Word: revs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...classic Christian answer to this quandary is the free will theory formulated by St. Augustine. As the Rev. Stephen Duffy of New Orleans' Loyola University summarized it last week: "God freely decided to limit his own freedom and put no limit on ours. We certainly are capable of making a botch of it." If God had programmed all human beings to be good, he explains, there might be no evil, but there would be no virtue either. God chose to let man choose...
...want them. In Catholic countries, political coercion of belief had largely died out long before the Second Vatican Council adopted its Declaration on Religious Freedom. That has led, in turn, to a more relaxed, benign stance toward rivals, even the most macabre of them. Says the Rev. Stephen Duffy, chairman of the theology and religion department of New Orleans' Loyola University: "The Catholic Church has learned a certain tolerance, a wisdom in biding your time and hoping people will regain their senses." The same is true of many Protestant churches. Jonestown also intensifies these groups' embarrassment over...
...Rev. Glenn Igleheart, the "interfaith witness" director of the nation's largest Protestant group, the Southern Baptist Convention, warns against "overreaction" by parents of cult members or by the government. He urges fellow Christians to support "free religious expression" at the same time that they carefully scrutinize new faiths and "speak out against deviant beliefs and abuses against persons." Every new group should be examined carefully, he advises, and measured by such beliefs and practices as "the unquestioned lordship of Jesus Christ, the unimpeded right of each believer to communicate with God and use of the Bible...
...cults pose a problem for main-line churches in general, the Rev. Jim Jones posed a particularly difficult one for Indianapolis' Kenneth L. Teegarden, president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a respectable denomination of 1.3 million members. Until his death Jones, for all his aberrations, was a clergyman in good standing in that church. What is more, he took care to join the Guyana Council of Churches...
...amount of procedural change is likely to resolve the basic problem. According to the Rev. J. Gordon Melton, a Methodist who heads the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Evanston, Ill., cults are a natural outgrowth of the religious climate in urban areas. "In a city no one cares what his neighbor does for religion," says he. "You can always sell a few people on every weird idea that comes along." By his reckoning, 10% of America's urban population is touched in one way or another by the new cults. As Melton sees it, that figure...