Page 5443 – Christianity Today (2024)

As a christian, I find the “survival of the fittest” doctrine of evolution—that might makes right—to be the very opposite of the teachings of Christ. As a scientist, I find the evolutionary position to be unsound and self-contradictory.

The presumed evolutionary process requires extremely long ages. But it takes only one proof of a young age to refute completely the evolutionary hypothesis. Based on reasonable postulates, a great scope of observable data, and the fundamental laws of physics, there are several factors proving the earth, the moon, and the sun are too young for the presumed evolution to have taken place.

1. Receding moon. There is an easily understood physical proof that the moon is too young for its presumed evolutionary age. According to the laws of physics, the moon should be receding from the earth. These same laws show that the moon could never survive a nearness to the earth of less than 11,500 miles, a distance known as the Roche limit. Inside that limit, the tidal forces of our planet would break up a satellite of the moon’s dimensions into smaller pieces, resulting in something similar to the rings of Saturn. Therefore, the receding moon could never have been that close to the earth.

The physical reason for the moon’s recession from the earth relates to the friction of earth’s oceanic tides generated by the gravitational pull of the moon. The net result is that the earth’s spin rate is gradually slowing, and the days are getting slightly longer. Angular momentum is transferred from the earth to the moon, causing the moon to move slowly away from the earth.

If one multiplies the present recession speed of the moon by the presumed evolutionary age, the result would place the moon farther away from the earth than it presently is, even if one assumes that it started from within the Roche limit. Theoretically, the recession rate of the moon would be much faster if the moon were nearer the earth, and this “nonlinear effect” upon the recession rate would make the moon even farther away than the above prediction. Thus, the moon could not have been receding for the entire age demanded by the doctrine of evolution. There is as yet no tenable explanation that will yield the evolutionary age of four billion years or more for the moon. This is as simple a proof as science can provide that the moon is not as old as some claim.

This known dynamic limit in the earth-moon system is a great problem to knowledgeable evolutionists. How can they reconcile this proof of the moon’s young age to the theory of evolution? In his Introduction to Space Science (John Wiley, 1971), Robert C. Haymes acknowledges the problem and states that “the whole subject of the origin of the moon must be regarded as highly speculative.” Louis B. Slichter, professor of geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, treated this problem extensively in the Journal of Geophysical Research (1964, Vol. 8, No. 14). He concluded that “the time scale of the earth-moon system still presents a major problem.”

2. Shape of the earth. Lord Kelvin used the earth’s slowing spin rate to prove that the earth could not be a billion years old. His proof: a billion years ago the earth would have been spinning twice as fast. If the earth were initially molten, the centrifugal force of such a high spin rate would have caused an extremely large bulge around the equator. Slow spin reduction and fast surface cooling would then have solidified that bulge into a high continent that encircled the equator. There is, of course, no trace of such a bulge.

3. Lunar dust depth. One prelunar landing prediction made by evolutionary scientists caused the astronauts great concern. Due to a presumed 4.5-billion-year age of the moon, the rate of influx of dust, and the lunar physical processes of rock break-up, scientists thought the astronauts might sink into a great depth of dust on the moon. Fortunately, the astronauts were not lost in the lunar “quicksand” of age-accumulated dust predicted by evolution. Instead, the creationists’ predictions of only a thin layer of dust—based on a young age for the moon—were correct.

The false prediction from evolutionary scientists lends support to the contention that the doctrine of evolution is a barrier to progress in science.

4. Radiometric evidence of rapid creation. Robert V. Gentry has discovered radiometric evidence that the basem*nt rock of the earth was formed originally in a cool, not a molten, state, giving support to a young age for the earth (see Annual Review of Nuclear Science, Vol. 23). His research, done at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, involves the study of the pleochroic halos (colored spheres) produced by the radioactive decay of Polonium-218. He analyzed over 100,000 of these halos in granitic rocks taken from all parts of the world at considerable depths below land surface.

Two important conclusions were drawn from this research: (1) the Polonium-218 was primordial—that is, this radioactive element was in the original granite; (2) because the halos can only be formed in the crystals of the granite, and the Polonium-218 half-life is only three minutes, the granite had to be cool and crystallized originally. The Polonium-218 would have decayed long before molten granite could cool.

Gentry concluded: “The simple evidence of the halos is that the basem*nt rocks of the earth were formed solid.… Halos in other minerals can be shown to give equally startling evidence of a young earth.” This presents problems to conventional radiometric dating that would not agree with this initial state identified by Gentry.

5. Magnetic evidence of a young earth. Perhaps the best evidence for a very young age for the earth is the surprisingly fast rate of decay of the earth’s main magnetic field. According to Sidney Chapman in The Earth’s Magnetism (London, John Wiley), “When the great scale of the phenomenon is considered, this must seem a remarkably large and rapid secular change, not paralleled for any other worldwide geophysical property. If one extrapolates the decay rate backwards in time, it becomes clear that the process of decay could not have been going on for more than a few thousand years, otherwise the original magnetic field would have been implausibly large.

This decay of the magnetic field has been documented by an immense amount of data and data reduction ever since Karl Gauss made the first evaluation in 1835. The state of the earth’s magnet (its strength and direction) is scientifically specified by a single vector quantity called the magnetic moment. It was that quantity that Gauss and subsequent scientists evaluated. A Department of Commerce publication (McDonald & Gunst, “An Analysis of the Earth’s Magnetic Field,” 1967) lists the evaluations from 1835 to 1965, and calculates the rate of decrease to be about 5 percent per hundred years. It then states that if that rate of decay continues, the magnetic field will “vanish in A.D. 3991.”

This decay has some harmful environmental effects. The earth’s magnetic field extends into the space around the earth and forms a protective shield against cosmic rays and solar winds. The half-life of this decaying magnetic field is 1,400 years (meaning that every 1,400 years its strength is cut in half), and at present is only about one-third as strong as it was at the time of Christ. More harmful radiation is penetrating this shield as it becomes diminished.

This decay was predicted by Sir Horace Lamb in 1883. He developed, with the aid of James Clerk Maxwell’s powerful equations, a theoretically sound explanation of the source of the earth’s magnetic field. According to his theory, the earth’s magnet is an electromagnet charged by enormous electric current flowing in a circular path in the core of the earth. There is no source of energy other than that original magnetic energy. Since its beginning at creation, it has been decaying and will gradually run out of energy.

One technical article, “The Earth’s Magnetic Field,” by J. A. Jacobs (Mining Geophysics, 2:426), acknowledged the soundness of Lamb’s physics but rejected his theory solely because it gave an age of only a few thousand years. The article stated that the earth is “known” to be at least 4.5 billion years old. However, the article did not mention the decay that confirms Lamb’s prediction. It did acknowledge that there were real problems with the “dynamo” theories held by some evolutionary geologists.

This dynamo mechanism, which has been proposed to generate and sustain the earth’s magnet, is based on a reversal theory. The theory assumes that the magnet has not been decaying continuously, but for some unknown reason has oscillated back and forth for billions of years. To concede that this decaying magnet has not been reversing would sound the death knell for the whole theory of evolution. Evolutionists’ only hope is to “read” reversal phenomena into the magnetization of accessible rocks in the crust of the earth. There is, however, ample evidence in scientific literature to show real problems and some self-contradictions in those interpretations.

At present there is no known reversal mechanism, nor is there any known source of energy to reenergize the magnet when its energy gets down to zero. One can safely say there is no theoretical reason at present to consider anything other than a single continuing decay process that started in the not-too-distant past—a creation only thousands of years ago. The age limit of the earth’s magnet would be something on the order of 10,000 to 20,000 years, depending on the postulated initial strength of the magnet.

6. Shrinking sun. A recent development in astrophysics has restored to importance an old theory of the source of the sun’s energy—almost as if it were a reminder from Ecclesiastes: “There is no new thing under the sun.” In the 1850s, Hermann von Helmholtz proposed that the cause of the sun’s shrinking was its strong gravitational force (i.e., its own weight acting on itself). Evolutionists rejected this theory because it would mean the maximum possible age of the sun would be 10 million years.

In this nuclear age, the dominant theory concerning the source of the sun’s energy has been an internal nuclear fusion process somewhat like a hydrogen bomb. That theory has had some severe reverses in recent years. Very elaborate experiments have failed to detect the number of particles (neutrinos) predicted to be emitted by the sun, leaving theoreticians scrambling at a hectic pace to repair the theory.

In 1979, astronomer John A. Eddy and mathematician Aram A. Boomazian shocked the world of science with the following scientific conclusions: “The sun has been shrinking for a hundred years and perhaps as long as 400 years.… The implication is that the sun, and presumably other stars, could now be deriving a significant part of their energy from gravitational contraction” (Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, “Secular Decrease in the Solar Diameter,” 1979, 11:437).

The rate at which the sun shrinks is five feet per hour, and some have interpreted this to account for most of the sun’s energy output (see Russell Abridge, The Sun is Shrinking, Impact No. 82, ICR, 1980). This puts an upper limit on the age of the sun at approximately 10 million years. Of course, there is nothing to refute even an age of a few thousand years. In any event, this shrinking sun appears to give strong evidence that the sun is much too young for the presumed evolution to have taken place.

It also casts equal doubt on the theory of nuclear fusion as the energy source for stars, which would reduce the age limit for stars to much below the requirements of the evolutionary hypothesis.

One must conclude that the presumed evolutionary processes would require extremely long ages for the emergence of the world as we see it today. As pointed out at the outset, it requires only one proof of a younger age to refute completely the evolutionary hypothesis. The age is too young when the laws of physics are applied to observed, large-scale phenomena.

Thomas G. Barnes is dean of the graduate school, Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, California. He is the author of Origin and Destiny of the Earth’s Magnetic Field (Inst. for Creation Research, 1973).

I remember once when troubles descended like a sudden storm that dumps 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. But why is it that way? Why do troubles so often come in bunches or in such rapid succession that we barely have time to catch our breath before another wave hits?

I’m glad the psalmist did not live on a perpetual high. David once longed for wings of a dove so that he might fly away and be at rest. We would settle for the wings of a Concorde or a 747—even a Piper Cub!

But I discovered God’s promise in Isaiah 40:31. There, those who “wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and no faint.”

So it boils down to: Away—or up? The key seems to be “waiting on the Lord.”

In this “instant” generation most of us don’t wait easily. But we can learn. F. B. Meyer once wrote: “Not always talking to Him or about Him but waiting before Him till the stream runs clear; ’till the cream rises to the top; till the mists part and the soul regains its equilibrium.”

Jeremiah, in the most dismal of circ*mstances, wrote: “The Lord is good unto them that wait for him” (Lam. 3:25).

Let’s start learning!

IN THE BEGINNING …

There were no human witnesses to the origin of the universe. Neither were there any observers when life began, or at the origin of a single living thing. Strictly speaking, then, no theory concerning origins can be considered scientific. Creation and evolution are inferences derived from scientific evidence, and ultimately neither can be subject to observation, test, or falsification.

Either/Or

Each theory, however, would result in consequences imprinted in the world about us—such as the fossil record and the natural laws of the universe. The credibility of either theory, creation or evolution, must therefore be judged in light of this evidence.

Based on this, the most consistent model of origins should be judged scientifically to be scientifically the best model. Since all ideas concerning origins basically fall within these two models, one or the other must be true.

The theory of evolution is an attempt to explain the origin of the universe strictly on the basis of mechanistic, naturalistic processes without the intervention of any outside agency. According to this notion, the universe may have begun with the explosion of a super-dense cosmic egg. The result was the present highly ordered, highly complex universe, with perhaps a hundred billion galaxies and millions of incredibly complex species here on planet earth.

The late Prof. Harlow Shapley of Harvard University stated, “Some people piously proclaim, ‘In the beginning, God.’ I say, ‘In the beginning, Hydrogen.’” Shapley believed that starting with hydrogen (which resulted from the Big Bang), natural laws, and sufficient amounts of time, one could explain the origin of everything. Of course, he could do no such thing, but this notion was at least consistent with his atheistic philosophy.

Since evolution theory is an attempt to explain origins by a process of self-transformation involving only naturalistic and mechanistic processes, God is unnecessary and so excluded from the process. While there may be those who are called theistic evolutionists, there is no such thing that could be legitimately called theistic evolution. By definition, evolution is a strictly mechanistic, naturalistic, and, therefore, atheistic process.

The creationist, on the other hand, maintains that the notion that a highly structured universe created itself from hydrogen gas is scientifically untenable and theologically bankrupt. If it is historical fact that in the beginning God created, as all Christians must believe, then the world originated as a supernatural process and cannot be accounted for merely by the natural processes and natural laws now operating on this earth.

There are, therefore, two views of origins that are logically and philosophically consistent: either our universe and the living things it contains were created and their origin was miraculous, or they arose mechanistically from disordered primordial stuff by a process of self-transformation. It is therefore contradictory and irrational to profess belief in God as the Creator of life and at the same time profess belief that living things arose by mechanistic, evolutionary processes. In fact, this latter view leaves us with a creation in which nothing was created.

In a recent article, Davis Young states: “The biblical record clearly demands the special intervention of God in the origin of man.” In the same article, however, he suggests a possible evolutionary sequence leading from an Australopithecus ancestor to man. Then he adds: “Although I am not an ardent advocate of evolutionary theory, I do not see that it precludes God’s creative control in bringing into being various organisms” (Eternity, May 1982).

How does Young’s proposition—typical of those expressed by theistic evolutionists—differ from the views held by atheistic evolutionists? The mechanism is the same (mutations and natural selection) and the process is the same (all creatures including man arising from lower creatures by natural processes). If there is a difference, what is it? If God intervened at any time, just when and where did he do so? And how then can one pretend to explain origins by some naturalistic process—which is precisely the reason the notion of evolution was invented in the first place?

If evolution is true, then the origin of man and other creatures certainly did not occur as described in the Bible. For example, we are told in Genesis 2:21–22 that God created Eve from Adam’s rib. In 1 Corinthians 11:8 we are told that “Man is not of the woman, but woman of the man.” No evolutionist, atheist or theist, could believe that. They maintain that humans gradually arose as a population of creatures from lower, apelike animals. But we cannot have it both ways, as some pretend. Either man was created, or he evolved.

Young goes on to insist that we must differentiate between evolution as a biological theory and evolutionism as a philosophy. He believes evolution can be taught as a theory without it being a philosophy of life. What he and others do not understand, however, is that the idea of biological evolution is the foundation on which the whole of evolutionism as a philosophy rests. It seems strange that while Christians like Young often fail to understand this, evolutionists are not so confused.

While Young, then, has no problem seeing the idea of mutation and natural selection as God’s method of “creation,” it is difficult to understand a Christian accepting such a view. Natural selection would be the blindest and most cruel way imaginable to create a new species. Marjorie Grene, a leading historian and philospher of science, stated in an article, “The Faith of Darwinism”: “It is as a religion of science that Darwinism chiefly held, and holds, men’s minds. The derivation of life, of man, of man’s deepest hopes and highest achievements, from the external and indirect determination of small chance errors, appears as the keystone of the naturalistic universe.”

Today, in most of the tax-supported public schools of our pluralistic democratic society, students are being indoctrinated—brainwashed—in evolutionary theory. Inevitably, millions of these students are becoming convinced that they are no more than a mechanistic product of a mindless universe, that there is no God, no one to whom they are responsible. Taught that they started out as a mere cloud of hydrogen, they conclude that they will end up only a pile of dust.

While acceptance of evolution is biblically indefensible, it is equally untenable scientifically. Today there are literally thousands of scientists holding advanced degrees who have rejected evolution as an untenable theory, and recognized that special creation is a much more credible explanation. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of students, unfettered by careers invested in evolutionary concepts, are becoming convinced that scientific evidence favors creation over evolution. It seems inconceivable that in these times when evidence against evolution is accumulating, and is so compelling that even some of the world’s leading evolutionists are abandoning lifelong beliefs in evolution and atheism, there are Christians who still defend it.

Drift Toward Disorder

In the physical sciences, the evidence against evolution and for creation is actually coercive. In the biological sciences, the evidence for creation is at least compelling. The natural laws and processes now operating in this universe demonstrate that the universe could not have created itself naturally; thus it had to be created supernaturally.

Consider the science of thermodynamics. If the universe began in a state of disorder, as evolutionists believe, and this initial chaotic system transformed itself into our present highly ordered and complex universe, then matter must have an inherent ability to transform itself from disorder to order, from a simple state to a more complex state. On the other hand, if creation is true, no such tendency of matter would be predicted. And if anything had occurred since creation to alter the original created state, deteriorative processes may have been initiated. Creationists might thus expect to find that, if anything, matter tends to deteriorate from an ordered to a disordered state. Predictions based on evolution on the one hand, and creation on the other, related to thermodynamics, are thus diametrically opposed. Let us look at the real world and see if common experience supports predictions based on creation or evolution.

First, no scientist has ever detected any tendency of matter to transform itself from a disordered state to a complex, ordered state. There is no natural law in science that describes such a property of matter. There is, however, a natural law that describes exactly the opposite tendency known as the second law of thermodynamics.

“There is a general natural tendency of all observed systems to go from order to disorder, reflecting dissipation of energy available for future transformations—the law of increasing entropy” (R. B. Lindsay, American Scientist, 56:100, 1968).

“Another way of stating the second law then is: ‘The universe is constantly getting more disorderly!’ Viewed that way, we can see the second law all about us. We have to work hard to straighten a room, but left to itself it becomes a mess again very quickly and very easily.… In fact, all we have to do is nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, wears out, all by itself—and that is what the second law is all about” (Isaac Asimov, Smithsonian Institution Journal, June 1970).

Now, it does seem that if this is what the second law of thermodynamics is all about, evolution is in deep trouble. Believing as they do that evolution is a fact and that the second law is also a fact, evolutionists, including those quoted above, are convinced there must be some way to reconcile the two. No answer has yet been forthcoming, however; indeed, there is no answer.

Unquestionably, the second law applies to an isolated system, one into which no energy is entering from the outside. The second law says that the order and complexity of such a system can never increase, but that the disorderliness or randomness of such a system (its entropy) will steadily increase with time. Yet evolutionists believe the universe is an isolated system that transfomed itself from an initial chaotic state (following the Big Bang) to its present highly complex state. This is directly contradictory to the second law.

Furthermore, in its present state, acknowledged by almost all scientists and clearly stated in Psalm 102:26, the universe is constantly becoming less orderly, more random. Inevitably it will suffer a “heat death” after all the fuel in all the stars is exhausted (unless God intervenes, as we are certain he will). But if the natural laws and processes now operating in the universe are leading inexorably to its destruction, and if these natural laws and processes are all there is and all there ever has been, how could these same natural laws and processes have created the universe in the first place? The tortured logic required to reach such a contradictory conclusion certainly cannot be called science. It is pure pseudoscience, or worse, anti-science. The science of thermodynamics absolutely excludes the possibility that the universe created itself, so it had to be created supernaturally.

What About The Sun?

Some evolutionists might be led to concede that this is true, but they and all other evolutionists insist that since the earth is not an isolated system but open to the sun, and a vast amount of energy constantly flows from the sun to the earth, evolution on the earth, with its accompanying increase in complexity, can occur at the expense of loss of complexity of the sun.

It is said that the decrease in entropy, or increase in order, on the earth during the evolutionary process has been more than compensated by the increase in entropy, or decrease in order, on the sun. The overall result we are told, has been a net decrease in order, so the second law of thermodynamics has not been violated.

An open system and an adequate external source of energy are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for order to be generated and maintained, however, since raw undirected, uncontrolled energy is destructive, not constructive. For example, without the protective layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere absorbing most of the ultraviolet light coming from the sun, life on earth would be impossible. Bacterial cells exposed to this radiation die within seconds. This is because ultraviolet light or irradiation of any kind breaks chemical bonds, thereby randomizing and destroying the highly complex structures found in macromolecules, such as proteins and DNA. The biological activity of these vitally important molecules is destroyed and death rapidly follows. If life cannot exist in the presence of ultraviolet light, how could it have arisen in its presence in the first place?

Needed: A Guidance System

That much more than a mere external energy source is required to form complex molecules and systems from simpler ones is evident from this statement by George Gaylord and William Beck in their book, Life … An Introduction to Biology (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965): “… the simple expenditure of energy is not sufficient to develop and maintain order. A bull in a china shop performs work, but he neither creates nor maintains organization. The work needed is particular work; it must follow specifications; it requires information on how to proceed.”

A green plant, utilizing its highly complex photosynthetic system, can trap light energy from the sun and convert it into chemical energy. A series of other complex systems within the green plant allows the utilization of this energy to build up complex molecules and systems from simple starting material. Equally important, that green plant possesses a system for directing, maintaining, and replicating these complex energy conversion mechanisms—an incredibly complex genetic system. Without this system, no specifications on how to proceed would exist, chaos would result, and life would be impossible.

For complexity to be generated within a system, then, four conditions must be met:

1. The system must be an open system.

2. An adequate external energy source must be available.

3. The system must posess energy conversion mechanisms.

4. A control mechanism must exist within the system for directing, maintaining, and replicating these energy conversion mechanisms.

The seemingly irresolvable dilemma, from an evolutionary point of view, is how complex energy-conversion mechanisms and genetic systems arose in the absence of such systems when there is a general natural tendency to go from order to disorder. It is a tendency so universal it can be stated as a natural law—the second law of thermodynamics. Simply stated, machines are required to build machines, and something or somebody must operate the machinery. Evolutionists persist in believing, however, in the myth that a bull in a china shop will somehow create order and complexity.

The Creator Guides Creation

So the creationist opposes the wholly unscientific evolutionary hypothesis that the natural universe with all of its incredible complexity was capable of generating itself. He maintains that there must exist, external to the natural universe, a Creator, or supernatural Agency, who was responsible for introducing, or creating, the high degree of order found within this natural universe. Creationism is extrascientific, but it is not antiscientific. The evolutionary hypothesis contradicts the well-established science of thermodynamics.

The vast complexity required of even the most primitive living cell imaginable shows that all such theories are extremely inadequate. In fact, they don’t even approach a solution to the problem. One cannot even account for the origin of significant quantities of relatively simple substances, such as amino acids and sugars, let alone the billions of tons each of the hundreds, if not thousands, of the large and complex macromolecules required, such as proteins, DNA, and RNA.

Probability

Even if, contrary to all available evidence, one assumes that vast amounts of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA) formed spontaneously on the hypothetical primitive earth, and that contrary to everything we know about chemical thermodynamics these subunits magically combined one with another to form the long chains comprising protein-like, DNA-like, and RNA-like molecules, there still would be no chance that even a single molecule with the precise order required for biological activity would result, let alone a highly complex living cell.

Most biologically active proteins, such as enzymes, hormones, and the protein associated with hemoglobin (the oxygen carrier of the red blood cells) consist of several hundred amino acids of about 20 different kinds. Like the letters in this sentence, these amino acids must be arranged in precise order. If a monkey were given a typewriter and allowed to type, letters would pour forth in random fashion and only nonsense would result. There are 107 letters in the preceding sentence. Ignoring the additional requirement of correct spacing, the probability of hitting all of these letters on a typewriter in the correct sequence by chance is 26-107, or 10–142 (there are 26 letters in the alphabet, and the correct letter must be chosen 107 times successively). A probability of 10-142 means that there is only one chance out of 10-142 of success.

If a monkey could type one sentence of 107 letters each second for five billion years, he could type 1017 sentences during those five billion years (there are approximately 1017 seconds in five billion years). The probability that he would type the particular sentence with no spelling errors would be one chance out of 10142/1017, or one chance out of 10125. The number 10125 is the number 1 followed by 125 zeroes. The probability is so low that it is for all practical purposes equal to zero.

Now let us relate these probability considerations to the problem of getting a protein molecule by chance. As mentioned earlier, most proteins contain several hundred amino acids. Let us assume, however, that the primordial proteins that supposedly were involved in the origin of life contained only 100 amino acids of the 20 different kinds found in present-day proteins (these assumptions favor the evolutionary hypothesis). The amino acids in such a protein can be arranged in 20100 or 10130 different ways.

Since no Creator, no intelligence, no directive force capable of acting in a deliberately planned way was involved in the origin of life according to evolutionary theory, these amino acids had to be arranged strictly by the chance processes exerted by chemistry and physics. Chemistry and physics, just like monkeys, would arrange the amino acids in random fashion. Since the number of different ways these amino acids can be arranged is so inconceivably large, the probability that an enzyme or other biologically active protein molecule would come about by chance in the assumed five billion years of earth history is again, for all practical purposes, nil.

On this planet we have an ocean system containing 300 million cubic miles of water. To have even a ghost of a chance to contribute to an evolutionary origin of life, billions of tons each of many hundreds of precisely arranged biologically active protein, DNA, and RNA molecules must be produced by chance. Yet the probability of getting only a single molecule of a particular protein, DNA, or RNA is esentially zero. The evolutionary origin of life would have required a multitude of miracles.

How Not To Make A Boeing 747

Sir fred hoyle, mathematician, astronomer, and one of Britain’s foremost scientists, has long been known as an evolutionist and antitheist. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Sri Lankan-born astronomer, is professor and head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy at University College, Cardiff, Wales. He has been a lifelong Buddhist-atheist, brainwashed, he reports, into believing that any concept of God must be excluded from science. These two, as friends and collaborators, became interested several years ago in the problem of the origin of life.

Using their knowledge of the minimum requirements for a living cell and their skill in mathematics, and each working independently of the other, they calculated the probability of life evolving on earth in five billion years. They were astounded; they couldn’t believe their results. The probability turned out to be one chance out of 1040,000 (one chance out of 1 followed by 40,000 zeroes)—essentially zero.

They then calculated the probability of life evolving anywhere in the universe. They assumed that the universe contains 100 billion galaxies of 100 billion stars each, that each star has a planet like the earth, and that the universe is 20 billion years old. Again, for all practical purposes, the probability turned out to be nil (see Evolution from Space, J.M. Dent, 1981).

Hoyle has declared that the probability of an evolutionary origin of life is equal to the probability that a tornado, sweeping through a junkyard, would assemble a Boeing 747. The report of this story, which appeared in the Daily Express of London, August 14, 1981, was headlined “Two skeptical scientists put their heads together and reach an amazing conclusion: THERE MUST BE A GOD.”

Although neither scientist accepts the Genesis account of creation, the two have concluded that wherever life exists in the universe and whenever this life came into existence, it was created supernaturally. Not only does Hoyle now reject the idea of the evolution of life, but he also maintains that the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe is scientifically untenable and the idea of biological evolution should be rejected as well. It seems incredible that the scientific evidence is sufficiently compelling to convert these two prominent scientists, formerly lifelong atheists, to accept the fact of creation, while many Christians persist in defending the theory of evolution.

Other scientists, on the basis of probability considerations, have come to realize that modern theories on the origin of life, and the current Neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution, are scientifically indefensible. In an article titled “A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory” (Journal of Theoretical Biology, 67:377, 1977), Hubert Yockey says that current ideas on the origin of life are really not science at all but are religious in nature. Frank Salisbury has published data that are equally convincing against the notion of a spontaneous origin of life (see Nature, 224:342–43, 1969). Other mathematicians, even though not giving up faith in their evolutionary philosophy, have attacked the Neo-Darwinian mechanism of evolution as mathematically impossible. As Hoyle has pointed out, evolutionists believe in mathematical miracles.

What About Fossils?

A consideration of thermodynamics, probability relationships, genetics, molecular biology, and other sciences provides convincing evidence that evolution could not occur. An examination of the historical evidence provided by the fossil record reveals that evolution has not occurred. According to the notion of biological evolution, millions of species of plants and animals have gradually evolved during hundreds of millions of years from a single-celled ancestor. If this is the case, the fossil record must contain an enormous number of transitional or intermediate forms. These fossils should provide undoubted proof of the fact of evolution.

If, on the other hand, creation is true, a great variety of highly complex creatures should appear abruptly in the fossil record without ancestors or transitional forms. We would expect to find fossils of each of the created kinds, or basic types, but no transitional forms. Gaps in the fossil record should be systematic.

The fossil record actually reveals a remarkable accordance with creation, which is a great embarrassment to evolution theory. Darwin recognized this but blamed it on “the poverty of the fossil record.” But as David Raup of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago recently pointed out (in the museum Bulletin, 50:22–29, 1979), the fossil record has become so rich during the past 120 years that the so-called poverty of the fossil record can no longer be used as an excuse. Furthermore, he says that, if anything, the fossil record for evolution is worse today than in Darwin’s time. Certain evidences for evolution previously accepted, such as the horse series, have now either been abandoned or substantially modified.

Descendents Without Ancestors?

Numerous examples serve to illustrate the nature of the fossil record that supports creation. Rocks of the Cambrian geological strata contain fossils of a great variety of highly complex creatures such as sponges, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, trilobites, worms, brachiopods, jellyfish, and other mollusks and crustaceans. Evolutionists believe these creatures evolved during many hundreds of millions of years from a single-celled ancestor. Generally lying underneath the Cambrian rocks are the pre-Cambrian rocks, which evolutionists believe were laid down during hundreds of millions of years preceding the so-called Cambrian Period. The pre-Cambrian rocks, many of which are undisturbed and suitable for the preservation of fossils, should contain billions of fossils of the intermediate stages leading from a single-celled ancestor to the complex Cambrian creatures.

What do we actually find in pre-Cambrian rocks? There are many reports in the paleontological literature of alleged fossils of microscopic, single-celled, soft-bodied bacteria and algae in pre-Cambrian rocks, but no one has yet found a transitional form for even one of the Cambrian animals. All of these creatures, wherever or whenever they first appear, are complete: trilobite has always been a trilobite, a jellyfish a jellyfish, a sea urchin a sea urchin, and a sponge a sponge. The idea that these creatures all gradually evolved from a common ancestor is without a shred of empirical scientific evidence. What greater evidence for creation could the rocks give than this sudden outburst of a great variety of complex living creatures with no ancestors?

One of these invertebrates, according to theory, evolved during 100 million years or so into fishes, supposedly the first well-documented vertebrates. Many billions of the transitional forms of the intermediate stages would have lived and died. But no one has ever found a single transitional form in the fossil record between the invertebrates and fishes. Speaking of the origin of the lungfishes, for example, Errol White admitted that “… whatever ideas authorities may have on the subject, the lungfishes, like every other major group of fishes that I know, have their origins firmly based in nothing (“A Little on Lungfishes,” Proceedings of the Linnaean Society, London, 177:8, 1966). Further, all three major subdivisions of the bony fishes, each very different from the another, appear simultaneously in the fossil record, and each is fully developed when first seen. Not a trace of an earlier, intermediate form has ever been found.

Sudden Appearances

The gaps between basic types of organisms throughout the remainder of the fossil record are equally impressive. Dinosaurs with spikes on their heads, dinosaurs with spikes on their tails and plates along their backs, dinosaurs with duckbills, and mammoth dinosaurs weighing up to 80 tons and standing as high as a five-story building suddenly appear in the fossil record with no ancestors or transitional forms. Flying creatures, including flying insects, flying reptiles, flying mammals (bats), and birds all appear abruptly and fully formed. (Some evolutionists argue that Archaeopteryx should be considered transitional, although it had 100 percent modern-type bird features, wings, and flew. Others argue that it is a strange mosaic that doesn’t count as a transitional form.) In addition, primates, the lemur-like creatures, monkeys, and apes all appear fully formed and, in spite of some imaginative transitional forms suggested as links between man and ape, man himself appears fully formed.

Lord Solly Zuckerman, a famous British anatomist, spent many years searching for man’s fossil ancestry. He directed the activities of a scientific team that rarely numbered less than four. This team spent 15 years studying fossils of the type of creature known as Australopithecus. This is the type to which Donald Johanson’s “Lucy” belongs (designated by Johanson as Australopithecus afarensis). Johanson claims that these creatures, although totally ape from the neck up, walked erect like man and so were links between man and ape. This agrees with the view of most evolutionists and is almost universally taught.

After many years of research, Zuckerman reached quite different conclusions, however. His studies, published in Beyond the Ivory Towers (Taplinger, 1970), show that these creatures did not walk upright and were not intermediate between ape and man. His former student and fellow evolutionist, Charles Oxnard, now professor of anthropology and dean of graduate studies at the University of Southern California, has continued study of these creatures. He concludes that they had a mode of locomotion similar to orangs and were not intermediate between ape and man (“Human Fossils: New Views of Old Bones,” American Biology Teacher, 41:264–76, 1979). The creatures studied by Zuckerman and Oxnard were supposedly one to two million years younger than Johanson’s “Lucy” and therefore, if anything, should be more manlike. The work of Zuckerman and Oxnard is almost completely ignored within evolutionary circles, however, since evolutionists prefer to believe Johanson.

These australopithecines have for many years been the central figure in suggested evolutionary schemes, and if eliminated there is little, if anything, left to suggest man’s origin from an ape ancestry. Zuckerman, in fact, concluded that “… no scientist could logically dispute the proposition that man, without having been involved in any act of divine creation, evolved from some ape-like creature in a very short space of time—speaking in geological terms—without leaving any fossil traces of the steps of the transformation” (Beyond the Ivory Towers, p. 64). If we exclude the possibility of creation, Zuckerman is saying, then obviously man must have evolved from an apelike creature. But if he did, we have no evidence for it in the fossil record.

“Nasty Difficulties”

Let us bear in mind the track record of evolutionists in this respect. Piltdown man turned out to be a hoax, fashioned from a modern ape’s jaw and a human skull. Nebraska man turned out to be a pig’s tooth. Ramapithecus is now judged to be nothing more than an ape, although long touted as intermediate. Neanderthal man, for nearly a century viewed as a primitive subhuman ancestor of man, is now classified as fully human, hom*o sapiens. His so-called primitive features actually were due to pathological conditions such as rickets and arthritis. We can conclude that man is indeed a special creation of God as described in the Bible.

In his paper “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory” (Evolution 28:467, 1974), David Kitts, evolutionist-paleontologist of the University of Oklahoma, says, “Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.”

Many similar statements could be cited. The fossil record produces notorious difficulties for evolution. On the other hand, it reveals just what is predicted on the basis of creation.

The scientific evidence related to the origin of the universe and of life demands creation. The fossil record verifies that creation. Science thus marvelously supports what the Bible proclaims—“In the beginning, God created …”

Duane T. Gish is associate director of the Institute for Creation Research in El Cajon, California.

We should reject naturalistic evolution, but put our faith on the line only over those alternatives that are unquestionably biblical.

There is not one shred of scientific evidence or unequivocal biblical authority for believing that the universe was created either by Charles Darwin in 1859 or by William Jennings Bryan in 1925.

That leaves us with several choices:

1. God created the world with the help of Archbishop Ussher at 9 A.M. on October 23, 4004 B.C.

2. The material universe is eternal and has evolved forever on the basis of blind chance.

3. In the beginning God created matter and the rules by which it operates, and then left it to endure on its own without his help.

4. In the beginning God brought the universe into being and since then has guided its course and proved sufficiently interested in how it turns out to interact with it directly along the way.

We favor view four and would like to explain why. That immediately raises such questions as: Where do we get our information?

Does The Bible Teach The Truth About Science?

We may hold scientific truth in varying degrees of probability, and may in time be proved wrong. But still, from our study of science we know some few things about the physical universe to be true.

Our question here, however, is of quite a different order. Evangelicals believe in another source of truth—the Bible. It is, in fact, the infallible Word of God. Therefore, in addition to what we know from science, we also accept the complete truth and divine authority of all the teachings of Holy Scripture.

But granted that the Bible is a book of truth, how may we determine what the Bible says? The truths of Scripture, like the truths of science, do not spring out automatically. In a way analogous to the scientific study of the data of nature, the student of Scripture must also labor over the texts of Scripture to make sure he interprets them correctly.

For example, we dare not demand that the biblical author must speak only in literal language or, for that matter, only in figurative symbols, myths, and parables. Like any other author, the biblical author is free to use whatever literacy form he chooses. Our task is to understand what he says. We do this with the Scripture as with any writing by analyzing the author’s grammar and language symbols in light of their historical and cultural context. In this way we ascertain what he intended to say, believing that, properly interpreted, this is what the Bible actually does say and is, therefore, truth from God. Of course we also believe that the Holy Spirit of God helps us in this work of interpretation. When we have completed the work of interpreting Scripture correctly, he can speak these truths to us directly as his personal word.

Does Scripture Contradict Evolution?

Unfortunately, there is no general agreement as to precisely what Scripture teaches about evolution. In interpreting the Bible we must avoid two dangers. We must not permit currently popular scientific viewpoints alien to the Scripture to determine our understanding of what the Bible means. On the other hand, we must equally resist the reading of traditional interpretations of Scripture back into the text and then demanding that science conform to our prejudices. Unfortunately, the church has a history of yielding to both these temptations, as the names of Copernicus and Galileo remind us.

The principle for the evangelical Christian is clear: When the Bible speaks, he must stand firmly by what it says; but when the Bible is silent, he must be silent as to what he believes on biblical authority. And the evangelical must always remember that the purpose of the Bible is not to teach science but spiritual truth. Certainly the Bible is not a textbook on science; and it is not written in scientific language, but in the popular language of people living two or more thousand years ago. We must, therefore, not try to settle scientific questions by referring to passages of Scripture talking about something else. Nevertheless, the whole of the written Scripture is the word of God written, and is therefore true in all that it teaches on every subject.

What Is Evolution?

Strangely enough, there is even more disagreement on what we mean by “evolution.” Frequently the term refers to a naturalistic evolution on a cosmic scale. This view is the antithesis of Christian faith, which holds to a sovereign personal deity who brought the entire universe into being and continues working to guide its history.

But belief in evolution is not always tied to a denial of theism and the creator God. Some evolutionists believe God started the whole show by creating matter and setting its laws of operation so that now everything develops by natural processes. Such theistic evolutionists accept the fact of divine creation but insist that evolution is the method by which God carried out his work of creation. Such a view is popular with some scientists who are also committed to biblical and Christian faith. More on this later.

A third sense in which the word evolution is used describes a process of continued change or development in plant and animal life. According to this view—often called microevolution—new varieties are produced in nature by ordinary processes and, at least in some cases, new species in the Linnean classification may be brought into existence by this evolutionary or developmental process. Most evangelicals would agree that this kind of evolution takes place. In fact, I know of no single contemporary evangelical scholar who contests this, including all “scientific creationists,” although they may not use the word “evolution” to describe their view.

Finally, evolution is sometimes wrongly used to mean the Darwinian (or Neo-Darwinian) theory of natural selection. Contrary to popular opinion, Darwin did not discover evolution, nor was he the first to propound a theory of evolution to explain the varieties of plant and animal life on earth. Evolutionary theories are at least as old as the ancient Greek philosopher Heracl*tus.

What Darwin did was to come up with a plausible theory of how all this could happen by natural processes. He posited an abundance of small mutations, each accidental in itself, some of them proving advantageous in the struggle for food and life. Such mutations would enable the plant or animal to survive so it would pass on its helpful mutations to its offspring. Eventually enough of these advantageous mutations would occur to create a significantly different kind of plant or animal. According to Darwin, this explains how all the various species of plants and animals could have evolved on a purely natural basis.

Everyone agrees that variations of this sort sometimes occur, but there the agreement ends. Some evolutionists accept Darwin’s explanation as to how all new species emerged, but others do not. They hold to evolution but insist that we simply do not have any explanation of how it occurred. Others accept a general evolution encompassing all life, but argue that it required a divine creative intelligence to make it work. And most evangelicals not only reject Darwinism as an explanation of the method by which evolution occurred but also reject any comprehensive view of evolution itself, opting instead for a miraculous intervention of God directly into the process at certain points.

What About The Age Of The Earth?

Everyone agrees that naturalistic evolution makes sense only if spread over immense amounts of time—hundreds of millions of years. If we could only show that the earth is a recent creation, evolution would be immediately ruled out. And there is some scientific evidence to support an age for the earth in the range of tens of thousands rather than hundreds of millions of years. (For a summary of this evidence, see the article by Thomas Barnes, beginning on p. 34).

Moreover, many think that any fair reading of the Bible shows that the earth was created only a few thousand years ago. Bishop Lightfoot (not Ussher) may have been off a bit, but give or take a few thousand years, his date of 9:00 A.M., October 23, 4004 B.C., is the Bible’s teaching. In any case, it is said, a chronology extending beyond ten or fifteen thousand years is incompatible with explicit biblical statements. Indeed, so creation scientist Henry Morris argues, any other interpretation of the Bible is simply a manipulation of the text to make it conform to a contemporary scientific view, popular since the days of Darwin, but a pseudoscience wholly unwarranted by the facts.

However, the church has in fact always offered various competing interpretations of the biblical passages relating to creation. The basis for a very recent creation of the universe, so meticulously worked out by Archbishops Ussher and Lightfoot and others, rested on two assumptions: (1) the days mentioned in Genesis 1 must be six consecutive periods of 24 hours, and (2) the geneologies presented in Genesis 1–11 and repeated elsewhere in Scripture must be complete.

Unfortunately, both of these assumptions are based on a superficial reading of Genesis and related passages. A rigorous examination of the texts, even taking them in their most literal possible sense, makes it very difficult to accept either assumption as compatible with the author’s intent, and certainly makes impossible the view that the passages are unequivocally teaching this view.

The Hebrew word translated “day” in Scripture often refers to periods of time. Indeed, Genesis 2:4 explicitly lumps into a single day all six “days” of creation: “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven” (NASB).

The attempt to bolster a literal interpretation of “day” by an appeal to the Sabbath commandment confuses interpretation with application. The commandment is not giving an inspired exegesis of Genesis 1 but is illustrating the need for human rest by referring to the seventh “day” in the action of God (who did not need to rest but chose to set a pattern for us).

Moreover, a literal reading makes it extremely difficult to fit all the sixth-day events into a single 24-hour day (Adam’s naming of the animals, his failure to find a companion, the creation of Eve, Adam’s exclamation, “Now, at last!”). Clearly, the author is communicating that the sixth day extended over quite a period of time. Thus on the most literal possible interpretation of the passage, at least one of the six days was not a 24-hour day but a long period of time. And certainly there is no grammatical reason to reject the view that the other days likewise stretched over long periods.

Even if we were compelled to interpret the six days as literal 24-hour days, we would by no means be shut up to a recent creation. As a note in the Scofield Bible points out, it is quite possible that Genesis 1:2 describes the state of the earth when God began his first day of creative work. How long the heavens and earth may have existed before the creative work described in this chapter, we do not know. We know without question only that in the beginning, God did it. Moreover, we are not told that these days were consecutive. Such evangelicals as Eckelmann and Newman, for example, argue that God began certain types of his creative work on each of six 24-hour days, but they were not consecutive. Literally the text reads: “a first day,” “a second day,” and so on through the week of days.

But there is no reason to think that the biblical author really meant to describe literal 24-hour days. A millennium and a half before Darwin, the ancient theologian Augustine argued that the biblical author structured the passage as a literary device to display the way the omnipotent God had created all things instantaneously. Many modern students point out that the account is directed specifically against the pagan myths of the ancient world. Their pantheistic view confused God, man, and nature. By contrast, the author of Genesis showed the proper relationship of Jehovah God to the whole of the created universe and the relationship of man to woman. He also showed the relationship of humankind to other humans, to the animal world, to all other living beings, and to the world of nature. Certainly the first chapter of Genesis was never intended to provide a calendar-type chronology of events in the creation of the world. The single clear point of reference in the first chapter of Genesis is the phrase “in the beginning.” Here we do not need to guess. Right from the start, God was in control.

As J. I. Packer so beautifully warns us, “It was to show us the Creator rather than the creation, and to teach us knowledge of God rather than physical science that Genesis 1 and 2 … were written.” Rather than criticizing these chapters for not satisfying our curiosity about matters of science, “we should take from them a needed rebuke of our perverse passion for knowing Nature without regard to what matters most: knowing Nature’s Creator.”

In summary, even the most loyal defenders of biblical inerrancy can find no hard data pinpointing the chronology of “in the beginning.” It is important that we refrain from going beyond what the text demands. We cannot set dates for creation on the basis of the biblical data. As biblical students, therefore, we must remain agnostic about the age of the earth. We have no biblical warrant for ruling out the validity of the commonly accepted geological timetable. Let scientists battle it out on the basis of the scientific evidence, but we should not bolster weak scientific positions with misinterpretations of the Bible conjured up for that purpose.

At the moment, we conclude that the preponderance of scientific evidence from geology and astronomy favors a universe 15 to 20 billion years old (since what might have been a “big bang” of divine creative energy to start things), and an earth with an age of 4 or 5 billion years. But there is some evidence to the contrary, as Dr. Barnes points out. Therefore, in traditional scientific fashion (theory if not always practice), we tentatively hold to an old earth, but we are always willing to revise the figures up or down depending on new evidence, or new insights into old evidence.

One of the problems in the current debate is the tendency of “creation scientists” to put biblical faith on the line on the basis of an earth and universe created in the last ten thousand or so years. Nevertheless, it is irritating to read the works of scientists like Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard (and unfortunately, some evangelicals too), who ridicule young-earth advocates but never bother to deal with their arguments.

Drs. Gish, Barnes, Slussher, Morris, and Whitcomb may be wrong on this point, but they are intelligent, knowledgeable scholars. Their opponents may feel that they are so emotionally committed to their position that they would not change regardless of evidence presented. But such opponents forget that millions of Americans—one half the adult population, including many of our brightest young Christians—are turned off by such ridicule. They suspect that the laugh only covers up a lack of facts and thin logic.

What About The Age Of Humanity?

Of course, if the earth is only 10,000 years old, man cannot be older. But we are convinced that the Bible does not permit us to put a calendar date on the age of the earth. Does it set a date for the origin of humans?

The geneologies of Genesis led Archbishop Ussher to set the creation of human life at 4004 B.C. But these geneologies are not complete, as a comparison of the Genesis account with Chronicles and Luke demonstrates. A careful reading of Genesis reveals that the author is giving us minute biographical sketches of significant personages. This fact coupled with the usage of the Hebrew “begat” or “son” to indicate a relationship other than father and immediate son renders invalid any attempt to construct a biblical chronology by simple arithmetic. Even the most strict creationists recognize this, and allow for creation of human beings over 10,000 years ago. But this concession is fatal to any strict view that seeks to set a date by adding the ages of the patriarchs, and nowhere does the Bible seek to suggest any age for humans by such a means.

A person could argue that whatever relationships are indicated by the geneologies, these are more meaningful when applied to tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands. But one fact is clear: the geneologies of Genesis will not permit us to set any exact limit on the age of man. Of that we must remain ignorant unless the sciences of geology and historical anthropology give us data from which we may draw tentative scientific conclusions.

Samuel J. Schultz, in what is probably the most widely used survey of the Old Testament in thoroughly conservative schools, writes: “Nowhere do the Scriptures indicate how much time elapsed in Genesis 1–11.… Regardless of what date man may approximate for the beginning of the human race, it is still within the scope of the scriptural account.” And Francis Schaeffer, popular spokesman for evangelicals, shows how widely this view is held in very conservative circles: “Prior to the time of Abraham, there is no possible way to date the history of what we find in Scripture.… When the Bible itself reaches back and picks up events and geneologies in the time before Abraham, it never uses these early geneologies as a chronology. It never adds up these numbers for dating.”

What About Human Evolution?

For any Christian, the idea of human evolution poses a set of problems not raised either by cosmic evolution of the heavenly bodies and planet Earth or by an evolution of the plant and animal world. It is not just a matter of pressing the natural sense of the words in the Genesis account of creation, though these pose difficulty enough for the view that human life descended physically from lower forms of life.

The problem is much deeper than this. It lies in the basic view of man spread through the whole of the biblical revelation. Though a physical being, a human is not just a physical being but also possesses a nonphysical soul/spirit. Evolution of physical beings, no matter how completely guided by divine omniscience, could never produce biblical man, who is also spirit. Not only so, a human is a unique and mysterious unity of matter and spirit made, unlike the plants and animals, in the image of God, and made specially by God to be like himself for fellowship with deity. This relationship, with all it implies for human knowledge, moral nature, role in the universe, and final destiny, constitutes the uniqueness of man.

That is why human evolution poses a special difficulty for any Christian, and why evangelicals who take the biblical view of man seriously must reject outright any ordinary view of human evolution. Biblical man can be explained only by the sheerest sort of immediate divine miracle to bring into being the divine-like man and woman of the Bible.

But, some will ask, could not God have used evolution from lower forms of life as his method of producing biblical man? Indeed, it is very dangerous to finish any sentence that begins with the words “God could not.” The Bible does so only to indicate that God never denies his own character.

But how shall we determine the method God used to create human life? The science of historical anthropology will not help us much. Suppose geology showed us an unbroken sequence of minute fossil changes from pongid through Australopithicus through hom*o habilis through hom*o erectus, Neanderthal, and Cro-Magnon man to modern man. That would prove only that God used a similar pattern for the physical aspects of higher mammals. Upright posture, cranial capacity, intelligence, even tool-making ability are not the really decisive difference that constitutes biblical man. Archaeological evidence for the worship of God, a sense of responsibility to God, burial rights, a self-conscious morality—these, therefore, are more to the point in showing a true human being.

The creation of the physical framework of a human being is by no means the truly unique thing that divides that being off significantly from other types of life. Presumably, God could have chosen to infuse the offspring of an animal with a divine-like spirit and so transform it (or two of them) into the first biblical man and woman. To many of us, that would seem harder to believe than the divine creation of man and woman de novo (as a completely new being).

But all this is pure speculation. The Bible tells us little about the method by which God brought the first humans into existence; but the little it does say certainly seems to indicate creation de novo rather than the radical transformation of a lower form of life (see Young’s analysis on page 41). We do not consider the view of an evolutionary origin for humankind as heretical so long as it fully safeguards the nature of man and woman. We do deem it as resting on inadequate exegesis of some biblical passages and, perhaps, as a bit foolish in light of the radical gulf between all other animals and biblical man and woman.

Where does this leave us with respect to the fossil record? Here a nonspecialist must tread softly where he does not have clear biblical teaching as a guide. Most anthropologists, including those who make a full commitment to biblical inerrancy and a biblical view of man, place Cro-Magnon man (roughly 10 to 30 thousand years ago) and Neanderthal man (roughly 30 to 70 thousand years ago) as clear examples of hom*o sapiens and fully human in the modern sense. Data for them go far beyond mere physical structure to include drawings and artifacts that suggest a worshiping creature. Here, then, we have biblical man.

But we must note that there is no reason to assume the artifacts we see are those of Adam and Eve or of their godly line; they might be from their descendants who drifted across the earth after the fall. We often forget that Genesis never suggests that the whole earth was originally a garden. Quite the opposite! Though God placed the first biblical man and woman in a garden, the rest of the world was very ungardenlike. And the story, pieced together so patiently by geologists and anthropologists, tells of man apart from God as he wandered over an unfriendly earth prepared for sinful fallen man.

This is not a question of literal or figurative views of Scripture. No careful student of Scripture would wish to impose either one on its text exclusively. It is a question of whether Scripture is true and, if true, what its meaning is, as determined by the way words and grammar are used by the author in any given context.

Evolution Of Plants And Animals?

The study of biblical creation would not be complete without raising the issue of the origin of plant and animal species. The biblical material lays all stress on the unique nature of humankind. The word “create” is used only three times in the first chapter of Genesis: of the beginning in Genesis 1:1, of the origin of conscious life in 1:21, and of man and woman in 1:27. The origin of plant life is particularly illuminating: “Let the earth grass grass.” This suggests not so much divine action of an immediate sort as divine guidance of natural processes.

A superficial view of Genesis might therefore lead one to think that with certain exceptions, God used natural processes, which he controlled to secure his own ends. (The exceptions would be the original creation of matter, of conscious life, and of humankind. In these cases he intervened creatively in a more direct way.) The word translated “kind” does not mean “species,” but simply “kind” in a most general way, and could apply to anything from a Linnean phylum to a Linnean species. It is even pressing too much into the phrase “after its kind” to interpret it to mean that God individually created each “kind” by a separate act. It may be only a phrase to describe the clearly observable laws of inheritance. Offspring are not haphazard; rather, each kind reproduced offspring like itself (and unlike humans made in the image of God). The issue of minor variations is not a matter under consideration, and there is no intent to affirm or deny any relationship between kinds.

On purely exegetical grounds it would be difficult to rule out the possibility that God created all plant and animal species by a divinely guided process that would include an unspecified amount of evolution—short of Genesis man, whom God made uniquely in his own image.

When we look at the scientific evidence from historical anthropology we find sharp cleavages of interpretation. Naturalistic evolutionists, of course, do not have any choice. By their naturalistic philosophy they are forced to hold to an unbroken evolution, for they have no god to do the creating. Theistic evolutionists who hold that God created, but in a uniform way by nonmiraculous evolution, are in the same fix.

When Darwin began his work he hoped that geologists would discover a fossil record complete with an unbroken series of very minute gradations. In the absence of any uniqueness on the part of plant or animal kind such as we find in biblical man, this would have presented us with a strong presumptive case for the interrelationship of all life below the level of humans. To Darwin’s great disappointment the record provided no such continuous change.

Since his day our knowledge of the fossil record has increased immensely. Currently, some scientists believe that Darwin’s hope will eventually be fulfilled. But more and more scientists, many of whom are committed to a naturalistic philosophy, have become reconciled to the fact that the “gaps” are not all filling out and probably never will. The multitude of small, almost imperceptible gradations simply never existed.

What then? If a person is committed to an unbroken evolution, he may posit macromutations—sudden jumps—as do Professor Gould of Harvard and many others. A Christian evolutionist will say that here was a divinely guided macromutation.

But a biblical supernaturalist who believes God can and does act miraculously in his world whenever he pleases may well say: Maybe this was a “kind” specially created by God. The more evidence available, the more significant becomes any lack of intermediary forms. Accordingly, though it will seem to the supernaturalist more probable that here was a created kind, he or she will not sweat. If suddenly a whole new series of intermediary fossils appears, demonstrating many minute variations between them, the supernaturalist will conclude: Well, what do you know! Apparently God in his wisdom saw fit to produce kind A and kind B from a common parent after all. That person will not be distressed by evidence that God introduced new kinds by guiding a nonmiraculous process of development (evolution in a highly limited sense of the term).

The Sum Of The Matter

Evolution, we conclude, means different things to different people. The Christian definitely cannot accept a naturalistic philosophy as held consciously or unconsciously by many evolutionists. Moreover, the Christian who takes his Bible seriously can scarcely bring Scripture into harmony with an unbroken evolution even when that process is guided by God. At the very least the believer must introduce sheer supernatural miracle at two points in the process: original creation and the origin of man.

Most Christians who believe God is ceaselessly active in his creation find it more consistent with the Bible and with the scientific evidence to believe that God chose to act in a miraculous way at many points in the unfolding of the world. True theists hold that the God of the Bible is like a fond parent who didn’t want to desert his offspring after he created them but chose to continue with them in interaction and fellowship.

God can perform a miracle when and where he wishes. But an evangelical must not ascribe to God miracles for which he or she has no evidence. Particularly we must not dictate to God how he must have done his business of creating. When he sees fit to reveal something of his ways with the world, we shall receive it with gratitude as a clue to our better understanding of him, of his creation, and of ourselves.

But then, God rarely sees fit merely to gratify our curiosity. And when God is silent, it is our deepest wisdom to be ignorant.

Incidentalize Your Preaching

I have often wished that Jesus had begun his miracle working with something more harmonious to my teetotaler’s ethic. But it was wine, and I cannot escape the truth. Oinos is the Greek word Jesus used, and while I have heard a nervous evangelical friend say that Plato once used the word to refer to “grapette,” I have grave doubts about such an interpretation.

When dealing with biblical interpretation that makes us edgy, we can soften what the Bible says by incidentalizing rather than exegeting. In dealing with this passage, we can divert the reader’s attention from the whole embarrassing issue of water and Oinos by simply not translating Oinos in its nonevangelical counterpart. If you stick with Oinos, it will make the sermon seem very classy and highly exegetical.

The key to survival in preaching is to make obscure those passages that are clear and too embarrassing to say out loud. To incidentalize is to take the unimportant aspects of a passage and make them the central idea.

In the water-to-wine miracle of John 2, therefore, it is better to deal with the word “firkin” than “wine.” Describe how to covert firkins to the metric system. By the time the average churchgoer converts 20 or 30 firkins to liters—and then to gallons—he will forget all about the real, and embarrassing, issue of wine.

This idea is also helpful in dealing with Gomer’s adultery in the Book of Hosea. You can just explain how Hosea’s little wood cart carried a homer-and-a-half barley. You can first convert homers to bushels and then to kilos, and after that the congregation won’t remember that Gomer was a harlot or why you brought it up.

The best incidentalizing I ever heard just did it all by implication and never dealt with the truth of Scripture. One person simply implied that when “Rachel died in labor,” she worked herself to death. It wasn’t honest, but it kept the Bible and genealogy comfortably separate. Another just read the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife so fast that the entreaty to “come lie with me” sounded only like a temptation to speak falsehoods together.

I remember a certain expositor proving, through a cautious route, that the hailstones of the Book of the Revelation weighed about 26 kilos each. I remember I left the church almost afraid to look up and wishing the ribs of my umbrella were reinforced. The thought transfixes me yet.

Incidentalizing is that rare ability to get people to focus on the majesty and power of the Book of the Revelation and only be able to recall the size of the hail that falls on the battered and confused world, which all too often has waited in vain for a clearer word to mark the times.

EUTYCHUS

Let it now be known: Eutychus XI is female. Perhaps we should have signed Marilyn Kunz’s columns Eutychae. But that would have given readers a clue, and CT never prints clues about the identity of Eutychus columnists. Marilyn’s stint ended last issue. We have enjoyed her brand of humor, which originates in Dobbs Ferry, New York, where she also writes Bible study guides and prepares seminars for Neighborhood Bible Studies, Inc., a world-wide ministry that encourages people to dig into the Bible for themselves (CT, Oct. 2, 1981).

—Eds.

Provocative Editorial

Your editorial “Christians Must Obey the Laws—but Which Ones?” [Aug. 6] was provocative and well researched. Yet I fear your recommendations have been conditioned negatively by our age. Specifically, decisions as to whether or not to obey a specific law are left in the realm of individualism. Choices of this nature are personal. Beyond soul-searching, the individual Christian considering the course of civil disobedience should be encouraged to have dialogue with other responsible believers. In fact, the existence of “ego trip” motivation will often be brought to fight in an interactive framework. Often this does not occur when decisions are individualized.

REV. CLAIR A. BUDD

College Avenue Church of the Nazarene

Whittier, Calif.

As you say, we must think about disobedience in light of biblical prophecy of religious persecution. Though you could have, you did not also mention our present philosophy of law that has led to abortion on demand and that could set other precedents contrary to the Word of God. I think we agree that no government should have the Christian’s unreserved or absolute obedience. This is for God alone. I contend that you are wrong in your definition of the point at which we are to disobey.

If we are to obey God, then we must obey him regardless of the consequences. Who can estimate all the effects of his actions? The point of caution should be in deciding God’s will in the situation. However, once we know God’s will our duty is to obey it.

RAY GRUBEN

San Diego, Calif.

Unsatisfying Report

“Evangelicals Study the Link Between Social Action and Gospel” [News, Aug. 6] was unsatisfying. Those who believe that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world have no choice but to be cautious about “the struggle for social justice” when the very phrase itself is so suggestive of a particular political bias, that of the Left. This is why conceding the priority of evangelism is not enough. Contrasting intellectual viewpoints of what is “social justice” are also necessary. (The new publication This World promises to be a resource for differing viewpoints.)

Perhaps I missed something, but there was no hint in your article that this critical factor of dissenting Christian viewpoints was present at Grand Rapids.

GARY L. SINGLETON, M.D.

Washington, D.C.

Applause!

Here’s a well-deserved clap for “Keeping the Faith Downtown” [News, Aug. 6]. As pastor of a church in the tough, downtown section of Bristol (England), I found a ready resonance with the Moody Bible Institute commitment to the city. Although we all feel drawn to the green grass of the suburbs, some of us have caught the vision that animates the Moody men and women.

The rewards are well worth it. First, city folks display a tremendous depth of commitment. Second, response to straight scriptural preaching is serious and exciting. Third, Marxism is making a meal of inner-city crises, but we have a solution that works.

REV. WAYNE DETZLER

Kensington Baptist Church

Bristol, England

Continued Racism

An example of the racism that continues to exist among so-called Christians is seen in your article “United Presbyterians May—Unite” [News, Aug. 6]. It seems you think of the black church and the white church, for in the figures you gave for the combined membership of 3.2 million, you stated the denomination would then be the fourth-largest religious body in the U.S. The groups you named were all predominantly white. But there are predominantly black denominations with that many or more.

Racism makes black people “blacks,” not people, and predominantly black institutions and black viewpoints invisible. Racism is not always reflected in violent action but also by remaining oblivious to a people as if they are not important enough to include in decision making or even to tally on a register of groups. Racism does a great deal of violence to black people who themselves sometimes respond in apathy, substance abuse, or suicide as a result of racist institutions. Racism keeps the church silent on the satanic conditions of black people in South Africa and Namibia.

STANLEY B. BROLEY

University Heights, Ohio

Our August 6 article was in error and we accept the rebuke. A combined Presbyterian church would be the fifth-largest religious body, after the National Baptist Convention of the U.S.A., which is listed in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, 1982, as having a membership of 5,500,000. As the round numbers might indicate, statistics for some black denominations are notoriously “soft.” Nevertheless, the combined memberships of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., listed in the same volume as 3,262,086, would clearly be less.

—Eds.

A Seventh Day Baptist Comments

May a Seventh Day Baptist Comment on “Climb One Doctrine at a Time” [Aug. 6]? Advanced technology and modern viewpoints do not eliminate the choice between the two ways of life offered us by Jesus Christ in Matthew 7:13–27. God is the source of wisdom and truth. There are two types of wisdom. The most intelligent course of action available to us is God’s perfect plan of salvation, consisting of repentance and a total commitment of faith in Jesus Christ. We must permit this faith under the leadership of God’s Holy Spirit to produce love for God, loyalty to God, and contentment with God.

TED JONES

Buena Vista, Va.

Conservative Baptists and Mormons

We appreciate very much the article on Mormonism in Utah [News, July 16] but are surprised that no mention was made of the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society’s work in Utah.

After more than 20 years of work, the Conservative Baptist Home Society has eight missionaries in Utah. They have started six or seven churches, now organized, with others in the process. Each summer a project called Operation Utah supervises a group of students who carefully study Mormonism, then go out as the Mormons do, two by two, to contacts that have previously expressed an interest in the gospel. This summer project has been active for at least 14 years, with an average of 30 to 40 students involved. Decisions for Christ are recorded; this past summer there were 100 students, and six or seven recorded decisions.

RAYMOND B. BUKER, SR.

Boca Raton, Fla.

Attention Needed

It is gratifying to see attention given to Sunday schools [“Once Upon a Time There Was Sunday School,” July 16]. One has only to look at Europe, and at Great Britain in particular, to see the sad results of neglect. It seems to me that our seminaries need to give more attention to Christian education in the local church. In some institutions it is almost downplayed, if not criticized, as irrelevant. Many denominations search for new programs to replace the Sunday school, but so far there have been no working models that even begin to approach it in influence and the number of volunteers it consistently uses in the local church. One can’t help wonder what might happen in our churches if our denominations, our pastors, and our educational institutions were to take a new look at the Sunday school in its potential and devote some effort to it.

WILLIAM T. GREIG, JR.

President

Gospel Light

Ventura, Calif.

Letters are welcome. Only a selection can be published. Since all are subject to condensation, those of 100 to 150 words are preferred. Address letters to Eutychus and His Kin, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60187.

One of the main purposes of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is to explore with evangelicals some of the difficult problems the church faces in our day. One of the most troublesome is the relationship between Christian faith and the modern scientific world view. Rightly or wrongly, this matter all but comes to focus over the question of evolution. Martin Ling may be right: “More cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution … than to anything else.”

Some Christians see no need to discuss such topics. Long ago Tertullian wrote, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What does the wisdom of this world have to do with the divine foolishness of God? We must rest secure in our private faith given to us in Holy Scripture. We have no need to become involved in the intellectual disputes of an unbelieving world.” Much could be said in support of this attitude if our Christian faith were simply a private preserve we protect for our own enjoyment. But we do not understand biblical faith to be of this sort. Faith drawn from the Bible does not demand a sacrifice of the intellect. And it is not a private opinion, but a public message to be communicated. It is, in fact, news—good news, the best of all news. As Christians, we are under orders to proclaim it far and wide to all men everywhere. And we do not invite them to set aside their brains, but the reverse. We call them not to blind faith, but to faith in a God of truth who promises us his Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth.

As we send forth this issue on the theme of Christian faith and “evolution,” we do so with the earnest prayer that God will grant us—editors and readers alike—a full measure of the Holy Spirit of truth. Only thus shall we be able to think through these difficult issues clearly and faithfully, loyal to God’s truth as drawn from the world of nature; and loyal to the truth of the Bible, God’s inerrant Word.

In the account of my personal pilgrimage, I resisted giving “practical advice” on lust. There are no ten easy steps to overcome temptation. At times the power of obsession overwhelms all reason or common sense. And yet, throughout the war within, I did learn some valuable strategy, which I will add in hopes of preventing needless scars.

1. Recognize and name the problem. If it’s lust, call it lust. You must admit your condition before it can be treated. Much of my earlier rationalizations were blatant attempts to shirk the name lust—I tried to redefine it.

2. Stop feeding lust. Killing fantasies is like trying not to think of a pink elephant, and there is no “magic bullet” solution to this problem. But cutting off desires through diversion, not dwelling on them when they begin, and trying to eliminate some of the mystery can help in the early stages of lust. The farther down the road you travel through books, magazines, films, and personal contacts, the more steps you must one day retrace.

3. Demythologize it. Sexual stimulations promise a lie. Cheryl Tiegs is not going to bed with you—in fact, photo sessions that create sexy photos are tiresome and mechanical, not at all erotic. Recognize that Playboy centerfolds are touched up in the miracle of dye transfer printing, that they represent an unrealizable ideal of sexuality that does not include feelings of impotence, awkwardness, monthly menstrual periods, and many other reminders of humanity. Life is far different from what soft p*rn portrays it to be.

4. Confess its real price. I learned the ultimate price just in time, by watching my pastor friend who went beyond the point of no return and is today as miserable a man as I have ever met. All the time lust was demanding its tribute from me, in the form of irritation with my wife and in the subtle and progressive loss of intimacy with my wife and with God. My own self-respect was gradually deteriorating also.

5. Trace its history. Professional counselors have proven very helpful in pointing out the root causes of my obsession that began in my sexually repressed childhood. For some people, lust comes from trying to win back the love of a distant parent, or earning vengeance against a disappointing God, or overcoming feelings of physical inadequacy by feeding myths. Friends and sometimes professional counselors can help you identify the cycle of lust by exploring its history with you.

6. Study sex in perspective. The church has unwittingly caused many of the problems with sexuality by elevating it to a singular status as heinous sin. A general term, immorality, comes to focus on merely one sin, sexual sin. From God’s perspective, sex is a powerful dimension of humanity, but it was never meant to preoccupy or gain dominion over the creation. Getting an idea of what God had in mind won’t tame the obsession but can be a picture to remember when the obsession flares, a counterpoint, a balance leading to alignment.

7. Build fantasies on God’s ideal. It may help to channel your fantasy life toward your spouse. As you become creative and loving and healthful when thinking about sex, the obsession lessens. When a fantasy pops into mind, try to direct it and control it.

8. Work on some positive addictions. Tennis, maybe, or scuba diving or hang-gliding. I’ve found that even video games like Pac-Man preoccupy me for a time, especially when I am traveling. When I’m tempted to go to a sexually explicit movie, now I seek out a safe, constructive film to occupy my evening. The obsession fades, at least temporarily.

9. Recognize the humanity of your victims. A friend of mine told me that he had regularly picked up Playboy and Penthouse until his daughter turned eighteen. Then for the first time he realized those “Girls from Kokomo” or “Girls from the Southwest Conference” were real human beings, daughters of parents like himself. Who can know what subtle destruction occurred inside them as they were coaxed to use their bodies to entice male America?

As long as the obsession can make you blind enough to care about satisfying only your needs, you will continue. But once you realize what you are doing to others, including the objects of your lust and your own family, obsession becomes more difficult.

10. Obsession comes out of a legitimate set of anxieties; follow them to their authentic source. I need God. I need a father. I need female friendship. I need to be hugged. I need to be loved, and to love. I need to feel worthwhile, attractive to someone. Those are my real needs, not the three minute rush of voyeurism inside a twenty-five cent booth. Let these real needs be met when the obsession arises, and the sexually based substitute may lose its grip.

Copyright © 1982 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

We are highlighting Leadership Journal's Top 40, the best articles of the journal's 36-year history, presented in chronological order. Today we present #37, from 1982, an article that became a defining piece for the journal in its commitment to be both utterly realistic and doggedly redemptive.

* * *

Driving through Wisconsin on vacation this summer, a Leadership staff member passed a huge sign in the middle of the bucolic countryside. "Naughty Things for Nice People," it proclaimed, and as if to prove it, a gigantic cuddly bear peered out from beside the words "Adult Novelties."

"What's that mean, Dad?" came the question from the ten-year-old boy in the back of the van. "Yeah," piped up the siblings, "what's that all about, Dad?"

Such questions abound these days, as media penetrate our homes and vehicles with not just sleazy sex but carefully packaged titillations. One report has it that a recent convention of youth pastors created the highest rental of X-rated movies in the hotel's history. More than 80 percent of all customers signing up for cable TV opt for the erotic films. The availability—the near-ubiquity of so much sexual enticement, the constant barrage of innuendoes, and the nonstop polemic for indulgence inevitably attracts.

Many rationales tempt the mind of the Christian leader: "I have to know what's going on. … Voyeurism is better than adultery. … I need moderation—total deprivation isn't necessary."

Admittedly, there are no easy answers. We cannot shut off either our brains or our glands. But consider the following article by a man in full-time ministry. The article is blunt. But we felt it important to be just this honest and realistic. Sexual temptations in many forms have always lured Christians, but today's opportunities and climate make this article especially relevant to all of us.

* * *

"Lust is the ape that gibbers in our loins. Tame him as we will by day, he rages all the wilder in our dreams by night. Just when we think we're safe from him, he raises up his ugly head and smirks, and there's no river in the world flows cold and strong enough to strike him down. Almighty God, why dost thou deck men out with such a loathsome toy?"
Frederick Buechner
Godric

I am writing this article anonymously because I am embarrassed. Embarrassed for my wife and children, yes, but embarrassed most for myself. I will tell of my personal battle with lust, and if I believed I were the only one who fought in that war, I would not waste emotional energy dredging up stained and painful memories. But I believe my experience is not uncommon, is perhaps even typical of pastors, writers, and conference speakers. No one talks about it. No one writes about it. But it's there, like an unacknowledged cancer that metastasizes best when no one goes for x-rays or feels for lumps.

I know I am not alone, because the few times I have opened up and shared my struggles with Christian friends, they have replied with Doppelganger stories of exactly the same stages of awakening, obsession, possession. Years from now, when socio-historians sift through the documents describing our times, they will undoubtedly come up with elegant explanations of why men who grew up in church homes are oversexed and vulnerable to attacks of lust and obsession, and why women who grew up in those same environments emerged uptight and somewhat disinterested in sex. But I leave that to the future analysts.

I remember vividly the night I first experienced lust. Real lust—not the high school and college variety. Of course as an adolescent I had drooled through Playboy, sneaked off to my uncle's room for a heart-thumping first look at hard-core p*rnography, and done my share of grappling and fumbling with my fiancee's clothes. I date my lust awakening, though, to the adult onslaught of mature, willful commitment to lust.

It hit on one of my first trips away from home. My job required me to travel at that time, and as I sat in a dingy motel room near the airport and flipped through the city guide of what to do in Rochester, New York, I kept coming back to one haunting photo of an exotic dancer, a former Miss Peach Bowl winner, the ad said. She looked fresh and inviting: the enchanting kind of Southern girl you see on TV commercials for fried chicken—only this one had no clothes on.

Somehow, I had survived the sixties sheltered from strippers and Woodstock-type nudity. And when I first saw the ad, I instinctively ruled her show out of bounds for me. But as I settled down to watch an inane TV show, her body kept looming before my mind with the simple question, "Why not?"

I began to think. Indeed, why not? To be an effective Christian, I had to experience all of life, right? Didn't Jesus himself hang around with prostitutes and sinners? I could go simply as an observer, in the world but not of the world. Rationalizations leaped up like flying buttresses to support my desires, and within ten minutes I was bundled in the back seat of a taxi headed toward the seamy side of Rochester.

I got the driver to let me off a few blocks away, just for safety's sake, and I kept glancing over my shoulder expecting to see someone I knew. Or perhaps God would step in, efface my desires, and change my mind about the wisdom of the act. I even asked him about that, meekly. No answer.

I walked into the bar between acts and was then faced with the new experience of ordering a drink. My forehead sweating, I scanned my memory of Westerns for an appropriate drink to order. Finally I decided on whiskey. I tried to make it sound casual, but the waitress flummoxed me by asking another question.

"How do you want it?"

How do I want it? What did she mean? What could I say? It seemed everyone in the bar was staring at me.

"A double," I stammered.

Sensing my naiveté, she rolled her eyes slightly and asked, "Is on the rocks OK?"

Bolstered by my first fiery sips of whiskey, which I tried to stretch out so as not to have to order another, I sat with my eyes glued to the stage.

Miss Peach Bowl was everything the ad had promised. With a figure worthy of a Wonder Woman costume, she danced superbly and was something of an acrobat. She started fully clothed and teased us with slow removals of each sequined article of clothing. Toward the end, when she wore only a G— string, whooping men near the stage bade her lean over and stuffed folded bills under the tiny swatch of cloth. She grinned invitingly. I stared in disbelief. In one final strobe-lit routine she cartwheeled nude across the stage.

The flush of excitement created by my first whiskey, drunk too fast in spite of myself, the eyepopping spectacle of this gorgeous woman baring all and jiggling it in front of me, and the boisterous spirit of the all-male audience combined to overpower me. I walked out of the bar two hours later feeling strangely warmed, intensely excited, and surprised that nothing had actually happened to me. I suppose it's the same feeling that washes in after a big event like marriage, or graduation, or first intercourse for that matter. In just a few hours, you realize that although in one sense everything has changed, in another sense nothing has changed. You are the same person.

Lust shares with sins like envy and pride the distinction of being invisible, slippery, hard to pin down. Was what happened that night a sin? I denied it to myself on the way home. To really rate as lust, I told myself, you must look on a woman so as to desire sexual intercourse with her. Isn't that what Jesus said? Whatever happened that night, I certainly couldn't recall desiring intercourse with Miss Peach Bowl. It was more private and distant than that. What happened, happened quickly, was gone, and left no scars. Or so I thought at the time.

Ten years have passed since that awakening in wintry Rochester, ten years spent never far from the presence of lust. The guilt caught up with me, and back in my motel room that very evening, I was already praying slobbery prayers for forgiveness. For a while that guilt kept me out of live shows and limited my voyeurism to magazines and movies, but only for a while. For ten years I have fought unremitting guerrilla warfare.

Being the reflective sort, I have often pondered the phenomenon of lust. It is unlike anything else in my experience. Most thrills—scary roller coasters, trips in airplanes, visits to waterfalls—lose a certain edge of excitement once I have experienced them and figured them out. I enjoy them and will duplicate the experiences if given the chance, but after a few tries, they no longer hold such a powerful gravitational attraction.

Sex is utterly different. There is only so much to "figure out." Every person who endures high school biology, let alone a snigg*ring sex education class, knows the basic shapes, colors, and sizes of the sexual organs. Anyone who has been to an art museum knows about women's breasts. Anyone who has hauled down a gynecology book in a public library knows about genitalia. Somehow, no amount of knowledge reduces the appeal—the forces may, in fact, work concordantly. What strange power is it that allows a male gynecologist to clinically examine female sexual organs all day long—there is nothing left for him to "learn"—and yet return home and find himself quickly aroused by his wifely peekaboo blouse?

"An ape that gibbers in my loins," wrote novelist Frederick Buechner about lust, and no experience comes with such a feral force. And yet, maybe by labeling it an "animal drive" we have missed the main point of lust. No animal I have heard of spends its life fixating on sex. Females in most species invite attention only a few times a year or less; the rest of the time males obediently plod through the mundane routine of phylogeny, apparently never giving sex another thought.

Humans are different. We have the freedom to center our lives inordinately in this one drive, without the harmony enforced by nature. Our females are biologically receptive the vast majority of the time, and no instinct inhibits us from focusing all our thoughts, behavior, and energy on sex.

I have tried to analyze lust, to fractionate it down into its particulars. I take a Playboy centerfold and study it with a magnifying glass. It consists only of dots—dots of four primary colors laid down by a printing press in a certain order. There is no magic on that page, only stipples of ink, which under magnification, show flaws and blurs. But there is magic on that page. I can stare at it, burn the image in my mind, fondle it mentally for hours, even days. Blood steams up when I gaze on it.

Early Marxists, heady with revolution, added sex to their list of human foibles needing alteration. Lenin pronounced his famous Glass of Water Theory, legislating that the sexual act was of no more consequence than the quenching of thirst by a glass of water. Surely bourgeois morality would topple along with bourgeois banks and industries and religions. But in a few years, Lenin had to abjure the Glass of Water Theory. By all reductionist logic, sex was like a glass of water, but sex proved immune to reductionist logic. It resisted being made of no consequence. Lenin, a historian, should have known better. Kings had renounced their thrones, saints their God, and spouses their lifetime partners because of this strange demon of lust. Dialectical materialism hardly stood a chance.

Books often question God's wisdom or goodness in allowing so much pain and sorrow in the world, and yet I have read none that question his goodness and wisdom in allowing so much sex and lust in the world. But I think the two may be parallel questions. Whether through creation or marred creation or whatever (we can't get into that here), we ended up with sex drives that virtually impel us to break rules God laid down. Males reach their sexual peak at age eighteen, scientists tell us. In our culture, you can't even legally marry before then, so when a male marries, if he has remained chaste, he has already forfeited his time of greatest sexual prowess. Mark Twain railed against God for parceling out to each human a source of universal joy and pleasure, at its peak in teenage years, then forbidding it until marriage and restricting it to one partner. He has a point.

Couldn't our hormones or chromosomes have been arranged so that mates would more easily find sexual satisfaction with just one partner? Why weren't we made more like the animals, who, except for specified periods, go through their daily routine (nude to a beast) with hardly a thought of sex. I could handle lust better if I knew it would only strike me in October or May. It's the not knowing, the ceaseless vulnerability, that drives me crazy.

Lust, I read somewhere, is the craving for salt by a man who is dying of thirst. There's a touch of perversion there, isn't there? Why were we not made with merely a craving for water, thus removing the salt from every newsstand, television show, and movie?

I know what you are thinking, you readers of Leadership. You are protesting that God never makes me lust, that I choose it, that he probably allows it as an opportunity for me to exercise my virtue. Yes, yes, I understand all that. But some of you know firsthand, as I do, that those pious platitudes, albeit perfectly correct, have almost no relevance to what happens biologically inside me when I visit a local beach or pick up any of a hundred magazines.

Some of you know what it is like to walk with your eyes at breast level, to flip eagerly through every new issue of Time searching for a rare sexy picture, to yearn for chains on the outside of your motel room to keep you in—unless it comes with that most perverse of all modern inventions, the in-room p*rno movie. And you also know what it is like to wallow in the guilt of that obsession, and to cry and pray with whatever faith you can muster, to plead with God to release you, to mutate you, to castrate you like Origen—whatever it takes to deliver you. And even as you pray, luscious, bewitching images crowd into your mind.

You also know what it is like to preach on Sunday, in a strange city, to preach even on a topic like grace or obedience or the will of God, or the decline of our civilization, with the awful and wonderful memories of last night's lust still more real to you at that moment than the sea of expectant faces spread out before you. You know the self-hatred that comes with that intolerable dissonance. And you muddle through the sermon swearing never to let it get to you like that again, until after the service a shapely woman comes beaming and squeezes your hand and whispers praise to you, and all resolve melts, and as she explains how blessed she was by your message, you are mentally undressing her.

The night in Rochester was my first experience with adult lust, but by no means my last. Strip joints are too handy these days. The drug store down the street sells Hustler, High Society, Jugs, anything you want. I have been to maybe fifteen truly p*rnographic movies, including the few classics like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door. They scare me, perhaps because it seems so deliberate and volitional to stand in line (always glancing around furtively), to pay out money and to sit in the dark for an hour or two. The crowd is unlike any other crowd I mix with—they remind me I don't belong. And the movies, technically, aesthetically, and even erotically, are vapid and boring. But still, when a local paper advertises one more Emmanuelle sequel, I drool.

I learned quickly that lust, like physical sex, points in only one direction. You cannot go back to a lower level and stay satisfied. Always you want more. A magazine excites, a movie thrills, a live show really makes the blood run. I never got as far as body tattooing, personal photograph sessions, and massages, let alone outright prostitution, but I've experienced enough of the unquenchable nature of sex to frighten me for good. Lust does not satisfy; it stirs up. I no longer wonder how deviants can get into child molesting, masochism, and other abnormalities. Although such acts are incomprehensible to me, I remember well that where I ended up was also incomprehensible to me when I started.

A cousin of mine subscribes to at least fifteen of the raunchiest magazines I have ever seen. Books I have peeked at for just a few seconds in airport newsstands litter his house. He has told me that, even surrounded by vivid depictions of every sex act, every size and shape of woman he can imagine, he still wants more. He still devours the new issues. He and his wife are experimenting with orgies now, and numerous other variations I won't mention. It is not enough. The thrill will fade before long, and he will want more.

Psychologists use the term obsession to label what I have been describing, and they may say that I have more innate obsession than the average male. They would trace its genesis back to my repressive upbringing, and they are undoubtedly right. That is why I am writing to others of you in the Christian world. If you have not fought such obsession yourself, every Sunday when you step to the pulpit you speak to many who have, although you could hardly read it in their blank, freshly scrubbed faces. Lust is indeed an invisible sin.

At times the obsession has felt to me more like possession. I remember one time especially that scared me. I was in Washington, D.C., one of the places in the United States where any kind of lust is easily attainable. At three o'clock in the afternoon, after touring the cherry blossoms, I sauntered into a dark bar that advertised nude dancing. I fended off the girls who came to my table and asked for drinks, and instead directed my attention to the dancers. There were only two, and maybe five customers at most. One black girl with an unspectacular figure weaved over to the part of the stage nearest my table.

This was somewhat different than the other strip shows I had seen. There was no teasing or "visual foreplay." She was already naked, unashamedly so, and she wiggled maybe a foot from my head. She stared right into my eyes. This was so close, so intimate, that it seemed for a terrifying moment to be nearer a relationship than a performance. What I felt could only be called possession.

I found myself—it seemed as though I had not made the decision, that someone else's hands inside mine were doing it—fumbling in my pocket, pulling out bills and stuffing them in a garter belt high up on her thigh. In appreciation she maneuvered herself to grant an even better view. She had no secrets.

I staggered out of that bar. I felt I had crossed a line and could never return to innocence. That weekend I had important business engagements, but throughout them indelible images of that anonymous girl filled my mind. I yearned to flee and go home to my wife, to demonstrate to her my fear so that she could shelter me and mother me and keep me from following where all this was leading.

Just a few years before, I had sat with a distant, reproachful view and watched men lose control and act like country-fair churls as they stuffed bills down the G-string of Miss Peach Bowl. I would never stoop to that—I was smugly confident in Rochester. After all, I was intelligent, happily married, sophisticated—a committed Christian known by friends for my self-control. It would never happen. But it did.

When I went home, I did not tell my wife. How could I? The story was too long, and she, who had hardly ever known lust and had never been unfaithful to me, would not comprehend it. It would likely rupture my marriage, and then I would be cast loose on a sea I could not navigate.

I made a vow then—one more in a series. I vowed I would only look at Playboy and other "respectable" erotic magazines. No more raunchiness. I had certain rationalizations about lust, and pained realism about my inability to stay pure. I simply needed some safe boundaries, I decided. Here are some of my rationalizations that supported my conclusion to contain, not destroy, my lust:

• Nudity is art. Go to any art museum in the world, and you will see nudity openly displayed. The human form is beautiful, and it would be puritanical to cut off appreciation for it. Playboy is photographed well, with an aesthetic, not prurient tone.
• Playboy and its kin have great articles. There's the Jimmy Carter interview, for example, and Penthouse's conversation with Jerry Falwell. I must keep up with such material. An aesthetic, not prurient tone.
• Some stimulation will help my sex life. I have a problem approaching my wife and communicating my desire for sex to her. I need a sort of boost, a stimulant to push me to declare my intentions. An aesthetic, not prurient tone.
• Other people do far worse. I know many Christian leaders who still do all the things I toyed with, and worse. For that matter, look at Bible characters—as randy a bunch as you'll ever meet. There's probably no such thing as a pure person anyway; everybody has some outlet. An aesthetic, not prurient tone.
• What is lust anyhow, I kept asking myself. Is fantasizing wrong in itself? If so, then erotic dreams would count as sin, and how could I be responsible for my dreams? I reminded myself of the definition of lust I had started with long before: desiring intercourse with a specific sexual partner. I experienced a general sexual heightening, a raising of the voltage, not a specific desire for the act of intercourse.

Some, perhaps all, of these rationalizations contain some truth. (Do they sound familiar?) I used them as an overlay of reason and common sense to help calm the cognitive dissonance that tormented me. Yet I knew inside that the lust I experienced was not subject to reason and common sense. To my dismay, on several occasions I had already felt it burst out of containment and take on a sinister power. At other times, I could analyze lust and put it in perspective, but at the moment when it was occurring I knew I would not stop and analyze. I would let it take its course. Secretly, I began to wonder what that course would be.

Don't let me give the wrong impression. My entire life did not revolve around lust. I would go days without fixating on sex, and sometimes a month or two without seeking out a p*rnographic magazine or movie. And many, many times I would cry out to God, imploring him to take away the desire. Why were my prayers not answered? Why did God continue to curse me with freedom, even when that freedom led me away from him?

I read numerous articles and books on temptation but found little help. If you boiled down all the verbiage and the ten-point lists of practical advice for coping with temptation, basically all they said was "Just stop doing it." That was easy to say. I knew some of those authors, and knew that they too struggled and failed, as I did. In fact, I too had preached many a sermon on handling temptation, but look at me. Practical "how-to" articles proved hopelessly inadequate, as if they said "Stop being hungry" to a starving man. Intellectually I might agree with their theology and their advice, but my glands would still secrete. What insight can change glands?

"Jesus was tempted in all points as you are," some of the articles and books would say, as if that would cheer me up. It did not help. In the first place, none of the authors could conceivably describe how Jesus experienced sexual temptation, because he never talked about it, and no one else has ever been perfect and lived to tell about it. Such well-meaning comments reminded me of telling a ghetto dweller in East Bronx, "Oh, President Reagan used to be poor too. He knows how you feel." Try telling that to a poor person, and prepare to duck.

I felt a similar reaction when I read accounts of people who had overcome lust. Usually, they wrote or talked in a condescending, unctuous tone. Or, like Jesus, they seemed too far removed from my own spiritual quagmire to comfort me. Augustine described his condition twelve years after conversion from his lusty state. In that advanced spiritual place he prayed to overcome these besetting sins: the temptation to enjoy his food instead of taking it as a necessary medicine "until the day when Thou wilt destroy both the belly and the meat"; the attraction of sweet scents; the pleasure of the ear provided by church music lest he be "more moved by the singing than by the thing that is sung"; the lure of the eye to "diverse forms of beauty, of brilliant and pleasing colors"; and last, the temptation of "knowing for knowing's sake." Sorry, Augustine, I respect you, but prayers like that led to the climate of repression and body-hatred that I have been vainly trying to escape all my life.

I got a perverse pleasure out of knowing that this same Augustine a few years earlier had prayed, "Give me chastity, but not yet." He delayed purity for a while also, to sample more delights than I would likely get around to. Why is it that I scoffed at accounts of saints who overcame temptation but loved hearing about those who gave in? There must be a name for that sin, too.

Most of this time I hated sex. I could not imagine it existing in any sort of balance in my life. Of course I knew its pleasure—that was the gravitational attraction—but those short bursts of pleasure were horribly counterbalanced by days of guilt and anguish. I could not reconcile my technicolor fantasy life with my more mundane experience of sex in marriage. I began to view sex as another of God's mistakes, like tornadoes and earthquakes. In the final analysis, it only caused misery. Without it, I could conceive of becoming pure and godly and all those other things the Bible exhorted me toward. With sex, any spiritual development seemed hopelessly unattainable. Maybe Origen had the right idea after all.

It is true there is difficulty in entering into godliness. But this difficulty does not arise from the religion which begins in us, but only from the irreligion which is still there. If our senses were not opposed to penitence, and if our corruption were not opposed to the purity of God, there would be nothing in this painful to us. We suffer only in proportion as the vice which is natural to us resists supernatural grace. Our heart feels torn asunder between these opposed efforts. But it would be very unfair to impute this violence to God, who is drawing us on, instead of to the world, which is holding us back. It is as a child, which a mother tears from the arms of robbers, in the pain it suffers, should love the loving and legitimate violence of her who procures its liberty, and detest only the impetuous and tyrannical violence of those who detain it unjustly. The most cruel war which God can make with men in this life is to leave them without that war which He came to bring. "I came to send war," He says, "and to teach them of this ware I came to bring fire and the sword." Before Him the world lived in this false peace.
Blaise Pascal
Pensees

This article is divided into two parts. The first part, which you have just read, recounts the downward spiral of temptation, yielding, self-hatred, and despair. If I had read this article several years ago, I would have gleefully affirmed every thing. Then, when I got to the second part, which describes a process of healing, I would have turned cynical and sour, rejecting what follows. Such is the nature of self-deception.

I have described my slide in some detail not to feed any prurient interests in the reader (after all, how many racy articles have you read in Leadership?) and certainly not to nourish your own despair if you too are floundering—God forbid. I tell my struggles because they are real, but also to demonstrate that hope exists, that God is alive, and his grace can interrupt the terrible cycle of lust and despair. My primary message is one of hope, although until healing did occur, I had no faith that it ever would.

Scores, maybe hundreds of times I had prayed for deliverance, with no response. The theologians would find some fault in my prayers, or in the faith with which I prayed them. But can any person assume the awful right to judge the prayers of another who writhes in mental torment and an agony of helpless unspirituality? I would certainly never assume the right, not after a decade—long war against lust.

I have not mentioned the effect of lust on my marriage. It did not destroy my marriage, did not push me out to find more sexual excitation in an adulterous affair, or with prostitutes, did not even impel me to place unrealistic demands on my wife's sexual performance. The effect was far more subtle. Mainly, I think, it cumulatively caused me to devalue my wife as a sexual being. The great lie promulgated by Playboy, television commercials, and racy movies is that the physical ideal of beauty is attainable and oh, so close. I stare at a Playboy centerfold. Miss October has such a warm, inviting smile. She is with me alone, in my living room. She removes her clothes, just for me, and lets me see all of her. She tells me about her favorite books and what she likes in a man. Cheryl Tiegs, in the famous Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, sweetly walks toward the camera, letting the coral blush of her breasts shine out boldly from underneath a net bikini. She lets me see them—she has no inhibitions, no pudency.

The truth is, of course, that if I sat next to either Cheryl Tiegs or Miss October on an airplane, she would not give me the time of day, let alone take off her clothes for me. If I tried to strike up a conversation, she would brush me off. And yet, because I have stared at Cheryl's breasts and gone over every inch of Miss October as well as the throng of beauties that Madison Avenue and Hollywood recruit to tantalize the masses, I start to view my own wife in that light. I expect her to have Farrah's smile, Cheryl's voluptuousness, Angie's legs, Miss October's flaming red hair and sparkling eyes. Envy and greed join hands with lust. I begin to focus on my wife's minor flaws. I lose sight of the fact that she is a charming, warm, attractive woman and that I am fortunate to have found her.

Beyond that, lust affected my marriage in an even more subtle and pernicious way. Over time, I began to view sex schizophrenically. Sex in marriage was one thing. We performed OK, though not as often as I liked, and accompanied by typical misunderstandings. But passion, ah, that was something different. Passion I never felt in my marriage.

If anything, sex within marriage served as an overflow valve, an outlet for the passion that mounted inside me, fed by sources kept hidden from my wife. We never talked about this, yet I am sure she sensed it. I think she began to view herself as a sex object—not in the feminist sense of being the object of a husband's selfish greed, but in the deprived sense of being only the object of my physical necessity and not of romance and passion.

Yet the sexual schizophrenia pales in comparison to the schizophrenia of my spiritual life. Can you imagine the inner rupture when I would lead a spiritual retreat for a weekend, winning sighs of admiration and tears of commitment from my devoted listeners, only to return to my room and pore over the latest copy of Oui? I could never reconcile it, but somehow I could not avoid it. If you pinned me down on what degree my succumbing to temptation was a conscious choice, I would probably search for an enigmatic response such as the one a Faulkner character gave when asked about original sin. "Well, it's like this," he said. "I ain't got to but I can't help it."

Paradoxically, I seemed most vulnerable to temptation when speaking or otherwise performing some spiritual service. Those who see Satan as personally manipulating all such temptation to sin would not be surprised by that observation.

Lust became the one corner of my life that God could not enter. I welcomed him into the area of personal finance, which he revolutionized as I awakened to world needs. He cleaned up many of my personal relationships. He gave stirrings of life to the devotional area and my sense of personal communion with him. But lust was sealed off, a forbidden room. How can I reconcile that statement with my earlier protestations that I often cried out for deliverance? I do not know. I felt both sensations: an overwhelming desire to be cleansed and an overwhelming desire to cling to the exotic pleasures of lust. A magnet is attracted equally to two opposite forces. No matter how small you cut a magnet or rearrange it, the two ends will still be attracted to opposite forces. One force never cancels out the other one. This must be what Paul meant in some of those strange statements in Romans 7 (a passage that gave me some comfort). But where was Romans 8 in my life?

Even when I had lust under control, when I successfully limited it to brief, orderly perusals through Playboy at the local newsstand, I still felt this sense of retaining a secret corner God could not enter. Often I would get bogged down in sermon preparation. For motivation to keep going, I would promise myself a trip to the newsstand if I could finish the sermon in an hour and a half. Can you sense the schizophrenia?

Just as I can remember graphically the precise incident in Rochester when adult lust moved in, I can remember the first flutterings of a commitment to healing. They also came on a trip out of town, when I was speaking at a spiritual life conference. The conference was scheduled for a resort hotel in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, near my favorite part of the country. Nothing affects me like the long drive up the rocky coastline of Maine. It is an invigorating, almost religious experience. Some people find deserts affect them like that, some wheat fields, and some mountains. For me, the magnificence of creation unwinds with each curve on the road up Maine's coast. I made plans to fly into Boston, rent a car, and spend three days cruising the coast just to refresh myself before the conference.

My mistake was spending the first night in Boston. I was then practicing a fairly rigid regimen of "controlled lust." I hadn't given in to any scary splurges like my Washington, D.C., encounter in some time. But sure enough, that night I found myself stalking the streets of the seedy areas looking for lust. I did not have to look far. Like many cities, Boston offers strip shows, p*rno movies—a veritable menu of lust. I usually avoided p*rno movies because they had proved so unsatisfying. But, Boston also features live nude girls on a revolving platform that you can watch for twenty-five cents. I went in one of those booths.

The mechanics are simple. Twenty curtained booths encircle a revolving platform. Each booth has a glass window covered by a piece of plywood. When you insert a quarter, a mechanical arm somewhat like a toll gate lowers the piece of plywood and lets you see the nude girls revolving on the platform. Then, about three minutes later the toll gate goes up, and you have to drop in another quarter to continue. This is lust at its most unadorned.

The girls employed by such places are not beautiful. Imagine for yourself what kind of women would willingly settle for such employment. You lie under bright lights, revolving like a piece of roast beef at a buffet table, masturbating occasionally to keep the quarters clinking. Around you, leering, furtive stares of men appear for three minutes, then disappear, then appear again, their glasses reflecting your pale shape, none of them looking at your face.

Maybe such booths do serve a redeeming purpose for society—by exposing lust in its basest demythologized form. There is no art or beauty, no acrobatic dancing. The woman is obviously a sex object and nothing else. The men are isolated, caged voyeurs. There is no relationship, no teasing.

The girls are bored stiff: over the whir of the timing mechanism you can hear them trading talk about grocery prices or car repairs. They masturbat* as a routine for the customers, like an ape at the zoo who learns to make faces because the onlookers then laugh and point. This is what the richest, freest society in history spends its wealth and freedom on?

And yet, there I was, a respected member of that society, three days away from leading a spiritual-life retreat, dropping in quarters like a frantic long-distance caller at a pay phone.

For fifty cents you could go to a private booth, and one of the girls would entertain you personally. A glass wall still separated you from the girl, but you could, if you wished, pick up the receiver and talk to the girl. Maybe you could talk her into doing something special for you. I went into the booth, but something restrained me from picking up the telephone. I could not make that human an act—it would expose me for what I was. I merely stood, silent, and stared.

Guilt and shame washed over me in waves that night, as usual. Again I had a stark picture of how low I was groveling. Did this animal lust have any relation to the romance that had inspired the Symphonie Fantastique, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets, and the Song of Solomon? Certainly each of those works contained traces of glandular desire, but this that I had experienced was devoid of all beauty. It was too naked, and shameful.

I had felt all that remorse before. What shocked me more was my trip up the coast the next two days. I followed my usual practice of staying in homey inns with big fireplaces, and of eating by the waterfront and watching the sailboats bob in the shimmering sea, of taking long solitary walks on the rocky promontories where huge waves crashed with thunder, of closing my eyes and letting salt spray splash across my face, of stopping at roadside stands for fresh lobster and crab. There was a difference this time: I felt no pleasure. None. My emotional reaction was the same as if I had been at home, yawning, reading the newspaper. All romance had drained out, desiccated.

The realization disturbed me profoundly. By all counts, those wonderful, sensuous experiences rated far higher than the cheap thrill of watching a fat, pock—marked body rotate on plywood. And yet, to my utter disbelief my mind kept roaming back to that grimy booth in Boston. Was I going crazy? Would I lose every worthwhile sensation in life? Was my soul leaking away? Was I becoming possessed?

I limped through the conference, and everyone warmly applauded each talk. They were all blessed. Alone in my room at night, I did not pore over p*rnography. I pored over what had been happening inside me for ten years. I did not like it.

Exactly three days later, I spent the night with a very dear friend, a pastor of one of the largest churches in the South. I had never shared intimate details of my lust life with anyone before, but the schizophrenia was building to such a point I felt I must. He listened quietly, with compassion and great sensitivity as I recounted a few incidents, skipping over those that showed me in the worst light, and described some of my fears to him.

He sat for a long time with sad eyes after I had finished speaking. We both watched our freshly refilled cups of coffee steam, then stop steaming, then grow cold. I waited for his words of advice or comfort or healing or something. I needed a priest at that moment, someone to say, "Your sins are forgiven."

But my friend was no priest. He did something I never expected. His lip quivered at first, the skin on his face began twitching, and finally he started sobbing—great, huge, wretched sobs such as I had seen only at funerals.

In a few moments, when he had recovered some semblance of self-control, I learned the truth. My friend was not sobbing for me; he was sobbing for himself. He began to tell me of his own expedition into lust. He had been where I was—five years before. Since that time, he had taken lust to its logical consequences. I will not dwell on sordid details, but my friend had tried it all: bondage, prostitution, bisexualism, orgies. He reached inside his vest pocket and pulled out a pad of paper showing the prescriptions he took to fight the venereal disease and anal infections he had picked up along the way. He carries the pad with him on trips, he explained, to buy the drugs in cities where he is anonymous.

I saw my friend dozens of times after that and learned every horrific detail of his hellish life. I worried about cognitive dissonance; he brooded on suicide. I read about deviance; he performed it. I winced at subtle fissures in my marriage; he was in divorce litigation.

I could not sit in judgment of this man, because he had simply ended up where my own obsession would likely take me. Jesus brought together lust and adultery, hatred and murder, in the Sermon on the Mount, not to devalue adultery and murder but rather to point to the awesome truth about hatred and lust. There is a connection.

If I had learned about my friend's journey to debauchery in an article like this one, I doubtless would have clucked my tongue, questioned Leadership's judgment in printing it, and rejected the author as an insincere poseur in the faith. But I knew this man, I thought, as well as I knew anyone. His insights, compassion, and love were all more mature than mine. My sermons were like freshman practice runs compared to his. He was a godly man if I had ever met one, but underneath all that … my inner fear jumped uncontrollably. I sensed the power of evil.

For some weeks I lived under a cloud that combined the feelings of doom and terror. Had I crossed some invisible line so that my soul was stained forever? Would I too, like my trusted friend, march inexorably toward the systematic destruction of my body and my soul? He had cried for forgiveness, and deliverance, and every other prayer he had learned in church, and yet now he had fallen into an abyss. Already lawyers were dividing up his house and possessions and his children. Was there no escape for him—for me?

My wife could sense the inner tension, but in fifteen years of marriage she had learned not to force a premature explanation. I had not learned to share tension while it was occurring, only afterward, when it fit into a logical sequence, with some sort of resolution. This time, I wondered whether this particular problem would ever have such a resolution.

A month after my conversation with my friend, I began reading a brief and simple book of memoirs, What I Believe, by Francois Mauriac. In it, he sums up why he clung to the Roman Catholic church and the Christian faith in a country (France) and an age when few of his contemporaries seriously considered orthodoxy. I had read only one novel by the Nobel prizewinning author, Viper's Tangle, but that novel clearly showed that Mauriac fully understood the lust I had experienced, and more. A great artist, he had captured the depths of human depravity. I would not get pious answers from him.

Mauriac's book includes one chapter on purity. He describes the power of sexuality—"the sexual act has no resemblance to any other act: its demands are frenzied and participate in infinity. It is a tidal wave"—and his struggles with it throughout a strict Catholic upbringing. He also discounts common evangelical perspectives on lust and sex. The experience of lust and immorality, he admits, is fully pleasurable and desirable; it is no good trying to pretend that sin contains distasteful seeds that inevitably grow into repulsion. Sin has its own compelling rewards. Even marriage, Christian marriage, he claims, does not remedy lust. If anything, marriage complicates the problem by introducing a new set of difficulties. Lust continues to seek the attraction of unknown creatures and the taste for adventure and chance meetings.

After brazenly denying the most common reasons I have heard against succumbing to a life filled with lust, Mauriac concludes that there is only one reason to seek purity. It is the reason Christ proposed in the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Purity, says Mauriac, is the condition for a higher love—for a possession superior to all possessions: God himself.

Mauriac goes on to describe how most of our arguments for purity are negative arguments: Be pure, or you will feel guilty, or your marriage will fail, or you will be punished. But the Beatitudes clearly indicate a positive argument that fits neatly with the Bible's pattern in describing sins. Sins are not a list of petty irritations drawn up for the sake of a jealous God. They are, rather, a description of the impediments to spiritual growth. We are the ones who suffer if we sin, by forfeiting the development of character and Christlikeness that would have resulted if we had not sinned.

The thought hit me like a bell rung in a dark, silent hall. So far, none of the scary, negative arguments against lust had succeeded in keeping me from it. Fear and guilt simply did not give me resolve; they added self-hatred to my problems. But here was a description of what I was missing by continuing to harbor lust: I was limiting my own intimacy with God. The love he offers is so transcendent and possessing that it requires our faculties to be purified and cleansed before we can possibly contain it. Could he, in fact, substitute another thirst and another hunger for the one I had never filled? Would Living Water somehow quench lust? That was the gamble of faith. Perhaps Mauriac's point seems obvious and predictable to people who respond to anguished problems with spiritual-sounding cliches. But I knew Mauriac and his life well enough to know that his observation was the culmination of a lifetime of struggle. He had come to that conclusion as the only possible justification for abstemiousness. Perhaps, just perhaps, the discipline and commitment involved in somehow allowing God to purge out the impurities formed the sine qua non, the essential first step toward a relationship with God I had never known.

The combination of grave fear struck in me by my pastor friend's grievous story and the glimmer of hope that a quest for purity could somehow transform the hunger I had lived with unabated for a decade prepared me to try once again to approach God in confession and in faith. I knew pain would come. Could God this time give me assurance that, in Pascal's words, pain was the "loving and legitimate violence" necessary to procure my liberty?

I cannot tell you why a prayer that has been prayed for ten years is answered on the 1,000th request when God has met the first 999 with silence. I cannot tell you why I had to endure ten years of near—possession before being ready for deliverance. And, most sadly of all, I cannot tell you why my pastor friend has, since our conversation after New Hampshire, gone into an unbelievable skid toward destruction. His marriage is now destroyed. He may go insane or commit suicide before this article is published. Why? I do not know.

But what I can tell you, especially those of you who have hung on every turn of my own pilgrimage because it so closely corresponds to yours, is that God did come through for me. The phrase may sound heretical, but to me, after so many years of failure, it felt as if he had suddenly decided to be there after a long absence. I prayed, hiding nothing (hide from God?), and he heard me.

There was one painful but necessary step of repentance. Repentance, says C. S. Lewis, "is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like." Going back for me had to include a very long talk with my wife, who had suffered in silence and often in nescience for a decade. It was she I had wronged and sinned against, as well as God. Perhaps my impurity had kept our own love from growing in the same way it had blocked the love I could experience with God. We lay side by side on our bed one steamy summer evening. I talked about nothing, in a nervous, halting voice, for an hour or so, trying to break the barrier that held me back, and finally about midnight I began.

I told her nearly everything, knowing I was laying on her a burden she might not be able to carry. I have wondered why God let me struggle for a decade before deliverance: maybe I will one day find out my wife required just that much time to mature and prepare for the one talk we had that night. Far smaller things had fractured our marriage for months. Somehow, she incarnated the grace of God for me.

I hurt her—only she could tell how much I hurt her. It was not adultery—there was no other woman for her to beam her resentment toward, but perhaps that made it even harder for her. For ten years she had watched an invisible fog steal inside me, make me act strange, pull me away from her. Now she heard what she had often suspected, and to her it must have sounded like rejection: You were not enough for me sexually, I had to go elsewhere.

But still, in spite of that pain and the vortex of emotions that must have swirled around inside her, she gave to me forgiveness and love. She took on my enemy as her enemy too. She took on my thirst for purity as her thirst too. She loved me, and as I type this even now, tears streak my face because that love, that awesome love is so incomprehensible to me, and so undeserved. But it was there.

How can I give you up, O Ephraim!
How can I hand you over, O Israel! …
For I am God and not man, The Holy One in your midst.
Hosea 11:8-9

Saint Augustine, who wrote so eloquently of his own war within, describes our condition here on earth as a simultaneous citizenship in two cities, the city of man and the City of God. The lure of the city of man often drowns out the call of the City of God. Man's city is visible, substantial, real; as such, it is far more alluring. God's city is ephemeral, invisible, cloaked in doubt, far away. It may not even exist— no one knows for sure.

Cheryl Tiegs coming toward me out of the page, her teeth flashing, her eyes sparkling, her body glistening, is that city of man. She, and what she represents, fits well with my body and the hormones that surge inside it and the complexes that grew in my repressed childhood and whatever else contributed to my obsession with lust. The pure in heart shall see God. Set against luscious Cheryl, sometimes that promise does not seem like much. But that is the lie of the Deceiver, and the dyslexia of reality we are asked to overcome. The City of God is the real, the substantial, the whole. What I become as I strengthen my citizenship in that kingdom is far more worthy than anything I could become if all my fantasies were somehow fulfilled.

A year has passed since the late-night talk with my wife. During that time, a miracle has occurred. The war within me has fallen away. Only a few snipers remain. Once I failed, just a month later, when I was walking the streets of San Francisco. I felt myself pulled—it felt exactly like that—into another of the twenty-five cent peep shows to watch an undulating girl on a revolving table for three minutes. Not ten seconds had passed when I felt a sense of horror. My head was pounding. Evil was taking over. I had to get out of there, immediately.

I ran, literally ran, as fast as I could out of the North Beach district. I felt safe only when I got out of there. It struck me then how much had changed: previously I had felt safe when I had given in to lust, because the war inside died down for a moment, but now I felt safe away from the temptation. I prayed for strength and walked away.

Other than that encounter, I have been free of the compulsion. Of course, I notice girls in short dresses and halter tops—why else would they wear them?—but the terror is gone. The gravitational force has disappeared when I pass in front of newsstands. For twelve months I have walked by them and not picked up a magazine. I have not entered a p*rno theater.

I feel a sense of loss, yes. I enjoyed the beautiful women, both the art and the lust of it. It was pleasurable; I cannot deny that. But now I have gained a kind of inner gyroscope that is balanced correctly and alerts me when I am straying off course. After ten years I finally have a reservoir of strength to draw on as well as a conscience. I have found it necessary to keep open and honest communication with God and my wife on every little temptation toward lust.

The war within still exists. Now it is a war against the notion that biology is destiny. Looking at humanity as a species, scientists conclude that the fittest must survive, that qualities such as beauty, intelligence, strength, and skill are worthy factors by which to judge the usefulness of people, that lust is an innate adaptation to assure the propagation of the species Charity, compassion, love, and restraint fly in the face of that kind of materialist philosophy. Sometimes they defy even our own bodies. The City of God can seem like a mirage; my battle is to allow God to convince me of its reality.

Two totally new experiences have happened to me that, I must admit, offset by far my sense of loss at the experiences of lust I miss.

First, I have learned that Mauriac was right. God has kept his part of the bargain. In a way I had never known before, I have come to see God. At times (not so often, maybe once every couple of months), I have had an experience with God that has stunned me with its depth and intimacy, an experience of an order I did not even know existed before. Some of these moments have come during prayer and Bible reading, some during deep conversations with other people, and one, the most memorable of all because of my occupation, while I was speaking at a Christian conference. At such moments I have felt possessed, but this time joyfully so (demonic possession is a poor parody of the filling of the Spirit). They have left me shaken and humbled, renewed and cleansed. I had not known that level of mystical experience, had not, in fact, even sought it except in the general way of seeking purity. God has revealed himself to me. The City of God is taking on bricks and mortar.

And another thing has happened, again something I did not even ask God for. The passion is coming back into my marriage. My wife is again becoming an object of romance. Her body, no one else's, is gradually gaining the gravitational pull that used to be scattered in the universe of sexes. The act of sex, as often a source of irritation and trauma for me as an experience of pleasure, is beginning to take on the form of mystery and transcendence and inexpressible delight that its original design must have called for.

These two events occurring in such short sequence have shown me why the mystics, including biblical writers, tend to employ the experience of sexual intimacy as a metaphor of spiritual ecstasy. Sometimes, lingering remnants of grace in the city of man bear a striking resemblance to what awaits us in the City of God.

* * *

Five years after this article was written, Leadership Journal asked the author how "The War Within" was going for him. His follow-up article can be found here.

Copyright © 1982 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

"Lust is the ape that gibbers in our loins. Tame him as we will by day, he rages all the wilder in our dreams by night. Just when we think we're safe from him, he raises up his ugly head and smirks, and there's no river in the world flows cold and strong enough to strike him down. Almighty God, why dost thou deck men out with such a loathsome toy?"

-Frederick Buechner, Godric

I am writing this anonymously because I am embarrassed. Embarrassed for my wife and children, yes, but embarrassed most for myself. I will tell of my personal battle with lust, and if I believed I were the only one who fought in that war, I would not waste emotional energy dredging up stained and painful memories.

But I believe my experience is not uncommon, is perhaps even typical of pastors, writers, and conference speakers. No one talks about it. No one writes about it. But it's there, like an unacknowledged cancer that metastasizes best when no one goes for X-rays or feels for lumps.

I know I am not alone, because the few times I have opened up and shared my struggles with Christian friends, they have replied with Doppelganger stories of exactly the same stages of awakening, obsession, possession. Years from now, when socio-historians sift through the documents describing our times, they will undoubtedly come up with elegant explanations of why men who grew up in church homes were oversexed and vulnerable to attacks of lust and obsession, and why women who grew up in those same environments emerged uptight and somewhat disinterested in sex. But I leave that to the future analysts.

I remember vividly the night I first experienced lust. Real lust -not the high school and college variety. Of course, as an adolescent I had drooled through Playboy, sneaked off to my uncle's room for a heart-thumping first look at hard-core p*rnography, and done my share of grappling and fumbling with my fiancée's clothes. I date my lust awakening, though, to the adult onslaught of mature, willful commitment to lust.

It hit on one of my first trips away from home. My job required me to travel at that time, and as I sat in a dingy motel room near the airport and flipped through the city guide of what to do in Rochester, New York, I kept coming back to one haunting photo of an exotic dancer, a former Miss Peach Bowl winner, the ad said. She looked fresh and inviting: the enchanting kind of Southern girl you see on TV commercials for fried chicken -only this one had no clothes on.

Somehow, I had survived the sixties sheltered from strippers and Woodstock-type nudity. And when I first saw the ad, I instinctively ruled her show out of bounds for me. But as I settled down to watch an inane TV show, her body kept looming before my mind with the simple question, "Why not?"

I began to think. Indeed, why not? To be an effective Christian, I had to experience all of life, right? Didn't Jesus himself hang around with prostitutes and sinners? I could go simply as an observer, in the world but not of the world. Rationalizations leaped up like flying buttresses to support my desires, and within ten minutes I was bundled in the back seat of a taxi headed toward the seamy side of Rochester.

I got the driver to let me off a few blocks away, just for safety's sake, and I kept glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see someone I knew. Or perhaps God would step in, efface my desires, and change my mind about the wisdom of the act. I even asked him about that, meekly. No answer.

I walked into the bar between acts and was then faced with the new experience of ordering a drink. My forehead sweating, I scanned my memory of Westerns for an appropriate drink to order. Finally I decided on whiskey. I tried to make it sound casual, but the waitress flummoxed me by asking another question.

"How do you want it?"

How do I want it? What did she mean? What could I say? It seemed everyone in the bar was staring at me.

"A double," I stammered.

Sensing my naiveté, she rolled her eyes slightly and asked, "Is on the rocks okay?"

Bolstered by my first fiery sips of whiskey, which I tried to stretch out so as not to have to order another, I sat with my eyes glued to the stage.

Miss Peach Bowl was everything the ad had promised. With a figure worthy of a Wonder Woman costume, she danced superbly and was something of an acrobat. She started fully clothed and teased us with low removals of each sequined article of clothing. Toward the end, when she wore only a G-string, whooping men near the stage bade her lean over and stuffed folded bills under the tiny swatch of cloth. She grinned invitingly. I stared in disbelief. In one final strobe-lit routine she cartwheeled nude across the stage.

The flush of excitement created by my first whiskey, drunk too fast in spite of myself, the eye-popping spectacle of this gorgeous woman baring all and jiggling it in front of me, and the boisterous spirit of the all-male audience combined to overpower me. I walked out of the bar two hours later feeling strangely warmed, intensely excited, and surprised that nothing had actually happened to me. I suppose it's the same feeling that washes in after a big event like marriage, or graduation, or first intercourse for that matter. In just a few hours, you realize that although in one sense everything has changed, in another sense nothing has changed. You are the same person.

Lust shares with sins like envy and pride the distinction of being invisible, slippery, hard to pin down. Was what happened that night a sin? I denied it to myself on the way home. To really rate as lust, I told myself, you must look on a woman so as to desire sexual intercourse with her. Isn't that what Jesus said? Whatever happened that night, I certainly couldn't recall desiring intercourse with Miss Peach Bowl. It was more private and distant than that. What happened, happened quickly, was gone, and left no scars. Or so I thought at the time.

Ten years have passed since that awakening in wintry Rochester, ten years spent never far from the presence of lust. The guilt caught up with me, and back in my motel room that very evening, I was already praying slobbery prayers for forgiveness. For a while that guilt kept me out of live shows and limited my voyeurism to magazines and movies, but only for a while. For ten years I have fought unremitting guerrilla warfare.

Being the reflective sort, I have often pondered the phenomenon of lust. It is unlike anything else in my experience. Most thrills -scary roller coasters, trips in airplanes, visits to waterfalls -lose a certain edge of excitement once I have experienced them and figured them out. I enjoy them and will duplicate the experiences if given the chance, but after a few tries, they no longer hold such a powerful gravitational attraction.

Sex is utterly different. There is only so much to "figure out." Every person who endures high school biology, let alone a snigg*ring sex education class, knows the basic shapes, colors, and sizes of the sexual organs. Anyone who has been to an art museum knows about women's breasts. Anyone who has hauled down a gynecology book in a public library knows about genitalia. Somehow, no amount of knowledge reduces the appeal -the forces may, in fact, work concordantly. What strange power is it that allows a male gynecologist to clinically examine female sexual organs all day long -there is nothing left for him to "learn" -and yet return home and find himself quickly aroused by his wife's peekaboo blouse?

"An ape that gibbers in my loins," wrote novelist Frederick Buechner about lust, and no experience comes with such a feral force. And yet, maybe by labeling it an "animal drive" we have missed the main point of lust. No animal I have heard of spends its life fixating on sex. Females in most species invite attention only a few times a year or less; the rest of the time, males obediently plod through the mundane routine of phylogeny, apparently never giving sex another thought.

Humans are different. We have the freedom to center our lives inordinately in this one drive, without the harmony enforced by nature. Our females are biologically receptive the vast majority of the time, and no instinct inhibits us from focusing all our thoughts, behavior, and energy on sex.

I have tried to analyze lust, to fractionate it down into its particulars. I take a Playboy centerfold and study it with a magnifying glass. It consists only of dots—dots of four primary colors laid down by a printing press m a certain order There is no magic on that page, only stipples of ink, which under magnification, show flaws and blurs. But there is magic on that page. I can stare at it, burn the image in my mind, fondle it mentally for hours, even days.

Blood steams up when I gaze on it.

Early Marxists, heady with revolution, added sex to their list of human foibles needing alteration. Lenin pronounced his famous Glass of Water Theory, legislating that the sexual act was of no more consequence than the quenching of thirst by a glass of water. Surely bourgeois morality would topple along with bourgeois banks and industries and religions. But in a few years, Lenin had to abjure the Glass of Water Theory. By all reductionist logic sex was like a glass of water, but sex proved immune to reductionist logic. It resisted being made of no consequence: Lenin, a historian, should have known better. Kings had renounced their thrones, saints their God, and spouses their lifetime partners because of this strange demon of lust. Dialectical materialism hardly stood a chance.

Books often question God's wisdom or goodness in allowing so much pain and sorrow in the world, and yet I have read none that question his goodness and wisdom in allowing so much sex and lust in the world. But I think the two may be parallel questions. Whether through creation marred creation or whatever (we can't get into that here), we ended up with sex drives that virtually impel us to break rules God laid down.

Males reach their sexual peak at age 18, scientists tell us. In our culture, you can't even legally marry before then, so when a male marries, if he has remained chaste, he has already forfeited his time of greatest sexual prowess. Mark Twain railed against God for parceling out to each human a source of universal joy and pleasure, at its peak in teenage years, then forbidding it until marriage and restricting it to one partner. He has a point.

Couldn't our hormones or chromosomes have been arranged so that mates would more easily find sexual satisfaction with just one partner? Why weren't we made more like the animals, who, except for specified periods, go through their daily routine (nude to a beast) with hardly a thought of sex. I could handle lust better if l knew it would only strike me in October or May. It's the not knowing, the ceaseless vulnerability, that drives me crazy.

Lust, I read somewhere, is the craving for salt by a man who is dying of thirst. There's a touch of perversion there, isn't there! Why were we not made with merely a craving for water, thus removing the salt from every newsstand, television show, and movie?

I know what you are thinking. You are protesting that God never makes me lust, that I choose it, that he probably allows it as an opportunity for me to exercise my virtue. Yes, yes, I understand all that. But some of you know firsthand, as I do, that those pious platitudes, albeit perfectly correct, have almost no relevance to what happens biologically inside me when I visit a local beach or pick up any of a hundred magazines.

Some of you know what it is like to walk with your eyes at breast level, to flip eagerly through every new issue of Time searching for a rare sexy picture, to yearn for chains on the outside of your motel room to keep you in, unless it comes with that most perverse of all modern inventions, the in-room p*rno movie.

And you also know what it is like to wallow in the guilt of that obsession, and to cry and pray with whatever faith you can muster, to plead with God to release you, to mutate you, to castrate you like Origen—whatever it takes to deliver you. And even as you pray, luscious, bewitching images crowd into your mind.

You also know what it is like to preach on Sunday, in a strange city, to preach even on a topic like grace or obedience or the will of God or the decline of our civilization, with the awful and wonderful memories of last night's lust still more real to you at that moment than the sea of expectant faces spread out before you.

You know the self-hatred that comes with that intolerable dissonance. And you muddle through the sermon swearing never to let it get to you like that again, until after the service a shapely woman comes beaming and squeezes your hand and whispers praise to you, and all resolve melts, and as she explains how blessed she was by your message, you are mentally undressing her.

The night in Rochester was my first experience with adult lust, but by no means my last. Strip joints are too handy these days. The drug store down the street sells Hustler, High Society, Jugs, anything you want. I have been to maybe fifteen truly p*rnographic movies, including the few classics like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door. They scare me, perhaps because it seems so deliberate and volitional to stand in line (always glancing around furtively), to pay out money and to sit in the dark for an hour or two. The crowd is unlike any other crowd I mix with—they remind me I don't belong. And the movies, technically, aesthetically, and even eroticaliy, are vapid and boring. But still, when a local paper advertises one more Emmanuelle sequel, I drool.

I learned quickly that lust, like physical sex, points in only one direction. You cannot go back to a lower level and stay satisfied. Always you want more. A magazine excites, a movie thrills, a live show really makes the blood run. I never got as far as body massages, let alone outright prostitution, but I've experienced enough of the unquenchable nature of sex to frighten me for good. Lust does not satisfy; it stirs up. l no longer wonder how deviants can get child molesting, masochism, and other abnormalities. Although such acts are incomprehensible to me, l remember well that where I ended up was also incomprehensible to me when I started.

A cousin of mine subscribes to at least fifteen of the raunchiest magazines I have ever seen. Books I have peeked at for just a few seconds in airport newsstands litter his house. He has told me that, even surrounded by vivid depictions of every sex act, every size and shape of woman he can imagine, he still wants more. He still devours the new issues. He and his wife are experimenting with orgies now, and numerous other variations I won't mention. It is not enough. The thrill will fade before long, and he will want more.

Psychologists use the term obsession to label what I have been describing, and they may say that I have more innate obsession than the average male. They would trace its genesis back to my repressive upbringing, and they are undoubtedly right. That is why I am writing to others of you in the Christian world. If you have not fought such obsession yourself, every Sunday when you step to the pulpit you speak to many who have, although you could hardly read it in their blank, freshly scrubbed faces. Lust is indeed an invisible sin.

At times the obsession has felt to me more like possession. I remember one time especially that scared me. I was in Washington, D.C., one of the places in the United States where any kind of lust is easily attainable.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, after touring the cherry blossoms, I sauntered into a dark bar that advertised nude dancing. I fended off the girls who came to my table and asked for drinks, and instead directed my attention to the dancers. There were only two, and maybe five customers at most. One black girl with an unspectacular figure weaved over to the part of the stage nearest my table.

This was somewhat different than the other strip shows I had seen. There was no teasing or "visual foreplay." She was already naked, unashamedly so, and she wiggled maybe a foot from my head. She stared right into my eyes. This was so close, so intimate, that it seemed for a terrifying moment to be nearer a relationship than a performance. What I felt could only be called possession.

I found myself—it seemed as though I had not made the decision, that someone else's hand inside mine were doing it— fumbling in my pocket, pulling out bills and stuffing them in a garter belt high up on her thigh. In appreciation she maneuvered herself to grant an even better view. She had no secrets.

I staggered out of that bar. I felt I had crossed a line and could never return to innocence. That weekend I had important business engagements, but throughout them indelible images of that anonymous girl filled my mind. I yearned to flee and go home to my wife, to demonstrate to her my fear so that she could shelter me and mother me and keep me from following where all this was leading.

Just a few years before, I had sat with a distant, reproachful view and watched men lose control and act like country-fair churls as they stuffed bills down the G-string of Miss Peach Bowl. I would never stoop to that—I was smugly confident in Rochester. After all, I was intelligent, happily married, sophisticated—a committed Christian known by friends for my self-control. It would never happen. But it did.

When I went home, I did not tell my wife. How could I? The story was too long, and she, who had hardly ever known lust and had never been unfaithful to me, would not comprehend it. It would likely rupture my marriage, and then I would be cast loose on a sea I could not navigate.

I made a vow then—one more in a series. I vowed I would only look at Playboy and other "respectable" erotic magazines. No more raunchiness. I had certain rationalizations about lust and pained realism about my inability to stay pure. I simply needed some safe boundaries, I decided. Here are some of my rationalizations that supported my conclusion to contain, not destroy, my lust:

Nudity is art. Go to any museum in the world, and you will see nudity openly displayed. The human form is beautiful, and it would be puritanical to cut off appreciation for it. Playboy is photographed well, with an aesthetic, not prurient tone.

Playboy and its kin have great articles. I need to be aware of what they're saying.

Some stimulation will help my sex life. I have a problem approaching my wife and communicating my desire for sex to her. I need a sort of boost, a stimulant to push me to declare my intentions.

Other people do far worse. I know many Christian leaders who still do all the things I toyed with, and worse. For that matter, look at Bible characters—as randy a bunch as you'll ever meet. There's probably no such thing as a pure anyway; everybody has some outlet.

What is lust anyhow? Is fantasizing wrong in itself? If so, then erotic dreams would count as sin, and how could I be responsible for my dreams? I reminded my elf of the definition of lust I had started with long before: desiring intercourse with a specific sexual partner. I experienced a general sexual heightening, a raising of the voltage, not a specific desire for the act of intercourse.

Some, perhaps all, of these rationalizations contain some truth. (Do they sound familiar?) I used them as an overlay of reason and common sense to calm the cognitive dissonance that tormented me. Yet I knew inside that the lust I experienced was not subject to reason and common sense. To my dismay, on several occasions I had already felt it burst out of containment and take on a sinister power.

At other times, I could analyze lust and put it in perspective, but at the moment when it was occurring I knew I would not stop and analyze. I would let it take its course. Secretly, I wondered what that course would be.

Don't let me give the wrong impression. My entire life did not revolve around lust. I would go days without fixating on sex, and sometimes a month or two without seeking out a p*rnographic magazine or movie. And many, many times I would cry out to God, imploring him to take away the desire. Why were my prayers not answered? Why did God continue to curse me with freedom, even when that freedom led me away from him?

I read numerous articles and books on temptation but found Iittle help. If you boiled down all the verbiage and the ten-point lists of practical advice for coping with temptation, basically all they said was "Just stop doing it." That was easy to say. I knew some of those authors and knew that they too struggled and failed, as I did.

In fact, I too had preached many a sermon on handling temptation, but look at me. Practical "how-to" articles proved hopelessly inadequate, as if they said "Stop being hungry" to a starving man. Intellectually I might agree with their theology and their advice, but my glands would still secrete. What insight can change glands?

"Jesus was tempted in all points as you are," some of the articles and books would say, as if that would cheer me up. It did not help. In the first place, none of the authors could conceivably describe how Jesus experienced sexual temptation, because he never talked about it, and no one else has ever been perfect and lived to tell about it. Such well-meaning comments reminded me of telling a ghetto dweller in East Bronx, "Oh, I used to be poor, too. I know how you feel." Try telling that to a poor person, and prepare to duck.

I felt a similar reaction when I read accounts of people who had overcome lust. Usually, they wrote or talked in a condescending, unctuous tone. Or, like Jesus, they seemed too far removed from my own spiritual quagmire to comfort me. Augustine described his condition twelve years after conversion from his lusty state. In that advanced spiritual place, he prayed to overcome these besetting sins: the temptation to enjoy his food instead of taking it as a necessary medicine "until the day when Thou wilt destroy both the belly and the meat"; the attraction of sweet scents; the pleasure of the ear provided by church music lest he be "more moved by the singing than by the thing that is sung"; the lure of the eye to "diverse forms of beauty, of brilliant and pleasing colors"; and last, the temptation of "knowing for knowing's sake."

Sorry, Augustine, I respect you, but prayers like that led to the climate of repression and body-hatred that I have been vainly trying to escape all my life.

I got a perverse pleasure out of knowing that this same Augustine a few years earlier had prayed, "Give me chastity, but not yet." He delayed purity for a while also, to sample more delights than I would likely get around to. Why is it that I scoffed at accounts of saints who overcame temptation but loved hearing about those who gave in? There must be a name for that sin, too.

Most of this time, I hated sex. I could not imagine it existing in any sort of balance in my life. Of course, I knew its pleasure -that was the gravitational attraction -but those short bursts of pleasure were horribly counterbalanced by days of guilt and anguish. I could not reconcile my Technicolor fantasy life with my more mundane experience of sex in marriage.

I began to view sex as another of God's mistakes, like tornadoes and earthquakes. In the final analysis, it only caused misery. Without it, I could conceive of becoming pure and godly and all those other things the Bible exhorted me toward. With sex, any spiritual development seemed hopelessly unattainable. Maybe Origen had the right idea after all.

This article is divided into two parts. The first part, which you have just read, recounts the downward spiral of temptation, yielding, selfhatred, and despair. If I had read this article several years ago, I would have gleefully affirmed everything. Then, when I got to the second part, which describes a process of healing, I would have turned cynical and sour, rejecting what follows. Such is the nature of self-deception.

I have described my slide in some detail not to feed any prurient interests and certainly not to nourish your own despair if you too are floundering -God forbid. I tell my struggles because they are real, but also to demonstrate that hope exists, that God is alive, and his grace can interrupt the terrible cycle of lust and despair. My primary message is one of hope, although until healing did occur, I had no faith that it ever would.

Scores, maybe hundreds of times I had prayed for deliverance, with no response. The theologians would find some fault in my prayers, or in the faith with which I prayed them. But can any person assume the awful right to judge the prayers of another who writhes in mental torment and an agony of helpless unspirituality? I would certainly never assume the right, not after a decade-long war against lust. I have not mentioned the effect of lust on my marriage. It did not destroy my marriage, did not push me out to find more sexual excitation in an adulterous affair, or with prostitutes, did not even impel me to place unrealistic demands on my wife's sexual performance. The effect was far more subtle. Mainly, I think, it cumulatively caused me to devalue my wife as a sexual being. The great lie promulgated by Playboy, television commercials, and racy movies is that the physical ideal of beauty is attainable and oh, so close.

I stare at a Playboy centerfold. Miss October has such a warm, inviting smile. She is with me alone, in my living room. She removes her clothes, just for me, and lets me see all of her. She tells me about her favorite books and what she likes in a man. Cheryl Tiegs, in the famous Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, sweetly walks toward the camera, letting the coral blush of her breasts shine out boldly from underneath a net bikini. She lets me see them -she has no inhibitions, no prudency.

The truth is, of course, that if I sat next to either Cheryl Tiegs or Miss October on an airplane, she would not give me the time of day, let alone take off her clothes for me. If I tried to strike up a conversation, she would brush me off. And yet, because I have stared at Cheryl's breasts and gone over every inch of Miss October as well as the throng of beauties that Madison Avenue and Hollywood recruit to tantalize the masses, I start to view my own wife in that light. How can she compete? Envy and greed join hands with lust. I begin to focus on my wife's minor flaws. I lose sight of the fact that she is a charming, warm, attractive woman and that I am fortunate to have found her.

Beyond that, lust affected my marriage in an even more subtle and pernicious way. Over time, I began to view sex schizophrenically. Sex in marriage was one thing. We performed okay, though not as often as I liked, and accompanied by typical misunderstandings. But passion, ah, that was something different. Passion I never felt in my marriage.

If anything, sex within marriage served as an overflow valve, an outlet for the passion that mounted inside me, fed by sources kept hidden from my wife. We never talked about this, yet I am sure she sensed it. I think she began to view herself as a sex object -not in the feminist sense of being the object of a husband's selfish greed, but in the deprived sense of being only the object of my physical necessity and not of romance and passion.

Yet the sexual schizophrenia pales in comparison to the schizophrenia of my spiritual life. Can you imagine the inner rupture when I would lead a spiritual retreat for a weekend, winning sighs of admiration and tears of commitment from my devoted listeners, only to return to my room and pore over the latest copy of Oui? I could never reconcile it, but somehow I could not avoid it. If you pinned me down on what degree my succumbing to temptation was a conscious choice, I would probably search for an enigmatic response such as the one a Faulkner character gave me when asked about original sin. "Well, it's like this," he said. "I ain't got to, but I can't help it."

Paradoxically, I seemed most vulnerable to temptation when speaking or otherwise performing some spiritual service. Those who see Satan as personally manipulating all such temptation to sin would not be surprised by that observation.

Lust became the one corner of my life that God could not enter. I welcomed him into the area of personal finance, which he revolutionized as I awakened to world needs. He cleaned up many of my personal relationships. He gave stirrings of life to the devotional area and my sense of personal communion with him. But lust was sealed off, a forbidden room.

How can I reconcile that statement with my earlier protestations that I often cried out for deliverance? I do not know. I felt both sensations: an overwhelming desire to be cleansed and an overwhelming desire to cling to the exotic pleasure of lust. A magnet is attracted equally to two opposite forces. No matter how small you cut a magnet or rearrange it, the two ends will still be attracted to opposite forces. One force never cancels out the other one. This must be what Paul meant in some of those strange statements in Romans 7 (a passage that gave me some comfort). But where was Romans 8 in my life?

Even when I had lust under control, when I successfully limited it to brief, orderly perusals through Playboy at the local newsstand, I still felt this sense of retaining a secret corner God could not enter. Often I would get bogged down in sermon preparation. For motivation to keep going, I would promise myself a trip to the newsstand if I could finish the sermon in an hour and a half. Can you sense the schizophrenia?

Just as I can remember graphically the precise incident in Rochester when adult lust moved in, I can remember the first flutterings of a commitment to healing. They also came on a trip out of town, when I was speaking at a spiritual-life conference. The conference was scheduled for a resort hotel in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, near my favorite part of the country. Nothing affects me like the long drive up the rocky coastline of Maine. It is an invigorating, almost religious experience. Some people find deserts affect them like that, some wheat fields, and some mountains. For me, the magnificence of creation unwinds with each curve on the road up Maine's coast. I made plans to fly into Boston, rent a car, and spend three days cruising the coast just to refresh myself before the conference.

My mistake was spending the first night in Boston. I was then practicing a fairly rigid regimen of "controlled lust." I hadn't given in to any scary splurges like my Washington, D.C. encounter in some time. But sure enough, that night I found myself stalking the streets of the seedy areas looking for lust. I did not have to look far. Like many cities, Boston offers strip shows, p*rno movies -a veritable menu of lust. I usually avoided p*rno movies because they had proved so unsatisfying. But, Boston also features live nude girls on a revolving platform that you can watch for twenty-five cents. I went in one of those booths.

The mechanics are simple. Twenty curtained booths encircle a revolving platform. Each booth has a glass window covered by a piece of plywood. When you insert a quarter, a mechanical arm somewhat like a toll gate lowers the piece of plywood and lets you see the nude girls revolving on the platform. Then, about three minutes later, the toll gate goes up, and you have to drop in another quarter to continue. This is lust at its most unadorned.

The girls employed by such places are not beautiful. Imagine for yourself what kind of women would willingly settle for such employment. You lie under bright lights, revolving like a piece of roast beef at a buffet table, masturbating occasionally to keep the quarters clinking. Around you, leering, furtive stares of men appear for three minutes, then disappear, then appear again, their glasses reflecting your pale shape, none of them looking at your face.

Maybe such booths do serve a redeeming purpose for society -by exposing lust in its basest demythologized form. There is no art or beauty, no acrobatic dancing. The woman is obviously a sex object and nothing else. The men are isolated, caged voyeurs. There is no relationship, no teasing.

The girls are bored stiff: over the whir of the timing mechanism you can hear them trading talk about grocery prices or car repairs. They masturbat* as a routine for the customers, like an ape at the zoo who learns to make faces because the onlookers then laugh and point. This is what the richest, freest society in history spends its wealth and freedom on?

And yet, there I was, a respected member of that society, three days away from leading a spiritual-life retreat, dropping in quarters like a frantic longdistance caller at a pay phone.

For fifty cents you could go to a private booth, and one of the girls would entertain you personally. A glass wall still separated you from the girl, but you could, if you wished, pick up the receiver and talk to the girl. Maybe you could talk her into doing something special for you. I went into the booth, but something restrained me from picking up the telephone. I could not make that human an act -it would expose me for what I was. I merely stood, silent, and stared.

Guilt and shame washed over me in waves that night, as usual. Again I had a stark picture of how low I was groveling. Did this animal lust have any relation to the romance that had inspired the Symphonie Fantastique, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets, and the Song of Solomon? Certainly each of those works contained traces of glandular desire, but this that I had experienced was devoid of all beauty. It was too naked, and shameful.

I had felt all that remorse before. What shocked me more was my trip up the coast the next two days. I followed my usual practice of staying in homey inns with big fireplaces, and of eating by the waterfront and watching the sailboats bob in the shimmering sea, of taking long solitary walks on the rocky promontories where huge waves crashed with thunder, of closing my eyes and letting salt spray splash across my face, of stopping at roadside stands for fresh lobster and crab.

There was a difference this time: I felt no pleasure. None. My emotional reaction was the same as if I had been at home, yawning, reading the newspaper. All romance had drained out, desiccated.

The realization disturbed me profoundly. By all counts, those wonderful, sensuous experiences rated far higher than the cheap thrill of watching a fat, pock-marked body rotate on plywood. And yet, to my utter disbelief my mind kept roaming back to that grimy booth in Boston. Was I crazy? Would I lose every worthwhile sensation in life? Was my soul leaking away? Was I becoming possessed?

I limped through the conference, and everyone warmly applauded each talk. They were all blessed. Alone in my room at night, I did not pore over p*rnography. I pored over what had been happening inside me for ten years. I did not like it.

Exactly three days later, I spent the night with a very dear friend, a pastor of one of the largest churches in the South. I had never shared intimate details of my lust life with anyone before, but the schizophrenia was building to such a point I felt I must. He listened quietly, with compassion and great sensitivity as I recounted a few incidents, skipping over those that showed me in the worst light and described some of my fears to him.

He sat for a long time with sad eyes after I had finished speaking. We both watched our freshly refIlled cups of coffee steam, then stop steaming, then grow cold. I waited for his words of advice or comfort or healing or something. I needed a priest at that moment, someone to say, "Your sins are forgiven." But my friend was no priest. He did something I never expected. His lip quivered at first, the skin on his face began twitching, and finally he started sobbing -great, huge, wretched sobs such as I had seen only at funerals. In a few moments, when he had recovered some semblance of self-control, I learned the truth.

My friend was not sobbing for me; he was sobbing for himself. He began to tell me of his own expedition into lust. He had been where I was -years before. Since that time, he had taken lust to its logical consequences. I will not dwell on sordid details, but my friend had tried it all: bondage, prostitution, bisexualism, orgies. He reached inside his vest pocket and pulled out a pad of paper showing the prescriptions he took to fight the venereal disease and anal infections he had picked up along the way. He carries the pad with him on trips, he explained, to buy the drugs in cities where he is anonymous.

I saw my friend dozens of times after that and learned every horrific detail of his hellish life. I worried about cognitive dissonance; he brooded on suicide. I read about deviance; he performed it. I winced at subtle fissures in my marriage; he was in divorce litigation.

I could not sit in judgment of this man, because he had simply ended up where my own obsession would likely take me. Jesus brought together lust and adultery, hatred and murder, in the Sermon on the Mount, not to devalue adultery and murder but rather to point to the awesome truth about hatred and lust. There is a connection.

If I had learned about my friend's journey to debauchery in an article like this one, I doubtless would have clucked my tongue, questioned the editor's judgment in printing it, and rejected the author as an insincere poseur in the faith. But I knew this man, I thought, as well as I knew anyone. His insights, compassion, and love were all more mature than mine. My sermons were like freshman practice runs compared to his. He was a godly man if I had ever met one, but underneath all that … my inner fear jumped uncontrollably. I sensed the power of evil.

For some weeks I lived under a cloud that combined the feelings of doom and terror. Had I crossed some invisible line so that my soul was stained forever? Would I too, like my trusted friend, march inexorably toward the systematic destruction of my body and soul? He had cried for forgiveness, and deliverance, and every other prayer he had learned in church, and yet now he had fallen into an abyss. Already lawyers were dividing up his house and possessions and his children. Was there no escape for him -for me?

My wife could sense the inner tension, but in fifteen years of marriage, she had learned not to force a premature explanation. I had not learned to share tension while it was occurring, only afterward, when it fit into a logical sequence, with some sort of resolution. This time, I wondered whether this particular problem would ever have such a resolution.

A month after my conversation with my friend, I began reading a brief and simple book of memoirs, What I Believe, by Francois Mauriac. In it, he sums up why he clung to the Roman Catholic church and Christian faith in a country (France) and an age when few of his contemporaries seriously considered orthodoxy. I had read only one novel by the Nobel prize-winning author, Viper's Tangle, but that novel clearly showed that Mauriac fully understood the lust I had experienced, and more. A great artist, he had captured the depths of human depravity. I would not get pious answers from him.

Mauriac's book includes one chapter on purity. He describes the power of sexuality -"the sexual act has no resemblance to any other act: its demands are frenzied and participate in infinity. It is a tidal wave" -and his struggles with it throughout a strict Catholic upbringing. He also discounts common evangelical perspectives on lust and sex. The experience of lust and immorality, he admits, is fully pleasurable and desirable; it is no good trying to pretend that sin contains distasteful seeds that inevitably grow into repulsion. Sin has its own compelling rewards. Even marriage, Christian marriage, he claims, does not remedy lust. If anything, marriage complicates the problem by introducing a new set of difficulties. Lust continues to seek the attraction of unknown creatures and the taste for adventure and chance meetings.

After brazenly denying the most common reasons I have heard against succumbing to a life filled with lust, Mauriac concludes that there is only one reason to seek purity. It is the reason Christ proposed in the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Purity, says Mauriac, is the condition for a higher love -for a possession superior to all possessions: God himself.

Mauriac goes on to describe how most of our arguments for purity are negative arguments: Be pure, or you will feel guilty, or your marriage will fail, or you will be punished. But the Beatitudes clearly indicate a positive argument that fits neatly with the Bible's pattern in describing sins. Sins are not a list of petty irritations drawn up for the sake of a jealous God. They are, rather, a description of the impediments to spiritual growth. We are the ones who suffer if we sin, by forfeiting the development of character and Christlikeness that would have resulted if we had not sinned.

The thought hit me like a bell rung in a dark, silent hall. So far, none of the scary, negative arguments against lust had succeeded in keeping me from it. Fear and guilt simply did not give me resolve; they added self-hatred to my problems. But here was a description of what I was missing by continuing to harbor lust: I was limiting my own intimacy with God. The love he offers is so transcendent and possessing that it requires our faculties to be purified and cleansed before we can possibly contain it.

Could he, in fact, substitute another thirst and another hunger for the one I had never filled? Would Living Water somehow quench lust? That was the gamble of faith. Perhaps Mauriac's point seems obvious and predictable to people who respond to anguished problems with spiritual-sounding clichés. But I knew Mauriac and his life well enough to know that his observation was the culmination of a lifetime of struggle. He had come to that conclusion as the only possible justification for abstemiousness. Perhaps, just perhaps, the discipline and commitment involved in somehow allowing God to purge out the impurities formed the sine qua non, the essential first step toward a relationship with God I had never known.

The combination of grave fear struck in me by my pastor friend's grievous story and the glimmer of hope that a quest for purity could somehow transform the hunger I had lived with unabated for a decade prepared me to try once again to approach God in confession and in faith. I knew pain would come. Could God this time give me assurance that, in Pascal's words, pain was the "loving and legitimate violence" necessary to procure my liberty?

I cannot tell you why a prayer that has been prayed for ten years is answered on the 1,OOOth request when God has met the first 999 with silence. I cannot tell you why J had to endure ten years of near-possession before being ready for deliverance. And, most sadly of all, I cannot tell you why my pastor friend has, since our conversation after New Hampshire, gone into an unbelievable skid toward destruction. His marriage is now destroyed. He may go insane or commit suicide before this article is published. Why? I do not know.

But what I can tell you, especially those of you who have hung on every turn of my own pilgrimage because it so closely corresponds to yours, is that God did come through for me. The phrase may sound heretical, but to me, after so many years of failure, it felt as if he had suddenly decided to be there after a long absence. I prayed, hiding nothing (hide from God?), and he heard me.

There was one painful but necessary step of repentance. Repentance, says C. S. Lewis, "is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like." Going back for me had to include a very long talk with my wife, who had suffered in silence and often in nescience for a decade. It was she I had wronged and sinned against, as well as God. Perhaps my impurity had kept our own love from growing in the same way it had blocked the love I could experience with God. We lay side by side on our bed one steamy summer evening. I talked about nothing, in a nervous, halting voice, for an hour or so, trying to break the barrier that held me back, and finally about midnight I began.

I told her nearly everything, knowing I was laying on her a burden she might not be able to carry. I have wondered why God let me struggle for a decade before deliverance: maybe I will one day find out my wife required just that much time to mature and prepare for the one talk we had that night. Far smaller things had fractured our marriage for months. Somehow, she incarnated the grace of God for me.

I hurt her -only she could tell how much I hurt her. It was not adultery -there was no other woman for her to beam her resentment toward, but perhaps that made it even harder for her. For ten years she had watched an invisible fog steal inside me, make me act strange, pull me away from her. Now she heard what she had often suspected, and. to her it must have sounded like rejection: You were not enough for me sexually, I had to go elsewhere. But still, in spite of that pain and the vortex of emotions that must have swirled around inside her, she gave to me forgiveness and love. She took on my enemy as her enemy too. She took on my thirst for purity as her thirst too. She loved me, and as I type this even now, tears streak my face because that love, that awesome love is so incomprehensible to me, and so undeserved. But it was there.

"How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! For I am God and not man, The Holy One in your midst. -Hosea 11:8-9"

Saint Augustine, who wrote so eloquently of his own war within, describes our condition here on earth as a simultaneous citizenship in two cities, the city of man and the City of God. The lure of the city of man often drowns out the call of the City of God. Man's city is visible, substantial, real; as such, it is far more alluring. God's city is ephemeral, invisible, cloaked in doubt, far away. It may not even exist -no one knows for sure.

Cheryl Tiegs coming toward me out of the page her teeth flashing, her eyes sparkling, her body glistening, is that city of man. She, and what she represents, fits well with my body and the hormones that surge inside it and the complexes that grew in my repressed childhood and whatever else contributed to my obsession with lust. The pure in heart shall see God.

Set against luscious Cheryl, sometimes that promise does not seem like much. But that is the lie of the Deceiver, and the dyslexia of reality we are asked to overcome. The City of God is the real, the substantial, the whole. What I become as I strengthen my citizenship in that kingdom is far more worthy than anything I could become if all my fantasies were somehow fulfilled.

A year has passed since the late-night talk with my wife. During that time, a miracle has occurred. The war within me has fallen away. Only a few snipers remain. Once I failed, just a month later, when I was walking the streets of San Francisco. I felt myself pulled -it felt exactly like that -into another of the twenty-five cent peep shows to watch an undulating girl on a revolving table for three minutes. Not ten seconds had passed when I felt a sense of horror. My head was pounding. Evil was taking over. I had to get out of there, immediately.

I ran, literally ran, as fast as I could out of the North Beach district. I felt safe only when I got out of there. It struck me then how much had changed: previously I had felt safe when I had given in to lust, because the war inside died down for a moment, but now I felt safe away from the temptation. I prayed for strength and walked away.

Other than that encounter, I have been free of the compulsion. Of course, I notice girls in short dresses and halter tops -why else would they wear them? -but the terror is gone. The gravitational force has disappeared when I pass in front of newsstands. For twelve months I have walked by them and not picked up a magazine. I have not entered a p*rno theater.

I feel a sense of loss, yes. I enjoyed the beautiful women, both the art and the lust of it. It was pleasurable; I cannot deny that. But now I have gained a kind of inner gyroscope that is balanced correctly and alerts me when I am straying off course. After ten years I finally have a reservoir of strength to draw on as well as a conscience. I have found it necessary to keep open and honest communication with God and my wife on every little temptation toward lust.

The war within still exists. Now it is a war against the notion that biology is destiny. Looking at humanity as a species, scientists conclude that the fittest must survive, that qualities such as beauty, intelligence, strength, and skill are worthy factors by which to judge the usefulness of people, that lust is an innate adaptation to assure the propagation of the species. Charity, compassion, love, and restraint fly in the face of that kind of materialist philosophy. Sometimes they defy even our own bodies. The City of God can seem like a mirage; my battle is to allow God to convince me of its reality.

Two totally new experiences have happened to me that, I must admit, offset by far my sense of loss at the experiences of lust I miss.

First, I have learned that Mauriac was right. God has kept his part of the bargain. In a way I had never known before, I have come to see God. At times (not so often, maybe once every couple of months), I have had an experience with God that has stunned me with its depth and intimacy, an experience of an order I did not even know existed before. Some of these moments have come during prayer and Bible reading, some during deep conversations with other people, and one, the most memorable of all because of my occupation, while I was speaking at a Christian conference.

At such moments I have felt possessed, but this time joyfully so (demonic possession is a poor parody of the filling of the Spirit). They have left me shaken and humbled, renewed and cleansed. I had not known that level of mystical experience, had not, in fact, even sought it except in the general way of seeking purity. God has revealed himself to me. The City of God is taking on bricks and mortar.

And another thing has happened, again something I did not even ask God for. The passion is coming back into my marriage. My wife is again becoming an object of romance. Her body, no one else's, is gradually gaining the gravitational pull that used to be scattered in the universe of sexes. The act of sex, as often a source of irritation and trauma for me as an experience of pleasure, is beginning to take on the form of mystery and transcendence and inexpressible delight that its original design must have called for.

These two events occurring in such short sequence have shown me why the mystics, including biblical writers, tend to employ the experience of sexual intimacy as a metaphor of spiritual ecstasy. Sometimes, lingering remnants of grace in the city of man bear a striking resemblance to what awaits us in the City of God.

"I get a knot in my stomach every Sunday evening. I dread the coming week. I work for a boss who seldom shows an ounce of compassion and never tells me whether I have done a good job. I feel tremendously alone in this company. I work with colleagues who really aren't friends. I spend most of the day on the telephone or pushing papers to another office. Seldom do I see the end result of my work, and frankly, I haven't felt good about what I'm doing for the past half dozen years. But it's hard to quit when you are paying off a mortgage and have two kids to put through college."

The pain in this man's expression is not unusual. As a church leader you minister to people at birth, marriage, illness, retirement, and death. But millions of people bear a silent crisis almost alone—the crisis of a soulless job.

Americans are having increased difficulty coping with their work environment. The Opinion Research Corporation of America has found that workers are more dissatisfied in their work now than at any time during the past twenty-eight years. In a survey of 2,821 executives by the American Management Association, 52 percent found their work unsatisfying. In a 1980 Gallup poll, the researchers asked: "Do you enjoy your work so much that you have a hard time putting it aside?" Fifty-two percent responded in the affirmative twenty-seven years ago. Today, only 34 percent respond positively.

What can you do to help your parishioners with problems at work?

First, find out what members of your congregation do for a living. This includes (a) the worker's responsibilities, (b) the quality of on-the-job relationships with supervisor and peers, (c) the rewards of the job, and (d) the threats of the job, both physical and mental.

Visit with workers on the job site. Most members would love to show you what they produce with their hands and the ideas that absorb their minds. Many will confide their frustrations and hidden pain. You may be the first pastor who has shown an interest in their working lives.

At the job site, most workers will bubble over with enthusiasm as they explain the intricacies and complexities of their working lives.It's as if suddenly, after years of employment, someone has taken an interest in this vital part of their lives. Paul Tournier once reflected: "A worker can spend years in a factory, shop or office without meeting anyone who takes the slightest interest in him as a person. The daily routine, together with the prevailing atmosphere of our times, makes it possible for him to associate with companions whom he really does not know and who do not know him."

Second, be sensitive to the frustrations that individuals may be having with their work. In economic hard times, more and more people are seeking out pastors for counsel on dead-end jobs, unrealistic workloads, boredom, a punitive boss, and the prospect of unemployment. Be aware of the five stages in the job dissatisfaction cycle:

• In the first stage, job contentment, workers report that they "love their job" and "everything is going great." Frequently they report working sixty, seventy, or more hours per week. While on the surface everything appears to be going well, vital adaptive energy is being consumed.

• If that energy is not replenished through sound exercise, sleep, and vacations, individuals move into stage two, which is job disappointment. They complain about tiredness, and lack of energy, and an inability to sleep soundly. Frequently they comment on their lack of creativity and their inefficiency. One executive in this stage noted: "I guess I have been hitting it too hard. I don't have any spunk. I feel jaded and indifferent." He indicated that he is never caught up, a common feeling among individuals in this second stage.

• In the third stage, job disillusionment, the person feels exhausted. Symptoms of ill health become acute: "I became almost physically ill," said one worker. "My body ached as if I had a viral illness. I got tension headaches and was nauseated." Anger often accompanies the physical symptoms. The worker resembles a volcano on the verge of eruption.

• In the fourth stage, job despair, workers have few waking moments when their thoughts are not riveted on their jobs. They think about their problems driving home and while watching television. Over and over again they replay the day's events and come away feeling, "This job is bad for me; the problem isn't going to go away." At times the individual wants to look for an escape hatch by fleeing the job or the family or even the whole way of life.

• In the final stage, hitting the wall, workers often find they cannot continue working. Some turn to drugs and alcohol; others experience serious physiological deterioration.

Third, help frustrated workers develop realistic goals.

Often they have too many goals, while others have too few. Dr. Alaman Magid, a San Diego physician, assists patients under stress with a set of techniques he calls "time therapy." He has found that positive visualization undertaken in the early hours of the day helps give a sense of contentment with one's work environment. So he has his clients write out their goals for the day, visualizing what the entire day is going to be like.

Helping counselees establish leisure goals is also important. If you are counseling someone in stages four or five, you might suggest a short vacation. Several three or four day vacations may be more helpful in restoring adaptive energy than one long vacation.

One of the best and quickest antidotes to work stress is exercise. Recommend walking a mile or two every day. One worker who almost had a breakdown because of employment pressures became an enthusiastic racquetball player. Later he confided, "Playing racquetball has helped me handle the pressure."

Scientists recently studied a group of workers at Exxon's physical fitness laboratory in New York and found that after only six months of exercise, workers had a significantly increased capacity for work. Most reported that they felt less tired and had more energy. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin who studied the value of jogging as a treatment for depression found that at the end of ten weeks, individuals who were exercising regularly showed more improvement than those undergoing traditional psychotherapy.

Fourth, develop a theology of work. Central to such a theology is the belief that all work can be sacred.

Sigurd F. Olson devoted his life to protecting the wilderness and the serenity of nature. For him, all life was sacred. He fought many battles with people who wanted to exploit forests and lakes. But whatever the outcome, he had a way of affirming others and affirming the meaning of his own work as an environmentalist.

At the age of eighty-two, he died while snowshoeing in northern Minnesota. After the funeral, friends went to his wilderness cabin, where he had written many books. In the typewriter was a sheet of paper that read: "A new adventure is coming up, and I'm sure it will be a great one."

If we could instill that kind of positive outlook in church members, their work can become an integral part of their exciting life in Christ.