Pastoral Bible Institute News

Respectfully submitted by Len Griehs, Treasurer

“For we are laborers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building” (1 Corinthians 3:9).

Many hands have contributed to the work of the Institute during the 84 years of its existence. This year has been no exception. Authors, proof-readers, workers in the production and printing of the Herald, those who record and produce tape recordings of the journal and those working on the web page are but a few of our co-laborers. Added to these are the members of the PBI and the subscribers, who are the very reason for this publication.

The main work of the Institute during this past year continues to be the publishing of The Herald magazine. We have continued using specific themes for each issue treating The Book of Revelation, Christ Through the Ages, Heroes of Faith, The Seven Churches of the Apostle Paul, Words from the Cross, and Living the Beatitudes during the past fiscal year.

Some of the issues have included booklets and other free enclosures. One which drew considerable response from our readership was a 12-page color catalog of Bible Student literature distributed by the Chicago Bible Students.

The Herald is also distributed each month on tape for the blind, those wishing to listen in their cars, or who merely enjoy playing the tapes in their home. For this service, we wish to express sincere thanks to the one who records the words of each issue. As a reminder, the Institute sends the audio tapes free to those who are blind.

The Herald web page continues to expand. In addition to each issue of The Herald, it has a special section where scores of books and booklets are offered for free download in a format compatible with the popular On Line Bible program, as well as in the Acrobat format for those who use our Bible Student Library CD ROM and in the standard web language of hypertext markup.

We continue to work on a major revision of the Bible Student Library CD ROM. It will contain many new works, including even more writings of C. T. Russell together with some of the historical background for his teachings. Most of these works will be available in the same three formats currently offered for download on our web page. Because all work is being done by volunteers, we cannot estimate when this new edition will be ready.

A spirit of close fellowship, harmony, and enthusiasm continues to exist between the editors and directors of the Institute as we enter another year of service in the Lord’s vineyard. As fellow-laborers with you, we welcome your comments and suggestions to make our efforts even more productive in the years ahead.

Directors and Editors
of the Pastoral Bible Institute

World News

Religious

The Roman Catholic Church’s top U.S. leaders said that they’ve outlined a policy to rapidly oust “notorious” priests guilty of “serial, predatory sexual abuse of minors” and send alleged new offenders to civil authorities and lay-led review boards. But they stopped short of calling for a “zero-tolerance” policy for offenders and alluded to “spiritual atonement” for cardinals and bishops accused of covering up the actions of predatory priests. The statements, in a three-page communiqué and a six-paragraph letter to priests, came at a news conference after two days of crisis meetings with Pope John Paul II and Vatican officials. The church leaders reaffirmed priestly celibacy, saying no link has been “scientifically maintained” between the practice and pedophilia. Though troubles in the USA led to the meeting, several cardinals said it was not only a U.S. problem. Recent scandals have hit the church in Austria, Ireland, France, Australia and the pope’s native Poland.

—USA Today, 4/25/2002

Proponents of the intelligent-design movement, which challenges Darwin’s primacy in the science classroom, argued for equal footing in the Ohio’s new teaching curriculum today. Dr. Jonathan Wells, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle organization dedicated to alternative scientific theories, contended that there was enough valid challenge to Darwinian evolution to justify intelligent design’s being ordered into the classroom curriculum—not as a religious doctrine, he maintained, but as a matter of “a growing scientific controversy.”

—New York Times, 3/12/2002

Social

North Korea has been experiencing food shortages since at least the early 1990s. Estimates of excess deaths run from the hundreds of thousands to 3 million with the central estimate around 1 million or about 5 percent of the pre-famine population. North Korea’s famine . . . is a product of 50 years of economic mismanagement. North Korea has drifted into a policy of chronic dependency on international assistance. Historically, most of the population relied on the public distribution system for food. This system has broken down, and food is increasingly distributed through markets. Today access to food depends on a complex set of factors including: membership in privileged groups such as the military or other “high priority” essential workers through conventional distribution channels; location in net food producing or consuming areas; access to hard currency to obtain food through markets. What has been the response of the outside world? Some, including Medicins San Frontieres, have cited intolerable conditions including diversion of aid to privileged groups and have withdrawn; the majority has stayed on, under the belief that they are ameliorating hunger if under less than optimal conditions. This, in a nutshell, encapsulates the ethical dilemma posed by the North Korean famine.

—Institute For International Economics, 4/17/2002

Almost 11 million children die each year from preventable and treatable diseases, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Chil­dren’s Fund (Unicef) said. The UN agencies called for a commitment to save children’s lives at the Global Consultation on Child and Adolescent Health and Development, a two-day gathering in Stockholm of health experts and politicians that began yesterday. “Of the 11 million who die, eight million are babies, half of them in the first month of life,” WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland said in a statement. “These deaths were preventable and treatable, not inevitable.” Pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, measles, HIV/AIDS and malnutrition are the main causes of death. Unicef and the WHO gave examples of how easily progress may be achieved to combat disease. Diarrhea may be treated with oral rehydration salts costing about 33 cents a treatment and measles may be prevented with a vaccination costing about 26 cents a dose, the organizations said.

—Bloomberg News, 3/13/2002

A severe water shortage brought on by yet another dry winter—coupled with the premature onset of summer—threatens to devastate the Rocky Mountain states. Conditions are so bad so early in the year, that officials fear the extended drought will debilitate the region’s economic powerhouses: agriculture, livestock and recreation. “It’s about as dry as it can get here,” said ranger George Whitten [who lives near the] New Mexico line in the south-central part of [Colorado]. “People talk about how bad it is compared to the norm, but it seems to me like drought is the norm,” Whitten said.

—Los Angeles Times 4/25/2002

A Rhode Island-size piece of the floating ice fringe along a fast-warming region of Antarctica has disintegrated with extraordinary rapidity, scientists said. The loss of floating ice does not contribute to rising sea levels, just as melting ice cubes floating in a glass do not cause it to overflow. But the researchers said this was the first time in thousands of years that this part of Antarctica — the east coast of its arm-shaped peninsula — had seen so much ice erode and temperatures rise so much. While it is too soon to say whether the changes there are related to a buildup of the “greenhouse” gas emissions that scientists believe are warming the planet, many experts said it was getting harder to find any other explanation. “With the disappearance of ice shelves that have existed for thousands of years, you rather rapidly run out of other explanations,” said Dr. Theodore A. Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, which has been monitoring the loss of ice in the Antarctic along with the British Antarctic Survey. For years, researchers hiking on the ice and using satellites have been watching pieces of the shelf slowly break away, but the disintegration over the last month was on a vastly greater scale, several experts said. “The speed of it is staggering,” said Dr. David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey.

—New York Times, 3/20/2002

Civil

Across Europe, unassimilated immigrant populations from former colonial possessions or old allies have become political headaches for governments that never thought their guest workers would stay. The success of nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of France’s presidential election is the most recent example of how immigration has risen to the top of the agenda for a growing minority of Europeans willing to vote for extremists to make their concerns heard. What makes this tougher for countries like France, Britain, the Netherlands and Germany is the “tribal” nature of European nation states that is threatened by immigration. Globalization, the need for skilled labor, inertia and simple decency make it unlikely that European Union governments will close the door to further immigrants.

—Wall Street Journal, 4/24/2002

The Pashtuns are Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, but a minority here in the valleys and plains of the northwest. They lived in clusters, away from the more numerous Uzbeks and Tajiks, and when the Taliban fled the area last November, the Pashtuns suddenly found themselves hunted and alone. The Pashtuns of northern Afghanistan are fleeing their villages by the thousands now, telling tales of murder and rape and robbery, and leaving behind empty towns and grazing grounds just beginning to shimmer with the first grass of spring. The persecution of the northern Pashtuns opens a new chapter in Afghanistan’s tangled history of ethnic relations. For decades, northern Afghanistan peacefully cradled its many groups, jostling together the Pashtuns, the Turkmen and the Hazara with the dominant Tajiks and Uzbeks. Then came the Taliban, ethnic Pashtuns drawn mainly from the south and inspired by a vision not only of extreme Islam but also of Pashtun supremacy. When the Taliban swept across northern Afghanistan in the late 1990’s, they ­focused their fury on minorities, massacring thousands. The Taliban often gave favored status to their local brethren, setting aside the choicest lands for their farms and cattle. Now, it appears, the new­ly dominant are exacting their revenge. A United Nations official, who declined to be identified, said of the anti-Pashtun campaign: “It has been systematic and wide scale. Rapes are far more common than killings, but the serious looting is very pronounced. With the change in power, it is time to settle old scores.”

—New York Times, 2/7/2002

Financial

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei made a threat April 5 when he called upon all Muslim states to “shake the world” by halting oil exports to “pro-Israel” Western states. Such an embargo is unlikely since without accompanying revenue and production cuts, any targeted state can easily procure oil from alternative producers. Furthermore, any serious embargo that includes real production cuts would inflict far more harm upon countries that are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, particularly in Asia. This, obviously, hasn’t stopped Khamanei from threatening a potential embargo. Alternative sources could hardly lessen the impact of a concerted effort to cut supplies to the United States by Muslim producers who collectively control over 20 million barrels per day of production. Still, in the unlikely event of an actual embargo, the Muslim producers would quickly discover the weaknesses of their actions. The West is not nearly as dependent upon oil as it was in 1973. The United States consumes only 60 percent as much oil per dollar of GDP generated as it did in 1973. It is the reverse situation for most of Asia. For an oil embargo now to deliver the same level of economic shock to the West as did the 1973 energy crisis, the per barrel price would need to hit $90, a target well beyond the Muslim world’s ability to deliver. Any oil embargo large enough to actually harm the West would decimate Asia, including Muslim countries, which has yet to recover from the 2001 global recession.

—www.Stratford.com, 4/8/2002

Russia is a changed land since August 1998, when it devalued its ruble and defaulted on government bonds. Russia has risen from being economically crippled to being in the midst of a radical turnaround. Led by President Vladimir Putin, a small army of reformers has spearheaded key economic and business reforms. “Russia’s economic reform has been fueled by three factors,” said Michael Donnelly, manager of the $145 million American Century Emerging Markets Fund. Those include a new flat tax, better corporate governance and financial transparency by business and government, and a boom in oil prices. Still, not all of Russia’s problems are solved. “The country remains poor by Western European standards,” said a spokesman for the American Enterprise Institute. “If you’re 50 years or older, you are adrift, you’re a product of the communist system. You’re likely to be unable to adjust to the new realities,” said John Conner of Third Millennium Russia Fund. “But people in their 20s and 30s don’t drink at lunch. They’re eager to learn new skills. These people work hard and they are hard to differentiate from young people in New York.” Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization will mean a further opening of Russia’s economy to global trade.

—Investor’s Business Daily, 4/11/2002

Israel

University students from Cairo have been gathering the names of would-be Egyptian martyrs who have volunteered to fight against the Israelis. Organizers now have 3,500 names. Organizers have collected $11,000 under the slogan “Preparing for martyrdom.” Unlike the first intifada against Israel, Egyptians and other Arabs have had the current fighting beamed to them hour by hour in their homes by pan-Arab TV channels. State-controlled television, which might once have kept coverage to a minimum in order not to inflame domestic opinion, has struggled to keep up. “There’s one simple answer: execute Bush” one man told the Financial Times during a demonstration of about 3,000 people. “Aren’t we in the third world war?” asked another.

—Financial Times, 4/8/2002

“I would like to explain the situation from the Cabinet’s perspective. Let us remember how we got to this point. Until September of 2000, we had a good economy and the Palestinian economy was prospering. This all exploded when Arafat refused the Camp David agreement. We offered the Palestinians 98% of the West Bank and a third of Jerusalem, including the Old City. Arafat refused this offer. He returned to the Middle East and began a wave of terror. Do not think that the terror was set off by Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. In the month of March, 124 people have been killed and 693 wounded. This is the month in which Gen. Zinni was here, when Israelis canceled all anti-terror activity to give the Tenet/Mitchell plan a chance. We have existed for over 50 years without a Palestinian state and we can live another 50 years without one. We were here before Arafat; we will be here after him. Arafat must understand that we will be everywhere, where there are terrorists. In international law, it is legitimate for a nation under siege of terror to defend itself.”

—IDF Spokesperson, 4/1/2002

In 2000 there were 6,040,000 Israelis of which nearly a third were born outside Israel. Of those born abroad, nearly half were born in the former U.S.S.R. Israelis following the Jewish religion: 80.1%. Muslim: 14.6%. Christian: 2.1%. Other: 3.2%. Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza: 3,191,000. Average number of children per Israeli woman: 2.6. per Palestinian woman: 6.1.

—Newsweek, 4/1/2002

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 5.9 billion people in the world. The world Jewish population is estimated at 13 million, which means that only one of every 453 people in the world is Jewish. In addition, Israelis are outnumbered almost 35 to 1 by hostile neighbors, who possess 270 times as much land as they do.

—Israel My Glory, March-April 2002

The Saudi kingdom pledged US$400 million last year for the support of “martyrs’ families,” according to the Saudi Embassy’s web site www.saudinf.com/main/y2014.htm. At $5,300 per “martyr” that works out to about 75,000 martyrs, suggesting the Saudi princes anticipate a lot more suicide bombings than Israel has suffered. The Saudis offered a “peace” plan intended to divert attention from their involvement in the horrors of September 11. According to the Web site, the assistance to the families of Palestinian “martyrs” is handled under the directive of Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the Interior Minister, who heads the Saudi Committee for the Support of al-Quds (Jerusalem) Intifada.

—Bridges for Peace, 4/6/2002