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Holy Land Narratives of Lament and Hope

Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy land Since 1948.

By Meron Benvenisti. University of California Press, 417 pp.

The End of the Peace process: Oslo and After.

By Edward Said. Pantheon, 448 pp.

The tumultuous history of Palestinian-Israeli relations has seemed to reach its nadir in recent years. The hope brought by the Oslo Accords has been almost buried by the grief over the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the delays and brokering of the Netanyahu years, and the corruption and dictatorialness of the Palestinian Authority. Yet Jewish and Palestinian history remain intertwined in a knot of suffering and hope. Paradoxically, the present despair is accompanied by a growing recognition that healing can come only through confession and reconciliation,

Meron Benvenisti’s book is an example of a burgeoning literature by authors who seek a long-range, in-depth understanding of the present predicament. In the 1970s Benvenisti was deputy mayor of Jerusalem. During the past 20 years or so he has been a prominent critic of Israeli occupation policies. In the ‘80s Benvenisti became convinced that the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank had for all practical purposes become permanent. If and when the occupation came to an end, the integration of Jerusalem and the West Bank into Israeli society and economy would continue. The space left for an independent Palestine or even the foundations for an independent and flourishing Palestinian culture would be minuscule. In effect, and without conscious intent or understanding on either the Jewish or Palestinian side, Israel and Palestine had merged into one entity.

Sacred Landscape is the latest of Benvenisti’s exploration of these themes. Its first chapters set the tone for a work that is both a critique of Israel’s past and a lament for the lost Palestinian landscape. To have Palestine evoked by a Jewish Israeli may seem strange at first, but Benvenisti grew up in pre-Israel Palestine. In fact, his father participated in the transformation of Palestine into Israel. As a geographer and mapmaker, he renamed the towns and villages of Palestine. By giving them names that referred to Jewish history, he was part of the process that eventually eliminated Arabic culture and the Arab people from a newly created Jewish state.

To instill a love for the Hebrew homeland in his son, Benvenisti’s father took him on excursions in the 1930s and ‘40s to villages and places inhabited and named by Palestinian Arabs. Benvenisti portrays his father’s agenda as aiming to clear physical and psychological spaces for the renewal of this Jewish homeland, and to instill in his son and his people the Zionist ethos of moledet (homeland): knowledge of the land’s glorious Jewish past, intimate communion with its natural environment, and commitment to a pioneer ethos in collective agricultural settlements. Yet the elder Benvenisti believed that there was room for both Arab and Jew in Palestine. Reclamation of Jewish space would also leave space for a continued and valued Arab presence -- room enough, then, for two homelands.

By the time of the 1948 war, however, this vision had disintegrated. During the communal struggle for and the emergence of an empowered and expansionist Israeli state, the landscape was thoroughly Hebraized at the expense of Arab sensibilities and population. Benvenisti argues that it was the loss of Arab population within the new Jewish state that eventually led to the virtual disappearance of Palestine. The disappearance was and continues to be problematic for Benvenisti, for he was born and raised as a Palestinian Jew, the mirror image of the Arabs who remained in Israel after the creation of the state.

Thus Israel’s triumph, a triumph in which Benvenisti participated after the war years as a member of the pioneering youth movement, evokes a lament: "My father’s map triumphed, and I, his dutiful son, was left with the heavy burden of the fruits of victory. The victory was so overwhelming that it utterly destroyed my childhood landscape, and my sense of loss was mixed with pride in my people’s triumph. I often reflected on the irony of the fact that my father, by taking me on his trips and hoping to instill in me a love for our Hebrew homeland, had imprinted in my memory the very landscape he wished to replace."

The details of that triumph may provide a way forward over the next decades, Benvenisti believes. Though not without controversy, the details he gathers, especially of the 1948 war, are affirmed in different ways by many Israeli historians. Yet it is the terminology that Benvenisti uses that distinguishes his analysis and raises the consciousness of those who inherit the Jewish victory. For Benvenisti, the 1948 war can be divided into two parts: the first, a conflict between two communities at the time when the British mandate powers were being withdrawn and the post-Holocaust emergency was at its most intense, when Jews struggled to established their fights to a homeland and to gain the power to achieve it; the second, a struggle to extend Israel’s geographic and political reach beyond its needs for a homeland. In that process, and with forethought and efficient execution, the fledgling Jewish state emptied its borders of much of its Arab population. Benvenisti boldly labels the second half of the war as ethnic cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were driven out of the Jewish state to create space for the new political entity to evolve without a disturbing pluralism.

Benvenisti’s point about ethnic cleansing is important for a variety of reasons. First, it deflates once and for all the purity of aims and intentions often claimed for the creation of Israel. Second, it places the Palestinian catastrophe in a wider context than the usual divisions between ethnic groups and the tensions that accompany cultural and religious differences.

The unforgivable fault that Benvenisti claims led to ethnic cleansing is a confusion between Zionist aims to create a homeland for a displaced community of Jews from Europe and the use of State power to continue these aims, as if state power itself were only another vehicle for Zionism: "The direct link between the Yishuv and its volunteering governing institutions, and the Israeli collectivity living in the context of a sovereign state produced norms and laws that were injurious to the basic rights of civil and human equality, were tainted with arbitrariness, and discriminated on an ethnic basis among the people subject to its authority." Thus Jewish leaders did not differentiate between ethnic actions and goals without state authority and those same actions and goals "perpetrated by heads of state with the ability to pass laws and to enforce them by means of a powerful standing army subject to their absolute authority."

The inability to differentiate between ideology and state underlies Israelis’ denial that there was any ethnic cleansing at the birth of Israel and resistance to a renewed integration of the Jewish and Palestinian communities in Eretz Israel/Palestine (a term Benvenisti uses intentionally throughout his book). With the division between the communities and with the expulsion of Palestinians from their native space, Jews have lost their ethical landscape. It hinders their ability to face an essential question. How can Jews come to grips with the fact that a state has arisen within Jewish history, and that this state, like all other states, has a responsibility to all of its citizens and to those who were injured and expelled in its formation?

The essays gathered in The End of the Peace Process speak eloquently and defiantly of the failure of Palestinian leaders to recognize the need to move from a revolutionary guerrilla entity to a mature democratic movement representing the needs of its constituency within and outside of the occupied territories. If for Benvenisti ethnic cleansing and continual expansion is Israel’s original sin, for Said the betrayal of democracy and collaboration with Israel in limiting Palestinian dissent and claims for dignity and rights to land is Yasir Arafat’s and the Palestinian Authority’s great sin.

Said correctly and passionately raises the question of how Palestinians can be free if a majority of those displaced in 1948 and 1967 are excluded from the final negotiations. Moreover, he asks how Palestinian life can be revived when the very landscape of the proposed Palestinian state is littered with Jewish settlements, bypass roads and Palestinian elites who negotiate away the future in return for favors and status. And how will Palestinians ever be able to accept and live an integrated life with Jews if so little of Palestine is returned to them, and their rights and dignity are ignored by both Jewish and Palestinian leaders?

While Benvenisti and Said stress the large questions of displacement and betrayal, their aim is more localized and achievable: to recover in a new framework the possibility of an ordinary life for Jews and Palestinians.

At the same time, Palestinians can renew their collective life in partnership with the Jews who displaced them and now seek a just reconciliation for a shared future. In the new landscape, a secular state where citizenship rather than ethnic or religious identity is key can create new opportunities for both peoples to transform history and identity into a new synthesis.

Benvenisti and Said call our attention to a sacred landscape that is violated through division and complicity. Their words are a lament and a clarion call to move beyond the denials and the superficial peace process. The narrative of lament and hope prophesies that the judgment of history can be delayed but not denied. The revolutionary call to reconciliation with justice allows us to perceive another path. When the narrative is shared and the revolutionary becomes the ordinary, it is only a matter of time before the sacred landscape becomes a shared homeland for the native, the refugee and the exile. Benvenisti concludes his book with this challenge: "Only one who knows how to listen to the unforgetting silence of this agonized land, this land from which we begin and to which we return -- Jews and Arabs alike -- only that person is worthy of calling it homeland."

The King Assassination: After Three Decades, Another Verdict

In December, 1968, a jury in Memphis, Tennessee, concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and "others, including governmental agencies." Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the now deceased James Earl Ray, the man sentenced for the crime.

Explaining how this verdict came about requires some background. In 1969 Ray pleaded guilty to the murder. His lawyer, Percy Foreman, had threatened to throw the case if Ray let it go to trial. Before receiving his 99-year sentence, Ray answered Judge Preston Battle’s question as to his guilt with a qualified, "Yes, legally, yes." He told the judge he disagreed with the government officials who denied there was a conspiracy. Three days later, Ray fired Foreman and asked Judge Battle for a new trial. For the rest of his life Ray continued to seek a new trial, maintaining that he had been set up in the King murder by a shadowy gunrunner named Raul. Ray died in prison in 1998.

William Pepper, who began investigating the King assassination in 1978, became convinced that Ray was innocent. In 1995 Pepper published Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King, a labyrinthine investigative work that detailed the tangle of evidence he had found pointing to a murder conspiracy that included government officials. The King family contacted Pepper in 1997 and asked to see his evidence. Convinced by it, the Kings supported Ray’s request for a trial.

After Ray’s death, the King family asked President Clinton to set up a commission similar to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that would offer legal immunity in exchange for truth telling. When their proposal was turned into a "limited reexamination" of the murder by the Justice Department, the Kings tried another route to get at the evidence: they filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Jowers, who said he had been part of a conspiracy to kill King.

The complaint actually reads King v. Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators. As soon became evident at the trial last fall, the real defendants were the anonymous coconspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The King family, represented by Pepper, was in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies -- particularly the FBI and army intelligence -- with organizing, subcontracting and covering up the assassination. Needless to say, this was a difficult case to make.

Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in King v. Jowers. It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the plaintiffs (the King family) and the defendant (Jowers) agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.

But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the government’s "sovereign immunity," it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government -- which is not likely to indict itself. The civil case in Memphis laid out the strange story of the murder, and in the end 12 jurors (six black and six white) said: Guilty as charged -- King was murdered by an intricate plot that included government agencies.

Jowers, 73, attended only the first three days of the trial. He was excused by the judge because of illness. He said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. However, in 1993 Jowers -- against Garrison’s advice and prompted by Pepper’s investigation -- appeared on Prime Time Live with Sam Donaldson and said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and had been told there would be a decoy in the plot. He was also told that the police "wouldn’t be there that night."

In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim’s Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.

The jury in Memphis also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King’s son Dexter and former UN ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that the meetings to plan the assassination occurred at Jim’s Grill. He said the planners included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell McCollough (who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency), MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark (who died in 1987), a third police officer, and two men Jowers did not know but thought were federal agents.

Young, who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the tape identifying McCollough as the man kneeling besides King’s body on the balcony in a famous photograph taken right after the shooting. According to witness Colby Vernon Smith, McCollough had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders, which was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his trial testimony Young said the MPD intelligence agent was "the guy who ran up [the balcony stairs] with us to see Martin."

Jowers says on the tape that right after the shot was fired he received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim’s Grill from Clark. He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day. Jowers said he didn’t actually see who fired the shot that killed King, but thought it was Clark, the MPD’s best marksman.

Young testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting was that the increasingly frail Jowers "wanted to get right with God, wanted to confess it and be free of it." Jowers denied, however, that he knew the plot’s purpose was to kill King -- a claim which seemed implausible to Dexter King and Young. Jowers has continued to fear jail, and he had directed Garrison to defend him on the grounds that he didn’t know the target of the plot was King. But his interview with Donaldson suggests he was not naïve on this point.

Jowers’s story opened the door to testimony on other areas:

Background to the assassination: James Lawson, King’s friend and an organizer with SCLC, testified that King’s stands on Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign had created enemies in Washington. He said King’s speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, which condemned the Vietnam war and identified the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," provoked intense hostility in the White House and FBI.

Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income. "I have no doubt," Lawson said, "that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination."

Evidence of a local conspiracy: On the night of April 3, 1968, Floyd E. Newsum, a black firefighter and civil rights activist, heard King’s "I’ve Been to the Mountain Top" speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. On his return home, Newsum returned a phone call from his lieutenant and was told he had been temporarily transferred, effective April 4, from Fire Station 2, located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, to Fire Station 31. Newsum testified: "I was not needed at the new station. I was needed at my old station. I was eventually told I was transferred by orders of the Police Department."

The only other black firefighter at Fire Station 2, Norvell E. Wallace, testified that he too received orders on the night of April 3 for a temporary transfer to a fire station far removed from the Lorraine Motel. The officer told Wallace vaguely that he had been threatened.

"I guess it was because I was putting out fires," Wallace told the jury with a smile. "I have never to this day been given a satisfactory explanation."

On the afternoon of April 4, a black Memphis Police Department detective, Ed Redditt, was removed from his surveillance post at Fire Station 2. Redditt had been watching King and his party across the street. Redditt testified that MPD Intelligence Officer Eli Arkin came to Fire Station 2 later that afternoon to take him to Central Headquarters. There he was brought to Police and Fire Director Frank Holloman, a retired FBI agent. During his 25 years in the FBI, Holloman had been head of the Memphis field office (1959-64) as well as J. Edgar Hoover’s appointments secretary. Holloman told Redditt that a secret service agent had just flown in from Washington with information about a threat on Redditt’s life. He ordered him to go home.

"I objected," Redditt said. "Director Holloman told Arkin to take me home." When they arrived at Redditt’s house, the car radio announced that King had just been assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. Redditt testified that nothing further was ever said to him by the authorities about the threat on his life.

Former MPD Captain Jerry Williams followed Redditt to the witness stand. Williams had been responsible for forming a security unit of black officers whenever King came to Memphis. For King’s April 3 arrival, however, Williams was not asked to form that bodyguard. He was told that someone in King’s entourage had asked for no security.

Philip Melanson, author of The Martin Luther King Assassination (1991), described his investigation into the April 4 pullback of four tactical police units that had been patrolling the immediate vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. When Melanson interviewed MPD Inspector Sam Evans (now deceased) on why the units were pulled back five blocks on the morning of April 4, in effect making an assassin’s escape much easier, Evans said that a local pastor connected with King’s party had ordered it. The pastor, however, denied this to Melanson.

Olivia Catling lived a block away from the Lorraine on Mulberry Street. Catling had planned to walk down the street the evening of April 4 in the hope of catching a glimpse of King at the motel. She testified that when she heard the shot a little after six o’clock, she said, "Oh, my God, Dr. King!" She ran with her two children and a neighbor’s child to the corner of Mulberry and Huling streets, just north of the Lorraine. She saw a man in a checkered shirt come running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine. The man jumped into a green 1965 Chevrolet just as a police car drove up behind him. He gunned the Chevrolet around the corner and up Mulberry past Catling’s house, moving her to exclaim, "It’s gonna take us six months to pay for the rubber!" The police, she said, ignored the man and blocked off a street, leaving his car free to go the opposite way.

I visited Catling in her home, and she told me the man she had seen running was not James Earl Ray. "I will go into my grave saying that was not Ray, because the gentleman I saw was heavier than Ray."

"The police," she told me, "asked not one neighbor [around the Lorraine], ‘What did you see?’ Thirty-one years went by. Nobody came and asked one question. I often thought about that. I even had nightmares over that, because they never said anything. How did they let him get away?"

Catling also told me that from her vantage point on the corner of Mulberry and Huling she could see a fireman standing alone across from the motel when the police drove up. She heard him say to the police, "The shot came from that clump of bushes,"’ indicating the heavily overgrown brushy area facing the Lorraine and adjacent to Fire Station 2.

The crime scene: A 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official James Orange was read into the record. Orange said that on April 4, "James Bevel and I were driven around by Marrell McCollough, a person who at that time we knew to be a member of the Invaders, a local community organizing group, and who we subsequently learned was an undercover agent for the Memphis Police Department and who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency.. . . [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King’s leg dangling over the balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It couldn’t have been more than five to ten seconds. The smoke came out of the brush area on the opposite side of the street from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up from the bushes over there. From that day to this time I have never had any doubt that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King’s life, was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the derelict buildings.

"I also remember then turning my attention back to the balcony and seeing Marrell McCollough up on the balcony kneeling over Dr. King, looking as though he was checking Dr. King for life signs.

"I also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o’clock, that all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut down and cleaned up. It was as though the entire area of the bushes from behind the rooming house had been cleared. . . .

"I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation.

"When I tried to tell the police at the scene as best I saw they told me to be quiet and to get out of the way.

"I was never interviewed or asked what I saw by any law enforcement authority in all of the time since 1968."

Also read into the record were depositions made by Solomon Jones to the FBI and to the Memphis police. Jones was King’s chauffeur in Memphis. The FBI document, dated April 13, 1968, says that after King was shot, when Jones looked across Mulberry Street into the brushy area, "he got a quick glimpse of a person with his back toward Mulberry Street. . . . This person was moving rather fast, and he recalls that he believed he was wearing some sort of light-colored jacket with some sort of a hood or parka." In his 11:30 P.M., April 4, 1968, police interview, Jones provides the same basic information concerning a person leaving the brushy area hurriedly.

Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 AM. on April 5, Stiles told the jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans "requiring assistance clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot near the site of the assassination. I called another superintendent of sanitation. He assembled a crew, went to the site, and cleaned up the site in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner under the direction of the police department." Stiles identified the site as an area overgrown with brush and bushes across from the Lorraine Motel.

Within hours of King’s assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.

The rifle: The rifle that government authorities have maintained is the murder weapon was found the night of April 4 in the Main Street doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company, one block from the Lorraine. It was dropped accidentally, they say, by Ray just before he jumped in his white Mustang and drove to Atlanta. The 30.06 Remington Gamemaster rifle was held up at the witness stand by Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over two years of hearings into the evidence concerning the rifle. "It is my opinion," he told the jury, "that this is not the murder weapon."

"Sixty-seven percent of the bullets from my tests," Brown said, "did not match the Ray rifle." He added that the unfired bullets found wrapped with it in a blanket were metallurgically different from the bullet taken from King’s body, and therefore were from a different lot of ammunition. And because the rifle’s scope had not been sited, Brown said, "this weapon literally could not have hit the broad side of a barn."

Circuit Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr. of Birmingham, Alabama, testified that he had been Ray’s attorney in 1968 (before Foreman) and had interviewed Guy Canipe, owner of the Canipe Amusement Company and a witness to the dropped bundle that included the rifle and unfired bullets. That dropped bundle was crucial to the case against Ray. Hanes said that Canipe (now deceased) provided "terrific evidence": "He said that the package was dropped by a man heading south on Main Street about ten minutes before the shot was fired."

When I spoke with Judge Hanes after the trial about the startling evidence he had received from Canipe, he commented, "That’s what I’ve been saying for 30 years.

The mysterious Raul: In a 1995 deposition by Ray that was read to the jury, Ray told of meeting a man named Raul in Montreal in the summer of 1967, three months after Ray had escaped from a Missouri prison. According to Ray, Raul guided Ray’s movements, gave him money for the Mustang car and the rifle, and used both to set him up in Memphis.

Andrew Young and Dexter King described their meeting with Jowers and Pepper at which Pepper had shown Jowers a spread of photographs, and Jowers picked out one as the person named Raul who brought him the rifle to hold at Jim’s Grill. Pepper displayed the same spread of photos in court, and Young and King pointed out the photo Jowers had identified as Raul. (Private investigator John Billings said in separate testimony that this picture was a passport photograph from 1961, when Raul had immigrated from Portugal to the U.S.)

The additional witnesses who identified the photo as Raul’s included: British merchant seaman Sidney Carthew, who in a videotaped deposition from England said he had met Raul (who offered to sell him guns) and a man he thinks was Ray (who wanted to be smuggled onto his ship) in Montreal in the summer of 1967; Glenda and Roy Grabow, who recognized Raul as a gunrunner they knew in Houston in the ‘60s and ‘70s and who told Glenda in a rage that he had killed Martin Luther King; Royce Wilburn, Glenda’s brother, who also knew Raul in Houston; and British television producer Jack Saltman, who had obtained the passport photo and showed it to Ray in prison, who identified it as the photo of the person who had guided him.

Saltman and Pepper, working on independent investigations, located Raul in 1995. He was living quietly with his family in the northeastern U.S. It was there in 1997 that journalist Barbara Reis of the Lisbon Publico, working on a story about Raul, spoke with a member of his family. Reis testified that she had spoken in Portuguese to a woman in Raul’s family who, after first denying any connection to Ray’s Raul, said that "they" had visited them. "Who?" Reis asked. "The government," said the woman. She said government agents had visited them three times over a three-year period. The government, she said, was watching over them and monitoring their phone calls. The woman took comfort and satisfaction in the fact that her family (so she believed) was being protected by the government.

A broader conspiracy: Carthel Weeden, captain of Fire Station 2 in 1968, testified that he was on duty the morning of April 4 when two U.S. Army officers approached him. The officers said they wanted a lookout for the Lorraine Motel. Weeden said they carried briefcases and "indicated they had cameras." Weeden showed the officers the roof of the fire station. He left them at the edge of its northeast corner behind a parapet wall. From there the officers had a bird’s-eye view of Dr. King’s balcony doorway and could also look down on the brushy area adjacent to the fire station.

Former CIA operative Jack Terrell testified by videotape that his best friend, J. D. Hill, had confessed to him shortly before Hill’s death that he had been a member of an army sniper team in Memphis assigned to shoot "an unknown target" on April 4. After training for a triangular shooting, the snipers were taking up positions in a water-tower and two buildings in Memphis when their mission was suddenly canceled. Hill said he realized the next day that the team must have been part of a contingency plan to kill King if another shooter failed.

Douglas Valentine said that while researching his book The Phoenix Program (1990), on the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence program against Vietnamese villagers, he talked with veterans in military intelligence who had been redeployed from Vietnam to the domestic front. They told him that in 1968 the army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group kept Martin Luther King under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Its agents were in Memphis April 4. Valentine wrote in The Phoenix Program that they "reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, took aim, fired and walked away."

Cover-up: Walter Fauntroy, Dr. King’s colleague and a 20-year member of Congress, chaired the subcommittee of the 1976-78 House Select Committee on Assassinations that investigated King’s assassination. Fauntroy testified in Memphis that in the course of the HSCA investigation "it became apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces." He discovered electronic bugs on his phones and TV set. When Richard Sprague, HSCA’s first chief investigator, said he would make available all CIA and FBI records, he became a focus of controversy and media attacks. Sprague was forced to resign. His successor made no demands on U.S. intelligence agencies.

Such pressures contributed to the committee’s ending its investigation, in Fauntroy’s words, "without having looked at all the evidence." Its formal conclusion was that Ray assassinated King, that he probably had help, and that the government was not involved.

When I interviewed Fauntroy in a van on his way back to the Memphis Airport, I asked about the implications of his statements in an April 4, 1997, Atlanta Constitution article. The article said Fauntroy now believed "Ray did not fire the shot that killed King and was part of a larger conspiracy that possibly involved federal law enforcement agencies," and added: "Fauntroy said he kept silent about his suspicions because of fear for himself and his family."

Fauntroy told me that when he left Congress in 1991 he had the opportunity to read through his files on the King assassination, including raw materials that he’d never seen before. Among them was information from J. Edgar Hoover’s logs. There he learned that in the three weeks before King’s murder the FBI chief held a series of meetings with "persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence in the Phoenix operation in Southeast Asia." Fauntroy also discovered there had been Green Berets and military intelligence agents in Memphis when King was killed. "What were they doing there?" he asked.

When Fauntroy had talked about his decision to write a book about what he’d "uncovered since the assassination committee closed down," he was promptly investigated and charged by the Justice Department with having violated his financial reports as a member of Congress. His lawyer told him he could not understand why the Justice Department would bring up a charge on the technicality of one misdated check. Fauntroy said he interpreted the Justice Department’s action to mean: "Look, we’ll get you on something if you continue this way. . . . I just thought: I’ll tell them I won’t go and finish the book, because it’s surely not worth it."

In an interview after the trial, former MPD detective Ed Redditt told me his testimony before the HSCA had been a "total farce." Redditt was subpoenaed by the committee to testify about being removed from his surveillance post across from the Lorraine Motel two hours before the murder. Redditt said he was grilled by the committee for eight straight hours in a closed executive session. His public testimony the next day "was a set-up." When he arrived for the hearing, he was ushered into a room and shown a book with his testimony’s questions and answers already set in print.

"So in essence," said Redditt, "what they were saying was: ‘This is what you’re going to answer to, and this is how you’re going to answer.’ It was all made up -- all designed, questions and answers, what to say and what not to say. A total farce."

Coretta King explained her family’s purpose in pursuing the lawsuit against Jowers: "This is not about money. We want the truth documented in a court of law. My family and I have wanted to see and know the truth, and to heal the nation."

Dexter King, the plaintiff’s final witness, said the trial was about why his father had been killed: "The same thing is still happening. It can happen to anybody. If the state doesn’t like what you’re saying, you will be dealt with -- not as in China overtly but covertly."

To the question, "What do we do about this?" he answered, "We are looking to get the truth out. We have never been interested in a criminal prosecution. Nonviolent reconciliation works. If we’re saying we’re willing to forgive, why can’t others?" When pressed by Pepper to name a specific amount of damages for the murder of his father, Dexter King said, "One hundred dollars."

The jury returned with a verdict after two and one-half hours. Judge James E. Swearengen of Shelby County Circuit Court, a gentle African-American man in his last few days before retirement, read the verdict aloud. The courtroom was crowded with spectators, almost all black.

"In answer to the question, ‘Did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King?’ your answer is ‘Yes."’ The man on my left leaned forward and whispered softly, "Thank you, Jesus."

The judge continued: "‘Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?’ Your answer to that one is also ‘Yes."’ An even more heartfelt whisper: "Thank you, Jesus!"

David Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said later: "We can look back on it and say that we did change history. But that’s not why we did it. It was because there was an overwhelming amount of evidence and just too many odd coincidences.

"Everything from the police department being pulled back, to the death threat on Redditt, to the two black firefighters being pulled off, to the military people going up on top of the fire station, even to them going back to that point and cutting down the trees. Who in their right mind would go and destroy a crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very, very odd."

I drove the few blocks to the house on Mulberry Street, one block north of the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum). When I rapped loudly on Olivia Catling’s security door, she was several minutes in coming. She said she’d had the flu. I told her the jury’s verdict, and she smiled. "So I can sleep now. For years I could still hear that shot. After 31 years, my mind is at ease. So I can sleep now, knowing that some kind of peace has been brought to the King family. And that’s the best part about it."

What Rembrandt Saw

Rembrandt’s Eyes

By Simon Schama



In this lavish new book, Simon Schama explores the boisterous, dynamic, capitalist society of 17th-century Holland through the eyes of the artist who, more than any other, has become synonymous with its vividly expressive pictorial culture. This biography of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) provides the pretext for a wide-ranging discussion of an era ripe with invention in science, economics and the arts.

The title of the book, printed on the dust jacket over a close-up of one of Rembrandt’s many penetrating self-portraits, alludes to the power of sight itself, a recurring metaphor (along with its opposite, blindness) both in Rembrandt’s work and in Schama’s elucidation of it.

Bisected by religious and political conflict in the 16th century, the Low Countries were divided into the Southern Netherlands, an appendage of Catholic Spain with Flanders at its heart, and the United Provinces or Dutch Republic, a newly minted, Protestant, entrepreneurial oligarchy whose growing pains sometimes seem uncannily predictive of our own. Determined to enjoy (but not too much) the fruits of their labors, the growing middle class of Dutch burghers, merchants, traders and manufacturers filled their tidy town-houses with art that celebrated their personal dignity and accomplishments, the humid sweep of their lowland countryside, and the miraculous bounty of Indonesian spices, Chinese porcelains, tropical fruits, Persian carpets, Venetian glass and other luxuries made available through the expertise of their merchant fleets.

Patronage of the arts, converted by Protestants from a privilege of the church to a thriving private enterprise, became a means for displaying personal success and civic virtue. Rembrandt participated in this consumer paradise as artist, art dealer and collector of exotic artifacts that often lend picturesque credibility to his biblical subjects. As Schama notes, the dagger used to puncture the hero’s eye in the Blinding of Samson, one of Rembrandt’s most dramatic history paintings, is a Javanese kris. The golden goblets, sparkling jewels and authentic, right-to-left Hebraic script in Belshazzar’s Feast bespeak a far-ranging curiosity about the world beyond.

Schama takes a celebratory and sensory excursion through Rembrandt’s milieu, lavishly describing the sights, sounds and smells of the studio and the street, as well as the political and religious climate that surrounded Rembrandt as he climbed the ladder of artistic success. Born in the conservative university town of Leiden, Rembrandt spent his mature years in the bustling capital city of Amsterdam. Dutch artists often gained financial success by specializing in subjects that suited the tastes of their bourgeois clientele. (Vermeer, for instance, painted primarily scenes of everyday life.) Rembrandt developed two specialties: portraits that made their sitters look both distinguished and vividly alive, and dramatic history paintings that probed the emotional heart of familiar biblical themes.

More than a third of Schama’s book is devoted to another artistic giant, Pieter Paul Rubens, who far surpassed Rembrandt in fame and wealth, and whom Rembrandt must have considered both an archrival and a potent role model. Rubens, wealthy citizen of Antwerp in the Southern Netherlands, painter to kings and queens across Europe, was revered by Rembrandt’s generation as the epitome of success among artists north of the Alps.

Art historians have long been intrigued by Rembrandt’s appropriation of certain Rubensian themes and pictorial types, but Schama makes this the centerpiece of his argument, as if the primary motivating force of Rembrandt’s career was to imitate, emulate and eventually get the better of Rubens. This picture of the Dutch artist’s dependence on his Flemish forbear (Rubens was almost 30 years Rembrandt’s senior) exaggerates the evidence and contradicts Schama’s other insistent claim: that Rembrandt should be recognized as an unparalleled genius. That assessment was widely held in the 19th century, but has been somewhat abandoned by recent scholars.

Schama also argues for Rembrandt’s intellectual accomplishments, again presenting the learned Rubens as a role model. For the reader, the value in this fixation on Rembrandt’s relationship to Rubens is that it leads to a historical digression on the conditions surrounding the Dutch revolt from Spain, in which Rubens’s father played a minor diplomatic role. By this means, Rembrandt’s Eyes becomes not just a picture of Rembrandt’s environment but a capsule history of its origins.

Schama frequently pauses to describe and analyze specific works by Rubens and Rembrandt. He comments on telling nuances of subject and style, spinning rich interpretations from minutely observed details. Rembrandt’s portrait of the Mennonite preacher Cornelis Claesz Anslo and his wife, Aeltje Gerritsdr Schouten, seated at home as Anslo practices an oration, becomes for Schama an example of Rembrandt’s "astounding capacity for transforming the ordinary into the sublime." The still life of Bible and candle is "a high altar" on which "books . . . are not mere heaps of parchment and paper. The pages stir, rise and flutter with light and life. The books, like Ezekiel’s dry bones, respire. The Word lives."

This poetic description incorporates an essential principle of both Mennonite and mainstream Protestant thought: the supremacy of word over image, a prejudice that Dutch painters in general and Rembrandt in particular countered by imbuing their portraits and historical subjects with the visual equivalent of sound. Anslo’s parted lips and emphatic gesture almost make it possible, as the Dutch poet Vondel wrote, for the viewer to hear the preacher’s voice.

As he often does, however, Schama overextends and trivializes his argument, interpreting the composition, with Anslo at its elevated center, as a portrait of a marriage in which the domineering husband "leans heavily toward his wife, benevolently overbearing, just short of bullying," while Aeltje, "her head slightly cocked like an obedient pet or a contrite child," patiently accedes to his diatribe. The handkerchief crumpled in her hand attests to what "hard work" it is to be "perpetually on the receiving end of the Word."

For this viewer, however, and I think for anyone aware that Mennonite belief valued both the outer and the inner word, it seems entirely possible that Rembrandt intended Aeltje (whose status in the composition was diminished when the canvas was cut down by a later owner) to appear genuinely moved by her husband’s speech, and by the deep faith that binds them together. Decorum and good business sense make it unlikely that Rembrandt would have painted paying customers in a way that was less than flattering. Certainly, for Rubens and his aristocratic patrons, portraiture was essentially a celebration of its subject, seldom a critique.

While Schama emphasizes Rembrandt’s struggle to surpass Rubens, it is the differences between their lives and careers that illuminates the complexities of life in the Netherlands. Rubens, born into a privileged diplomatic family and graced with a humanist education, was fluent in several languages, conversant with Greek and Latin literature, and on friendly terms with an international network of intellectuals and connoisseurs. (Schama delights in the juicy gossip surrounding Rubens’s youth, when his father was accused of having an affair with the wife of his noble employer, William of Orange.) An early sojourn in Italy imbued Rubens’s style with the grandeur and vivacity of Titian and Michelangelo, and exposed him to the wonders of the classical past.

Rembrandt was the son of prosperous, middle-class mill owners in Leiden, where he attended college for a short time before dropping out to apprentice as a painter. He never left Holland, and scoured the markets for paintings and prints by the old masters.

As Rubens’s growing reputation brought him commissions from the courts of Spain, England and elsewhere, his distinguished demeanor enabled him to engage in diplomacy, often using painting assignments for royalty as a cover for conducting delicate negotiations between courts. The surfeit of commissions awarded to Rubens was managed by a businesslike outfit in Antwerp, where specialist assistants in landscape, costume, flora and fauna collaborated to produce large-scale panels and canvases that were ultimately certified as Rubenses by the final enlivening touch of the master’s hand.

Rembrandt’s interactions with his patrician patrons are characterized, as far as documents show, by squabbles over late payment and complaints about likeness and lack of finish. He, too, managed a busy workshop, but seems to have run it less as an assembly line than as an association of colleagues.

By the time Rembrandt began to attract notice in Amsterdam, Rubens was spending a golden maturity in his palatial house in Antwerp, designed by his own hand to rival the palazzi of Genoa and Venice. He strolled in the garden with his lovely second wife, Helena Fourment (whom he married when she was 16 and he 53), and benignly surveyed the progress of their four children (the fifth was born soon after his death, in 1640, at 63).

All this is vividly reimagined, yet the contextual differences between the two men are blurred by Schama’s presumption that Rembrandt’s goal was, essentially, to become another Rubens. Ultimately, the two artists and their output reflect divergent environments: one the international milieu of Roman Catholic cathedral and aristocratic palace, the other the Protestant, middle-class marketplace of Amsterdam.

In film and fiction, Rembrandt has long embodied the archetype of the profligate, rags-to-riches genius who willfully defies expectation in both art and life. He is depicted as making and losing a fortune, shocking his straitlaced patrons by having an affair with his housekeeper, and painting in a style too unconventional for his contemporaries to appreciate. While recognizing that the legend of Rembrandt’s plebian origins and self-destructive lifestyle is largely a romantic exaggeration, Schama preserves the picture of an artist who, although never deliberately flouting convention, delighted in pushing the envelope.

The greatest crisis of Rembrandt’s life after the death of his wife in 1642 came in the mid-1650s, when financial mismanagement pushed him into bankruptcy. Schama immerses us in the atmosphere of gathering doom, taking us through the rooms of Rembrandt’s house as 30 years’ accumulation of precious possessions are carted off to the auction block. Ultimately, this was as much a moral disaster as a financial one, since Rembrandt’s Calvinist patrons regarded material wealth as a sign of God’s favor, good stewardship of one’s assets as an ethical necessity, and bankruptcy as a sin.

By the time Rembrandt reached maturity, the Inquisition’s persecution of Anabaptist and Protestant heretics had long ceased in northern Europe, as had any real hope of Spain’s reconquering the rebellious provinces of the Netherlands. The religious controversies that occupied Rembrandt’s Dutch contemporaries were internal debates among Calvinist factions -- the conservative Reformed establishment against the more liberal Arminian or Remonstrant sect that favored free will over predestination, and peace -- a policy also good for business -- over continued war against Catholic Spain.

As Schama notes, Rembrandt’s move from Leiden to Amsterdam took him from a bastion of Reformed conservatism to a polyglot capital in which the Remonstrants dominated politics and mercantile pragmatism made it sensible to tolerate anyone who offered a good deal, whether Mennonite, Jew, millenarian or Calvinist -- anyone, that is, except Roman Catholics, who were required to practice their faith in clandestine sanctuaries disguised within private homes.

Rembrandt, like many other artists, treated subjects that suited each of these faiths, often by crafting versions that cut across confessional boundaries. While his patrons included Calvinists, Remonstrants, Catholics and Jews, Rembrandt was not, as far as we know, an active churchgoer himself. His spirituality reveals itself best in his art, arguably the greatest body of work ever produced by a Protestant painter. Like many of his contemporaries, he read the Bible frequently and internalized its lessons. Especially popular among Protestant art buyers were Old Testament themes, such as Samson and Delilah or the prodigal son.

Schama’s analyses of Rembrandt’s paintings of biblical subjects (as well as of Rubens’s commissions from Oratorians, Jesuits and other Catholic factions) reflect a sound knowledge of the visual and doctrinal traditions that shaped them. He illuminates Rembrandt’s acute sensitivity to the essential pathos and drama that make these stories both entertaining and profound moral lessons, Rembrandt’s wonderfully earthy depiction of the fall in an etching of 1638 is revealed as innovative in its rejection of the classical ideal yet firmly grounded in the medieval tradition, "which had imagined Adam and Eve not as smoothly sculpted by the hand of Divinity but rather as roughly fashioned, grotesque vessels of shame."

When discussing themes or circumstances that invite a leer or chortle, like Rubens’s penchant for modeling his female saints on buxom blondes or the baroque taste for sexually charged subjects like Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (a "tug of war" between Joseph’s virtue and the "gross sensual appetite" of his mistress), Schama’s tone can be vexingly flip. He closes the book, however, with a commentary on the profundity of Rembrandt’s last works, including the Return of the Prodigal Son, left on the artist’s easel at his death in 1669 and completed by a pupil. In this painting, which has inspired the meditations of Henri Nouwen and so many others, Schama finds "the dying, phosphorescent flare of Rembrandt’s deathbed vision." The painting returns to the leitmotif of vision, blindness and spiritual insight, as the forgiving father delivers "the balm of grace with . . . lids closed and . . . arms outstretched."

Schema’s book is an entertaining read, though its multitude of details may strike readers as self-indulgent. The careful reader will come away knowing the leaders of the seven angelic choirs, the variety of dialects spoken on the streets of 17th-century Amsterdam, the specific pigments that compose a Rembrandt portrait, the type of acid used to destroy Rembrandt’s Danaë in the Hermitage (one of the most egregious acts of cultural vandalism in recent memory) and the methods used by early modern surgeons to excise gallbladders and cataracts.

Whether one finds Schama’s verbal pyrotechnics amusing, annoying, brilliant or poetic, his work offers much to stimulate both intellect and imagination.

Emerging God

Theologians are paying attention to strange recommendations about theology from financier John Templeton -- and not just because Templeton has the resources of a large foundation behind his ideas. Templeton is interested in "spiritual information," or as Christians might express it, information about God and God’s actions in the world. His controversial idea is to obtain new spiritual information by linking theology much more closely to natural science. This strategy would lead us to concentrate on areas of the human intellectual quest where new information is becoming available, where knowledge is increasing. In our current situation that means looking to the sciences as allies in theological endeavors. How does this risky move influence speculation about the nature of God?

The Templeton program involves tracing out the speculative lines suggested by the most recent breakthroughs in natural science. Natural science, or its predecessor natural philosophy, has always served as a framework for conceiving God -- or for dispensing with the concept of God, as the case may be. Consider a few examples. As Augustine realized, Plato’s forms needed to be located somewhere, and the mind of God was the natural place to put them. Thus Augustine could argue that, since any successful science requires the existence of forms, there must be a God to eternally think them. No God, no science.

Aristotelian science, dominant in the West for nearly 1,500 years, also required a God, at least according to St. Thomas’s masterful interpretation. Consider the famous doctrine of the "four causes." From Aristotle to (roughly) Galileo, "to do science" meant to discover the four causes of a thing. The forms or "formal causes" require a divine mind in which they can be located. Assuming that matter, or the material cause of a thing, is not eternal, it must be created -- and by God, of course. Efficient causes -- the sculptor who transforms a block of marble into a statue of Athena -- exist as separate from God but since they are contingent, they too require God as their ultimate cause. The final cause or goal toward which everything develops is God, for God must be the one who brings about the final outcome of the earthly process in accordance with the divine aims. Again, it seemed, if there’s no God, there’s no science.

Even as late as the 18th century, Isaac Newton offered a compelling line of speculation that appeared to lead from science to God. If it worked, the science of his day would still provide "spiritual information" about the nature of God. Newton’s laws seemed to account for the interactions of all bodies in the universe. Yet, as Newton realized, applying these laws required an ultimate, unchanging framework of "absolute space" and "absolute time" within which bodies moved. This framework could be located only within God as the eternal object of God’s thought -- or at least it could exist only with the concurrence of God’s will and as a reflection of the divine nature. So Newton’s laws, the greatest insight in the history of physics, appeared to communicate something of the nature of God.

Connecting science or "natural philosophy" and theology became progressively more difficult as the modern era progressed, however. Beginning shortly after Newton and continuing until recently, most of the dominant scientific models left little room for the sort of theological connections we have been considering. The explosion of scientific knowledge, the predictive accuracy of mathematical physics, the emergence of evolutionary science based on random variation rather than on purpose, the controlling paradigm of reductionism, the dominance of materialist explanations and assumptions -- all of these developments made science-based theological speculations difficult and, in the eyes of many, impossible. (For the story of the modern warfare between science and theology see the works of John Hedley Brooke.)

But within the past few decades, we have seen an important new opening for science-based reflection on the nature of God. The concept of emergence, and with it the new field of emergence studies, has gathered momentum, giving rise to new speculation about God. What can we conclude about the nature of God based on these new sciences?

In one sense it’s a truism to note that things emerge. Once there was no universe and then, after the Big Bang, there was an exploding world of stars and galaxies. Once the earth was unpopulated and later it was teeming with primitive life forms. Once there were apes living in trees and then there were Mozart, Einstein and Gandhi. But the new empirical studies of emergence move far beyond truisms. A growing number of scientists and theorists of science are and theorists of science are working to formulate fundamental laws that explain why cosmic evolution produces more and more complex things and behaviors, perhaps even by necessity. Especially significant for religionists, they are also arguing that the resulting sciences of emergence will break the stranglehold that reductionist explanations have had on science.

These scientists turn our attention to "the laws of becoming": the inherent tendency toward an increase in complexity, self-organization, and the production of emergent wholes that are more than the sum of their parts. Perhaps, many suggest, it’s a basic rule or pattern of this universe that It gives rise to ever more complex states of affairs, ever new and different emergent realities. (See Stuart Kauffman’s Investigations and Harold Morowitz’s The Emergence of Everything.) Assume that these theorists are right and that it is an inherent feature of our universe to produce new types of entities and new levels of complexity. What might this fact tell us about the existence and the nature of God?

Traditional theology looked backward: It postulated God as the cause of all things. Emergentist theology looks forward: it postulates God as the goal toward which all things are heading. Moreover, if God stood at the beginning and designed a universe intended to produce Jesus, then God would have to use deterministic laws to reliably bring about the desired outcomes. Where the deterministic processes, on their own, are insufficient to produce a theologically acceptable world, God would have to intervene into the natural order, setting aside the original laws in order to bring about a different, nonlawlike outcome. Divine action then becomes the working of miracles, the breaking of laws; and God becomes, paradigmatically, the being whose nature and actions are opposed to nature. This opposition of God and nature has been disastrous.

Emergence, in contrast, suggests a very different model of the God-world relationship. In this model God sets in motion a process of ongoing creativity. The laws are not deterministic laws but "stochastic" or probabilistic: although regularities still exist, the exact outcomes are not determined in advance. More and more complex states of affairs arise in the course of natural history through an open-ended process. With the increase in complexity new entities emerge -- the classical world out of the quantum world, molecules and chemical processes out of atomic structures, simple living organisms out of complex molecular structures. Then come complex multicellular organisms, societies of animals with new emergent properties at the ecosystem level, and, finally conscious beings who create culture, use symbolic language -- and experience the first intimations of transcendence.

Conceived according to the model of emergence, God is no longer the cosmic lawgiver. The result is a far cry from Calvin’s God, who must predestine all outcomes "before the foundation of the world." Instead, God guides the process of creativity. God and creatures together compose the melodies of the unfolding world, as it were, without preordaining the outcome. Emergentists note that this God must rejoice in the unfolding richness and variety apparently willing to affirm the openness of the process and the uncertainty of particular outcomes. On this model God’s finite partners are the sum total of agents in the world, and all join in the process of creation. In Philip Hefner’s beautiful phrase, we become "created co-creators" with God.

Finally, in the emergence model God does not sit impassively above the process, untouched and unchanged by the vicissitudes of cosmic history. Instead, there must be emergence within God as well. God is affected by the pain of creatures, is genuinely responsive to their calls, acquires experiences as a result of these interactions that were not present beforehand -- all ideas familiar to readers of process theology (or Jürgen Moltmann’s The Cruel God). Ultimately, is not such a picture of God closer to the biblical witness than the distant God-above-time of classical philosophical theism?

Emergence-based reflection on the nature of God challenges the separation between God and world. Panentheism, a major school of late20th-century theology, argues that the world is more correctly understood as located within the divine being than as separate from it. (See In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being, edited by Arthur Peacocke and Philip Clayton.) Panentheists, who reflect on the scientific evidence and explore the intimate interdependence of God and world, conceive the world as "within" God and God as "in, with and under" all existing things(to adapt Martin Luther’s language for the sacraments).

Does all this mean that the transcendence of God will be lost and the divine will be completely "immanentized"? Such was the claim of Samuel Alexander in Space, Time and Deity: as the world gradually develops more and more complex structures, it becomes more Godlike. In such a view, "divinity" is a property that the world develops in the course of emergent evolution. There is no longer a transcendent God, only an emerging, fully immanent one.

Some may wish to go this far, but emergence in the natural world does not require it. As a theological model, panentheism is responsive to the emergentist turn yet able to preserve a basic (and highly desirable) feature of traditional theology the transcendence of God. For panentheists, the world is in God, but God’s also more than the world. Fundamental differences in the natures of the two remain: God is necessary, the world contingent; God Is eternal, the world limited in duration; God is infinite, the world finite; God is by nature morally perfect, the world -- well, that one is obvious.

Then there are the social and political implications of emergentist panentheism -- the dimension that for many is the strongest attraction for the position. The first Implication is that a doctrine of God Inspired by emerging scientific models is speculative rather than dogmatic, not fixed in stone but open to new information and revisions. It is a dialogue partner in the political process, not a final authority or arbiter of all truth. Moreover, a God who is intimately involved in the world, responsive to its joys and its suffering, can never be apathetic to the injustices in the world. If each of us is in some sense "within" the divine, then our striving for justice is itself part of the unfolding purposes of God.

There is no moral triumphalism here, however. The mystery of evil is pervasive: how can God allow evil actions when these now take place not "at the far ends of the earth" but within the divine being itself? No less decidedly, however, emergentist panentheism also testifies to the mystery of grace. Somehow the divine love is such that it even tolerates imperfection within itself -- presumably because, due to some metaphysical necessity beyond our ken, it is not possible to create finite, limited agents without their engaging in actions that are imperfect, short-sighted, self-serving. For panentheists, the fact that evil exists in societal structures and in our very souls is not an invitation to quietism, but rather a clarion call to action. Since we live "in, with and under" the divine presence, It behooves us to do everything within our power to make the world around us reflect more clearly the divine source and presence to which it owes its very existence.

Recent Classical/Process Dialogue on God and Change

Contemporary reflection on the theme of God and change is divided into two quite diverse schools or traditions. On the one hand, process philosophers have made important advances under the inspiration of the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, while on the other a group of thinkers has pursued the developmental implications of the classical Christian doctrine of God as Trinity.1 Normally these two discussions proceed with little cognizance of or interaction with one another. This relative silence is unfortunate, since the two conversations clearly hold potential for significant cross-fertilization and mutual inspiration.

A recent collection of articles has broken the usual silence. The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg focuses on the work of one of the handful of trinitarian theologians who have dialogued extensively with American process thought. The contributions by the three process thinkers -- David Polk, John Cobb Jr., and Lewis Ford -- provide a clear statement of the options, positive and negative, in this dialogue, and Pannenberg’s responses bring the discussion one step further. In what follows I evaluate these three recent process interactions with Pannenberg. Using them as a basis. I then consider the state of -- and prospects for -- classical/process theological dialogue in the light of four central themes: being and becoming, the question of personal identity, the part/whole relationship, and the Trinity.

I.

In his contribution, "The All-Determining God and the Peril of Determinism," David Polk explores the meaning of God as the "all-determining power" in Pannenberg’s system.2 The question of power is a difficult one, as Polk shows: if Pannenberg overemphasizes God’s control, he falls into the morasses of determinism alluded to in Polk’s title; conversely, "the freedom of the other" must be "genuinely authenticated" (TWP 159).

Polk paints the decision as one between hard and soft determinism. In hard determinism "God is interpreted as fully constituting what emerges in history" (emphasis added), hence as the only locus of control. By contrast, soft determinism can allow for many real agents acting in history, even though "God finally decides what those emergent realities ultimately mean, what their essence is" (TWP 162). As Polk continues, it becomes clear that he interprets Pannenberg as having in fact already opted for hard determinism: for Pannenberg, whatever happens in history has always already been true in God’s eternity; whatever emerges will turn out to have been true all along. Ultimately, Pannenberg holds to a "changeless eternal co-presence" of God (TWP 167), which entails hard determinism.

Polk’s article correctly zeroes in on one of the major challenges that Pannenberg’s doctrine faces: how to preserve the real openness of the future in light of his insistence on a completed and changeless immanent Trinity, a final eschaton, and the primacy of the future? In Polk’s analysis, theism and soft determinism are best wedded by a process conceptuality. By implication, Pannenberg too must accept a Whiteheadian conceptuality if he is to avoid the unwanted and unacceptable fall into hard determinism. Polk’s own proposed reconciliation is to suggest that God may will, through love, to allow humans to decide their own becoming; God may determine to allow other-determination (TWP 163f). This option maintains human freedom without challenging the divinity of God for Christian theologians.

In his response in the volume, Pannenberg embraces the suggestion that God chooses to give to creatures "some degree of self-determination"; he finds the idea inevitable and views it as "not actually a concession" on his part (TWP 322). But, he claims, God’s causal influence from the future is a retroactive influence that is in principle different from any determinism. However, Polk has remained unconvinced by the contention that a Bestimmung (determination? influence?) from the future might not be determining in the same way that, say, causal determinism from the past would be.3 To advance any further, their discourse would need to turn to the nature of God’s future causality. Since Polk seems willing to grant future causality, there is room for progress here; still, these questions remain unaddressed in Polk’s present piece.

On the question of the nature of God, there seems to be little prospect of achieving conceptual rapprochement. At the same time, such agreement is clearly a necessary condition for classical/process consensus regarding exactly how this God acts from the future. Polk’s notion of God emphasizes features drawn from Whitehead’s consequent nature of God, whereas Pannenberg appeals to the unity of the immanent and economic Trinity as grounds for denying that there is ultimately development in God. That is, Pannenberg denies real divine development on the premise that God’s actions in history directly mirror (or are the outworking of) God’s own eternal being. One notes a significant conceptual distance between Pannenberg’s immanent/economic Trinity and Polk’s "divine adventure, full of novelty and uncontrolled twists and turns even for God" (TWP 167). The only basis for agreement here would be if an immanent-economic unity that takes place in the future could be shown to be equivalent to a becoming God in the present. But Polk does not give us much reason for optimism on this score.

John Cobb Jr. is also concerned with the freedom question. In his article, "Pannenberg and Process Theology," he states the crucial stumbling block: Whitehead’s acceptance and Pannenberg’s rejection of the open-endedness of an infinite future. For Whitehead there is closure in each moment and hence no need for a final future; for Pannenberg the meaning of any present moment can only be settled by a still outstanding future. Cobb insists that Pannenberg’s stance poses insuperable difficulties for the freedom of the creation. Actual occasions are the final arbiters over what they will become, though the valuation by future occasions remains open. If the future decision of God is constitutive for the actual being of individuals, it is hard to see how they are free to choose their own fate. Once again, the debate turns on the nature of the influence exercised by this God of the future. If we are "collectively destined" for God’s kingdom, then divine rule already exercises ‘determinative efficacy" and human freedom becomes ipso facto impossible (TWP 67).

In order to reach consensus with Cobb, Pannenberg would have to grant that future determination by God allows for "formal freedom" in the present, viz, that creatures "could have acted otherwise" (TWP 69). But the German theologian has made it clear that he will not go this far. Further, he and Cobb wish to stress very different aspects of the freedom issue: Pannenberg "would rather focus on the phenomenon of conscious choices" (TWP 329), while Cobb’s interest lies with the "much subtler decisions that characterize life from moment to moment" (TWP 69). Phenomena of consciousness are not ultimate for the process thinker -- the goal is a metaphysical framework that treats conscious and nonconscious entities in a unitary manner. This metaphysical disagreement gives rise in turn to a theological one: will the actual occasion or the future God be the ultimate source of determining what the actual occasion is? The only way that Pannenberg could appropriate Whitehead’s analysis would be to affirm a doctrine of personal becoming which stresses individual concrescence more and ascribes a less important role to consciousness, especially consciousness of the whole of history. Yet it is clear from his recent metaphysics book that this is a move Pannenberg is still unwilling to make (MG, esp. chap. 3).

At its base, Pannenberg’s compatibility (of divine all-determination with human responsibility) stems from the unique nature of a determining activity that has its locus in the future. This move depends, obviously, on an acceptable defense of future causality, which in turn points us back toward the question of the nature of this God of the future: is the trinitarian tradition an adequate way of conceptualizing God? How are we to construe God’s influence or rule? Both thinkers give a central place to divine influence in time, hence to the importance of history for God, and both agree that human self-determination always takes place within narrow limits (e.g., TWP 63). However, such peripheral agreements do not amount to a shared understanding of God and change.

The articles by Cobb and Polk, then, do not offer much ground for effecting a meeting between the two traditions. The tenor of Cobb’s article is a regretful but firm acknowledgement that his work and that of Pannenberg have not, after twenty-five years of contact, achieved significant overlap. Polk’s suggestion of a self-limiting on the part of the all-determining God Pannenberg accepts as compatible with his understanding of God’s power as love; still, in other respects the conceptual foundations of their two doctrines of God appear to diverge widely.

The situation is somewhat different with Lewis Ford, whose article in the collection, "The Nature of the Power of the Future," continues his long-term effort to forge a bridge between Whitehead and Pannenberg.4 The crux of Ford’s project is to reconceive God as pure becoming and the source of all becoming (creativity, novelty). This corrective to Whitehead is consistently carried out in Ford’s suggested modifications. Thus eternal objects are to be understood as abstractions from the "real possibilities" that are contained in God as Creativity (TWP 84n24), belief in an end of history is compatible with Whitehead when interpreted subjectively as the unification of all experience in God at a particular time, and a process God could even be said to "create" the world -- "from" the future, as Pannenberg also holds -- if this means "determining [the] role and significance [of each individual act] in the unity of the final whole" (TWP 86).

Each of these modifications is fueled by the shift to a God of becoming rather than of being. A "God of the future" in Ford’s sense is the source of all possibility; indeed, by an act of projection or objectification on our part, we may even conceive of God as appearing to us as this possibility. For Ford, God gives rise to and is influenced by the process of becoming in history, yet does so without taking away the freedom of the creation. Moreover, Ford’s shift to becoming has no trouble with (a type of) future causality since, like Pannenberg, he too inverts the order of causality normally found among existing things, that is, from past to present. In this new theory of becoming, the future is that which is fully indeterminate now but will become progressively determinate as it moves from future (undecided) to past (decided, determined).

However, even Ford’s article in the volume does not actually claim to achieve a fusion between process metaphysics and classical trinitarian theology. The body of his paper moves a significant distance in this direction, with its series of statements of compatabilities between a modified Whitehead and Pannenberg. But Ford’s appendix, in which he defends Whitehead against eight objections by Pannenberg, provides evidence that deep disagreements still remain. In the following section 1 would like to explore four of these remaining disagreements -- if not to overcome them, at least to define them more clearly.

II.

(i) Being and Becoming. The ontological task that Whiteheadians and Pannenberg share is to establish a relationship between being and becoming. I worry that Ford’s approach, which treats the two as radically disparate realms, will have difficulty providing a unitary metaphysical account of how the contact and reconciliation of the two principles can actually take place. Surely, all other things being equal, it would be preferable to reconceive being in terms of process or becoming, rather than to concede it to the proponents of static ontological categories and to settle on pure becoming instead.

The classic theories of becoming in the history of philosophy, at any rate, have not treated becoming in abstraction from being. To mention just two: for Aristotle becoming meant generation, or the "movement" from nonbeing to being. Such a metaphysics, though not successful in introducing development into being, at least correctly locates becoming as an important locus of ontology, namely as involved in those peculiar movements Aristotle called generation and corruption. The study of ontology cannot be carried out without attention to the beginning and final end of beings (onta). Building on Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel introduced becoming, almost at the outset of the System, as the category that synthesizes being and nonbeing, in which their difference is both transcended and preserved (aufgehoben). This early incorporation of becoming provides the core of a dynamic ontology which -- in principle if not in Hegel’ s actual practice -- could be adequate for conceptualizing human subjectivity, natural change, and the pervasiveness of historical development

The views of both Aristotle and Hegel are motivated by the need to bind becoming and being. Indeed, the inadequacy of any final dichotomy should make itself felt at both extremes: being without becoming is left an empty category, inapplicable to most things which are (Seiende), since they are in the mode of being-in-change. Likewise, becoming without being remains inapplicable, for we can only apply the concept when we can conceptualize something as becoming. This constraint applies most pressingly to God. Hence Pannenberg contra Ford: "it still seems unavoidable (as long as one is not an atheist) to admit that God ‘is’ becoming" (TWP 326, emphasis added).

Now there is a viable response to this line of argument: suppose we reserve the term becoming exclusively for the transition from nonbeing to being. We can then sharply distinguish the change that existing things undergo from genuine becoming, referring to the former as simple process or change. Under this view, becoming connotes only the nontemporal process by which something that does not yet exist comes into existence.’ Since something "is" only at the last (nontemporal) moment of this transition from nonbeing to being, the argument continues, we should expect that being and becoming will tend to dichotomize: when something is becoming, it is not yet and when it exists, it has already become.

Still, I fear that the transition view alone is not sufficient. How is the verbal notion of becoming to be related to beings the substantive? Here I prefer Hegel, who weds Being with Becoming in the first triad of his System. Likewise, Whitehead’s strength is to construe God’s being, and ours, as fundamentally in process: I am a new instance of becoming, a new concrescence, at every moment. The brilliance of the theory of actual occasions is precisely this implication that our being lies in becoming. Classical theists can appropriate this insight, while insisting in return that what occurs is being.

(ii) The Question of Personal Identity. If we add the Whiteheadian societal reconstrual of personal identity to the problematic explored in (i), the alleged harshness of the being/becoming dichotomy may be further mitigated. There are deep continuities between the "I" that became a moment ago and the "I" that becomes now; I2 inherits a much larger set of initial data from I1 than it does from distant or discontinuous events, since I1-I2 forms a particularly significant thread in the relevant nexus of inheritance. Whitehead writes, "An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors (PR 350/531). Nonetheless, despite the close links, each one of these atomic "l’s" remains a unique culmination of a process of becoming: it is in the same determinate sense that any past fact (datum) is what it is for the duration of history. Likewise, according to Hartshorne, God as an actual occasion is at the completion of each process of becoming (thereby becoming a datum for all future occasions), though the society of occasions that we label God shows development or change.

With this argument we have reached another central metaphysical difference between Whiteheadian and Pannenbergian theism6 Pannenberg has rejected the Whiteheadian treatment of God in favor of a metaphysic that lays greater stress on consciousness. He may eschew the German Idealists’ belief in the ultimacy of the category of subjectivity, along with their insistence that the subject can be self-creating or hold itself in existence without any supernatural foundation (MG 47ff). Yet he still defends (something like) their concept of subjectivity as a basic requirement for maintaining the personhood of God. We have here a sort of recapitulation of the battle between Hume and Kant. Whitehead offers us a variant on the Humean notion of the self as a bundle of instances -- though he of course provides a metaphysical account of the becoming of each instance where Hume took them as ultimates of experience. Kant, by contrast, found It necessary to posit a transcendental unity of apperception to account for the phenomenon of self-consciousness and for our awareness of identity through time. For Pannenberg, of course, this transcendental unity will lie not in the present but in the future. Still, Pannenberg shares with the idealists an insistence on an enduring, developing, subjective center of self-consciousness to ground ontological identity through time: each "I" is a numerically identical subject of experience persisting through many temporal moments.

The Humean and idealist approaches are two of the major competing options for a theory of personal identity in modem philosophy. Their differences cannot be ignored, and I am unable to synthesize them into a single view. At best, I suggest, they can be viewed as two complementary ways of conceptualizing the individual. There are contexts in which we want to speak of an individual existing through time -- certainly our subjective experience prompts us to speak in this manner. Whitehead’s view, in contrast, does justice to the strict demands of the concept of identity: two things are only identical when they are exactly the same.7 A person at two different moments of time is not the identical person; he or she should therefore be understood as composed of many different occasions, and as "one person" only by extrapolation.

I tend to side with Pannenberg’s "loose" sense of identity -- continuity through time of an individual -- as phenomenologically more adequate: it does express the subjective sense of sameness through time of which persons are aware. However, the task which the Whiteheadian critique poses for Pannenberg is to specify a framework for grounding the real metaphysical identity of individuals, given his criticisms of the idealist project (e.g., MG 45). He clearly means to accomplish this metaphysical task via a final eschaton, that future reconciling of time and eternity in which a whole is formed that can give meaning to all moments of history. For Pannenberg, there is an important sense in which this future reconciliation has already been accomplished in Christ.

By contrast, I wish to treat it now only as a standard or goal. The final point at which the identity of all individuals will be both constituted and revealed is at present only a posit or regulative principle of reason, which we treat as if (in hopes that?) it will one day become an actual reality. In both cases it provides a point of reference for determining that individuals are not yet who they will become; they are not yet completed or self-identical.8 Note that the regulative view stands closer to Ford’s position. The divine aim seeks to unify the various temporal contents into one final unity, although the success of that project is at present unclear. Indeed, even the language for discussing a final future remains projective, possibly fictive.

(iii) The Part/Whole Relationship. One difficulty with Pannenberg’s theory of identity through time lies in his understanding of the part/whole relationship on which it depends. Pannenberg wishes to ascribe primacy and objectivity to the concept of the whole. Present anticipation of a final whole at the end of history is central to his ontology, his theory of truth, his doctrine of God -- in brief, to his entire project.9 Emphatically, for him it is only an objective ontological whole that can give meaning to each historical moment -- that is, can determine what each object really is.

Ford’s view is similar in several respects. It also allows for some type of final unification of all moments, for God’s experience constitutes "the unity of the final whole." As we saw, Ford is even willing to label this final unity an eschaton -- although the term final may convey overtones of absolute finality that are dissonant with his broader process position. The status of his synthesis remains unclear to me, however. The final unity must remain subjective: it is the subjective whole of God’s "final" valuation. But Ford’s is not ultimately a metaphysics of subjectivity; what is ultimately real are individual actual occasions. This leaves Ford’s "eschaton" with a decidedly secondary ontological status: can it be anything more than one arbitrarily chosen moment in the continuing subjective experience of God? Either God’s valuation is less real than the data that it unifies (if viewed as an element of the process of concrescence) or, if fully real, it is such only as a datum that is available for future occasions or future moments of God’s experience. Finally, God is not now complete, so any valuations in the present are preliminary. If God does anticipate God’s final valuation, it can only be as wish or hope.

These concerns notwithstanding, I continue to resist Pannenberg’s alternative conception as well. The primacy of the whole, the conceptual unification of all particulars, is undoubtedly a central goal for any systematic philosopher. We can observe this search for a unifying principle at work in the history of philosophy, developing from Thales’ water, Plato’s Form of the Good, and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, through most of medieval and early modern philosophy, and on to the objective anticipation of the final whole around which Pannenberg centers his system. But after the deadends and Holzwege encountered during 2,500 years of metaphysical reflection, the requirements for an adequate unifying principle are staggering. Consequently, the system ideal, like the notion of personal identity sketched in (ii), is perhaps better viewed as a regulative principle guiding philosophical reflection than as a philosophical reality that we can appropriate and elucidate in the present. 10 If we interpret the system ideal in this way, we will find ourselves, per necessitatem, building up from the parts in the effort to construct larger and larger coherent theories and sets of theories, in a manner reminiscent of Nicholas Rescher’s "coherence machinery."11 However, there is no clear sense in which the whole would be prior to the parts in this case, except in the guise of a guiding ideal or lure that motivates the endeavor.

(iv) The Trinity. The final classical/process conflict is perhaps the most serious of all, viz, the apparent incompatibility of trinitarian and non-trinitarian notions of God. Reacting to criticisms from classical theologians, Pannenberg has given increasing attention to the doctrine of the Trinity, and now makes it the pivotal point of his entire systematic theology (GST 2, chaps. 3-5; ST). In developing his position, he ascribes to "Rahner’s Rule," the equivalence of the immanent and economic Trinity. 12 In other words, an adequate trinitarian theology cannot develop a notion of God’s actions in history that is incompatible with its claims about God’s own eternal nature.

If God acts in real response to events in time, then, it seems, there must be some place for change in the immanent Trinity as well. Yet for Pannenberg Rahner’s Rule does not necessitate belief in a becoming God, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. The economic Trinity, God acting in history, is always -- Pannenberg would say: will always have been -- the God who was before and will be after time, the immanent Trinity. The trinitarian relationships within God are eternal relationships, though they are also the actual relationships that we see manifested in God’s actions in history. In short, the ontological movement in Pannenberg’s thought must be said to be from God’s internal nature to a description of God’s actions in history. For the classical theologian, the theology of the immanent Trinity must finally set the constraints for any claims made about the economic Trinity.

But there is no place within a Whiteheadian conceptuality for this sort of trinitarian God. Whitehead obviously does not see himself constrained to incorporate or even draw on the New Testament and church councils, be their conclusions trinitarian or otherwise. Instead, where the classical theologian begins with the actions of the three persons in history, Whitehead sets out from a specification of the single (though dipolar) essence of God. Moreover, for Whitehead God must be conceptualized in conformity with other beings. The God who reacts to a set of initial data at a given moment is simply the divine occasion that emerges from that process of concrescence -- and likewise for all other moments. Since no other actual occasion is trinitarian, there can be no place in Whiteheadian metaphysics for a divine three-in-one. 13 By contrast, God for the classical theologian is fundamentally trinitarian; the Trinity is the beginning and end of all reflection on God and the heart of theology.14

III.

Given these radically distinct treatments of the four themes, will not any parallels that emerge between (e.g.) Whitehead and Pannenberg have to be mere analogies or coincidences rather than substantive metaphysical agreements? Not necessarily -- as long as we find a common commitment to systematic reflection, interaction with the metaphysical tradition, and mutual interest in the themes here discussed: God and change, time, becoming, identity. As long as these criteria are satisfied, there is the possibility of reciprocal internal criticism.

Consider the question of the Trinity. A variety of problems have been raised from a classical Christian perspective regarding non-trinitarian conceptions of God, including the problems of creation, salvation, divine self-consciousness, God’s relation to the eternal ideas and to Creativity, and religious adequacy. Likewise, process thinkers have helped to expose serious difficulties with trinitarian thought. Critics have always worried about conceptualizing the unity in three, of course, but also about the relationship between God prior to creation and the God who acts in history. If the economic Trinity is not essentially one with the immanent trinity, then it is not the preexistent God who in fact acts in history; if they are one, we face (e.g.) the paradox of saying that the human individual Jesus was really in God prior to the creation of the world. The only prospect for progress on these issues depends on the existence of effective and mutual criticism of inadequate positions.

For example, Pannenberg insists that we take as our starting point the three persons who are implicated in Christian revelation and expounded in the early creeds, rather than beginning with a single essence or any theory of the unity of God. But will this methodology not inevitably separate theology from philosophy? Of course, Pannenberg requires that theology not insulate itself; but this requires only that it hold its claims up to philosophical scrutiny. It apparently does not mean that theology must begin with a theory of the essence of God as a philosopher would. When theology does expose its traditional doctrines to criticism in this manner, Pannenberg admits, the results are not all rosy. The task of showing both the unity and the separateness of the immanent and economic Trinity is "in the general theological discussion so far unsolved"; in fact, to show the unity of the trinitarian God "has formed the central problem of Christian trinitarian theology" since the fourth century (ST 362,370). Christian theologians’ continuing difficulties, and Pannenberg’s humility about his own efforts at a solution, provide a continued opening for input from process-metaphysical options.

Pannenberg has been an effective critic of process thought, as both Cobb and Ford acknowledge in their articles. He has raised important internal difficulties with process theism (PS 14/1: 21-30), and argued for increased attention to the task of synthesizing Whiteheadian and other process conceptualities. The state of metaphysical discussion would be healthier if Whiteheadians became equally as effective at raising internal criticisms of recent work in the classical tradition. Philosophy of science provides an interesting analogy here. Whitehead and Pannenberg do not work from within a single paradigm, with only a few "puzzles" to be solved to make them compatible, as in T. S. Kuhn’s "normal science." Nor will the decision between them be made for us by a decisive falsification instance -- either of Whitehead’s atomism or of Pannenberg’s trinitarianism -- à la Karl Popper; metaphysics simply does not work that way. Instead, we have two competing research programs, each with its own fundamental intuitions and program of inquiry to pursue, as in Imre Lakatos’s philosophy of science.15 Only "over the long haul" can we judge which will be more progressive more able to handle the classical challenges raised by the entire history of metaphysics, by dialogue with existing religions (Christian and otherwise), and by the experience of contemporary religious believers.

In conclusion, despite my insistence on the irresolvability of these two models, in Pannenberg and in Ford’s modified Whitehead we do find a narrowing of the gap. There is some agreement on the primacy of the future as the place where the required unity is achieved: in Pannenberg’s case, the unity of immanent and economic Trinity; in Whitehead’s case, the unity of the primordial and consequent natures of God; for Ford, the unity of final becoming or emergence. The God who thus emerges is a different God in each case. Still, the locus of emergence is the same. And many of the qualities of this God -- temporality, responsiveness to the world, the granting of freedom to creation, the effecting of unity through a subjective unification of the parts (data) available to God -- are in fact shared by the various approaches. If process and trinitarian conceptualities do not in fact overlap, at least they share many of the attributes and part of the philosophical framework that underlies them. This fact allows for continued dialogue and the possibility of change, compromise, critique. That any full mediation remains future should not surprise thinkers who have made the category of the future central to their thought.16

References

GST -- Wolfhart Pannenberg, Grundfragen systematischer Theologie. 2 vols.

Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967, 1980. (David Polk is currently preparing a translation of vol. 2 for Westminster Press.)

MG -- Wolfhart Pannenberg. Metaphysik und Gottesgedanke. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988. (The English translation, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, will be published by Eerdmans in 1990.)

ST -- Wolfhart Pannenberg. Systematische Theologie, vol. 1. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988.

TWP -- The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg: Twelve American Critiques. Ed. Carl E. Braaten and Philip Clayton. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988.

 

Notes

1See Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being is in Becoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976)/and God as the Mystery of the World, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1980); Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), and God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985); Robert Jenson, The Triune Identity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).

2Polk’s full-length treatment of the subject is now available; see David P. Polk, On the Way to God: An Exploration into the Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Washington: University Press of America, 1989).

3For instance, after reading Pannenberg’s response to his criticisms, Polk reiterated them, without modification or retraction, at the 1988 American Academy of Religion meetings in Chicago (Pannenberg session).

4In addition to his article in the present volume, see e.g., "A Whiteheadian Basis for Pannenberg’s Theology," Encounter 38 (1977): 307-17; "A Dialogue About Process Philosophy" (with Wolfhart Pannenberg), Encounter 38 (1977): 318-24; "God as the Subjectivity of the Future," Encounter 41 (1980): 287-92; ‘The Divine Activity of the Future," Process Studies 11/3 (Fall 1981): 169-79; and "Creativity in a Future Key," in New Essays in Metaphysics, ed. Robert C. Neville (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), pp. 179-97.

4In general this seems to be the assumption that underlies Ford’s position. Cobb gives a helpful exposition of a related idea on p. 62.

6The difference may be even more pronounced in the case of Lewis Ford, who renounces the notion of God as a society of divine occasions in favor of a single everlasting concrescence which is imprehensible (personal correspondence).

7Whitehead’s position could be defended on other grounds as well: e.g., it gives us a single type of experience for all existing things; it provides a single metaphysical basis for the natural and social sciences; it stresses the difference between the becoming of a not-yet-existing occasion and the relations between existing things.

8Indices of Pannenberg’s full position on this matter can be found in GST 2, chap. 3, "Person und Subjekt," and in his Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew O’Connell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985).

9See Pannenberg, "The Significance of the Categories ‘Part’ and ‘Whole’ for the Epistemology of Theology," trans. Philip Clayton, Journal of Religion 66 (1986): 369-85 (forthcoming in the English translation of MG); and Clayton, "Anticipation and Theological Method," in TWP 122-50. For an excellent exposition of this concept of anticipation, see Lothar Kugelmann, Antizipation. Eine begrffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986).

10See Philip Clayton, "Being and One Theologian," The Thomist 52 (1988): 645-71.

11See Nicholas Rescher, The Coherence Theory of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973).

12For an excellent exposition of Pannenberg’s position on this issue, see Roger Olson, "Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Doctrine of the Trinity," Scottish Journal of Theology 42 (1989).

13See Lewis Ford, "Process Trinitarianism," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43 (1975), e.g., p. 207.

14I have not been able to interact here with the two important articles by Joseph Bracken, SI., on process philosophy and trinitarian theology (PS 8/4: 217-30 and PS 11/2: 83-96). Particularly important is his proposed equation of the Thomistic act of being with Whitehead’s Creativity (PS 11:86). As Bracken’s concluding appeal to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics makes clear, no one is claiming that Whitehead intended PR to be read in a trinitarian fashion. As a suggested modification of Whitehead, then, Bracken’s new position offers an intriguing framework for wedding Whitehead and trinitarianism -- for those who are interested in doing so. It is hard to discern that many process thinkers are interested in the marriage, however: To convince them that they ought to be, or even what it would mean to say that they ought to be, is a daunting task, and one that I have not undertaken here. Probably the answer is: only if historical Christianity can be made (philosophically, ethically, politically) attractive to modem readers through efforts such as Pannenberg’s Systematische Theologie.

15See e.g., Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, ed. John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978). I expand Lakatos’s work into a general theory of rationality in Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), chap. 2.

16 I have profited from discussion with Steven Knapp and Wolfhart Pannenberg during work on this article, and from extensive and constructive written criticisms by Lewis Ford.

Biology Meets Theology

Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human history.

 By Holmes Rolston. Cambridge University Press,

Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy.

 By Michael Ruse. Prometheus.

Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action Series (Vol. 3).

 Edited by Robert J Russell, William Stoeger and Francisco Ayala.



When conservative Christians take a stand against evolutionary theory, everyone notices. When biologists such as Richard Dawkins or E. O. Wilson claim that evolutionary biology excludes faith, disproves God or shows how much human beings are like other primates, the religious community becomes irate and newspapers spread the story across their front pages.

But the real work on evolution and faith is being done by two sets of scholars whom the popular press would rather ignore. One group consists of Christians who are attempting to combine the idea of God’s providential design with evolution. The other is made up of non-believing or agnostic biologists who eschew radical anti-religious claims in favor of sober assessments of genetic influence. The books by Holmes Rolston and Michael Ruse and the collection of essays edited by Robert Russell, William Stoeger and Francisco Ayala represent the best recent thought of both camps.

Rolston, whose mediating position is signaled by his book’s subtitle, is one of the sober and intelligent Christian voices in the discussion. He cares deeply about preserving the non-biological aspects of culture, ethics and religion. He searches for the "brooding Spirit of God" in the world, and believes that religion is about "the finding, creating, saving, redeeming of. . . persisting sacred value in the world."

Yet Rolston is willing to embrace the results of the scientific study of the biological world: "This has been Darwin’s century, and we have more understanding than any people before us of the evolutionary natural history by which we arrived," he states. Our genetic makeup results from an evolutionary process; we share most of our genetic structure with other animals, particularly with the higher primates; and this genetic code influences vast areas of human behavior, The strength of the influence results in the strong pull to "naturalize" and "socialize" the domains of culture, ethics and religion. Yet Rolston finds good reasons for rejecting a reduction of these domains to natural causes. Biological evolution, he proclaims, leaves room for religious truth.

Is Rolston’s apologetic successful? Consider his central arguments. One is that cultural history rises above genetic influences: "With the coming of humans there appears the genesis of ideas; encultured thereafter, ideas are perennially generated and regenerated." For him biology and culture are ultimately separate, parallel aspects of the human person: "The self is not simply biological and somatic but cultural and ideological," he argues. "The self is expansive and finds an entwined destiny with many other persons. Cultural evolution renders genetic evolution relatively powerless. "One does not have to have Darwin’s genes to be a Darwinian, or Jesus’ to be a Christian."

The notion that our biological equipment is "like a computer hardware, as a given to work with," is crucial for Rolston’s case against genetic determinism. An extremely large number of software programs can be run on a given piece of hardware. You can use your home computer to write about shagging or Shakespeare, to play games or search the heavens, to buy stocks or solve differential equations. The same degree of freedom, Rolston contends, characterizes the whole realm of human culture and thought.

Though some have argued that ethics and values have their roots in evolution, Rolston thinks that only religion puts them in an adequate context. Ethics involves altruism, the placing of the interests of others above one’s own. Many biologists have found the animals sometimes behave altruistically. Indiscriminate altruism -- acting for the good of all and not merely for those who carry our genes -- contributes to a healthy society, and thus, indirectly, to biological fitness. But Rolston maintains that altruism and other forms of ethical behavior must be measured not only for their biological survival value but also for their contribution to the flourishing of culture. Morality is emergent: our species has risen from "is" to "ought." In the end, Rolston insists, the "ought" that is basic to ethics cannot be derived from the descriptive "is" of biological research. To be a person is to be "moral, valuable, and evaluating." Only the language of transcendence can grasp the human mind, which is able "to reach truths about realms that it does not inhabit, extrapolating and reasoning from the realms it does."

In making his case for Christianity, Rolston’s starting point is our ability to transcend ourselves, our social or historical context and even our biology. This, he states, is strong evidence in support of religion and of a personal, transcendent God. Ralston argues not only that theism has a positive biological function for human culture and survival, but also that there is good reason to regard it as true. Tribal religions are "nonexportable" (and therefore false?); "only the universalist synoptic creeds have proven exportable, globally functional, because they speak to the common condition of humankind."

The fertility of the idea of God and the fact that a biological species could produce such an idea need to be explained; for Rolston, the only adequate explanation is the actual existence of God. The evolution of biology and culture demonstrate that "there is a Ground of Information or an Ambiance of Information otherwise known as God." God is a "countercurrent to entropy, a sort of biogravity that lures life upward. . . . God introduces new possibility spaces" into human existence. Rolston is cautious about presenting God as a miracle worker or regular causal force in the world, but he is optimistic about demonstrating a God who gives meaning to the world.

Christians will of course want Rolston’s project to succeed. A natural theology that makes God the best explanation of biological evolution would eliminate both atheistic naturalism and the antiscientism of creationism. But is Rolston’s picture too easy, too good to be true?

Consider how Rolston’s arguments look from the standpoint of Ruse, a leading moderate theorist of evolution. According to Ruse’s view, Rolston bias failed to take Darwin seriously. Ruse argues convincingly that culture is not parallel to biology. It is not a relatively independent sphere built on top of its biological basis, like software running on hardware. Instead, research has shown that the biological constraints on culture are much more pervasive and influential than Rolston’s allows. The type of language we produce is determined by our mouth and throat structure; the mental categories we use are either responses to our environment or reflections of our own physiological structure (as in the case of color categories); and our interaction with our physical environment is our only means for establishing which of our beliefs are true. Truth and biological survival are, Ruse insists, the closest of allies.

The strict "bottom up" model of determination by our genes -- a model passionately advocated by Dawkins -- may have been replaced by the more complex model, according to which nongenetic factors influence gene expression and thus behavior. But, Ruse insists, though the circle may be broader than the "gene reductionists" believe, it still starts and ends with gene expression. Brains do not evolve and then function as a sort of tabula rasa, molded and formed by culture. Rather, humans are born with highly structured brains, hormonal and behavioral dispositions, and strong tendencies to think and behave in particular ways -- all of which bear the mark of our evolutionary history.

The same holds true for ethics. Though the specific ways we formulate our ethical principles are not totally determined by their genetic basis, we cannot load just any ethical software onto our biological hardware, To take an obvious example, if a given population accepted a moral injunction against sexual intercourse (and its substitutes), it would have no more than a one-generation life span. Ruse’s string of examples fall into two categories: those that underscore biological constraints on ethical positions, and those that trace biological influences on ethical beliefs. Thus Ruse connects the universal taboos against sexual relations between siblings with the biologically based tendency for people raised in the same house to lose sexual interest in each other.

In general, "epigenetic rules giving us a sense of obligation have been put in place by selection, because of their adaptive value." In the end, "morality is a function of (subjective) feelings"; we just think that morality must be something more because "we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity." Our brains and bodies -- and the genetic coding that transmits these patterns to our offspring -- are able to increase our chances of survival "by filling us full of thoughts about obligations and duties"; that is, we survive better "because we think morality is something laid upon us." But any sense that obligations are something more, something transcendent or "real," is an illusion.

What is true of ethics applies with a vengeance to religion, First, the same constraints hold sway: when religious beliefs and practices conflict with biological survival, they and their holders will soon find themselves decisively selected against. Strong lines of influence run from our survival needs as a species to the sorts of religious beliefs we form. Religious belief is not like the content we type into our word processors, which is presumably unaffected by whether we are using a Mac or a PC.

Biological factors may not determine our doctrine of the Trinity or our particular theory of the Eucharist, but they do affect the sort of beliefs and practices that tend to be developed and preserved within successful religious communities. Think, for example, of the links between the physiological characteristics of bread and wine, the social role that these two foodstuffs have played, and the religious use to which Christianity has put them.

In many ways Ruse remains a moderate. His most recent book, Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?, challenges the claim made by radical evolutionists like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett that Darwinism counts against theism and makes religious practice absurd. Ruse believes that biological evolution leaves open the question of the ultimate meaning or purpose of the universe. Religious beliefs just might be true. Still, his argument is the antipode to Rolston’s theistic evolution. For Ruse, Darwinian evolution is sufficient unto itself; it doesn’t need any support from God, and it certainly doesn’t by itself provide the direct evidence for God’s existence that Rolston hopes to find.

How can one mediate this dispute? Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action provides a sober assessment of what can and cannot be discovered at the interface of biology and theology. These essays are part of a ten-year project cosponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, seeking to rediscover a place for divine action in a scientific age. The book exhibits neither Rolston’s optimistic exuberance nor Ruse’s dogged insistence on the explanatory power of Darwinism. Its moderate stance, technical (occasionally highly technical) argument and cautious inferences are an effective response to Rolston and Ruse’s sometimes overstated conclusions.

Most of the essayists don’t think that the emergence of order, design, culture or religion in the natural world can be the basis for an argument that there is a divine purpose to the universe. In "Evaluating the Teleological Argument for Divine Action," Wesley Wildman challenges all attempts to use evolutionary biology either to prove or to disprove theism. Wildman’s analysis of the limitations of teleological (purpose-based) arguments, when combined with the careful summaries of the scientific data by Ayala, Cela-Conde and Chela-Flores, sound a powerful cautionary note to Rolston’s apologetic project. Though biology and theology don’t occupy separate worlds, neither are they bosom buddies. Evil, as in the massive deaths of individuals and species within biological evolution, is a weighty negative counterbalance to Rolston’s positive interpretation (see the essay by Thomas Tracy, "Evolution, Divine Action, and the Problem of Evil").

The most helpful positive argument in this volume may be Paul Davies’s "Teleology Without Teleology: Purpose through Emergent Complexity." Davies notes that the laws of physics are responsible for the emergence of ever higher orders of organized complexity within the natural world. Each of these orders represents the emergence of a genuinely new type of reality. Ruse is right that complexity appears gradually, and only through the evolutionary process. Still, what results is something new in the natural order: cells; organisms that strive to exist and to reproduce; ecosystems in which living things exist in complex interdependence; and, in the higher primates, complex modes of thought leading, eventually, to consciousness. With consciousness come moral beliefs, rational arguments and self-awareness. Perhaps most surprising of all, consciousness is accompanied by the preoccupation with transcendence -- with God, freedom and immortality -- that characterizes our species.

Had he done justice to this pattern of emergence, Ruse would have been more hesitant about basing ethics and knowledge on Darwinian principles alone. Influence "from below" is undeniable; but emergence forces us also to acknowledge that rationality and ethics -- and perhaps religion -- depend on metabiological factors as well. It’s not a big step from this insight to the recognition of a basic "directionality" to the evolutionary process, as William Stoeger describes it. If there is "purposiveness without purpose" in natural history, then the Christian language of divine guidance and care may find at least a handhold within the biological sciences.

The essays in this volume represent the real cutting edge in discussions between Christianity and biology. They provide a careful, sober assessment of the biological story in all its complexity. Their story is more ambiguous than Rolston would have it -- though it doesn’t justify conclusions as strong as Ruse’s. Certainly the essays provide an effective answer to antireligious biologists like Dawkins and Dennett, who argue that biological evolution rules out religious belief.

Missing from all three volumes are the acerbic and extremist views that the press loves to trumpet from the street corners. Rolston does not claim that evolution shouldn’t be taught in schools or that it stands opposed to the belief in a revealing and providential God. He considers it an ally -- even if he sails ambitiously beyond the evidence at certain points. Ruse does not claim that Christian beliefs have been falsified by evolution. Instead, he understands that the question of theism is left open by the evidence for evolution -- even if he does go too far in reducing the explanations for religion to biological terms. One can only hope that church people will enter into the debate with the care and reasonableness these authors have shown.

Six Myths About Faith-Based Initiatives

The White House initiative on faith-based social services, widely touted as ushering in a new era of partnership between governments and religious organizations, is based on several myths.

Myth No. 1: Religious organizations face substantial discrimination when competing for government grants and contracts.

Though occasionally some overzealous bureaucrats demand that as a condition of receiving public funds a Catholic hospital must remove its crucifixes, or that the Salvation Army must not use the word "salvation," these instances must be weighed against the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of government grants and contracts received over decades both by large religious social service agencies, such as Catholic Charities or the Salvation Army, and by many smaller religious organizations. Approximately 60 percent of Catholic Charities’ budget, and approximately 20 percent of the Salvation Army’s, comes from government sources.

Before any changes were made by charitable-choice legislation or President Bush’s faith-based initiatives, religious social service providers who wished to maintain a religious atmosphere or religious content in their programs -- and not all, perhaps not even most, wish to do this -- commonly did so openly and with no consequent problems with or interference from the government. In a 1993-94 survey, only a minority (11 percent) of religiously affiliated, government-funded child service agencies reported having to curtail religious activities, and only a minority (22 percent) of publicly funded, religious, international aid agencies reported encountering any sort of problem regarding their religious activities.

Moreover, most, perhaps all, of the activities about which problems were reported were activities such as proselytizing and requiring attendance at worship or at religious instruction that still are prohibited by the "charitable choice" provision included in the 1996 welfare reform legislation and by the "Charitable Choice Expansion Act" recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.

The White House report "Barriers to Participation by Faith-Based and Community Organizations in Federal Social Service Program," released in August, does not change the basic picture. Indeed, this report, its title notwithstanding, mainly documents just how open the current funding system is to religious organizations.

Throughout the report, the facts are at odds with the rhetoric. The report claims that federal officials are biased against religious organizations, but that bias did not stop Habitat for Humanity -- an explicitly religious organization -- from receiving over half of a $20 million funding stream from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Another HUD program is highlighted as an example of outright exclusion of religious organizations from a funding opportunity. This program, which funds residences for the elderly, prohibits religious organizations from being "project owners" but allows them to be "sponsors who initiate a project." But this appears to be a distinction without a difference; in the 35-year history of this program more than two-thirds of the funded sponsors have been religious organizations.

The White House report also cites percentages of various funding streams going to religious organizations as if these numbers by themselves imply that religious organizations are prevented from competing fairly for these funds. In 2000, for example, 21 percent of the Department of Health and Human Services abstinence education funds went to religious organizations.

But it is impossible to assess whether or not this number should be considered problematic without also knowing how many grant applications, and of what quality, came from religious organizations. In the one instance in which such a benchmark is provided the evidence undermines the claim that antireligious bias is pervasive: 2 percent of the applicants for Department of Labor Welfare-to-Work funds were religious organizations, and religious organizations received 2 percent of the grants. The facts, if not the rhetoric, contained in the White House report make it clear that even six months of diligent searching for antireligious discrimination in five federal agencies has not been able to produce compelling evidence that such discrimination is a major, or even a minor, problem.

Myth No. 2: Religious congregations -- churches, synagogues, mosques -- are intensively involved in social service activity.

The intensity of congregational involvement in social services varies greatly. Regarding food programs, for example, congregations may donate money to a community food bank, supply volunteers for a Meals on Wheels project, organize a food drive every Thanksgiving, or operate independent food pantries or soup kitchens. When it comes to housing, congregations may provide volunteers to do occasional home repair for the needy, assist first-time home buyers with funds, participate in neighborhood redevelopment efforts, or build affordable housing for senior citizens. When serving the homeless, congregations might donate money to a neighborhood shelter, provide volunteers to prepare dinner at a shelter, or actually provide shelter for homeless women and children in the congregation’s own building.

Most congregations engage in some social service of this kind, but only a tiny minority actively and intensively engage in such activity. Only 6 percent of congregations have a staff person devoting at least quarter time to social service projects. The median dollar amount spent by congregations directly in support of social service programs is about $1,200, which is about 3 percent of the median congregation’s total budget. In the median congregation, only ten individuals do volunteer work connected with congregational social services. Some congregations intensively engage in social service activity and constitute important social service institutions in their communities, but those congregations are the exception rather than the rule.

Myth No. 3: Religious organizations are better than secular organizations at delivering social services.

Although some studies have been made of religious organizations’ effectiveness, there are very few systematic comparisons between religious and secular organizations doing similar kinds of work. From the studies we have, it appears that religious nursing homes, for example, might be somewhat more effective than secular nursing homes, but religious child care centers appear to be of lower quality than secular nonprofit alternatives.

Few studies have focused on organizations directly relevant for the activities envisioned by charitable choice: those involved in service delivery to the poor or to individuals receiving public assistance. When David Reingold and colleagues compared religious and secular social service agencies in seven Indiana counties, they found the results mixed. On the one hand, the religious organizations are more likely to have tightened client eligibility criteria in response to welfare reform; are less confident about their ability to improve clients’ job skills; and have fewer ties to public funding agencies, to firms that may provide employment opportunities for clients, and to other service providers. On the other hand, the most disadvantaged welfare recipients are more likely to seek assistance from religious than from secular organizations.

In short, we have no basis for assuming that religious organizations in general are likely to be more effective than secular organizations at delivering social services. The most that could be said is that religious organizations may perform better in some arenas and worse in others.

Myth No. 4: Religious organizations deliver services in a more holistic, personal way, focusing on deep transformation rather than short-term solutions.

Recent research on the social services of churches, synagogues and mosques suggests congregations are actually more likely to engage in activities that address immediate, short-term needs than in programs requiring sustained involvement to meet longer-term goals. Housing, clothing and especially food projects are much more common than programs dealing with substance abuse, mentoring or job training. Fewer than 5 percent of congregations have programs in any of these latter areas. By comparison, 11 percent have clothing projects, 18 percent have housing or shelter projects and 33 percent have food-related projects. Eight percent of congregations report providing services to homeless people, although there is substantial overlap between this category of activity and the food, clothing and housing or shelter projects.

Congregations certainly play an important role in many communities’ social service systems, but their role is generally not that of providing holistic or transformational services. This pattern is found in every extant survey.

Moreover, the initial reports from self-conscious and well-intentioned efforts to involve congregations in more holistic kinds of activities, such as mentoring programs, are not promising. Mississippi’s "Faith and Families" program, designed to connect needy families with mentors in religious congregations, proved to be ineffective and is no longer operating. An in-depth case study of a congregation’s mentoring effort in Wisconsin found that people in the congregation experienced great difficulty connecting with and knowing how to help the poor people in the program. This congregation gave up on its mentoring efforts after only seven months, and the larger program of which it was a part, which involved several congregations, folded after three years.

Myth No. 5: Much faith-based social service activity is isolated from the world of secular and government-funded social service and needs to be better integrated into larger community social service systems.

A recent national survey of congregations found that collaboration with other organizations already is the norm for faith-based social services. Eighty-four percent of congregations that engage in social services do so in collaboration with other organizations; 59 percent collaborate with a secular organization; 20 percent collaborate with a government agency.

Studies of religious social services beyond congregations also show that collaboration with secular nonprofits and government is the rule. Many church-based soup kitchens, for example, depend on food from secular food banks and on city grants to pay for cooks and drivers. Churches often are key players in this system -- commonly providing physical space to feed people and volunteers to serve the meal -- but there seems to be little need for special efforts to bring them into partnerships that are already the norm. Far from toiling alone and unsupported, the vast majority of faith-based efforts already occur -- and in many ways depend upon -- collaboration with secular non-profits and government.

Myth No. 6: The new faith-based initiative is likely to involve new kinds of religious organizations in publicly funded social services.

Which congregations are likely to take advantage of potentially expanded opportunities to receive public funds for social services? Three patterns are evident. First, large congregations are considerably more likely to express interest in seeking government funds.

Second, and perhaps most important, a congregation’s racial composition is by far the most powerful predictor of willingness to apply for government funds. In one, two-thirds of the African-American congregations surveyed expressed a willingness to apply for government funds compared to only 28 percent of predominantly white congregations. Taking into account other congregational features, predominantly black congregations are five times more likely than other congregations to seek public support for social service activities. In at least one state that has actively encouraged religious organizations to apply for public funds, black churches have been much more likely than white churches to do so.

Third, Catholic and liberal or moderate Protestant congregations are significantly more likely to apply for government funds in support of social service activities than are conservative or evangelical congregations. Forty-one percent of congregations in liberal or moderate Protestant denominations said they would be willing to apply for government funds, compared to 40 percent of Catholic congregations and only 28 percent of congregations in conservative or evangelical denominations. Furthermore, when informants were asked to classify their congregations as liberal-leaning, conservative-leaning or middle-of-the-road, those identified as theologically and politically conservative are significantly less likely to express willingness to apply for government funds, and this is true even after controlling for denominational affiliation and other characteristics.

What’s significant about these data is that the larger and more liberal religious organizations already are the most likely to be involved in social service and other kinds of community activity. And African-American churches already are more likely to be engaged in certain key types of social services, such as education, mentoring, substance abuse, and job training or employment assistance programs. Far from bringing new types of religious organizations into the social service arena, the faith-based initiative is likely to reach the congregations already active in this area.

Despite the questionable assumptions that have fueled recent government efforts to support faith-based organizations, it appears these efforts will continue, and may even escalate. If so, several aspects bear watching.

One troubling prospect is that the faith-based initiative, rather than simply remove discrimination against religious organizations, will give them a privileged status. As pointed out above, there is little evidence of substantial discrimination against religious organizations applying for government funds. Efforts to alter the status quo could end up tilting the playing field toward religious organizations.

One way this could happen is through the creation of grant programs for religious organizations only, as in California’s recently launched program designating up to $5 million for religious organizations’ employment assistance programs. Similarly, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services created a $4 million fund to support prevention of substance abuse and HIV infection, and initially limited applicants to religious organizations or organizations collaborating with religious organizations. The California initiative is being challenged in court, and the DHHS initiative was changed, after it was publicized, to expand eligibility.

Another way religious organizations may be favored in public-funding competitions would be through the easing of regulations for religious organizations, exempting them from the accreditation requirements, incorporation procedures or discrimination laws by which other recipients of public funds must abide. More subtle still, government agencies may publicize funding opportunities particularly among clergy or religious organizations, offer grant-writing or accounting assistance specifically to religious organizations, or establish a "faith-based liaison" to grease the wheels of grant applications. All this, arguably, would constitute favoring religious organizations rather than removing discrimination against them.

Other aspects of the initiative also warrant close scrutiny. How much change will be attempted and accomplished through administrative rather than legislative action? How much change depends on state and local action rather than federal action? To what extent will this initiative, even if it succeeds in changing funding patterns, simply shift resources from some organizations to others without increasing either the quantity or the quality of services provided?

If we are going to assess the progress, potential and limits of the faith-based initiative, we will have to be diligent in looking beyond the rhetoric for answers to these questions.

Are We ‘Bowling Alone’ — And Does it Matter?

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

By Robert D. Putnam. Simon & Schuster.

The phrase "bowling alone" -- the title of an article Robert Putnam published in 1995 in a relatively obscure academic journal -- quickly became shorthand for the arresting claim that civic engagement is in decline. Putnam’s point was that though we may be bowling as much as we used to, we are much less likely to be doing it in organized leagues. The article did not, of course, rest mainly on bowling statistics. It pointed to evidence of declining participation in a variety of civic arenas -- politics, churches, labor unions, parent-teacher organizations and fraternal organizations.

As civic participation in these arenas declined, Putnam claimed, so did America’s stock of social capital -- the connections between people that foster cooperation and trust. To be sure, social capital can be used malevolently -- to restrict employment opportunities for those outside one’s own group, for example, or to battle real or imagined enemies, But because it also serves as a resource for many benevolent activities, we should be concerned about its decline.

Many commentators found Putnam’s original article unpersuasive. By focusing on formal membership in organizations such as the League of Women Voters, the Boy Scouts and the Elks, critics said, Putnam overlooked other, newer lands of civic engagement that have compensated for the decline in these particular organizations. Declining church attendance may be offset by increased participation in small support groups. Perhaps shrinking membership in the League of Women Voters and the Shriners is offset by membership gains in the Sierra Club or the American Association of Retired Persons. Bowling leagues may be dwindling, but what about the soccer explosion? Putnam, the criticism went, mistook change for decline. The vessels through which Americans channel their civic engagement may be different, but the overall level of engagement has not declined much. At the very least, the critics asserted, the case for decline has not been proven.

This long book is Putnam’s response to his critics. It is plainly argued and compulsively readable. To the fundamental question, "Are we in a time of declining civic engagement?" Putnam answers with a resounding and definitive yes. His claim is supported by a massive amount of evidence drawn from a wide range of sources and covering a broad spectrum of specific activities. Putnam shows that the present decline in civic engagement does not characterize the 20th century as a whole. Rather, civic engagement seems to have steadily increased for the first two-thirds of the century, stagnating and declining only in the last third. The decline began in the 1960s and ‘70s and accelerated in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

What is the evidence? With stunning consistency, virtually every indicator of civic engagement currently available shows the same pattern of increase followed by stagnation and decline -- newspaper reading; TV news watching; attending political meetings; petition signing; running for public office; attending public meetings; serving as an officer or committee member in any local clubs or organizations; writing letters to the editor; participating in local meetings of national organizations; attending religious services; socializing informally with friends, relatives or neighbors; attending club meetings; joining unions; entertaining friends at home; participating in picnics; eating the evening meal with the whole family; going out to bars, nightclubs, discos or taverns; playing cards; sending greeting cards; attending parties; playing sports; donating money as a percentage of income; working on community projects; giving blood.

The evidence covers partisan political activity and nonpartisan community activity; it covers religious activity and secular activity; it covers high-commitment activities and low-commitment activities; it covers things one can do as an individual as well as things requiring the cooperation of others; it covers informal socializing as well as participation in formal organizations. Though the details vary for specific items, the consistency of the pattern is compelling. It might be possible to quibble about one or another detail of’ one or another indicator, but such quibbling would miss the deeper point. Even if one finds some flaw in the evidence about, say, card playing, there are still several dozen other indicators showing the same trend. Putnam draws an apt analogy to global warming. Standing alone, evidence from tree ring research might not amount to much. But when tree rings, pollen counts in polar ice, and temperature records from multiple places around the world all point in the same direction, we become increasingly confident that global warming is a reality. Congruence across multiple kinds of evidence from multiple sources is powerfully persuasive.

Evidence about trends in workplace socializing is difficult to come by, but even if workplace socializing has increased, it mains only a small part of most people’s social lives. Participation in self-help and support groups and in protest demonstrations has gone up, but the absolute numbers participating in these kinds of groups do not come close to compensating for declines in other forms of civic engagement. Volunteering is up, but virtually all that increase is among retired people. Generally speaking, the increases that have occurred tend to involve forms of participation that do not promote face-to-face connections among people. And the increases in some social-tie generating activities such as 12-step support groups (or soccer leagues!) are too small to offset the large-scale declines in civic engagement throughout the society.

The overall decline in civic participation cuts across virtually all social and demographic groups. It is evident among both women and men, in all regions of the country, and in cities and towns of all sizes. It also is evident across racial groups, religious traditions, political parties, occupational categories, social classes and household types. However, a large difference in civic participation is evident in one category: generations. Younger cohorts are much less likely to be civically involved than older cohorts. Roughly speaking, about half the decline in civic engagement has come about because those born before 1945 are inexorably leaving the scene and are being replaced by the less civically engaged generations born after 1945. Even if not a single individual changes his or her behavior over time, it still is possible for widespread social change to occur through this generational turnover.

Religion is a big part of this story, and it receives a chapter of its own. Perhaps the most important lesson for those who care about religion, however, is in the deep similarity between trends in religion and in other areas of civic life. Church attendance is declining along with other kinds of civic engagement. Declines in church attendance are mainly produced by a generational changing of the guard, as are declines in many other institutional arenas. Religious participation, it seems, is a special case of something much more general.

It appears, then, that declining church attendance is unlikely to be fundamentally caused or cured by developments specific to religion. Churches may be having trouble attracting young people, but so are virtually all other voluntary and membership organizations. Looking for root causes or solutions only within the religious sphere is like the man who, faced with a flooded basement, looks for the leak in his own pipes, not realizing that the water main has broken and every house on the block is flooded.

What explains the decline in civic engagement? I cannot do justice to Putnam’s subtle sifting of evidence and rich discussion of possible causes, but will simply report that the main culprits, in order of importance, are: generational change, television watching, suburbanization (with its associated increases in sprawl and commuting time), and pressures of time and money (including increases in two-career families). Putnam’s arguments about underlying causes are more qualified and tentative than those about the decline itself. Nevertheless, the book gives you plenty of reasons to hate television.

Putnam also documents the many ways in which states and cities with higher levels of civic engagement differ from states and cities with lower levels. Among other things, areas with measurably higher levels of civic engagement also have higher levels of child welfare, better schools, less crime, healthier people and better functioning democratic institutions. When civic engagement generates social capital that is outward- rather than inward-looking, when it leads to social ties that cross typical social boundaries rather than reinforce social homogeneity, many positive consequences follow.

It is this edifice of associations, built in the context of late 19th-century social change, that today is creaking under the pressure of contemporary social change. Perhaps we should not be surprised that institutions formed in another era are not quite up to current challenges. And perhaps we should be optimistic that, as before, new movements will emerge to reinvigorate our community life. Those who call our attention to contemporary social problems commonly try to heighten our concern by making often unjustified claims about the unprecedented nature of the challenges before us. Putnam’s historical sensibility leads him away from that shallow jeremiad, and as a result he both deepens our understanding of the current situation and evokes hope that, as the book’s subtitle suggests, revival will follow collapse.

Is such hope justified? On the positive side, Putnam calls attention to nascent efforts intended to move us in the right direction. Young people who volunteer or participate in certain kinds of service are more civically engaged as adults, and there are movements afoot to increase these kinds of experiences among youth. There are companies pioneering workplace practices that encourage community involvement and family connectedness among employees. Urban designers have proposed what they intend to be community-enhancing public policies and architectural ideas. A "civic journalism" movement aims to foster electronic media that reinforce rather than displace community engagement. And there are examples of cultural events in which diverse groups of people together produce dances, concerts and other works of art.

On the negative side, virtually all the innovative social-capital-generating efforts Putnam mentions are relatively small-scale and isolated. A skeptic would be justified in wondering how likely it is that family- and community friendly workplaces will become the norm, or that experiments in neighborhood design will slow suburban sprawl, or that changes in telecommunications will inspire us to rise from our couches in search of activity more demanding than channel surfing.

Perhaps, however, we miss something by focusing on the limited nature of current efforts self-consciously aimed at increasing civic engagement. Several of the most significant movements that provided civic infrastructure for previous generations were not, after all, designed primarily to promote community involvement. The labor movement aimed at material improvement for workers. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union advocated prohibition and other specific measures. Progressive form movements wanted to undermine urban party machines. It maybe that significant social capital will be generated in our time more as a byproduct of social movements and reform efforts with other goals than as the direct result of crusades for civic engagement.

The future may surprise us by generating social capital in unexpected ways. It also may show that specific efforts to increase civic involvement can be too successful. Putnam asks us to consider this question: What if we were faced with campaigns that were wildly successful at enhancing social capital, but only in the form of tightly bonded, homogeneous social clusters -- the kind of social capital that bolsters divisions between "us" and "them"? If it turns out that the easiest, and therefore most likely, way to increase social capital is via movements that encapsulate their faithful within religious, ethnic, linguistic or other enclaves, then we might be ambivalent about whether we would like to see such a future after all. This is, possibly, the most vexing issue raised by an agenda-setting book that will be the starting point of discussion and debate for years to come.

Windblown (Acts 2:1-11)

It was a great day for multiculturalism. It was the Tower of Babel turned upside-down, and what fell out was a glorious manifestation of the grace of God. It was also a tough day for future lay readers: all those forbidding names -- Parthians, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Cappadocians, Phrygians, Pamphyilians -- that whole crowd. In Luke’s geography they represented "every nation under heaven." Devout Jews of the Diaspora were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the 50th day after the consecration of the harvest and the Passover. Although bound by a common religious past, their languages and dialects were as diverse as those heard at Ellis Island in the early 1900s.

The surviving disciples of Jesus were there too. How they got to the head table Dr. Luke does not tell us, but there they were. Then something utterly wondrous happened. God happened. The symbols tell the story: wind and fire and Spirit! Suddenly the whole place was smoking, and the disciples began to look like so many oversized trick birthday candles, crowned with tongues of fire that even the mighty wind could not blow out. We are not told what they said in their Galilean, ex-fishermen, ex-tax collector brogues. We are told, however, of the greatest of all miracles: everyone in the house understood each other.

Some call Pentecost the "birthday of the church." I disagree. I sense that the church was born on Good Friday when Jesus, "just hanging around," as Robert Capon stunningly puts it, asked the Father to forgive us, and a few bewildered, broken-hearted women and men wandered off wondering how they were going to live with that. Pentecost was the day they got their answer: with great joy, and with wind and fire and Spirit, making them look like a bunch of happy drunks in the midst of a numbingly sober and sour world. At last they knew that they were God’s -- every last one of them -- and that God was Love, not just in poetic theory but in palpable fact. They learned that in belonging to God they belonged also to each other. The joy derived from their trusting contained power, power not only to gladden but also to heal and redeem.

In today’s world, especially in our anxious Western culture, we seem hell-bent on happiness and on any shortcut that can get us there. Generally we seek a happiness that is a far cry from what went on that day of Pentecost. The 16th chapter of John’s Gospel clarifies the difference. In Jesus’ long, beautiful farewell to his disciples, he tells them that he must go away and leave them and that they will be sorrowful. Then he adds: "but your sorrow will turn into joy."

It has taken me a lifetime of what Dorothy Day called "the long loneliness" to discern the power and the simplicity of that most comforting of words. They turn out to be a power definition: Joy is something that sorrow turns into. No sorrow, no joy! That is precisely the joy that turned the world upside-down on the day of Pentecost. The definition adds a new dimension to the familiar lines, "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee," as it implies a people willingly and compassionately entering into the suffering and sorrow of an unjust and unmerciful world.

There has been one event in my life in which I came close to apprehending the wonder of Pentecost. It occurred during the solemnest of priestly obligations. For over a year I had been the custodian of the ashes of a child in my parish who had died of SIDS. The father was a Frenchman who wished to have his son’s ashes interred in his family cemetery in eastern France, near Dijon. I agreed to bring the ashes there and to hold the service with his family and friends. The cemetery dated back some 600 years. The family was predominantly Roman Catholic, and few of them spoke English. Leaden gray clouds hovered over the ancient burial ground. A light mist of rain made us bring out umbrellas. A great slab of stone was rolled back to allow me to enter the underground vault.

I stammered my way through the liturgy, and the gathered friends and family were more than courteous and gracious, though the only French I felt confident about was jus d’orange and merci, neither of which I could manage to work into the service. The grandmother of the child stunned me when she thanked me for "the mess" I had made. Her daughters-in-law quickly explained that this was the French for mass.

It was a time of great healing for the parents and their devoted family and friends. Afterward, we went to a 400-year-old inn and had lunch, which turned into a French wake, with joy and camaraderie and love flowing as freely as the wine. I didn’t understand a word they were saying, but I understood what was being said.

The name of what was going on is the name of what was going on the day of Pentecost. It is always a miracle of sorts, whether recognized or not. It always comes from God, whether we know it or not, and bears God’s most beautiful of names: love. Unleashed from an empty tomb, God’s outlandish love found its way into empty hearts, and the world has never been the same since.

Weatherproof (Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41)

In considering Mark’s story of Jesus’ stilling the storm and rebuking the wind, the Book of Job is helpful. It reminds us that in the Old Testament creation is described in part as a great struggle between God and the sea. In fact, the sea is presented as a monster that only God’s ineffable power can tame. If you have ever been caught on a small fishing boat in a squall on the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic or any other large body of water, you can identify with the plight of Jesus and his terrified disciples on this occasion.

Jesus had been teaching the multitudes gathered to hear him along the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Except for the holistic objections of the scribes, it had been a fruitful and, as we are wont to say, "uplifting" occasion. He had taught the people through the parables that had gained him fame and the rapt attention of the faithful. They were so caught up in the power and strength of what was taking place that there was no time even for eating.

Realizing that he was skipping meals, Jesus’ mother came down with the rest of the family to have a mother’s word with her son. He did not take this at all kindly and proclaimed that the motley crowd in front of him was his true family of mother and brothers and sisters. So much for family values. It had been an exhausting and wearying day, and when evening came, he and his tired Twelve climbed into a fishing boat and headed out to sea.

As it turned out, the sea was no more hospitable than the scribes had been. In Mark’s words, "A great storm of wind arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already filling." The disciples were filling too -- with fear. And there was no Franklin D. Roosevelt to tell them that fear was the only thing they had to fear. There were huge, surging black waves, whipped by a driving wind and crashing in on their small craft. Their oars had no more effect on the turbulent sea than toothpicks, even though some of them were fishermen, They were accustomed to wind and wave, but to nothing like this.

We know. Jesus was there. The trip was his idea. Only Jesus had nodded off, dead to the world, catching a few Zs in the back of the boat, and apparently unperturbed by what was going on. Of course, the men shook him awake and asked (screamed!) in bewilderment and desperation, "Do you not care?"

Here all amusement stops. Here is echoed the heartbreaking desperation of all saints and sinners alike, whose prayers for themselves and those they love seem to bounce back from the ceiling or from an infinite, empty space or from wherever God seems absent. Here is formed the poorly disguised cynicism of those who plead earnestly to heaven but later tell their believing friends that "he must have been asleep in the boat." This is holy ground, where we dare not scoff but rather weep, because in the human condition not all our storm-swept sea journeys end as happily or safely as the one Mark relates.

Mark knew this. His Gospel is addressed to believers who knew every kind of terror, every kind of loss, but who yet endured and yet believed. His Gospel was written, as were those of the other evangelists, to assure believers that their losses and grief, their sorrows and anguish, were not the last word. Maybe that’s why Jesus could snore through the storm and against the wind -- because the Son of man knew and trusted that glorious surmise like no one else in the world.

When awakened, Jesus commanded the wind to be quiet and the waves to be still. Then he had the audacity to ask his disciples why they were afraid. His soaked-to-the-skin companions could only marvel and ask that most important question, "Who is this man, that even the wind and the waves obey him?"

We need to remember that the ones who voiced this response were Galileans. They lived where wind and wave were vital to the safety of their being, their lives and livelihoods. That Jesus could command them was a most propitious sign. It meant that the things which could overcome them had been overcome. The thought foreshadowed Jesus’ beautiful statement to them that would come later: "In the world, you shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer -- I have overcome the world!" (John 16:33).

Here we discover Mark’s purpose, not just in this miracle story but in all of his Gospel: to tell us "who this man is" and how he may be trusted. Not only is he the Savior of the world, he is also our close, storm-proof companion, our fellow traveler. Like all who follow him, he bears the marks and the scars of the journey; they are part of his beauty. They are part of us, and the part that he loves the most as he bids us join him.