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Could the Civil War Have Been Prevented?

(What If. . . ?’ -- Rewriting U.S. History -- is the second in a Bicentennial Series)

What would the course of American history and the quality of our national life have been like over the past 110 years or so if the U.S. had not fought the Civil War? It is hard to imagine "America," in any of its aspects, without that harsh conflict of 1861-1865, but such imagining is worth the musing.

To inject a personal word, I would not have lost to war a great-great-grandfather on my mother’s maternal side, nor would my great-grandfather on my mother’s paternal side have spent the rest of his life minus one arm. That life and that limb fell victim to the defeated cause. The best accounts estimate that some 610,000 died -- 360,000 in the service of the Union and 250,000 in the service of the Confederate States of America -- with countless thousands of others maimed, dismembered or less severely wounded.

Together with this irreplaceable and tragic human loss go the wastage of farms and cities, economic devastation, careers ended or prevented from beginning, families sundered or diminished, political suspicion and belligerency, internecine strife, a divided people, regional isolation -- the list of ravages is interminable.

But there are two additional dimensions of this war to which we shall give attention. One is its cost to the enduring and legally reunited nation in psychological strain and governmental and social preoccupation with reconstructing, solidifying and facilitating. These processes consumed decades of brainpower and millions of dollars. It boggles the mind to ponder what the American society might have been doing with its resources had it not been forced to rebuild and reconcile and to reconsider its values.

The second is the pride and prejudice the conflict engendered in both regional societies. Unlike President Lincoln, each was convinced that the Lord was on its side and so denounced the other as immoral or imperious. Until very recently most Yankees and Rebels spoke openly of their superiority over the other in terms of quality of life and moral responsibility. If the South is open to the charge (in a James Sellers phrase) of having squandered most of its psychic energy on the anachronism of segregation (and slavery before that), the North may be accused of having misdirected many of its attitudes toward the benightedness and inferiority of southerners and southern ways. A distant relative of mine from the Deep South as a child refused to step outside his family’s car parked on a Cincinnati street out of a sense of bestrangement, fear, and contempt for the residents of that (border) northern city. As recently as two decades ago such a response was not altogether exceptional -- and the same might be said of analogous incidents involving northern condescension toward citizens of Dixie.

I know of no better schema for interpreting this historic cancer in American life rooted in slavery and sectionalism than the classic triad of irony, paradox and fact. These are the index terms that best illuminate the inordinate complexity and extensiveness of this supreme American tragedy enacted within our own borders.

Lee: Ensnared in a Dilemma

The irony of the irrepressible conflict has been noted again and again by students of the War Between the States and its aftermath (which is hardly over in 1976). But surely none of these assessments of that bellicose era can hold a candle to General Robert E. Lee’s reflections on it: "had forbearance and wisdom been practiced by both sides," it might have been prevented. In providing a context for this quotation, Lee biographer Douglas Southall Freeman wrote: "Each new inquiry has made the monstrous horror of war more unintelligible to me. It has seemed incredible that human beings endowed with any power of reason should hypnotize themselves with doctrines of ‘national honor’ or ‘sacred right’ and pursue mass murder to exhaustion or ruin." (See An Historian and the Civil War, by Avery O. Craven [University of Chicago Press, 1964], p. 132.)

Lee himself was ensnared in a dilemma. Was he to stand firm for the preservation of the Union or be uncompromising with respect to honor? In Craven’s words again, Lee "chose to yield deeply held convictions regarding immediate concrete issues in order to stand by those intangible, yet more profound values which had to do with honor, with self-respect, and with duty" (p. 115). There is no doubt that he did love the nation. The irony of his choice consists in his dedication to high ideals, subscription to which resulted in a practical abdication of his position that slavery was a moral and political evil and that secession was no constructive solution to the nation’s ills. That irony easily shaded into tragedy, because the pursuit of ideals led to the military defense of a society whose economic and social system was acknowledged by Lee and many another southern leader to be tainted with values indefensible on constitutional, humane or democratic grounds.

Furthermore, Lee was flying in the face of the entire drift of Western civilization on the question of disinherited people’s rights. To quote once more from the incisive words of Craven:

The historian may still question the soundness of southern leadership, but he will remember that men whose opportunity in the Modern World was one of producing its raw cotton did not deliberately choose to do so on plantations with Negro slavery. They only went on with what was already at hand in their hurry to prosper. And having done so without the necessity of altering to any degree their social economic patterns, they saw no reason for changing their traditional notions of the federal character of the national government, the benefits of Negro slavery, or the superiority of a rural-agricultural way of life. The social-intellectual side of the nineteenth century had not come their way. As. a result, they were sometimes confused, sometimes reduced to rationalizing, sometimes overwhelmed by guilt [pp. 215-216. emphasis added].

One wonders what alternative courses of action to the Civil War might have brought southern leaders to see that, although their people did not create slavery as an economic system or raw cotton as the principal product in the regional economy, the regional modus operandi was antithetical to the spirit of the American Constitution and the democratarian trend of Western civilization. What if Lee had chosen differently? What if the impulse for preservation of the Union had governed? Suppose the extremist mentality of Yancey of Alabama and Rhett of South Carolina had not prevailed. Might there even have been a few visionaries beginning about 1850 to promote a centennial celebration in which the several southern states would proclaim Emancipation, voluntarily doing away with the "peculiar institution"? It does not seem totally absurd to speculate that after a quarter-century of painstaking preparation, the southern states singly and in confederation might have brought slavery and secessionist impulses to an end, accomplishing those results on terms which they themselves had hammered out, hence found congenial.

Absurd such flights of the mind may not be, but they are fanciful, in light of the very special character of the South’s parochialism and conservatism. That is the sickness underlying the horrendous war. Let us leave our imagining long enough to deal with the facts of the matter, by reference to the profound and tragic proportions of the social origins of the war. Two explanatory devices help me understand the South’s containedness, or cultural "sacredness," in the sociological sense of the term. One draws upon the approaches of cultural anthropology in focusing on a society’s value orientation around the issues of space and time. The other turns to the evolution of southern literature for insight into the southern mind.

Wed to Its Own boundaries

Device I. There would seem to be four ways in which societies interrelate space and time in their systems of meaning: moving-time, fixed-time, moving-space, and fixed-space. (1) "Moving-time" describes an orientation to responsiveness, change and movement. Probably it is accurate to say that American society in the 20th century has been characteristically a moving-time society. (2) "Fixed-time" is the posture of nostalgia. A people may take its cues and derive its norms from what it once was, or is alleged to have been, before circumstances placed it at a disadvantage. Contemporary Britain shows some of the marks of this outlook. (3) A society preoccupied with conquest, or enhancing its own power and position, may be classified as possessing a "moving-space" orientation. Nazi Germany is the spectacular example of such a basic assumption. (4) Finally, "fixed-space" describes a society wed to its own boundaries and the traditional practices and arrangements of those who have lived within them. The evidence from the past century and a half indicates that the American South has been a "fixed-space" society.

What is the significance of the South’s being so oriented -- "wed to its own boundaries and the traditional practices and arrangements" which emerged there and were regnant for so long? First, I would suggest that of the four societal value-orientations, "fixed-space" is the most conservative -- that is, the least responsive to new historical situations. By contrast, fixed-time" is an attitude of lowered expectations and acquiescence in the face of less favorable conditions, but not necessarily to the absolutizing of the past by tenacious retention of its attributes. "Moving-space"’ also is conservative since its movement results from provincial rather than intercultural considerations. In addition it may be pathological. But there is dynamism and development in this orientation, and inevitably interaction with other cultures; "Fixed-space" fastens onto how things have been - and endeavors to preserve the past against erosive forces. It absolutizes or sacralizes the way of life of the province.

Second, "fixed-space" is a posture of abstraction, with emphasis on the rightness of institutions and formal policies, as distinct from both "time" positions which, in a variety of ways, trade in changing historical conditions. Cultures appear to find it easier to be tightly parochial with abstractions than with events or memories.

It is instructive and inspiring to contemplate alternatives to fighting the Civil War, but the character of southern conservatism prevented any of those other choices from being made. What was preserved and what provided a dynamic for the relatively separatist way of life in the South was a structure or a pattern -- once again, an abstraction, not categorically unlike the sterling Lee’s love of honor. Southern-ness stayed alive not because of events or leaders or wars or symbolic ceremonial occasions or adulation conferred upon it by outsiders. The energizing and identity-providing force came from the structure or pattern of a specific and inviolable arrangement for living involving blacks and whites. It seems to have been the sheer presence of Negroes -- affirmed to have their special place in this structural arrangement -- which intensified and perpetuated regional distinctiveness. This circumstance suggests a primary symbolic reliance on spatial categories, not temporal ones. There is irony in that fact, surely, given the legendary southern disposition to recall the past, and in view of the profound "God acts in history" tone of the biblical narrative which had (and has) such general and devoted following in the southern population.

The Dialectic of Tragedy

Device 2. Mention of southerners’ love for recalling the past, for story-telling, and even their not infrequent gifts as raconteurs, prompts reference to a brilliant essay by Allen Tate on the southern imagination (see Studies in American Culture, edited by Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie [University of Minnesota Press, 1961], pp. 96-108). In this description of the southern outlook we are again probing into the deeper layers of southern consciousness in an effort to understand why alternatives to doctrinaire regionalism and the resultant fighting of the Civil War were not pursued.

Tate’s thorough acquaintance with regional and national literature of the 19th and 20th centuries gave him an excellent vantage point for observing the evolution of southern literature over a considerable length of time. He concludes that the literature produced between 1870 and 1920 was typically of low quality, reflecting mostly social vanity and self-adulation, and expressed in artificial, contrived style. Thus, the so-called "literary renaissance" commencing in the 1920s was more a birth than a rebirth. About that time the production of first-rate literature began, with William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ellen Glasgow, Robert Penn Warren and several others moving to center stage on the national scene. Why? What was wrong in the earlier period, and what occurred to lift southern-writing from mediocrity to excellence?

Tate argues that a shift took place in the mode of discourse, from the rhetorical to the dialectical. Before the era of Faulkner and his contemporaries, southerners were rhetoricians, speaking and doing battle for the local community. In a particularly memorable passage, Tate remarks that the "typical southern conversation is not going anywhere, it is not about anything. It is about the people who are talking." Clearly that kind of speaking and thinking lacks in tension and interaction and abounds in narcissism.

By 1925 or 1930, however, some major southern voices, including novelists, "looked round and saw for the first time since about 1830 that the Yankees were not to blame for everything" (p. 107). As Lionel Trilling has observed, the great writer, who speaks for a culture, carries in himself or herself the fundamental dialectic of that culture. When great writers, by Trilling’s definition, came to light in the American South, the mode of the imagination shifted from melodramatic rhetoric to the dialectic of tragedy. In Tate’s words, "the southern legend of defeat and heroic frustration was taken over by a dozen or more first-rate writers and converted into a universal myth of the human condition" (pp. 107-8).

The Cessation of Dialogue

The profound and tragic proportions of the Civil War -- from its preparatory period through its lengthy wake -- are demonstrated most intensely by the quietus they clamped on dialogue, the quintessential medium of effective humanity. North and South of the same nation broke off talking. So long as there were compromise stratagems, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the Compromise of 1850 -- "compromise" is a metaphor of speaking, it should be noted -- there was some hope. But interaction gave way to silence, only to be replaced by the cacophony of artillery. Close kinspeople or neighbors stopped speaking; not infrequently they proceeded to take up arms, each against the other’s side.

This aspect of the calamity produced tragic results both intersectionally and regionally. The South became a one-party political unit, thus depriving itself of the clash and flow of ideas prominent, and usually creative, in a multiparty system. Even within the national Democratic Party the southern wing was recognizably different from the rest. Again, reconstruction was largely imposed upon the South, so ill-equipped for conservancy and policy formation were the states of the Confederacy upon their readmission to the Union at the close of the war. The fact of imposition, as well, admittedly, as the mistakes in much of Reconstructionist policy framed by "the North," further stifled dialogue between the South and the rest of the nation, contributing to the hardening of unrespecting intersectional relations.

Within regional life, the cessation of dialogue brought about one of the most lamentable outcomes of the war. Throughout the period of slavery, as numbers of diaries and journals reveal, many across the barriers separating the slaveholding from the enslaved knew each other as friends. The picture is a sharply mixed one, inasmuch as relationships were limited and colored by the hierarchical framework, a boundary well understood by both. Yet, numbers of Negro slaves knew numbers of whites, both those to whom they were legally servile and others -- and they talked. Once the war erupted, was waged, and came to an end, with a new legal-social situation following in its train, a widened alienation occurred. No longer could there be genuinely promising communication. Blacks lived in their own neighborhoods, went to their own churches, and generally interacted only with other blacks save for the new (but still tight) pattern of hierarchical relations.

Thus, tragically, the very sense of local community over which (in part) the war was fought, with its attendant opportunities for friendship and communication between white people and Negroes, foundered and perished. Maybe, just maybe, if the war had not been fought, the face-to-faceness of white-black relations could have provided a foundation for building a coherent new society. That did not happen, and as a result precious little mind was given by the controlling white population to Negro rights and needs until, finally, after another war sufficient black leadership and national consensus emerged to listen to grievances and construct a better way. King, Abernathy, Shuttlesworth and Walker, along with others, gave proleptic embodiment to James McBride Dabbs’s low-keyed plea for the South to get down to concentrating on its main export, the spectacle of white people and black people living together.

New Forms of Diminishment

Abruptness, totality and finality, which are the pace of war, took their toll, then, on any possibility that living, especially by blacks, might be ameliorated in the South in the 19th century and for more than a half of this one. Whites were diminished too, by their cut-offness from their black neighbors and, in actual practice, from the other Americans to the north, but even more by their preoccupation with preserving segregation. Surely no one who saw the television drama The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman can ever forget the lengths to which the imperialism of segregation went. The symbol of its dethronement was the aged black woman sipping from a water fountain on the southern courthouse lawn. What a waste of concern and misdirection of energy!

Nor is it over yet. Rock-throwing, name-calling, and expressions of hate are as bad in South Boston as they were in Birmingham or Jackson. However, for this late ’40s southern liberal, something new is happening -- something that comes as a real surprise and an occasion for a saddening fright. Is there not a new segregation in the land, accompanied by a new form of discrimination? I suspect we are still paying for the abrupt pace of the Civil War, this time with another form of diminishment of black Americans. Liberal-spirited whites, many of them church people, who intend to be persons of goodwill with a record to corroborate much of that intent, are beginning to think it is time for a new round of public activity. In some areas delinquent behavior by blacks in the corridors, toilets and classrooms of the public schools is approaching destructive proportions, with the result that the quality of education is in jeopardy. Favoritistic, kid-gloves treatment for black students and college athletes creates animosity in the ranks and harms individuals through the distorting image of a special-treatment style of existence.

I, for one, expect to go on being-open, advocating the civil rights of all, and continuing to celebrate the fact of my close friendships with blacks. But diminishment by special treatment is only quantitatively less injurious than old-style inhumanity. I take heart in the belief that this is a stage that will pass, partly because a basically peaceful revolution -- consisting in laws and a somewhat aroused national conscience -- not a war, ushered in the era of these problems. Yet we are still suffering the consequences of that long-ago abrupt destruction, that 19th century "final solution," this time through lowered expectations and a kind of double standard.

Maybe we who want to embody agape as "creative goodwill" are being called back into action, not this time to man the barricades or even to carry picket signs, but rather to initiate fresh forms of dialogue in parent-teacher-student organizations and town councils. We must seek to create conditions that will help prevent haughtiness or false expectations, and should work to create relations wherein white and black pupils will know each other and have respect. Replacement of the old bigotry or hatred by new ethnocentrisms or disrespect is hardly the improvement we yearn for.

With the benefit of hindsight, we are forced to conclude that almost any alternative to the Civil War would have been preferable. The cancerous nature of its social causes would not brook any other "solution," it is true. But the wastage of the actual and the potential Was enormous. Worse still, that war conditioned us for so many decades to choosing between total inactivity and action by strident measures. Perhaps we are finally moving toward the cultivation of an alternative way to do the nation’s business of forging one from many -- namely, dialogue: people talking, with moral passion, with respect, and with agreement that we fall or stand together.

Parallel Conversions: Charismatics and Recovered Alcoholics

Something happens to the converted alcoholic or the converted charismatic that brings about change, sometimes a quick illumination, but often a rather gradual and increasingly insistent spiritual awakening. The spiritual conversion experienced by both of these groups is intended to carry the individual along in a "new" way of life, and it does for those who stay with it.

Text:

A spiritual conversion is an interior experience, a decision for Christ, a change of heart, a turning of the mind away from vice and toward virtue, a relinquishing of the past and an embrace of the future. Something "happens" to people who are converted, as it did to Saul on the road to Damascus, and often this "happening" is not a personal choice. What the Protestant Pentecostals have been saying for a long time is now occurring among Catholic charismatics; in the words of one of their national leaders: "I am involved because I believe that God has touched me and that I have responsibilities as a result of that touch and call."

One has only to attend a large charismatic prayer meeting, or read the pages of New Covenant, to learn, of first-person testimony of conversion. Reports a priest: "I felt as if God took off the top of my head and poured his peace into me and that simultaneously all the junk of my past life was draining out of my feet." Comments a young woman: "For me the baptism of the Holy Spirit was a particular moment in my life; a moment when all time seemed to stand still and I truly felt the presence of the reality of Christ."

I

There is a steadfast tradition in the 40-year history of the Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship that practically every member has had a spiritual experience which "quite transforms his outlook and attitudes." Carl Jung in Zurich warned one of his alcoholic patients that his "only hope of salvation was a spiritual experience." Bill W., co-founder of AA, has told of his own conversion: He was in a hospital after a jag, deep in depression because he could not overcome his addiction to booze. In desperation he called on God for help. Then "suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy which there are no words to describe."

It would be going too far to say that every converted alcoholic (or converted charismatic; for that matter) has such a dazzling spiritual experience. From reading AA. Grapevine, or attending an AA meeting, or listening to a member tell his story, one learns that "something happened" to brings about change; however; often it was not a quick illumination, but rather a gradual and increasingly insistent spiritual awakening. Sometimes the conversion starts not with faith, but with a desire to believe: "God if you do exist, and if you do answer prayers, give me the help I need."

II

In simplistic terms the stated goals of these two groups appear to be quite different. The purpose of AA is individual and personal: that the alcoholic stay sober. The purpose of the charismatics is directed to the praise and glory of God. The practical effect on people, however, is that the goals tend to become means, and in both instances the outcome is a change of life style -- the alcoholic’s sobriety is a means of allowing him to lead a normal, nonaddictive life, while the charismatic’s prayerful praise of God is a constant reminder and inspiration for living a more virtuous life.

The spiritual conversion does not necessarily involve a switch from a life of extreme immorality, although some converts are willing to testify to that. For alcoholism, the emphasis has changed from sin to sickness; and while there are still people who attribute moral weakness to the habitual drunkard, the general consensus of the medical profession now is to diagnose disease. Even so, physicians have not yet discovered a cure for the illness. The patient can be detoxified, perhaps medicated and given hospital care, but more and more physicians are recommending the Alcoholics Anonymous program as the way to achieve sobriety.

The recovered alcoholic is usually humbly ready to admit to previous guilt feelings. This appears to be the case also with charismatics, all of whom say that they "know how it feels to repeat and to experience the forgiveness of sins." Their mystical metanoia is, therefore, generally preceded by repentance -- and, after all, this is what Peter preached to the people of Jerusalem at the first Pentecost. He told them to "turn away from your sins" and promised that "you will receive God’s gift, the Holy Spirit."

One of the lessons alcoholics -- as well as charismatics -- learn the hard way is the possibility of a lapse after the conversion experience. The alcoholic knows that a "slip" can happen even after years sobriety. A popular AA slogan carries’ the reminder: "But for the grace of God." To put oneself trustingly in the care of God means to live confidently one day at a time. While many Catholic charismatics believe that to accept Jesus as their personal savior is a guarantee of eternal salvation, they also know that they can become remiss or drop out of the fellowship completely.

III

Although conversion is an individual and personal experience, one of the secrets of staying converted is the support of a group. The more frequently an alcoholic attends AA meetings, the more likely is he or she to eschew drink. Further undergirding regular attendance is the fact that an essential part of the recovery program is for the member to carry the message to other alcoholics. While "the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking," AA is a program of mutual help. New, or prospective, members are called "pigeons" whose main supporter, a "sponsor," looks after them and sees that they get to meetings. But the person helping is also the person helped. The 12th step of the program is, in a way, a kind of evangelism: to bring the good news to those who want and need it, and to increase the number of converts.

Dedicated charismatic converts also reinforce their spiritual strength by frequent contact with group members. Susan Anthony says that in her travels around the country she makes use of her list of charismatic prayer groups as well as her list of AA groups. Even when on the road she can keep in contact with her fellow converts in both groups. Like alcoholics, charismatics follow a pattern of attending a group meeting every week, and some do so even more frequently. The enthusiastic member is also a kind of missionary, spreading the word to others and constantly inviting them to come to prayer meetings.

Said one cheerful alcoholic, who happens to be a charismatic as well: "I used to do plenty of talking in tongues back in the days when I was drinking." While the charismatic prayer meeting includes testimonials and glossolalia, it is also given to guitar music and the exuberant singing of hymns (most of them borrowed from Protestant sources). The AA meeting, too, is suffused with enthusiasm, but of a quiet and determined sort. The meeting regularly starts with a silent minute of gratitude to God for continuing divine support, followed by the group recitation of the Serenity Prayer. At the conclusion members repeat the Lord’s Prayer, sometimes joining hands, as is the common practice among charismatic prayer groups.

Membership in enthusiastic convert groups seems to call out a need for self-revelation. Witness in charismatic prayer meetings is often personal testimony about how one’s life has changed. These public "confessions" are often frank and detailed accounts of spiritual and moral waywardness in the past, going on to indicate how wonderful things have been since "finding the Lord." The willingness to confess is even more prevalent, among recovered alcoholics. There appears to be almost a compulsion to reveal the problems, difficulties and obstacles the person had when drinking. In fact, it is often difficult to "turn off" the former drunkard who wants to tell you how he or she got that way. As some of them readily admit: "We used to drink too much, and now we talk too much."

IV

Having attended the International Charismatic Congress at Notre Dame and also the International AA Convention at Denver, I can attest to marked similarities in enthusiasm, joyfulness and spirituality in both groups. Attending as a sociological observer, I had hoped for professional papers, results of academic studies, research reports and scholarly discussion from panels of experts. What I found in both instances was like a gigantic revival meeting, with speakers encouraging everybody to stay converted and members greeting one another joyfully -- all in an overall spirit of religious fervor. Wearing an anonymous name tag (just the first name) is characteristic of both congregations.

The camaraderie among AA members, their tight fellowship, becomes even more evident when an "outsider" admits to being a nonalcoholic. The impression is given that one cannot really understand these people and their illness, cannot really appreciate their fellowship -- and certainly cannot share in it -- without having personally been through these experiences. There is a similar difficulty in trying to relate to charismatics. The "insiders" have had the privilege of baptism in the Spirit, and the impression is conveyed that they feel sorry for anyone who has not had this extraordinary good fortune and are eager to lay hands in prayer on him or her.

In another interesting similarity, both fellowships proclaim a distrust of organization and structure. They find it important that no one have power and authority, except what they call the "authority of service." The charismatics’ top-level group of decision-makers is the "Service Committee," and the New York headquarters of AA houses the "General Services Office." There is, however, a great deal more autonomy for both individuals and local groups within the AA fellowship than within the charismatic movement. The latter has become more tightly organized as its membership has increased -- most prominently in the extent to which it accepts the model of the covenant community.

One important nationwide factor is found in communications. AA publishes a sprightly monthly magazine, the Grapevine, and distributes books and pamphlets related to the field of alcoholism. The charismatics also have a monthly publication, the New Covenant, and the communications center issues an annual catalogue of cassettes and record albums, inspirational books and pamphlets offered for sale. Both organizations consider their periodicals a teaching instrument, but they also carry news of the movement and letters from readers. Both groups recognize the value of propaganda in getting the message across to members and nonmembers alike.

The Grapevine regularly prints a "calendar" page, listing the dates and places of meetings, conventions, rallies, roundups and conferences. The references are to state and regional gatherings, not to the local meetings which are scheduled regularly and frequently. The charismatics issue an annual roster of member groups, with brief notations of time and place of meetings together with the name of each local group leader. The New Covenant’s coverage extends to announcements of forthcoming gatherings on the regional level, and much space is devoted to reports of large meetings held both in this country and abroad.

The spiritual conversion experienced by alcoholics and charismatics is intended to carry the individual along in a "new" way of life, and it does for those who stay with it. The before-and-after difference is obviously appreciated by the convert, but it is also observable by close friends and family members. This difference consists not simply of another way of relating to God, although that is the basis for changes in personal behavior and in dealing with fellow human beings. The 11th step of the AA program is probably applicable to the charismatics too: we "sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will and the power to carry that out."

Rudolf Bultmann: Scholar of Faith

Rudolf Bultmann -- who died on July 30, 1976 at the advanced age of 91 -- was the last of the theological giants who grew up in the universities of the Kaiser’s Germany (he began to study theology in 1903 at 19), and the last of the prophets who struggled to hear the word of the Christians’ Lord after what had happened in 1914. Teaching New Testament at Marburg University from 1921 to 1951, Bultmann exerted all his many talents in order to recover the highest tradition of German biblical scholarship after the interruption of the war. Giving his acute and well-stored mind to the problems of biblical interpretation, or hermeneutics, he developed the science of form criticism with Martin Dibelius. However, he also took very seriously the world around him -- the postwar world of the Weimar Republic, groping for financial as well as spiritual stability (in the end, its gospel was Mein Kampf).

I

Absorbed as he was in his New Testament studies, Bultmann took time off to listen to his colleague Martin Heidegger, who was professor of philosophy at Marburg from 1923 to ‘28. To Bultmann’s delight he found in that colleague’s philosophy a secular preparation for the New Testament’s essential gospel. It was a philosophy articulated, though obscurely, in the unfinished Being and Time (1927). It was a philosophy which defined being by reference to nonbeing, time by reference to death -- and thus seemed to Bultmann to be the best available analysis of man waiting and listening for God.

John Macquarrie’s wonderfully lucid book An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (Harper & Row, 1955) can give to English-speaking audiences who wish to understand a little more about the spirit of this century a thorough introduction to Bultmann’s use of Heidegger. The point for us is that for these two 20th century professors -- as much as for any mystic wrapped in contemplation in some more remote ashram -- the inevitability of death brought one face to face with the question of whether his existence had any point.

Heidegger wrote in a strange prose. It was the dance of the bloodless categories of German philosophy across the deathbed. Bultmann seized what he could use of these ideas: the anxiety produced by the existential question; the dread produced by the answer of death to all; the attempted flight into worldly business, social status and ephemera; the rare courage to begin an existence which would be authentic because open-eyed. Bultmann seized these ideas because he saw in them a portrait of man without God, and because they seemed likely to awaken man to the possibility of hearing the answer to his existential question in the New Testament.

In interpreting his biblical texts Bultmann made use of these ideas with a vigor which promises that his basic principles of interpretation may survive, still seem valid, when the misty vocabulary of Heidegger’s early philosophy no longer seems compelling. At any rate, Bultmann always emphasized that it was his task as a Christian theologian to offer answers, whereas the task of a philosopher was only to sharpen the questions (and particularly the question about human existence). Bultmann was very far from being stooge to Heidegger, whatever critics from the Catholic or Protestant right may have alleged. It is for us to ask what in his theological achievement was authentic, now that we can begin to see his life in perspective.

II

We immediately notice the authority given to his constructive theology by his devotion as a student of the New Testament. Because he spent his life trying to see more precisely what the primitive Christian community and its theologians saw in Jesus, he was better equipped than his fellow giants, Barth and Tillich, to declare what the 20th century might see in the same provocative Lord.

The literary monuments remain. His 1921 work History of the Synoptic Tradition (Harper & Row, 1963) has been available in English for over a decade, and was joined in 1971 by an edition of his 1941 commentary, The Gospel of John (Westminster). A powerful essay of 1926, Jesus and the Word (Scribners, 1934), has more recently won large sales as a paperback. But the book which demanded immediate translation in the 1950s and has been widely used by students was his two volume Theology of the New Testament (Scribner’s, 1951, ’55). With its introductory pages on the historical Jesus as the proclaimer of the coming Kingdom of God, this work gives a superb analysis of the proclamation of the eternal Christ by Judaists and Hellenists in Christianity’s first years, by Paul and John, and by the apostolic fathers.

Before the flourishing of Bultmann’s career, New Testament scholarship had been dominated by literary criticism, which attempted to uncover the secret of how the texts were compiled; by investigation of the Hellenistic background, especially the mystery religions surrounding the early church, as part of a sociological critique of the history of religion; and by excitement about the apocalyptic content of the teaching of Jesus as a first century Jew. Bultmann incorporated what he regarded as the results of these previous inquiries, but his own scholarly interests took him in other directions, for he was not moved by the old fascination with historical research, the life of the church in society, or the life of Jesus. "I often have the impression that my conservative New Testament colleagues feel very uncomfortable, for I see them perpetually engaged in salvage operations," he wrote in 1927. "I calmly let the fire burn, for I see that what is consumed is only the fanciful portraits of Life-of-Jesus theology, and that means nothing other than ‘Christ after the flesh.’ But ‘Christ after the flesh’ is no concern of ours. How things looked in the heart of Jesus I do not know and do not wish to know."

Bultmann’s concern about what it meant for a person or a community to proclaim Jesus as Lord led straight into a field ripe for scholarly exploitation. He had new questions, not about life but about its meaning. How did the early church, in the course of its eucharistic or missionary preaching, retell the story of Jesus and reshape or invent stories about his miracles and sayings, his birth and resurrection? How did the earliest preachers proclaim Christ as the Lord of life -- not merely of exotic religion? And how did the transformation of life which these Christians experienced, and their knowledge of a salvation which was already theirs, so dominate their thinking and so infuse their preaching that other matters seemed trivial in comparison -- the postponement of the Lord’s visible Second Coming, the actual content of the Lord’s original message, and even his historical personality?

Bultmann pictured the thrills of life, thought and preaching in the first and second Christian generations as taking place against a sophisticated, largely gentile background, a setting for a dialogue not unlike his own with the secular philosopher Heidegger in Marburg. He was able to picture early Christianity this way with the more assurance because he did most of his scholarly work before attention shifted back to Palestine in the time of Jesus (thanks in part to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls), and before the themes of light against darkness, life against death, came in the 1960s to be understood as first century Jewish themes. A Palestinian background has been claimed once again even for the Fourth Gospel.

In any case it was probably inevitable that Bultmann’s pupils (such as Günther Bornkamm) -- while accepting his negative verdicts that Jesus did not think of himself as Messiah, Son of God, or Son of Man -- should refuse to accept the dispiriting embargo on all discussion about how Jesus did regard himself, and refuse as well to accept the excessively rigorous skepticism about the facts behind the Gospels’ literary forms. The quest for the historical Jesus was resumed, although in a new way, with the realization that Jesus and his followers regarded that one historical life as the "turning of the ages."

III

We can now begin to see Bultmann’s New Testament work as a phase in the ongoing story. Its intrinsic importance may be indicated by saying simply that no greater New Testament scholar has ever lived. But it was no accident that the preaching of the early Christians fascinated him, for Bultmann himself regarded his scholarly work as a service to preaching. His famous proposal for "demythologizing" the New Testament originated in a 1941 lecture, subsequently duplicated, which was designed to be a help in pastoralia to former pupils serving as chaplains in Hitler’s army. As much as Karl Barth, Bultmann wanted everyone to enter the illusion-shattering crisis of hearing the Word of God. He too rejected the liberal Protestant map of knowledge and life, its comfortable synthesis of religion and society, Fatherhood and brotherhood, and he never entirely lost the sense of crisis which in the 1920s had caused his theology to seem "dialectical" like Barth’s. But he knew more than Barth did about what was actually in the mind of modern man -- or perhaps he was not so dismayed by it.

His Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh on The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology (Harper, 1957) and various books of essays -- the most notable collections in English being Faith and Understanding (Harper & Row, 1969) and Existence and Faith (World, 1960) -- show over how long a period, and in relation to how many challenges, he worked out his own presentation of the Word of God to our time. But the clearest summary is to be found in his little book of lectures to young Americans in 1951, Jesus Christ and Mythology (Scribner’s, 1958). For all his thoughts were unified around the desire of his heart to encourage or to shock students of theology into preaching a relevant Christ.

He thought that it was possible to strip away the metaphysical doctrines of the church fathers and the mythological stories of the first Christians to reach a Lord whose impact would transform modern lives. He thought that in this Lord alone, "saving" or "justifying" faith could and should be placed. (Bultmann never ceased to be a Lutheran.) How, then, was faith to be born? By going to the death of Jesus. On the wood of the cross, the existence of this strange man was questioned by the hard nails of the world. In every generation those who decided for themselves that the crucified Jesus was right -- rather than his enemies -- had Christian faith, and the rising of their faith was the one perpetual miracle. It was the Easter of faith in a world naturally progressing toward winter.

What, then, did it mean to say that Jesus was right? It meant to put one’s own trust where Jesus put it, in God and God’s future. Bultmann’s central concern was precisely the opposite of the wish to reduce theology to anthropology, but he was passionately "subjective" in the sense of believing that God could never be a mere "object" to the believer.

One could not know much about God, only what God did for one. (When Macquarrie urged him to follow Tillich in using the philosophy of Being to reconstruct a purified theism, Bultmann could only confess: "I myself cannot conceive of an ontological basis.") One could not do much for God, only gamble one’s life on his reality and on his power to uphold one. One could not say much to God, only give thanks and surrender. He saw eschatology (the announcement that ordinary things were ending) as the heart of the gospel, but his eschatology was not a description of the world’s history to come, and its preaching was not a visible exhibition. It was an address to the individual, an address about that individual’s life and death, an address which reached that individual’s heart.

That decision of faith mattered most to Bultmann of all the items which have collected into the creeds and confessions of Christendom. Many have criticized this view for being too narrow. What about the history of Israel? What about the problems of ethics? What about social responsibility? What about the scientific view of nature? What about the philosophical status of talk about God (Wittgenstein and the later Heidegger)? But Bultmann gave his answer to such criticisms -- in, for example, his contribution to the volume of essays edited by Charles W. Kegley, The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (Harper & Row, 1966).

His answer was not that such general questions were boring. The survey of his theology by Walter Schmithals (Introduction to the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann [Augsburg, 1968]) successfully demonstrates how wide was his scope. But he was primarily a New Testament scholar, not a philosopher; his datum was Scripture. Even more important for him, as limiting his task, was the background to all his thinking for half a century:

Germany in anxiety, Germany in hysteria, Germany in flames, Germany in reconstruction from the foundations. While not neglecting his duties to his day as a professor or citizen (he supported the anti-Nazi Confessing Church and welcomed the Americans in 1945), he felt called to essentially one work as a preacher. He drew out of the New Testament, and particularly from the faith of the apostles as they looked back at the cross of Jesus, the belief that it was the world which was dying, not God who was dead.

In his volume of wartime Marburg sermons, translated as This World and the Beyond (Scribner’s, 1960), he did not supply a commentary on the news. Instead -- and with as much success as any Christian preacher could expect -- he addressed the fears which gripped young and old. It was a traditional and individualist message, and he would say much the same thing to Sheffield industrial workers in time of peace (reprinted in The Honest to God Debate). It was not colloquial; it was not sociological. But in point of fact Bultmann’s theology helped to keep many individuals within the great tradition of faith in the eternal God, the God revealed in the crisis of the gospel of Christ; for in the jargon, although his work was to "demythologize," he refused to "dekerygmatize."

There were plenty of men (Karl Jaspers, Fritz Bun, Herbert Braun and others) who urged him to complete his program by a thoroughgoing secularization, but Bultmann obstinately insisted on the power and grace of the Other who comes. He knew. He had met him. This is his glory, in an age which has exalted research above the encounters of life, and which has obscured God by the massive horrors of politics as well as by the petty sentimentalities of religion.

Socialism and Sin

Much of the political comment coming from theologians these days has a socialist flavor. I was surprised, therefore, to find a theologian arguing the case for capitalism in the editorial pages of the Washington Post ("A Closet Capitalist Confesses," March 14, 1976). Especially was it surprising to find Michael Novak in this role, for in a previous incarnation he was one of the early proponents of a theology for radical politics. Not only does Novak admit to being a "closet capitalist" (acknowledging the truth of Michael Harrington’s charge about liberals in the United States), but he also sets forth elements of a theological argument for the superiority of capitalism over socialism.

Making the World Free for Sinners

Actually Novak makes two cases -- one political, the other theological. The former calls into service two time-tested claims of capitalism’s defenders: (1) that the free market yields greater efficiency and productivity than socialist economies, and (2) that it results in greater freedom. Novak raises the specter of a whole economy run with the well-known efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service, and then attributes to capitalism most of the world’s productivity:

Millions are alive, and living longer, because of medicine developed under capitalism. Without our enormous psychic energy, productivity and inventions, oil would still be lying under Saudi Arabia, undiscovered, unpumped and useless. Coffee, bananas, tin, sugar and other items of trade would have no markets. Capitalism has made the world rich, inventing riches other populations didn’t know they had. And yielding sinful pleasures for the millions.

The only way socialism can possibly work at all, we are told, is by being authoritarian. Lacking the incentive of greed, people have to be coerced into producing. At the same time great power is concentrated in the hands of politicians, bureaucrats and experts. They make the momentous decisions that determine the fate of millions. The result is a command society -- a result which, Novak suggests, no self-respecting liberal would want. Democratic socialists are hard put to cite an example, he notes, of a model socialist society. Everywhere we look -- China, Cuba, Tanzania, eastern Europe -- socialism means the same thing: the domination of society by huge, ponderous government bureaucracies.

Why is this the case? The theological part of Novak’s analysis provides the answer: capitalism is more congruent with human nature -- i.e., with humanity’s sinful nature. It accepts selfishness as a fact of life; it doesn’t require any illusions about the innate goodness of people. "God’s heart may have been socialist; his design was capitalist as hell." Given the freedom to sin, human beings have of course taken abundant advantage of the opportunity, and the only way to create a productive and free society is to cater to selfishness. Socialism, presuming goodness, "‘never works," whereas capitalism, building upon greed, "is nearly always a smashing success."

Sin thus accounts for the greater productivity of capitalism; it also accounts for the greater freedom it allows. Capitalism "makes the world free for sinners"; it tolerates people’s doing what they will. Socialism, dedicated to the cultivation of benevolence, can’t leave people alone. Human beings have to be made over; sin has to be eliminated. All the while, of course, socialists place great faith in the goodness and wisdom of the politicians and social planners.

In short, capitalism is realistic while socialism is naïve. For this reason, the future belongs to capitalism. A social system built on illusion simply cannot succeed -- not in the long run.

But such arguments make little headway with socialists, says Novak, because, contrary to appearances, socialism is not really a practical political proposal at all. It is a faith, a secular religion, "the residue of Judaeo-Christian faith" minus the theistic component and minus the idea of sin. It is a belief that paradise can be brought to earth here and now by human action. In the face of such a belief, practical considerations are "beside the point."

A Fixation with Profits

When I first read this "confession," I suspected that Novak was putting us on -- that it was all tongue-in-cheek. The mid-1970s are not, after all, the most auspicious time for a spirited defense of capitalism. Devaluations, unemployment, inflation, problems with OPEC -- the catalogue of serious economic problems suffered by capitalist societies in the past few years does not inspire confidence. The more I thought about it, however, the more I concluded that he was serious and the more I felt that his argument called for a reply.

At the risk of being dismissed as a naïve visionary who can’t face up to reality, I want to suggest that the choice between capitalism and socialism is considerably more complex than Novak would have Washington Post readers believe. I have come to take his argument seriously, both because there is some truth in what he says and because he articulates sentiments widely held in this country. The problem is that his view expresses only half the truth. He conveniently overlooks certain other considerations favorable to socialism; when these considerations are given their due, even some practical people unafflicted by the need for a secular religion will find the alleged superiority of capitalism something less than obvious.

The socialist case against capitalism has never, to my knowledge, challenged the productivity of the free market. That has not been the issue. There is no better hymn of praise, after all, to the achievements of capitalism than the Communist Manifesto. The socialist critique has been based on other grounds -- specifically, the use of the productive resources which capitalism generates. Because of the fixation with profits, capitalist use of this productivity necessarily is far less rational and humane than it could be.

Examples abound, but to my mind the most graphic case in point is the American automobile industry. Year after year, decade after decade, we witness the spectacle of Detroit’s efforts to sell ever-increasing numbers of cars designed for quick obsolescence, though it has been clear for some time now that considerations of both space and air quality dictate that we move toward some alternative transportation system. Both transportation and ecology experts tell us that we cannot go on indefinitely multiplying the number of cars on our streets and highways without serious costs to our physical and psychological well-being. Yet this is precisely what the health of the economy is said to require.

Food production offers other illustrations. Chemical additives in our food, possibly harmful, are justified as a convenience to the producer and seller. Short of unequivocal prohibition by the government (which the industry strongly resists), these additives continue to be used because they enhance the appeal and durability of food products. The meat looks pinker; the baked goods last longer on the shelves -- even if they actually may be less healthful! Then there is the irony of underproduction. For many years now the federal government has been paying farmers not to produce foodstuffs, while millions, in this country and abroad, go hungry, The rationale, once again, is economic necessity: prices and profits must be maintained at a level sufficient to stimulate production.

The energy crisis is another case in point. Now that there are no lines at the gas pumps and the scare has faded, consumers are once again being encouraged to use energy in all kinds of ways, many of them patently frivolous. The crisis is hardly over, of course, but the imperatives of the market require that we stop worrying about energy conservation.

Underlying the whole system is, of course, a consumption ethic, which John Kenneth Galbraith and others have analyzed. Vast sums of money and resources are invested in the creation, mainly through the mass media, of "needs" which otherwise would not exist. To make the system go, to keep sales and profits moving, people must be encouraged not to acquire only what they sensibly need but, in the words of the beer commercial, to "grab for all they can get." Whether these acquisitions will really benefit them and whether this style of consumption represents the best use of available resources are questions not seriously considered.

‘Public Penury’

The other side of the story is what David Broder aptly characterizes as "public penury." Vital public services, which do not easily lend themselves to profit-making, are underfunded and inadequately developed: public transportation, health care, education, criminal justice. Alongside Novak’s picture of the abundance which capitalism produces there needs to be placed another equally significant image -- that of decaying, broken-down bus and railway systems; underpaid teachers, policemen, firemen and social workers; overcrowded and understaffed public hospitals; jails and rehabilitation facilities extended far beyond their reasonable capacities. In America at least, capitalism has resulted in a situation in which, as Broder has written in (The Party’s Over), "every single essential service we depend on some public agency to provide is seriously underfinanced."

The case for socialism derives from the irrationality of this state of affairs. Would it not be a more intelligent use of resources, asks the socialist, to focus our productive capabilities on those things that are conducive to human well-being? Would it not be more rational (and humane) to invest more of our resources in such things as health care and education and less in providing 17 brands of breakfast cereal or dream cars with Moroccan leather upholstery? Would it not be more intelligent to seek to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of profits? Would it not be preferable to develop and utilize our productive capacities on the basis of a rational plan rather than the whims of investors? Would it not be more intelligent, in short, to try to transcend the anarchy of capitalism?

To speak of planning, of course, raises the other issue on which Novak makes his case for capitalism. For many people, any mention of social planning suggests dictatorship, and socialism becomes therefore almost by definition a recipe for tyranny. I have no intention of making light of this problem. It is the central problem of socialism today. But the notion that socialism need be tyrannical can be dismissed as an exaggeration. Democratic socialism as it has been practiced in western Europe and elsewhere demonstrates clearly that this is not the case. Democratic socialist regimes have tended, however, either to be coalition governments or to be short-lived, and they have had considerable difficulty with the problem of reconciling parliamentary, bureaucratic and managerial authority. Democratic socialism still remains, therefore, much more a vision than a demonstrated possibility.

The Problem of Freedom

But to admit that freedom is a problem for socialists is one thing, and to say that capitalism solves the problem of freedom is quite another. It all depends, of course, on how you define the term. Novak defines it in negative terms -- freedom means being left alone, being uncoerced by other people. That is an important part of freedom, no doubt; in this respect it must be admitted that the liberties of bourgeois capitalist society are no small achievement, and that they are not to be casually forsaken.

There remains, however, another side to the story, which people who take Novak’s line characteristically neglect. Freedom has a positive aspect as well. The free person is not only free of external coercion but also has the ability to control the direction of his or her life and to develop his or her potential. In this respect I would argue that the difference which capitalism makes has been greatly exaggerated by its proponents. Perhaps in the 18th or early 19th century the simplicities of the free market made it possible for anybody with gumption to become a "rugged individualist" and shape his or her own destiny. But we are far removed from that era today. We are now confronted with a form of capitalism which concentrates economic power in vast, impersonal institutions, with the result that decisions vitally affecting the livelihood of average citizens are made in places far removed from their capacity to have any influence at all. What kinds of jobs will be available, where they will be available, how much salary they will provide, what products will be sold, how much they will sell for -- these matters are settled for most of us by people who remain faceless.

It is therefore a misleading half-truth to say, as Novak does, that capitalism "allows human beings to do pretty much what they will." It all depends on what you choose. If you opt for selling insurance or making automobiles or fixing plumbing, the system will probably find a place for you. It will also tolerate your whim if you choose to "drop out" in a commune somewhere. But if you choose to do something which does not lead to profits and which requires substantial financial support, your chances of being frustrated are fairly high. If you choose, for example, to be an educator or a social worker or an artist, realism demands that you prepare for the possibility that a shrunken job market or the impossibility of making a decent living will force you to abandon your career aspirations in favor of something more "practical."

Restricted Choices

The same holds true for consumption. Strictly speaking, we are not forced to buy anything. And if we happen to like what is offered in the marketplace, then indeed capitalism does allow us to do what we wish. But what if we do not like what is being offered? What if, for example, an individual does not want to pay the price being asked for automobiles? What if he thinks the price unnecessarily high and the product undesirable in important respects? He needs transportation, and public transportation in his particular area is either inadequate or nonexistent. Such a person, I would submit, has his freedom of choice restricted precisely because of the way the free market operates. He will probably end up buying one of Detroit’s latest models not because he really wants to but rather because it represents the only available practical answer to his needs.

The same argument applies to the life and medical insurance premiums people pay because there is no cheaper, more efficient public program for dealing with the costs of medical care and old-age security. It also applies to our food, much of which comes to us in the supermarkets overpriced and laced with chemicals of dubious value. Theoretically it is possible to grow one’s own crops and bake one’s own bread, but as a practical matter that is not a serious possibility for most people. So they end up "choosing" products about which they have serious reservations. Short of transforming their whole way of life, they are stuck with what A&P and Safeway make available -- and at the prices A&P and Safeway charge.

I do not mean to imply that things will be radically different under socialism. Only anarchism makes sense as a formula for the full restoration of positive freedom, and anarchism is incompatible with industrial society. If we are going to live in an industrialized world, with its economic complexity and population density, a substantial diminution of the freedom of the individual (as compared with simpler times) is probably inevitable. Concentrated economic and political power is going to be a fact of life, regardless of the economic arrangements under which we live.

Socialists have argued that it makes a considerable difference where this concentration occurs. They contend that freedom is enhanced when economic power is vested in public rather than private hands because the people who wield that power are made publicly accountable. As R. H. Tawney, a British socialist of an earlier generation, wrote: "It is the condition of economic freedom that men should not be ruled by an authority which they cannot control" (The Acquisitive Society). The virtue of socialism, it is argued, is that it does away with such irresponsible authority, and forces those who make economic policy to appeal to the electorate and to justify their decisions in terms of the public good. Through political action, in turn, there is something average citizens can do about their fate. No longer need they be the victims of faceless, powerful people over whom they have no control.

I subscribe to this argument, but it can be confidently asserted only insofar as socialism is democratic. And by "democratic" I mean liberal democracy -- i.e., a multiparty system, regular competitive elections, and civil liberties. Without these, there is no reliable check on the policies laid down by government officials, and there is a strong likelihood that the ruling elite will become just as exploitative as any capitalist (perhaps even more so).

Sinfulness and Justice

The other element in the case for socialism is, of course, justice. Down through the socialist tradition, the argument repeatedly has been made that capitalism results in gross inequities, and that socialism can do away with such foolishness. Under socialism no one goes hungry; everyone who is able works; those who work receive benefits commensurate with their social contribution; and there are not the radical disparities in wealth and opportunities characteristic of capitalism.

Curiously, Novak makes no mention of the issue of justice. But it is of critical importance to the choice between capitalism and socialism, and it is directly relevant to what he has to say about sin.

I have no quarrel with an emphasis on sin per se. The inevitability of selfishness in political and economic affairs is something which I have taken for granted ever since reading Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr’s arguments are thoroughly persuasive that sin is simply a fact of the human condition which no amount of education, preaching or social engineering will eliminate. I take this to be one of the principal contributions which Christian thought has to offer in the realm of social and political theory.

For Niebuhr, however, an emphasis on sin was not the whole story of human nature. It was equally important to recognize humanity’s capacity for justice. If I read Niebuhr correctly, the two are roughly equal their strength and influence in human affairs. It is for this reason that Niebuhr could be moderately optimistic about the course of history and make comparatively high demands on social institutions (unlike, e.g., St. Augustine).

The neglect of the issue of justice is what makes Novak’s case as plausible as it is. There is no question that capitalism builds upon and in fact encourages selfishness; a capitalist environment naturally inclines us to believe that people must be addicted to a greedy, competitive individualism. But the socialist argument is that a different environment will elicit a significantly different kind of behavior.

Socialism’s Moral Appeal

"Different," I emphasize, but not sinless. There are socialists, of course, who harbor fantasies about completely rooting out selfishness. But they hardly represent the whole of the socialist tradition, and there is no reason to believe that the socialist idea requires such a belief. Many socialists have been and continue to be more modest and pragmatic. They identify socialism not with heaven on earth but simply with a better, morally superior way of life. They have no intention of remaking the soul of humanity -- only of harnessing human egoism and cultivating a better human nature. They know that selfishness is a given, but they also know that its force and consequences vary enormously with the context. They believe that there is a fundamental moral distinction to be drawn between a system that encourages people to be greedy and one that instead encourages them to acquire only what they truly need.

For much the same reasons, it is simply fallacious, I think, to say that socialism must take the form of a secular religion. Socialism no more than capitalism need be a substitute for theistic religion, and it is worth noting that capitalist ideology, for all its alleged "realism," just as easily succumbs to this danger. (For every socialist who believes that socialism is The Answer to the problems of the human condition, there are at least as many capitalist "true believers," the preponderance located in the business world.) Admittedly, socialism does make a strong moral appeal, and in the past this appeal has often been associated with a heavy dose of secularism. But to suggest that this is a necessary connection is to mistake history for logic. Socialism no more requires a secularist foundation than does modern science.

Logic is probably beside the point, however, in dealing with this charge, because it is mainly a polemical device. Its main purpose, as Novak shows, is to dismiss socialists as impractical visionaries and thereby to protect capitalism against moral criticism. It enables the defenders of capitalism to deflect the socialist critique without having directly to address it. The argument of socialism’s impracticality is nonsense which can be sustained only so long as one is ignorant of the variety and complexity of the socialist tradition.

Capitalist Naïveté

A standard reply to this kind of critique is to praise capitalism’s flexibility. According to capitalism’s revisionist defenders, collaboration between government and private industry can curtail the anarchy of the market, and the various devices of the welfare state can be used to resolve inequities. Socialism is therefore unnecessary because welfare capitalism answers the principal objections of socialists. Such an approach is apparently what Novak has in mind when he speaks of a capitalism "made intelligent and public-spirited."

Capitalism is indeed flexible. Capitalist economies have shown a remarkable resilience that has defeated the pessimistic prophecies of socialists again and again. So one would be foolish to speak dogmatically about what is possible. Still, there is ample reason for skepticism that any version of capitalism can adequately resolve the problems that agitate socialists. Where the genuinely mixed economy becomes a reality (as, for example, in Sweden), capitalism clearly becomes much more like socialism, and is therefore more palatable. But "capitalism with a human face" still is not socialism. As Michael Harrington keeps insisting, as long as the means of production remain in private ownership, there is a fundamental structural obstacle to the realization of socialist objectives.

It is here that the realism of socialists and the naivete of democratic capitalists become apparent. The democratic capitalist wants to believe that we can have most of the dividends of socialism without actually moving to public ownership of the major industries. The socialist says in reply that we cannot have it both ways. Capitalism is designed primarily to prevent the objectives which socialists seek, and its adherents will strongly resist the measures necessary to adapt private enterprise to anything seriously approaching a socialist program. They may allow "national planning" of a sort (as in France); they may allow welfare programs; they may allow some progressive taxation; but what they will not allow is an invasion of the autonomy of the private corporation so that economic decisions can be coordinated and made on a basis other than profits. That is where the line must be drawn if capitalism is to remain capitalist. And this in turn means that real national planning, oriented primarily toward social needs, will be impossible.

J. B.: The Artistry of Ambiguity

Job asks "Why?" But no satisfactory answer to his question emerges -- not from the confrontation with the three comforters, nor from the arguments of Elihu, nor from the framing device of Satan’s wager, nor even from the voice in the whirlwind. In all his glory God appears to Job, who, abhorring himself, repents in dust and ashes. The beauty and the power of the biblical story of Job depend finally not on reasoned answers but rather on an act of faith.

In like manner the verse drama J. B. -- Archibald MacLeish’s modern retelling of the Job story -- seeks not rationally comprehensible solutions but rather an artistic evocation of this "leap of faith." In the process of writing his play, MacLeish achieved aesthetic complexity only after a struggle to move beyond solution-seeking. In this evolution not only did his play improve in dialogue, imagery and timing; more significantly, its artistic vision widened. Changes in elements such as setting, character and plot resulted in the transformation of a limited, bitter satire into a larger, poetic statement about the human condition.

The shaping of this poetic statement was a slow and difficult process. MacLeish began working with J.B.’s central visual image -- the circus-tent world and the infinite sky -- in an early poem, "The End of the World." The first stanza of this poem describes a dynamic, colorful circus world which comes to a halt when the big top blows off unexpectedly. All turn to see what lies beyond. The second stanza, one long sentence, propels us toward the culminating lines of the poem to learn what the people see: "There in the sudden blackness of the black pall/Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all." Thirty-two years passed before MacLeish replaced this vision of "nothing at all" with Sarah’s injunction to see by love in the dim light of J. B.’s last scene:

Blow on the coal of the heart.

The candles in churches are out.

The lights have gone out in the sky.

Blow on the coal of the heart

And we’ll see by and by. . . .

J. B. underwent several "visions and revisions before reaching its final form. MacLeish began it in 1953 as a one-act drama for BBC production, but by 1956 the still unfinished J. B. had already undergone three drafts to become a three-act play with acted prologue. Not until two years later was the play ready for performance. It premiered at Yale University in May 1, 1958 and was performed again that summer at the World’s Fair in Brussels. MacLeish then rewrote the play and served as consultant for its Broadway production, directed by Elia Kazan. The result was the present J. B., a play which by January 1959 was being acclaimed a "smash success."

I

An intriguing thing about this "smash success" is that reviewers could not agree on what the play meant. In the Saturday Review John Ciardi saw the Yale production as a human triumph (March 8, 1958, p. 48), while Henry Hewes argued that the play was a pageantry lacking any real humanity (May 10, 1958, p. 22). Christian Century reviewers also disagreed: Samuel Terrien thought that J. B. presented "modern man’s reaction to the problem of evil without the category of faith in a loving God" (January 7, 1959, p. 9); Tom F. Driver found the play afflicted with "a sort of theological schizophrenia," divided between its religious and humanistic dimensions (January 7, 1959. p. 22); and Henry P. Van Dusen found the protagonist of J. B. more convincing, more moving than the biblical Job (January 28, 1959, p. 107). Such critical diversity is not surprising given the ambiguity within the play itself. Since the play proposes no logically convincing answers, members of the audience must either come away from the play in doubt or make their own leap of faith. Unfortunately, many viewers who did make the leap also tried to impose their beliefs upon the play -- and then criticized J. B. for not sustaining their interpretation.

An instructive way of understanding the play’s hard-earned aesthetic complexity which so plagued the reviewers is to compare an earlier manuscript version (held by the Lilly Library, Indiana University) with the later published play (Houghton Muffin, 1958). The first things that strike the reader in such a comparison are the slight but important changes in the setting. The manuscript version gives extensive and detailed description of the setting and its significance. As the audience enters the theater the stage is dimly lit, revealing a few circus hands cleaning up. On the stage are two circus rings -- Job’s house and Satan’s arena. A railed platform represents heaven, with a perch to mark that part of heaven to which only God can climb. Scattered about the stage are clown costumes, while the backdrop suggests a circus tent bedecked with colorful signs of the zodiac. Into this scene come Mr. Zuss and Nickles, who will play-act the parts of God and Satan.

In the later published play, the scene is less specific, more universal. The significance of the platform, stage, deal table, and seven chairs is left up to the director and the audience to determine. The clothing lying about has "the look of vestments of many churches and times." The tent is a simple and unobtrusive, if not tattered, canvas. The circus hands are absent. The play’s tone and atmosphere -- rather than being confined to a circus performance -- are more generalized and familiar, as the stage directions explain: "The feel is of a public place at late night, the audience gone, no one about but maybe a stagehand somewhere cleaning up, fooling with the lights." The resulting increase in objectivity not only makes it easier for the audience to identify with the action; it also leaves interpretation of that action open. Mr. Zuss’s performance may invite us to see the platform as "heaven," but the play does not insist solely on that view.

II

Into this more universal setting MacLeish puts less obtrusive and more human characters than those he had initially created. In the manuscript, Mr. Zuss is an’ old and pompous actor with a resonant voice. Nickles is a gaunt, sardonic youth with a cracked, harsh voice. While these two characters who frame the main action seldom agree with each other, both men repeatedly interrupt the scenes involving J.B. They discuss him while he discusses Thanksgiving with his family. Like a stage manager, Nickles dresses and prompts the soldiers and reporters for their roles as messengers of death. Indeed, he himself acts as J.B.’s butler, admitting the soldiers who will report the first loss -- the death of J.B.’s son. Mr. Zuss also directs the action, beating a dull and ominous thud on the drum before the announcement of each disaster. Moreover, it is to Mr. Zuss on his perch that Sarah looks after the reports of the first and second losses. A spotlight follows her gaze to reveal Mr. Zuss stepping back -- as though to avoid her eyes -- and raising his God-mask, as though to hide behind it. The masks themselves further isolate the God and Satan of the wager from the human level of the action. They are oblivious of J. B.’s suffering. When Mr. Zuss raises the Godmask, it appears to go as blank as the moon in a hard glare. It is the mask of a God of cold, impersonal force with blind eyes and a face of stone. These massive mask figures upstage not only J. B. in his suffering, but even Mr. Zuss and Nickles themselves. The human beings are engulfed by the roles they play: the allegory consumes the humanity.

In the revised play Mr. Zuss and Nickles are both old men who "betray in carriage and speech the broken-down actor fallen on evil days but nevertheless and always actor." They are contemporaries in age and experience. Unlike the earlier characters, the pair can’t be misread as the man of faith opposing the man of despair, as age and experience posed against youth and naïveté, or as the quarrel of traditional beliefs with modern mores. Nor can the questions which arise from their wager be reduced to social issues. The equality of these two later characters frees the audience to judge for itself between their positions.

Just as the roles of Mr. Zuss and Nickles are made more balanced, they are also made more human. They no longer direct the action. They may play at being God and Satan, but we are always aware of them as broken-down actors playing. They speak between J. B.’s scenes, not during them. Nickles no longer prompts the messengers. The first two drum-beats are offstage, while the stage directions for the third leave it unclear whether Mr. Zuss actually strikes the drum or whether the sound comes from offstage as the light fades. Neither Sarah nor the spotlight looks toward Mr. Zuss after the losses. Thus he does not need to step back or hide behind an impersonal Godmask.

These changes result in the greater importance of J. B. As a character suffering his losses, J. B. attracts our attention and sympathy in a way that J. B. as a puppet of the gods never could. Moreover, the suffering of the later J. B. is inexplicable, not the easily dismissed consequence of a wager as in the first version. We are, like Job, uncomforted before the contingencies of the human condition. The changes in the roles of Mr. Zuss and Nickles turn them into persons who under other conditions might themselves have Job’s role to play. Even as they fumble for their masks of God and Satan, they, too, hear a "Distant Voice" anticipating their own lines (Job 2:3), and they respond to the voice:

Nickles: Who said that?

Silence.

Mr. Zuss: They want us to go on.

Nickles: Why don’t you?

Mr. Zuss: He was asking you.

Nickles: Who was?

Mr. Zuss: He was.

Nickles: Prompter probably. Prompter somewhere.

Your lines he was reading weren’t they?

Mr. Zuss: Yes but...

Nickles: shouting Anybody there?

Silence.

Mr. Zuss: They want us to go on. I told you.

Nickles: Yes. They want us to go on...

I don’t like it.

This mysterious voice serves as a reminder to us that we too are in a play under another’s control. We too might one day have Job’s role to play. And as a result, suddenly that role takes on larger dimensions for us. We are personally implicated in the suffering and challenged by the subsequent leap of faith -- rather than being concerned merely with the intellectual interpretations others place upon that suffering and faith.

MacLeish’s efforts to focus upon J. B.’s role lead to changes in the roles of even the minor characters. For example, in the manuscript the women pity J. B.; they go to him and invite him to join them. Although J. B. in his agony does not see or hear them, they sit in a circle about him shielding him from .the night. Indeed, they are to remain in this circle throughout intermission. In the published version of the play, on the other hand, they enter later, say less, and make no attempt to mitigate his suffering. J. B. remains alone, unspoken to, unshielded. No human kindness reduces his suffering; no human intervention diverts the man’s desire to know why he suffers. The central question of the play remains uncluttered.

III

MacLeish’s revisions of the final scenes provide perhaps the clearest examples of his changing attitude toward the role of J. B. and the nature of the play. In the earliest version J. B.’s repentance is portrayed as defeat and humiliation. J. B. sees himself as nothing and therefore as unworthy of receiving answers. He utters the biblical line "Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent" (Job 42:6) and sinks to his knees. Unsatisfied with this version, MacLeish corrected the manuscript by hand to give J. B. a triumph even in repentance. Although in the depths of abnegation he sees himself as nothing, J. B. finds freedom in acceptance of this condition. After reciting Job’s confession, this second J. B. slowly raises his head and squares his shoulders.

In the published play MacLeish uses neither of these responses. Instead, J. B. utters his line and the light fades out, relieving him of the necessity to act in either manner. The audience must decide if J. B.’s repentance is a Victory or a defeat. Not even Mr. Zuss and Nickles know for sure whether J. B. has been ennobled or crushed: Nickles sees submission; Zuss, defiance.

Nickles: He misconceived the part entirely.

Mr. Zuss: Misconceived the world! Buggered it!

Nickles: Giving in like that! Whimpering!

Mr. Zuss: Giving in! You call that arrogant,

Smiling, supercilious humility

Giving in to God?

After their debate Mr. Zuss informs Nickles that the play is not over -- God restores J.ÊB. at the end. Nickles, snorting, refuses to believe that J. B. could start over again. He then tries to persuade J. B. to reject God’s offer, but J.B. ignores this advice. At this point the, two versions again differ. In the original Mr. Zuss also tries to win J. B. to his viewpoint and receives a similar rebuff. In the published play, however, Mr. Zuss is spared the indignity of pleading his cause and, by implication, God is also spared’ the indignity of justifying his ways to man. Moreover, God’s position is not defined in the limited terms of the early Zuss’s proposal. In the closing scene J. B. accepts his wife Sarah in what may well be. also an acceptance of God -- the human affirmation of divine love. As MacLeish said in the playbill for the Yale production: "It is in man’s love that God exists and triumphs: in man’s love that life is beautiful; in man’s love that the world’s injustice is resolved" (as quoted by Tom F. Driver, "Clean Miss," The Christian Century [June 11, 1958], p. 693).

This acceptance of Sarah differs greatly in the two versions of the drama. In the original, J. B.’s initial response to her is harsh and bitter. He demands to know what she wants. He then launched into a diatribe reciting ‘his interview with God. He had sought reasons a man could live with: God had had no reasons, only wonders and omnipotence. In the middle of his harangue J. B. suddenly stops and asks Sarah why she has returned. She says that she has done so for love, but J. B. mocks the idea of love in a world where one must lose what one loves most. During J. B.’s speech, Sarah begins to restore order. When she picks up an unlit lantern, J. B. tells her to use her love to light it. Then he himself lights the lantern, Sarah leans her head on his shoulder, and a warm, intimate, human light fills the room. Sarah suggests that love will yield understanding. J. B. takes her in his arms, but he cannot accept her suggestion. He says that man can never understand: he exists and that is all. He can suffer and because he suffers, love; because he loves, suffer. But it is in ignorance that human beings still must live.

In the published play J. B. is not the bitter and defiant man who resents his position and almost rejects Sarah and love. When he finds her sitting on his doorstep, J. B. exclaims "Sarah!" and tells her. "roughly" to "Get up!" Although he starts to make her leave, J. B. reconsiders and asks "more gently" where she has been. Sarah describes the "mountains of ashes" that are the world now and tells J. B. why she had deserted him: He had wanted justice in the world and she could offer only love. She thought she knew an answer:

I thought there was a way away...

Water under bridges opens

Closing and the companion stars

Still float there afterwards. I thought the door

Opened into closing water.

Overcome at this suggestion, J. B. drops "on his knees beside her in the doorway, his arms around her." Sarah reveals that her love for life was too strong to let her find her way away: "Even the forsythia beside the/Stair could stop me." Together J. B. and Sarah rise and look into the darkness of their home. J. B. remarks that it is too dark to see. It is Sarah who replies that one must trust in love to see, for love is "all the light now":

Blow on the coal of the heart and we’ll know . . .

We’ll know. . .

Rather than insisting that J. B.’s repentance and acceptance of life is some third possibility opposing those offered by the Godmask and Satanmask, the new ending leaves our interpretation of his actions open. By reducing J. B.’s bitter defiance and by eliminating his comments about his interview with the whirlwind, MacLeish has successfully avoided dictating to us the nature of J. B.’s repentance and the adequacy of God’s answers. By letting Sarah propose love as a reason to begin again, MacLeish is able to leave J. B.’s own reasons ambiguous or at least unarticulated. We no longer have J. B. talking of the human tendency to start again in blind ignorance. J. B. suffers, questions, repents, and begins again through love. This human love may or may not be an attribute of divine love. His repentance may or may not be a victory. His questions may or may not be sufficiently answered. The play does not seek to solve these issues. Rather, it seeks to embody them in dramatic art.

MacLeish’s changes between the manuscript and published form of J. B. move the play from specifics to the universal, from the allegorical to the human, from mediated to unmitigated suffering, from imposed rationalizations to the dramatic action which is left to speak for itself. Not only do ‘these changes help to define J. B.’s suffering and repenting as the central images of the play, but they also effectively hide MacLeish’s own interpretations of these images. The critics who look to the play for answers will be disappointed. J. B.’s aesthetic ambiguity evokes in us Job’s question "Why?" and demands that our own leap of faith supply the answer.

Will the Real Evangelical Please Stand Up?

Two years or so ago I picked up an issue of a widely circulated religious publication and found a statement titled "A Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern." The document put into words many of the convictions which I had been moving toward since the days when I first began to grasp the social dimensions of the gospel. I subsequently became a co-signer of the Declaration, and I am glad to have my name associated with it.

However, as I read through that magazine, many of its pages devoted to events surrounding the issuance of the Declaration, I became increasingly puzzled. For the reports of the Chicago meetings that gave birth to the document indicated that some of the original signers had in their deliberations contrasted themselves, the "evangelicals," with other church people whom they called "liberals."

Their language perplexed me. For years I had used both terms to describe myself. I grew up in a tradition which was "evangelistic," and though I now recognize the folly of reducing evangelism to acts of "personal witnessing" or of preaching to the masses, I have never lost the conviction that there is a gospel, an euangelion, and that it should be shared. Because of my commitment to this euangelion I have always thought myself to be evangelical.

A People-Oriented Gospel

I never heard the terms "liberal" and "conservative" until I was about 2 or 3 years old, but from that time I heard them used in ways which made the term "liberal" more descriptive of the convictions I was forming. As I matured, I kept hearing the term "liberal" used to describe thinking like my own -- thinking which seemed to grow out of a basic concern for the gospel itself. Those whose political priorities were people-oriented rather than money-oriented or corporation-oriented were called liberal; and though I did not see politics as the salvation of the world, I felt that the gospel should have root influence in all my thinking. The Christ of the gospel was people-oriented; therefore, if to be people-oriented in politics was to be liberal, then I was happy to be called liberal. Those who supported civil rights goals were called liberal, and I felt that supporting these goals gave expression to my biblically oriented belief in the dignity and worth of all people. Those who in religious faith believed in intellectual honesty -- indeed, in intellectual openness -- as an expression of one’s trust in God as the source of all truth were called liberal. Those who in church life believed in ecumenical Christianity because they took seriously the prayer of Jesus that his followers may be one (see John 17:11) were called liberal. If all these things meant being "liberal," then I was more than ready to embrace the term.

It continues to baffle me that "evangelical" is frequently used to suggest a spiritual virtue in contrast to "liberal" or to some other perfectly honorable word. I am not satisfied when I am told that the word liberal describes a 19th century view of humankind based on a view of Absolute Idealism. I know enough philosophy and historical theology to know when these disciplines are not the topic of discussion -- and they are not in most of the places where I hear the term "evangelical" contrasted to "liberal." "Evangelical" is being used not in the sense that European Christians use it but to describe what Robert Ellwood calls a "mood or style" (One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning [Prentice-Hall, 1973], p. 25).

Defining the Terms

I am distressed too by the sloppy way in which so many who call themselves evangelicals throw other terms around. In otherwise sound and provocative essays and volumes the word is used in contrast to other words without any clear definitions of what the writer means. Donald Bloesch’s book The Evangelical Renaissance is basically a courageous call for openness of attitude and spirit. Yet Bloesch tosses terms about as if his very use of them established some ecclesiastical or theological fact. For example, on page 7 he speaks of "both ecumenists and evangelicals." Are the two mutually exclusive? But on the next page he declares: "I try to speak as one who is both evangelical and ecumenical." I do too, and so I might conclude that Bloesch and I are of one mind. But in speaking of "evangelicals and liberals" he declares that "an evangelical church, unlike a liberal church, will have a passion to convert the world" (p.17). And then, as if the statement were axiomatic, he equates the terms "evangelical" and "conservative" and gives the term "liberal" another bad mark by saying, in reference to Dean Kelley’s book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, that "conservative churches seek to meet those deep spiritual needs while liberal churches seem to be more interested in working for social change" (p. 18). In his scheme of things it seems that one who claims to be liberal necessarily lacks a strong desire to take the gospel to the world and to meet people’s "deep spiritual needs." What he has done is to set forth his own definitions and to structure his own view of the Christian world around them. But the definitions and contrasts are tenuous.

This tactic is little different from the error I once committed in a political bull session in graduate school when I said, "Conservatives do not believe in progress" -- to which a friend replied, "Since you have set up your own definitions, no one can argue with you." Of course he was right. I had structured the world to suit myself, around my own emotional responses to certain terms, but this did not make what I described the real world. Similarly, the characterizations of those who claim the word "liberal" made by many who call themselves "evangelicals" are not necessarily accurate.

The Cross and the Flag (edited by Robert Clouse, Robert Linder and Richard Pierard [Creation House, 1972] is a commendable - book in its social concern and its attempt to end the marriage between some brands of popular religious thinking and right-wing ideas. Yet in discussing liberal politics one contributor asserts that "Christians must reject the liberal concept of freedom as nothing more than the absence of restraint." (Apply that view of freedom to corporations, and the concept suddenly becomes conservative!) And: "The Christian rejects the liberal concept that the human condition is fundamentally a product of the environment" (p. 87). As a political liberal I do not believe either of those "liberal concepts. I support liberal causes and candidates because they are more often people-oriented, and to be people-oriented is to be consistent with the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth.

Evangelical One-Upmanship

But what bothers me even more than the imprecise use of other terms is the evidence of one-upmanship in the use of the term "evangelical" itself. A noticeable segment of the religious population takes this term, defines it by imposing doctrinal conclusions on what is basically an English derivative of the Greek word for "good news," and reads the rest of the religious population out of its circle of definition. In doing so the definers are really saying that "evangelical" means what they have said it means. Instead of "good theology" this is actually the fallacy of petitio principii, known commonly as begging the question or circular reasoning.

Just recently, in thumbing through one of America’s better-known "evangelical" publications, I found a list of the nation’s four-year "evangelical" colleges. What struck me was that all the schools listed seemed similarly "conservative" in the extreme. The editors admitted leaving out schools "associated with Seventh-day Adventists, non-instrumental Churches of Christ, Church of the Brethren, Lutherans, and Southern Baptists" because so many of them were so denominationally oriented (Christianity Today, November 7, 1975, pp. 39-41). But the list included only one United Presbyterian school, though there are probably over 20; only one Presbyterian U.S. school, when there are 17; only two American Baptist schools, though there are 22; no Disciples of Christ schools; no schools affiliated with the United Church of Christ, despite a heritage which includes the Evangelical and Reformed denomination; and no United Methodist schools, though that denomination has the rich tradition of the Evangelical United Brethren. The list is preceded by a statement that some of the colleges in omitted groups are "no longer sectarian but have become too pervaded, in our judgment, by nonevangelical views of the Bible, theology, and ethics."

In other words, the editors imply, to be "evangelical" means to agree with them. And because the word "evangelical" calls to mind the word euangelion, if one does not agree with them one is by implication not soundly committed to the gospel.

I so much as heard Harold Ockenga (now president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) say this once in a freshman assembly at a state university where I was teaching. He spoke on modern theological movements; before several hundred 18-year-olds -- many of them less than six months out of small towns and rural churches, many others from no substantial religious backgrounds at all -- he talked about the "liberal" and "modernistic" trends that had resulted in something that wasn’t Christianity at all. He then told them, almost in passing, about "neo-orthodoxy": though it had some truth to it, it wasn’t the real thing. Finally, he told them about "orthodoxy" -- wherein lay the truth. Of course I had to explain his remarks to my freshman honors students later, for none of them -- much less the other freshmen -- had even understood what he was talking about. But though I did tell them what I thought to be the essence of Ockenga’s address -- that there were many theological positions but that his was the "right" one -- I did not tell them that he was also a champion of political conservatism.

A Matter of Temperament

And that point leads me to suggest that one ingredient of this one-upmanship in the use of the term "evangelical" is to imply that only those of a certain temperament are loyal to the gospel. Many of the self-styled evangelicals I have known have been "conservative" across the board. Not all are, of course -- Mark Hatfield and Harold Hughes are two who are not. But there are notable people who do fit this mold -- Billy Graham is among the most prominent in his support of conservative political figures. And the editors of The Cross and the Flag admit that there has been "a persistent, uncritical alliance between conservative Protestantism and conservative political, economic and social interests" (p. 14). Temperament, or conditioned response, has more to do with religious thinking than some want to admit. But temperament is not the gospel, and conditioned response is not the gospel, nor is religious style the gospel; if we, however unwittingly, equate any of these with the gospel, we are in danger of idolatry. To use a derivative of the New Testament word for gospel (euangelion) to encompass temperament, conditioned response, or style is to come perilously close to making such an equation.

So pervasive is this one-upmanship game of religious style that faithful Christians without the style have often capitulated in the use of the term "evangelical." Not long ago The Christian Century published an article by a Christian leader of no less stature than Lloyd Averill called "Can Evangelicalism Survive in the Context of Free Inquiry?" (October 22, 1975, pp. 924-928). I was attracted by the title, for I felt that at long last the Century was declaring itself to be evangelical -- something which by virtue of its historic concern with the total implications of the euangelion I felt it was entitled to do all along. But alas, though the article offered a stimulating analysis and challenging conclusions, the author allowed the perfectly good word to be usurped by those with a more severe kind of spirit.

Said Averill at one point: "Because evangelicals have traditionally placed doctrinal, if not dogmatic, tests on scholarly membership in their communities of inquiry, and because of their consequent reluctance to hear the truth whenever and by whomever it is spoken . . ." This is a fine analysis of a certain kind of spirit, which, as Thomas O’Dea once said at an AAR meeting, "like the poor is always with us -- but why call these people the evangelicals? Is Averill’s concern for the gospel any less than theirs? I don’t think so. In some ways he may be even more concerned because he, unlike those whom he describes, is willing to keep his hands off the gospel, recognizing that because it is "of the spirit," it will like the wind blow where it wills -- regardless of propositional form.

Linking Terms to Theology

I say "regardless of propositional form" because there is a strong urge on the part of many self-styled evangelicals to link the term "evangelical" to propositional theology -- statements in effect become the containers of divine revelation. Despite some external differences, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ -- the two groups which Robert Ellwood discusses in his book One Way as the principal "evangelical" influences on the modern campus -- have this common undercurrent. Their theology is propositional, and there is a tendency for large numbers in each group to think of themselves as more loyal to the gospel than those who do not have their particular mental organizations of revelation. I sense this among many who relate the term "evangelical" to propositional theology. I have known some to suggest that if I do not believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and that the prophet Isaiah wrote chapters 40-66 of the book bearing his name, I have somehow rejected a basic proposition of the Christian faith and am therefore not loyal to the gospel. How often we swallow camels!

This theological one-upmanship is carried further by use of other companion terms to "evangelical." Clouse, Linder and Pierard in The Cross and the Flag assert that the words "orthodox," "biblical" and "conservative" can all be used interchangeably with "evangelical," "without distorting the meaning in any way" (p. 18). Evangelical principles are, they say, essentially the principles of historic Christianity. It seems to me presumptuous to suggest that those located at a certain point on the contemporary theological spectrum are entitled to exclusive use of terms which connote faithfulness to historic Christianity.

But is this not what the equation of terms does? What are the implications? If I can’t adhere to certain tenets as organized and set down by those who have taken it on themselves to define "evangelical," then I am not "orthodox." If I don’t adhere to those tenets, then I am not "biblical," even if it is my study of the Bible that has kept me from adhering to some of them. If I am not "conservative," then I must be something other than faithful to the Bible and to historic Christianity, even if in my Bible Jesus and Paul often seem "nonconservative" in relation to the society of their day, and even if in my study of Christian history Martin Luther doesn’t seem to have been "conservative" in the context of his day either. Some will tell me that if I don’t see biblical passages their way, I have a "low" view of inspiration, whereas they have a "high" view -- another example of one-upmanship.

‘Fundamentalism Gone Respectable’

I am coming more and more to think that all this pre-empting of terms to describe what are essentially matters of religious style and theology not rooted in biblical studies is really the modern equivalent of the older fundamentalist style. It is unfair to call all modern self-styled "evangelicals" only fundamentalists, and "evangelical" writers like Bloesch and the late E. J. Carnell hasten to make distinctions. But in use of terminology to confer status on themselves the two movements are quite similar. When Amzi Dixon and Reuben Torrey published their ten small volumes called The Fundamentals in the early 1900s, and when Curtis Laws of the Watchman Examiner in 1920 coined the term "fundamentalist" to designate those who are ready to fight for the "fundamentals" of the faith, they were claiming that in their position on the theological spectrum were to be found the essentials, the basics, of Christianity. Implicit in their use of the word fundamentalist was the suggestion that they had a corner on the gospel and biblical truth and Christianity in general.

E.J. Carnell once described fundamentalism as "orthodoxy gone cultic" (The Case for Orthodox Theology [Westminster, 1959], p. 113). 1 would suggest that the "evangelicalism" or "orthodoxy" which we see pre-empting these terms is "fundamentalism gone respectable." The combative and pugilistic attitudes I have encountered among self-styled "orthodox evangelicals" make some of these brothers and sisters appear as kindred spirits to some of the old belligerent fundamentalist types such as J. G. Machen.

The corrective is not for others to become as pugilistic as those who would defend the gospel by trying to malign their opponents -- a procedure attempted by departmental and seminary "purges." Sour attitudes are after all not the sole possession of "ultraconservatives," and some of the pat characterizations of them by less conservative Christians are just as inaccurate as theirs of others. Not all self-styled "conservative evangelicals" are obscurantist, not all are anti-intellectual, and not all are ignorant. And even some of the more combative of them seem to be making attempts to be more irenic in attitude and ethical in dialogue than in the past.

For some this must be an emotional hurdle similar to those encountered by many Protestants and many Roman Catholics as they began confessing the spiritual limitations of their own brands of exclusiveness, seeing the gross inaccuracies of their cherished views of one another, and walking cautiously but bravely into the presence of one another -- to find out that God is bigger than either had given God credit for being.

Putting Aside the Labels

Those of us who have been excluded from the boundaries of the term "evangelical" by persons who have drawn the boundaries too narrowly must avoid reading these people out of the Kingdom. The teaching of Jesus to "love your enemies" applies to us as well. Frankly I find much to feed my spirit in writings of both the self-styled evangelicals and their critics, and for years I have remained puzzled over what many of the squabbles are really about. Both sides have resorted to knocking over straw men.

I propose that the church begin by putting aside the rampant use of labels. Whatever the shorthand labels, they quickly become flags around which people rally or barriers that divide. One "evangelical" journal to which I submitted an article pleading for attention to people instead of labels sent it back to me with the explanation that my characterization of myself as a liberal would "not be effective with our readership." This of course demonstrated the very point of my article -- that all labels are ultimately artificial and capable of creating artificial barriers.

The church, if it must use labels, should use them as invitations to dialogue. I suggest the following "propositions" as a beginning: (1) The term "evangelical" refers at root to one’s primary commitment. (2) If one’s primary commitment is to the gospel -- the euangelion -- that is what is basic. (3) The gospel is the Christ Event. (4) Theological conclusions, because they vary and change in each of us, are not necessarily identical with our basic commitments. Indeed, our commitments may be ,the causes of some of the changes which take place. (5) We should talk to one another at the level of commitment and "judge not."

If these "propositions" are taken seriously, then the next step is to get those who think they are the evangelicals together with those whom they think are not -- to talk and pray. For those of us interested in ecumenism as a theological verity, it would certainly be a necessary step. (What greater ecumenical breakthrough than an exchange of lecturers between Moody Bible Institute and the divinity school of the University of Chicago?) But more broadly it can be a revealing step. All of us might discover the following:

1. That Jesus’ call is to discipleship and not to labels. That he did not say "Follow me and I will make you a conservative," or "Follow me and I will make you a liberal," or even "Follow me and I will make you an evangelical." To fishermen he said "fishers of men" and to his followers generally he simply said "followers" -- disciples.

2. That Jesus had among his first disciples both Matthew the publican and Simon the zealot -- an establishment conservative and a radical revolutionary -- and that therefore temperament is not the mark of discipleship.

3. That the Spirit, like the wind -- in both cases the pneuma -- "blows where it wills" -- a hint that God is not captive of theological systems nor the prior possession of certain ones.

4. That Jesus once admonished his disciples for forbidding those with another identity from casting out demons in his name and told them that "no one who does a mighty work in my name will soon after be able to speak ill of me," and that "he that is not against us is for us."

5. That, as a speaker at one ecumenical conference remarked, "brothers don’t have to be twins" -- but brothers should be brothers.

Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968: In Memoriam

Men and women who have dreams, who see visions, and who then have the audacity to prophesy in word and deed have been described by the sustainers of the status quo of every age as being drunk. As Peter had to explain at Pentecost: "For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day" (Acts 2:15). A variety of epithets is employed to put down the dreamers, visionaries and prophets; they may be referred to as outside agitators, troublemakers, people with chips on their shoulders, maladjusted individuals, and so on.

The people who use terms of this sort do so in order to divert attention from prophetic activity. These people are assassins, making their deadly attempts by attacking competence, experience and character. When these attacks fail, those who use the gun take over and complete the dirty deeds.

I

But throughout history assassins have failed to realize that one can, "slay the dreamer but not the dream." It is possible to kill a human being but not an idea. This message speaks clearly on this occasion, the commemoration of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are reminded through the death of Dr. King that a man or woman who demonstrates faith, in a faithless age is certain to be misunderstood and liable to be attacked and abused. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a product of the southern black experience: son of a Baptist preacher, graduate of Morehouse College, holder of a Ph.D. degree in systematic theology, black preacher, prophet in word and deed -- Martin Luther King, Jr., came on too strong for a nation that had from its very inception used so much of its energy in declaring black people invisible, irrelevant, null and void. America looked at Martin King’s academic accomplishments and said he was uppity. America responded to his cry for justice for black people by declaring that preachers ought to concern themselves with the suffering world. When he spoke out on Vietnam, he was told that he ought to stick to problems in this land. When he confronted unjust laws, people said he should stick to God’s laws, but when he did just that, they said "law and order" must prevail. The abuse he experienced is that which comes to anyone who dares to demythologize the myths that sustain a sick society.

Acts 2:16-18 describes God’s democratic activity in the dispensing of dreams, visions and prophecy; sons and daughters, young men and old men, menservants and maidservants -- all are on the receiving end of God’s particular activity in history. Sometimes we forget that historic juxtaposition of Rosa Parks and Martin King. It was Rosa Parks on that Montgomery bus who said with her body: "I will not be moved." Her determination to stay put started a movement that has inspired numbers of subsequent liberation efforts. In his book The Days of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Putnam, 1971), Jim Bishop tells of the first of those days, in December 1955:

The driver looked. All the seats were filled. A few whites stood up front. "All right, all right," he said, looking at Mrs. Parks and two other blacks. "Come on. Get in the back." Rosa Parks looked up at the strong white man at her side, waiting. Three blacks got up and walked to the back. "Get out of that seat," the driver said, pointing at Mrs. Parks. All he saw was a small dark woman with a circlet of braids and a glint of light from her glasses.

"No," she said, "I won’t."

The way God speaks to people, the way God uses people, is amazing and magnificent. The wisdom of the world would not have chosen Rosa Parks and Martin King to act together for that moment in history. She was a seamstress, he was a scholar; she made dresses for white women, he preached the gospel to black folk; she had taken no theology courses to enable her to comprehend God’s claim on her, while he had studied so much theology that he was not expected to take God’s claims seriously. Yet, despite the fact that the world would have difficulty in casting these two persons in a drama of social change, God did use a seamstress and a scholar/ preacher to bring about a radically altered way of life.

II

People forget about God’s democracy. It is so easy to become racial, sexual, academic and class chauvinists, to pretend that God has spoken most distinctly to my group or to that group. Some are convinced that God spoke clearly in the Council of Hartford -- William Sloane Coffin was there -- while others say God spoke more clearly in the Council of Boston -- Harvey Cox was there. I might say that God spoke most clearly at the World Council in Nairobi because Gilbert Caldwell was there.

After identifying the places where and those to whom God has spoken, people become convinced that, from then onward, God has laryngitis, writer’s cramp, production problems. But the biblical story serves as a reminder that God is no respecter of persons, that the word is spoken and heard in shacks and mansions, churches and classrooms, and that it reaches scholars and illiterates.

In 1976, in reflecting on the response to God’s word as revealed through Martin Luther King, Jr., it becomes necessary to say that instead of creating new community, what has been created is new chaos. We blacks have moved from segregation to desegregation, but our basic condition and position in American society have not changed. We who were once invisible are now, visible, but we have presence without power. The nation’s institutions have been seductive in their efforts to recruit us. But after we have been seduced into becoming "a part of" them, we have discovered once again our impotence in American society. We are still unable to help restructure those institutions that once structured us out.

We are to be seen but not heard. We are used to attract new money and new participants and to satisfy conscience, but we are told in a hundred ways that our experience, our expertise have nothing to contribute toward major issues. Our gifts become universal when we display them in the world of music or athletics, but we have no gifts to offer in decision-making, reorganizing, restructuring.

III

But, as always, Scripture holds us up against God’s continual and continuing involvement in history, and this is the source of our hope. It was the internalization of this hope that served as Martin Luther King’s moving power; thus he could "have a dream" and say "I’ve been to the mountaintop"-- for without dreams there are no mountaintop experiences.

The biblical story tells us time and time again that, important though analysis of estrangement may he, God is about reconciliation. We see this and experience it in Jesus Christ. God’s reconciliation is neither cheap nor premature, but is the kind that does justice to the integrity of creation. As James Baldwin pointed out years ago: "Who wants to be integrated into a burning house?" We are called, therefore, to build those new houses that accommodate all of God’s children.

On this the eighth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King the dreamer, let us -- blacks and whites, together -- dream of a nation whose business, rather than being the kind meant by Calvin Coolidge, is justice and liberation which come only with a redistribution of power. On this day when we remember Martin Luther King the visionary, let us have a vision of what my church, what your church, would look like if we dared hold up the torch he held so high.

In our observance of the nation’s bicentennial year, as we remember Martin Luther King the prophet, let us become prophets of word and deed -- prophets who believe what we have heard, who act on what we know to be true, who know that the Lord is a stronghold in times of trouble and live in the knowledge that the Lord is our rock, our fortress and our deliverer.

Let us confess to God how often we destroy dreams with our apathy, violate visions with our sophisticated arrogance, and prevent prophecy with our politics of pragmatism. Let us ask God to enable us to dream again, to free us up so that we envision a new day, and then to let us be prophets of liberation and reconciliation.

The Law: Sacred Writ or Institutionalized Injustice?

One of Langston Hughes’s memorable literary characters, Jesse B. Semple -- nicknamed "Simple" in the three books written about him -- invariably speaks his mind with wry understatement on a variety of issues. I was not disappointed when I looked to see if Simple had said anything about the law in the perspective of ethics:

"If I was setting in the High Court in Washington," said Simple, "where they do not give out no sentences for crimes, but where they gives out promulgations, I would promulgate. Up them long white steps behind them tall white pillars in that great big marble hall with the eagle of the U.S.A., where at I would bang my gavel and promulgate."

"Promulgate what?" I asked.

"Laws," said Simple. "After that I would promulgate the promulgations that would take place if people did not obey my laws. I see no sense in passing laws if nobody pays them any mind."

What would happen if people did not obey your promulgations?" I asked.

"Woe be unto them," said. Simple. "I would not be setting in that High Court paid a big salary just to read something off a paper. I would be there with a robe on to see that what I read was carried out. I would gird on my sword, like in the Bible, and prepare to do battle. For instant, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ The first man I caught who did not love his neighbor as hisself, I would make him change places with his neighbor -- the rich with the poor, the white with the black, and Governor Faubus with me" [Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill & Wang, 1965), p. 160].

Simple is fully aware of the ambiguities to be found where law and ethics meet or fail to meet. A question that might intrigue Simple is this one: Can morality be legislated?

The initial problem with such a question is that, in our highly pluralistic society of competing self-interests, it is excruciatingly difficult for people to reach a mutually acceptable definition of what constitutes morality. For example, is morality to be found in the arguments. for or against legalized abortion, busing, and the "right to die"? Is it found in the arguments for or against free sexual expression of consenting adults, prison reform, government surveillance of people’s lives, and civil disobedience? Where such issues are at stake, one encounters bitter conflict among proponents of sharply divergent ethical propositions.

A Godlike Authority

Since moral relativism has to a large extent replaced the old clear-cut lines of authority, the burden placed upon the law today by our society is a virtually insupportable one. For the law is, by default, supposed to be society’s moral arbiter, its agency of ethics, its definer of right and wrong. There is a deep irony in this situation because the law is inescapably the definer of our surrogate morality rather than of our morality itself. Indeed, morality forms the very foundation of law. As Peter Singer points out: "Our ultimate obligation to obey the law is a moral obligation and not a legal obligation" (Democracy and Disobedience [Oxford University Press, 1973], p. 3).

Nonetheless, there is an expectation on the part of society that the law will speak from on high as well as in the people’s midst, and that it will make straight what would otherwise remain twisted, crooked lines; it will establish order in the stead of anarchy and chaos; it will retain a semblance of purity amid vile motives and human deceits; it will speak with godlike authority and power in a godless age. The law is the first to say, of course, that this situation is absurd, untenable and beyond the pale of rationality. And yet, these expectations persist. That this is so does not mean that the law is loved by the society or even universally respected. But the law exists; it is a given factor of stability, credible historical development, and yearned-for order amid the rise of violence, terror and an unspeakable sense of insecurity that haunts the burnt-out souls of an anxious people.

At the same time that the society places the law inside a transitory and secular holy of holies, the law itself is torn by conflicts concerning its identity and role. Is there a point of intersection between law and morals? Are what is and what ought to be indissolubly fused? Legal positivism has insisted on the separation of law as it is and law as it ought to be. It has viewed law not as an ideal, but as something that exists and must be considered in its actuality.

On the other hand, for Lon L. Fuller "it is in the light of [the] ‘ought’ that we must decide what the rule is’" ("Positivism and Fidelity to Law -- A Reply to Professor Hart," Harvard Law Review, February 1958, p. 666). He raises the question: "Is it really ever possible to interpret a word in a statute Without knowing the aim of the statute?" He claims that law possesses an internal morality," and says:

The fundamental postulate of positivism -- that law must be strictly severed from morality -- seems to deny the possibility of any bridge between the obligation to obey the law and other moral obligations. No mediating principle can measure their respective demands on conscience, for they exist in wholly separate worlds.

The Sanctioning of Evil

If we believe that the law in its proper role reflects the ideal of a higher justice, how then are we to react when it violates that ideal? If the law seemingly institutionalizes injustice, is there a need to disobey it? From childhood through school days and college, I understood implicitly that there was, in practice, one law for haves and another law for have nots. (Anatole France perceived the law somewhat differently. To him, it was inherently inequitable rather than merely unequal in application. "The Law, in its majestic equality," he wrote, "forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.")

Whether my own awareness came from early reading (Edwin Markham’s "The Man with the Hoe," Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, a book about the Scottsboro case, Richard Wright’s Native Son), or simply from viewing life around me in the Great Depression, in the metropolis where I grew up, in the racial maze where blacks and whites lived their separate lives -- I do not precisely know. In my teens I learned that a Marian Anderson concert was not merely another concert. I knew that Marian Anderson was black. The manifold meanings of her blackness escaped me, but beneath the surface of that knowledge there lurked an awareness of tragic symbols that caused me to weep quietly in my seat in the concert hall when she sang "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." I also knew in my bones that the racial tragedy had the sanction of law.

I was a student in high school when I listened to the radio reports of H. V. Kaltenborn -- he was Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters rolled into one -- on the rise of Hitler and a new anti-Semitism. Nazism was a distant but quite close-to-home monstrous force that repelled and frightened me, forcing me to look with apprehension and a new kind of wonder at my Jewish classmates. "Juden" became a chilling word in my limited, growing vocabulary that also included "nigger." The Nazis’ destructive urges against Jews were bolstered by (I realized) the sanction of law.

What, then, was I to make of the law? It seemed to possess the power to do terrible things as well as good ones. I determined never to run afoul of the law with its seeming capriciousness. I did not wish to find myself under any circumstances in its Witch-of-the-West clutches. Some people would say that it was a good thing that I feared the law. But, alas, I did not respect it. Although I held it in awe as being sacrosanct, possessing even an element of the mysterium tremendum, I knew that it could be manipulated by the leverage of power. A demythologizing of the law took place in my early consciousness.

I had no way of knowing that later in my life I would actually test the law in the light of ethics as I understood them. Years afterward when I was a freedom rider, an earnest figure of the early ‘60s, I endeavored to test (and change) the law that enforced apartheid -- the practice of separate lives and opportunities for blacks and whites -- and that even forbade racial mixing at a lunch counter. Often in the course of the civil rights struggle, one found oneself stopped short by the stone wall of a dehumanizing system embedded in unyielding laws.

One felt a sense of wrestling with shadows or ghosts. Where was one’s ground? As a middle-class white volunteer at work on black voter registration in the Deep South, I rode along a highway one day in a car with three young black men. We drove well under the speed limit in order to avoid a confrontation with the police. But our car was stopped by the police, and we were actually arrested on the utterly false charge of speeding. The experience was a profoundly shocking one for me. I had always embraced the concept of law and order. But now I had to ask myself: law and order for whom? What could one make of an "order" that brought disorder into people’s lives, tyrannizing them? More significant was the shady underworld of killings and lynchings. The story of Emmett Till comes to mind as a latter-day example that at least became widely known and received the attention of the news media. For an agonizingly long time, such victims of torture and gross injustice had no access to justice. On entirely too many occasions, local laws apparently stood in the way of access itself, even though access was guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

When the Vietnam war raged madly out of control -- consuming human lives, gutting a portion of the earth, and souring an American generation’s idealism -- I found myself once again a dissenter. This time I did not test or try to change laws; I merely wished to exercise responsibly the civil liberty that I believed was my right. Yet I recall how Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew attacked "the glib, activist element who would tell us our values are lies." He seemed not to understand that criticizing the state can be a way of honoring it, and that without the honest and creative practice of dissent, democracy suffers irremediably. Concerning those who dissented, Vice-President Agnew proposed "to separate them from our society with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel."

On two occasions I participated -- once as the celebrant, once as the preacher -- in peace masses inside the Pentagon, nonviolent and orderly demonstrations for the cause of peace. Laws of access at the Pentagon were not the issue; instead, it was the seeming irrelevancy of the law itself to the conduct of an undeclared war that seriously strained the moral fiber of the nation. When we were arrested on the two occasions, the legal charge of disturbing the peace had to be juxtaposed against the reality of how many bombs the United States had dropped that day on Vietnam. One thought inescapably of how many Americans and Vietnamese were being killed on the same day that a few dissenters tried against clearly hopeless odds to disturb the peace of the Pentagon.

At the particular times when I have felt impelled to engage in acts of public dissent, I was never so naïve or self-righteous as to feel that God was on "our side." Yet undeniably I believed that I was following the dictates of my own conscience as well as the fundamental precepts of what I had learned was the Judeo-Christian ethic. But this can be heady stuff. Is there such a thing as "law above the law or "the moral code"? Is there "a lamp unto the feet and a light unto the path" and "a still small voice," or are these mere delusions in the place of serious reality? Do so-called moral values possess any ultimate sanction over legal sanctions?

The Holocaust: Justice Judged

The year 1984 is now but eight years away. However, I do not presume to look into the future or to inspect its implications, whether these be Orwellian or Disneyesque. Instead, let us look backward 30 years to the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews. It is the single event in my own lifetime that has most deeply affected me. Millions of people participated in it. To observe a single aspect of it places us sharply in an existential frame of reference. One asks: How could the Holocaust have occurred in a highly civilized society rich in historical mores, the practice of religion, and a vigorous intellectual life? We need to hold the Holocaust in a precise perspective of near-contemporary occurrence instead of letting it become an abstract symbol of universal numbness. In the interest of specificity, consider this excerpt from a German engineer’s sworn testimony at the Nuremberg Trial:

I went round the mound of earth and stood before the gigantic grave. People lay in it so closely packed one upon the other that only their heads could be seen. The trench was already three-quarters full. By my reckoning there were already about a thousand people lying in it. I looked round to see who was shooting. An SS man sat at the edge of the trench letting his legs dangle in it; he had a submachine gun resting on his knee and was smoking a cigarette.

The completely naked people went down a few steps which had been dug in the wall of the trench, scrambled over the heads of those who were lying there to the position that the SS man indicated. They lay down among the dead or wounded people; some stroked those who were still alive, and spoke quietly to them. Then I heard a succession of shots. I looked in the trench and saw how the bodies twitched; blood spurted from the necks. I was surprised that no one told me to go away, but I also saw two or three postmen in uniform standing nearby [The Nuremberg Trial, by Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb (World, 1962), p. 334].

Could anything demonstrate more vividly the crying need for a higher judge of law? What judges justice? This event, the Holocaust, judges justice! It took place at a particular time and place, and certainly with the compliance of the law.

So we have learned that the law, sometimes mistakenly equated with justice, cannot be considered sacrosanct. But does this mean that we must accept, for example, Philip Berrigan’s dictum that "given America’s crimes, keeping the law is rejecting Christianity" (Widen the Prison Gates: Writing from Jails [Simon & Schuster, 1973], p. 51)? Surely one cannot insist upon a utopian ideal of an absolute moral purity as a prerequisite for keeping the law in human society, where there can be only approximate justice, and moral ambiguities are as much a part of life as idealism and spirit.

Conscience and the Law

"Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream," wrote Amos. But, Giorgio Del Vecchio tells us, justice can be hard to grasp or to define precisely:

Justice is sometimes taken to be synonymous with or equivalent to law, sometimes to be distinct from law and superior to it. Justice in one of its aspects is held to consist in conformity with law, but it is also asserted that law must conform to justice. What at one moment is taken as the standard whereby to judge what is just and unjust can in turn, in its manifestation as mere empirical fact, be itself judged in the same way; this happens when we appeal, in the name of justice, to a higher ideal criterion which transcends all rules of positive law and must therefore rest on some other foundation [Justice: An Historical and Philosophical Essay (Edinburgh University Press, 1952), p. 1].

When is it possible for a society to agree upon this "higher ideal criterion"? Is it not by means of perversely appealing to such an undefined "criterion," which is said to transcend "all rules of positive law" and "therefore [to] rest on some other foundation," that the door is opened to the "transcendent" or "divine" or absolutist rights of those who do evil even as they claim to stand above the law? If, as citizens, we are told that it is our duty to hold conscience above the law, what collective conscience can save us from the sheer anarchy of a legion of individual consciences?

Most people’s individual consciences will be informed by the individual consciences of peers and colleagues, and the collective represented by these. But collective consciences can create the most barbarous evil, as in Nazi Germany and present-day South Africa. There is a profound need for these individual consciences to be nurtured by morality in the sense of a universally accepted ethical context. Few would argue with Lord Devlin when he says: "The idea that you must not seek without restraint your own profit and well-being but must be careful that in so doing you do not injure others is a moral idea that is part of the foundation of every good society" (Law and Morals [Holdsworth Club of the University of Birmingham, 1961], p. 3). And this is surely not the only universally accepted moral principle. When the law is true to its nature, it provides a parameter for the implementation of this principle and others like it.

However, to accept this role for law and to put it into practice are quite different things. There’s the rub. One could travel in this bicentennial year to a thousand American communities, and in each of them see instances of human tragedy directly based upon failures of justice and the breakdown of moral ideas -- this in the face of operative legal systems. What hope is there that the law can make any difference in these fragments that form a mosaic of impending social tragedy that is as much a part of the American bicentennial observance as are TV specials and patriotic oratory? What is the law in the perspective of ethics supposed to mean when it comes to the needed growth of genuine social morality and the injection of hope itself into human lives?

Apparently we must hold in some kind of a workable balance (1) the demands of individual conscience, (2) the extenuating demands made upon individual consciences by the often competing realities of society and the world, (3) the dangers inherent in postulating an undefined higher ideal criterion which is said to transcend all rules of positive law, and (4) the moral vision inherent in a higher ideal criterion that takes positive shape in the service of human needs and justice.

A Prophetic Instinct

A sick, badly wounded or endangered society is addressed by occasional surrogate prophets. A healthier society is informed by a prophetic instinct -- even a body of knowledge -- that is generated, nurtured and shared by a larger number of people. This prophetic instinct needs to provide the foundation of a responsible, self-challenging, socially challenging, humanly responsive community of law.

Let the law be the servant of justice. Justice needs to be informed by love and mercy. Surely these words do not comprise mysterious conundrums or puzzles within puzzles that are incapable of being understood in this moment of the age-old struggle between the individual and constituted authority. Let the law not reduce itself to letter-perfect casuistry that denies its own servanthood to humanity. Humanity is never a cut-and-dried entity. Brand Blanshard usefully reminds us: "However capricious or selfish or brutal a man may be in actual behavior, if we are right in calling him a moral being at all, what he is trying to be and do is never exhausted in what he is" (Reason and Goodness [George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1961], p. 397).

On this point our best poets and playwrights agree with our most explicitly moral prophets. This is an essentially optimistic, generous, open-ended and hopeful view of the human endeavor. The law must maintain order, yet recognize that order is changing, adjusting, relating to the human beings whom it encompasses. Order is fluid, not constant; it is not a straitjacket, but a garment that adheres naturally to the body following long use.

One thing is clear. Internal morality is not essentially different from external morality. The law is judged by the law. The law above the law, and the law within the law, are the same and cannot be seen as standing separate from the essence of the law itself.

As a people we do not wish to see the law as holy. At its best the law is a guide to motives and actions that point toward what is holy. As a people, we do not wish to suffer under the law as institutionalized injustice that stands in the way of justice and decency. We seek a balanced vision of the law as necessary, and based on justice and suffused with love and mercy. We yearn and are sometimes heard to cry out for this.

As we need the law, so does the law need us. It needs us to irritate, prod, disturb and criticize. Why? Because the law needs people as human reminders of what the law ought to be, and is capable of becoming, so that it will not arrogantly and comfortably settle for what it is. Let the law be honored in its own practice.

Academic Values and Prophetic Discernment

In 1965 I wrote a book called The Crisis of Cultural Change. While it was not news then that pervasive change was afoot, it has taken the traumas of the past ten years -- an immoral and lost war, racial and sexual conflict, the imminence of economic and ecologic collapse -- to persuade us of just how deep that crisis is. Not so long ago it was thought that the problems of higher education were merely methodological -- that, while complex, they could be solved in time the way you would solve a giant crossword puzzle. But unfortunately that technical, rational approach simply hasn’t worked: while many logistic problems of one kind or another on the nation’s campuses have been solved, both faculty and students continue to operate in that spiritual climate where, as Yeats prophetically put it, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

It is sadly true that the "best" are slowly withdrawing their commitment to an increasingly philistine academic culture and its institutional forms, filling merely the outward requirements of their roles and suffering the malaise of aimlessness and false consciousness. The "worst," having no such tender sensibilities of mind or spirit, are zealous to fulfill whatever careerist goals are set for higher education by our technetronic and industrial society. Thus, the deepening cynicism of some and the frenetic activity of others are symptoms of that deeper crisis in the meaning and purpose of higher education which we are just beginning to face.

Fortunately, more and more persons in higher education have begun to face up to this situation. People like Henry David Aiken in The Predicament of the University and Paolo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed pursue the kind of fundamental query about the ends of higher education which John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold and Robert Hutchins did in earlier generations. Furthermore, the growing concern among academicians about "values" in higher education is an attempt to come to grips with that deeper crisis. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Change have been much concerned about values recently, as have the American Association of Higher Education and the other Washington-based educational agencies; the Danforth Foundation recently held a workshop on values in liberal arts education, and the whole issue has been given academic credibility by programs in moral development and in value analysis at several universities. However effective such approaches turn out to be as instruments of inquiry and change (and I will explain my doubts about them later), their current vogue is a sign that the crisis in higher education is at least being joined at the level of meaning and purpose rather than merely at the level of methodology. I want here to sketch out how this growing concern might be deepened and, especially, how Jews and Christians -- the biblical people of God -- can contribute to its deepening and its potential for beneficent change in academic culture.

Dynamics of Institutional Values

Value in institutions is not, as the individualist would have it, simply the sum of the values of the individuals within it. If that were true, the appropriate strategy for change would be to affect each separate individual, one after the other. Rather, value in institutions is systemic, assuming a variety of forms, and it is this coherent and focused system of values which socializes every living person in any institution, overtly and covertly. Thus, in order to affect those individuals’ values in any fundamental, lasting way, the existing system of values must be changed.

Further, value in institutions is not, as the ideologues of rationalism would have it, inert and abstract -- lying there before our manipulating minds as the world is presumed to lie before the natural scientist. No, value in its systemic forms is pulsing with power, possessing capacities for concealment, beguilement and the like, achieving a kind of spiritual hegemony over institutions and persons. In fact, St. Paul defined our real situation much more clearly than most contemporary social scientists, bemused as they are by positivist dogma, when he observed: "For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12).

Let me briefly define three aspects in which value socializes all of us who live, move and have our being in an institution of higher education. First and most concretely, institutions incarnate value in the way they order space and time. As James Ackerman, writing in the Harvard Educational Review, reminds us, "Architecture is the physical form of social institutions"; and it is generally the economic establishment that determines the values incarnated in the buildings of a place and period:

"In the Middle Ages, colleges like those at Oxford looked like monasteries because the Establishment was theocratic; today, our high schools look like factories and regiment students like the labor force because the Establishment is commercial and industrial" ("Listening to Architecture," 1969, pp. 4-5). I recall two huge, cylindrical high-rise dormitories at Ohio State University sitting in the midst of a bare and windy plain. They are considered an engineering tour de force because their only source of energy is natural gas -- conveyed by a single steel umbilical cord -- which is then generated into heat and power. O brave new world! It does not take much imagination to see the doctrine of humankind which is incarnated in these twin monster beehives, to realize which establishment that doctrine serves, and to guess the effect in self-image and world view on its compacted, droning students who spend four years there. It is heartening that some people are sane enough to go mad in them and, hence, to establish themselves in more human precincts. Students call these buildings, with rueful affection, Sodom and Gomorrah!

But even the less bizarre versions of the beehive, rabbit warren or factory have similar socializing powers. Immaculate and extensive greensward, hedgerows, and neocolonial buildings carefully separating the college from its surrounding world -- these bespeak an elitist, dualistic and static notion of truth, and they insinuate that notion into the lives of those who live there. The numbering, rather than naming, of buildings at MIT and their severe geometricity create a positivist ambience. Similarly, the segmenting of academic time into stiff, interchangeable units molds the psyches of the inhabitants according to the very precise values and needs of a technetronic establishment. Clearly, too, there are arrangements here and there in the academic world which carry more humane assumptions that enlarge and vivify their inhabitants. But because, as Ackerman says, the economic establishment usually calls the shots, these places are not very numerous.

Hidden Curricula and Sentient Ideology

Taking a slightly deeper cut, we can also see systemic and sentient value in the formal patterns of institutional behavior, in the bureaucracy of education. After years of research on several campuses, Benson Snyder in The Hidden Curriculum (MIT Press, 1973) found that every student must master a mass of unstated norms which have enormous socializing effect, often exactly the opposite of the stated goals. Every college catalogue, for example, declares that this institution is to be a community of scholars, all working together -- albeit in differing roles -- to discover truth, to advance knowledge, to serve humankind, and so on. In fact, however, the word the academy has for such cooperative engagement (when it actually comes to pass) is "cheating." No, what the hidden curriculum teaches is competition, not communality.

Snyder says that it is this "hidden curriculum" which determines the sense of worth and self-esteem held by people within the academy. Grading on a curve is the main instrumentality for sharpening the competitive spirit at MIT, and while this institution holds up the communal ideal and explicitly tries to foster it through student activities and the like, it is the skills of the solitary predator that count for survival -- for faculty as well as students. The predator’s skills and attitudes are also those cherished by the economic establishment, and successfully learning them is the way value is most profoundly appropriated at MIT and at other institutions of higher education as well.

But value -- systemic and sentient, as "principalities and powers" -- finds its fundamental expression as ideology. Henry David Aiken in The Predicament of the University (Indiana University Press, 1973) argues that the "ideology of rationalism" is the ruling principality of higher education, subtly subjugating every other capacity of the self and every other version of the world in the name of its puritanical dualism. The arrogant elite it creates, structured into academic life, is especially vulnerable to tyrannical political power. The rationalist ideology denies the full development of the "constructive imagination,"

whose aim is not to inform us about what is or ought to be but to offer envisagements of what might be and to fashion symbolic forms to which questions of literal fact are not determining. . . . Their loss, or worse their repudiation among literal-minded "cognitivists," concerned exclusively to describe or explain what is the case, entails not only for themselves but for societies and educational systems which view them as exemplary, a terrible constriction of the whole life of the human spirit and a ghastly depletion of man’s capacity for refreshment and self-renewal [p. 370].

Christopher Jencks and David Riesman in The Academic Revolution (Doubleday, 1968) argue that the meritocratic world view is the basic determinant of academic life and "an inevitable feature of highly organized societies with a very specialized division of labor." They say that "meritocracy brings with it what we will call the national upper-middle class style: cosmopolitan, moderate, universalistic, somewhat legalistic, concerned with equity and fair play, aspiring to neutrality between regions, religions, and ethnic groups" (p.12). What Jencks and Riesman seem to be describing is a welding of the ideology of rationalism with the bourgeois, individualistic spirit of capitalism. The style they describe -- and which, I expect, we all recognize -- is, at first blush, blandly unexceptionable; but it is also absolutely intolerant of moral passion, of strong affective expression, or of spiritual vision. Such a style is meant to cool us out sufficiently, to make us tractable enough, in order to fit the manpower needs of the aforesaid "highly organized societies with a very specialized division of labor."

Changing Academic Values

I am less interested here to press my description of the particular values that inhere in academic life than I am to insist that, whatever their identity, they are built into the institution’s spatial and temporal forms, its patterns of behavior, and its ideological set; and that value, both systemic and sentient, has a profound socializing effect. If we are serious about value reform in higher education, we must certainly reckon with this situation. Let me now sketch out several necessary, if not sufficient, requirements for a strategy that could transform the academic establishment.

In the first place, the description of how value functions in the academy must be pressed as deeply as possible because the problem of value socialization is yet widely unrecognized. The still prevalent notion of the academy as a value-free marketplace for the free exchange of ideas -- or for the neutral impartation of data and skills to the young -- must be exposed for the delusion it is. Needless to say, the ideology of rationalism is one of the main supports of this delusion of neutrality. One could argue further that value has special socializing potency in the academy because of what sociologist Everett Hughes calls "the cloistering effect," the powerful socializing impact on persons who live almost totally immersed for a period of time within one institutional setting.

A second part of the strategy is to help colleges and universities become more up-front about their real operative values. It is possible for people to achieve a measure of freedom, from the socializing power of institutionalized values if they can see them and their workings with some clarity. A few years ago, teaching a course on religion in Western civilization at MIT, I struggled to screen out my own religious bias from my presentation of the materials. Not only did that effort take all the juice out of teaching, making the course a dull business for all of us, but I could never quite allay the students’ suspicion (and mine) that I was still covertly an apologist for Christianity. In the second year that I taught the course, I spent the whole first session laying out that dilemma and spelling out what I understood my own bias to be. That cleared the air. The students were able to establish as much distance from my values -- or closeness to them -- as they wished.

A third element in the strategy would be to encourage an open clash of commitments in academic communities. It will be argued that educational institutions are already at pains to entertain a wide world of ideas, but this is not exactly the case. For one thing, faculty have themselves -- in the cloistered process of graduate education and the struggle for tenure -- been through a profound socialization process. For another, outside speakers and the like, appearing briefly on campus, are inevitably treated as entertainers rather than purveyors of serious challenges to the life of the institution. In order to provide the necessary foils to our essentially homogenous academic culture, we must find ways of introducing into the academic world sustained confrontation with persons whose basic life-commitments and institutional contexts -- not just their cognitive positions -- are decisively different from ours.

Fourth, we must also encourage the development of ongoing cadres of persons within the academic community whose own deepest commitments are decisively other than its meritocratic and rationalistic ideology. I mean here not just cadres which hold differing ideologies, although that is part of what I mean; more, I mean those who have perceived a world which is prior to any ideology, one which calls all ideologies to account -- people who have consciously chosen to live the life of faithful citizens of that "real" world.

Calling Ideology to Account

Ignazio Silone worked as an underground agent in the communist cause for years in fascist Italy. In Emergency Exit (Harper & Row, 1968) he describes his compulsion to leave the Communist Party when it became clear to him that the party was more interested in institutional and ideological aggrandizement than in alleviating the suffering of the oppressed. He writes:

My faith in Socialism (I suppose my subsequent conduct bears witness to it) has remained more alive than ever. In its essentials it has returned to what it was when I first rebelled against the old social order: an extension of the ethical requirements of the restricted individual and family sphere to the entire realm of human activity; a need for effective brotherhood; an affirmation of the priority of the human person above all the economic and social mechanisms which oppress him. With the passage of years there has been added a reverence for that which incessantly drives mankind to surpass itself and which is at the root of his unallayable anxiety. But I do not mean to press for my own brand of Socialism. The "insane truths" I mentioned are far older than Marxism. . . . I cannot conceive of Socialism tied to any particular theory, only to a faith. The more Socialist theories claim to be "scientific," the more transitory they are. But Socialist values are permanent. The distinction between theories and values is still not clearly enough understood by those who ponder these problems, but it is fundamental. A school of a system of propaganda may be founded on a collection of theories. But only on a system of values can one construct a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together as men [pp. 98-99].

Always, in every place and every time, those who provide the energy and insight for real change in the human condition are those for whom values are not just ethical generalizations or moral ideals but, rather, life lived in faithfulness to apparently "insane truths" which define a real world as they have been given eyes to see it. Without such spiritual grounding and commitment, we are inevitably defeated by the world. This conclusion is St. Paul’s, after describing the awesome strength of the principalities and powers to diminish human life: "Therefore," he advises, "take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand." After specifying that armor in some detail, he concludes: "Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication" (Eph 6:13, 18).

Only such a serious, sustained, communally supported life in an alternate spiritual identity can provide the discriminating vision and the energy for bringing about real value change in higher education. It is because of their lack of such alternate grounding that most of the current efforts in "value analysis" and "moral development" seem so frail. The problem is that the leading practitioners of these voguish arts operate precisely within that same ideology of rationalism which possesses academic culture. While Sidney B. Simon at the University of Massachusetts and his colleagues claim that their values-clarification approach "does not aim to instill any particular set of values," they certainly reveal their ideological bias toward the autonomous, bourgeois, rationalistic self when they talk about "learning a process for selecting the best and rejecting the worst elements contained in the various value systems. And the six-stage theory of value formation, from lowest to highest value, which Harvard’s Laurence Kohlberg claims has universal validity both descriptively and normatively reveals that same rationalistic hubris. In short, these analytical instruments and others like them are not very likely to expose the pervasive ideology by which we in the academic world shape our life together, for they are rooted in that very ideology.

God’s People in the Process of Change

One might expect that biblical people in the academy would be grounded in an alternative spiritual identity which would stimulate continuous, creative challenge to the academic ideology. Generally speaking, however, the new spiritual enthusiasts -- Pentecostals and the like -- are so individualistic and world-escaping that they avoid cultural analysis and encounter; and many of us of mainline persuasion, seeming to have lost all clarity about our spiritual identity, are captive to the academic principalities. Daniel Bell defined this latter dilemma for Protestants and Catholics a couple of years ago. About the Protestants he says:

In its liberal theology, Modernism had preached a moralistic humanism in which the doctrine of the redemption of man had been equated with a view of a future society in which men would be freed from institutional constraints and achieve moral perfection. . . . The more serious effort to concern itself primarily with ethical rather than theological problems, as the followers of Bonhoeffer have done, has led them outside the framework of biblical language and judgment, and has tended to dissolve their religious answers either into personal morality or social activism which, while serious in its intention, has made them weathercocks turning freely in the cultural winds. In matters of doctrine, liberal clergy has lost its moorings. All that remains is the impulse of social idealism in politics ["Religion in the Sixties," Social Research (Autumn 1971), pp. 459-60].

Then Bell goes on to summarize the situation for Roman Catholics in the 1970s:

. . . if one looks at the new liturgies and celebrations, one can see that they are primarily cultural experiences expressed in religious language. That is, they involve no new code of beliefs, or an articulated view of a general order of existence, but rely entirely on rituals, on an acting out of feelings in a permissive group setting. And this is why they, too, will become quickly exhausted, to be replaced within the decade by some new kind of search, psychological, cultural, or religious [p. 485].

Bell’s brushstrokes are broad, but I fear (being one of those "liberal clergy") that the picture he paints is all too real, at least as it obtains in the academic world.

Kenneth Underwood’s book The Church, the University, and Social Policy was a splendid analysis, providing campus Protestants (at least) with a useful typology for self-understanding. But Underwood found his spiritual authority more in the academic ideology of rationalism than in the dark mystery of a crucified Messiah; his final vision is a rather flat social idealism in which the academic world is adulated. More recent versions of the Underwoodian vision picture Jerusalem and Athens going hand in hand into the sunset of service to humankind, though one suspects that Athens really has Jerusalem in an armlock. What has happened in these latter days is that in the academic world, the biblical people -- especially Protestants -- whose usefulness to that world is predicated on their being in but not of it, and on their having a certain beneficent spiritual leverage to bring to bear on it, have by and large succumbed to it. The salt has lost its savor.

‘Behold, I Am Doing a New Thing’

In this situation as in others, the vocation of the biblical people of God, Jewish and Christian, is prophetic discernment. What we need to engage in are acts of imagination that penetrate the apparent opacity and aimlessness of the historical present, and reveal how persons and institutions are accomplishing their destinies in relation to the sovereign God of history. Yahweh in Second Isaiah impatiently enjoins the people to such discernment:

Remember not the former things,

nor consider the things of old.

Behold, I am doing a new thing;

now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

[Isa. 43:18-19]

The university, like every human institution, is subject to the sovereignty of God. Its authenticity depends finally on how well it discerns and responds to God’s initiatives, his "new thing" springing forth in the soil of the present.

The landscape of the present, however, becomes illuminated only for those whose sight has been trained by the great illuminating events of the past. While the people of God are not to be bemused by the "things of old," their capacity to discern the real in the present moment must derive from a profound understanding of how God’s action and the people’s response have interacted to shape the past. Israel’s prophets were able to foresee the wrath of God descending upon the people when they oppressed the weak because God had demonstrated his love for the oppressed and his anger against the oppressor repeatedly in time past -- most notably in the Exodus. The whole priestly apparatus of cult, ritual and ceremonial -- which helps people to recognize their historical vocation and trains them in the means and "manners" of relating to God -- is necessary for the creation of that prophetic imagination which sees God’s shaping presence in this moment. In short, if the people of God today do not have a lively knowledge of how God acted in the past, they will not recognize him in the present; they are likely to be overcome by that blindness which the prophets called hardness of heart, and in fact they may lose their identity altogether. The biblical people in the academic world -- at least those of the Protestant dispensation -- have, I believe, nearly fallen into this latter condition.

If Christians are to contribute prophetically to the struggle for new meaning and purpose in academic life, they must attend with quickened imagination to "the teaching of the apostles, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers." Since the first Christian communities these "priestly" activities have nourished the spiritual identity of Christians as a peculiar people. Thus possessed of their identity, knowing themselves to be in but definitely not of the academy, these biblical people might then become one community of ongoing spiritual energy and moral insight for all those who are working to expose the academy’s covert operative values and searching for new academic purpose. Even though they may be few in number on the campus, biblical Christians engaging in acts of prophetic discernment can be crucial in the movement for transforming the university.

Prophetic Vision and Values Analysis

The "values" movement is ‘one area in which Christians can be prophetic in academia. The prophetic disposition sees all reality in terms of historical eventfulness -- it weighs every event by its tendency to conspire with or against God’s drive to shape history toward his kingdom of love and justice, and it understands that the human vocation is to participate in this struggle. This prophetic vision will clearly be uncomfortable with the bourgeois individualism of "value analysis" and the bland determinism of "moral development." In fact, it will be uncomfortable with the tendency of the whole "values" approach, both as description and as prescription, to impose an abstracting ideology of rationalism on the dynamic, sentient character of human existence. Just as Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling protested against Hegel’s moral universalism with the concept of "the teleological suspension of the ethical," and just as Buber in the Eclipse of God spoke out against the reduction of God to a concept, so the people of God today will raise a protest against the universalism and reductionism of the values approach. Academia’s addiction to the abstract is one of the reasons why higher education has trouble understanding and responding to its own malaise. Perhaps the biblical people of God, by pointing out the really real within the historical present, could help academic leaders to break out of this impacted perspective, as the university struggles for its soul.

One cannot be certain that cadres of Jews and Christians will be able so to possess their own souls that they can bring biblical perspectives to bear upon this struggle. But fortunately, something seems to be stirring in the land. Under the pressure of these times -- groaning with the sense of impending crisis which will change our life decisively -- increasing numbers of us are realizing that secular, technocratic liberalism can hardly name the malaise, much less respond to it. The world has begun to take on biblical lineaments again for more and more people, and the prophetic vision of reality, painful to assume though it is, again takes hold of their imaginations. At the very least, the dilemma of our historical moment -- in the academy and elsewhere -- is increasingly recognized for what it is, a spiritual crisis. The challenge to biblical people to exercise a critical ministry in the academic realm has never been clearer. Only time will tell if we will have the faith and the imagination to respond to a moment that seems weighted with the specific calling of God.

Hartshorne on Personal Identity: A Personalistic Critique

Before examining Professor Hartshorne’s view of personal identity, I wish to express my esteem for him and my gratitude for his work. I had already caught the general outline of the view that process is reality in Whitehead’s class in cosmologies in 1931-32. My revered teacher, Edgar S. Brightman, had even before this made me aware of the problems facing a scholastic or substantive view of mind, finite and infinite, as he reexamined the personalistic world-view of his teacher, Borden P. Bowne. In 1934-35, while working through my dissertation at the University of Cain-bridge with F. R. Tennant,1 I was forced to reconsider the case for a substantive soul-psychology.

In any case, the problem of defining the nature of personal identity has been with me during all of my teaching years, especially since a good part of my efforts have been focussed on borderline issues in the philosophy and psychology of personality. For over twenty-five years I have found myself being drawn over and over again to Hartshorne’s way of conceptualizing the nature of identity. Is my present uneasiness with Hartshorne due to an obstinate residue of the psycho-logic of substantive metaphysics? I hope that this response to Professor Hartshorne’s paper will be a step in clarifying what I take to be a significant difference between a temporalistic-personalistic view and an organismic-process view of identity.

Let me, to begin with, affirm basic agreements. First, becoming is real; being is the common property of all becoming, and nothing apart from becoming. Second, this first principle is consistent with what I find in my experience: to be is to act and to be acted upon. Third, act-uality is always a definite and noninstantaneous unity. Assuming agreement thus far, the problem is that of discovering the most reasonable account of act-ive unity and, what is inseparable, of act-ive continuity.

In the remainder of this paper, I shall try to pinpoint reasons for my present inability to follow Professor Hartshorne’s account of personal identity.

1. While this is not the place to pursue the matter, I must say to begin with that a methodological difference may well be at the root of differences in interpreting personal identity. Hartshorne, following White-head, is convinced that an epistemology must be worked out within the framework of a theory of reality. His paper shows that he is led to conceive of personal identity as one level of a basic model of identity; one developed, as I hope to show, without adequate attention to experience at the personal level. There is, methodologically, a radical personalistic experientialism in Brightman’s insistence that every metaphysical theory is inadequate if it misconstrues or forces self-conscious experience into some mold that does not include personal self-consciousness -- the one place where there is not only activity but activity aware of itself as activity. The fact that we begin theorizing as self-conscious persons does not, to be sure, entail the conclusion that the person is the microcosmic model for the macrocosm. But it does require that both philosophers and psychologists never lose sight of what is given in self-conscious experience; that any attempt to show that the sell-conscious experient is an emergent from other beings, psychic or not, be consistent with what is displayed in personal self-conscious experience.

2. Borden Parker Bowne, the founder of American idealistic personalism, held that there could be no succession of experiences without the experience of succession. To use A. C. Campbell’s illustration (without accepting his conclusion), in order for a person to hear Big Ben strike ten times he must be present at the beginning and at the end of the series in order to know that these ten strokes succeeded each other. I agree. If a person is to hear ten successive strokes he must be a unity that is a self-identifying continuity as he experiences the strokes as successive. Thus far I agree with Hartshorne’s insistence: identity is never a strictly logical identity. This is clearly so in personal experience; I am a self-identifying unity-continuity in change.

But when Hartshorne says that "reality is the succession of units" (b), meaning thereby the succession of actual entities or "experient occasions," I must ask whether this statement can be rendered coherent with personal self-conscious experience. For at no point am I a succession of unit-events. I am an experient who is a self-identifying unity without which there would be no meaning for "succession." For me to know my-self as a continuity I must be succeeding myself but not be a succession of units. For, again, succession cannot be apart from a self-identifying continuant.

3. Hartshorne says that "experient occasions have previous occasions, whether or not clearly similar to themselves, as their data" (d). He goes on to say that "in becoming datum for an experience of unit-subject, an entity becomes constituent of the subject" (e). And I emphasize his own further elaboration:

Subjects include their objects. Thus an actual entity must "house" its actual (meaning its past) world, must embrace the latter in the "synthesis" forming its own unity. Excluded by this doctrine of synthesis or "prehension" is the view that the data of experience are merely adjectives of that experience.

Hartshorne’s explanation for this fact, that subjects "include" their objects, is italicized: "The past comes into the present; the present cannot go into the past" (f).

I find neither the basic thesis nor the explanation consistent with my experience.

a. In my person-al, noninstantaneous direct experience. I do not find that I am a succession of units. I am a self-identifying unity who can recognize and recall his own experiences as successive.

b. What Hartshorne would call my previous occasions are not a past (or other data) that I am "housing" or "embracing" or "including" as such. There is nothing in my experience of myself that justifies my calling myself a synthesis of successive moments. I am indeed active in any moment, but I am neither a collection of moments nor a "synthesis." As long as I exist at all, I am a unity as synthesizing, selective activities, a unity accepting and selecting, in my contemporary ambient, what is consistent with my own activity-potential to date.

c. I come now to the point where epistemic and ontological contentions are both critical. In knowing my past (or present) objects I never include or embrace them; they are, insofar as they are objects of my experience, "adjectives" without the word "merely" attached (cf. quotation from Hartshorne, above). I don’t know what distinguishes the word "know" from "exist" if in my becoming I must be in part what my objects are in themselves, independent of me. The meaning of objects is adjectival to me, whatever their status in themselves is as they interact with me.

The epistemic dualism I assume here against Hartshorne’s (and Whitehead’s) realism is rooted in a concern to make error intelligible, but I shall not discuss this point here. Suffice it to say that it seems to me that both Hartshorne and Whitehead do not draw the dualistic consequences of a sentence in Process and Reality (p. 18): "Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality" (italics added). I would think that in the light of many such statements, one can hardly say that subjects include their objects. If the actual occasion is creative, can the theory of prehensions support a realistic epistemology?2 Here, however, I turn to the crucial ontological issue.

d. I agree that the present cannot go back into the past. But I do not know what it can mean experientially to say that "the past comes into the present." I understand the manner of speaking, but surely it is not more descriptive of what actually takes place than when we say: "the sun rises in the east and sets in the west." The sun doesn’t rise! The past doesn’t come into the present! It is gone forever.

What is at stake is the nature of the continuity required for a self-identifying unity. My fundamental contention is that our manner of speaking, "going back into the past," or "coming into the present," should not blind us to what we experience. This saddle-back now, the crucible of my becoming, cannot indeed go back into the past that is no more. Neither can it be said to move into a not-yet. Both "past" and "future" are abstract poles by which I identify my own history.

Thus, for example, at any moment in my personal experience I can roughly discriminate the Big-Ben sounds characterizing my vivid peak of "enjoyment." One stroke after the other is enjoyed in a present durée which remembers and anticipates even as it makes its creative contribution; and the novelty of each sound is differentiated and appreciated in a present. For I am never in my past, but only in my present. I may say that my present is my past with the enjoyment of a subjective aim that passes into a future, but this manner of speaking must not seduce me into reifying what cannot be. The burning, present experience is a present complex unity that is able to identify itself as changing and successive. To say with Hartshorne that "the present includes the past, becoming is cumulative and is a growth" is to give a theory about my present, but it is a theory and not what I experience. In a present I recognize aspects I describe as past, but my present is never an accumulation of pasts (hidden, distinct, or clear).

In (j) Hartshorne says that "since data are past events indistinctly given in the present we have, but do not fully have, our past." This marks the kind of seduction this manner of speaking invites. For epistemically we do not reach into a past that no longer is, and ontologically we cannot be what in fact is no more. The person-al moment is always a person-al now recognizing itself as it changes, and anticipating what is not now. The temporal person, accordingly, is not necessarily a line of sequences, of pasts becoming presents which become pasts for future presents. The temporal person is a complex unity interacting with his ambient at each moment and able to sustain his nature in a way that gives meaning to the words "self-identifying" and "continuing."

To summarize: for me, it is crucial to see that my personal identity is the selective and creative history of a becoming-being who has found that he can persist -- can modify his own being, select from, or change, his ambient in ways consistent with his being. I am not the result of persistence of the past into the present. The kind of persistence, and the causes and factors involved in the fact that I am still able to identify myself -- all this is open to further theorizing. I suggest that my memories, as aspects of my present, indicate a successive past because I, as an active unity, have been my "past." I am not, however, a result of linear and cumulative sequence. For, as I said, the experience of succession is the experience of a unity able to remember and anticipate. Again, how this is possible, be it in relation to God or to the environment as they present themselves, distinctly or indistinctly, to me as a creative self-identifying unity, is a matter for further debate. But I deny units of succession and unity as preeminent linear sequence.

4. This contention is critical in relation to Hartshorne’s view of personal identity, which stresses the linear or "personally ordered" sequences or "trends of becoming" (k, 1, m, n). To quote: "What then is personal identity? It is the persistence of certain defining characteristics in a very complex orderly society endowed with a preeminent linear society or "soul" (n).

I interpret this to mean that there can be no I that is other than a dominant linear persistence of a complex body. Thus Hartshorne holds that there is "no absolute right or wrong" as to whether personal identity begins with conception, or at some later stage. He leaves no doubt that he finds no meaning in saying that an "I" exists at the moment the fertilized egg came into existence. I see no reason why an actual occasion (later knowing itself as I) cannot come into being on the occasion of conception, having been created in accordance with God’s will at such a point, or at any other point.3 But I am not sure that I understand Hartshorne at this point. I press my concern.

Assuming that Hartshorne does not identify the person entirely with his bodily society, then the person’s own linear unity, however "fed" by his bodily society, can hardly be understood as a constant by-product of the complex bodily society. For as I said above, every actual occasion makes its own contribution to what is received selectively. Whenever it is that "I" does come into existence (let us assume, when a multicellular organization is present) the paramount question still remains: Does that "I" have the capacity to maintain itself, as it interacts with its body (however finally conceived) and with its total ambient, including God?

I suggest, in agreement with Hartshorne, that the person is no monad with closed windows; it opens and shuts its windows (within limits). But, I would insist, as long as the person is able to maintain its unity-continuity at all, it affects and is affected in accordance with the quality of its own knowing-caring-active nature, which is not identical with the society deemed to be its body or the ambient world. This is the essence (not circumference) of the personalistic contention, whether the person is created with limited delegated autonomy by God, or whether the person is a nonreducible emergent.

5. Thus, granted the existence of God, I myself hold that the person is created by God, and I would suggest that this view is what is required by a Whiteheadian theory if we are to take seriously the view that God creates the subjective aim of any actual occasion. Process theology is, I think, misguided in allowing a preference for creativity to lose the values in creatio ex nihilo. But that is another story. The important personalistic thesis is that the (temporal) person, whenever he begins to be, is the kind of being who is never a sequence or a succession of units but a unity who can succeed himself by virtue of his ability to relate his world to himself on his own terms (within limits). My larger contention would be that this quality of being depends ultimately upon God for its existence and also for the principles by which it survives -- which seems clearly to involve what we call nurture and challenge from the nondivine environment. God establishes the limits of consequences of personal being, but persons choose the sequences insofar as they choose at all.

6. Is this view endangered by the fact of dreamless sleep? I would hold that the phenomena of subconscious and unconscious being call for a theory of personal being that does not identify it with consciousness and self-consciousneSs, but this is again a larger story and, I think, still needs further elaboration by personalistic thinkers. But I confess that I do not see why dreamless sleep creates a hardship for a personalistic view of self-identity that does not hold equally for any other view of personal being that includes consciousness and self-consciousness. If personal identity is no more than that of a bodily society, there is no problem seemingly -- that is, until we ask what changes in the body are such as to produce the consciousness which is still nonexistent during dreamless sleep. In dreamless sleep the nature of a society of mental (nonconscious) entities, or of a society of brain-cells, is hardly the same as one that enjoys conscious experience. The problem of accounting for the self-identifying unity within the conscious-self-conscious being is still present.

Accordingly, any resort to bodily unity-continuity to explain the awareness of self-identifying unity despite intermittent consciousness does not resolve the problem. I do think personal being must be more broadly defined in appropriate mentalistic, telic terms, rather than conscious-self-conscious terms alone, but I see no good account of continuity across intermittency of consciousness by shifting the problem to a bodily society that does not enjoy my consciousness. It does no real theoretical good to sidestep the problem of intermittent consciousness by referring either to the body or to God. Why is it better to talk about a probability that is an actual state of a body (which in the sleeping state is presumably not the same as waking), than to talk about the dynamics of a telic being which, at the personal level, is to be understood in terms of activity-potentials by which it maintains itself at conscious, unconscious, and self-conscious levels? As I say, the problem cannot be sidestepped for long. But that must remain a topic for another occasion.

 

Notes:

1 His two volumes of Philosophical Theology (1928-1930) I still regard as the best systematic argument for theistic philosophical theology in England.

2 In a written rejoinder Professor Hartshorne writes: "My personalistic critic denies that present experience includes past experiences. If ‘includes’ meant that we effectively and adequately still possessed these experiences, then I too would deny this. Thanks to the pervasive indistinctness of memory, past experiences are in a real sense inaccessible to us." What I am disclaiming is the possession of past experiences, because this blurs the distinction between "know" and "exist." How would the past "be" indistinctly? Earlier I said that epistemic differences may well underlie important phases of our disagreement. This becomes clear when Hartshorne continues in a vein that runs through realistic epistemic claims of any sort, including the Whiteheadian: "On the other hand, if what I have in present experience is not the past itself but a newly created substitute or image, then the door is open to solipsism of the present moment, and only arbitrary fiat will keep that door closed"(italics added). I must reply that solipsism cannot be overcome by an arbitrary denial, made at the very moment that it is conceded that memory is inaccurate; and that, owing to data in the present that are otherwise inexplicable, we can infer with reasonable probability that we ourselves have a past. But here a basic issue is joined, and I conclude with Hartshorne’s further explanation: "I think the truest way to do justice to the inaccessibility of the past, which nevertheless we somehow know, is to say that we indistinctly intuit the past itself."

3 Incidentally, questions about abortion should not, I think, enter in at all here, since the question as to whether abortion is right or wrong depends on whether one believes that killing is ever justified.