rhode Island. The convention voted to ask the Episcopal General Convention to approve the blessing of same-sex unions and did not address homosexual ordinations. CT regrets the error.

President Clinton, meeting recently with a group of religious journalists at the White House, said that Americans need “spiritual change” to deal with the pressing problems of urban violence and cultural conflict.

Clinton said many inner-city areas have decayed to a point where “the church is about the only thing left trying to hold life together.” He said, “To turn it around is going to require a massive, highly concentrated effort … but also really requiring an almost spiritual change in a lot of the communities in our country. I don’t think governmental policies alone will fix this.”

The President said that the nation’s churches should do more to get on the front lines in dealing with the problems of urban America. He said some churches “could be much more actively involved in … the whole range of anti-violence activities that you’ve got when citizens decide they’re going to take their streets back.”

In addition to addressing the need for spiritual change, Clinton also spoke in favor of pending federal anticrime legislation, which would put more state and local police officers on the street, build more prisons, and federalize some crimes. Some critics have said the legislation will increase public construction and add to state and local payrolls, but not truly focus on the root causes of violent crime.

Looking for leaders

Since mid-1993, the President has increasingly sought out religious leaders to engage in discussion of public-policy issues. At the December meeting, editors and writers from Baptist, Catholic, and Jewish traditions were represented, as well as Christian Century, First Things, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

During the session, Clinton spoke about the Catholic and Baptist influences on his life. The President said Catholics taught him about the social mission of the church, about the importance of confession, and how to approach all questions with “intellectual rigor.” Of his Baptist experience, Clinton said, “Before I was even baptized, [the church] was a source of real security [and] reassurance. As a child, if I hadn’t had my church, I think my life would have been much, much more difficult.”

Talking about the problem of hate crimes, Clinton said, “I wish somehow, between the government, the churches, and the schools, we could teach people not only to resolve their differences, but to understand that America has the opportunity to become the world’s first truly multiethnic, rainbow society, where we can embrace their differences.”

By Timothy C. Morgan in Washington, D.C.

Advertisers and affiliates caught in the crossfire.

Steven Bochco’s NYPD Blue was late in coming to San Angelo, Texas, and it did not stay long when it got there.

ABC, seeking to make up for the more than 40 affiliates that have refused to air the controversial program, has offered it to independent stations in those markets. After the local ABC affiliate refused to run NYPD Blue, San Angelo’s Fox network affiliate, KIDY, picked up the program. However, KIDY only aired a few episodes before pressure on local advertisers forced it to cancel the program. The police drama now is unavailable on any channel in San Angelo.

Donald Wildmon, president of the American Family Association (AFA), claims ABC is losing millions of dollars on a show that has attracted viewers and praise from reviewers but few advertisers. “This program ultimately is going to go because of lack of advertisers,” Wildmon says, “unless ABC wants to keep eating huge losses. Right now, they are not in that kind of financial position.”

Wildmon, who has seen his organization’s supporters more than double in the past year to 1.85 million, believes that “it hasn’t dawned on them” at ABC that opposition to the graphic violence and sex on NYPD Blue will not die down.

Others are less convinced of the power of pressure groups to improve TV. “The only thing that will make a major difference in the content,” says Quentin Schultze, communications professor at Calvin College, “will be changes in the personnel at both the networks and the major production houses.”

The television industry is undergoing major technological and operational changes, leading some to experiment with “pushing the envelope” of what is acceptable to the audience. NYPD Blue has been joined by MTV’s animated Beavis and Butt-head as prime targets of a growing antiviolence movement, which has moved out of living rooms and into the political arena. Activists have become increasingly upset with what they view as excessive televised violence and its links to the real mayhem on the nation’s streets, and they are urging the federal government to become involved. “If the networks aren’t going to take responsibility, then I think it’s logical and wise for Congress to look at it,” says Edward Roden-Lucero, a Catholic priest in San Angelo.

Even cable TV mogul Ted Turner has added violence to his list of causes, telling a congressional subcommittee that TV is the “single most significant factor contributing to violence in America.” Turner said that if the industry does not clean up its act, Congress should write its own antiviolence statute and “ram it down their throats.”

The body count

Barely a week goes by without the announcement of a new poll or study about TV violence and viewer attitudes. USA Today counted, in one week of prime-time network fare, 276 violent incidents, 57 people killed, and 99 people assaulted. The AFA recently calculated a total of 8.64 incidents of violence per hour on the three major networks, ranging from 1.63 per hour on NBC to 4.03 per hour on ABC. And a survey released by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) found Adventures of Brisco County Jr. on the Fox network to be the most violent program, with 117 violent acts per hour.

Public concern over TV violence claimed another television western—CBS’s The Wild, Wild West—a quarter-century ago in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Over at MTV, executives have already moved the popular Beavis and Butt-head to a later time slot after a mother claimed her baby’s arson death was the result of another child imitating the show’s characters.

If polls accurately reflect popular opinion, the networks are facing a lot of angry people. A Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University poll found 64 percent of adults are offended by TV violence. A Gallup/Family Channel survey found that 79 percent believe violence on television contributes to violent behavior.

Though interest in stemming the tide is on the rise, not everyone agrees on how to measure violence, and not everyone agrees on what kinds of violence should he considered bad violence.

Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) acknowledges disagreement over the degree to which TV violence contributes to real-life violence, but he says there is agreement that some link exists. His colleague Sen. Ernest Hollings (D.-S.C.) has referred to more than 1,000 studies that demonstrate a link between violence in the media and violent behavior in society.

One widely cited study by the University of Washington’s Brandon S. Centerwall examined the effects of the introduction of TV in South Africa, where politics delayed its arrival until 1975. “From 1945 to 1974, the White homicide rate in the United States increased 93 percent. In Canada, the homicide rate increased 92 percent, “he wrote in a recent issue of The Public Interest. “In South Africa, where television was banned, the White homicide rate declined by 7 percent.”

He notes there was a 10- to 15-year lag between the introduction of TV and the doubling of homicide rates, which represents the time needed for the “television generation” to come of age.

Centerwall reports that the three main broadcast networks have studied the matter themselves and found disturbing results, but in an industry where hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake with even small changes in advertising, the networks have been reluctant to alter programming.

Talking heads

Simon has proposed an industry-established board to report to the American public on violent programs. The board would have no enforcement authority, he says, therefore avoiding censorship problems.

Simon has not found the industry eager to adopt his proposals. He says, however, that many in Congress want to take more extreme measures.

The politics of TV violence has produced some unusual allies, from Methodist Donald Wildmon to Roman Catholics in San Angelo, from conservative Jesse Helms to liberal Howard Metzenbaum, and from the National Council of Churches to Focus on the Family.

In December, President Bill Clinton weighed in on the debate by urging the television industry to accept responsibility for the effects of its products. “You have the capacity to do good—culturally—to help to change the way we behave, the way we think of ourselves.”

Congress is considering, among other things, proposals for a presidential commission on TV violence and setting up a toll-free number at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to collect complaints. Congress also is considering forcing the FCC to require labels on violent programs and requiring new TV sets to have a computer chip installed that would allow parents to block programs.

Some in Hollywood are ready to fight. NYPD Blue executive producer David Milch says he needs to address certain themes and would kill the show rather than tone it down.

Limited government

Longtime Christian critics of the television industry are cynical about the recent attention the government has focused on this issue. The ability of Congress to regulate television content is limited at best, and technological advances are rapidly eroding what ability remains. (See “Telecomputers and Helpful Chaos,” p. 42.)

Government regulation efforts must, for the most part, go through the FCC. Local affiliates can refuse to air a network program, and the FCC therefore can refuse to renew affiliates’ broadcast licenses if it thinks they are not operating in the public interest. Thus the affiliates—not the national broadcast networks—are the focus of pressure by the FCC and, increasingly, activist groups such as the AFA.

“The FCC set up the system and gave the affiliates the power not to run network programs precisely because they’re the ones ultimately responsible for the community,” says Kristine Karnick, assistant professor of communications at Indiana University in Indianapolis.

Attempts by the FCC to put limits on certain programming inevitably end up in court, and the FCC loses. Censorship, either direct or indirect through enforceable guidelines, is forbidden.

Local affiliates, however, are more sensitive to community pressure and less sensitive to network arm-twisting than in previous decades, says Karnick. The reasons include proliferation of competing stations in individual markets and increasing programming available from nonnetwork sources.

With this setup, the federal government is left with little leverage, and that is just the way many critics want it. “It’s often the threat of censorship that will create action,” says Karnick. “I can’t imagine, though, that the industry can take that seriously, because they know from the past the limits imposed on the FCC.”

Network change of heart?

In December 1992, the three major networks agreed to issue uniform standards restricting the violent content of their programming. Industry apologists this year have touted what they say is a less violent prime-time schedule, and some numbers bear them out.

The AFA found sharply reduced levels of prime-time violence. Though Wildmon says sexual incidents and profanity remained about the same, almost half as many violent incidents occurred last fall compared to last spring.

The change may not last, however, if the cycle of high and low public interest in media violence continues to repeat, warns Schultze, author of The Best Family Videos. He says the situation today with TV violence is similar to a controversy over movies earlier this century. “This is all by and large symbolic posturing, which will have no significant long-run impact on television programming.”

The networks are in a protracted, high-stakes battle with cable channels for audiences, Schultze notes. “It’s nearly impossible, in today’s marketplace, to have significant TV-content regulation.”

Telecomputers And Helpful Chaos

Tomorrow’s revolutionary TV may be a device that functions as both television and computer—appropriately called the telecomputer. The telecomputer could be used for computer mail, watching news reports, producing animated programming of your own, and ordering and viewing Humphrey Bogart classics.

Regulating such a system would be difficult, if not impossible, says George Gilder, author of Life After Television. Expensive network bureaucracies would be things of the past; viewers—not the government, networks, or affiliates—would determine when and what to watch; and Hollywood would lose its near-total domination of program production.

“You’re looking to a possible future with one channel, which has whatever you want on it,” says Gilder. “In other words, all your first choices.”

“Think of it as text, and you’ve got the picture,” says Gilder, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute and a longtime promoter of the information superhighway, which would help pave the way for the telecomputer. “Just as you buy your own books, your own magazines, you receive your own mail, you will receive your own video and multimedia when you want it.”

The system could be created in the next three years by allowing the cable and long-distance telephone industries to interconnect their systems, says Gilder.

He cites the Clinton administration’s desire to foster competition as an obstacle.

Former Reagan science adviser George Keyworth agrees that less government regulation is the answer to spurring the needed technological developments.

Keyworth, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, recently wrote that “by using digital systems we can make it possible for every form of information to be transmitted, stored, processed, and used by exactly the same set of tools.”

The increased speed and choices made available by such a system will dramatically alter the power structure in the television content debate. The more informed consumers become about available choices, the more capable they will be at accessing the good programming.

“It will be a lot cheaper to produce programs than before, and the availability of pom is already a problem,” Gilder says. “It probably can be managed by parents who focus on it, but it still will be a problem. The world is still hovering out there with all of its seductions and offenses, and I don’t think government regulation can stifle it. But you will have much more, much better programming available for every family.”

Parents as watchdogs

As the television industry becomes increasingly complex and viewing choices continue to multiply, observers are split over how—if at all—to control TV content.

Schultze emphasizes the need for Christians to get involved in the industry, citing a demand for good writers. “If you don’t have a good story that holds people,” he says, “you’ve got to rely on violence or nudity or something to try to perk people’s interest.”

Kamick stresses that the role of watchdog over children’s programming should fall to parents, not the government. Inviting government intervention, she says, simply creates an even worse mess.

Simon, however, rejects a laissez-faire approach. “It’s a difficult thing for a parent to monitor, and it’s difficult to know what are the good programs and what are not the good programs,” says Simon. “Second, if Johnny or Jane goes next door to play, you’re a pretty unusual parent if you can control what’s on at the neighbors. And finally, it just totally ignores the fact that we have a lot of single parents who are … just struggling to get by. Having a chance to monitor their children in a significant way is almost beyond their capacity.”

By John Zipperer.

Total cure

Why did’t Jesus Christ not remain alive and eliminate, generation by generation, all the evils which harass humanity? Simply because He was the Great Physician, and in the finest tradition of medical science, He was unwilling to remain preoccupied with the symptoms when He could destroy the disease. Jesus Christ was unwilling to stttle for anything less than elimination of the cause of all evil in history.

—Richard C. Halverson in Relevance

Lord of our politics

If Jesus is Lord then he must also be Lord of our politics. That’s an unarguable Christian truth—that everybody argues about.…

Too many of us Christians confuse political convictions with spiritual convictions. Insecure with ambiguity, we assume people of one Lord, one faith and one baptism must also promote one political agenda.

That assumption leads the church into trouble.

First, it prompts us to make judgments about people that ought to be left to God.…

Second, when the church confuses spiritual and political convictions it is tempted to use political power to forward a “spiritual” agenda.

—Don Ratzlaff in the Christian

Leader (Feb. 23, 1993)

God never gets anxious

God … “works always in tranquility.” Fuss and feverishness, anxiety, intensity, intolerance, instability, pessimism and wobble, and every kind of hurry and worry—these, even on the highest levels, are signs of the self-made and self-acting soul; the spiritual parvenu. The saints are never like that. They share the quiet and noble qualities of the great family to which they belong.

—Evelyn Underhill in

The Spiritual Life

Two kinds of grace

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace … is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer in

The Cost of Discipleship

The Spirit’s role

I have not heard recently of committee business adjourned because those present were still awaiting the arrival of the Spirit of God. I have known projects abandoned for lack of funds, but not for lack of the gifts of the Spirit. Provided the human resources are adequate we take the spiritual for granted.

—John V. Taylor in

The Go-Between God

Our views are not necessarily God’s

Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.

—Abraham Lincoln in his

second inaugural address

Overwhelmed by God

Looking back, [my wife] Jan and I have learned that the wilderness is part of the landscape of faith, and every bit as essential as the mountaintop. On the mountaintop we are overwhelmed by God’s presence. In the wilderness we are overwhelmed by his absence. Both places should bring us to our knees; the one, in utter awe; the other, in utter dependence.

—Dave Dravecky in When You

Can’t Come Back

A biblical case for fighting death throuhout our lives.

In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah, son of Amoz, went to him and said, “This is what the Lord says: Put your house in order because you are going to die; you will not recover.” Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord, “Remember, O Lord, how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly. (Isa. 38:1–3; all Scripture quotations from the NIV)

Ray had been in a coma for four days. Once powerful and muscular, his arms lay quietly at his flanks. Physically exhausted and consumed by his two-year struggle with colon cancer, he lay in his hospital bed motionless, a living chrysalis in an inverted cocoon. He would soon die, most likely within the day.

My hospital visit that morning brought me to Ray’s room at 5:30. The nursing station and patient rooms were quiet and, in one of the paradoxes of hospital life, even peaceful—if such a thing as peace is possible in a place where life and death constantly vie for dominance. Sitting silently at his bedside, Ray’s wife of 40 years, Jean, had placed her small hand softly on her husband’s right shoulder. No examination would be necessary today. In deference to Jean’s vigil, I pulled a chair abreast of hers and joined her silent watch, conjointly marveling at the physical stamina and endurance of the human body and pondering the mystery of the approach of physical death. Lost in our private thoughts and beset by personal memories of this marvelous man, we sat together, bonded by our grief and captivated by the drama slowly unfolding before us.

Suddenly, an awesome thing happened. Lazaruslike, Ray sat bolt upright in his bed. Fiercely clutching the sides of his bed, Ray contracted his arms as he gazed with apparent abject horror into the void at the foot of his bed. This totally unanticipated activity was immediately followed by an equally unexpected loosening of his vocal cords—silent for these four days—in a terrifying scream that cascaded down the quiet hospital corridor.

In four short clauses that reverberate even today in my mind as I reflect on his death ten years ago, Ray screamed into the early morning surrounding his bed: “No! I don’t want to go … I don’t want to die … I won’t go!” Completely exhausted by this emotional and physical outburst, Ray collapsed into the bed, gasped the humid air of the hospital room two or three times, and died.

King Hezekiah would understand.

Facing the wall

Ascending the throne as king of Judah after the death of his godless father, Ahaz, Hezekiah put into motion one of the greatest religious revivals in the history of the southern kingdom. Idols were destroyed, the temple in Jerusalem was repaired and rededicated for worship, the Mosaic covenant was renewed, and the Passover was celebrated by a joyous and thankful nation.

But 14 years into Hezekiah’s reign, crisis struck in the form of the Assyrian army. Judah watched in terror as the mighty Assyrians overran the small nation, ultimately beseiging the capital city of Jerusalem. Yet, because of Hezekiah’s decision to trust in Jehovah, God miraculously delivered the nation from Assyrian captivity.

With the withdrawal of the Assyrian troops from Jerusalem, however, Judah’s great and godly leader became desperately ill. As the king’s illness intensified, the prophet Isaiah, on whose help Hezekiah had undoubtedly relied as he fashioned the spiritual renewal of the nation, was sent by God with a pointed message to Hezekiah. In words that left no room for doubt and no possibility of escape—and that must have deeply grieved Isaiah personally—the great prophet declared, “You are going to die; you will not recover.” Thirty-nine years old and political leader of God’s chosen people, Hezekiah learned that his future had thus been decided by the very God he had worshiped so faithfully. All hope had been removed; his death was both inevitable and imminent.

Hezekiah reacted swiftly and passionately. Withdrawing from personal contact, the king “faced the wall,” poured out his distress as a complaint to God in prayer, and “wept bitterly.” In a reaction analogous to Ray’s when faced with the overt reality of his death approaching, this great religious leader simply could not accept the words of Isaiah without an intense emotional and spiritual struggle.

Ray would understand. Do we?

A fragile truce

As a medical oncologist, I have had the privilege and responsibility of accompanying many women and men on the journey to their physical death. We have struggled valiantly together, these patients-turned-friends and I, with the physical, emotional, and spiritual ramifications of their terminal cancers. And long after their deaths, I continue to struggle, both emotionally and spiritually, with the ugly fact of death.

Death and I have gradually come to a fragile but significant truce, a truce that provides my soul with the shield it requires as I render my service to the dying. It is a truce that has been forged only with the aid of Ray, Hezekiah, and the message of God himself.

Of all people, Christ’s followers surely need not fear death, and, in fact, they should serve as examples for others in their response to death. Paul writes to the Philippians, “For to me, to live is Christ; to die is gain.… I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body” (1:21–24). But while this passage is foundational for a biblical perspective on death, I have found that Paul’s words are often used in a manner that minimizes or ignores the very real emotional and physical pain of the struggle. Many times I have wondered how much room there would be for Ray or Hezekiah and their agonized questions and complaints in today’s churches.

If we are to assist our fellow Christ-followers in the forging of their individual truces with death, we would do well to study other biblical teachings—those that accept, and even embrace, the honest emotional and spiritual reactions of people in the Scripture story. In my personal quest for biblical understanding, the following facts have emerged, which have helped to guide my way.

1. Although inevitable, death is not natural. The inescapability of physical death is one of the great and terrifying realities of human existence. Confirming the certainty of death, the psalmist wrote, “Remember how fleeting is my life.… What man can live and not see death, or save himself from the power of the grave?” (89:47–48). Likewise, the New Testament author of the Letter to the Hebrews emphasized the view that we are “destined to die once and after that to face judgment” (9:27).

But although the certainty of physical death is clearly imbedded in reality, it is not the complete reality. The complete reality is that although physical death is a certainty, it is not “natural.” Humankind, as originally created in the image of God, was not created to die. Physical death is an aberration that has plagued women and men because individually and collectively we have rebelled against God’s just rules for right living (Rom. 5:12–14).

Understanding this crucial fact has become one of the foundations upon which my uneasy truce with death has been built. I have not been created to die; I have been created to live. Physical death is a reality through which I must travel, but it is a reality that was no part of God’s original plan.

As a doctor, I found this truth liberating. My mind was now free to rebel at the certain fate awaiting my patients—and me. It became both acceptable and appropriate for me to be angry as death approached. I felt my faith no longer required me to accept physical death passively. My questions and fears became a confirmation of my common humanity with my patients. And the fact that I, with them, had these fears revealed that death is not natural but the universal and direct consequence of our common rejection of God.

2. Although a deep mystery, God’s reaction to physical death parallels that of his creation’s. Distress (2 Sam. 22:5–7; Ps. 116:3) and despair (Ps. 88:15; Job 6:26), as well as fear and terror (Heb. 2:15; Ps. 55:4–5) were all emotions recorded as experienced by individual people of God when confronted with physical death.

And God does not appear as a passive bystander in this drama of life and death. He has involved himself passionately and, indeed, redemptively with the struggles of his creation. Paul describes our physical end as God’s final adversary in this world, finally to be overcome through the death of his Son on the cross—“The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26).

God does not condemn the flood of emotions we experience when confronted with death, forcing us to stuff them deeply into the recesses of our souls as hidden psychic skeletons. He understands our fears, provides us with human examples for our instruction, and personally involves himself with us in the emotional outflow of our questions and concerns.

3. Although a daunting adversary, physical death is neither the ultimate enemy nor the ultimate victor. Serving as a great counterbalance to my emotional reactions to physical death is the assurance in Scripture that life extends beyond the physical. I have learned that although an awesome adversary, physical death is neither the ultimate enemy nor the ultimate victor in the battle that has engaged all of humankind.

In his earthly ministry, Jesus’ teachings—often delivered with considerable passion and intensity—underscored the significance of soul life. Jesus sought to convince his audience that this unending conscious selfhood represents the ultimate reality of existence and the ultimate focus of God’s concern in his intercourse with his human creatures. In his most direct indications that physical death is not the ultimate adversary of life, Jesus told his disciples, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). He also asked them, “What good will it be for a man if he gain the whole world and yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man exchange for his soul?” (Matt. 16:26). Ultimately, according to Jesus, we live on a level of ongoing selfhood and not merely on a physical plane, and the spiritual death of a person separated from God, rather than the physical death of a person separated from his or her body, is our final and most fearsome foe.

Given the foundational nature of these facts for my faith, I have found my day-to-day acceptance of them to be surprisingly difficult. Somehow, though I acknowledge their veracity intellectually, the principle of death being a limited and defeated adversary does not help as I discuss physical death with my patients and their families. It is precisely at these challenging and dangerous times that I have learned I must choose to believe God’s astonishing promises concerning our victory over death through Christ our Lord.

Like the disciples and crowds Jesus taught, the concept of a soul life that goes beyond physical life represents a deep mystery to me. But as I have groped my way through the mystery and majesty of these awesome assurances, I have repeatedly found the God who is the rock of my faith reaching to me even as I struggle to find him.

“How do I look in the face?”

On May 10, 1863, in Chancellorsville, Virginia, eight days after a furious battle between Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army and the Grand Army of the Republic, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the most trusted and admired of Lee’s field generals, lay dying. He had been inadvertently shot in the left arm by one of his own troops as he patrolled the battle lines in the aftermath of the Confederate victory. Attempting to prevent tissue gangrene, physicians had amputated Jackson’s arm. Despite their best efforts, however, the 39-year-old general developed a progressive pneumonia. As his death neared, Jackson, a devout Christian, gazed into the faces of the physicians and aides who surrounded his cot and allegedly asked, “How do I look in the face?”

Looking into the face of death in others is a fearsome and daunting experience that has shaken and changed me. I wonder how I will “look in the face” as that time nears for me.

The forging of my personal truce with death has become a seminal fact of my life. Understanding the basic “unnaturalness” of physical death, the universality of my instinctive “no” to it, God’s identification with my emotional response to it, the supremacy of soul life, and the forthcoming destruction of this “last enemy” has not caused my inward questions and churnings to dissolve in doctrinal triumph. But such understanding has allowed me to deal with one day after another, one patient-friend after another, one “faith leap” after another, one look into the face of death after another.

My friends—Ray, a 61-year-old coppersmith from northern New England, and Hezekiah, the 39-year-old Hebrew king and spiritual reformer—understood. And as we listen carefully to both the anguished cry of our Savior on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46), and the triumphant declaration of the angelic messengers at the tomb, “He is not here; he has risen!” (Luke 24:6)—we, too, can understand.

Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.

The current pope is crusading for “moral truth.” We should welcome his help.

Theologian and social critic Richard John Neuhaus gave us the phrase the naked public square, in a 1984 book of that name, to describe the secular ideal of civic discourse without the benefit of religious and moral insight. First as an inner-city Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor, and more recently as a Catholic priest, Neuhaus has served as a rallying point for moral and theological conservatives from a variety of backgrounds—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish—to reintroduce religion into the cultural debates.

Toward that end, Neuhaus, now editor-in-chief of First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, here explains for Christians outside the Roman church the significance of John Paul II’s recent writing on morality.

“You guys have a pope who sure knows how to pope.” That is the admiring comment of friend, a Southern Baptist who is surprised, and just a bit uneasy, about finding that he and John Paul II are on the same side in the great moral conflicts of our time.

My friend does not agree with Catholic teaching about the continuing office of Peter in the church, and he is not sure what to do with his childhood belief that the pope is Antichrist; but he will accept help from wherever he can get it, and, increasingly, he discovers he is getting it from this pope. The recent encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) is a case in point. The encyclical has provoked widespread and generally favorable comment from sources not usually sympathetic to Catholic moral teaching.

When it appeared in October, some newspapers blazoned that the pope is clamping down on sexual ethics. And it indeed turns out that he has not changed his mind on, for instance, fornication and adultery; but that is rather to miss the point of this extended argument on the nature of morality. Other reports focused on his criticism of moral theories that go by awkward names such as proportionalism and consequentialism. That is closer to the point, but it still does not quite get it.

In this encyclical (encyclical means simply a letter to be circulated), the pope does not so much analyze the sorry moral condition of the contemporary world as he asks us to reflect on the meaning of “moral truth.” The sorry truth of the matter is that many people today think “moral truth” is a contradiction in terms. You have your “values” and I have mine, and that’s that. Beyond the individual assertion of “values,” there is nothing left to discuss. “What is truth?” asked Pilate. Like many of our contemporaries, he took that question to be a discussion-stopper. John Paul II argues that it ought to be a discussion-starter.

He notes that the modern world has had a great deal to say about freedom, and that is good. But freedom must be grounded in truth. Freedom is not enough. Freedom standing by itself inevitably degenerates into license. License, which is unbridled freedom, quickly becomes the enemy of freedom. Friedrich Nietzsche, the brilliantly mad philosopher of the nineteenth century, well understood this. He saw that, once the reality of absolute truth is denied, all arguments—indeed, all human relationships—become nothing more than the exercise of “the will to power.” Against Nietzsche and those of like mind, John Paul contends that power—and freedom itself—can be made and must be made accountable to truth. “Authentic freedom,” he says repeatedly, “is ordered to truth.” Not my truth, your truth, or her truth, not the truth of a class or a tribe or a nation, but truth. As in “absolute truth.”

The central text of the pope’s argument is John 8:32—“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” The claim that there is a necessary connection between freedom and truth is hardly new. Aristotle understood that, as did the American founders who signed a Declaration of Independence that begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” The apparently new thing about our time is the idea that freedom can get along without truth. In this encyclical, John Paul attempts to explain why that is a very bad idea—intellectually unpersuasive, spiritually incoherent, and morally disastrous.

Clear thinking about moral truth has enemies. The enemies are often called relativism and subjectivism. Ours is a radically individualistic culture in which it is hard to make the case that we must discern and obey what is objectively true. Rather, each of us decides what is “true for me.” In other words, says John Paul, we arrogate to ourselves the right to create the truth. Biblical believers will recognize that this way of thinking and acting began with the serpent’s temptation in the garden and has resulted in herds of so-called independent minds marching toward moral oblivion with Frank Sinatra’s witless boast on their lips, “I did it my way.”

Many intellectuals today argue that everything, including ideas about morality, is created by culture. We are, they say, “socially constructed all the way down”—truth has no foundation in either reason or revelation. This is called “anti-foundationalism,” and it is a cherished theory of those who call themselves “postmodernists.” According to this theory, freedom may be high among your “values,” but that is only because you are the product of a culture that values freedom. Put bluntly, what you call your freedom is a delusion. You are as captive to your culture as somebody else who is the product of a culture that values collectivism, or child sacrifice, or the worship of Baal, or whatever. John Paul knows these arguments inside out. He recognizes that they are very clever, very intriguing, and very false.

The human person, he contends, truly is free—created for freedom and, although wounded by the depravity of sin, capable of freedom. Without a firm understanding of human freedom, talk about morality makes no sense. John Paul appreciates the insights of psychology, anthropology, and the behavioral sciences into the ways we are “conditioned” by culture, genes, and factors yet unknown. But deep within each “acting person” (a key phrase in this pope’s thought) is an aspiration toward the good, which is finally an aspiration toward God, that we either follow or defy.

Veritatis Splendor opens with an extended reflection on the rich young man who comes to Jesus and asks, “Teacher, what good must I do to have eternal life?” (Matt. 19:16). That, says John Paul, is really the question of every man, no matter how tentatively or confusedly it is asked. And the answer of Jesus is the answer to every man: “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” Life is to know the truth and do the truth. Life is ultimately fulfilled in following the One who said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

Many of our contemporaries will object that all this is very nice; it may even be true in some sense of the word. But, they say, there is no going back to “simpler days” when it was possible to assert that “we hold these truths” as though there are actually truths to hold and to be held by. Nowadays we live in a “pluralistic society,” don’t you know? There is no agreement on what truths we hold, we must not impose our values on others, and on and on.

John Paul turns the usual talk about pluralism on its head. Precisely because we live in a pluralistic world, he says, it is all the more urgent that we engage one another in civil argument about the truth that undergirds human freedom and dignity. Our differences notwithstanding, we can make sense to one another because we have in common our human nature and the capacity to reason, and these are universal. Here enters the important concept of “natural law”—or, as some Protestant theologians prefer, the order of creation as distinct from the order of redemption. In this encyclical, the pope makes a very close connection between creation and redemption, insisting that the latter does not negate but fulfills the former.

John Paul is keenly aware that in contending for universal nature and reason he is going up against dominant views in universities and other elite institutions. As freedom has turned against itself, so also reason has turned against itself. Some of our most clever philosophers have “rationally” demonstrated that reason is an illusion. What people call reason, they say, is only a veneer of “rationalization” that disguises the irrational factors determining who we are and how we behave. The result is that confidence in what is distinctively human has been severely undermined. We are, it is said, no more rational than the animals.

John Paul’s defense of reason should not be confused with the truncated and reductionist rationalism of the secular Enlightenment. He is for sure no friend of “secular humanism.” True humanism, he contends, is directed toward the transcendent, toward the ultimate good, who is God. And reason participates in the fullness of truth through revelation. But to people who are made nervous by references to God and revelation, the pope is saying that we still have a lot to talk about. And we had better get on with it before humanity staggers more deeply into the night of moral nothingness.

Like Paul, John Paul is confident that we can engage the question of moral truth with nonbelievers because, when “Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves.… They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them” (Rom. 2:14–15). In other words, reason and nature are universal.

It follows, says the pope, that human rights and duties are “universal and immutable.” This, not so incidentally, is the position taken by the United States against countries that claim that the idea of universal human rights reflects Western “cultural imperialism.” In fact, such countries may have a case. The human rights agenda is no more than an ideological imposition by the West, if the cause of freedom is divorced from the claims of truth. The same applies also in our life together in society. If what you call your rights is no more than an assertion of your interests, I can counter your interests with my interests. If I can muster greater force, you lose. So much for your vaunted rights. Again, in the absence of truth, power is the only game in town.

The idea that there is no objective or universal truth has achieved a measure of official status among us by fiat of the Supreme Court. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, for example, the court declared that it is up to each individual to determine “the concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” It is an astonishing piece of “theology” cooked up by lawyers to justify the abortion license. John Paul, by contrast, warns against “the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism.” This means that when truth itself is democratized—when truth is no more than the will of each individual or a majority of individuals—democracy is deprived of the claim to truth and stands naked to its enemies. Thus does freedom, when not “ordered to truth,” undo freedom. If there is no objective truth that compels you to respect my freedom, why should you? Especially when my freedom gets in the way of your doing what you want with your freedom?

Moral truth that is evident in a natural law that is accessible to all reasonable persons includes commands both positive and negative. But it is not for nothing that the Ten Commandments delivered at Sinai are framed in the negative. We cannot always do the good that we would, but we are called always to refuse to do evil. In our actual life situations, we discover with Paul, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what Ido” (Rom. 7:18–19). Moral responsibility means never fudging the reality of evil.

Some acts are intrinsically evil, evil per se—always and everywhere. As examples, John Paul cites homicide, genocide, abortion, slavery, prostitution, and trafficking in women and children. He quotes Paul VI: “Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good, it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it.” Evil must never be called good, nor good evil. If good and evil are confused, not only are we more likely to do evil, but we are deprived of the highest freedom of being forgiven sinners who can declare with Paul, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Here John Paul II takes on those moralists, including some Catholic theologians, who say that an evil act may be justified by the end to which it is directed or by weighing the other goods at stake. Liberal Protestants have been plagued with similarly deviant theories, such as the late Joseph Fletcher’s “situation ethics.” To call evil good is morally incoherent and, equally important, undercuts the gospel of forgiveness. To be excused is not the same thing as to be forgiven. In fact, they are opposites. An act that is excused cannot be forgiven. Only evil, as in “sin,” can be forgiven. If we are to be clear about the grace of God, we must be clear about the law of God.

John Paul is adamant on this: It is never right to do evil in order to achieve good. To those of a contrary view, the question might be put: When is rape morally justified? Or the torture of children? Or Auschwitz? Or, to get it down to the everyday, slandering your neighbor? John Paul’s answer is never. Intentions may be noble, people may claim that they are acting “in good conscience,” circumstances may mitigate personal responsibility, but the act remains, always and everywhere, evil.

The moral person is prepared to die rather than do evil. The word of Jesus could not be more explicit: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). This moral wisdom is not limited to Christians. John Paul cites the pagan poet Juvenal, saying that his words apply to everyone: “Consider it the greatest of crimes to prefer survival to honor and, out of love of physical life, to lose the very reason for living.” That conviction should not be alien to those for whom the very reason for living is to follow the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.

The encyclical concludes with an extended meditation on the meaning of martyrdom, drawing examples from the Scriptures and the history of courageous resistance to tyranny. Martyr, of course, means witness. We are not all called to martyrdom, but we are called to bear witness to the truth that makes, and keeps, us free. And that, according to Veritatis Splendor, is the splendor of living in the truth.

It is a splendor splendidly articulated in this document that is not only for Catholics and not only for Christians, but is directed to all who, at the bottom-most base of their being, intuit the call to live a life of moral meaning. My Baptist friend who says that this pope sure knows how to pope adds, “He’s your pope, but I hope you don’t mind if we borrow him from time to time.” Not at all.

The complete text of Veritatis Splendor is available from Origins—Catholic News Service, 3211 4th Street, NE, Washington, D.C. 20017–1100; $5 for single copies, $3.50 for two to four copies.

Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.

Victims of Liberia’s civil war invited us to teach them realized a formula created in an air-conditioned study about reconciliation. We soon would not be enough.

Armed guards with machine guns in the ready position are everywhere. Five or six are high up on the airport control tower. Others form a wall in front of the terminal. Still others take positions around my plane and form a corridor into the terminal. As the few people on the plane begin to disembark, I feel a sudden urge to stay in my seat.

Why do I see so many armed soldiers? I am a veteran traveler and have been in many unusual situations. Yet I am unable to reconcile my briefing in the U.S. with the reality played out a few feet away. And I wonder: Has God really called me to Liberia to help lead a reconciliation workshop?

As I approach the small, simple terminal, a smiling face and outstretched hand appears out of the crowd: “Pastor Jimmy Dugbe is my name. Welcome to Liberia. I will help you.” Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, will be my home for the next eight days. I might get accustomed to the military check points every few miles, but I cannot keep from staring at the scars of the civil war etched on nearly every building and, it seems, on each face, a war that continues just beyond my visual horizon. I am seeing a traumatized city—once beautiful, peaceful, and free of fear.

Monrovia, named after former U.S. President James Monroe, was founded by freed slaves from the United States who sought a new home far away from slavery. The American Colonization Society facilitated the relocation beginning in 1821, when ex-slave Elijah Johnson took the first shipload to Providence Island, a peninsula of a land that, in light of the liberation it promised, would be called Liberia.

When England and the United States eventually outlawed slavery, ships laden with slaves were intercepted on the high seas and the human cargo deposited on Liberia’s shores. These people were called Congos after the region from which they had been taken. In the interior were tribes native to the soil: the Gios, the Krahns, the Manos, the Krus, the Kpelles, and others. A long history of warfare and deceptions, alliances and coalitions checkered their tribal history. In 1980, a new chapter would be written, which would eventually account for my arrival.

In April of that year an army sergeant, Samuel Doe, assumed the presidency by leading a violent coup against William Tolbert, a strong Christian. Tradition dictated that when the defeated wished to surrender to the victor, he would bring a white chicken as a sign of submission. The victor would then place the person under house arrest or send him into exile. Doe broke tradition by killing Tolbert and displaying his mutilated body parts around the president’s mansion and in the city. Blatant humiliation was heaped upon the defeated. The seeds of hate and revenge were sown in unprecedented ways.

Reports say Doe violated other traditions. He killed pregnant women and old men and harassed tribal groups in their own designated lands. When the Gio tribe become a threat to Doe, a Khran, he began killing the Gio tribe’s educated leaders, business people, and men with military capacity. The Gios fled into exile to survive and plot revenge. In one way or another, all the tribes would be drawn into the conflict. The enemy walked everywhere, but most did not wear uniforms. What was one to do except be suspicious of everyone?

Into this charged situation came our team on a mission sponsored by World Relief Corporation. World Relief had drilled several fresh-water wells for the city some months earlier and then asked if they could be of further help. The stunning answer revealed the Liberian’s daily desperation: “Yes, but as much as we need more wells, we need someone to help us with reconciliation. What good is clean water if we keep hating and killing one another?”

At World Relief’s request, I designed a conference and assembled a multiracial team that would model our message of reconciliation. Our party included the executive director of the National Black Evangelical Association along with executives from World Relief and Elward Ellis of the Destiny Movement, an Atlanta-based organization that encourages Black people to enter missions work. A 21-member steering committee made up of Liberian Protestant groups laid the groundwork in Monrovia. The Conference on Peace, Prayer, and Reconciliation would bring together 500 people across denominations, government bodies, tribal groups, and religious sectors—a formidable task in the best of times, but now?

My reconciliation experiences in South Africa helped equip me for this moment of ambiguity, but I still wondered if I could make any difference. Would God be pleased to meet with us in a powerful and life-changing way?

Once beautiful and peaceful, Monrovia had been crippled by the war. Dismembered airplanes littered the airport. Sanitation was minimal; many people used the beaches as toilet facilities. Electricity was available only a few hours a day, sometimes less. Most buses, disabled by bullets and mortar shells, had been hauled to rest in fields. Soldiers cut communication lines in hundreds of places. Most buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes. Many places I could not walk two steps without stepping on spent machine gun shells. It was a fierce battle, I was told. Peacekeeping soldiers from neighboring countries were everywhere, heavily armed and suspicious.

The night before the conference started there were no chairs and no private or public buses to bring the people. In a city ravaged by war, even chairs can be a precious commodity. Buses were a luxury. The mayor of the city, a youthful, bright-eyed dynamic Christian committed to the conference, somehow found 500 chairs. He convinced the university to work all night to get three buses running. By God’s grace, it all came together. The enormous work of two of God’s saints inspired us: Pastors Jimmy Dugbe, a sturdy older man whose deeply lined face suggested he had seen it all, and Jasper Ndaborlor, a thin young man with quiet determination and leadership.

But even more challenging—indeed, frightening—was the risk of bringing the tribal groups together. Three things gave us confidence: the conviction that God brought us here; the fact that the 21-member steering committee represented virtually all groups who would attend, and the awareness that everyone had experienced the anguish of war and wanted it to stop.

Two of the sessions became turning points for participants. I asked them to break into groups of three and to share their greatest pain or trauma in this past year. Frequently the mimicked sound of machine-gun fire was heard from someone’s lips as he or she recounted a story. Many wept. After each person shared, the other two would pray for God’s healing grace—healing from the nightmarish memories, from bitterness, and from the desire for vengeance.

The stories I heard underlined the grotesqueness of war. A husband and wife trying to flee from enemy soldiers are caught. The soldiers cut off the husband’s head and, while it is hemorrhaging on the ground, severed from the body, the wife is told to pick it up and kiss it. Then she is told to spit on the head and laugh at it in scorn and throw it down. Today she will be confronted with the severity of forgiveness.

Then there were the stories of rape, killings of sons and daughters while parents watched, betrayals costing one his job and often his home, tortures, and virtually every form of inhumanity. Unlike many wars where the enemy leaves your land, in this war the “enemy” may well be someone you will see regularly on the street, in the store, workplace, even at church.

A second turning point came during a lengthy session on the meaning of forgiveness. It seems rather straightforward to most of us. You either forgive or you don’t. I realized, for the first time, that my ability to forgive had never been tested—not compared to what these people faced. Hearing some of their heart-wrenching stories, I could offer them nothing from my experience with forgiveness. Their suffering was too close to that of Christ’s to be reduced to a recipe created in someone’s air-conditioned study. It had to be something born deeply from within their Christian faith, and the midwife had to be the Holy Spirit.

I quickly realized that they longed for someone to stand before them who would know their suffering, identify with their struggle to forgive, and be a worthy pioneer for them to follow.

Their longing began to be satisfied when the discussion turned to Christ’s crucifixion. I asked them, “What did Jesus experience? How did he respond?” They sensed that Jesus had been in the place of their suffering and he understood. But even more imporant, he was with them in the place of their suffering now, asking that they draw upon his grace and strength.

Next their thoughts turned to the heavenly Father who loved his own Son. Most of them identified with the Father’s loss since they had lost close friends and family members. But here again they were confronted with the severity of forgiveness. The Father forgave his Son’s tormentors, and not just with a few spoken words. Forgiveness meant offering his enemies eternal life, all the benefits of sonship, and hope in this world and the next.

The group staggered at the implications of their discoveries. But the last discovery would cut to the marrow of their beings and violate deeply ingrained assumptions. God’s forgiveness was free. It required no exacting of penalty, no vengeance, no withholding of favor, no seeking of an eye for an eye. It was as though the Father had forgotten their enemy status. Forgiveness is treating enemies like friends. “But I say to you … love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:27–28).

Would the demands of forgiveness be too severe, causing them to faint?

“Forgive and forget” said one member. “I’m sorry,” said another, “I cannot forget.” Everyone knew they could not just hit the “delete” key and erase their memories. Every day, hundreds of times a day, the painful memories invade the rare peaceful moment.

Group silence suggested the answer would not be easy. Finally, one person said, “I cannot forget, but I can choose to disregard my memories. I do not have to let them linger in my thoughts. I do not have to act on my memories. I can choose to set them aside quickly, knowing that they are seeds of revenge Satan wishes to grow in my heart.”

I asked each participant to write down the wounds that would be hardest to forgive. Then they were to take the paper over to a candle, light the paper, and drop it into a container. The symbolism spoke volumes. Some dropped the burning paper quickly, eager to be rid of the painful past. Others held on to the paper until the flame touched their skin, perhaps pondering what this act would require of them tomorrow. Nearby was another paper they picked up with the words, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” They needed a word from God to replace what they had burned. Then a circle started, and as each burned his or her paper, that one would enter the circle and receive words of encouragement from those who had gone before. I saw hugging and weeping.

I wrote my own list of pains and burned it. Being with these beautiful people made me aware of wrongs I needed to forgive. They encouraged me and shared their strength with me.

Two Muslim leaders attended the conference. Except during prayer times, when they left for their own prayers, they participated fully. They were among the last to burn their papers, and as they entered the circle, they were hugged and blessed by the group. The work of a severe forgiveness had begun, but only begun.

At the closing plenary session, the audience was asked to share reactions. A well-dressed Muslim leader was the first one to the platform. He stood in silence, seemingly overtaken with all that had transpired. He expressed profound gratitude for the conference. His affirmations were interrupted by applause and enthusiastic “amens” and “hallelujahs.” Then, in a moment of somber reflection, the Muslim said, “I believe the Spirit of God is with us in this conference. You know that we Muslims do not talk about the Spirit of God, but I believe he is here.”

Sunday morning found a smaller group of Christians gathered to worship God in prayer, praise, and thanksgiving. Our joy was short-lived as a few hours later we learned that during our worship service, nearly 500 people, mostly women and children, were massacred only 25 miles away.

The resolve to forgive will be tested again, and again. It is indeed a severe forgiveness that God calls forth.

Only a couple of weeks after the conference, warring factions signed a peace accord. An interim government is being formed, and free elections are planned for this year. Christian leaders believe that the conference prayers and activities directly produced the peace accord.

Lately I have been wondering: Should we invite some of these beautiful Liberians to come and teach the American church about forgiveness? With our nation’s racial conflicts, church splits, gang rivalries, family violence, God knows we desperately could use their help.

Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.