OUR CHANGING WORLD

 

Michael Hall, writing in the bulletin of Northland Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio, says: “When a preacher stands before the assembly of Christ on Sunday morning and proclaims the truth, he is not doing primarily the work of an evangelist in that task. The work of an evangelist is going to people who are not converted and evangelizing them. That’s the preacher’s task!”

One of our preachers, Clyde Thompson, was once a convicted murderer and spent years in the penitentiary. He is now a minister of the Word to prisoners in Texas correctional institutions. In the bulletin of the Church of Christ, Mabank, Texas, who helps to support his work, he reports over 600 immersions. He counsels with these men, and there are assemblies for the breaking of bread in the Huntsville prison and at several of the prison farms.

One significant congregation among Christian Churches is Mount Carmel in Decatur, Ga., which has a million dollar auditorium and Sunday School facilities for 3,000. It may well be the most impressive of the Independent congregations, with a professional staff of five and offerings that sometimes reach as high as $100,000 a Sunday. They have upwards of 2,000 at morning assembly and something like half that for evening. The senior minister has long practiced visiting each family every month, which proves to be no small task. The youth program is something else, with as many as 500 present for their Sunday evening meeting, and they have a big red barn for raps and sports. The church is strongly Bible-study centered, with classes running two hours both Sunday morn and eve, with all sorts of special classes through the week.

A Roman Catholic nun, serving as a campus minister at Boston University, was fired by her superior for saying mass. She claimed innocence of violating the sanctity of priesthood, which only men may enter, in that she omitted “the words of consecration.” One priest, serving with her on the same campus, took her side, insisting that the celibate, male tradition is an outrage that should be changed. For those of our background, what the nun did would be roughly equivalent to a woman presiding at the Lord’s Supper in a Church of Christ, or perhaps baptizing. Would that unglue you?

Also out of the Roman Catholic world comes the story of a half-million dollar home for the archbishop of Washington D. C. The archbishop purchased the home and was preparing to make it his residence when “all hell broke loose” in the form of protests. Leading the protest was a Paulist priest, who has been trying to get the Washington diocese to commit ten million annually to “the poorest of God’s poor” in D. C. He pointed out that the $525,000 home for the archbishop was more money than the church was now giving to the poor, and so he staged a hunger strike, vowing to fast until the archbishop decided to live in humbler circumstances. The priest lived on water only for 23 days, at which time the archbishop capitulated, announcing that he would remain at the rectory and the new residence would be sold. The priest lost 40 pounds, but does not yet have his 10 million for the poor.

Eternity recently presented a study on the modern versions, an evaluation of nine translations now widely used, made by eight “conservative” scholars. Highest marks go to the Revised Standard Version, with lowest marks going to The Living Bible. This is remarkable in view of the fact that for years the Revised Standard was criticized as the work of modernists, with some charging that it was a calculated effort to destroy faith. F. F. Bruce, one of the evaluators, says of it: “It keeps as close to the original as fidelity to modern English idiom will permit. It has gone far to replace the KJV as the best ‘all purpose’ English version,” while Robert H. Mounce says it is “The best translation in the English language for general use.” On the other hand, the new Bibles out of Grand Rapids, the publication center for evangelicalism, do not fare so well, even when judged by evangelicals. Of The Living Bible Prof. Bruce struggles to say only “A paraphrase, serving mainly as a simplified Bible for children,” while Mounce says flatly “In terms of its fidelity to the Greek text, it is the poorest of the English translations.” Even the very newest New International, the pride of Grand Rapids and perhaps justly so, doesn’t begin to score like the RSV. Bruce commends it highly enough, but Mounce says “Somewhat uneven in its attempts to modernize. A number of felicitous phrases.” All this confirms what I said 20 years ago, in my earlier Bible Talk, in support of the RSV, at a time when it was an unpopular course, with some of our folk here and there holding public burnings of that version. I still say it is better to let the “modernists” do our Bible translating. All they have at stake is their scholarship!