Articles – Page 118 – Religion Online

Christ’s Death To End Sacrifice

On every Lenten journey many people stumble over the paradox of the Christian story. Jesus’ death saves the world, and it ought not to have happened. It fulfills prophecy, but it was the work of sinners. It is a "good bad thing." The attempt to give the crucifixion a general moral (die to self, be faithful to the end) runs the risk of simply baptizing all bad things, as if with the right approach they too can be good things.

Is there good reason that scripture puts Jesus’ death at the heart of the redemptive plot? These days, many object to the notion of Jesus’ death as a substitutionary sacrifice, a vicarious assumption of the punishment that humans deserve. In last week’s issue, we rehearsed some of the objections to this view, including the concern that it presents a confused image of God (is God really merciful if he demands a sacrifice?) and that it ends up exalting the role of suffering and abuse, both with God and among humans.

Let’s think about the problem the other way around. What would Christianity need to be like to avoid all the criticisms that are made about the shocking execution that is at the center of faith? What if, in place of the passion narratives of the Gospels, Christians had instead the following text:

Christ -- the living wisdom of God -- came down to earth. He visited a great city in the form of a stranger, a swarthy carpenter with a withered leg, in order to call back those who had fallen into ignorance. He taught many things to those who had the inner ears to hear. But those who saw only his outward form did not understand the grace he brought.

He performed many miracles, and the people worshiped him for this reason and made him their king. But still their ignorance was not dispelled, and each house in the city was set against another, and great fires burned there day and night. So Christ prepared his final miracle. One day he called to him Mary, his mother and his dearest disciple. He went into the temple and ate the bread in the holy of holies, that no person is to touch. They lay together there near the altar throughout the night. While they lay there the earth shook, and many in the city were stricken with a deadly disease and the people were afraid. He sent Mary away, telling her that she must return without fail at the first hour and that whatever she found at that time must be cast outside the gates.

In the morning, when the people came to the temple, seeking to know what evil had been done to bring these troubles upon them, they found nothing but the smallest mustard seed lying near the altar. He had taken the form of a mustard seed, carrying the entirety of divinity within him. All the people were greatly distressed at this. Priests and soldiers, foreigners and natives, members of every tribe, all were seized with awe, in a kind of trance. Heeding Mary, with one spirit they rushed together to form a procession and carried the seed to a stony hill where they threw it in a great hole that opened there. And each person, without exception, threw in stones to cover it.

Miraculously, the seed immediately grew up into a great tree, and Christ himself was in the fruit of that tree, and everyone who ate of this fruit discovered God within themselves and the joy of eternal life. The people returned to the city rejoicing, and health and peace ruled in those walls.

This is a rich symbolic story, full of allegorical possibilities. There is no offensive violence, no punishment or glorified suffering. Instead of a cross of blood, there is a tree of life. How different things might have been if Christians had made such a parable of spiritual self-discovery their text. We would not be embarrassed by charges of victimization in our scriptures. We would have the added bonus that the spiritual value of this story is uncomplicated by worries about what actually happened. Its spiritual value is no less if we regard it as entirely imaginary rather than historical.

Suppose we added just one additional clarification, namely that this text in fact refers to the events of Jesus’ execution, to what actually took place as it is described in the Gospels. In that case, the text is a lie about a lynching. If we were then happy to substitute this text for the Gospels, knowing that Jesus’ death is perhaps the one thing about which we are historically most certain, it would say something interesting about us -- that we like to avert our eyes from the real victims.

The substitute gospel we have just considered is not merely a thought experiment. René Girard has attracted a great deal of attention by arguing that to avert one’s eyes from the sight of the real victims is a characteristic human act. He also contends that in light of this central aspect of human life, we can understand the saving character of the cross. That is, the meaning of Jesus’ death can be understood only in light of the prototypical "good bad thing" in human culture: scapegoating sacrifice. Girard maintains that central human myths are in fact transcriptions of a consistent kind of violence that he calls the "founding murder." Such murder literally stands at the beginning and in the middle of human society. It makes human community possible.

Girard’s account, in brief, is this: social life, particularly in its infancy, is fatally subject to plagues of rivalry and vengeance. Escalating cycles of retaliation are the original social disease. Without finding a way to treat this violence, human society can hardly get started. The ability to break this vicious cycle appears as a kind of miracle. At some point, when feuding threatens to dissolve a community, spontaneous and irrational mob violence erupts against some distinctive person or minority in the group. They are accused of the worst crimes the group can imagine, crimes that by their very enormity might have caused the terrible plight the community now experiences. They are lynched.

The sad good thing that happens as a result of this bad thing is that the scapegoating actually works. In the wake of the murder, communities find that this sudden war of all against one has delivered them from the war of each against all. The sacrifice of one person as a scapegoat discharges the pending acts of retribution. It "clears the air." This benefit seems a startling, even magical result from a simple execution. The sudden peace confirms the desperate charges that the victim had been behind the crisis to begin with. If the scapegoat’s death is the solution, the scapegoat must have been the cause. The death has such reconciling effect that it seems the victim must possess supernatural power. So the victim becomes a god, memorialized in myth.

Rituals of sacrifice originated in this way, says Girard. They were tools to fend off social crisis. And in varied forms they are with us still. The prescription is that divisions in the community must be reduced to but one division, the division of all against one common victim or one minority group. Prime candidates are the marginal and the weak, or those isolated by their very prominence. Typically, they will be charged with violating the community’s most sacred taboos. The process does not just accept innocent victims, it prefers them -- "outsiders" who are not closely linked to established groups in the society.

This, in a nutshell, is Girard’s account of the origin of religion. It is identical with the beginning of culture itself, for without some such mechanism to head off tit-for-tat violence, human society could not get off the ground. It is the founding "good bad thing" -- reconciliation in the blood of the innocent.

No one thought out this process, and its effectiveness depends on a certain blindness to its workings. Myth reflects the scapegoat event but does not describe it. Myth is the product of a collective killing that all the actors found completely justified, entirely necessary and powerfully beneficent. It is the memory of a clean conscience that never registered the presence of a victim at all. The unbroken continuity of consciousness between producers and consumers of the myth from generation to generation ensures the invisibility of the victim as a victim.

So our text about the seed and the flowering tree is an example of what Jesus’ death would look like if it were a true myth in Girard’s sense. If we suspect there is an execution behind this story, we can see many telltale signs: typical marks of the victim (he has a physical deformity, he is a foreigner), indications of social conflict (fire sweeping the city), traces of the accusations (incest, profaning holy things), the unanimity of the mob violence (stoning and burying the "seed"), and the positive benefits of the death. We can easily see how a ritual would evolve from this story -- perhaps the annual offering of a sacrificial victim at the foot of the sacred tree. Above all, of course, what is "mythical" is that the killing has disappeared completely, and no issues of persecution, guilt or violence are present in the text at all.

Scapegoating is one of the deepest structures of human sin, built into our religion and our politics. It is demonic because it is endlessly flexible in its choice of victims and because it can truly deliver the good that it advertises. Satan can cast out Satan, and is the more powerful for it. It is most virulent where it is most invisible. Victims are called criminals, gods or both. So long as we are in the grip of sin, we do not see our victims as scapegoats. Texts that hide scapegoating foster it. Texts that show it for what it is undermine it.

Jesus’ willingness to face death, specifically death on a cross, suddenly looks anything but arbitrary, and much more like the "wisdom of God" that the New Testament so surprisingly discovers in the crucifixion. God is willing to die for us, to bear our sin in this particular way, because we desperately need deliverance from the sin of scapegoating. God breaks the grip of scapegoating by stepping into the place of a victim, and by being a victim who cannot be hidden or mythologized. God acts not to affirm the suffering of the innocent victim as the price of peace, but to reverse it.

God is not just feeding a bigger and better victim into this machinery to get a bigger pay off, as the theory of substitutionary atonement might seem to suggest. Jesus’ open proclamation of forgiveness (without sacrifice) before his death and the fact of his resurrection after it are the ways that God reveals and rejects what Girard terms the "victimage mechanism."

Note that in the Gospels it is Jesus’ accusers who affirm the reconciling value of his death. "It is expedient that one man should die for the sake of the people," says the high priest. And Luke 23:12 contains this curious note after Pilate and Herod had shuttled Jesus between them: "That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies." Jesus’ persecutors intended his death to bring peace; it offers a way to avoid an outbreak of violence between Romans and Israelites, between Jews and other Jews. Jesus’ death is intended to be sacrificial business as usual. But God means it to be the opposite.

C. S. Lewis, who knew the mythical heritage of the world better than most, saw this aspect of the crucifixion clearly. In his Christian allegory the Chronicles of Narnia, the lion Aslan, the Christ figure, allows himself to be killed so that the evil powers will release those they hold hostage. The idea of this exchange is proposed by the evil powers. The sacrificial process is known to all from the earliest times; it is the law that an innocent one may die on behalf of others and so free them. It is called "deep magic from the dawn of time."

The evil powers love this arrangement and, incidentally, have no intention of keeping their side of the bargain after Aslan is dead. The resurrection comes into this story as an unexpected development, from what Aslan calls "deeper magic from before the dawn of time," something about which the evil powers knew nothing. And when Aslan rises, the ancient stone altar on which the sacrifice was offered cracks and crumbles in pieces, never to be used again. The gospel, then, is not ultimately about the exchange of victims, but about ending the bloodshed.

Enthusiasts for myth, like Joseph Campbell, like to deride "Judeo-Christian religion" for its low symbolic quality and its crude moral literalism. They deplore the Bible’s brutal representations of violence, its fixation on persecution and murder. The biblical tradition, they say, lacks the beauty and imaginative sophistication of great myth. The story of Jesus’ death is a cut-rate version of the sacrifice of the corn king, flattened into something that belongs on a police blotter and not in high spiritual culture.

To Girard, this sort of critique gets things just backwards. Major myths are rooted in sacrificial violence, prescribe it, and shield us from awareness of our complicity in it. That is why they do not show it directly. The Bible, by contrast, makes the violence visible, and therefore makes the victims uncomfortably visible too.

Modern sensitivity to victims, which now makes people uneasy with the Bible, is rooted in the Bible. We would not be able to criticize the Gospels of encouraging victimization if we had not already been converted by them. We would not look for scapegoated victims in every corner of the world if the magnifying glass of the cross had not already helped us see them.

Campbell thinks that only spiritual philistines worry about whether an actual person was literally crucified. The Gospels, however, are of the opinion that what happened to an actual person on Golgotha is a religious concern of the first order.

The workings of mythical sacrifice require that in human society people "know not what they do." But in the Gospels, the process of sacrifice is laid out in stark clarity. Jesus says these very words from the cross. The scapegoat is revealed as a scapegoat. The point is made dramatically in Luke’s account, when the centurion confesses at the moment of Jesus’ death, "Surely this man was innocent."

Girard recounts the shock of recognition he experienced in coming to the New Testament after studying violence and the sacred in anthropology and the history of religion. He found in the Gospels all the elements he had come to expect in myths: the crowd coalescing against an individual, the charges of the greatest crimes and impurities. But he was startled to recognize that the reality of what was happening was explicit, not hidden. Here is the same mythic story, but this time told from the point of view of the victim, who is clearly accused unjustly and murdered wrongly. In the Gospels, the scapegoating process is stripped of its sacred mystery, and the collective persecution and abandonment are painfully illustrated so that no one, including the disciples, can honestly say afterward that they resisted the sacrificial tide.

The resurrection makes Jesus’ death a failed sacrifice, but of a new kind. When mythical sacrifice succeeds, peace descends, true memory is erased and the way is smoothed for the next scapegoat. If it fails (because the community is not unanimous or the victim is not sufficiently demonized), it becomes just another killing, stoking the proliferation of violence, and the search intensifies for more and better victims.

But in the case of Jesus’ death, something else happens. People do not unanimously close ranks over Jesus’ grave (as Jesus’ executioners hoped), nor is there a spree of violent revenge on behalf of the crucified leader. Instead, an odd new countercommunity arises, dedicated both to the innocent victim whom God has vindicated by resurrection and to a new life through him that requires no further such sacrifice. As Girard sees it, this is the good news, the inexplicable revelation, that is found in the Bible.

The revelatory quality of the New Testament on this point is thoroughly continuous with Hebrew scripture, in which an awareness and rejection of the sacrificial mechanism is already set forth. The averted sacrifice of Isaac; the prophets’ condemnation of scapegoating the widow, the weak or the foreigner; the story of Job; the Psalms’ obsession with the innocent victim of collective violence; the passion narratives’ transparent account of Jesus’ death; the confessions of a new community that grew up in solidarity around the risen crucified victim: all these follow a constant thread. They reveal the "victimage" mechanisms as the joint root of religion and society -- and they reject those mechanisms. Jesus is the victim who will not stay sacrificed, whose memory is not erased and who forces us to confront the reality of scapegoating.

This is why the case of anti-Semitism is the infallible test for a healthy Christian theory of atonement. One of the crucial things that makes the church a new community is its solidarity not against some sacrificial victim, but in identification with the crucified one.

Christians have always been as inclined as others toward scapegoating, and have too rarely overcome that inclination. Our guilt in this regard is underlined by the fact that the gospel prompted Christians who would resist its revelation to create a new version of the old sin. Because the dynamic of Jesus’ passion has made it impossible to be unconscious of scapegoats or to mystify them in myths, Christian persecutors have put them in plain sight. Jews were scapegoated with the claim that they were the ones who had scapegoated Jesus. The new sin, for which Christians can claim "credit," was to victimize people by accusing them of being victimizers, to make the revelation directed against sacrifice a new rationale for sacrifice. To use the gospel in a "mythological" way, Christians have somehow to distort the very truth it has given them. The moment we point a finger at some "they" as Jesus’ killers, we have enacted the sin that the very particularity of the cross meant to overcome. Christians bear a special culpability for this prompt perversion, with less right to claim that we knew not what we did: our sacrificial violence toward Jews proclaimed the very sin it practiced.

We began by noting the tension seeded through the passion story: Jesus’ death saves, and it ought not to have happened. The tension is there not because the gospel writers can’t get their story straight but because this tension is the heart of the story itself. The language of sacrifice and blood (with all its dangers) tells the truth. To want to purge these elements from the story reflects a naïve confidence that we are in greater danger of being corrupted by the bloody language than we are of falling prey to the sin it describes. The good/bad tension is there first because of the frank description of the sacrificial, scapegoating violence that has existed from the foundation of the world. That violence does save people from more violence. But its victims ought not to be sacrificed. This tension reflects an honest description of our human condition.

Becoming subject to this sin, God takes this tension to a different level. The peace that depends on sacrifice (the "reconciliation" Herod and Pilate aim for in Christ’s death) now also registers as something that ought not to happen. The good part of the "old good bad thing," sacrifice, now is seen as part of what is bad in the crucifixion. What is needed is a completely new basis for peace. It is hardly accidental that "Peace" is usually the first word of the risen Christ in his appearances. It is an apt greeting in two ways. If a sacrificial victim were to return with power to those who had persecuted or abandoned him, peace is the opposite of what they would expect. And peace not based on new victims, "not as the world gives," is what is now offered. So in the gospel a new kind of tension is stressed, in which it is the entire complex of sacrificial violence -- both the "good" peace it brings and the bad violence it uses -- that becomes the bad thing. And it is God’s willingness to suffer the worst this process has to offer to deliver us from it, to deliver us to a new path of peace, that is the good thing.

Christ is wounded for our transgressions. We can hardly deny that Jesus bears our sin of scapegoating, precisely because of its collective and ubiquitous character. Christ died for us. He did so first in the mythic, sacrificial sense that all scapegoated victims do. That we know this is already a sign that he died for us in a second sense -- to save us from that very sin. Jesus died in our place, because it is literally true that any one of us, in the right circumstances, can be the scapegoat. As the Letter to the Hebrews says, Christ is a sacrifice to end sacrifice, and he has died once for all. Christ’s purpose was not "to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself" (9:25-26).

Is Christ’s death unique? It is not, since it is crucial to the saving "work" of the cross to recognize that Jesus’ death is precisely the same as that of so many other victims. And yet by virtue of this identification it is unique because it is the one of all these deaths that have been happening from the foundation of the world that irreversibly shows us the sin in which we are every-where enmeshed and in which God has acted on the side of the victims.

It is true that there is a transaction of sorts at the cross. God agrees to be "handed over" to our sacrificial process, to bear our original sin and to carry the burden that no human alone can bear. Any human being can be plausibly scapegoated (we are all sinners) and no human can prevail when the collective community turns against her. Nor is it sufficient for Jesus to simply instruct us about our situation, for we are all too fully enclosed in the scapegoating process to be able to break the spell. It is an extraordinary step even to arrive at the awareness of our own susceptibility expressed by the disciples at the Last Supper, when they piteously ask Jesus, "Is it I, Lord?"

Only one whose innocence truly can be vindicated and whose power could have offered escape can, by suffering this sacrifice, reverse it. The work of the cross is the work of a transcendent God breaking into a cycle we could not change alone. If we limit Jesus’ work to that of a human exemplar, the crucifixion becomes more of a prescription for suffering than if we grasp it as the work of the incarnate one, done once for all. It is a saving act of God, a victory over the powers of this world, a defeat of death.

Early Christian writers spoke of the crucifixion as basically a trick on Satan. The powers have been tricked. By drawing Christ into the usual sacrificial machinery, the powers have been revealed and broken, because all the traditional means of justifying and erasing the sacrificial violence won’t stick this time, and their hold will increasingly be broken.

When Christians gather at communion we see this clearly in the unequivocal reminder of Christ’s bloody death. When we hear "Do this in remembrance of me "we should hear the implied contrast that comes with emphasis on this. Unlike the mythic victims who became sacred models for future sacrifices, Christ is not to be remembered with more scapegoating. This is a humble meal and prayer, not a new cross. Christ has offered his very real body and blood so that at the last supper he can set a new pattern and say of bread "this is my body" and of wine "this is my blood."

Following that example, Christians believe this meal of the new community is able to accomplish all the peace that sacrificial violence could, and more. In it, we recall a real sacrifice and celebrate a substitutionary atonement. Here on this table, bread and wine are to be continually substituted for victims -- substituted for any, and all, of us.

Gender and Creed: Confessing a Common Faith

The study presupposes that the apostolic faith can be expressed in many ways, and that the various Christian communities portray these in their own worship, witness and theologies. Recognizing this rich pluralism, the study seeks a particular expression that could be common to all. This expression would provide a doctrinal basis for recognizing each other as parts of the one unbroken body. To some -- though this possibility goes beyond the boundaries of the study -- such recognition could be the basis for an authoritative and ecumenical council of the whole world church.

The leading candidate to serve as such an "ecumenical symbol" appears to be the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381. No other symbol is so widely used or recognized among Christians as a statement of the apostolic faith. Even some groups that do not use the creed as a central expression of faith in their own internal lives can nevertheless affirm it as a common expression. The WCC study project anticipates a process of explication of the creed’s meaning, which will lead to the churches’ common recognition of the faith the creed expresses, and, finally, common confession of that faith.

Focusing on a creed immediately causes uneasiness in some circles. Many free churches feel that affirming the creed involves too much constraint and too little confession. Many others would agree on the second point, arguing that confession of the apostolic faith means much more than confessing the creed -- whether that "more" involves sacramental unity or acting on behalf of justice. A more general concern is whether a creed that was formulated to exclude can be appropriated to include and unify. The concern centers not on those the creed historically intended to exclude, like Arians, but on those who may feel themselves excluded by it now, such as women.

This concern has received special attention from a National Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission study group, since it is an area in which North American churches perhaps can contribute uniquely to the World Council’s dialogue. Part of this contribution comes from the NCC study group’s extreme pluralism. Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Missouri Synod Lutherans as well as Pentecostals, Quakers and most of those who might be regarded as somewhere in between are involved. I will sketch my own assessment of the issues emerging from this group’s study, thus indicating the type of reflection that is being fed into the World Council’s process. I will not attempt to summarize the views of any single participant, let alone the group as a whole.

There were deep differences among participants, however, in the way this distinction was understood. One position asserted that the content and the wording of the creed are severable in fact, and that the fourth-century church fathers understood and intended it that way. At the council of Constantinople the fathers were explicitly affirming what they called the "faith of Nicea," but were deliberately using different words.

Indeed, some scholars maintain that the Nicene Creed (which was actually produced by the council of Constantinople) is not even "Nicene" in the sense that it was an adaptation of and an elaboration on the creed of Nicea. Rather, they argue, Constantinople took a different, though similar, local baptismal creed as its point of departure for reaffirming the "faith of Nicea." Thus the very process of the creation of the creed implies that different language can express the same content or meaning. What the fathers of Constantinople did with the words of Nicea in fidelity to the faith of Nicea could in principle be done with the words of the "Nicene Creed" while remaining faithful to the apostolic faith. Thus, we could change their words in the same spirit.

An opposing position argues that meaning and language are not so easily severable in fact, nor did the fourth-century fathers believe that they were. The particular structure or creed taken as a point of departure is not so important as the fact that the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed does replicate language from the creed of Nicea. This replication was necessary because different words cannot always express the same meaning. And even if the same meaning sometimes can be expressed differently, language that comes with revelation and has been carried into the creed because it is in Scripture is a notable exception.

At issue is the word "father.’’ Adherents to the first view argue that it would be consistent with the creed’s faith to avoid any gender-linked word for God. According to the second view, the word "father" -- while not implying that the first person of the Trinity is male (an implication that the Cappadocian fathers, for instance, vehemently deny) -- conveys an aspect of trinitarian faith that no other language can express.

Study group participants generally agree that at least one central affirmation of the creed’s father-son language involves the generative relation of the first to the second person of the Trinity: the second person comes ‘of the same stuff" and is not a creature. Such language was already assumed in Scripture and in church usage, before the creed was written.

It can be argued historically that the Creed’s ‘‘father" language is not saying anything about God as known through creation (e.g., extrapolating knowledge of God from knowledge of human fathers), but rather is speaking of God within the Trinity: a subject unknowable and inexpressible save through revealed language. And even in such language, since we know so tenuously that of which we speak, we have a hard time meaning it correctly.

To understand "father" in human terms is to misunderstand it. Indeed, the Nicene Creed was framed against those who wanted to stress the human analogy -- the Arians. If the human analogy is definitive, the Arians were undeniably right: fathers precede children, and it follows that there must necessarily have been a time when the second person of the Trinity "was not." But the creed rejects this understanding, insisting that ‘‘father’’ cannot and must not be exegeted by a ruling human analogy. The content of "father" is not time sequence or, through the same reasoning, anatomy.

Unlike the common ways of treating God as "father" in our tradition, the Nicene usage does not appear to have embodied what we would call fatherly qualities: love, discipline, care, protectiveness. The theologians of Nicea and Constantinople (most notably the Cappadocians) did not think of the "persons" of the Trinity in such "personal" terms. Doing so would be letting human analogy rule.

Thus, the creed was already alive to the objection so readily raised today to talk of God as father -- namely, that many people do not have a positive conception of the word "father" because of negative experiences with their own fathers. This objection has only been able to gain force because people have begun associating modern ideas of the human person with the "person" of the Trinity. But using the term in the creed was not even intended to imply a list of such qualities.

Some argue that the "father" language only implies that the second person is generated from the first, and that generative function is all the apostolic faith was expressing in using the word "father." Thus the apostolic faith -- if not the Nicene Creed -- may be expressed adequately without any gender-specific references to God.

Others, while agreeing with this position, would argue that more content is included. The word "father" implies not only generation, but also the very root essence of personhood: the capacity for relationship ‘that makes generation a possibility.

In the view that the term "father" has only generational connotations, genderless language could convey the faith expressed in the word. In the latter view, however, gender reference is essential to the expression. And while both points of view agree that the same faith can sometimes be expressed through different words, they disagree about whether "father’’ is such a case.

Thus the question becomes, does "mother" have the same terminological meaning of generation as "father"? To argue that it cannot have this meaning because women’s role in reproduction implies a previous male role is to fall into the very line of thought that the creed itself ruled out in its connotations of the word "father" -- i.e., the dominance of human analogy. (And even human analogy would fail to yield a clear distinction, since "father" implies a female role just as much as "mother" implies a male one.) Thus the only possible arguments for exclusively using father language seem to be: (1) Something about the relation of generation is more aptly expressed by "father" than "mother"; and (2) there simply are "revealed metaphors" -- mandated ways to speak of the unspeakable -- that we must preserve.

This leads naturally to the question of the particularity of language as a sign of the particularity of incarnation and history. The incarnation is undoubtedly an event of historical particularity, and it follows that the language of Scripture and creed is historically conditioned. All study group participants are concerned that there be no "flight from history," though they see that danger from two directions.

For some, the danger comes from a gnostic direction -- abstracting from a particular time and place, and simply expunging the specific traces of that particularity (such as language like "father"). The language’s particularity must be preserved as the context of the revelation, lest the revelation itself be distorted, the character of Christianity as a historical faith be denied, and true transposition to another context be made impossible.

Others see the danger of a flight from history in a refusal to take present history seriously enough. Incarnation, they assert, is not only a single historical particularity, but the freedom to meet each historical situation in its particularity, without being dominated by the context of the original revelation. Refusing to alter language distorts the revelation’s original context, because words no longer convey the same connotation or even denotation that they did in other times. It is all very well to argue about what "father" was intended to mean historically, but the meaning it conveys today must be faced. The inescapable task of the church is to find the historical means of witnessing to the living truth of the apostolic faith.

There is general agreement that the chief concern of the language of faith is to convey the promise of the gospel. But this may be taken to mean either that questions about the language should be met by clarifying the intent and the effect of the proclamation as a whole, or that the language should be modified if it hinders the message. For some, explication of the text is required. For others, the text could be changed so that it says what it means.

Since an altered creed loses the very attributes that make it such an attractive vehicle of common confession -- namely, its antiquity, widespread use and authority -- some feel that once again the ecumenical movement encounters a conflict between unity and justice. But this is a hasty foreclosure of the process. For one can see real hope in the breadth of agreement that exists in explicating the creed’s faith. As the World Council study continues, reflections from many other contexts will augment those of the NCC study group. Here in North America, scouts and forerunners (like the Inclusive Language Lectionary project) will continue to search out new territory.

The task of finding ways for the church ecumenical to affirm the universal faith that permeates the historical expression of the Nicene Creed may prove to be more uniting than dividing. And as we search for the proper historical expressions of our faith today, we may be able to find common ground in recognizing that faith as it was expressed in another context and as it continues to witness to us through that historical symbol.

The Pharisaic Jesus and His Gospel Parables

The new Christology proceeding out of the Christian-Jewish dialogue, expressed by such theologians as Catholic John Pawlikowski and Anglican Paul van Buren, challenges traditional Christian assumptions in a manner that can seem threatening, yet captures an important strain of our faith too long suppressed. The earliest church was barely, if at all, removed from Judaism; 20 centuries later, the Christian faith is far removed from it. In the process of that widening estrangement, Christianity has lost its understanding of the Jewishness of Jesus; has lost touch with the culture out of which the message of Jesus was spoken, thus bringing a Gentile definition to Jewish words; and has lost its sense of the immediacy of God’s working through scandalous particulars in human history in order to affirm the universal goodness of his creation.

The method increasingly chosen by theologians who wish to understand anew the interdependence of Christianity and Judaism is to focus on the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Judaism of his day, and then to extrapolate some contemporary theological challenges for modern Christians and Jews. Examining this relationship leaves little doubt that Jesus had some significant identification with Pharisaism. Scholars agree that the New Testament portrait of Jews, and especially of Pharisees, is in large part distorted and inaccurate. The specific relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees, however, remains a subject of debate. Some argue that Jesus was himself a Pharisee, calling from within for the charismatic renewal of that popular form of Second Temple Judaism; others argue that he was a prophetic itinerant evangelist, heavily influenced by Pharisaism but not specifically allied with it. The arguments that Jesus was himself a Pharisee appear to be more convincing, for there is little in his uncontested words to suggest that he stood at all outside that movement.

Like the Pharisees, Jesus held himself apart from non-Jews, referring to them variously as swine or dogs. His manner of dress was consistent with that of the Pharisees, as was his way of calling disciples. His devotion to the Torah exhibits a knowledge of both written and oral law (a basic definition of Pharisaism as opposed to Sadducism and Essenism), and he repeatedly affirmed the Pharisaic doctrine of the resurrection of the body and the eternal life of the soul. Above all, we find normative Pharisaic teachings echoed again and again in his words. Phrases such as "No one can serve two masters," "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s," and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" are all directly traceable to Pharisaism in the Second Temple period. The Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer exhibit a typically Pharisaic theology. For these and many other reasons, it would seem not unreasonable to think of Jesus as a Pharisee calling for the renewal of that movement which was itself already a movement of renewal within Judaism.

But if Jesus was a Pharisee, then he must have thought and taught as a Jew of his time. To understand his parables, one must read them through Jewish eyes, assuming Jewish values and symbolism and the Jewish religious heritage. Non-Jews 20 centuries removed from the life and ministry of the historical Jesus do not find this approach easy or comfortable, for it necessitates dropping the assumption that Christianity has displaced or fulfilled Judaism; it means refusing to spiritualize the literal meanings of the texts; and it requires familiarization with the first-century meaning of symbols. The difficulty and challenges of rereading the parables through Jesus’ Judaism, may be illustrated by examining three: the parable of the prodigal son, the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, and the parable of the wicked tenants in the vineyard.

The parable of the prodigal son has long been interpreted by those involved in Christian-Jewish dialogue as concerning the relationship between Jews and non-Jews. This reading holds that God the Father has two sons: the Jewish elder brother and the Gentile younger. The Gentile, having squandered his inheritance and learned the ways of the world, is welcomed home by the Father God, while the Jew is assured, "Son, you are always with me. and all that is mine is yours (Luke 15:31). Would Jesus’ Jewish listeners have heard this parable as a plea for a more universal understanding of God’s relationship to human beings, in that God welcomes home both Jew and non-Jew? Certainly the reference to God as Father, Abba, was common to Pharisaism, and thus to Jesus -- hence the beginning words of the Lords Prayer. Avinu sh’ba ’Shamayim, "Our Father in Heaven." Jewish thought by the time of Jesus held that Adam and Eve were created as one male and one female, rather than as several, in order that all men and women might understand that they are brothers and sisters, descendants of the same set of divinely created parents. Furthermore, Palestine’s Jewish population was not isolated from mixing with Gentiles, as we know from Galilee’s demographics and from the example of the "God-fearers" who attached themselves to synagogues. The "brotherhood" interpretation of the parable is therefore possible.

The universality of Gods love appears to be a predictable theme in Jesus’ teachings. Perhaps this is one sort of renewal to which he was calling Pharisaism from within. Yet there remains the nagging problem of how to reconcile this theme with Jesus’ obvious indifference to, or even dislike for, those non-Jews with whom he came into personal contact, as exemplified by the story of the Samaritan woman in John 4 and the "dogs and swine" reference in Matthew 7. One must also question the significance of swine-tending in the parable: is this detail a confirmation that the younger son is meant to symbolize the Gentiles, or does it suggest the shocking depravity into which the Jewish boy has sunk’? These details stand in need of reconciliation. If the message of the parable is the universality of God’s love, an idea not widely focused upon in Second Temple Judaism, then it is understandable that Jesus Jewish listeners would need the clear assurance of the continuing validity of Gods unique relationship with Israel: "You are always with me, and all that is mine is yours." It is equally possible that the message of the parable is that God does not break covenant with Jews, even with those who wander far into Gentile culture.

As Matthew 25 records the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, it would have been total gibberish to Jesus’ Jewish audience. Even in our liberal age, bridesmaids do not attend the groom at a wedding. They would certainly not have done so in traditional Judaism. Nor would a bridegroom have entered a room alone with five wise, and presumably attractive, young maidens on the night of his wedding. The story as we have it makes no sense because the bride is entirely omitted. Whom would the Jews have understood to be the unmentioned bride, and whom would they have identified as the bridegroom?

Isaiah 54:5-6 states: "For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name. . . . For the Lord has called you like a wife forsaken and in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off," Hosea 2:16-19 states: "And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me ‘My husband’ . . . and I will betroth you to me forever." Israel as bride would have been a familiar image to Jesus Jewish listeners, the Torah being the marriage contract between God the bridegroom and Israel the bride. What then would they have heard in the parable? Israel the bride is awaiting God the bridegroom; many others, uninitiated and virgin, are called to attend her. Only those of the uninitiated, or non-Jews, who are fully prepared to assist Israel in her calling to be Yahweh’s bride will be invited to enter the heavenly banquet chamber at the eschaton.

Certainly Christian tradition has identified the wise and foolish virgins with the Gentiles. But in ignoring what the bride symbolized. Christianity has removed altogether this parable’s specific Jewishness, giving it a meaning contrary to the one Jesus surely intended. For him, Judaism’s renewal was paramount, and it is consistent with his disinterest in Gentiles that they should be assigned the position of facilitators of Israel’s right relationship with God. The ramifications for Christian clergy who try to preach the parable in this fashion are yet to be fully explored and few Christians are theologically prepared to humble themselves by considering themselves as servants to Israel, the bride of God. Yet Paul himself proclaimed that "Christ became a servant to the Jewish people in the cause of God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises made to the patriarchs. . ." (Romans 15:8-9).

A man planted a vineyard and let it out to tenants, and went into another country for a long while. When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants, that they should give him some of the fruit of the vineyard; but the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. And he sent another servant; him also they beat and treated shamefully, and sent him away empty-handed. . . . Then the owner of the vineyard said, "What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; it may be they will respect him." But when the tenants saw him they said to themselves, "This is the heir; let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours.". . . What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants, and give the vineyard to others.

It is, of course, questionable whether this parable is original to Jesus at all: it has been preached for so long as a story condemning the Jews for rejecting Jesus as the Messiah that the possibility that Luke had an anti-Jewish intent must be conceded. The standard Christian homiletical interpretation has been that the owner of the vineyard is God, the vineyard is the world, the tenants are the Jews, the various messengers are the prophets preaching the shortcomings of Judaism, and the beloved son is Jesus. In retribution for his murder by the wicked Jewish tenants, God takes the world away from the Jews and gives it into the hands of the Christians.

But would Jesus’ Jewish listeners have heard the parable that way? The answer is clearly negative. There is no precedent anywhere in Judaism for the prediction that God would replace Jew with Gentile; even all of Jeremiah’s new covenant prophecies must be interpreted as affecting Jews only. More important is the interpretation of the vineyard symbol. Hosea 9:10 states, "Like grapes in the wilderness, I found Israel;’’ Isaiah 5:7 reads. "For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting."

Because Jesus’ listeners would have been familiar with the vineyard as a symbol for the people Israel, not for creation, they would have given an altogether different meaning to the story than the one traditionally preached by Christians. They might have heard it this way: God chose Israel as the vineyard and entrusted it to various tenants: Babylonians, Persians, Greeks. From time to time God would send someone to collect the fruits of Israel’s faithfulness -- that is, God would inspire some sort of covenant renewal with Israel -- but each time, the overlords’ oppression became stronger; they beat and treated shamefully those in covenant relationship with God. Finally God inspired the long-expected new covenant, an incredible vitality in Judaism that produced the Pharisees’ wisdom and charity, the Sadducees’ liturgical enthusiasm, the Zealots’ deep commitment to social action and the Essenes’ mystical purity. But this charismatic renewal was treated most harshly of all, for the Roman overlords at the time of Jesus persecuted Judaism with vehemence, putting to death anyone who challenged the state’s control over Jewish expression. In the face of this horrible oppression, Jesus holds out a message of hope to his people Israel: God will liberate Israel from oppression, placing the vineyard into the hands of tenants who know how to care for it lovingly, and who will enable it to fulfill its mission; only non-Jews who are willing to protect Israel and encourage it to bear fruit will be given control over it.

These are but three examples of the ways in which Christians misunderstand the meaning of the parables through their estrangement from the Jewish setting in which they were told. Not only the Gospels, but many of Paul’s sayings have a very different meaning when read in the context of Judaism. Christians have only begun to understand the import of the scandalous particularity of Jesus’ Jewishness, and this material remains extremely difficult to preach in local congregations. But if the church is to proclaim its understanding of God’s revelation In Christ, the Prince of Peace, in a manner which does not promote bitterness and hatred, persecution and pogrom, then it must learn to let Scripture speak for itself as a Jewish document. God humbled himself in Christ, taking the form of a Pharisaic Jew, teaching an exciting renewal of the covenant between God and his bride, his vineyard Israel. The Christian tradition and anti-Jewish motif perpetuates violence against the choices God made in the Incarnation. We can begin to change this by looking anew at Jesus’ cherishing of his Jewish faith and his own people Israel in the Gospel parables.

Suicide and Christian Moral Judgment

Three incidents illustrate the confusion that persists among many Christians who are confronted with suicide:

•Five or six years ago, as I was ending a class lecture, a young seminarian rushed in from the hallway to say he had just had a call from his parish. There had been a suicide in the community and he had been asked to conduct the person’s funeral. His anxiety was clearly evident in his question: Is it all right for me to do it?"

• In anticipation of a directed study on suicide in the Bible, a young mother whose teen-aged son had killed himself a few years before spoke of her eagerness for such a course to her pastor. His response was simply, "There is nothing in the Bible about suicide."

• Just after the usual round of holiday activities, a college senior took his life before his planned return for a final semester at Notre Dame. He grew up on our street and was frequently in our home. He was from a well-known Roman Catholic family and attended a prominent church in the city. As my daughter and I left home for his funeral, I wondered what kind of service we might expect. To my surprise, the entire service was very upbeat, with college friends sharing happy remembrances, appropriate music and a quite positive sermon. The burial was in the family plot in the church’s cemetery.

In sharing such stories with colleagues, students and laity in several churches. I have found that they are not unusual. There is confusion over what is acceptable and what isn’t. There is ignorance concerning what the Bible says about suicide and what it doesn’t. And there are a number of changes taking place at the grass roots of American churches that many Christians aren’t aware of.

I have identified five needs that call for careful attention if the church is to respond to the present crisis in a responsible way. Anything less will result in a theological position that is not only unsystematic, but one that is also impractical and unpastoral. The church can’t afford such confusion.

The need for a thorough re-examination of the Bible. The pastor’s statement to the young woman is, unfortunately, indicative of a widespread ignorance of biblical texts dealing both directly and indirectly with the subject of suicide. Several major commentaries on both Old and New Testament works omit any serious discussion of suicide, even when the texts themselves deal with an episode of precisely that kind. Bible dictionaries have little to say, and one recent book on death in the Bible made only passing reference to the subject, not even listing the word in its index.

Yet students who have done directed studies with me have identified not only the several specific examples of suicide representative of the broad categories of Émile Durkheim in his book Suicide but also a large number of biblical passages that speak to the church’s response to the issue, even when suicide per se is not the topic of discussion.

Biblical scholarship has been remiss in neglecting this important subject. It has relied on stereotyped exegesis, which is often based on preconceived theological and ethical notions. The recent ferment in approaches to biblical study and new forms of criticism such as canonical criticism and narrative theology give promise of offering new insights on this subject.

In the early centuries suicide was not always condemned. Under certain circumstances, it was even considered a Christian, virtuous act. One of the first to set forth a logical argument against suicide was Augustine, the fourth-century theologian. By his day sentiment opposed to suicide was being reinforced by somewhat limited interpretations of the Sixth Commandment as a prohibition of self-murder. Some interpreters pointed to Job’s refusal to "curse God and die" despite his physical and mental torment and, by contrast, to Judas’s suicide (recorded as such only in Matthew) as a self-murder -- a death befitting the betrayer of Jesus.

Aquinas, the most influential theologian after the 12th century, gave further support to Christian opposition to suicide with his reliance on natural theology. Suicide was contrary to observed nature, he said, and therefore contrary to God’s ordained laws.

Recently, through a translation of his work provided by William Clebsch, we have been reminded that in the 17th century the well-known English cleric John Donne raised serious questions about the established view. But apparently the church found it convenient to silence such objections, and the old norm prevailed. As late as 1790, after years of otherwise progressive thought and effort in such areas as poverty, unemployment, prisons and slavery, John Wesley could write:

It is a melancholy consideration, that there is no country in Europe, or perhaps in the habitable world, where the horrid crime of self-murder is so common as it is in England!

But how can this vile abuse of the law be prevented, and this execrable crime effectually discouraged?

By a very easy method. We read in ancient history, that, at a certain period, many of the women of Sparta murdered themselves. This fury increasing, a law was made, that the body of every woman that killed herself should be exposed naked in the streets, The fury ceased at once.

Only let a law be made and rigorously executed, that the body of every self-murderer, Lord or peasant, shall be hanged in chains, and the English fury will cease at once [The Works of John Wesley (Baker Book House, 1979). vol. 13, p. 481].

The heritage of Wesley s prescription to combat suicide has continued to have a strong effect on most Christians today. But as the issue is brought more directly to our attention, few people are entirely happy with the old teachings. Before thoughtlessly perpetuating past tenets, we should re-evaluate them in the light of both the original situations which called them forth and current circumstances.

The need for an awareness of changing situations in society. In spite of the attention given to it by both the news media and television dramas recently, the full extent of suicide in our society is hardly appreciated by most Christians. Among the elderly, suicides have increased in recent years. In U.S. News and World Report Dr. Robert Butler, one of American’s foremost experts on gerontology and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his book Why Survive? Growing Old in America, said: "Up to 25 per cent of all suicides are committed by persons over 65. The highest rate occurs among white men in their 80s" (July 2,1982, p. 51).

A lengthy front-page story in the February 18 Washington Post was headlined "Jail Inmates’ Suicide Rate Rises Sharply." The director of jail operations for the National Sheriffs Association was quoted as saying, "The figures are a national disgrace." According to Lindsay M. Hayes, author of a major study of jail suicides in the United States, "The federal government is trying to help map out a prevention strategy, but the magnitude of the problem is enormous. . . . Even the threat of jail for a first-time offender is enough to put some people over the edge." With the meting out of more mandatory sentences for drunk driving, the number of suicides among first offenders is likely to increase significantly.

Time was when suicide among blacks was little more than a bad joke. Today, for reasons still not clearly established, the growing number of black suicides reflects significant changes in yet another segment of American life. For some, like the rising young Chicago journalist Leanita McClain and Cleveland’s school superintendent Frederick Douglas Holliday, overt racism seems to be a major cause impelling blacks to take their own lives.

Perhaps the most startling of all such statistics are those that pertain to children and youth. Suicide is now the number-two cause of death among teen-agers, right behind automobile accidents. This prompts the obvious question: How many of the latter are really suicides also? Public announcements have put the figure of attempted suicides among America’s youth for the coming year at between 400,000 and 500,000. At least 10 per cent of that number are expected to succeed.

Child psychologists now speak of "early-onset depression’’ in children who manifest suicidal tendencies as young as age three. Many try suicide several times before the age of ten.

If the church is to respond to the crisis made clear by these harsh statistics, it must take into account the social factors that lie behind so many of them. The societal cause of suicide was highlighted by Èmile Durkheim, a pioneer in studying the subject. We are living in an age quite different from that of any other in our brief national history, insofar as suicidal behavior is concerned. These changes should play a part in our theological considerations. Knowing our true condition is a basic factor in determining how to go about the task of forming religious answers to it. Statistics do have theological significance.

The need for a clear method for addressing the ethical issues. All of the matters mentioned thus far bear on the central question of ethics: Is it "right" for a Christian, under any circumstance, to take her or his own life? A related question is, If there are such circumstances, how does one go about identifying them? The next question might be, How can we go about preventing such circumstances from occurring?

How these questions are answered will determine the answers to a host of other questions, for example: What shall be said about the "soul" of the departed? Shall there be a full Christian funeral and burial? And what shall be the theological basis for pastoral care, not to mention Christian education, regarding suicide? Next come ethical questions related to hospital and nursing-home practices, insurance programs, legislation and the government’s provision for (even encouragement of) the use of poison capsules by captured espionage agents and special-forces personnel.

Two further questions are sure to arise. First, might we, by drawing further attention to the problem, run the risk of inducing even more suicides by "making it all right"? Perhaps, but the alternative is to offer no real guidance at all, or to insist on an ethic based on ideas from the Middle Ages. The church should never be guilty of using poor biblical exegesis or theology to oppose or condone a specific act. As one astute young woman put it: "If I get poor theology on this matter, I can’t really trust the theology I get on any other."

Second, what are our priorities? In the midst of grave concern about nuclear war, world hunger and rising racism, are we justified in giving so much time and effort to suicide? This question is one that individual Christians, local churches and denominations will have to answer for themselves. But none of the three big issues, or all of them together, will warrant our dismissal of other concerns that impinge on human welfare -- especially one -- suicide -- that affects more people each year.

Fundamental to any consideration of more specific matters is the need for a method whereby a Christian moral judgment on suicide might be achieved. Such a method would of course be no guarantee of a single ethical stance, but to proceed without such thought concerning the how of Christian ethics would most surely end in further frustration.

Unfortunately, Christian ethicists themselves have largely ignored the issue. Few textbooks on Christian ethics even mention suicide, much less offer any enlightened comment on it. At the most recent annual meeting of the leading ethics society, not one paper was devoted to suicide. Yet Christian ethicists have a special responsibility, along with biblical interpreters, church historians, sociologists and workers in pastoral care, to lead the church in rethinking the theological dimensions of suicide. It should be clear by now that this is a task that must involve the whole church.

To be sure, the church’s failure to address a particular issue seriously or effectively has often resulted in the emergence of a helpful non-mainline group determined to deal with that need. The Salvation Army is perhaps the most obvious example from the past, but the phenomenon is still occurring today.

Largely because the church was not dealing directly with the broad subject of death and dying ten years ago. Father William A. Wendt, an Episcopal priest in Washington, D.C., established the widely acclaimed St. Francis Center. Today the center also addresses other issues of life and living; staff members teach semester-long courses in intermediate and high schools, as well as offer workshops and group counseling to the bereaved.

At a recent St. Francis Center workshop on suicide, the 19 participants came from northern Virginia, the District of Columbia, and several Maryland suburbs. They included three psychotherapists, two nurses, two pastors, a seminary professor, a graduate student, three counselors, a school psychologist, a half-dozen teachers and one member of a city council committee charged with identifying emerging issues. The center is but one of several church-related groups around the country responding to the present need outside the "normal" mainline church channels.

A more controversial group also dealing with suicide is the Hemlock Society, founded by Derek Humphry, who assisted his wife to take her own life in England several years ago. He said on television that his book Let Me Die Before I Wake has helped hundreds of people to end their lives. It is widely read, even though assisting another person to commit suicide is a crime in some states.

As effective as interdenominational and nonchurch groups are, however, the effort must be made to involve as many churches as possible. It is only through a willingness to study the issue with the express purpose of changing the attitudes of society and providing more effective pastoral care that the church can rise to the challenge of suicide.

Fortunately, there are some encouraging signs. The large number of interdenominational studies on a host of sticky theological problems have produced some agreements that would have seemed absolutely unthinkable 20 years ago. These newer understandings are taking hold in many churches at the local level. Given the enormity of the present problem and its obvious urgency for all segments of society, it should not take another 20 years for the churches to begin getting their theological act together.

A first step would be the decision by each religious group to reassess its own position. (As a United Methodist I can point to the various descendants of John Wesley as being among those most in need of such reassessment!) Centers of theological education could offer courses, directed studies and graduate research projects that focus on a broad range of related topics. A number of youth groups have already begun having psychiatrists and social workers meet with them. Several have gathered parents and youths together to watch and discuss a television drama such as the recent film Surviving. Regrettably, few preachers have addressed the matter from the pulpit -- partly because most aren’t really sure what the Christian position is and partly because their understanding of the Bible and the teachings of the church does not square with either their experience or their reason.

Yet several very important steps could be taken. As suggested above, those who are directly involved in any field in which suicide is a professional concern should press their colleagues, societies and institutions to address the issue. Local councils of churches could sponsor joint community meetings, perhaps more easily than hospitals, counseling centers or universities. General church boards and agencies could be urged to support symposia that bring together laity, clergy and a cross-section of other professionals to identify the complexities of the ethical problems involved and to prescribe the next urgent steps to be taken.

These things can be done in a matter of months. Whether or not the attitudes of society will soon be changed is not our concern now. What we are called to do is to begin the process, on whatever levels we can, with determination and confidence. In failing to provide a theological position and effective pastoral care related to suicide, we have been napping too long.

Norman Thomas: Socialism and the Social Gospel

Thomas’s thought, wrote one biographer, was a mixture of Christianity, anarchism and Marxism (Bernard J. Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism, Quadrangle, 1970). The biographer might just as accurately have characterized it as an outgrowth of the 19th-century Social Gospel movement. Walter Rauschenbusch, who developed a Social Gospel theology most thoroughly, had a profound influence on Thomas.

Born in 1861, Rauschenbusch experienced an adolescence and young adulthood that coincided with the end of Reconstruction (accompanied by Klan violence), the last of the Indian wars, the rapid settlement of the West, tremendous industrial expansion and centralization, marked by widespread, often violent, labor strife, and the greatest wave of immigration in American history. It was also an era of major farm and labor organizations based on Christian fraternalism and engaged in experiments with the cooperative production and distribution of goods: the National Labor Union, the Knights of Labor, Patrons of Husbandry and the Southern Farmers Alliance. Rauschenbusch absorbed Henry George’s Progress and Poverty and Edward Bellamy’s utopian novels. He studied in both Germany and the United States, read Marx, Mazzini and Tolstoy, and visited Sidney and Beatrice Webb in England, where he became acquainted with the Fabian Socialists.

The key to Rauschenbusch’s theology was his concept of the Kingdom of God. To him, this Kingdom was not located in another place called heaven or in a future millennium, but could best be described in modern terms as a level of consciousness in which one recognized the immanence of God in human life and the interconnected, interacting, interdependent nature of the entire human species. His vision was like the ancient concept of the organic community that underlay tribalism, feudalism and early American Puritanism, but it expanded the community to include the whole earth. Walter Rauschenbusch was convinced that this was the original Christian vision which had been distorted and lost with time, and that it was possible to regain it.

The social and political implications of such a view were radical indeed. A socialist economy fit comfortably into this scheme, while laissez-faire capitalism led to a situation where, Rauschenbusch said, "the larger part of the members are, through solidarity, caged to be eaten by the rest and suffer what is both unjust and useless." (A Theology for the Social Gospel, McMillan [1917], p. 20). Rauschenbusch believed that social institutions should be "fraternal and cooperative," and raised the question of "institutionalized sin" 50 years before King’s young followers discovered institutionalized racism. The anarchist component of his thought lay in the high value he placed on each individual human life and his opposition to coercion. If socialism was desirable, Rauschenbusch argued, it must be chosen voluntarily, not imposed. Individual conscience must be respected. Anti-imperialism, pacifism and respect for all races were implicit in this teaching.

Thomas met and married a young nurse from a wealthy, socially prominent family. She shared his views, and they settled down to what they expected to be a lifelong ministry to the urban poor. At East Harlem Church on 116th Street (in a neighborhood with New York’s highest homicide rate), they ministered to people who faced a combination of high unemployment and low-paying jobs, which oppressed both body and soul. The couple planted inner-city gardens, opened workshops and begged from the rich to feed the poor.

World War I and Thomas’s public expression of pacifism unexpectedly curtailed his ministry. Although he was not yet a socialist, the minister was an ardent pacifist, a position for which his church gave little support. Attracted to the Socialist Party primarily because it opposed World War I, he endorsed Socialist candidate Morris Hillquit for mayor of New York in 1918. In a letter to the press, Thomas wrote:

I believe that the hope for the future lies in a new social and economic order which demands the abolition of the capitalistic system. War itself is only the most horrible and dramatic of the many evil fruits of our present organized system of exploitation and the philosophy of life which exalts competition instead of cooperation. I am convinced that the hope of peace lies not so much in statesmen, who have already shown themselves bankrupt of ideas, but in people of all countries who demand the cessation of war in which they pay so horrible a price [W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist, Scribners (1976) p. 58].

He soon paid the price for his letter, as contributions to his church and its charitable activities declined abruptly. When it finally became clear to Thomas that "his poor" would not be fed until he resigned his post, his Social Gospel ministry came to an end. Soon after that, he was appointed secretary of the newly-formed Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Thomas’s strong pacifist stand distressed many friends and relatives. One brother promptly joined the Army. But another brother, Evan, announced when he was drafted that he refused to kill. Evan was imprisoned, brutalized and placed in solitary confinement, where he was forced to stand on tiptoe for nine hours each day. From that time on, Thomas championed the right of exemption from the draft based solely on individual conscience. He worked for the release of Eugene Debs and others who were imprisoned for verbal opposition to World War I. Thomas was slow to accept the necessity of entering World War II, and quick to denounce the Vietnam War. However, he did not oppose the United Nations-supported police action in Korea.

Thomas joined the Socialist Party in 1918, and quickly rose to prominence. As a party leader, he violated all traditional images of normal socialist behavior by warring with the party’s labor faction leaders. Quite simply, their ethics did not meet his standards. He found them unconcerned about the unorganized poor, too wedded to promoting only self-interest when organizing, and too ready to wink at racketeering within their ranks. The labor movement that might have shared his Social Gospel vision -- the Knights of Labor -- died before he rose to prominence in socialist circles.

While Thomas had strongly advocated and supported certain New Deal legislation, such as Social Security, he attacked the New Deal for failing to help America’s most economically depressed people: sharecroppers. He helped to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), an interracial group which demanded, among other things, that government payments for plowing-under crops or leaving land idle be split with tenant farmers, not paid solely to land owners. He helped raise money for STFU members who were beaten and evicted. And he traveled to Mississippi where STFU members were being terrorized, and where he and his fellow workers faced the same treatment.

In the late ‘30s Thomas vigorously supported the new Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), whose early policies were more in line with his social views than were those of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He gave public speeches in New Jersey, defying a ban on CIO speakers in that state, and was twice forcibly deported to New York.

Thomas was vocal and controversial on issues of his times. When Spain’s civil war broke out in 1936, he opposed Franco early, even bending his pacifist principles to support armed aid for the resistance. Eventually he gave critical support to U.S. participation in World War II, while still upholding the rights of conscientious objectors and pointing out that the Allies were not themselves innocent of imperialism. He especially supported Gandhi’s struggle against the British government in India. For quite some time, Thomas stood almost alone in left and progressive circles in the United States in expressing outrage at the internment of Japanese Americans at home. He also objected to segregation within the army.

Although frequently in bitter conflict with Communists and Trotskyites, Thomas opposed government interference with those groups’ right to travel. He opposed the 1940 Smith Act, which made it a criminal offense to be part of any group that advocated violent overthrow of the government, and he asked for clemency for Smith Act victims and for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, though he believed they were guilty of spying. Thomas personally helped various left-wing individuals, even while opposing their views.

Although Thomas did not oppose the CIO role in overturning the communist Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, he totally rejected Rafael Trujillo’s cruel and absolute dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and expressed grave concern about the United States’s general failure to oppose right-wing Latin American dictatorships.

When the civil rights movement blossomed in the 1960s, Thomas was delighted. Twice he flew to Mississippi to speak for it despite his advancing age, and was chased by night riders -- just as he had been 30 years earlier. But his admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., was unbounded. He envied King, Thomas said, because King’s life and movement were so firmly rooted in his religion.

Although Thomas and his brother Evan did not formally resign from the Presbyterian Church until their mother died in 1931, both referred to themselves as agnostics after their church failed to support their pacifism during World War I. But in the 1950s Thomas still said, "I am no atheist. Indeed, I am almost haunted by religion and often wish that I could regain the comfortable Christian theology of earlier years" (Swanberg, p. 367). In the end he asked for a Christian burial rather than a socialist funeral. "I am not an orthodox Christian," he said, "but the Christian tradition is so much a part of our life, of my life, and Christ is to me so commanding a figure who so released all that I care most for that I feel justified in asserting a Christian service which should not play up personal immortality" (Swanberg, p. 407)

Thomas remained an activist until his death in 1968, and his last crusade was for world peace. He called arms control a delusion and insisted on the need for real disarmament. He believed that neither the Soviet nor the American government is trustworthy, but that the people in both nations cherish peace and life. And he added that while the Soviet Union had been guilty of heinous crimes, so had all governments, and the United States’s present stance was the more provocative of the two superpowers positions.

Six times the Socialist Party’s candidate for president, Thomas is sometimes seen as a disaster in terms of his political leadership. Certainly he presided over a continuously dwindling membership. He lacked interest in -- perhaps even skill for -- the organizational work required for party-building. He distrusted even that part of the labor movement closest to him, denouncing Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers, among others, for supporting the arms buildup.

Dehumanizing People and Euphemizing War

In his definitive work The Destruction of the European Jews (Quadrangle, 1961), Raul Hilberg presents some insights that are as relevant to the United States today as they were to Nazi Germany a half-century ago. If we believe that we must remember the tragedies of history so that we will not repeat them, we ought to pay special attention to Hilberg’s assertion that

in a Western society, destructive activity is not just a technocratic phenomenon. The problems arising in a destructive process are not only administrative but also psychological. A Christian is commanded to choose good and to reject evil. The greater his destructive task, therefore, the more potent are the moral obstacles in his way. These obstacles must be removed -- the internal conflict must somehow be resolved. One of the principal means through which the perpetrator will attempt to clear his conscience is by clothing his victim in a mantle of evil, by portraying the victim as an object that must be destroyed.

Hilberg’s observations apply equally to today’s nuclear age, when destroying one’s “enemy” carries with it the possibility that one may kill most of humankind and devastate the earth in the process. To remove the moral obstacles to such a course, leaders, both political and religious, euphemize killing and the weapons of destruction and dehumanize the potential victims in order to justify their extermination.

In his novel 1984 and in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell warns against those who use words to defend the indefensible. He contends that our language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Some ugly and foolish thoughts expressed in slovenly language were put forth by President Ronald Reagan when, during a 1982 conference with some eastern Carribean leaders, he called Marxism a “virus”; when, in 1983, he labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” telling the assembled National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, that communism “is the focus of evil in the modern world” and that “we are enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might”; and when, while conferring in 1984 with 19 conservative and religious leaders, he vowed to fight the “communist cancer.”

When the president takes us into a metaphoric world where his language invites extermination of the “enemy,” he clothes the ‘‘victim in a mantle of evil, by portraying [him or her] as an object that must be destroyed” (The Destruction of the European Jews). A virus, a cancer, and an evil empire all invite destruction and extermination.

When the persecution of the Jews began in Nazi Germany a half-century ago, Jews were labeled a “disease” or “parasites”; Hitler talked of the “Jewish bacilli’’ and the “demon of Communism.” This metaphoric language was essential for dehumanizing the “enemy.” Defining people as microorganisms and as subhuman made it easier to justify their extermination. As Richard Grunberger points out in Twelve-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany [Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971], “the incessant official demonization of the Jew gradually modified the consciousness even of naturally humane people,” so that the populace became indifferent to Jewish suffering, “not because it occurred in wartime and under conditions of secrecy, but because Jews were astronomically remote and not real people.”

We cannot, therefore, dismiss Reagan’s language as mere political hyperbole. Linguistically, the president’s metaphors for defining the “enemy” are frightfully similar to the Nazis’ dehumanizing terms for Jews, communists and other “un-Germans.” To some, the metaphors may appear to be harmless stylistic devices used by government officials to emphasize a point of view or an argument; they may appear as oratorical ornaments. However, such metaphoric language is more than ornament, affecting people’s conceptual systems and thought processes, influencing how they perceive others, and determining their political views and behavior.

Unfortunately, dehumanizing metaphors carry some plausibility, for they allow the expression of aggressive sentiments and attitudes. Belligerent metaphors’ functions and effects can readily be understood when one compares their use to that of Reagan’s “aggressive” jokes. When during the microphone testing episode in August 1984, the president declared, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes,” this “joke” allowed him to express in an acceptable way the unacceptable view that millions of human beings -- Russian children, women and men -- ought to be killed and their nation destroyed. The metaphors and jokes permit the speaker to imply brutally hostile sentiments and thoughts which, if stated directly, would be considered coarse and inhumane.

When Ronald Reagan was asked whether homosexuals should be barred from public office in the United States, he replied jokingly that they should certainly “be barred from the department of beaches and parks.” He was, of course, “just kidding.” When he stated that “we [were] told four years ago that l.7 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet,” he was, of course, “just kidding.” The metaphors and jokes allow audiences to cheer language that, at another level, expresses destructive aggression against the “enemies”: Marxists, homosexuals, the hungry poor.

Dehumanizing metaphors are more than just figures of speech; they affect our thoughts and behavior. “The trouble with metaphors is that they have a strong pull on our fancy. They tend to run away with us. Then we find that our thinking is directed, not by the force of the argument at hand, but by the interest in the image in our mind,” says philosopher Monroe Beardsley (Thinking Straight [Prentice-Hall, 1965]). The images of Russia as the evil empire and of communism as a virus and a cancer encourage us to take severe measures against them. Such language invites hostility and aggression, not coexistence and compromise.

The barriers created by using words that denigrate and dehumanize others are clearly illustrated by the January 1984 “Man of the Year” issue of Time magazine. On the cover, Reagan and Andropov stand back to back. The first paragraph of the lead article begins “In the beginning were the words,” the second paragraph “After the words, the walkouts.” Using dehumanizing language not only affects our perceptions of the “enemy”; it also affects the “enemy’s” perceptions of us. As Seweryn Bialer states, “Among the Soviet elites, who have spent much of their lives manipulating the nuances of ideology, words are taken very seriously. . . . For Soviet leaders and high officials President Reagan’s decision to use bellicose language was and is a political fact that amounts to a policy pronouncement (New York Review of Books [February 16, 1984]). In our nuclear age, such misunderstandings may threaten our survival. “The destruction of the Jews was no accident,” asserts Hilberg. “When in the early days of 1933 the first civil servant wrote the first definition of a ‘non-Aryan’ into a civil service ordinance the fate of European Jewry was sealed.” Similarly, the destruction of humankind would be no accident; the virus-cancer-evil empire view of reality, coupled with the admonition that Scripture and Jesus Christ authorize us to destroy those so characterized, are but an initial part of a definitional process leading to destruction.

Our nation has, of course, always contained people who, needing to denigrate and dehumanize others, have relied on racist and sexist language. Unchallenged, such language has, among other things, given the denigrators power, helping them to keep the subjugated in their place and influencing people’s perceptions of those dehumanizingly defined. The power to subjugate that comes with the power to define others is well illustrated not only by the Nazis’ characterization of the Jews as bacilli and parasites, but also by the American colonist’s and settler’s redefinition of the “American Indians.” When Columbus arrived in America the native population of what was to become the United States was 1 million; by the late 19th century that population was down to 250,000! To defend the indefensible, the invaders defined the victims as savages, heathens and barbarians. As the New Mexico Supreme Court judges said in an 1896 court opinion, “The idea that a handful of wild, half-naked, thieving, plundering, murdering savages should be dignified with the sovereign attributes of nations enter into solemn treaties . . . is unsuited to the intelligence and justice of this age, or the natural rights of mankind” (United States v. Lucero, l N. M. 422, 1896). When such language becomes institutionalized, when it is spoken by judges, religious leaders or presidents, it receives the imprimatur of authorities who have the power and influence to impose their metaphors. In the heat of a political discussion, it is one thing for a private citizen to declare that Marxism is a virus and a cancer that must be destroyed. It is an entirely different thing when the president of the United States uses the same dehumanizing language in public discourse.

Not only is destroying other human beings rationalized and justified through metaphorizing them into creatures, into microorganisms needing to be eradicated, but moral obstacles are also overcome by euphemizing the weapons of destruction and the pain, suffering and death that their use would bring. The brutality and inhumanity of our policies and practices are hidden behind euphemisms. During the Vietnam war, when government officials talked of “regrettable by-products,” they meant civilians killed by mistake; “pacification” meant the forcible evacuation of Vietnamese from their huts, the rounding up of all males, the shooting of those who resisted, the slaughtering of domesticated animals and the burning of dwellings; “incursion” meant another invasion of another country; creating a “sanitized belt” meant forcibly removing all the inhabitants of the area being “sanitized,” cutting down the trees, bulldozing the land and erecting “defensive positions” with machine guns, mortars and mines. “By-products,” “pacification,” “sanitized belts” -- such language hides the truth that human beings are dying and families are being destroyed.

This past August, Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, neutralized and euphemized the horror and inhumanity of war by declaring that America must remain prepared for “low-intensity conflict.” In comments prepared for delivery to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, McFarlane said, “The use of force can never be our preference or our only choice. It cannot yet be discarded, however, as an instrument of policy.

We must be prepared to deal with low-intensity conflict in whatever form it takes.” His examples of low-intensity conflicts included the Soviet Union’s “risktaking in Angola, Ethiopia” and other nations. “Rational and resolute management of Western power in the face of Soviet pressure will deter major war,” McFarlane concluded (the Seattle Times, August 4).

“Low-intensity conflicts,’’ “risk-taking,” “management of power,” “instrument of policy”: such language suggests an encounter group dealing with personal problems or a union-management negotiation. One hardly senses that war and killing are being discussed. The destruction of human life has been euphemized through using abstractions. Discussing the language of war, Aldous Huxley focused on the word “force”: “The attempt to secure justice, peace and democracy by ‘force’ seems reasonable enough until we realize, first, that this non-committal word stands, in the circumstances of our age, for activities which can hardly fail to result in social chaos; and second, that the consequences of social chaos are injustice, chronic warfare and tyranny” (The Olive Tree [Harper & Row, 1937]). Huxley’s prenuclear concept of the social chaos resulting from using force pales when compared to the probable consequences of a nuclear war.

Pentagon documents refer to fighting a nuclear war “over a protracted period” and argue that American nuclear forces “must prevail and be able to force the Soviet Union to seek earliest termination on terms favorable to the United States.” The Federal Emergency Management Agency, responsible for civil defense preparations, tells us that “the United States could survive a nuclear attack and then go on to recovery within a relatively few years.

What is a “protracted period’’? ‘‘Protracted” means prolonged, dragged out; does that mean that nuclear weapons would be fired as long as someone were left alive to push the buttons, long after major cities had been destroyed and millions of humans killed? What does it mean to “prevail”? The American Heritage Dictionary tells us that it is ‘‘to triumph or win a victory.’’ After a protracted nuclear war, it might be difficult to determine who had triumphed amid the massive death and destruction.

To say that the “United States could survive a nuclear attack” is ambiguous. “The United States” is an abstraction; in this context, “survive” is an abstraction. Asserting that “the United States could survive” is not the same as saying that its people and other living creatures could survive. What will survive? The military weapons still to be fired by programmed computers? To say that the “United States could survive” is so ambiguous as to be meaningless, and yet the language gives the impression that life would go on as usual after a nuclear war.

Acronyms are still another means used to hide the horrors and the weapons of war. Functioning as euphemisms, they make unpleasant or embarrassing things appear tolerable. This becomes especially evident when we consider some of our everyday acronyms: at one time cancer was the “Big C”; children have “to do a BM”; while “syphilis” may be difficult to utter, “VD” is less of a problem; the “SOB” may hand out a lot of “BS”; “HO” is to be dreaded; and of course we have our “F---” word.

Nuclear weapons are called ABMs, SLCMs, MIRYs, and other letters of the alphabet. One reason that “the question of universal death grows stale,” Robert Scheer has written, is that the arguments are couched in ‘‘terms that pointedly mute just what it is these bombs will do, which is, to start with, to kill the people one loves and nearly everyone else as well.” If we seriously are considering using those SLCMS and MIRVs, knowing that they will lead to the killing of the people we love, and if we are willing to consider the possibility of ‘‘prevailing” in a “protracted period” of mutual destruction, then how much easier it is to consider exterminating an enemy defined as a cancer, virus or demon.

Our political and religious leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, must be persuaded to refrain from dehumanizing people into viruses and cancers residing in an evil empire which Scripture admonishes us to destroy. The euphemisms of war must be exposed for what they are -- words and phrases that fool us into accepting the unacceptable. Dehumanizing the “enemy” and euphemizing the weapons of war and war itself is a deadly combination that, unfortunately, has historically been successful in defending the indefensible.

A half-century after the Nazis began their persecution of the Jews, a process demanding, in Hilberg’s words, that “moral obstacles must be removed -- the internal conflicts must somehow be resolved,” an American launch control officer at an Intercontinental Ballistics Missile base, cited in David Barash and Judith Lipton’s Stop Nuclear War (Grove, 1982), indicated that “we have two tasks: The first is not to let people go off their rockers. That’s the negative side. The positive side is to ensure that people act without moral compunction.”

Women Clergy: How Their Presence Is Changing the Church

Though women clergy constitute a very small minority of the ordained clergy in most denominations, current seminary enrollments -- in some cases more than 40 per cent women -- suggest that the next few years will see sudden and dramatic increases in the numbers of women entering parish ministries and other clergy positions.

What, we must ask, will happen as churches move beyond tokenism in ordaining and employing women? What changes are now being wrought in seminaries because of women faculty and students? What are the prospects for placement of women graduates? Will the influx of women somehow change the profession? Do women’s styles of ministry and leadership differ from traditional models?

To address such questions as these, we asked five knowledgeable women from as many denominations to share their perspectives on the present reality and future prospects of women in the ordained ministry. Suzanne Watt was one of the first women ordained in the Episcopal Church. Beverly Anderson, a black seminarian, will be seeking ordination in the United Methodist Church. Nancy Hardesty, a laywoman from an evangelical tradition, and Barbara Brown Zikmund, a United Church of Christ minister, are both church historians. And theologian Letty Russell, a United Presbyterian, had extensive parish ministry experience before coming to her present seminary post. These five offer their insights on the impact women clergy are having and will have on the church.

Women and the Seminaries

By Nancy Hardesty

(Dr. Hardesty is assistant professor of American church history at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. She is coauthor [with Letha Scanzoni] of All We’re Meant to Be.)

The relationship of women to seminaries -- initially all-male bastions for the education of the clergy, an all-male profession -- seems to evolve through four stages. Movement toward the fourth stage may Constitute progress.

(1) Initially a few women are grateful for the opportunity to study in seminaries. They hope to find some form of ministry on the fringes of the church to satisfy the inescapable call from God they feel in their hearts. Male students, unthreatened, are friendly and patronizing; male faculty members are solicitously paternal.

(2) As small groups of women gather in a seminary context, their consciousnesses are raised. They get in touch with the sexism of church and society and with their own anger. They form an embattled women’s caucus, knowing that the skirmishes they fight in seminary are preliminary rounds for the battles they will fight for their right to full ministry in the church. Their stance evokes hostility from their male peers, resistance from the faculty. Demands are met by concessions.

(3) As more women students arrive, the fervor of women and the fever of the situation dissipate. Changes are being made; the atmosphere is different. Several women are on the faculty; a few “feminist theology” or “women in ministry” courses are added to the curriculum. New students wonder what the problem is. Younger ones have encountered few difficulties thus far in their education or church experience. They have seen female role models in the parish, and they see themselves as being no different from their male peers. They compare notes on church politics and plan for their own parishes. Faculty and student men have learned to speak nonsexist,” and so a modicum of harmony reigns.

(4) Eventually women come to appreciate past struggles and gains while being realistic about the depths of prejudice and the difficulties remaining. Women faculty members are no longer marginal but integral to the faculty. An awareness of feminist, black and liberation theologies informs the critique of all theology and biblical hermeneutic. History courses include material about all segments of church life -- clerical and lay, white and black, men and women, bishops and Sunday schools, General Conference decisions and the work of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society. Men and women choose, and the church affirms, forms of ministry for which the individuals are gifted, whether parish work or more specialized endeavors. Couples find support for flexible solutions to the complex issues raised by egalitarian marriages and family rearing.

As I look at the spectrum of seminary life today, I find institutions and individuals at all four stages. Some fundamentalist and traditionalist institutions are still at stage one. Evangelical and denominational seminaries are moving from two to three. Perhaps some independent seminaries are approaching the fourth level.

Though I have seen considerable progress in the three years I have been a part of seminary life, hard work remains to be done. As women, we have been welcomed and accepted. Now we must create and model for our students new ways of theologizing and ministering as whole people.

Womanstyle: Eyes to See the Gifts in Others

By Beverly J. Anderson

(Ms. Anderson is a second-year, second-career student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.)

A new dawning for the church is heralded by the escalation in the numbers of women entering the ordained ministry. As traditionally accepted modes of ministering are being expanded and reshaped out of women’s experiences and history, what may initially appear to be radically threatening changes can be seen as signs of resurrection.

Women who have responded to God’s call to the ordained ministry bring a wealth of previous experience and involvement in the local church -- experience which serves to enhance their ministry with the laity in diverse ways. Many ordained women bring not only their Christian understanding of relationship to God and neighbor, but the particularized dimensions of feminist and other liberation theologies as well. The linking of these fundamental life postures prepares the way for the gifts and graces of all women, men and children to be affirmed, utilized and developed in mutual sharing in response to the gospel.

The most publicly visible changes that women bring to the ministry are in the area of leadership style. Two phrases that characterize this particular departure from tradition are ‘‘shared involvement’’ and “mutual pilgrimage.” Because women themselves have had to struggle to arrive at ordained ministry, they often bring a heightened awareness of the dehumanizing experience of being “shut out.” Women can draw on their own pilgrimage as a resource as they invite and enable others to affirm and value their own uniqueness, gifts and resources.

It is apparent, from the profile of women who attended the second Consultation of United Methodist Clergywomen in January, that the majority of women now in the ordained ministry have self-consciously dialogued with, have struggled in, and have been aided by one or another of the liberation movements, be it Third World, feminist, civil rights or human potential. As a result, women are modeling a style of leadership that acknowledges the pain of ignored talents, dual standards and narrowly defined roles. It appears then that women clergy can be more open to exploring leadership styles that are less hierarchical and more fluid than those of the majority of their male colleagues, who have been admitted to the system as a matter of fact, expectation and privilege.

I am convinced that the task and role of clergy leadership are greatly enhanced by the presence of women in the ministry, many of whom are bringing a new understanding and style to the church. Women who are penetrating the previously walled bastions of male leadership have observed and felt the effects of the closed system. The Christian faith whose essence calls each person to ministry, the continuing reminders of wounds incurred in the personal and corporate struggle for affirmation, and the learned gift of reconciliation -- these have conspired to force women to create and refine alternative modes of leadership. The traditional disparity between leader and follower, powerful and powerless, skilled and unskilled, is being challenged, while the concept of a shared ministry between clergy and laity is being tested and embraced as women enter positions of clergy leadership.

The open style of church administration, which appears to be more characteristic of women (though not to the total exclusion of some men), is bound to be perceived by those who have functioned primarily in leader-follower systems as not only weak, by traditional standards, but also ineffective. Sizable numbers of persons continue to espouse the myth that leaders are born and not made, and therefore do not believe that they have valuable leadership skills that can be “grown,” enhanced and utilized. Many persons will view the clergywoman as “shirking her responsibilities” and lacking the basic knowledge of “how to get things done” as she encourages and enables a mode of shared leadership and resources. This shift in leadership style is strikingly contrasted by M. S. Knowles in his paper “Some Characteristics of Static vs. Innovative Organizations.” Within his dimensions of structure, atmosphere, management philosophy, decision- and policy-making and communication, there is considerable correspondence to women’s emerging model of leadership style.

It is disheartening to observe that a good many of Knowles’s characteristics of “static” organizations are emphasized as effective corporate, upward-mobility skills in the popularized books for women in Leadership. It soon becomes clear that these books promise instant management success at the expense of others, encouraging the perpetuation of the closed, low-risk pyramidal organizational structure -- the very antithesis of the characteristics necessary to effective and enabling church leadership.

One of the primary keys to a mutually shared ministry is having the eyes to see. More specifically, this means searching for talents and skills in other people. Women are in a unique position to provide training grounds for skills assessment and development for other pilgrims in ministry, precisely because their own historical journey has prepared them to “tune in” to the self-denial and pain of role rigidity of others.

The church has historically been a setting in which some people have been given the opportunity to try on” leadership behavior. Indeed, history reveals the church to be the only public setting available to some groups barred from participation in other public arenas. Moreover, the church has also miraculously withstood and supported that often ill-fitting garb, as members adjusted, changed and rearranged their unfamiliar leadership wardrobe.

The church can continue to be the supportive setting in which persons can “get the feel” of visible leadership in a variety of roles, as it affirms the presence of gifts and provides opportunities for their use. Often persons feel stuck in certain roles in other contexts, but the variety of tasks needing to be cared for in the church offers a continuum along which persons can move as they develop and focus their leadership qualities.

From my point of view, this understanding is what gives meaning and purpose to a mutual pilgrimage. Ordained persons are entrusted to develop and use their gifts along with and on behalf of the whole community of believers -- and at the same time, to enable others to use and develop their gifts, skills and graces. This means continually urging the members to “plug in” at some point on the continuum, so as to use their visible skills and nurture those that are dormant.

Christ has been experienced as the comforter, the clarifier and the confronter. Likewise, in raising up other co-pilgrims, the clergy and the church have the responsibility to comfort and nurture, to clarify and focus, to confront and question its members in love, so that women, men and children may flourish in their journey toward wholeness in all its dimensions.

Starting and sustaining persons on their journey toward self-affirmation and the use of their God-given gifts for God -- that is the task that belongs to the church. It is my conviction that women clergy are at a unique juncture in history to enable that affirmation in others and in themselves, as the whole church becomes increasingly self-conscious about its calling to “birth” co-pilgrims who can be Christ’s effective and enabling ambassadors wherever they may be.

Do We Have an Advocate?

By Suzanne R. Hiatt

(Dr. Hiatt, an Episcopal priest, is an associate professor of pastoral theology at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

At present there are equal numbers of black and women clergy in the Episcopal Church -- slightly more than 300 of each, with an overlap of about four black women. The two groups have separate (but equal) employment problems. While there are “black” parishes looking for black rectors, there are no “woman” parishes looking for women rectors; on the other hand, the large pool of “assistant” jobs in suburban parishes is more available to women than to blacks, though it is wide open only to white males. Rectorships of large white or mixed parishes are equally closed to blacks and to women.

In all the complicated analysis of the “job problem,” an aspect of that problem impeding . both women and blacks seems to be routinely overlooked. That is the unwillingness of congregations to choose as their leader any person who is seen as “exceptional.” Some time ago I asked a woman minister of the United Church of Christ who had been in a small-town congregation for about a year how things were going. A person with long ministerial experience, she responded brightly that things were going very well and that the parishioners “had just about worked through their grief.” Curious as to what calamitous parochial tragedy could have required a year’s grieving, I inquired further. The grief to which my sister referred was, I discovered, the grief the congregation felt at having sunk so low in the company of parishes that it had been forced to hire as its pastor a woman, rather than a “real” minister -- i.e., a man.

It seems to me that the reluctance of congregations to hire an “exceptional” person such as a woman as their chief pastor is rooted in their fear of “losing face” among the parishes. That curious human dynamic, appearing here on the corporate level, needs to be recognized. It cannot simply be dealt with pastorally as that valiant UCC minister was doing; it also needs to be looked at theologically. Of course a parish wants a pastor who is immediately acceptable in the world of ecclesiastics. But doesn’t the gospel have something to say for the leadership of one who is “despised and rejected of men” ?

Few, if any, of the ecclesiastical authorities who help parishes decide whom to hire are strong advocates for “exceptional” people. Bishops, superintendents, synod executives all want their congregations to be contented with their clergy -- a congregation “working through its grief” must be an ecclesiastic’s nightmare. Yet until such men (and they are, almost without exception, men) become strong, theologically motivated advocates for the “exceptional” pastor, female and/or racial minority member, the current grim situation will not improve.

In the past when we have spoken of church leaders who were “for” the ordination of women, we meant those who were not opposed to it. It is time that “being for” minorities began to mean active advocacy -- insisting that parishes interview women and blacks and actively promoting the candidacy of specific female and black persons for specific positions. Women and blacks do not “win” acceptance simply by doing excellent work and thereby converting the skeptical. Congregations will not “hear about” our talent and clamor for our ministries. We need special help from our brother clergy, and congregations need special help in dealing with the good news “exceptional” people can bring them.

Since nearly half our present seminarians are female, the urgency of the situation should be clear to denominational leaders. As we project that factor institutionally, it becomes obvious that either congregations will accept and prosper with female leadership, or we will one day have approximately half the congregations we have now. If women and blacks continue not to be accepted and go elsewhere, the current clergy oversupply will soon become a serious clergy shortage.

Those responsible for the development of professional leadership in the churches must begin to see the deep reluctance of congregations to hire “exceptional” people as the serious theological and institutional problem it is. The difficulty lies with the churches -- it is not a “women’s problem” or a “black problem.” God is certainly calling all these exceptional people to ministry. Church leaders must take seriously the problem of our Christian brothers and sisters who cannot hear that call.

Clerical Ministry as a Female Profession

By Letty M. Russell

(Dr. Russell, a United Presbyterian minister, is associate professor of theology at Yale University divinity school)

Along with the general ferment and change affecting social roles in all of society today, we find that the roles of women and men in ministry are also changing. Some of these changes are already happening as women enter the clerical ministry in increasing numbers. With more clergy couples looking for part-time or shared positions, there is an increased demand for the revision of ecclesiastical policies so that part-time and team ministries are possible. With women choosing ministry as a second career and entering seminaries in midlife, there is a growing recognition that both men and women frequently change their professions today. This realization in turn puts pressure on church bodies to recognize ministries of shorter duration, and to make it possible for persons to leave as well as to enter professional ministry without stigma or loss of pension.

Despite considerable resistance from the theological and ecclesiastical status quo, seminaries are responding to financial pressures and developing a variety of educational models. So that a wider group of persons may be reached, education is sometimes related to actual life experience and offered as a continuing process available to those who are also working. Women and Third World groups are especially interested in ways of pursuing theological education while continuing their ministries at home, in the church or in society. All groups are interested in the prestige of an added degree, and many younger students are beginning their careers with joint professional degrees in theology and another discipline -- education, law, medicine, social work, etc.

Women are entering seminaries in greater numbers while the number of men does not increase as rapidly. From 1972 to 1977 the enrollment of women increased 118.9 per cent and that of men only 20.2 per cent (“Women Ministers in 1977: A Report,” by C. H. Jacquet [National Council of Churches, 1978], p. 13). The entrance of large numbers of women into ordained ministry may cause it to become a “female profession” like nursing or primary school teaching. Sexism causes work done by women to be devalued in society; when large numbers of them enter a field, the men tend to leave; prestige and salaries drop. If this prejudice continues, it may cause ordained ministry, which is already associated with the private sphere and with feminine cultural characteristics of being loving and kind, to become not only “feminized” but also “female.” This development might, however, have a side benefit: an ever-increasing erosion of clergy status would diminish the line of separation between clergy and laity.

Clerical ministry as a female profession is by no means the only alternate scenario, but it is important to notice the trends Pointing in this direction in order to work for a more balanced professional ministry that neither keeps women out because of sexism nor turns over jobs to women because of sexism, but recognizes the gifts of both women and men in a partnership of ministry (The Future of Partnership, by Letty M. Russell [Westminster, 1979], chapter 6, “Flight from Ministry”).

If the trends in seminary continue, in ten or 15 years the churches will have to ordain and employ women in large numbers if they are to have sufficient numbers of educated clergy. Sex-role stereotypes are such in our society that women are very much attracted to caring and nurturing roles such as those of clerical and nonclerical ministry. Women are entering the job market in unprecedented numbers and now constitute 40.7 per cent of the labor force (New York Times, September 12, 1976, section I). They are attracted to jobs in the church when such jobs are open to them. The present state of the economy indicates that less money will likely be available to hire church staff. Women, who at first were laid off as extra workers, or not hired at all, may eventually be hired in larger numbers because they may be more willing to work part-time and for lower pay.

Given the sexist attitudes of church and society, the influx of women into seminaries and (possibly) into clergy jobs may have a “blockbusting effect.” Just as whites flee urban centers and then blame blacks for taking them over, men are likely to flee the “declining” ministerial profession, abandoning it to women, and then accuse women of taking over. The clerical profession, already highly feminized in the roles played by most clergy, and captive to the private sector of women and children, may become snared in the cage that religion helped to build (From Machismo to Mutuality, by Eugene C. Bianchi and Rosemary Ruether [Paulist, 1976], p. 20). Having sanctified the inferiority of women, it is faced with the possibility of falling victim to its own trap.

Perhaps women will seriously challenge the clerical hierarchy of the church by bringing with them new ideas about cooperative ministry. However, many will probably buy into the old idea of clerical prestige if they find an opportunity to be other than marginal in church structures. The net result may be the dissolution of a largely male caste system: it will no longer make sense to maintain such a caste if it includes everyone!

In the area of theological education women have made only a small impact on the curriculum and power structure of the white male establishment. Despite the interest of many women in relating theory to experience in the educational process, there continues to be a firm commitment to the status quo with stress on academic disciplines. This commitment grows ever more firm as budget cuts leave the largely white, male tenured faculty as the “righteous remnant.” Such a policy may produce a very wide gap between faculty and students. In the long run seminaries may become obsolete. The expenses are tremendously high, and funds more difficult to raise as the profession becomes less prestigious or less needed. Students may be less willing to incur debts if the certification isn’t worth much, even in pride. Churches may find it cheaper to provide training schools for women like those for nurses or secretaries, or to work with lay training courses for nonprofessional ministers as is the case in the Roman Catholic Church with male deacons. Additional needs might be met by the universities, as they have been in the past or in other nations.

Clerical ministry as a largely female profession is not the only possible alternative future. Nor is it a desirable future. Women do not want to take over the ministry, but they may one day discover that it has been dumped in their laps because of the social forces of discrimination in church and society. The only way to avoid such a scenario is to work now to overcome the sex-role stereotypes that could contribute to such an outcome. Sexism in the church has kept women out of the professional ministry and continues to do so in more than half of the major U.S. churches (Jacquet, op. cit., p. 6). Sexism may also victimize those who succeed in entering the professional ministry unless we begin to root out our attitudes and prejudices that continue to devalue the gifts of more than one-half the people of God.

Upsetting the Assumptions

By Barbara Brown Zikmund

(Dr. Zikmund is assistant professor of church history and director of studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. She is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ.)

I view the increased numbers of women enrolling in theological education and seeking ecclesiastical vocations as a blessing. Although the trends are unclear, these women are raising some basic theological questions about the authority, scope, style and nature of religious leadership and Christian ministry.

First, women are challenging traditional sources of religious authority. Because classic interpretations of Scripture and church history have not accepted many forms of female leadership, the very presence of woman leaders emphasizes the tension between Scripture/tradition and religious knowledge which comes directly from the Holy Spirit. This is not a new development in the history of the church. It was always true that women were able to command religious authority when there was popular confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit (e.g., medieval mystics). Whenever women have moved into visible church leadership, the relative importance of Scripture and tradition has been reduced and the legitimacy of personal religious experience has been enhanced.

In today’s world, where religious institutions and leaders often seem paralyzed by canon and custom, this development has important ramifications. Although there is not a direct correlation between the women’s movement and the charismatic renewal, both developments challenge traditional sources of religious authority and open up possibilities for new forms of leadership.

Second, women are expanding the understanding of religious life. Within church history Christians have often been preoccupied with an artificial dualism between body and spirit. Religious matters were frequently viewed as “things of the spirit.” Only holy men and women, untainted by carnal lust and living celibate lives, could be religious leaders. Eventually only a male priest was allowed to supervise the spiritual journey of the Christian soul. Within this tradition women were generally associated with nonspiritual things. Women’s bodies reminded men of sex and sin. Women were seen as unfit spiritual guides.

The movement of women into religious leadership fundamentally challenges the latent body-spirit dualism within Christianity. When women become religious leaders, they affirm the incarnational message of the gospel in a very direct manner. They proclaim, by who they are, that the church is concerned not simply with “spiritual things” but with all of life. They suggest forms of church leadership which take seriously the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, psychological and physical dimensions of the Christian life.

Third, women are changing the style of religious leadership. Historically women have been denied direct opportunities for leadership in the church. Women’s gifts have been lost behind the scenes, or made auxiliary to male leadership. Women have carved out arenas of service considered unworthy by men. Within the separate spheres of “women’s work,” women have exercised leadership in their own ways.

Because of this history, women seeking leadership in today’s church often bring a new perspective. Although they believe that they can and ought to be allowed to carry any mantle of leadership worn by a man, they are not so quick to embrace conventional styles of church leadership. They are asking questions. They have a deep appreciation for and experience with collaborative, facilitating, shared and communal styles. When women assume positions historically held by men, many refuse to function in the same way. In some cases women are rejecting the role of priest and the prerogatives of clergy to reshape their very understanding of the church itself.

This observation leads to my fourth conviction: that women are calling the churches to a more vital theology of ministry. Women in the church know what it means to be followers, not leaders. In most churches women are the majority of the volunteers, the members, the laity. Women know this place very well, because for many women the church has been the center of their lives.

As a consequence of this experience, many women seminarians and women seeking ordination are approaching traditional church leadership with serious reservations. They are questioning the nature of ordination and its privileges. They are reminding all Christians of the call to ministry inherent in baptism and/or confirmation. A great number of women are suggesting that within Christ’s church, leadership does not follow the ways of the world.

In the early part of the 20th century, ministry focused on the maintenance and development of the institutional church. The model for an effective church leader was eventually labeled the “pastoral director.” When American optimism was dashed by wars and depression, ministry reclaimed its theological task. In recent times there has been a call for clergy to function primarily as theologians, or as agents for social change in a secular world. But theology, as it is usually done, is an extremely intellectual and theoretical task. Some women assert that it is a masculine genre.

I sense that women are reflecting a revised understanding of ministry itself. Today’s Christians do not want a pastoral director, or a grass-roots theologian; they seek a caring community. This view of ministry emphasizes the historic female tasks of nurturing personal growth in order to wean persons from immature dependence on authoritarian leadership. It begins by challenging sources of authority, expanding the concept of religious life, changing existing styles of leadership and suggesting radically egalitarian ways for Christians to support one another in community. And, unlike the privatism usually associated with the celebration of women’s work in the past, this approach to ministry builds upon female experiences of oppression to address the social and political realities of our world.

As a seminary professor, a historian and a clergy-woman, I am too close to these trends to judge their depth or lasting power. I do believe, however, that the theological assumptions behind the training and maintenance of ordained leadership for the contemporary church are being upset by the influx of women. I rejoice at this unrest.

A Ministry to Students

Ministry to Jewish Students

Daniel I. Leifer

Rabbi Leifer is director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation at the University of Chicago.

Though much has changed, much has remained the same since I came to work with Jewish students and faculty at the University of Chicago in 1964. Political activism and the use of hard drugs have disappeared. Students do not drop out and sometimes return, as they once did. The scourge of feeling out of joint with the world, directionless, rejecting career and family, which afflicted an entire college generation, has passed and is found now only in some of the survivors in their late 20s and early 30s.

Today students share with their parents the awareness of economic scarcity, restricted future and limited career options which has affected American and world society. Almost every student works and is in debt for his or her education. Students have less time and energy for extracurricular activities, whether political, religious or voluntary social service. What time is left from the pressures of schoolwork, now competitively focused into practical career-oriented majors, is spent relaxing and having fun, privately or with friends.

And yet, those who work with students meet generation after generation of young adults at the same stage of psychological and intellectual development. The “work” of separating oneself from one’s parents and the patterns of behavior and values of one’s childhood home; of breaking up and putting together anew the pieces of one’s personality; of questioning, rebelling, hungrily exploring the world’s cafeteria of ideas and behaviors; of finding emotional and physical companionship with peers; of ultimately finding a direction and a purpose in life -- all this has not changed. It is with these issues that campus ministers have worked and will always work, regardless of the political and economic fluctuations of our society. Our permanence on the campus rests in the fact that we make our entry into the lives of others at their most crucial moments of impermanence.

Jewish life on campus also has changed -- as it has for the Jewish people throughout the world since the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israel wars and the 25-year delayed burst into public consciousness of the Holocaust of European Jewry. Jewish identification has been reinforced by the influence of the black power movement, the ethnic revival in America and the surfacing of national-cultural-religious separatist movements throughout the world. Like everyone else on this planet, the Jews have swung closer to the particularism and away from the universalism in their heritage.

Today even the secular, cosmopolitan, elite private universities are more comfortable places at which to be positively Jewish. More Kippot (traditional head covering) than ever before are seen on the heads of Jewish males walking across campus. One of Harvard’s dining halls serves kosher food, and for the first time in its history the University of Chicago rescheduled the first day of classes so as not to conflict with Yom Kippur. The change is more noticeable among faculty; not only the younger but even the older generation is more open and less embarrassed with its Jewishness. Proof of this change lies in the new or expanded departments of Jewish studies in over 100 major universities -- staffed by an American-born and -trained new generation of Jewish scholars.

The numbers of Jewish students participating in Hillel activities have increased, but like their parents, most observe only the High Holidays and Passover. As always, only a minority of the Jewish students on campus are actively involved, but it is a better educated, more sophisticated minority. Most have been to Israel by the time they arrive at college or go during their college years; it is the crucial Jewish identity experience. These days there are more observant Jews on campus and more Jews whose identity is focused on Jewish people issues, such as Israel and Soviet Jewry. This Jewish political activism is the meeting ground for all kinds of Jews.

Strong opposite forces are also at work. Assimilation and intermarriage among the third- and fourth-generation Jews, particularly on the elite campuses, has never been so high. Estimates of the intermarriage rate range between 40 and 60 per cent of all marriages involving Jews. Nevertheless, conversions to Judaism have risen significantly. Though motivated by marriage, they are genuine conversions -- as every Hillel director knows, because so much of one’s time is spent with these couples.

In my opinion, the most significant Jewish religious movement on the American scene is the Havurah movement, created on college campuses by political activists of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Though it has begun to revitalize synagogue life in America, it is still based at or loosely connected to university campuses, and its members are students, academics and professionals. It has created small, egalitarian, participatory fellowship groups for worship and celebration of festivals and life-cycle customs. Its significance for American Jewish life is indicated by the fact that this movement’s guide to Jewish observance and knowledge, The Jewish Catalog, has sold more copies than any other Jewish book in the history of the U.S. except for the Bible.

Campus Jewish life has moved closer to the center of concern of the organized American Jewish community. While funding and staffing increased in the ‘70s, these have begun to peak as competition grows (from the elderly, new immigrants, Israel) for the scarcer dollar. Jewish campus work will always be inadequately funded and staffed in comparison with synagogues and community centers. A cruel asymmetry exists in that the people we serve do not pay for the services they receive; they are not even organized into a lobby to push for their share of the Jewish community dollar. Hillel directors must interest the older adults of B’nai B’rith and the Jewish Federations in providing funds to serve Jewish students. It is a difficult task and one that will grow harder as the number of Jewish college students decreases in the next decade because of low birthrate, intermarriage and assimilation.

Twenty years from now the Jewish college generation, like the Jewish community in America, will be smaller. But numbers have never been the most significant factor in Jewish life. Those who remain will be more knowledgeable, more committed Jews in their private and public lives. It will be a vital, creative and pluralistic community writing a wholly new and significant chapter in the history of the Jewish people.

Long-Distance Loneliness and Communities of Hope

Robert L. Johnson

Mr. Johnson was United Methodist campus minister at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 18 years. He is presently national program director for the National Institute for Campus Ministries.

To focus on the pastoral opportunity before us in campus ministry, I turn not to Clark Kerr or David Riesman for clues to the spiritual condition of academe, but rather to two of the most popular bards of this generation, Jackson Browne and James Taylor.

Indeed, whoever listens carefully to the lyrics of Browne and Taylor will be initiated into the feelings with which a large number of today’s students resonate -- feelings of loss, lassitude, uncertainty, despair. All that the academy describes cognitively as the character of our predicament is rendered poetically and with feeling in the music of Browne and Taylor. The power of death, the immensity of space, the certainty of entropy, the “long-distance loneliness,” the fragility of community, our political paralysis -- all are themes of the minstrels’ art.

Jackson Browne’s song “The Fuse” points to a self that can still hope, for a part of that self is “alive in eternity/that nothing can kill” And James Taylor in a recent interview describes his “Secret o’ Life” as “a spiritual song.” Like the Venerable Bede before him, he considers life as a brief passage out of darkness into light and then back into darkness. Taylor bids us to show the fear we feel but also calls attention to the possibility of being graced along the way: “And since we’re only here for a while/Might as well show some style -- /Give us a smile.”

As these songs echo through dorms and coliseums shrouded in blue smoke this fall, those of us with the sensibilities of biblical faith need to attend to the pastoral dimensions of this moment. The music will remind us of the powerful presence of the “Savage God” of death in our midst and the attendant symptoms of alcoholism, suicide, vocational despair, institutional fatigue. How in such a setting can we sing the Lord’s song?

Certainly not as a solo. We need community, a sense of “the great cloud of witnesses.” We need to nourish our sense of historical connectedness as well as set forth a hope that breaks the paralyzing force of death. We need to set the claims of the Kingdom over against the culture of narcissism.

There are heartening signs that campus ministries in myriad ways are addressing this malaise. Vital liturgy seems to be a key part, especially when the music and action join honest fears and valid hopes. Bible study has become another “place” where real community occurs, demons are exorcised and communal action is initiated. And that much-abused term “fellowship” is again being reclaimed in forms that encourage students and faculty to come together apart from the pressures of academic legitimation simply to own their humanity, celebrate friendship and support one another in the building of a life. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, maybe only in the church will friendship survive as an arena of true freedom.

As campus ministers, we cannot separate ourselves from the cognitive dissonance mirrored in academic institutions. Knowing our limitations, the deceit of superficiality, the terrors of fatigue, we can yet help nurture liberated zones in a cultural wasteland -- places where students and faculty can come together and face the encompassing dark as faithful and empowered persons. In such communities, we can never seek grounds for hallowing our ignorance or sheltering our comrades from the vastness of life and the ambiguities of our choices. But we shall not engage persons in the prophetic and political tasks before us until we engage the power of death with all the resources of faithful community.

A Game of Survival

Davida Foy Crabtree

Ms. Crabtree is minister and director of Greater Hartford (Connecticut) Campus Ministry, serving four institutions and more than 16,000 people.

Economic realities and the consequent unpredictability of the future combine to create ambiguity and anxiety for all of us. Higher education, as a future-oriented industry, experiences these in concentration. Students seek credentials for immediate employability, and thus shrink from involvement in social issues. Institutions market courses to attract a high volume of students. The turn away from liberal arts is exacerbated by increasing dependency on major corporations for grants, contracts and clientele. Public campuses begin to compromise programs to ensure enrollment so they won’t be reorganized out of existence by the state. The name of the game is survival. And that same game plagues campus ministries.

In the game of survival, it is the elite private institutions that are most likely to make it. In our country the sons and daughters of the elite not only are insulated from the economic vagaries but also receive the major share of the church’s ministry. Meanwhile, other sons and daughters in public (and nonelite private) higher education have no insulation and little ministry. It is as though the church’s ministry is meant only for the elite and thus for those educated for future leadership, not at all for those who study for immediate employability. Campus ministry is a justice issue.

In part because of declining budgets, and in part because of a deep commitment to the church, many persons involved in campus ministries are convinced that local churches must be engaged in carrying out this ministry in higher education. We develop new approaches to encourage congregations to send People and money. We cajole, entice, exhort and pray -- because we have a vision to share: higher education and the church can be key partners in the humanizing and developing of our communities, especially cities. We spend hours preaching and speaking in churches to educate parishioners and clergy about the new shape of higher education, helping them to see it as resource for, not just recipient of, mission. We bring laity and clergy to campuses, building relationships, encouraging cooperation, sharing God’s word.

Despite poor funding and often low morale, creative work is happening in ministries in public higher education. Caught amid church pressure for liturgical ministries, church/state separation issues, and students’ lack of interest in organized religion, deeply religious ministries are nonetheless being carried on. And despite the slow pace of progress in engaging congregations in ministry, we are yet hopeful because the vision is beginning to be shared.

Yet there are some dangers for our future growing out of this new movement to involve parishes in campus ministry. In seeking to enable parish based ministries (rather than do ministry in the parish’s behalf), we may end up managing and not leading, enablers of an uncreative status quo. Such a danger comes from undue focus on method to the exclusion of direction or content. If we only generate a flurry of activity without direction, then better we had not begun at all.

A second danger is that we will meet the needs of campus ministry and of churches but not the needs of students and of higher education. A perpetual problem of any mission of the church, this need for activity and product can speed us up when we should go slowly, and can distort our sense of purpose.

Finally, some will argue that campus ministries are not needed in a day of commuter students and parish-based ministries. In reality, it is often just because campus ministers are there that local churches are involved. Our function is to coordinate, lead, ensure an ecumenical presence, and speak the prophetic word as well as to enable individual congregations to minister.

Overall, ecumenical campus ministry in public higher education -- in the northeast at least -- has some well-defined needs, the most critical being a constituency in each denomination that will support it, especially in terms of budgetary increases. For, on occasion, ministry does come down to money.

The Right Staff

Thomas Phelan

Dr. Phelan is dean of the school of humanities and social sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and pastor of the University Parish of Christ Sun of Justice, Troy, New York.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is a technological university. The student who comes here is usually clearly oriented toward a goal, willing to work hard, ambitious for success, but not very sophisticated socially. She or he is also quite traditional in religious matters. The Roman Catholics, with whom I am especially familiar, go to church, have some appreciation of their theological underpinnings and are hoping to find a slightly different style of worship, teaching and activity from what they had experienced in their home parishes. The big problem is to get students to involve themselves in ongoing Christian service. There is no problem, however, with getting them to make ad hoc and limited-time commitments.

I believe that the churches need once again to provide adequate staff for campus ministry, and that this can happen only when local campus ministries assume responsibility for their own support. The church’s ministration is basically one of caring for its people and enabling them to lead the gospel life and thus to move the world on toward salvation. A basic problem today is that there is so little staff to facilitate this work. And in my experience, local parishes have seldom supplied either ethos or continuing support for the few students they have been able to attract away from the hermetically sealed campuses.

Marginality has sometimes been a problem for campus ministry staff persons. They are usually away from supportive church structures and not quite part of the university structure. The solution is to find staff persons who regard marginality as a distinct advantage, offering a freedom and mobility that one rarely finds in any position in our society. Of course, this solution requires campus ministry personnel who have deep faith and a sense of personal responsibility. It also requires persons who can reach out to the constituency, and not wait for the constituency to come to them.

Campus ministry must also be ecumenical in its outlook. Young people readily cross denominational lines. To understand, appreciate and respect other religious traditions is essential. This statement in no way suggests, however, that one can be soft on one’s own tradition. In fact, campus ministry personnel must be steeped and secure in their own.

There is still the problem of the quantity of persons to be dealt with on campus. Staff, where it exists, is certainly not adequate, nor is it likely to be adequate in the foreseeable future. Skilled and talented persons must maximize their effectiveness and engage as many members of the university community as possible in the ministry. Roman Catholics sometimes accomplish this aim through liturgy. But we can also work with key groups. And one must be concerned to build an environment on campus in which religious ideas and values can flourish, so that every member of the campus community is touched. Finally, the staff can act as enablers, activating and preparing as many members of the community as possible to serve the rest. This means the revival of church organizations -- a difficult but not impossible task. There are the tools of programs and sometimes buildings which can be employed in all of this, but in my estimation it all comes down to having the right staff.

I have chosen to speak almost exclusively about staff because I am convinced that we must start again at this point. The stakes are enormously high. Future leadership will be different leadership without the influence of the church, and the loss would spell out a serious failure in the church’s mission.

A Parish-Based Ministry

Joseph C. Williamson

Mr. Williamson is pastor of the Church of the Covenant, Boston.

From 1969 to 1972 I worked with the staff collective of the Boston-Cambridge Ministry in Higher Education. Those were heady and frequently apocalyptic days, both for the student movement and for campus ministry. We had been released by our supporting religious denominations from the encumbrances of liturgical and institutional forms to go with the “movement” for racial justice and for peace. The “action” was the critical factor in which the vitalities of the Spirit could be both discerned and experienced with power.

By the fall of 1972 it seemed appropriate for me to accept a call to return to a parish-based ministry. The call was extended by the Church of the Covenant, a federated United Church of Christ and United Presbyterian congregation located in the downtown Back Bay area of Boston. Since that time I, along with the Covenant staff and congregation, have continued to engage in ministry with students from a parish rather than a campus base. I have learned much during these past seven years.

First, I would affirm the viability of ministry with students from a locus outside the immediate social and political context of the university or college. I remember clearly the rationale developed to justify campus-based ministry with students: it called the church “to serve” the university within the context of the educational institution. The problem with such a theological rationale is that it was not sufficiently mindful of the church’s mandate “to serve Jesus Christ by “serving” human need. The priorities and the politics of the university were complicit with the social forces that were most frequently serving those in power rather than those who were powerless. When the base for ministry with students is moved from the campus to an extracampus location, it becomes possible to see the church in its own integrity “outside” the university rather than “inside” the structure of the educational institutions.

The second thing I have learned is that the student constituency most receptive to the church’s ministry tends to be graduates rather than undergraduates. There are a variety of psychosocial factors that inform this observation. Certainly undergraduates tend to be more intrigued by the “liberal” movement outside the more-or-less conservative institutions of family and religion. Furthermore, they are frequently becoming aware intellectually of the relativity that characterizes the intellectual milieu of the university. Graduate students, on the other hand, are beginning to reappropriate the “conservative” values of meaning, rootedness and community. They know that there is something in the religious reality which addresses those issues. In the midst of the relativity they are aware of a need for both focus and commitment.

Third, I have learned from ministry with this student constituency the necessary coinherence of the mystical and the political. The mystical touches the dynamism of myth and ritual, of song and dance. The political links that dynamism with the struggle against those social factors that destroy the myth and inhibit the dance. Mysticism without politics becomes mystification. Politics without awe of the holy becomes cynical and tired. At the Church of the Covenant we have attempted to keep the tension alive. We seek to engage the social forces that oppress people without power. But we also seek to engage the ancient story of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt and to attend to the sacramental means of grace.

Ministry with students will always be proleptical. It will be ministry for the future as much as for the present -- ministry that gambles on what is possible as much as on what is actual. It is exactly this eschatological anticipation that sustains us in our task.

Archives: Articles

Christ’s Death To End Sacrifice

Gender and Creed: Confessing a Common Faith

The Pharisaic Jesus and His Gospel Parables

Suicide and Christian Moral Judgment

Norman Thomas: Socialism and the Social Gospel

Dehumanizing People and Euphemizing War

Women Clergy: How Their Presence Is Changing the Church

Women and the Seminaries

By Nancy Hardesty

Womanstyle: Eyes to See the Gifts in Others

By Beverly J. Anderson

(Ms. Anderson is a second-year, second-career student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.)

Do We Have an Advocate?

By Suzanne R. Hiatt

(Dr. Hiatt, an Episcopal priest, is an associate professor of pastoral theology at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

Clerical Ministry as a Female Profession

By Letty M. Russell

(Dr. Russell, a United Presbyterian minister, is associate professor of theology at Yale University divinity school)

Upsetting the Assumptions

By Barbara Brown Zikmund

A Ministry to Students

At Home in the Spiritual Market Place

Heart of a Child

Women and the Seminaries By Nancy Hardesty

Womanstyle: Eyes to See the Gifts in Others By Beverly J. Anderson

(Ms. Anderson is a second-year, second-career student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.)

Do We Have an Advocate? By Suzanne R. Hiatt

(Dr. Hiatt, an Episcopal priest, is an associate professor of pastoral theology at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

Clerical Ministry as a Female Profession By Letty M. Russell

(Dr. Russell, a United Presbyterian minister, is associate professor of theology at Yale University divinity school)

Upsetting the Assumptions By Barbara Brown Zikmund

Women and the Seminaries

By Nancy Hardesty

Womanstyle: Eyes to See the Gifts in Others

By Beverly J. Anderson

Do We Have an Advocate?

By Suzanne R. Hiatt

Clerical Ministry as a Female Profession

By Letty M. Russell

Upsetting the Assumptions

By Barbara Brown Zikmund