OFFICE NOTES

 

You are to be advised that the next issue of this journal will be the September number, for we do not publish in July and August. Our policy is to send you 200 pages a year in ten installments. We want you to miss us these summer months, but we also want you to know why, lest you suppose we have forgotten about you. We’ve planned some interesting stuff for you for the September number. This is a good time to send us some extra names (only 5.00 for five names, and we do the mailing) so they can be processed for our fall mailings.

Ouida is in search of one Clyde O. Goff. If he, or someone who knows him, will send us his address, we’ll mail him the book he has coming. Since our mailing list is by zip codes rather than alphabetical, she thumbed through all our plates in search of him. He must have ordered the book from someone else’s copy, and his address, if we ever had it, got away from us.

We express appreciation to Ira Rice, Jr., editor of Contending for the Faith, for publishing the writeup by W.A. Reed of the Nashville Tennessean on Carl Ketcherside’s visit to the Belmont Church of Christ in that city. Mr. Reed quotes Carl as saying, “Our relationship to God is on a basis of a covenant which, before Christ, was a covenant of laws but now is a covenant of grace whose only dynamic is love.” He further quotes Carl as saying that many Church of Christ folk are coming to see the New Testament as love letters from Jesus rather than a book of laws. That was the heading of the writeup, blazoned across both the Tennessean and Ira’s paper: “New Testament Regarded as Love Letters from Christ.” This is but one instance of many important stories among our folk that Ira passes along to his many readers, this being one of the reasons I praise him up and down the country whenever I am asked about his paper.

We can supply two important paper backs by Keith Miller: A Second Touch and Habitation of Dragons at 1.75 each. Ideal to hand to a friend. Kenneth Hamilton, a Canadian theologian, has written a significant new book on To Turn From Idols which argues that all idolatry finds its origin “the imaginations of men’s hearts.” In reading the book you may decide we are all closer to idolatry than we suppose, for he deals with idols in both the world and the church, such as the cult of relevance, the great god of change, and the worship of freedom. 3.95.

For 1.95 we will send you The Christian Looks At Himself by Anthony A. Hoekema. It is a heart-searching study of the old and new man in the believer, with chapters on Romans 7, sinless perfection, and the joy of fellowship. For the same price we’ll include F. F. Bruce’s The Message of the New Testament, which is a penetrating statement on what that book is all about. Reading it will give you a sense of victory as a believer. All of Bruce’s works are highly worthwhile and this is his newest.

We all agree that faith has its hidden difficulties. Two keen writers have collaborated in unmasking some of these, such as: Does God forgive the kind of sins I’ve committed, that I’ve never told anyone? You’ll appreciate Living the Adventure with Keith Miller and Bruce Larson. 3.95.

We’d be pleased to have you at the July 4 special service at Panther Creek Church of Christ, between Cove and Watson, Oklahoma on highway 4, where I’ll be speaking on freedom in Christ. Also at the Campbell Bicentennial Seminar at Bethany College, July 7-9, where I’ll discuss the significance of the Campbell travel letters. On the program will also be Robert Fife of Milligan, Bill Humble of Abilene, Earl West of Harding, David Edwin Harrell of Alabama, and Bill Banowsky, Carey Gifford and Richard Hughes of Pepperdine, along with two “secular” profs from Temple and UCLA. Among the hosts at Bethany will be Bill Tucker of TCU, the new president at Bethany College, and Perry Gresham, the former president. Following Bethany I will have appointments in Cleveland and Indianapolis.

We wish for you a beautiful summer. Ouida and I are hoping to find a few weeks to spend at our cabin on Cedar Creek lake in east Texas, where I plan to start writing an extensive book on the history of the Restoration Movement, to be published by College Press. Our target date for completion is April, 1978. You’ll be hearing more about this, of course. The thing now is to have a good summer. Take your wife for a walk in the woods. Our next visit will be in the September issue, which will be Vol. 18, No.7.