Over and over again we found that pattern employed in the Biblical texts. The preachers of the Good News about Jesus regularly X-rayed the "bad news" of people's lived experience to help them see, and then admit, their root malady. That done, they had an open door to tell their clients "Why Jesus."

You might think this would result in one sing-song sermon repeated ad nauseam throughout the New Testament witness. Not so. The root malady takes many forms in people's experience: shame, guilt, alienation, possession, slavery, disintegration, curse, uncleanness, and more.

When we tried this New Testament program on the three "other options" we tested, the results were clear. For therapy, John Parfitt's words were the best answer.

For Buddhism we tracked its own diagnosis. Suffering is at the center of human experience. Suffering's cause is desire aflame in all human hearts. Extinguish desire, and you eliminate suffering. That is the basic paradigm. Buddhism has no God-problem at all, so there is no need for a Jesus. Even the Buddha is no savior, but a teacher who shows the way.

For our session on "common sense ethics" we took the "easy" way out. It was our last session at Holden. The boat was waiting. We scanned Galatians to learn that any ethic apart from the Gospel inevitably becomes a legal one. Law always binds, never liberates. The bondage goes all the way down: seen first in actions, then the heart, finally the God-connection. Paul's harshest word for that bondage is "curse." And none ever get out from under a curse on their own steam.

So why Jesus? "He redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us...in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come" to us all.

Other options? Yes. Other saviors? No. ehs

S-I-N-G is for SINGing

When this Report gets to you, Bob will be on his way to Capetown, South Africa, for a meeting of the International Bonhoeffer Society. There he'll be in the company of dear friends of Crossings, Eberhard and Renate Bethge. Renate is Dietrich Bonhoeffer's niece; Eberhard his student, biographer, and the grand old man of the society.

When Marie and I came home from Ethiopia this summer we sojourned for a few days in Germany. Two of those days we were guests in the Bethge home just outside of Bonn. Amidst the conversations--serious and hilarious--Eberhard reminisced about the exhilarating time in the underground seminary at Finkenwalde with Bonhoeffer as principal.

Only once had he experienced anything like that since then. Where? "When I visited your Seminex