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My Beating by Refugees is a Symbol of the Hatred and Fury of this Filthy War

It was a bad place for a car to break down. A bad time, just before the Iftar, the end of the daily fast of Ramadan. But what happened to us was symbolic of the hatred and fury and hypocrisy of this filthy war, a growing band of destitute Afghan men, young and old, who saw foreigners – enemies – in their midst and tried to destroy at least one of them.

Many of these Afghans, so we were to learn, were outraged by what they had seen on television of the Mazar-i-Sharif massacres, of the prisoners killed with their hands tied behind their backs. A villager later told one of our drivers that they had seen the videotape of CIA officers "Mike" and "Dave" threatening death to a kneeling prisoner at Mazar. They were uneducated – I doubt if many could read – but you don't have to have a schooling to respond to the death of loved ones under a B-52's bombs. At one point a screaming teenager had turned to my driver and asked, in all sincerity: "Is that Mr Bush?"

It must have been about 4.30pm that we reached Kila Abdullah, halfway between the Pakistani city of Quetta and the border town of Chaman; Amanullah, our driver, Fayyaz Ahmed, our translator, Justin Huggler of The Independent – fresh from covering the Mazar massacre – and myself.

The first we knew that something was wrong was when the car stopped in the middle of the narrow, crowded street. A film of white steam was rising from the bonnet of our jeep, a constant shriek of car horns and buses and trucks and rickshaws protesting at the road-block we had created. All four of us got out of the car and pushed it to the side of the road. I muttered something to Justin about this being "a bad place to break down". Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war has produced in Pakistan.

Amanullah went off to find another car – there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and that's a crowd of angry men after dark – and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered round our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands – perhaps I should have thought of Mr Bush – and uttered a lot of "Salaam aleikums". I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped.

The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open road. A child had flicked his finger hard against my wrist and I persuaded myself that it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin's shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I remember how I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank. Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me in the back.

How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn't smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner – the man who had been all "salaam aleikum" a few minutes ago – was upset, frightened, on the run. The West was being brought low. Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus driver waving us to his vehicle

That's when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated me enough to hurt me. There were two more blows, one on the back of my shoulder, a powerful fist that sent me crashing against the side of the bus while still clutching Justin's hand. The passengers were looking out at me and then at Justin. But they did not move. No one wanted to help.

The next blow came from a man I saw carrying a big stone in his right hand. He brought it down on my forehead with tremendous force and something hot and liquid splashed down my face and lips and chin. I was kicked. On the back, on the shins, on my right thigh. Another teenager grabbed my bag yet again and I was left clinging to the strap, looking up suddenly and realising there must have been 60 men in front of me, howling. Oddly, it wasn't fear I felt but a kind of wonderment. So this is how it happens. I knew that I had to respond. Or, so I reasoned in my stunned state, I had to die.

The more I bled, the more the crowd gathered and beat me with their fists. Pebbles and small stones began to bounce off my head and shoulders. How long, I remembered thinking, could this go on? My head was suddenly struck by stones on both sides at the same time – not thrown stones but stones in the palms of men who were using them to try and crack my skull. Then a fist punched me in the face, splintering my glasses on my nose, another hand grabbed at the spare pair of spectacles round my neck and ripped the leather container from the cord. I guess at this point I should thank Lebanon. For 25 years, I have covered Lebanon's wars and the Lebanese used to teach me, over and over again, how to stay alive: take a decision – any decision – but don't do nothing.

So I wrenched the bag back from the hands of the young man who was holding it. He stepped back. Then I turned on the man on my right, the one holding the bloody stone in his hand and I bashed my fist into his mouth. I couldn't see very much – my eyes were not only short-sighted without my glasses but were misting over with a red haze – but I saw the man sort of cough and a tooth fall from his lip and then he fell back on the road. For a second the crowd stopped. Then I went for the other man, clutching my bag under my arm and banging my fist into his nose. He roared in anger and it suddenly turned all red. I missed another man with a punch, hit one more in the face, and ran.

I was back in the middle of the road but could not see. I brought my hands to my eyes and they were full of blood and with my fingers I tried to scrape the gooey stuff out. It made a kind of sucking sound but I began to see again and realised that I was crying and weeping and that the tears were cleaning my eyes of blood. What had I done, I kept asking myself? I had been punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country –among others – was killing along, with the Taliban, just across the border. God spare me, I thought. I think I actually said it. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.

Then something quite remarkable happened. A man walked up to me, very calmly, and took me by the arm. I couldn't see him very well for all the blood that was running into my eyes but he was dressed in a kind of robe and wore a turban and had a white-grey beard. And he led me away from the crowd. I looked over my shoulder. There were now a hundred men behind me and a few stones skittered along the road, but they were not aimed at me –presumably to avoid hitting the stranger. He was like an Old Testament figure or some Bible story, the Good Samaritan, a Muslim man – perhaps a mullah in the village – who was trying to save my life.

He pushed me into the back of a police truck. But the policemen didn't move. They were terrified. "Help me," I kept shouting through the tiny window at the back of their cab, my hands leaving streams of blood down the glass. They drove a few metres and stopped until the tall man spoke to them again. Then they drove another 300 metres.

And there, beside the road, was a Red Cross-Red Crescent convoy. The crowd was still behind us. But two of the medical attendants pulled me behind one of their vehicles, poured water over my hands and face and began pushing bandages on to my head and face and the back of my head. "Lie down and we'll cover you with a blanket so they can't see you," one of them said. They were both Muslims, Bangladeshis and their names should be recorded because they were good men and true: Mohamed Abdul Halim and Sikder Mokaddes Ahmed. I lay on the floor, groaning, aware that I might live.

Within minutes, Justin arrived. He had been protected by a massive soldier from the Baluchistan Levies – true ghost of the British Empire who, with a single rifle, kept the crowds away from the car in which Justin was now sitting. I fumbled with my bag. They never got the bag, I kept saying to myself, as if my passport and my credit cards were a kind of Holy Grail. But they had seized my final pair of spare glasses – I was blind without all three – and my mobile telephone was missing and so was my contacts book, containing 25 years of telephone numbers throughout the Middle East. What was I supposed to do? Ask everyone who ever knew me to re-send their telephone numbers?

Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist – the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man's jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world.

I had spent more than two and a half decades reporting the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world and now their anger had embraced me too. Or had it? There were Mohamed and Sikder of the Red Crescent and Fayyaz who came panting back to the car incandescent at our treatment and Amanullah who invited us to his home for medical treatment. And there was the Muslim saint who had taken me by the arm.

And – I realised – there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us – of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the "War for Civilisation" just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them "collateral damage".

So I thought I should write about what happened to us in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions would produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was "beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees". And of course, that's the point. The people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted by us – by B-52s, not by them. And I'll say it again. If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

 

 

 

In Sacramento, A Publisher Stirs the Wrath of the Crowd

Christmas break usually leaves the campus of California State University here to roaming roosters and janitors. But the school’s administrators have been busy all week, fielding questions over an incident last week in which a commencement speaker was booed of the stage for calling for the protection of civil liberties in the government’s response terrorism.

"I have been a university president for 26 years, and I’ve never seen anything like what happened last Saturday," said Donald R. Gerth, president of the university.

Dr. Gerth was on the stage in front of a crowd of at least 10,000 graduates and guests on Saturday night when the speaker, Janis Besler Heaphy, the president and publisher of The Scramento Bee, raised a number of euqestions about the government response to terrorism.

When Ms. Heaphy urged that citizens safeguard their rights in free speech, against unlawful detainment and for a fair trial she was loudly booed. When she wondered what would happen if racial profiling became routine, the audience cheered. The speech was halted as Dr. Gerth urged the crowd to be civil.

Ms. Heaphy tried to finish But just as she argued that "the Constitution makes it our right to challenge government policies," a clapping chant and further heckling forced her off the stage.

Memory has etched different moments into different people’s minds. It was when she started defending habeas corpus that things went downhill," said Robert Jones, a university vice president.

But some students, while saying that the rowdiness was limited to a very vocal bleacher crowd, criticized Ms. Heaphy for bringing up too many philosophical questions arising from the terrorist attacks on a day that they said should have been light and celebratory.

"She started out O.K., promising to be brief," said Britt Randall, who graduated from California State last May and was attending as a guest. "But then she goes right into Sept. 11, and she goes on, and on, and on."

The university did not keep a video or audio record of the speech, officials said. But a home video of the commencement address taken by a member of the audience shows that the heckling started about five minutes into a nine-minute speech, and grew as Ms. Heaphy raised questions about civil liberties violations.

The actions that Ms. Heaphy cited as questionable — from expanded wiretapping to harnessing the press, to unlawful detainment — were applauded by many in the audience.

"It was scary," said Bob Buckley, a computer sciences professor and president of the faculty senate. "For the first time in my life, I can see how something like the Japanese internment camps could happen in our country."

All week, the speech has been the talk of Sacramento, and among civil liberties advocates and their conservative critics.

"We’ve always known that if you took the Bill of Rights to the Street and asked most people to sign it, you would be unable to get a majority of Americans to do so," said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Los Angeles.

Conservative talk radio Stations in California have criticized the speaker, a longtime newspaper executive, for the political content of the speech. Ms. Heaphy refused repeated requests for an interview.

In letters to the editor carried by The Bee this week, most writers were critical of Ms. Heaphy.

"Although I think it was a shame that she was unable to finish the speech, I feel that she brought the reaction of the crowd on herself," wrote Jason Collins, identified as a student who witnessed the speech. "The consensus was that this forum was neither the time nor the place to be’ making such strong political statements as she did."

Mr. Gerth, the university president, said that nothing in the speech diverged from a basic American civics lesson. "It is not only thoughtful, but extremely responsible," he said of the speech.

Ms. Heaphy did not question the war effort or the buildup of domestic security. She praised the call to patriotism. But she repeatedly questioned whether American values were being lost in the response by law enforcement.

"No one argues the validity and need for both retaliation and security," she said in the speech. "But to what lengths are we willing to go to achieve them? Specifically, to what degree are we willing to compromise our civil liberties in the name of security?"

University officials say the graduates themselves — about 1,100 students, or barely a tenth of the audience — were polite and did not take part in the heckling. The videotape is unclear on that point. But it does show sporadic hooting, heckling and foot-stomping from the stands.

Cal State Sacramento, which is far less known than other big institutions in the state system, has more than 27,000 students. It serves as a commuter school for the Sacramento area, as well as a place for international students to study.

Administrators say there have few protests — one way or the other— about the war.

"We had a teddy-bear drive to get at least one bear for each of the victims’ families from Sept. 11," said Artemio Pimentel, the student body president.

Mr. Pimentel, who presents himself with a business card and occupies an office with slogans from past campus elections — "safer campus, no new fees" — said he was horrified by the jeering and heckling.

"I’ve spoken to a lot of students since this happened," he said, "and they all say this is something they’ve never seen in their entire lives. People were sickened by this. But to be fair, a lot of people are just tired of hearing about 9/11."

A text of Ms. Heaphy’s speech shows she intended to end on an upbeat note: "America was founded on the belief that the freedom to think as you will and speak as you think are essential to democracy. Only by exercising those rights can you ensure their continued existence." But she quit about 500 words before that closing.

Mr. Buckley, the faculty president, said the incident was not unique to this campus.

"I think she could have given the speech at any university in America and the reaction would have been the same," he said. "People in this country are hurt, angry and vengeful. There's a lot of emotion out there."

Diplomats Protest Lack of Information

 

Diplomats in New York whose job it is to monitor the welfare of their citizens here say that as detentions of foreigners for investigations into terrorism drag on into the fourth month, they are frustrated by the dearth of information available to them on many cases and concerned by reports of mistreatment of some detainees.

The diplomats — officials in charge of New York consulates separate from United Nations missions —say they are hard pressed to explain to their governments and the news media back home why scores of people remain in detention, usually on minor immigration charges, at a time when the United States seeks the support of public opinion abroad for its war on terrorism.

Hundreds of people are in custody in the New York region, most of them at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the Manhattan Correctional Center, the Hudson County Correctional Center in Newark or the Passaic County jail, diplomats say. Human rights monitors trying to check reports of mistreatment say they are being denied access to most of these prisons for the first time.

In protests to the State Department, diplomats in New York are accusing the authorities of violating international conventions governing access to detainees. Canada is the most recent country to raise the issue after a Canadian citizen disappeared on Sept. 20, and American officials at first denied he was in their custody.

Peter Lloyd, an official at the Canadian consulate in New York, said that the family of the detainee, Shakir Ali Baloch, who was admittedly in the United States illegally, had no idea where he was and asked Canada to locate him. Mr. Baloch, who was born in Pakistan, was finally found last week at the Metropolitan Detention Center. He told consular officials that he had been turned down when he asked for legal or consular help.

Canadians and Europeans are watching closely how the United States uses new powers of detention and trial. A European diplomat said that there had been considerable criticism of American methods in the news media there.

Some diplomats say that whatever the provocation, what they see as a failure to abide by international norms in handling detentions has undermined assertions by the Bush administration that the United States is fighting to preserve freedom.

One European diplomat said he was surprised on a consular visit to see a detainee from his country brought out in chains and forced to sit behind bulletproof glass at the Metropolitan Detention Center, although the man had not been charged with a criminal offense. The detainee told of being kept in close confinement with little space to exercise, and allowed to do that only on weekdays, the diplomat said.

Acting on such reports of harsh conditions, Human Rights Watch, the monitoring and advocacy organization based in New York, asked to visit detainees across the country but were flatly refused access, in contrast to past practice, the organization said in a statement on Friday.

Irfan Ahmad, vice consul for Pakistan in the New York region, where more than 200 Pakistanis are in custody, said in an interview yesterday that detainees told him they were left in the cold without blankets for 24 hours after being picked up, apparently to weaken their resistance.

Since then they have been housed with convicted criminals, Mr. Ahmad said, and are beaten or live in constant fear of physical assaults.

Mr. Ahmad said that many detainees — Pakistan has the largest number in the New York area — had waived the right to contact Pakistani consular officials, which puzzled diplomats. "When we ask why, they tell us the I.N.S. or an I.N.S. interpreter would tell them informally that their cases would be delayed if they notified the consulate," he said. The Pakistan consulate remains totally in the dark about the cases of about 100 detainees.

In Ottawa, Reynald Doiron, a foreign ministry spokesman, said that his government protested immediately after Mr. Baloch, the missing Canadian, was found last week, nearly three months after being detained.

"A diplomatic note was sent to the State Department in Washington, asking them to tell us what happened— how come consular access was refused and how come the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations was left aside, although Mr. Baloch had requested consular access and was denied access to legal counsel," he said in an interview on Tuesday.

Foreign diplomats say that they are told by American officials that the State Department’s hands are often tied. Moreover, diplomats are told that the Immigration and Naturalization Service, whose charges of visa or residence violations usually become the vehicle for continued detentions, cannot deport foreigners, even when ordered to do so by a court, if the Federal Bureau of Investigation decides it needs to question a detainee further.

Ambassador Mehmet Nun Ezen, a Turkish diplomat who serves as consul general here, said in an interview that 42 Turkish citizens were in detention in the New York region, down from 58 after Sept. 11. All were initially detained to determine if they had links with terrorists, he said. The immigration violations were then invoked. Some have since been deported or released on bond.

"The I.N.S. is keeping them, but the I.N.S. is awaiting clearance from the F.B.I.," he said. Normally, he added, immigration cases can be resolved in under 20 days.

"The problem for our people is that Turkey was among the first to help the United States, supporting the United States policy in Afghanistan and in the fight against terrorism," he said.

The Pakistanis find their situation particularly distressing, Mr. Ahmad said. The United States has relied on Pakistan in its battle against the Taliban and in the search for Osama bin Laden.

"I can’t talk to any of the detainees without this coming up," Mr. Ahmad said. "They say, ‘We are helping the U.S. in its war on terrorism, and this is what we get in return.’"

This War is Not Just

In recent days, sage editorial writers, religious leaders, politicians, liberal pundits, and admired columnists have joined in the Donald Rumsfeld-Condoleezza Rice chorus praising the American war as "just."

The Taliban are described as all but defeated. The "noose" around bin Laden grows ever tighter. Afghans are seen rejoicing in the streets, and the women among them are liberated. All because the United States turned the full force of its fire power loose on the evil enemy. Anyone still refusing to sign onto this campaign is increasingly regarded as unpatriotic. Next, we will be called "kooks."

Not so fast. The broad American consensus that Bush’s war "is just" represents a shallow assessment of that war, a shallowness that results from three things.

• First, ignorance. The United States government has revealed very little of what has happened in the war zone. Journalists impeded by restricted access and blind patriotism have uncovered even less. How many of those outside the military establishment who have blithely deemed this war "just" know what it actually involves? It is clear that a massive bombardment has been occurring throughout Afghanistan, but to what effect? And against whom? Is the focus on the readily targeted Taliban, in fact, allowing a far more elusive Al Qaeda to slip away?

The crucial judgment about a war’s "proportionality," central to any conclusion about its being lust," simply cannot be made on the basis of information available at present And how is this war "just" if the so far unprovoked war it is bleeding into -- against Iraq -- is unjust?

- Second, narrow context. The celebrated results have so far followed from the American war — collapse of the Taliban, liberation of women — are welcome indeed, but they are relatively peripheral outcomes, unrelated to the stated American war aim of defeating terrorism.

And these outcomes pale in significance when the conflict is seen in the context of a larger question: Does this intervention break, or at least impede, the cycle of violence in which terrorism is only the latest turn? Or, by affirming the inevitability of violence, does this war prepare the ground for the next one? By unleashing such massive firepower, do we make potential enemies even more likely to try to match it with the very weapons of mass destruction we so dread? Alas, the answer is clear.

This "overwhelming" exercise of American power has been a crude reinforcement of the worst impulse of human history— but this is the nuclear age, and that impulse simply must be checked. This old style American; war is unwise in the extreme, and if other nations — Pakistan, India, Israel, Russia? — begin to play according to the rules of "dead or alive," will this American model still seem lust"?

• Third, wrongly defined use of force. This war is not "just" because it was not necessary. It may be the only kind of force the behemoth Pentagon knows to exercise, but that doesn’t make it "just" either. The terrorist attacks of Sept 11 could have been defined not as acts of war, but as crimes. That was the first mistake, one critics like me flagged as it was happening.

As perhaps the most savage crimes in history, the terrorists’ acts should have been met with a swift, forceful response far more targeted than the present war has been. Police action, not war. The criminals, not an impoverished nation, should be on the receiving end of the punishment

Instead, a massive war against a substitute enemy leaves the sprawling criminal network intact — perhaps in Afghanistan, certainly in major cities elsewhere. Meanwhile, because of the war, the rule of law at home is being undermined. Because of the war-driven pressure to be "united," the shocking incompetence of US domestic security agencies goes unchallenged.

Early in the war, the highest US officials, including the president and vice president, encouraged the idea that the anthrax attacks were originating with the bin Laden network. The understandable paranoia that consequently gripped the public imagination — an enemy that could shut down Congress! — was a crucial aspect of what led both press and politicians to accept the idea that a massive war against an evil enemy would be both necessary and moral.

Now, the operating assumption is that the anthrax cases, unrelated to bin Laden, are domestic crimes, not acts of war. But for a crucial moment, they effectively played the role in this war that the Gulf of Tonkin "assault" played in the Vietnam War, as sources of a war hysteria that "united" the nation around a mistake. In such a context, the more doubt is labeled disloyal, the more it grows. The more this war is deemed "just," the more it seems wrong.

A Road Map for Peace and Justice

With profound sadness and humility, we have sought to make sense of the September 11 tragedy and this month’s U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan. Those who died in the United States represent a cross section of the human community: 4,000 people from more than 80 nations, people of nearly every ethnicity and religious belief, wealthy individuals and people with very little, including low-wage immigrant workers. Now the U.S. government is adding to the list of victims, bombarding a country whose people already live in misery after decades of war. The cycle of violence is overwhelming.

The United States is not the hemisphere’s first country to suffer from terrorism. As we remember the dead of September 11, 2001, let us also remember those who died in the military coup in Chile of September 11, 1973. Let us remember the victims of death squads in El Salvador and Haiti, the victims of massacres in Guatemala, the victims of paramilitary and guerrilla violence in Colombia, the victims of rightwing and military violence in Chiapas, the victims of the military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay. Each one of these deaths was devastating to the family and community left behind.

And, as we mourn, let us not forget that terror has been tolerated, funded and even encouraged by the U.S. government. This is no excuse for what happened September 11, but understanding the context of the violence is crucial. For a path forward, we offer seven principles:

1. Seek justice, not vengeance. We call on the United States to respect the norms and procedures of international law. Work with allies and supporters throughout the world, find the perpetrators, root out their networks and bring them to justice, but do not punish innocent civilians for the actions of others. Bombing is no solution and only creates more fear, anger, alienation and violence.

2. Defend the civil and human rights of Muslims and people perceived to be Middle Eastern. Attacks and discrimination against people who follow Islam or are (or appear to be) Arab must not be tolerated. Build understanding and connections with all people who may be targeted and defend their lives, property and integrity.

3. Defend immigrants. All immigrants, not only people of Middle Eastern descent, are at risk of becoming targets of revenge, violence and scapegoating. With the current hysteria in the United States, we must protect the human rights of immigrants. We must also continue to press for a federal immigration policy that addresses issues concerning the millions of undocumented people living within our borders.

4. Protect civil liberties. At times of national uncertainty and fear, we must guard against an erosion of civil liberties. The right to dissent is fundamental to our democracy, and alternative voices are necessary when the push for a national consensus is so strong. Congress must deliberate carefully when considering expanding the powers and budgets of national security agencies. The failure to protect civil liberties now may have serious consequences for the future.

5. Tell the truth about U.S. foreign economic policy, and build an based on human rights and social justice. The Resource Center gives voice to people who have been marginalized, silenced and ignored. We have shone a light on U.S. government support for anti-democratic governments and state-sponsored terror against civilian populations. We have exposed U.S. government tolerance of the wrenching violence of poverty throughout the hemisphere. We need to continue to focus on history, context and root causes if our nation is to move toward the future without repeating the mistakes of the past.

6. Build and strengthen mechanisms keep the peace, address poverty solve common problems. The United States, especially under President George W. Bush’s administration, frequently has chosen to ignore, disparage or abandon multilateral institutions set up to solve problems that affect the world community. We must strengthen bodies such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. We must support agreements that address global problems.

7. Nurture tolerance and -cultural understanding. The Resource Center builds respect among various peoples and cultures. That work has never been more important. To heal as a nation and as individuals, we must continue coming together across racial, ethnic, religious and cultural divides. We must listen to one another’s point of view, working together to build a world free of fear, hatred and intolerance. We join with peace-loving people everywhere who seek a solution that affirms justice, protects human rights and allows healing.

 

 

 

Church Education for Tomorrow

This is the twelfth in a series on New Turns in Religious Thought.

It is a truism that Christian faith and education are inevitable companions. Wherever living faith exists, there is a community endeavoring to sustain and transmit that faith. Still, an accurate description of education in the church today is almost impossible. Generalizations are meaningless. Evangelical Protestant, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches appear to confront unique situations, though perhaps the greatest crisis is being experienced among the mainline bodies (my own tradition).

The Need for Radical Changes

Nevertheless, I would argue that while situations differ, the understandings, purposes and theological foundations upon which all Christian groups engage in education are shaking. While a host of builders attempt, with varying degrees of success, to shore them up, there is a dearth of architects engaged in designing new structures.

This conviction is not entirely new. Colloquy, a magazine on education in church in society, was born in 1968. For eight years, as its founder-editor, I advocated the need for radical changes in church education. In 1970, just before the walls of mainline Protestant church education began to show their cracks, I wrote a short tract, Values for Tomorrow’s Children (Pilgrim, 1970), which boldly suggested that a radical alternative for church education was needed for the future. In A Colloquy on Christian Education (Pilgrim, 1972) and Generation to Generation (United Church Press, 1974) I expanded that thesis. I have now concluded that it is not enough simply to conceive of alternatives for church education; fundamental issues once clearly resolved need to be explored afresh.

No longer can we assume that the educational understandings that have informed us, the purposes that have inspired our efforts, or the theological foundations that have undergirded our programs are adequate for today.

During the early decades of the 20th century the religious education movement was a major force in American Christianity. The future is uncertain. While many realize that we can’t go home again, few can agree on the direction we need to take. I suggest, as a way of beginning, that evangelicals and liberals, "high" and "low" churchpersons, Roman Catholics and Protestants, Christians and those of other faiths stop warring, ignoring or passing each other in the night and begin to share perspectives and convictions. Coalitions of local church laypersons, church education professionals, clergy, church bureaucrats and academics need to start working together more closely.

As one contribution to this end, divinity schools will need to reconstitute the theoretical study of religion and education. New centers for church education need to emerge where scholars in numerous fields can engage in research and development around foundational issues. Here and there this is already taking place: I think of our work at Duke University and that of my friends James Fowler at Harvard, David Stewart at Pacific School of Religion, and Berard Marthaler at the Catholic University of America, to name only three. The challenge, however, is before all of us. These reflections are offered to stimulate our common task. The stakes are high, for education is central to the Christian faith community’s life and mission.

The Public School as Model

In every age, in every endeavor, some agreed-upon frame of reference has informed the church’s efforts. Since the turn of the century, church education has operated according to a "schooling-instruction" paradigm. While admitting that learning takes place in many ways, church education has functionally equated the context of education with schooling and the means of education with formal instruction. The public school has been the model, and insights from secular pedagogy and psychology provided guides. For Protestants, a church school with teachers, subject matter, curriculum resources, age-graded classes, supplies, equipment, classrooms and, if possible, a professional church educator has been the norm; for Roman Catholics, parochial schools or some other form of catechetics. Within this understanding, creative responses have been made to the church’s educational ministry.

There are, however, numerous anomalies in that paradigm: Characteristically, only large, well-to-do churches with professional leadership have been able to meet adequately the full requirements of the church school, and even they have begun to question their results. Schools and formal instruction seem effective for teaching persons about Christianity, but not for enabling growth in faith. The crucial ecology of institutions -- community, public school, home and church -- which once unconsciously supported the church school and made it viable has eroded. The best church school cannot accomplish what it once took five interrelated institutions to do. And most serious, the processes of religious socialization have been systematically kept outside the purview of church educators. The result has been catastrophic, for we all know that faith and values are not primarily the result of formal instruction. Indeed, the hidden curriculum in our lives is often more influential than the formal curriculum of schools.

We have too easily linked the ways of secular education with religion. Dependence upon the practice, rhetoric and norms of secular education is risky business, for, I suggest, there is something unique about education in religious communities. Yet when we have faced new problems, our typical response has been to focus church education even more sharply on formal teaching and learning, naïvely believing that it is possible with new knowledge and techniques to build a workable school for the church, train an adequate number of capable teachers, and provide more useful curriculum resources for quality church education. In bondage to this inadequate understanding, we interpret any small success or reversal of existing negative trends in church schooling as a confirmation of the old paradigm’s validity.

The Natural Context of Education

In my opinion it is the paradigm itself which is bankrupt, not the attempts at educational reform which issue from it. An alternative paradigm, not merely an alternative program, is needed. Presently I am developing a "community of faith-enculturation" paradigm in which the total life of a faith community becomes the natural context of education, and intentional religious socialization the means. We need to stop thinking of "school" or "instruction" and center our educational concern on the church’s rites and rituals, the formal and informal experiences persons have in community, the interactions between the generations, the church’s environment, structure, organization and budget, the role models presented, the status assigned particular persons, and the actions witnessed and encouraged in a host of often unconscious ways.

While this new paradigm maintains a necessary particularity for education -- deliberate, systematic and sustained efforts -- and a place for schooling and instruction, it broadens church education to include, consciously and intentionally, as the primary context and means of education, every aspect of our individual and corporate lives within an intentional, covenanting, tradition-bearing faith community. Only as we rethink the radical nature of Christian community and reform our institutions so that they might faithfully strive to transmit their cumulative tradition through ritual and life, to nurture and convert persons to Christian faith through common experience and interaction, and to prepare and motivate persons for individual and corporate action in society can true Christian education emerge.

To accomplish this end, we need to ask what it means to be Christian together and how it is that persons develop mature faith. Our question cannot be "How can someone teach someone else about the Christian faith?" but "How can we be Christian, individually and corporately with others in the world?" To answer that question we need to address faith’s relationship to religion, our corporate selves, and society. Thus a new paradigm not only makes possible new forms and means for church education but also suggests new questions and answers as to our purposes.

Nurture or Conversion?

Historically, church education has vacillated between a concern for conversion and a concern for nurture. With the birth of the "schooling-instructional" paradigm, nurture became the dominant underlying purpose in the rhetoric of Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant church education. Characteristically, Christian faith was understood in terms of nurture, which functionally corresponded to a gradual process of schooling. Church educators proceeded to develop a program of education that moved from baptism through instruction to confirmation -- or, more accurately, to institutional initiation. At the same time evangelical Protestant churches, also enamored of the "schooling-instructional" paradigm, described personal conversion as their purpose and designed educational programs that used instruction to move persons to an early faith commitment. Neither side could affirm the other’s purpose though both depended upon the same paradigm. Both, I contend, have made a serious error.

Support for nurture as the sole purpose of church education is found in a single phrase in Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture: A child is to grow up a Christian and never know himself or herself as being otherwise. (Interestingly, little attention is given to the fact that, as the last of the Puritans, Bushnell referred in this dictum only to the children of the Saints.) I contend that the church can no longer surrender to the illusion that child nurture, in and of itself, can or will rekindle the fire of Christian faith either in persons or in the church.

We have expected too much of nurture. At its very best, nurture makes possible institutional incorporation. We can nurture persons into institutional religion, but not into mature Christian faith. The Christian faith by its very nature demands conversion. We do not gradually educate persons to be Christian. Of course, conversion can and indeed often has been misunderstood and overemphasized, but that does not justify our disregarding it as one necessary purpose of Christian education.

In one sense we all inherit faith. We are nurtured or socialized into certain ways of understanding the world and our lives, and into particular goals for life and guides for conduct. One style of faith typical of children but also frequently found among adults is founded upon a deep sense of belonging to a community in Which faith is expressed through the "heart" and belief is dependent upon external authority. Persons need to be nurtured into a community’s faith and life. There is a basic need for religious experience. But persons also need, if they are to grow in faith, to be aided and encouraged to judge, question and even doubt that faith, to be given the opportunity to experiment with and reflect upon alternative understandings and to learn what it means to commit their lives to causes and persons. We must never depreciate the important intellectual aspect of Christian faith. Only after a long adolescent struggle with doubt and an honest consideration of alternatives can a person truly say, "I believe." And only then is a person enabled to live the radical political, economic and social life of the Christian in the world.

From Faith Given to Faith Owned

Conversion is therefore best understood as a radical turning from faith given (through nurture) to faith owned. Conversion is radical because it implies ownership and the corresponding transformation of our lives. It implies a turning from one style of faith to another and as such is characterized by a total reorientation in our thinking, feeling and willing. That is why conversion historically is not singularly an emotional outburst, nor a once-and-for-all occasion to be dated and described. Rather it is more like a long series of significant changes in our total behavior and enlightenments -- changes that can be identified only in retrospect. Neither is conversion an isolated event devoid of an element of nurture. Nurture and conversion are a unified whole. Parenthetically, neither the liberal who has nurtured persons into church membership nor the evangelical who has nurtured persons into accepting the church’s beliefs has taken the relationship between nurture and conversion seriously, and both have finally ignored the nature of conversion.

Neither the pietist who has no commitment to the struggle for justice and righteousness in the world of institutional life nor the social activist who has no personal commitment to Christ is converted to mature Christian faith. True conversion -- authentic Christian life -- is personal and social life lived on behalf of God’s reign in the political, social, economic world. One cannot be nurtured into such life -- not in this world. Every culture strives to socialize persons to live in harmony with life as it is. The culture calls upon its religious institutions to bless the status quo and upon religion’s educational institutions to nurture persons into acceptance of it.

But God calls his/her people to be signs of Shalom, the vanguard of God’s kingdom, a community of cultural change. To reach the conviction that such countercultural life is our Christian vocation and to be enabled to live such a corporate existence, in but not of the world, necessitates conversion as well as nurture.

Once again we need to understand that both conversion and nurture have a place in church education, if such education is to be Christian. Our sole concern for nurture has contributed to our losing both an evangelical power and a social dynamic. While rejecting a sterile revivalism, we constructed a false evangelism through nurture. Church education for conversion means helping persons to see that they are called not only to believe the church’s affirmation that Jesus is the Christ, but to commit their lives to him and to live as apostles and disciples in the world. And considering that task brings us face to face with some basic theological issues.

A Theology for Today

Once again, those responsible for church education are confronted with a crucial decision: what theological orientation will inform their labors? Church education is a dependent discipline -- dependent upon theological underpinnings which both judge and inspire its work. On occasion we have forgotten that fact and, at our peril, relied upon insights from philosophy, the social sciences or general education. What theological system will inspire church education during the next decade is a central issue to be resolved.

The religious education movement, a mainline Protestant church endeavor, was the offspring of liberal theology. George Albert Coe’s Social Theory of Religious Education best translated the liberal understanding to the area of church education. When neo-orthodoxy emerged, it consumed the educational enterprise. My predecessor at Duke, H. Shelton Smith, asserted (in Faith and Nurture) the important unity of education and theology and sought to build a bridge between liberalism’s concern with the social order and neo-orthodoxy’s concern for the tradition. But there was no acceptable theology to hold these two together; hence they have remained essentially estranged up to the present.

Today proponents of a variety of theological positions are vying for attention. Conservative, liberal, new reformation, liberation, hermeneutical, process and eschatological theologies all speak to part of the tradition. From my perspective, "liberation theology" is the most promising because it makes possible a synthesis. It provides a base for new coalitions between Roman Catholics and Protestants (witness the ecumenical character of its adherents), liberals and conservatives (witness the continuing concerns of the World Council of Churches and the evangelicals’ Chicago Declaration), "majorities" and "minorities" (witness the numerous theological works written from black, feminist, Latin American and Anglo perspectives), and therefore can become an acceptable, sound theological foundation for church education.

In any case, a workable theology to undergird church education today should have certain characteristics. It should both affirm a concern for experience and the religious affection and be founded upon a historicist perspective. Further, it should unite the Christian tradition with a radical concern for social justice.

To restrict religion to the immediate relations between an individual and God or to an individual’s relationship with another individual -- that is, to a religion of personal salvation -- is heresy. To neglect the world and institutional life is to deny the sovereignty of God over the whole of life, and to practice an idolatry which confines God to our individual existence and limits the Christian life to individual behavior, thereby leaving the world to the principalities and powers.

A common motif for a relevant theology needs to be centered upon action and reflection arising out of a commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and the desire both to understand and to act with God in the light of a corrupt and changing world. Needed is a foundation for uniting a radical understanding of God’s action in history with radical individual and corporate discipleship in the world -- namely, reflection which results from depth experience, the spiritual life, the interiorization of faith through meditation, prayer and corporate worship.

Holistic Education

An adequate theology for church education today will not only raise questions about schooling and instruction but will push us to ask what we uniquely have to bring to and receive from each other as followers of the crucified God. It will affirm the centrality of the will, which unites thought and passion in action. It will further elevate conversion to a position of new importance and affirm the possibility of our being grasped and radically turned around so that we might commit our lives to new goals for individual and social life.

A theology for our day must call our lives into question by reminding us that God’s message of mercy is also a message of judgment. It must question our understanding of mission and ask that we not only help our neighbor but also equip ourselves to change the social, economic and political structures that make help necessary. Such a theology will ask that we be more concerned for the transformation of persons and society than for the growth of church membership or the numbers of those who say they believe in Jesus. Thus it will place faith commitment above both institutional religion and pietism. As such, it will require of us new understandings of religious community and new holistic forms of Christian education.

A myopic concern for nurture, understood as schooling and instruction undergirded by increasingly vague pluralistic theologies, will not be adequate for framing the future of church education. A new paradigm encompassing the radical nature of Christian community, with conversion and nurture as its purpose and with an experiential, historicist, liberation theology undergirding it, can provide us with a framework for our educational mission and ministry in the next decade.

I offer these first thoughts in the hope that others will join the dialogue. The issues and their solution belong to all of us, and the stakes are high. A first word has been spoken, and the last should not be hurried.

The Sunday School of Tomorrow

One has to be somewhat mad to accept a request to write on the future of the Sunday school. Those who have given it a try in the past succeeded only in revealing their own prejudices or desires. Though historians have ignored it and futurists have predicted its demise, the Sunday school has made its impact on our history, surviving every critical blast. Of late there has even been a revival of interest not to be explained solely by its 200th birthday. A few bold defenders and advocates have once again taken up the cry, "it’s OK to like the Sunday school." Perhaps Princeton’s D. Campbell Wyckoff best explained its persistence when he labeled it "as American as crabgrass."

Meeting Needs

How are we to understand this enduring institution? And what might we anticipate its life to be in the dusk of the 20th century? I have no crystal ball, but I would like to explore a few possibilities.

It is not easy to birth an institution. Institutions emerge slowly out of vital movements to give those movements shape, form and permanence. It is even more difficult to kill social institutions, for they share certain enduring characteristics: they outlast any generation; they are largely independent of the individuals and groups through which they function; they serve to conserve cultural values and life styles; they provide an identifiable, acceptable, familiar means to address basic human needs, interests and wishes; they offer both universality and variability; they become intricately interrelated with other institutions so that a change in one causes disease and necessitates change in all the others; and they provide people with the places and roles necessary for meaningful corporate life.

A particular Sunday school may die or suffer from terminal illness, but the Sunday school as an institution lives on, conserving the memory and dreams of the people, especially those who tend also to be the most institutionally loyal. The Sunday school meets various human needs: a concern for children, the perpetuation of the church and its faith, a place to experience community in an impersonal world. While a worldwide phenomenon, it has its own shape and character in every land, denomination and congregation; to have seen one is not necessarily to have seen them all. The Sunday school is so much a part of life on this continent that new persons in a community are reluctant to associate with a church that does not have one; churches that have eliminated Sunday school are faced with the difficult task of envisioning, planning and developing an alternative, something typically more difficult than maintaining that which is familiar. Further, the Sunday school has provided many laypersons with a place of significant influence and ministry in a clerically dominated church. Is it any wonder that it survives no matter what its health and vitality? Is it any wonder that attacks on its continuing viability are futile?

Death or Transformation

Of course all this could change and radically affect the future of even this most enduring institution; institutions do die. For example: if new, more enticing lay ministries were to emerge, there would be fewer adults available and interested in the Sunday school as a place of service. If styles of worship were to change and children were to feel both more welcome and more at home in the worship service, there would be less need for children to be separated from adults on Sunday morning. If activities at times other than Sundays were to become more vital to family life, there would be a diminished interest in age-graded schooling activities on Sunday. If the public school were to provide quality religious education within its curriculum, there would be less demand for Sunday school classes. If churches were to become smaller and more communal, there would be less need for the Sunday school class to provide a place of caring fellowship.

On the other hand, it is equally important to acknowledge that institutions can change radically to meet new situations; institutions are reformable. For example, in an age when the number of persons outside the church and unfamiliar with the gospel is growing, the Sunday school might return to its original missionary purpose. In 1898 at the Third World Convention Sunday School, H. M. Tamill of Tennessee, the superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Sunday School, wrote:

it must be remembered that after all the primary aim of the Sunday School is not so much educational as it is evangelistic [cheers]. God permits us to encompass the child with great forces that center in and about the Sabbath School in order that we may win souls of the children. What are these forces? In the first place, there is the Word of God. Second there is that holy place, and finally there is the personality of the godly man or woman incarnating God’s Word. These are the forces that come together for the saving of the children.

In that regard it is well for us within mainline Protestantism to realize that the Sunday school is an alive and growing institution among Southern Baptists and other evangelicals who continue to understand it as an agency of evangelism more than of nurture.

Further, the Sunday school might become an instrument of the ecumenical movement existing alongside the boundaries of the parish church and its denominational prejudices. This agency might also be given new birth by the emergence of a new committed core of laypersons able to attract, excite and lead large numbers of people in the joy of shared teaching and learning. Smaller parishes might, for economic reasons, begin to unify into larger parishes where the Sunday school could provide small intimate communities of nurture and pastoral care. If the culture and its public schools should become increasingly secularized, the church might transform the Sunday school into a Christian day school to preserve the faith and identity of Christians. Or if our society refuses to meet the needs of families and children, Sunday schools might be turned into child-care centers.

Of course, one last option remains. We might simply blunder along, keeping the Sunday school alive with drugs, surgery, and support systems, acknowledging that it is terminally ill but lacking the imagination or will to frame an alternative.

The End of an Age

All of this is pure conjecture. However, there are two trends that could influence the future. First, it appears that we are reaching the end of a secular age. A longing and a hunger for a new spirituality are emerging. Increasingly adults are seeking a context for their own growth in faith and a place to share their faith journey with others. In many congregations reformed Sunday schools are providing a convenient and useful context for the birth of a new spirituality.

If this trend continues and becomes dominant, it could result in a renewed pietism (a traditional heresy on this continent) with an excessive concern for feelings and right experience and the neglect of reason and faithful social, political and economic action.

We appear to be emerging from a reign of the secular; the return of the sacred is a key event in our time. As always, the issue is how we will respond. My own commitment is to stress the contingent and dependent existence of the universe and ourselves on the will and activity of God; to integrate the eschatological and historical so that there is no disjunction between our passion for social justice and personal fulfillment; to be open to secular thought and reason so that a return to the sacred does not mean a return to an inner world of religious experience; to integrate piety (personal religious experience) and politics (prophetic personal and social action) in a healthy, intrinsic religion of involvement rather than a sick, extrinsic religion of escape; and to affirm both a material physical reality known indirectly through sense experience and reason and a nonmaterial spiritual reality known directly through participation and encounter. I fear that the Sunday school will have difficulty addressing these commitments; its history is antithetical to such concerns, and it is a questionable context for their actualization, no matter what occurs within them.

Second, the liturgical renewal movement is taking hold. With its reform of the liturgy into a family-oriented, participatory, communal celebration of word and sacrament, there is a renewed interest in the relationship of catechesis (education) and liturgy (worship). In many churches the Sunday school is being transformed into an intergenerational preparation for the Sunday Eucharist based upon an experience of and reflection on the lectionary texts.

If this trend also continues and becomes dominant, it could result in a community of nurture without a prophetic transforming word or an evangelistic outreach. The history of liturgical life in mainline churches is a history dominated by a concern for didache -- for nurture, interpretation, formation and growing-up. Indeed, the emphasis of both worship and church schooling has tended to neglect the kerygma -- proclamation, conversions, transformations and new beginnings. As a result, many mainline churches have a basic understanding of evangelism as institutional incorporation and of ministry as service and care of its members. Faced by our pressing contemporary needs for community, identity, nurture and institutional growth/survival, the church could easily ignore social, political and economic action in the world; openness; and the need for continuous institutional reform and personal conversions. While a renewed, vibrant community could emerge, offering the world a sign of God’s Kingdom, it is likely to be insular, unable to make an adequate witness on behalf of that Kingdom in the political and economic contexts of society.

My own commitment is to the integration of these polarities: conversion-nurture, identity-openness and piety-politics. But typically the church has emphasized one or the other. I fear that the Sunday school, no matter how it understands its purpose, functionally cannot adequately address these polarities.

Imagining the Future

While these possible trends need to be acknowledged, I suggest that they cannot be taken too seriously because we are in the midst of a change period in history as significant as those in the first, fourth, 11th and 16th centuries. We have come, I contend, to the end of a fluctuating but trend-marked stage in our history. We are facing a period of foundational change. Our understandings of the church’s educative ministry and the Sunday school have been directly related to a historical period which is ending.

Like most folk caught in such a time, we find it extremely difficult to imagine the future or to plan for it. It seems as though we have all we can do to respond. Neither a doomsday nor a utopian mentality is reasonable in such a day. Daniel Bell once quoted Augustine as saying, "Time is a threefold present -- the present as we experience it, the past as a present memory, and the future as a present expectation." By that criteria, Bell continued, the year 2000 has already arrived, for in the decisions we make now, the future is committed.

Well, yes and no. I still contend that it is God’s future and that God, in the mystery of things, is still acting on behalf of that future. Hope is born at the moment we begin to turn our attention to God’s vision and to realize that we are not finished but have an infinite number of tasks to be accomplished. In just such an era as this, we might best spend our time and energy on renewing the gospel vision of life and our lives, deepening our experience of God, and preparing ourselves to act faithfully in the political, social and economic world; that is, to live under the merciful judgment of God to the end that God’s will is done and God’s Kingdom comes. We could easily deny that calling by worrying too much about the Sunday school and its future.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I do not see a place of significance for the Sunday school in the future. It is too bound to the past to meet the needs of a new age. I do not believe I am being melodramatic when I say that we are entering a new period in history. I can, however, hear my conservative friends, especially my historian mentors, saying that I have let my emotions overwhelm my intellect. Still, I remain committed to framing an alternative and would prefer to fail at that effort than to succeed in reforming old worn ways.

I hope that this position does not make me appear arrogant to those who are struggling for survival in the confusion of the present or judgmental to those who are responsibly striving to reconstruct our present understandings. I am aware that it is likely to frustrate those who desire simple, immediate, practical answers to the pressing needs of the day. I am also aware that the best way to achieve recognition and popularity is to offer simple, useful, pragmatic resources. But I contend that the issue is more than a matter of better education -- schooling and instruction. The issue is foundational; the questions are as profound: What are Christian faith, revelation and vocation? How is faith understood as perception enhanced and enlivened? How is divine revelation understood as the experience of a living, acting God made known? How is our vocation understood as life in spirit; i.e., reflective action in personal, social, political and economic life?

Further, I do not believe that these questions can be answered through the use of "educational" language borrowed from the social sciences; nor can they be resolved in the seminary or by professional Christian educators. Only through shared experience and reflection in community by persons who are engaged in a dialogical conversation between their story and vision and the tradition’s story and vision can new understandings and ways of educational ministry (catechesis) emerge.

A Personal Vision

In that regard, I can only share the outline of a vision that has resulted from my reflections. It is a vision of a lay-centered ministry integrating conversions and nurture, (lifelong transformations and lifelong formation); religious experience and personal fulfillment with reflective action and intentional social life; life in a caring family-like community combined with political, social, economic activity through "voluntary associations" formed within church and society.

I envision this endeavor of both religious socialization and shared praxis as characterized best through the metaphor of journeying and as taking place without specific reference to age or sex in three contexts: liturgical or familial/communal settings in which persons are nurtured, identity is acquired and caring community experienced; ascetical-pastoral or leisure/retreat settings in which persons withdraw and engage in activities aimed at continuing growth in personal faith or sanctification through conversions and nurture; and moral or societal/work settings in which persons participate in activities aimed at shared reflective action for individual faithful daily life and for cooperative responsible efforts in the political, social and economic realms of life.

Of course, this is only an incomplete and vague outline of a personal vision. But it is my conviction that we all need begin to imagine and experiment, and to share alternative understandings and ways even as we maintain and continue to adopt our known understandings and ways. The future is, as always, with those who act. In any case, in what better way could we celebrate the 200th birthday of the Sunday school and be as faithful as our foreparents?

Deciding on a Christian Life Style

Traveling as a Christian in a world of poverty and energy constraints is like hiking a path that repeatedly forks. To the right at the first fork stand the technological optimists, clamoring for freedom to turn loose their genies on the problems of food, energy and pollution, and promising unlimited abundance if only the traveler will go their way. To the left dance the "new agers," forecasting limits and promising the new spiritual delights of conservation, simplicity and smallness.

Deciding between these options is no easy task. For reasons of prudence in a limited world, of concern for the increasing side effects of many new technologies, and of care for the poor, many Christians elect to turn left. But having made this decision, they are immediately confronted by a second fork. To the right is a sign reading "The Path of Social Engineering and Minor Tinkering," to the left a sign of equal size indicating "The Path of Major Value and Life-Style Change."

A still-sizable group of Christians turns left here, too, thinking that minor alterations are inadequate given the magnitude of the problems. A little way down the path, however, they encounter still another fork. To the right stands a rather somber-looking man holding a sign reading "Responsible Consumption." To the left is an eager lad enthusiastically proclaiming the virtues of Christian perfectionism, of self-denial, and of solidarity with the poor. His sign reads "Rigorous Discipleship."

Some quickly turn left, attracted by the young man’s intensity and immediately resolved to give all they have to the poor. But many remain undecided, needing to wrestle seriously with the problem of how to relate the ideal of the Kingdom of God to the realities of everyday living, or frankly caught in the bind of having too many possessions, or simply not cut out for a life of self-denial.

The issue is joined. Is it consistent with the life and work of Jesus Christ to be "reasonably" comfortable in an age of advanced materialism, limits to the consumption of resources and energy, and the continuing ravages of malnutrition and poverty? Or is living in "reasonable" comfort under such conditions a cop-out, with the only faithful response being obedience to the radical claims of the Sermon on the Mount?

The task is to understand that both paths -- rigorous discipleship and responsible consumption -- are valid Christian options. It is to see with the apostle Paul that there are varieties of gifts, varieties of service and varieties of work, but the same Spirit. It is to help overcome the dilemma of Christians who are not monks or ascetics but who nonetheless feel caught in the crossfire between the realities of daily living and the demands of the Kingdom of God. It is finally to anticipate the dangers of both paths: to see the tendency of those turning left to neglect everyday- reality and of those turning right to lose sight of the Kingdom.

The Early Church

The witness of the early church is relevant to this task. However, we must acknowledge the differences between then and now. The early church was not beset by the same limits to material growth that today’s church is. The milieu by comparison was decidedly nontechnological. Wealth was in no way nearly as abundant, and thus the problem of consumption and ownership of possessions was far less acute. Most significant, the imminence of the final coming of the Kingdom of God dominated the thinking of many in the early church and lowered the priority accorded to worldly goods, economic systems and attempts at social transformation.

While these differences must be kept in mind, the biblical witness remains for Christians the starting point for deciding which path to take. Of first importance and so obvious that little needs to be said is the biblical concern for the poor. Found in both testaments, it called in biblical times for both charity and social justice. In the New Testament this motif is most prominent in the writings of Luke, who was perhaps the most troubled by the apparent delay in the coming of the Kingdom and hence most concerned with the problems of ongoing life. The concern for the poor expressed by Luke remains of first importance and is directly transferable to the present.

Regarding consumption, riches and self-denial, the Bible is not so univocal. The Hebrew Scriptures come down hard on unscrupulous speculators and the idolatry of riches. But this polemic against the misuse of wealth is balanced by praise of the just rich man. Here and there in the history of Israel, groups such as the Essenes preached asceticism and the virtues of poverty, but this was by no means the general rule. In the rabbinic tradition the criticism of wealth itself and the preaching of self-denial are rare. In fact the opposite is often the case: riches and their just use are held in high repute, poverty in contempt.

With Jesus things are different. On the one hand he proclaimed the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. His preaching called for an unparalleled righteousness, freedom from possessions, and complete trust in God. Serving God and serving riches were not compatible because riches closed one’s ears to the call of the Kingdom. Jesus himself had no possessions and prodded his disciples into renouncing what they had and accepting extreme poverty.

On the other hand, Jesus took for granted the ownership of property. He was apparently supported by women of substance and urged that possessions be used to help those in need. He did not require Zacchaeus to give up more than half of his possessions to the poor. Jesus dined often with hated tax collectors and, was fond of celebrations, especially meals of fellowship. While by no means a heavy consumer of goods, Jesus was not a rigorous ascetic, either. He apparently enjoyed the material pleasures of life, though he probably could afford few of them.

The Dangers of Possessions

The life and teachings of Jesus thus lend credence to both rigorous discipleship and responsible consumption. However, complete support for any of the current options to the exclusion of the others is not to be found, The imminent coming of the Kingdom colored Jesus’ perceptions and hence his ethics, in a way which makes their direct appropriation difficult for present-day Christians who must deal with a delayed coming. Jesus was not interested in theories of property or of the rightness or wrongness of possessions. His support for the poor was unequivocal, but he did not champion social programs such as wealth redistribution or guaranteed incomes. All this was superfluous; given the signs of the times. Yet, when all this is said, present-day Christians must bear in mind that the weight of Jesus’ teachings is on the dangers of possessions and the responsibility of sharing.

Early Christian communities were also dominated by this sense of the imminent end. In Jerusalem there developed what some biblical scholars have called "love communism," which was the close personal sharing of goods within the community of Christians. How well this experiment worked out is not clear, but Luke ceases to mention it in Acts, and Paul made no attempt to duplicate it in the communities he founded. His communities were poor but apparently not so poor as the one in Jerusalem, for he successfully called on them to send gifts. Paul -- like Jesus and probably for the same reasons -- did not systematically address the problems of poverty, riches and consumption. He himself had few possessions and was self-supporting. He did not advocate social transformation; the slave, for example, was to return to his master. But echoing Jesus, Paul did preach freedom from attachment to possessions and the importance of sharing in community.

In sum, the early Christian communities seconded the message of Jesus. Be not anxious about or attached to possessions. Give freely to the poor. Do not worry too much about social structures. That they were poor and that Paul, at least, lived without possessions lends support to the path of rigor. But, again, not all are called to Paul’s ministry, and not all have Paul’s gifts or his sense of an imminent end.

As the Christian communities developed, the problems of the long haul began to emerge, and the same forked paths now being encountered began to appear. Some early Christians were influenced by ascetic and sometimes apocalyptic tendencies; interestingly, they joined pacifism and sexual abstinence to their radical criticism of wealth, possessions and consumption. On the other side were those who urged moderation and charity, while property, the poverty of the many, and the wealth of a few were assumed and seldom addressed.

Theological Tensions

Theologically, the two paths of rigorous discipleship and responsible consumption take their cues from a classic tension in Christian thought: between the way things are and the way they ought to be, This tension appears in the very first pages of the Bible: persons are made in the image of God but with Adam fall into sin. It reappears again and again as the Israelites wrestle with the obligations of the covenant, comparing their own situation with the responsibilities set forth by Yahweh at Mt. Sinai.

In Jesus’ message the tension appears in his teaching that the Kingdom of God is at hand, Later Christians reformulated this slightly to say that the Kingdom had been inaugurated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that its fulfillment awaited his second coming. "Here, but yet to come" exemplifies the tension, as does Jesus’ advice to his disciples to be sheep among the wolves and to have the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove.

Pre-eminently for Christians, this tension is found in the cross and resurrection. The cross is reality at its worst and points to th.e limitations of individuals and groups and to the need for order to keep sin in bounds. Yet the cross is not the last word in Christianity. It is followed and superseded by the ever-new word of the resurrection. The resurrection points to a God at work in the human situation overcoming sin and death. It points as well to the possibility of "new creations" in the lives of individuals and groups. As a result, Christians are Invited to deal hopefully with a partly open future in which even small responses can make a difference.

The cross and the resurrection are closely tied together; separated, they yield a distorted message.The cross alone leads to cynicism, apathy and resignation to fate; the resurrection alone leads to a theology of glory and to sentimental illusion or fanatical aggression.

Finally, the theological tension is highlighted by Paul’s sense that Christians live between the ages. Though still in the Old Age of sin, death, injustice and limitations, they are called to live according to the New Age inaugurated by Jesus Christ and made present by the Holy Spirit. Living in the Old Age involves supporting less-than-perfect institutions and making compromises (which those who take the rigorous path call cop-outs). Even so, Christians are not to be serpentlike or to abide by the ways of the Old Age; they are to live in the resurrection according to the love and justice of the New Age. In the present context this means pushing beyond current assumptions to changed life styles -- but always with the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove,

Rigorous Discipleship in Action

The theology of the path of rigorous discipleship is simpler and better known, and its advocates frequently are more vocal and more intense. Basically the position builds on Jesus’ call to radical discipleship, his frugal and simple living, and his freedom from possessions. In some cases the "love communism" of the early churches is stressed along with a preference for asceticism and self-denial,

Simply put, the Christian is to live a life of simplicity, to satisfy only the most basic of needs, and to give all that he or she has to the poor. It is a life of surrender and total commitment to the Kingdom of God, a life made possible by the grace of God through faith. As for living between the ages, this path emphasizes the New Age almost to the exclusion of the Old -- an exclusion that comes not from failure to see the sin of the Old Age but from the assumption that total and sustained commitment is a real possibility.

The path of rigorous discipleship is attractive and validly Christian. It does not bog down in the inevitable relativities of the Old Age. It is simple, direct, and often accompanied by communities approximating the "love communism" of early Christianity.

It is also problematic. Beyond the obvious dificulties of works righteousness and a tendency to failure and illusion about sin, the wisdom of the serpent suggests ways in which the Old Age garbs itself in the New Age. The disguises are many. Claims made for the path of rigorous discipleship do not always carefully distinguish ego needs from the Word of God, Those who take this path are often predisposed to it by a preference for self-denial or asceticism, and this preference can be just as self-centered as gluttony. As a consequence, their pleas for radical change are sometimes perceived not as calls to discipleship but rather as ego-trips to expiate guilt or even attempts to re-create others in their own image.

More subtle is the underestimation of the resilience of the Old Age. There are serious consequences to changed life styles in an economy based in the short range on heavy consumption. One is the unemployment that results from reduced consumption and that always strikes the poor first. Ask an unemployed Detroit auto worker who is trying to feed a family what he thinks about reduced consumption. Another consequence is the lack of genuine options. New jobs, new housing and new transportation systems are simply not possible except for a very few. Ask the homeowner who has life savings tied up in a poorly insulated house and whose skills qualify her only to make energy-guzzling widgets what she thinks about the possibility of change.

Still another consequence is exposed by people of the world’s poorer countries, to whom talk about sustainability and reduced life styles has the familiar odor of injustice to it. They see it as a new way to keep the poor in misery so the rich can maintain their high living standards even with diminished resources. Ask the landless farmer in Guatemala what he thinks about asceticism and self-denial.

Responsible Consumption’s Appeal

The path of responsible consumption takes its main directions from the theological tension between the Old and the New Ages. Christians on this path are equally concerned for the poor and aware of the problem of being tied to possessions. They do not, however, take the asceticism of Jesus literally or urge the surrender of all possessions.

Reduced to basics, following this path requires wrestling with what it means to live between the ages, taking both ages seriously. In contrast to the rigorists’ heavy stress on the New Age, these Christians point to the realities of the Old Age or to the ambiguity of life between the ages. The problem for them is how to act responsibly so as to begin a process of change which will lead to sustainable consumption and greater justice. Their mood is sober, their programs moderate and reformist in nature. They also have a greater appreciation of material consumption.

Their path is attractive to less ascetic Christians and admittedly to those who find themselves heavily committed to consumption-oriented life styles. It is a valid Christian path with several advantages. It does not play on guilt feelings. It accounts for the complexities of living, in the world as it is. It does not pursue an impossible ideal and thus avoids the illusion and the fanaticism that sometimes accompany appeals to the Kingdom of God. Finally, it offers a Christian response for those who are not predisposed to asceticism and self-denial.

The responsible-consumption position is not without difficulties. A heavy stress on complexity, realism and limitations has a way of dulling the blade of social change. Complexity overwhelms us, and we resign ourselves to the impossibility of doing anything. Realism moves us beyond a healthy sense of sin into cynicism. The inevitable limitations on all actions dim our enthusiasm and turn us into silent champions of the status quo. The wolf in sheep’s clothing on this path takes the form of selfishness in the skin of responsibility; ten dollars to the food bank once a month makes us automatically virtuous. Finally, legitimation of consumption can lead to the ratification of selfishness and to neglect of the poor. Once the door to a little consumption is open, television sets, boats and vacation cabins push in like the proverbial camel with its nose in the tent. These things become basic needs seemingly just as important to us as food, clothing and shelter are to a poor person.

Some Practical Considerations

Living responsibly between the ages today requires new thinking and being. A few general elements common to all Christian life styles are clear. A Christian life style is one that puts trust where it belongs: in God, not in material possessions -- or even in a life style. It is involved in the affairs of the community, including the distribution of political power. It is sensitive to the concerns of the poor and the impacts of social programs on them. With regard to existing political and economic arrangements, it can support them within limits despite imperfections, but at the same time it works toward a greater approximation of justice in these arrangements. It is concerned for the maintenance of basic ecological support systems.

These generalizations can be enunciated with great ease. The rub comes in putting them into practice, in trying to decide which path to take. What does it mean, concretely, as applied to consumption, possessions, poverty and wealth, to live responsibly in a world that cries for justice and that probably cannot sustain American levels of consumption?

At this point the, immediate response of those on the path of rigorous discipleship is clear and direct. In the present situation, being a Christian means such things as cutting back to a level of consumption which satisfies only basic needs, building new communities, and giving what one has to the poor. In short, it means a radical life-style change.

Such a response is admirable for those called to it. Christians who elect this path are to be encouraged, for they play the vital role of witnessing to the ideal, thereby keeping the ethics of the Kingdom alive and calling easy compromises into question. They occupy the same position in regard to consumption and wealth that pacifists do in regard to violence.

The path of responsible consumption is also a valid Christian response. Without exhausting the possibilities, I can offer four practical suggestions here. The first has to do with personal consumption and takes seriously the Bible’s concern for the poor, its teachings on the dangers of possessions, and its call to sharing. The suggestion is this: in major consumption decisions involving purchases beyond the basic needs of food, shelter, clothing and transportation, include a gift to the poor of time or money. For example, in the purchase of a boat for recreational purposes, set aside a sum up to the price of the boat to give to the food bank or an organization such as the Urban League.

Second, in response to both the biblical concern for justice and the problems of resources and energy, actively support international, national and local initiatives to conserve energy and resources and to reduce poverty and injustice. Progressive taxes, self-help programs for the poor, agrarian reform, low-interest loans for home insulation are just a few possibilities.

Third, to conserve energy and resources, avoid -- or at least cut down on -- unnecessary consumption of energy and resource-intensive products. Combine several shopping trips into one, and weatherize your home. Beyond this, in all consumption decisions elect the alternative which, within reasonable cost, does the most to conserve energy and resources and to protect the environment. For example, when the time comes for a new automobile, buy one that maximizes gas mileage and durability.

Fourth, to ensure consistency, develop within the churches responses that embody the generalizations and suggestions offered here. Of practical note are programs for conserving energy in church buildings and for sharing income and wealth within each congregation.

These suggestions are vulnerable to criticism from the rigorists. They will also be attacked by conservatives and by those who deny that there are problems with resources and energy. They are only starting points, not solutions or even blueprints. But justice and sustainability, as approached through Christian life styles, have great potential. Like the mustard seed, they can grow mightily, and one day the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove may be brought into harmony. Both rigorous and responsible living fertilize God’s seed of love.

The Challenge of Conservative Theology

At the very time when ecumenical Protestants are drawing closer to Roman Catholics, the rift within Protestantism is growing wider. The ecumenical and neo-orthodox movements, as well as joint participation in graduate theological education, have not brought the different traditions together. In fact, the gap between conservatives and the neo-orthodox and liberals is growing wider and deeper. What I find most disturbing is that conservatives are not content to represent one branch of Protestantism but explicitly lay claim to the entire Reformation heritage. Indeed, their claim is even more imperialistic: by appropriating the word "evangelical," they present themselves as the only ones who are Christian. Putting aside all the rhetoric regarding the significance of church membership statistics and the future of conservatism, the widening gap represents a theological schism in American Christianity of the first order.

Theological debate is always complicated and becomes deeply personal when one side lays claim to an essential term. The word "evangelical" is indispensable for Protestantism and, for that matter, for all Christians. There is something deeply disturbing, therefore, about a theological movement that declares that it represents evangelical Christianity and suggests quite pointedly that other movements are not evangelical. Since Christian theology is by definition evangelical, it is both naïve and arrogant to suggest that theology is evangelical only when it fits into a particular position. We may wish to ponder the development of less pretentious ways of defining ourselves.

Competing Conservative Positions

The debate is further complicated by the variety of competing positions among conservative Protestants. There is no agreement among the so-called evangelicals. Terms such as fundamentalist, orthodox, biblical Protestant, conservative and evangelical are sometimes used interchangeably, while at other times they express slightly different nuances.

Harold Ockenga has suggested that in the conservative tradition there has been a movement from fundamentalism to neo-evangelicalism and ultimately to evangelicalism. My general impression is that all of these distinctions are overdrawn.

Basically, we are talking about conservative Protestantism in the United States, which is in general derived from three traditions: (1) conservative Lutheran and Calvinist groups, (2) the pietist traditions, and (3) indigenous American churches. The second and third of these are characterized by the impact of the American frontier, revivalism, a rather low-church liturgical style, and fundamentalism. Despite the distinctions Christians of these traditions would make among themselves, there tends to be a common theological position regarding the Bible and certain basics. Much attention is being given to the attempt to go beyond fundamentalism, but the "new evangelical" theology still tends to sound like either Protestant scholasticism or fundamentalism. Indeed, in a panel presentation, Harold O. J. Brown, former associate editor of Christianity Today, admitted that the evangelicals are "nothing but fundamentalists."

There are some notable exceptions that strike me as important. In regard to the Bible, one group of writers has sought to move away from the rigidity of fundamentalism to a position basically akin to the neo-orthodox view. These writers admit that there may well be biblical inaccuracies, and that the inerrancy of every verse can be challenged. The historically relative situation of the biblical authors is accepted, with full recognition of the problem this creates for interpretation. They resolve the problem by means of two carefully worded affirmations: either one affirms that the Bible is inerrant whenever it speaks on its intended subject in its own way, or one holds that inerrancy and infallibility really mean that the Bible is reliable/trustworthy regarding the gospel.

Such proposals are obviously quite equivocal. Whether or not such was the intention, they dodge the crucial issue while sounding the code words of conservative rhetoric. The first proposal is disturbing because it simply restates the problem. The second is but a return to the idea of a canon within the canon. That these two solutions can be offered at all indicates a considerable movement on the part of many conservatives toward a less constricting view of the Bible. Yet one senses that it is difficult to set forth revisions of that view in the face of the ritual warfare within conservatism and its accepted rhetoric.

Opposition to Liberalism

By far the most complicating factor in the debate is that conservatism lives and dies as the antithesis to liberalism, the modern Antichrist. Conservative theology is defined in opposition to the godlessness and skepticism of liberalism. Everyone to the left of conservatism is lumped together; no matter how many gradations may have existed among liberal Protestants, they are usually treated uniformly and equated with the rationalism and skepticism of the Enlightenment. Neo-orthodoxy is seen as a bankrupt subcategory. Indeed, one must be impressed by the paucity of categories for describing the problem: on the one side, we Christians stand arrayed against the liberals on the other side.

For example, Harold Lindsell states unequivocally: "Basically, we come to the Bible in one of two ways. Either we approach it with trust and belief or we come with suspicion and distrust." John H. Gerstner would sort things out as follows: "If the term evangelical can include Karl Barth as well as Carl Henry, Emil Brunner as well as Jonathan Edwards, Oscar Cullmann as well as John Wesley, then we must give it a definition so broad as to be somewhat meaningless."

Or look at some article titles that are fairly typical of Christianity Today: "The Lusts of Modern Theology" and "Six Modern Christologies: Doing Away with the God-Man."

It is disturbing to find an entire theological position composed in such a polemic key, assuring the faithful that conservatism represents the last great hope of Christianity. An example of this style comes again from Harold O. J. Brown in his review of Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God (Christianity Today, March 14, 1975):

Like so much that is written by people of his stature, it is brilliant but unreliable, indeed fundamentally unsound. There is much in it that the evangelical should take seriously and yet it is characterized by what seems a perverse refusal to accept the authoritative Biblical witness without first subjecting it to existentialist and other historically conditioned mutations.

Those taken aback by such rhetoric must ask whether neo-orthodox Protestants, for example, write with the same polemics and hostility against liberals, Catholics, conservatives or secularists. Sooner or later, all of us are going to have to pay for our excessive rhetoric and for the ways in which we misrepresent our opponents in a desire to create straw men or to perpetuate the ritual warfare that goes on between rival theological positions. At some future point the theological agenda must include the laying of foundations for a reconciliation of opposing camps.

The Reformation and Authority

The challenge of conservative theology does not lie in its commitment to the evangelical mandate; indeed, to the extent that it is rooted in the gospel and the quest for true religion found in all Christian communities, that theology will always be a strong and positive force. Rather, the challenge lies in its tendency to equate the gospel with characteristics of the conservative mind-set and one view of the Christian faith -- an especially dangerous tendency in light of the problematic elements this view contains.

In defining what we understand the word "evangelical" to signify, I adopt the perspective of Luther and Calvin as they interpret the New Testament through the ecumenical creeds and the influence of Augustine. The Reformers proclaimed that the sovereignty of God was both a critical word against the world and a gracious act of deliverance. This affirmation of God’s sovereignty and the principle of salvation by grace led to a series of criticisms against all worldly authorities that claimed to usurp the power of God, be it an authoritarian church, an infallible Bible or a mechanical sacrament that offered salvation in a simplistic way.

While the Lutheran-Calvinist Reformation affirmed the authority of Scripture, it nevertheless insisted that faith is always directed to the saving work of God in Jesus Christ. It refused to treat the Bible in a simplistic or mechanical way. Witness the emphasis on a canon within the canon, Luther’s response to the Anabaptists on the question of infant baptism, as well as both Reformers’ insistence that the Word always stands in juxtaposition to faith and that neither is possible without the activity of the Holy Spirit.

It was the genius of both Luther and Calvin to insist that the certainty of our salvation rests with God and not in any human institution, or any claim regarding the sacrament or the Bible. The bridge between heaven and earth is none other than Jesus Christ and the new covenant which gathers into the peace of God the faithful from all lands. Thus, the believer stands before the gracious activity of God in Christ, trusting only in that grace. Believers have put aside all trust in themselves and in worldly powers -- even the powers of religious institutions. Before the sovereign God, they forsake all authority other than that certainty found in the living Word. To be sure, the believer is edified, nourished and supported by church, sacrament and Bible, but these cannot become the objects of our ultimate loyalty.

But it is precisely at this point that conservative Protestantism and the American free churches have never fully accepted the reform of Luther and Calvin. While they welcome the assault upon an authoritarian church and the rejection of sacraments efficacious in and of themselves, they have resisted the Reformation logic as applied to doctrine and to the Bible. In this resistance lies the problematic character of conservative theology, and it takes three forms.

The first is the tendency to substitute doctrine for the saving work of God in Christ as the object of trust and loyalty. This occurs whenever confessional statements or a set of fundamentals is declared to be the absolute standard for Christian faith. It must be admitted that there is something quite logical about a doctrinal test: if there are essentials to the Christian faith, then we should be able to state them. Speaking generally, it is quite correct to seek the boundaries of faith, especially when confronted with a truly heretical claim. The church of the early centuries closed the gap between possible and actual doctrinal tests on several occasions. At the same time it is instructive to remember that these creeds speak mainly to the doctrines of God and the person of Christ. The ecumenical church did not fix a position regarding anthropology, sin, the work of Christ, church and sacraments.

While logic suggests that the gap can and must be closed, we do well to remember the hazards involved. Every confessional test of faith is inevitably the product of a given tradition and historical-social context. To make absolute claims regarding such doctrinal statements gives too much weight to specific formulations of doctrine. Moreover, the establishment of doctrinal tests suffers from both an intellectualizing of faith and the reduction of it to doctrinal assent. Since faith is the act of trust in and loyalty to God, it cannot be reduced to doctrinal tests, for they misdirect it and therefore divert one’s vision from the One who is the source of all true faith. Yet the persistent tendency of conservatives to rely on doctrinal tests raises the question of whether they agree with the Reformers’ insistence that the church itself must submit to the judgment of God and must avoid an imperial and authoritarian stance.

Faith, the Bible and Salvation

The second problem is the tendency to substitute for the living Word of God the Bible as an inerrant or infallible book. Most of the debate on this subject focuses on whether the Bible is in fact inerrant and infallible. But more attention should be given to the theological problem of whether the Bible should be asked to bear such a claim. The conservative view of the Bible is not one arrived at after historical-critical study, but one held before such study. This view is a theological premise regarding the certainty of faith. Conservatives argue that if God is absolute, then the Bible itself must be absolute. The statement of this principle. from the believer’s standpoint, is: If faith is to be certain, it must have an absolutely certain basis, which, the conservative insists, is the Bible.

It simply does not follow, however, that because God is absolute, therefore every detail in the record and witness of God’s revelation is infallible. Nor does it follow that since faith needs a ground of certainty, therefore the Bible must be that ground through being infallible. These syllogisms have a docetic ring. They presuppose that the absolute enters the world in a way that is absolute (i.e., unhidden, self-evident and publicly verifiable). They presuppose that human faith can lay hold of the divine and claim to have an infallible bridge between heaven and earth. Moreover, the use of the word "absolute" is itself problematic because that usage introduces the distinction between absolute and finite, a distinction with strong Hellenistic overtones.

Such language can be helpful if one accepts a paradoxical resolution of the tension between absolute and finite. In the conservative view of Scripture, however, there is no paradox; written words become unequivocally the Word of God -- even without the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. (It is ironic to note that the Roman Catholic tradition uses the same logic as does conservative Protestantism, but in order to defend an infallible church. The conservative is bold to reject such an imperial conclusion in regard to the church, but not in regard to the Bible.) Having drawn the battle line at the Bible, conservatism will be required to exhaust itself in theories and explanations of how the Bible is not only infallible but does in fact, when read correctly, substantiate all the new theories discovered by the modern age.

The third tendency is to make faith itself a saving work. This is perhaps the most objectionable characteristic of the American free-church tradition. Faith has become a mechanical and all-powerful human activity guaranteeing our salvation. Billy Graham can declare to a revival audience that one receives Jesus Christ in the most simple way; just as one receives a polio vaccine as a wafer, so one receives Jesus Christ by coming to the platform.

For others, faith becomes the healing power which will take away all of our physical ailments. It is the source for robust claims about overcoming all of our personal problems and achieving worldly success. This view of faith seeks to reduce the power of God to a merely human technique. An advertisement for one of Graham’s latest books, How to Be Born Again, refers to "the simple steps to being spiritually reborn." Faith of this sort is not the response of the believer standing before the gracious word of God in Christ, but itself becomes the ground of certainty and the saving force. It works ex opere operato. In this sense, these positions come full circle and begin to look like that great ritual enemy of Protestantism; namely, the mechanical view of the sacraments attributed to the medieval tradition.

The Risks of Faith

In his book Fundamentalism (Westminster, 1978) James Barr argues that fundamentalism arises out of a particular religious tradition: the revival experience of conversion and the intensely personal acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. This experience is always in the shadow of an institutionalized church which appears to have lost the true religion. While Barr’s thesis provides much insight, it alone cannot explain the conservative mind-set. Since not all personal conversions lead to fundamentalist views of the Bible, it would be preferable to emphasize a more universal tendency as the origin of conservative zeal: the human quest for absolute certainty.

I am by no means suggesting that a psychological reductionism is the key to understanding conservatives; rather, I want to focus attention on the search for certainty that arises out of human anxiety and finitude. Conservative theology is problematic because it refuses to accept our finitude and the risk of faith. It might be said that the demand for an absolute doctrine, an infallible book, or a wonder-working faith is a form of seeking after signs -- a quest for an absolute certainty which is verifiable and controllable through human effort and rationality. Indeed, it is a proof for God’s existence that surpasses any natural theology. Instead of seeing faith as the act of the trusting heart directed toward God, it seeks after a visible form of certainty to be an irrefutable bridge between heaven and earth.

This drive on the part of conservatives is especially inconsistent since they are well known for championing the view that Christianity involves the personal relation between the believer and Jesus Christ. One would therefore expect conservatives to use this christological base as the framework for theology. Insistence on doctrine or Bible as the infallible base for theology undercuts the christological ground of certainty. To affirm the sovereignty of God and salvation by grace means precisely that we have no self-evident and infallible bridge between heaven and earth other than God’s saving work in Israel and Jesus Christ. (Here we must remember that the evangelical theology of Luther and Calvin questions both the Catholics’ infallible church and the conservatives’ infallible Bible.)

Amid the clamor of rival Protestant groups, one needs a perspective for understanding the conflict. The liberal and conservative mind-sets represent polar tendencies in Protestantism. If the liberal type is less bound by the Bible, creed and tradition and more concerned with the demands of reason and contemporary society, the conservative type tends to be the opposite. The conflicts between liberal and conservative movements can be clearly traced over the past three centuries. In the same way one can trace a mediating theology which has existed in the tension between the rival camps. In our time the mediators have been the biblical and neo-orthodox theologies. This precarious middle ground is precisely where ecumenical Protestants should be. To live in that space requires that we lay claim to the truly evangelical heritage of the Reformation.

As we do so, two factors will be paramount. First, churches in the ecumenical center must forego the temptation to imitate the conservative theology, and style on the assumption that this is what will succeed. Such a strategy will only confuse the public and ourselves. What we need is not imitation but the affirmation of our own heritage as a viable source of identity and renewal.

The second factor required is the development of our own form of piety consistent with the biblical and Reformation traditions. We have come through a period in which we sought to place mission and service in the foreground. It is now apparent that this cannot be done apart from a community of faith rooted in the study of Scripture, in worship and fellowship, and in the care of souls. The church cannot address the question of action until it clarifies its being in the new covenant of Jesus Christ. Here we find the most fundamental challenge from conservatism: to stand firm in our witness to a form of piety that is rooted in Bible and creed, but directs faith beyond them to the Lord of all.

Cynics, Martyrs and the Importance of Energy Conservation

Since 1973, most of us have heard so much about "the energy crisis" that the phrase has lost all meaning. We have lived through a steady stream of energy price increases, presidential proclamations, severe-weather energy shortages and raging debate on the various energy-supply technologies. Life remains tolerable and changes slowly for most Americans, and huge numbers of people are skeptical or at least inactive. "Why should I care about energy?" they ask. "What can one person do in the shadow of gigantic energy corporations, impersonal public utilities, a hopelessly uncoordinated government and a populace that doesn’t seem to care?"

There are volumes of information available on what a household, a person, a business, or a legislator can do to reduce personal or national energy consumption. Most of these conservation steps could be implemented immediately or very soon. If anything is lacking, it is a commitment to conservation that goes beyond shortsighted moneysaving reasons to include long-term changes in the way we use energy. In other words, in the long run, why should an individual person care about energy?

Altruism and Energy Conservation

There are two sorts of reasons why energy conservation is so important right now. Those of the first category all relate to a notion of human responsibility toward current and future generations of humankind and to the ecosystem in general. Such reasons certainly reflect a classical Western view of the social contract, and those who don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves can skip this section and go on to the next. Those who skip will not stand alone; there is no clear consensus among scholars as to whether human beings possess any innate or biological altruism. If there is a natural sense of altruism, it is undoubtedly linked to some long-range sense of danger to the species and the Aristotelian instinct of self-preservation. In the absence of definitive data, for us to assert that humans do care about others or to make a pragmatic decision to care is little more than an act of faith. For those of us willing to take this step, the value of energy conservation can easily be understood.

Let me cite three major altruistic reasons to conserve energy. The first of these is that if we don’t do so, we are likely to destroy the earth’s ecosystem. Though this thesis is not very difficult to imagine or understand, it is a hard thing to prove. In the past decade, however, several reasonable analyses of world environmental futures have emerged, and they show a definite likelihood of environmental collapse sometime in the next hundred years. The most famous of these predictions was made in The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 1974.

The Club’s researchers built an immense computer model of the world economy and let it advance through time along our present course of exponential energy growth. The result shows a prediction of world population peaking in about 2030.

After this time, the crude death rate exceeds the crude birth rate, so the population declines. Food per capita rises steadily throughout the twentieth century . . . but it declines sharply after 2015. Industrial output per capita reaches a maximum value of 375 dollars per person-year in 2015. The index of persistent pollution reaches a peak of 11 times the 1970 level of pollution in the year 2035. The behavior mode exhibited by the reference run is overshoot and decline. Population and capital grow past their sustainable physical limits and then return to a pre-industrial level of development. Growth is halted in this run through the effects of nonrenewable resource depletion [emphasis added].

The Club of Rome has since updated its findings without substantially altering its main conclusion.

With the use of very different methods of prediction, similar conclusions on world collapse have been reached by Willis Harmon’s group at the Stanford Research Institute. Harmon does not rely on complicated computer models such as the Club of Rome’s World 3. Instead he uses rough calculations and nonnumerical cybernetic analyses of social and technical trends. His results show a spectrum of possible world situations in the year 2000 ranging from "Manifest Destiny" to collapse. All of the successful future paths he finds require what he calls a "war on ecological problems." For all practical purposes, this means the implementation of worldwide energy conservation and renewable energy technologies.

Often cynics like to argue that the world is too complex a thing to model, even on a computer, and that something can always come along to save us. Yet if our energy consumption keeps increasing, there is nothing that can mitigate the adverse environmental impacts. We can argue all day as to whether the exact facts and figures in these predictions of doom are correct, but the fact is, ecosystems can be destroyed; Lake Erie is dead and supports no life. Anyone who thinks that the same thing can’t happen to the world ecosystems is working under a delusion.

The Roots of World Tension

The second altruistic reason emerges from a realistic assessment of the first. The Club of Rome report shows a future in which food, energy supplies, capital goods and mineral ores grow increasingly scarce. In such a situation, any economist can tell you, international competition for these resources will be fierce and tensions strong. The idea of taking resources by military force will be on the minds of many nations. By that time, nuclear power plants will be spread throughout the world, and it is predicted that more than 35 countries will possess nuclear weapons (as opposed to seven now). Ask yourself what the chances are that a country’s environmental problems might lead to catastrophe without also creating international military repercussions, possibly starting as an internal rebellion among a citizenry tired of its resource hardships, for which it blames the existing government.

All of this is not just idle speculation. In the oil embargo of 1973 concrete plans were considered for the invasion of OPEC countries to secure the oil the U.S. was thought to need. Harper’s magazine (May 1975) featured the article "Seizing Arab Oil: The Case for U.S. Intervention." The cover shows U.S. paratroopers descending on Saudi oil fields, and the article concludes that "assuming fairly extensive but unsystematic sabotage, pre-invasion output levels could be resumed in one to two months so long as certain essential items are sealifted with the first Marine convoys and plenty of skilled manpower is flown in." As fighting rages in Afghanistan and the world’s eyes remain fixed on the supply of Mideastern oil, there is talk like this once again in high political circles. Yet the anti-draft movement is also growing, and although everyone acknowledges that oil would be the reason for a U.S. war in the Middle East, no one seems interested in fighting it. What surer way do we have of reducing these pressures than decreasing our reliance on energy use in general and on oil in particular?

In this perspective, energy conservation plays the role of decreasing world energy demand, decreasing the need for both nuclear power (and its attendant problems) and scarce mineral resources. Such a development cuts at the roots of our most fertile source of world tension. It is especially important for the United States, now the energy glutton of the world, consuming 30 per cent of annual world energy despite having only 6 per cent of the total population. If we can decrease our energy use, we can set an example for the rest of the world to follow; if we don’t, we leave it with little choice. Our goal should be to establish a comfortable, stable economic system that conserves as much energy as possible and gets the rest from renewable energy sources such as the sun and wind.

Our Children’s Children

The final altruistic reason to conserve energy is this: What kind of world do we want to leave to our children’s children? If we continue to use energy at our present rate, all oil and natural gas will be gone by the year 2010 in the U.S. and by 2040 everywhere else. If electricity use continues to double every nine years, huge amounts of power will have to come from 500 years’ worth of coal supplies and lots of nuclear power plants -- by this time possibly breeder or fusion plants.

The use of coal will mean that huge areas of Montana, Wyoming, Illinois and other states will be strip-mined. Even with antipollution devices, total air pollution emissions are predicted to triple to 30 million tons per year, bringing with them large increases in air-related sicknesses such as lung cancer. Huge amounts of land and water would be required for these plants -- at present rates, by 2177 every usable patch of land in the country would contain a 1,000-megawatt power plant, according to Malcolm Peterson of the Committee on Environmental Information.

Other but perhaps more serious problems devolve on any future generations that must rely on nuclear power. These include adequate uranium supply (probably necessitating immense uranium strip mines in Tennessee), almost inconceivable reactor and waste-transport accidents, low-level radiation effects from normal plant operations, and the burden of guarding both radioactive waste and outdated but radioactive nuclear plants for thousands of years. On top of all this, all electric power generation produces heat, and too much generation will raise the earth’s temperature, possibly enough to cause partial melting of the polar ice caps and wreak havoc on the world’s ecosphere.

Even our present rate of energy consumption is not sustainable in the long term, so it is a matter of decreasing per-capita energy use as soon as possible. Never again will generations of people use as much energy as we do with so little productivity and so much waste. The longer we wait to begin conservation, the less energy will be available to future generations, and the worse off the environment will be.

Self-Preservation and Self-Interest

We now come to several arguments for energy conservation that require no lofty goals or moral analyses. Each one of these reasons benefits the individual over the course of a lifetime, and one need not consider the fact that one is also doing society a big favor.

The most obvious reason in this category boils down to the simple fact that saving energy saves money. This is a common appeal made by private industry and government. The two main government publications on energy conservation for the average citizen are called Save Energy, Save Money and Up the Chimney or in the Bank. One solar-heating design firm has taken the motto "Profit from the Sun." Because energy is nonrecyclable and in short supply, it will continue to be one of the most expensive resources around. But it is not difficult or unusual to save 20 or 40 per cent of one’s heating and cooling bill with very little effort. This can be a very sizable amount of money, and it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of money savings available to the low-energy household.

In connection with saving money, it is appropriate to mention a phenomenon called the "respending effect." Presumably if a person saves a bit of money by reducing energy costs, he or she will either spend the money on something else or put it in the bank. If it is spent on something that uses up as much or more energy per dollar as the original reduction, nothing has been gained in the energy budget at large (though this person may now own a more desirable mix of goods and services than before). Only respending money on an activity less energy-intensive than the one reduced will result in a net energy saving for the economy. Those who are truly serious about living the low-energy life divert their spending from consumer activities to direct investment in the tools they require to change and then maintain their life style: land, bicycles, pressure cookers, solar and windpower equipment, a garden, bus rides, etc.

A more immediate gratification available to a community of energy conservers is better health and a more pleasant local environment. Many of the harmful and unpleasant effects of both nuclear and coal-fired power plants are temporary and can show signs of improvement after only a few years if the plants are shut down. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reported that in the ten years since it implemented water pollution guidelines for Lake Michigan, the quality of lake water has actually improved. Radiologist Leonard Sternglass cites a study of a research reactor located about 100 yards from where I work in Urbana, Illinois. According to Sternglass, when this reactor went into operation, infant mortality in my county increased 300 per cent and deaths from congenital malformation increased sixfold. When the reactor was shut down (temporarily), both rates dropped to about double the original level. During this same period in a more distant Illinois county, both of these death rates declined steadily.

In 1972 the city of Uppsala, Sweden, revamped its central city, eliminating automobiles and improving bus, bicycle and pedestrian routes. Aside from the resultant energy savings, the city experienced a decrease in dust and carbon monoxide, a factor-of-two reduction in noise levels, a 46 per cent lower traffic-accident risk, and even faster average travel times since buses ran more frequently.

I do not mean to give the impression that energy-conservation benefits accrue only to groups, or that they consist only in the removal of undesirable factors. Though many people equate energy conservation with personal hardship -- and the truth is that it often means sacrificing a little of one’s precious time -- there can be definite health benefits from, say, riding a bicycle or staying off the elevator and taking the stairs instead.

Older but Not Better

The final self-centered reason for energy conservation may seem a little hard to grasp. It is related to a phenomenon that can exist only in a post-industrial Western society far beyond the point of supplying necessities alone. If we have indeed produced everything we need to survive and even prosper, then what exactly is all this additional energy supplying us? To put it another way, energy use per capita is now about twice what it was in 1950. What new ways of increasing energy demand have we employed since 1950, and what benefits have they brought us?

Some products introduced in the past 20 years are quite excellent. On the other hand, a huge portion of the growth in energy use is due to an increase in travel speeds, more heavily processed and franchised foods, bigger cars with lower gas mileage, larger houses with excessive energy use, plastic and throwaway packaging, and the replacement of many jobs with big machines. For the most part, these are negative additions to American life. We must begin to ask ourselves whether these additions to the gross national product are economic benefits or unwanted burdens.

The point here is that the much-vaunted quality of life and pace of life are not automatic givens in our lives. We have a right to judge them and to decide that they ought to change one way or another. Just because America is 20 years older doesn’t mean it’s 20 years better, and many people think that lots of things were better in 1950 than now.

One Man’s Hands

A friend of mine went shopping with me one day and was surprised when I struggled with an armload of groceries rather than take a paper bag from the store. "Do you really think that your not taking a bag is worth all that trouble?" my friend asked. "Do you really think you’ll cause any real political or environmental change from your action?"

I raise this question because, even for those who are convinced that energy conservation is a good thing, it often seems a lonely and pointless activity in present-day America.

There is an obvious parallel here to any sort of movement that seeks to influence external reality on the basis of internal belief. Aside from the basic moral rightness of doing what one believes is right regardless of. its calculated political effectiveness, there is a genuine value and influence in setting an example. The exemplary manner 6f living displayed by Gandhi captured the lasting imagination of the entire Indian subcontinent. In amoral, non-organized America, any person practicing (and not just espousing) a moral view stands out like a beacon, and willingly or not becomes an example to others. Recently, I chanced upon a book on meditation by the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hahn. His name for what I would call environmental awareness is "mindfulness," and in discussing the application of his principles he states the responsibility of the individual quite clearly:

In a family, if there is one person who practices mindfulness, the entire family will be more mindful. Because of the presence of one member who lives in mindfulness, the entire family is reminded to live in mindfulness. If in one class, one student lives in mindfulness. the entire class is influenced.

In peace-serving communities, we must follow the same principle. Don’t worry if those around you aren’t doing their best. Just worry about how to make yourself worthy. Doing your best is the surest way to remind those around you to do their best. But to be worthy requires the continuing practice of mindfulness. That is a certainty. Only by practicing mind-fulness will we not lose ourselves but acquire a bright joy and peace. Only by practicing mindfulness will we be able to look at everyone else with the open mind and eyes of love.

Ours is a culture that all too often worships wastefulness and fosters greed. To a large extent we have to find our own source of strength and inspiration for conservation. Those of us who can find such strength and belief must stand against the tide of exponential growth. If we don’t, no one will, and there will be no historic force for true change. Individual energy conservation is not a substitute for effective citizen participation in civic affairs, for industrial energy conservation or revamped government energy policies. It is a small, almost invisible action, one that has effect only in the very long term. But it is also the deepest form of change -- a change in the very being of the most fundamental building block of society: the individual. We must ourselves become examples of the men and women of the future. Only by showing others that we can be healthy and happy within a low-energy, stable-future life can we convince them to relinquish their unhealthy, unstable, high-energy existence.