Articles – Page 133 – Religion Online

The Reshaping of Word

Imperceptibly, but far more rapidly than we might imagine, we are entering a period in American history when the issues of work and organized labor may again become paramount. The historical forces now pushing those issues toward the top of the social agenda -- and therefore toward serious consideration by the churches -- are different from those of the turbulent 1920s and ‘30s, when the masses of working people in the United States were struggling for the basic right to have a union, a decent wage and tolerable working conditions. Then, although sporadically, the churches involved themselves with labor issues. Now the nation, along with the entire industrialized world, is in the midst of profound shifts in the very structure of the work force itself. Such shifts, as well as automation, computerization and the widespread introduction of robots into the manufacturing industry, are increasingly distancing workers from any sense of meaning and satisfaction on the job.

These new developments compel the attention of the American religious community, for they are now affecting millions of workers, their families and their communities in the form of massive plant closures, huge movements of industrial capital overseas and a downshifting of the work force into lower-paying and more menial jobs -- when such jobs can be found. The highest unemployment rate in America in 40 years, although attributable in part to the disastrous policies of Reaganomics, thus points to conditions developing prior to this administration.

It is astonishing that the Christian community has paid so little attention to work as a religious issue. Our seminaries briefly introduce students to the subject through such classic texts as Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and through reviewing medieval and Reformation views of work. But once seminarians become pastors, that one-half of a parishioner’s weekday waking hours which is given to a job is almost totally ignored as a part of the Christian scheme of things. How much does a typical pastor really know, for instance, about his or her parishioner’s work life? What Christian education curriculum seriously examines work and the Christian life in a modern context? Furthermore, the very word "labor" has to many a distinctly pejorative ring, especially in mainline Protestant churches. Such congregations -- perhaps because they are made up of a disproportionate number of parishioners who are in management -- commonly think of labor unions as corrupt and grasping. They may even consider them the chief cause of the economic troubles of management.

Yet "work, as a human issue, is at the very center of the ‘social question,’" asserts the recent papal encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Performing Work) issued by John Paul II. Not only is work central to the fulfillment of the individual, it is central to the shape that society itself ultimately assumes. The economic system is built around the very content, shape and outcome of work. The social relationships that work creates (in modern industrial society it fragments and stratifies them) and the manifold and profound cultural expressions that spring out of work and the workplace are critical to the quality of society itself.

The pope’s encyclical, putting the issue of work in a modern context, states, "We are on the eve of new developments in technological, economic and political conditions . . . which will influence the world of work and production no less than the industrial revolution of the last century." What are these recent developments which draw our attention once again to the world of work and its implications for the well-being of society?

First, a widespread and deep "deindustrialization" of the American economy is under way. Economists Harry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison (of Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively) define deindustrialization as "a widespread, systematic disinvestment in the nation’s productive capacity." Bluestone and Harrison believe that the essential problem with the U.S. economy can be traced to the way capital -- in the form of financial resources as well as plants and equipment -- "has been diverted from productive investment in our basic national industries into unproductive speculation, mergers, acquisitions, and foreign investment. Left behind are shuttered factories, displaced workers, and a newly emerging group of ghost towns."

By now it should not be news that plant closures are sweeping the entire country. Bluestone and Harrison estimate that 30 to 50 million jobs have been lost nationwide in the 1970s as a direct result of private disinvestment by American businesses. The firms that have shut down have in many cases moved overseas, or diversified into other product lines, or obtained huge tax write-offs with which to buy other companies or simply invested at high interest instead of improving productive capacity. For example, General Electric shut down a profitable and stable flat iron plant in California and opened iron plants in Singapore, Mexico and Brazil, where labor costs are many times cheaper. U.S. Steel obtained a $900 million tax write-off when it closed 15 steel plants nationwide in 1979; later, instead of investing in a renewed American steelmaking capacity, it bought Marathon Oil for $6.4 billion. General Motors closes auto factories here while investing heavily in Japanese Isuzu cars which it will later import, after having demanded substantial cuts from its American auto workers.

The plant closure devastation sweeps far beyond the traditional auto, steel and rubber industries; it affects such industries as timber, canneries, meat-packing, electronics, airlines, cosmetics and department store chains. It reaches into the deep South, into the Pacific Northwest, and into prosperous California, where an estimated 210,000 jobs have been lost in just two years.

Where are all these jobs and jobless workers going? While traditional heavy industry is declining, the service sector (made up of office workers and computer operators, fast food and restaurant workers, health care workers, bookkeepers, optical workers, and building custodians, among others) is rapidly expanding. Some of the discharged workers find jobs in this sector, usually at much lower pay; others -- about 25 per cent -- simply remain jobless. The rise of jobs in the service sector simply does not offset the decline in the traditional industrial sector; hence the steep rise in unemployment, adding to the negative effects created by Reaganomics.

A second change in the workplace is that in the past ten to 15 years a technological revolution in transportation and communications has made it possible for large multinational corporations both to manage and to produce on a global scale. Huge cargo aircraft can now fly virtually an entire factory halfway across the globe, while decisions as to how fast that new factory assembly line must operate, what its workers should be paid and what profit is to be made are based on data from the corporation’s global computers back in Connecticut or New York. The former president of IBM World Trade Corporation put it succinctly: "The world outside the home country is no longer viewed as a series of disconnected customers . . . but as an extension of a single market."

The result for many multinationals is the decision to move increasing numbers of their plants overseas or to the largely nonunion South, where much cheaper labor assures greater profitability. According to a recent study cited by Maurice Zeitlin, a sociologist at UCLA, in 1960 21 cents out of every new investment dollar went overseas; by 1980 that figure had more than doubled. Thus, many plants, although profitable in the United States, close here and open elsewhere.

A third major development having significance for the world of work is the breathtaking speed at which plants and offices are being automated. "We are witnessing a massive infusion of new technology into industry, a technology based on computers and micro-electronics," says Harley Shaiken, an MIT expert on technology and its impact on society. For example, General Motors has calculated that in a decade 90 per cent of its machine tools will be computerized, says Shaiken. Another company has estimated that robots can economically replace two-thirds of all production painters and one-half of all production welders -- resulting in about 1 million jobs lost. And to illustrate both the international dimension of this revolution in automation and its impact even on the newly growing service sector, a German multinational firm’s study estimated that by 1990, 40 per cent of the jobs in the office could be rationalized and 25 per cent automated. The implications of this development for the loss of jobs, its impact on-workers and communities and the need for massive retraining programs are obvious.

A fourth aspect of the transformation of the nature and shape of work is what has been called the "deskilling" of jobs. Technology and the drive for the rationalization of the production process are resulting in increased -- and increasingly meaningless -- specialization for the worker. Assembly-line workers, limited as the variety of tasks they performed has always been, are now being transformed to resemble even more closely the robots, that work alongside them. An office secretary, formerly possessing a variety of skills (typing, filing, taking dictation, receiving people), now sits at a word processor all day, doing only one thing. The result: work is more and more meaningless, more and more alienating, more and more dehumanizing.

Perhaps the harshest impact of this devastation falls upon black, Hispanic and Asian workers. A recent incomplete data sample from a compilation of plant closures in California showed that the numbers of minority people laid off exceeded whites laid off -- a figure far out of proportion to racial percentages in the general population. Once again minority workers find themselves discarded by a system that had pretended at least to find them a niche in stable and remunerative employment.

Along with the personal tragedy they cause, changes in the realm of work are having an impact on the community. A recent New York Times Magazine article, "Collapse of Our Industrial Heartland," quoted Jim Beckman, head of a Chevrolet dealership in Defiance, Ohio: "You won’t believe the bleakness that has come into our lives," Beckman told a reporter. General Motors expects him to sell 680 new cars and trucks a year; last year he sold 274. "I can’t make any money. Once I run out of cash, I’m down the tube. Sometimes it’s almost more than you can take," he said. In such a community -- and there are hundreds all across the country like it -- grocery stores, small suppliers, health clinics, schools and municipal services are folding up precisely at the moment they are most needed.

What is happening to trade unions during this great shift and what ought to be the attitude of churches toward them? Wrote a labor journalist recently in the Los Angeles Times, "For the first time in decades, many of the country’s largest and strongest unions appear to be in open retreat, creating the impression that union strength has deteriorated badly." The statistics lend credence to this assertion. From a record 35.5 per cent of the work force in 1945, trade union membership has slipped to about 21 per cent today. Among the causes of the slippage are the shift from blue-collar to service industries (the latter more diverse and harder to organize), the moving of jobs overseas and a resurgence of antiunionism, tacitly encouraged, many labor observers feel, by the Reagan administration.

As might be expected, trade unions are not of one mind concerning the causes of, and remedies for, the new threats to labor. But in some parts of the country a grass-roots movement of laid-off workers resisting the plant closures is exerting surprising pressure upon its own leadership, as the recent vote by the rank and file membership of United Auto Workers to defy its own leadership and decisively reject a wage agreement with Chrysler Corporation appears to indicate. Leaders like William Winpisinger of the Machinists, newly elected Richard Trumka of the United Mine Workers and Anthony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers also Inspire many rank-and-filers with their "fight back" spirit and their longer-range vision of alternative policies.

Can the unions -- particularly the AFL-CIO -- overcome their frequent tendency to acquiesce in the status quo, to persist in racist and sexist bias and to hang on to narrow nationalist views of the world? The answers are not yet clear. But many of the younger rank-and-file workers seem to have a better and more realistic understanding of what is happening than their leaders do, and a corresponding will to take up the issues. In any case, it is clear that, as every papal encyclical and major Protestant pronouncement in this century on labor has affirmed, trade unions are an essential instrument of justice for working people and an indispensable and positive part of democratic societies. As the joining together of forces in last year’s historic Solidarity Day march indicated, the profound threats to the stability of workers and community now demand that labor, church and community must come together.

The papal encyclical Laborem Exercens has made an excellent beginning at the first task. Biblically centered and sociologically aware, it puts the human person at the center of work. The Genesis story, in which God commands Adam and Eve to exercise dominion over the earth and cultivate it, imparts an ethical nature to work. "The basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. . . . In the first place work is for the, person and not the person for work," says the encyclical.

It is obvious how far industrial society has moved from that insight and how commonly we accept the reverse proposition. Adds the encyclical, "work constitutes a foundation for the formation of family life." Further, since work is for the enhancement, and enrichment of the person and not the reverse, the encyclical is critical of a capitalism which denies this truth; it upholds the "principle of the priority of labor over capital."

A second recent document, "Affirming Justice," issued this year by the ecumenical Commission on Religion in Appalachia, likewise touches several of these themes and deserves further study and implementation. In addition, non- Roman Catholic churches could greatly benefit by recovering some of their own past history. The Church League for Industrial Democracy, founded in 1919 by Vida Scudder, an Episcopal laywoman and Wellesley College professor; the ecumenical Religion and Labor Foundation, a movement spanning three decades, led by Presbyterian minister Willard Uphaus; the work of the Methodist Federation for Social Action; and the remarkable ministries of Claude and Joyce Williams to black and white workers involved in labor struggles in the South in the 1930s need to be brought to light and affirmed. Also significant was the Industrial Mission movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, pioneered in this country by the Detroit Industrial Mission under Hugh C. White.

In light of both the religious statements on work and of what is happening to us during this economic dislocation of work and the workplace, some critical moral questions begin to emerge. Are capital and community in a new conflict? To what degree is the profit motive, as it is now being pursued, basically inimical to a Christian affirmation of work as meaningful and purposeful for the whole of society? Is the alienation between work and the worker, now felt so broadly in the workplace, something a technological society must simply accept with resignation? How far should workers participate in the decisions of the workplace? And what of the operations of international capitalism with regard to all these questions?

It becomes clear in their asking that these questions pose an unmistakable challenge to the churches to wrestle seriously with the question of the justice of the entire economic system as it is presently evolving. To see the issue of economic dislocation as one affecting only laid-off blue-collar workers, for example, or as only the result of Reaganomics, would be a gross misunderstanding of what is happening.

There are some encouraging signs of the beginnings of a response by the churches. Plant-closure and religion and labor coalitions have been formed, among other places, in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Milwaukee, Chicago and California. In the latter state, after the large Western International Conference on Economic Dislocation last fall, a statewide coalition of eight local groups was formed. Composed chiefly of rank-and-file workers, churches, community groups and academic groups, it has had the political muscle to push a major plant-closure bill to the floor of the California State Assembly, and has generated widespread attention by resisting specific closures. National and regional church funding, as well as labor funding, have also provided major support. Other groups, such as the Tri-State Conference on Steel (coming out of the Youngstown, Ohio, plant-closure struggles), the National Conference on Religion and Labor and the Religion and Labor Project of Theology in the Americas are continuing indications of the churches’ slowly reawakening interest in labor and work. Also encouraging is last summer’s inauguration by the Division of Church and Society of the National Council of Churches of a national networking and support project for those hurt by plant closings and economic dislocations.

These and other emerging groups ought to have the unequivocal support of the churches. Their tasks will vary according to their locations. But they will mainly use a combination of action strategies to stop plant closures and/or to propose community-worker plant buyouts, to push legislation protecting the worker, to propose alternative economic development plans and to hold conferences and publish educational materials. Through forming and supporting such groups, the churches will identify much more closely with the people and communities affected by economic dislocation. Christian congregations must raise their prophetic voices to proclaim the kind of society of which the Lord of Creation has given us a vision.

The Needle’s Eye: Christians and Their Money

The conversation was about whether money helped or whether it stood in the way of getting into heaven. Most of those talking admitted that they were looking for a way to have their money and heaven, too. When they asked their leader for his opinion, he said that it was easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle (Matt. 19:24) than for a person with an MBA or an All Savers Certificate to enter the kingdom. It was an outrageous image, the camel and the needle’s eye; but the rest hit a little too close for comfort for anyone to be amused.

This is how another remembered the advice: "The gate to life is narrow, and the way that leads to it is hard and there are few people who find it" (Matt. 7:14). Think of an airport security gate; all possessions -- even the contents of pockets and purses -- have to be put aside before one goes through the gate alone. It made sense, of course, that all one needed in heaven would be God. But the idea was frightening so not many were consoled.

After a time, reports trickled back about those who tried to get through the gates loaded down with gold chains, their pockets bulging with municipal bonds. There was an occasional embarrassing scene whenever someone refused to surrender his or her treasured possessions to the conveyor belt. Rebuffed, some turned away, clutching their belongings and settling wherever they were welcome with the things they clung to.

Once in a while someone surfaced who tried to explain that God, who had more important things to deal with, most certainly had nothing to say about money, or that Christianity was indifferent to it, or even that a hefty bank balance was a sign of God’s favor. There were always takers for these positions, but not everyone agreed and so the issue never totally disappeared.

The money issue is simmering again, fueled by inflation, unstable interest rates, and the disconcerting fact that lifestyles which Christians were accustomed to simplifying for the noblest of reasons are now being involuntarily modified by forces beyond their control.

The subject is a touchy one. The Quaker author of a Pendle Hill pamphlet suggests that money is to our generation what sex was to the Victorians -- which is to say that many people are willing to read about how others handle it or mismanage it, but few are ready to disclose their own involvement with it. When a publisher informed columnist Abigail McCarthy that "money" was selling better than "lust" (A Woman of Property. A Woman of Substance, The Money Book, Merger, Noble House), McCarthy pinpointed that phenomenon as being symptomatic of degenerative and obscene greed permeating our society and suggested that we consider banning books on money, rather than sex, from our libraries.

The Christian gospel has some things of its own to say about money, and says them directly and simply. First of all, it tells us that money itself is not the issue; the real issue is how we get it and what we do with it. In other words, money may not be intrinsically evil, but in its comings and goings in our lives it is frequently the root of evil.

On the subject of how we get money, "Thou shalt not steal" is more than a directive to employers to pay just wages and to employees to do a fair day’s work. In its "Second Letter to the People of God," the Taizé Community itemized some subtler ways of stealing, such as depriving the poor of access to what belongs to them, and of using up resources, thus making them unavailable to succeeding generations. Getting our houses in order on this score frequently means agonizing over employment that supports ethically questionable enterprises, or collecting fees that widen the gap between those who can afford our services and those who cannot.

On the subject of what to do with money, Jesus was unambiguous: "Sell your possessions and give alms: Get yourselves purses that do not wear out, treasure that will not fail you, in heaven where no thief can reach it. . ." (Luke 12:33, JB). I’m not sure I want to believe that such counsel is as radical as it appears, or as personal, or as nonnegotiable, since it fails to thank us for the share we’ve already given. Instead, it leads us to places where we would rather not go and asks, making us increasingly uneasy, questions we would rather not hear.

How much does the gospel tell us to give away? Excess, for sure, because to hoard is to exploit the poor who are demeaned by the brutal poverty of imbalance. But the fact that the widow’s offering (Mark 12:42-44) was not declined might give a clue about divesting even when it cuts into basic needs. "She gave from her want, all that she had to live on." That kind of giving is always a powerful sacrament of solidarity. It says that even though we cannot take the suffering away or really share it, symbolic action (fasting, living with less, sharing -- not renting -- space in our home, opposing consumerism) is one way of lessening the distance between our own lives and the terror, deprivation and despair of the suffering poor. And something more. It also opens our eyes to the reality that we are all needy -- not only the suffering poor, but we, the suffering rich, as well. The slave-making forces at work in our world exempt no one.

Jesus may have given the best answer to the "how much" question when he urged the rich young man (Matt. 19:21) to rid himself of whatever stood in the way of acknowledging that Jesus alone sufficed. The costliness of Christian discipleship boils down to just that: detaching ourselves from material goods, from prestige, power, advancement, or whatever else stands in the way of attachment to Christ. However much we would like to keep economics and faith separate, the gospel forges them together, establishes a mysterious but real connection between them, and asks for a continual reckoning from each of us concerning the blocks we place in the way of their unity.

Second, the gospel says that our attitude toward money can be dangerous. Jesus frequently warned about greed that encouraged people to work not only for what they needed, but for more and more. "Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a [person’s] life does not consist in the abundance of possessions" (Luke 12:15). Jesus knew that in the amassing of money, people sometimes became obsessed by it. When his followers wondered what was wrong with that, he told them the story of an enterprising entrepreneur (Luke 12:16-21) who built silos to store his extra grain. Buying (or building) on margin has always been a risky business, and the inherent anxiety in that kind of gambling may well have triggered the coronary, or whatever it was, that unexpectedly did in this hustler.

The man’s death, however, was not the issue. The moral of the story, it seems, had to do with security. Even (or especially) in the eyes of Wall Street, this fellow lost out because he invested imprudently. The mistake was tragic, but Jesus offered a redeeming lesson to the survivors, claiming that he is our security -- our only security. To make anything else our "ultimate concern," or to let anything else deflect us from recognizing that he is all we need, is not only idolatry but a fatal flaw. For, at least in this parable, the man’s concern was responsible for destroying the very thing he hoped to save.

That, insight seems eerily apropos as we hear arguments supporting a staggering military budget for defensive (as well as offensive) arms in the name of providing for our security. "Fool! This very night the demand will be made for your soul; and this hoard of yours, whose will it be then?" (Luke 12:20, JB).

Finally -- or maybe this is what he was saying all along -- Jesus was convinced that money hindered the internal freedom which he called the poverty of spirit.

Jesus spent a lot of time talking about money and what it could buy because he knew that it creates the illusion that it is all anyone needs. Therefore, people who had a lot of money, or those who hoarded it or were greedy with their relative share of it, tended to need him less. The Christian gospel is, at its heart, about loyalties and dependencies, and Jesus set down some specific guidelines for those who would be his disciples: divest, deaccumulate, resist the urge to consume. The bottom line, as they are wont to call it these days, is whether you believe that Jesus saves or money saves, whether money talks or the gospel does. Jesus was sure you couldn’t have it both ways: "You cannot serve two masters" (Matt. 6:24).

Because there can be only one way, it is necessary for the follower of the gospel to sense a real and blessed harmony (Luke 6:20) between external poverty and interior poverty, because that harmony validates Christian discipleship and keeps us honest about what our commitments really are. On the matter of honesty, Elizabeth O’Connor tells a story of the early days of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., when the proposed constitution and disciplines of the community were submitted to Reinhold Niebuhr for his comment. He offered only one remark, and it had to do with money. "I would suggest," Niebuhr said, "that you commit yourselves not to tithing but to proportionate giving, with tithing as an economic floor beneath which you will not go unless there are some compelling reasons."

O’Connor responded that anyone could figure out 10 per cent of gross income, but that "each of us had to be a person on our knees before God to understand our commitment to proportionate giving." The wisdom of the rewritten discipline, she relates, shielded the covenanted faith communities from egregious hypocrisy and "has kept us from mistaking . . . churchgoing for Christianity."

Proportionate giving is one way of pointing to the internal freedom of the poor in spirit. Chilean pastor and theologian Segundo Galilea approaches that freedom from another angle: "Blessedness is not only a call to feel with the poor; it is a challenge to us to become poor ourselves." That view may explain why we are willing to listen to a Francis of Assisi, a Dorothy Day or a Teresa of Calcutta. These people came to recognize Jesus in his distressing disguise of poverty: in the beggar, the leper, the marginalized and terrorized peasant. They made the transition from solidarity with the poor to identification with the poor, and there is enough imagination, idealism and grace among the weakest of us to recognize the authenticity of lives that complement the theory of the gospel with its practice.

What does it look like to live the internal freedom of the poor in spirit? What, in other words, are the side-effects of living the gospel teaching on money and possessions? I count five things.

1. To live this way prevents us from thinking that because money is scarce, or even unavailable, nothing can be accomplished. We need only to glimpse the vitality of the church in the poorest areas of the world to know that the Holy Spirit is not confined to large budgets, endowments and foundation support. This truth also underscores the fatuousness of arguments holding that the ideal is to be a rich Christian who shares his or her plenty with the economically deprived. In the first place, that position suggests that the earth’s poor want to be redeemed into a world of middle-class values -- a dubious-if not arrogant assumption. Second, even if that ideal were motivated purely, it doesn’t work -- and never has.

2. The internal freedom born of the gospel teaching on money lets us see that no one owns money, any more than anyone is absolute owner of the earth. Money is a human invention that facilitates the transfer and distribution of goods and must always be at the service of-justice. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago commented recently: "Economic prosperity is to be assessed not so much from the sum total of goods and wealth possessed as from the distribution of goods according to the norms of justice." So be it.

3. Curiously, the gospel spirit of detachment and nonclinging with regard to money allows us to use it more freely. When a woman poured expensive ointment over the head of Jesus (Matt. 26:6-13), it was the disciples who computed the cost and calculated the gesture as an extravagance since, they insisted, the money involved could have been better invested. Jesus, on the other hand, did not reprimand the woman or condemn the gesture, possibly because he knew that giving with largesse is a form of poverty; such a giver is not bound to a cost-accounting process but responds, rather, to the inner logic of love.

4. Believing and acting on the gospel allows us to trust that the poor way -- the gospel way -- never fails. Ultimate victory results because the gospel persistently raises hard questions about the things everyone takes for granted. In particular, it calls into question certain perennial human assumptions: that suffering and pain are to be avoided at all costs; that the more one consumes, the better off one is; and that the goal of life is to have. James Carroll writes that "Jesus Christ comes as the horrible sign to us that religion without suffering is meaningless; that life without suffering love is a lie, and that an affluent Christian life is a sacrilege."

5. Finally, a political reality is altered. The most pressing issue in the world today -- political, economic and moral -- is the fact that a minority of human beings pursue without limits their own pleasure, while the majority pay for that privilege with their very lives. Living among the poor in spirit can have a ripple effect that reshapes and transforms the public and political reality which takes its form from us as human beings. The militarism of today’s ethic is simply our collective expression of a personal conviction that we do not trust God, or that we trust God a little bit while hedging our bets with nest eggs, pension plans and MX missiles.

Thinking about money, unpleasant as it may be, exposes the inner division many of us experience with regard to the subject, for our hearts so often tell us one thing and our heads another. Thinking about money also refocuses the issues of trust and security. A resource book on my desk from the Sojourners group is called My People. I Am Your Security, and that title is neither sentiment nor slogan but the very rock of reality. Of Francis of Assisi’s "sublime dependence" on God, G. K. Chesterton wrote: "That we all depend in every detail, at every instant, as a Christian would say upon God . . . is not an illusion of the imagination; on the contrary, it is the fundamental fact which we cover up, as with curtains, with the illusion of ordinary life."

Choices for freedom in our ordinary lives are frequently -- perhaps constantly -- connected with money. One sobering reminder of what is at stake appears on all of the paper currency that passes through our hands. Like a cancer warning on a pack of cigarettes, it calls us to consider that it is "In God We Trust." Once considered, the statement is ours to affirm or to deny, and to make peace with as best we can.

Totalitarian Evangelicalism

Although the teacher was shocked at his class’s response, unfortunately the desire to impose one’s preconceived pattern on the thoughts and actions of others, even though not biblical, is a dangerous temptation for many evangelicals. Since a society’s desire to produce a standard, approved human product through a rigid control of thought and action is basically totalitarian, its existence within a closed evangelical context can properly be called totalitarian evangelicalism.

Because a phrase like "totalitarian evangelicalism" has a frightening ring to it, I will distinguish it from those "goods" and "partial goods" -- which have some justification in the facts of life and human nature -- by explaining what I do not mean by it.

First of all, "totalitarian evangelicalism" is not a simple hierarchical arrangement instituted solely for the purpose of doing things "decently and in order"; obviously, any society needs laws, rules and modes of accepted conduct. Unlike a simple authoritarian society, in which the purpose of rules and regulations is to maintain order and structure, a totalitarian society institutes order for the purpose of control -- control of mind and body, thought and action. Make no mistake, the difference is one of kind, not degree. A simple ordered society will settle for outward conformity; a totalitarian one demands complete inward allegiance. Simply obeying the rules is not sufficient; one must feel at one with such a society in every corner of one’s being. Whether such allegiance is achievable, let alone desirable, does not seem to be at issue, for unquestioning allegiance is postulated as the norm even though the bed is, more often than not, a Procrustean one.

A second clarification to be made is that "totalitarian evangelicalism" is neither healthy nor efficient. As Hannah Arendt points out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, efficiency is so subordinated to control that the totalitarian society can afford to spend 50 to 75 per cent of its energies enforcing control of one sort or another on its citizens.

Such a system of priorities strikes at the essence of evangelicalism, for within a totalitarian evangelical system, thought -- or, more insidiously, spirit -- control takes precedence over spiritual growth. The process of spiritual growth involves individual struggle, doubt and one’s confrontation with God -- tensions that are effectively short-circuited by thought control. Far from being healthy, then, the set of attitudes that I am discussing is inimical to spiritual maturity.

The Bible’s life-giving, liberalizing force should encourage the Christian to search for the truth which does indeed make him or her free. But, difficult though it may be, we must enter into the deep places of faith and the soul and ask the hard questions of Christianity with some kind of faith that answers are really there. They are, of course, but we must descend into them and into ourselves if they are ever to be known. To avoid that journey will change the destination. We need to set aside our fear of getting outside of God, for if we journey in honesty and truthfulness the path cannot end anywhere else but within God. As T. S. Eliot, himself a great journeyer, observes: "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time." Without such exploration we in all probability will never know the place at all. Far from being biblical, the kind of control that stops spiritual growth seems to verge upon the sinful; it is to self-forge a manacle for one’s soul.

Totalitarianism is, almost by definition, religious in its intensity and in the nature of the demands it makes upon the total being of its adherents. In its evangelical form it insidiously rigidifies and codifies the attitudes of the spirit. God frees; humans enslave. To achieve this slavery, four methods have been the most obvious in my own experience. The first was to break down the person’s concept of his or her own individuality; one must think of oneself primarily as a member of a group. Uniform behavior, when it becomes a reflex, admirably depresses one’s sense of individuality. Such a reflex was brought about by means of an intricate system of rules which existed for their own sake -- for the sake of the psychological conditioning they instilled -- and not for any actual necessity. From my own experience I learned how the system worked.

In the totalitarian evangelical society in which I as an undergraduate student spent three years of my life (and the situation there reportedly has not significantly changed over the years), all students were subject to numerous unwarranted demands. Women were required to be in bed at 11 PM. (not 10:59 or 11:01) and up at 7 AM. (not 7:01). Disobedience was unheard of, deterred by the prompt and efficient punishment meted out by hall monitors and discipline committees.

Breakfast was served exactly at 7:25, and everyone was required to be there -- even those who had no morning classes or who did not want to eat. Dress was strictly regulated (for women, skirts and blouses or dresses, stockings and flats, and no hair curlers), and attendance was checked (by the table monitor). Table manners were closely observed; and as one chewed one’s grits in the dull Carolina darkness, "Our Etiquette Rule for Today" was announced. Conversation was evaluated for spirituality and attitude. At 7:45 exactly we would be dismissed to get our room ready for inspection, which was daily and thorough and precisely at 8:05. And the rest of the day was filled with similar restrictive rules.

I want to stress again that such precision and multiplicity of rules were designed primarily to take away the volitional impulse. The way the morning was set up, made it impossible for students to decide anything for themselves. And this kind of automatic, volitionless going through the motions distorted one’s spirit as it bent one’s mind. The rules, we were taught to think, were not important; it was our attitude toward them that was significant. And something did happen to my attitude toward myself and my world as I automatically followed the prescribed regimen.

It is interesting that very few students rebelled; that seemed simply not a possibility. In my three years there, I received a total of nine demerits (a demerit was given for being a minute or two late for class, for example, or for not making one’s bed to the satisfaction of the monitor), but that was not an unusually good record since most students received no demerits at all. Whether I would or no, I was a member of a group; every day in every way, if I would but accept the patterns of my society, I could be defined from without and therefore was not in need of definition from within.

Not only must one conform, but one’s apparent attitude in the midst of external compliance had to be constantly evaluated: Does the student smile as she jumps out of bed promptly at 7 AM.? Does the student pray often enough and long enough in prayer meeting? Indeed, does the student go regularly and joyfully to the "optional" Sunday school and prayer meetings? Does his or her facial expression sometimes reveal a questioning of decisions made by superiors? Under the totalitarian system these were valid questions, and simply to have done nothing wrong (or noncompliant) was no salvation.

At the college I attended, such evaluation was accomplished by a "spiritual police" system which effectively enforced attitudinal and spiritual conformity. Each dorm room had an assistant prayer captain responsible for assessing and reporting on the spirituality of the other students in the room. Every four rooms had a prayer captain to whom the assistants reported; she, in turn, reported to the assistant monitor, who reported to the monitor, who reported to the dorm supervisor, who reported to the assistant dean of women, who reported to the dean of women. At each step the reports were evaluated -- and the assistant prayer captain or monitor who observed no spiritual problems among any of her charges would soon become a spiritual problem herself!

The terrifying thing about such a system was the arrogance implicit in the evaluation of unique spiritual beings on the basis of some predetermined, often shallowly conceived quality control. The "product" who fell short of the system’s "standards" was hauled out of classes or bed and questioned by the administration! If some perceived defect in spirituality or attitude was indeed found, the hapless student might be expelled with a bad recommendation even the week before graduation. After all, "If you’re not an asset, you are a liability" -- or so proclaimed the sign in two locations on every dormitory floor.

Yet a third quality inherent in this totalitarian system was a suspension of normal values of common sense and individual judgment. Another sign in our dormitory admonished: "Griping is not tolerated -- constructive suggestions are appreciated." To my young ears that sounded minimally acceptable, although even then it seemed to me that sometimes griping can be a valid human need. But in reality, no suggestions, constructive or otherwise, were tolerated; to "suggest" implied individual thought and evaluation, the perception of a possible improvement -- obviously dangerous qualities in that world.

In my own case, I was branded forever as a "malcontent" whose treason merited permanent admission into her record -- for making the innocent suggestion that paper towels be installed in the women’s restroom. What I did not realize then, and what I still have a little trouble understanding even now, was the nature of my offense. Evidently what was so treasonable was not the suggestion itself but the fact that I had individually exercised my common sense and made an evaluation. The premium, I found, was on passivity, on detachment from one’s environment in any thinking fashion. Passive people "belong"; they are easier to lead.

The final quality of the totalitarian evangelical mentality that I experienced was its paranoia about the outside world. The implication seemed to be that in conformity and loyalty lay safety; since the world conspires against us, let us not look at its ideas, participate in its institutions, or understand its needs lest we be led away from the faith. We must "stand," build a wall, patrol the campus with machine guns, and quarter our faculty in on-campus dorm rooms, for if they lived elsewhere they would bring the corruption of the outside world in to the students. While it is true that there was a hostile world which surrounded our community, common sense, and Christ’s practice, would indicate that we evangelicals should have tried to change it (or, failing that, to influence it), rather than to exorcise it.

The inescapable truth about the totalitarian evangelicalism I experienced was that, although the totalitarianism was real, the evangelicalism can scarcely have been. In imposing a rigid pattern of thought control, evangelical totalitarianism had given itself over to the "world system," substituting human power for God’s freedom.

Although my experience was with an extreme system, the point is valid in less extreme situations. We evangelicals seem to have a built-in weakness for some aspects of totalitarianism. We worry about those who do not fit in, we are uneasy about questioners and doubters, we feel that there needs to be more order" and regularity. We seem sometimes to have a prefabricated (and entirely unbiblical) concept of what a Christian should act like, look like, even think like. Rigidity and totalitarianism are bedfellows; they are alike a spiritual abomination, making a mockery of the freedom of our Lord.

To cast our lot with such a mind-set is to avoid facing the variety and complexity of God’s world. Those who devise and run such systems do irreparable harm to young people, and as a result they have a negative impact on the future of evangelicalism. Dedication and zealousness will not excuse such "leaders" for, in Christ’s words: "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."

Mary’s Hope and Our Hope (Luke 1:30-31)

‘Do not be afraid, Mary . you will conceive in your womb and bear a son" (Luke 1:30-31].

But what did his birth mean for Mary -- one woman among the many generations who had awaited this birth? So often we concentrate on the conception and the birth, and forget about the time in-between -- those nine long months when Mary waited for the birth of her child. Mary trusted God enough to become his servant, and yet she must have wondered and worried about the child whom she did not yet know, but who grew within her.

What did Mary do during those nine months? What did she think about on the long nights when her back hurt and she couldn’t sleep? What were her hopes as she spun dreams of the future, and how do her hopes relate to our hopes this Advent so many years later?

Abraham Heschel once said, "We live not by needs alone, but by hopes for that which we do not even know how to utter. A person is what he hopes for." Something deep and universal in the human person needs hope in order to live, and many things in our society masquerade as hope but are not. One of these is a kind of cheerful and unrealistic optimism. Although there is nothing wrong with optimism, it does not fill that deep need which true hope fills.

Our hope as we await the coming of Christ is something profound -- something woven into the very fabric of our being and only vaguely expressible in the paradoxical continuum of the Christ who was and is and is to come.

Hope allows us already in the present to experience partially the expected fulfillment. This gives a continuity to present and future. That for which we hope is both here and not-yet-here, just as Mary’s child was already present in her womb as he was becoming what he would be. She experienced the child even as she hoped for it, and yet the child would not fully be until he was born.

Paul also speaks of hope in terms of birth when he says:

We know that up to the present time, all creation groans with pain, like the pain of childbirth. But it is not just creation alone which groans; we who have the Spirit as the first of God’s gifts also groan within ourselves as we wait for God to make us his children and set our whole being free. For it is by hope that we are saved . . . if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience [Rom. 8:22-25].

In Raphael’s painting The Alba Madonna (in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), Mary sits with the child Jesus on her lap. He is playing with a toy that has been made out of two sticks tied together in the form of a cross, while his mother looks beyond him, her eyes fixed pensively on that cross. The artist is reminding us that the hope of Israel and the child of Mary was born in order to die.

When Jesus was preparing his disciples for his coming death he told them that death is a kind of birth:

When a woman is about to give birth she is sad because her hour of suffering has come; but when the baby is born she forgets her suffering because she is happy that a baby has been born into the world. That is how it is with you; now you are sad, but I will see you again and your hearts will be filled with the kind of gladness that no one can take away from you [John 16:21-221.

What must birth seem like to babies? Their world is dark, but safe and secure. All of their needs are filled automatically; they are cushioned from shock and prevented from feeling pain. If they were given a choice, they would probably choose to stay right where they are, in the warm, watery environment which is familiar and safe to them.

But one day they feel their world caving in. The walls begin to push and crowd them into the birth canal and for the first time they feel pain and know fear. Then after the pain comes light, and children are received into the world by comforting hands and given into the loving care of their mothers and fathers, who have been waiting for them, expecting them, hoping for them.

Perhaps death is like that. Perhaps birth -- death -- life, -- the past -- present -- future are all twined together in the intricate web which is our hope. Our hope is in the one who gives life, takes away life, and gives new life. Our hope is that one day we will be born -- again -- into the very life of God.

But for now we await the coming of the Christ child, knowing even as we wait that Christ indeed has come. He lives within us, as he once lived within Mary, to give us hope.

Can Evangelicalism Survive in the Context of Free Inquiry?

There appears to be an inherent incompatibility between Christian evangelicalism and the idea of a university, for only an "open" style of Christian commitment can affirm a university's commitment to free inquiry.

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Despite the fact that a Christian university, built along evangelical lines, has been an announced part of the program of the neoevangelical movement, such a university has not yet appeared in the quarter-century of neoevangelical resurgence.

This is not to say that there has been any lack of recent activity, or of relative success, among evangelicals in higher education. But Oral Roberts University and Bob Jones University -- to name only two of the more notoriously successful -- are essentially the lengthened shadows of individuals, not the institutional forms a historical movement takes. Neither school has yet achieved the accepted standard of a university, in the sense of providing broad intellectual leadership and contributing to the growth of knowledge and culture; and neither has won sufficient recognition among evangelicals themselves to be said to typify the movement’s university aspirations. Nor, indeed, has any other evangelical institution done better. Why not?

The scarcity of students and of operating funds is a relatively recent phenomenon in private higher education, and it has followed upon a decade when there were burgeoning enrollments and high prosperity, presumably good times for institutional initiative. Oral Roberts University has apparently thrived since its founding in the mid-1960s. And even if Rex Humbard’s attempt four years ago to establish a college on Mackinac Island failed, despite the television exposure he was able to give it, the present seems relatively favorable for evangelical aspiration. There is still plenty of wealth (Pew and Jarman, to cite only two of the more obvious evangelical fortunes) to bankroll such an operation. In any case, my own observation is that where private colleges are in fact prospering in enrollments these days, two things are likely to be true about them: (1) they still have a strong base in a religious constituency (and most often an evangelical constituency at that), and (2) they have retained a conservative campus life style. So for evangelicals in higher education, at least, times are not all that bad.

Then why no evangelical Christian university? The possibility I want to propose is that there is an inherent incompatibility between Christian evangelicalism and the idea of a university; that evangelical commitments may, indeed, foreclose the very terms which have traditionally defined a university; and that only what might be called an "open" style of Christian commitment can assume university form.

When Dogma Becomes Dogmatism

Consider commitment to intellectual freedom -- surely part of the foundation upon which all university life must be built. The test of its adequacy for university purposes is whether or not there is freedom enough to call into critical question the very nature and authority (magisterial as well as intellectual) of the university itself.

Paul Tillich enunciated the "open Christian" commitment to freedom in that "Protestant principle" which, as he wrote, "contains the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality, even if this claim is made by a Protestant church. The Protestant principle is the judge of every religious and cultural reality, including the religion and culture which calls itself ‘Protestant.’" Inquiry which takes place under "open Christian" auspices must resist and reject all claims to absolutism or finality, whether made in behalf of intellectual, moral or religious systems, methods or institutions. Believing that undivided truth belongs only to God, it affirms the relativity of all human apprehensions and expressions of truth, including those which claim the authority of revelation. Nothing is revealed until it is received, and the reception is always humanly problematic, whatever the source. So men and women must be left free to criticize and construct without restraint by any official dogmatism. This "open Christian" view of freedom, as H. R. Niebuhr saw so clearly, implies a kind of seemly intellectual modesty rather than total subjectivity or skepticism. The person who confesses "that his view is conditioned by the standpoint he occupies" is not required to "doubt the reality of what he sees," wrote Niebuhr; and the person who knows that "his concepts are not universal" is not required to doubt that they are, nevertheless, "concepts of the universal."

The "Protestant principle" warns us that danger arises for intellectual freedom, not when a university becomes identified with a doctrinal tradition (there is always some doctrinal center, secular or otherwise, which holds a university together), but rather when it becomes captive to a doctrinaire position. Then dogma becomes dogmatism, which is a very different thing. The self-righteousness of supposedly correct belief produces claims for the self-evident rightness of ideas and behaviors which that belief presumably guarantees. Dogmatism is precisely what gives people a good conscience about performing some of the world’s worst actions for what appear to be the world’s best reasons.

The history of higher education in this country offers a similar warning. Calvinist and Lutheran dogmatism made it possible, in the 19th century, to attack Roman Catholic institutions since, in view of their alleged "spiritual despotism," it was impossible for them to teach history and philosophy properly; while at the same time Calvinists and Lutherans guarded in their own colleges a rigid curricular orthodoxy of classical disciplines wedded to the most arid forms of theological orthodoxy. Dogmatism made it possible for Protestants to attack the new secular universities because they were allegedly staffed by people of doubtful (because secular) moral credentials, people whose research threatened the fabric of American culture; while Protestant dogmatists protected in their own institutions an educational and behavioral authoritarianism derived from what Walter Metzger has called "the doubtful conclusion that age best imparts its wisdom when youth surrenders its style" -- a conclusion as subtly and profoundly immoral as anything the secular universities were likely to produce.

Because its inclination to claim absolute and exclusive theological truth so regularly, moves evangelical doctrine into dogmatism, it may be unable to establish the intellectual foundation which distinguishes a university from all other social institutions.

Traducing the Quest for Truth

Consider the complex character of truth to which free intellectual inquiry in the university must adapt itself. Truth is assuredly not single, as the common simplistic formula would have it; and it is precisely that formula which, in recent years, has created the intellectual mischief of scientific orthodoxy (surely a self-contradiction) and of historical revisionism, and the cultural mischief of "official" art, music and literature (no less a contradiction) in the Soviet society.

Truth has at least a twofold nature: there is truth about the structures of existence, and there is truth about the meanings of existence. Structural facts (e.g., about genetics or cosmology) do not disclose their own meaning, and no amount of scientific combination of the data in one area of existence will directly yield a vision of the whole by means of which we can begin to make sense out of all existence. On the other hand, meaning does not constrain structure; facts are not derived from meanings. No comprehensive vision of the meaning of life provides us with direct information about the structures of life.

This is to say, then, that a Christian world view does not, except within the broadest limits, dictate any particular understanding of phenomena; indeed, it can properly be said that there is no such thing as a Christian approach to any field of inquiry -- no Christian astronomy or anthropology, for example -- just as there is no such thing as a Marxist, or a democratic humanist, approach to phenomenological inquiry. Therefore, it does not follow that one who is committed to a particular world view -- Christian, Marxist, humanist or some other -- must subject himself or herself only to some univocal understanding of a particular field of intellectual inquiry. Rather, he or she is free to range widely in the understanding and interpretation of the discipline. And the encounter with truth requires that we understand the methods appropriate to its complex character: truth about structures is discerned primarily through the objective methods of the sciences -- natural, social, historical -- and through the rigorous application of critical thought; truth about meanings is learned through the intuition and exercise of faith, hope and love.

Albert Outler has been an advocate of the "open Christian" understanding of these dimensions in his own distinction between "discursive truth" and "evangelical truth." No doctrine of "double truth" is implied, Outler has insisted. Neither dimension can be subordinated to the other; they cannot be posed as rivals or alternatives; and neither must corrupt the other, "as they will if either is contemptuous of the other." In Outler’s view, the Christian university must be a place where "truth is sought in all its ‘fullness’" but never imposed; a place "of rigor and reverence, of inquiry and worship, of competence and compassion, of truth and love."

Because evangelicals tend to subordinate discursive truth to evangelical truth, limiting inquiry by the creation of discursive orthodoxies to match their evangelical ones, dissipating the tension and traducing the complementarity which reside within the fullness of truth, they appear to have disabled themselves for the kind of free university inquiry out of which, historically, has come the growth of knowledge and culture.

Inclusiveness -- or Indoctrination?

Consider the inclusiveness of the university. Its primary mission is the enlargement and enhancement of the human and the humane through the advancement of learning and culture. Nothing which is of importance to persons is foreign to its inquiry. That makes the university one of the most humanly -- perhaps the most humanly -- inclusive of our institutions.

In fact, understood in "open Christian" terms, the university is broadly soteriological in its definition, and is viewed as a part -- though by no means the whole -- of a humanly redemptive event. Salvation can be understood as the process, both human and divine, by which God confers upon human persons what they need to be fully human. Salvation means healing (salving), and healing is making whole. Human wholeness is the end which God intends in Jesus Christ, for in Christian faith Christ himself is held to be the whole man, personhood completed, the New Adam; and human wholeness is the consuming theme of his ministry. In the university which takes as its mission greater human completeness (integrity, wholeness), "the educational process is at the same time a soteriological process," as Gerhard Spiegler has written in a related context; and while it must guard against the arrogant pretense that it is itself soter, it is nonetheless, as Spiegler noted, a "mediator of human salvation." Thus the university ideal is a religious ideal, as Protestant reformers insisted in attempting to establish its relative autonomy from church authority.

It is therefore a Christian anthropology, rather than the entire corpus of Christian doctrine, which bears direct relevance to teaching and learning in the "open Christian" university. Its members are not bound in common cause by Christology, which is the authenticating mark of the church (it should not be expected that there will be, in the university, a common answer to the question, What think ye of Christ?). Rather, members of the university must bind themselves together in the passion for human wholeness which was at the center of Christ’s message and mission.

So the "open Christian" university is able to welcome into its community of inquiry an invigorating pluralism -- both on the faculty and in the student body, men and women of varying religious commitments, Christian and non-Christian -- without compromise to the integrity of its educational (that is to say, anthropological) mission. The fact that the Christian passion for humanity may resemble other forms of humanism which appear to owe nothing to specific Christian origin or inspiration, and that humanists outside the Christian tradition can make a common commitment with Christians to enlarge and enhance the human and humane, does not mean that these individuals’ differing sources of humanism are to be treated deprecatingly or indifferently; Christians will see in those sources evidence of the radical freedom and the unpredictable activity of the Logos, to which the Fourth Gospel first gave witness.

Furthermore, the university needs that pluralism for the full truthfulness of its inquiry, not only in dealing with structures but also in its witness to meanings. Even within Christian history, there is no single locus from which our meanings derive. If the biblical tradition is our primary source with. Jesus Christ at its center, it is by no means our only -- source. The biblical tradition itself constantly points beyond itself: Israel’s prophets acknowledging God’s revealing activity in the lives of other nations; Paul declaring himself to be debtor to both Jews and Greeks. And if the center of our faith is not simply Jesus but Jesus as the Christ -- not simply a man trapped within the limitations of his own history, but the creative Word that God speaks throughout his creation -- then Christians must be attentive to what God may have to say to them through the general culture and history, regardless of how apparently lacking those may be in credentials for such communication.

Because evangelicals have traditionally placed -- doctrinal, if not dogmatic, tests on scholarly membership in their communities of inquiry, and because of their consequent reluctance to hear the truth wherever and by whomever it is spoken, they may be unable to offer that inclusiveness without which university inquiry becomes mere parochial indoctrination.

Clarifiers of Faith -- or Arbiters?

Consider, finally, that sort of moral learning which ought to characterize a university. With respect to value issues, no institution of higher education can be either officially neutral or unofficially indifferent without falling into self-contradiction, since there can be no community gathered for humane scholarship apart from the institutionalization of certain values; for example, the value attached to truth-seeking, to ideas, to disinterestedness, to empirical, evidential and rational procedures; or convictions about the nonidiosyncratic and nonunivocal character of truth. And undergirding, overarching, and interpenetrating all such values is the root value of the human enterprise: selves in all of their relations. A community of humane scholarship is thus a value construct itself. Institutions which attempt, officially or unofficially, to deny or ignore explicit value questions are engaged in a behavior which is dis-integral, if not actually immoral, since they perpetrate the illusion of neutrality or indifference while actively taking sides.

Moreover, the academic disciplines practiced in a university are not merely subjects for study; they are forms of human behavior. And like all human behavior, they bear inherent moral implicates -- their practice has consequences which are not morally indifferent -- which cannot be ignored without doing intellectual violence to the disciplines themselves. So a university is a moral enterprise, whether all of its members would have it so or not.

The moral learning which ought to take place in a university does not mean some form of moral imposition or authoritarianism. Indeed, moral imposition and prescription are precisely the opposite of morally serious behavior; for while the arbitrary imposition of authority, whether mental or moral, can create conditioned reflexes, it is powerless to bring about responsible action. Such action is not prescribed; it is chosen. Therefore, one function of a university, whether in teaching or research, in classrooms or dormitories, is to assist all of its members, and indeed all of its constituencies, toward that achievement of moral clarity -- toward the clarification of the moral issues and alternatives which are resident in the university itself and in the disciplines it practices -- which surely is an essential ingredient in all responsible action.

Similarly, the "open Christian" point of view cannot permit a definition of the end of higher education in terms of the acceptance by the student of a Christian ethical view of life. Such a view is not an arbitrary convention; it is, rather, a view aspired to by one who has first confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord. Paul insisted in I Corinthians that "no man can say that Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Spirit," and Jesus confirmed that order of things in words recorded in the Fourth Gospel: "No man can come to me, except the Father draw him." Christians do not command the Spirit of God in the university; nor is education -- not even Christian education -- a substitute for the work of the Holy Spirit. At best, our efforts are preparatio evangelium. The late Clarence Tucker Craig was right when he wrote; in essence, that the more effective service we can render to the Christian faith is to state it clearly. Persuasion is the work of God.

The "open Christian" university will not be a self-serving agency intended to provide a theologically and ethically safe and prescriptive environment for the churches’ own young people. Although the analogy of university to hospital is not often enough invoked, it points to a critical dimension of the university’s mission. The test of admission to a Christian hospital is not church membership but the prospective patient’s need for certain healing for which the hospital possesses special competence. Since biblical sanction can be claimed for the view that healing is intrinsically good. the test of a hospital’s Christian adequacy lies in measures of healing, not in conversion rates. Similarly, the test of admission to a Christian university ought not be church membership, but the prospective student’s need for the kind of healing -- wholeness -- for which the university possesses special competence. Since biblical sanction can be claimed for the view that learning is intrinsically good, the test of a university’s Christian adequacy, as well as the justification of its purpose, lies in its standards of learning, not in its conversion rate.

Because evangelicals have traditionally viewed institutions of higher learning as arms of the churches, and because they have required that those institutions serve as the guarantors rather than the clarifiers of the churches’ faith to its young people, evangelicals may be incapable of generating the morally serious learning which is a mark of the university.

A Failure of Will and Nerve

This article began with the observation that the evangelical university has failed to appear in the postwar years of the movement’s resurgence, and asked, Why not? I want to conclude with a question which I hope evangelical readers will ask; namely, where can we go to find the "open Christian" university in action?

That question is as embarrassing to "open Christians" as I hope the earlier one will be to evangelicals. For my own judgment is that the "open Christian" university does not exist in exemplary form either. (I leave unsettled, for the moment the question as to whether or not exemplary "open Christian" colleges can be found.) There are, to be sure, a number of universities that still locate themselves somewhere within the Christian tradition, that do not fall under the strictures which I have applied to evangelicals -- though the number dwindles yearly. But nowhere in my recent acquaintance has there been a successful effort deliberately and committedly to articulate, design and implement an "open Christian" institution of university grade. Why not?

The reason is not, as in the evangelical case, a lack of compatibility. The problem, I am forced to conclude, lies in a failure of "open Christian" will and nerve. We have acquiesced in the popular but mistaken notion that only a secular university can be really first-rate -- as though secular meant uncommitted and therefore fit for scholarship. But surely we ought to have learned, in recent years of intellectual debate, that "open" is not a term which in scholarship can stand by itself without vacuity; it has-significance only as a modifier. There may be "open Christians," or "open democratic humanists," and perhaps by now even "open Marxists." Freedom for scholarship exists only where openness is joined with an honestly (openly!) acknowledged ideological point of view from which scholarship can proceed.

A significant educational and religious breakthrough might occur in the founding of a Christian university, if we could find a way to join the evangelical will and nerve with the university compatibility of the "open Christian."

Jesus on Marriage and the Afterlife

Jesus eschatological assertion was a response to a skeptical question raised by Sadducees during his last week in Jerusalem. They found no basis for a doctrine of resurrection in the "books of Moses," the only scriptures they recognized as authoritative. Quite accurately, that priestly party recognized that the concept of an individual afterlife arose long after the Pentateuch was written.

Apocalyptic Judaism introduced into the Palestinian culture the idea of a postmortem revival of the body. The Book of Daniel contains this forecast: "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (12:2). That late Hebrew outlook was developed during the era when Persia dominated Western Asia. The Persian prophet Zoroaster taught that there would be a life after death, its pleasures and pains similar to those experienced in this life. An eternity of happy marriage and sensuous pleasures would reward the righteous. Apocalyptic Judaism may also have been influenced by ideas from the opposite end of the fertile crescent. Egyptians believed in an afterlife in which wives and lands would bear abundantly.

Baruch’s Apocalypse is a good example of the materialistic ideas about the afterlife that were popular during Jesus’ time: "The earth shall then assuredly restore the dead which it now receives, in order to preserve them. It shall make no change in their form" (50:1-4). Some Pharisaic rabbis assumed that marriage and propagation would continue unchanged in the life after death. Their party tended to believe that there would be a reanimation of relics at the time of divine judgment.

The conservative Sadducees scorned the newfangled notions that apocalyptic Judaism had imported from alien cultures. To ridicule the doctrines of the rival Pharisaic party, they added a stinging question to an old Jewish tale. Tobit had told a story about seven husbands who died in succession shortly after marrying the same bride. The Sadducees asked Jesus which one of them would be married to the widow in the afterlife. Rather than seeking information, they were trying to trap Jesus into advocating an idea that was both nontraditional and absurd. Enraged by his denunciation of the temple commercialization in which they were engaged, these priests struck back in this and other ways.

Since through most of its history the church has championed a doctrine of physical resurrection similar to that of apocalyptic Judaism. Christians have found the Sadducees’ question difficult and Jesus’ answer baffling. Several quite different attempts have been made to solve this interpretive puzzle.

The feminist interpretation is the most recent. Ruth Barnhouse thinks Jesus is saying that the patriarchal marriage system is obsolete in heaven (Male and Female: Christian Approaches to Sexuality [Seabury, 1976] pp. 233-34). In that ideal realm a woman has autonomy and is not treated as a possession to be "given in marriage" to groom after groom. Sexism is intrinsic to the Sadducees’ story, for there would have been no dilemma had matriarchal polyandry rather than patriarchal polygyny been sanctioned in ancient Israel. Under polyandry the woman could have been married eternally to all seven men at once!

Though Jesus treated women as the equals of men, the thrust of his criticism of the Sadducees’ position lies elsewhere. The case they presented involves the levirate custom, a means for elevating a widow’s low status. To relieve social shame and economic deprivation, a brother was obliged to provide offspring for a childless, widowed sister-in-law. This surrogate-father system strengthened the possibility of family continuity. The Book of Ruth demonstrates that a woman’s dignity in ancient Israel was enhanced by the levirate custom.

In the course of church history, Jesus response to the Sadducees has most often been interpreted as favoring celibacy. From the third-century church father Cyprian, through Vatican II, the prevailing Roman Catholic interpretation has been that those who preserve their virginal chastity are vanguards of a realm where people will be like sexless, pure angels. Max Thurian, a Protestant monk, has stated: "Celibacy is related to the resurrection of the dead: it is a sign of eternity, of incorruptibility and of life" Marriage and Celibacy [Allenson, 1959]. p.115).

In one of the earliest comments on Mark 12:25, Clement of Alexandria rejected this interpretation. He recognized that, since the marital state had been blessed by Jesus, his words here should not be read as a denigration of marriage. Clement discerned that Jesus’ criticism was directed not against marriage but against a carnal interpretation of the resurrection. By a reductio ad absurdum, Clement reasoned that monks who reject marriage because it involves physical intercourse, which is not a part of the everlasting life, should also abstain from eating or drinking.

In recent years a growing consensus has maintained that what Jesus is saying about resurrection is distinctively different from either the feminist or the celibate interpretations. According to this emerging viewpoint, in contrast to the Sadducees, Jesus is asserting that there is a life after death and, in contrast to the Pharisees, he is saying that it is not a carbon copy of earthly life. As generally institutionalized, marriage bonds a man and a woman from unrelated families in order to provide the genetic diversity and lengthy nurture needed by their anticipated offspring. Sidney Callahan suggests that in contrast to this exclusive sexual union, the resurrected life is inclusive. This Catholic writer expresses her heavenly ideal in this way: "The ecstasy of male-female coupling could be expanded to all human relationships" (Beyond Birth Control [Sheed & Ward, 1968]. p. 6).

The life of the earliest Christian community, in Jerusalem. may afford a clue to this more inclusive life. These Christians were able, at least temporarily, to expand the communal bond of ideal family life by sharing their possessions, transcending a mine-thine dichotomy, they received from members according to their abilities and gave to them according to their needs. Similarly, in the resurrected community, the harmonious give and take of a happy family will be expanded to all so that all will be in perfect concord.

One of Paul’s letters to the Christians at Corinth provides help in understanding Jesus’ resurrection doctrine. Although raised a Pharisee, the apostle did not accept the idea of a "flesh and blood" resurrection. To him, the afterlife was not a mere continuation of the physical life of eating and reproducing, he believed that humans cannot fully imagine what has been prepared for those who love God. Since love abides forever as an attribute of God, in the deathless life with Christ personal relationships will be more loving than they are in this life.

Sentiments similar to Paul’s have occasionally been expressed by other Christians. In the famous sonnet beginning "How do I love thee?" Elizabeth Barrett Browning ponders the profundity of her love for Robert. and then concludes: "If God chooses. I shall but love thee better after death." In his Bottom Line Catechism for Contemporary Catholics, Father Andrew Greeley likewise asserts: "We will love one another in the resurrected life even more intensely, even more joyfully than we do in the present life. . . . It is utterly unthinkable that there would not be between those who work close to one another on earth an even more powerful and more rewarding intimacy in the life of the resurrection" (Thomas More, 1982. pp. 105-106). Thus the best way to gain insight into the hereafter is to extrapolate on the deepest earthly love. Marital loves will become something wonderfully inclusive and intense as persons move from the provisional material sphere to the permanent spiritual one.

Our earthbound imaginations pale at intuiting the nonsensory, thus limiting our understanding of both science and religion. Astronomer Carl Sagan has observed that when they try to imagine extraterrestrial life, scientists are often quite mundane, for they rely heavily on forms already known. Similarly, Christians often are no more able to envisage what is beyond space and time than fetuses, living in darkness and fluid, are able to imagine what it is like to smell stimulating aromas, see colorful sights and savor tasty foods. Imagining antimatter in the nucleus of an atom or conceiving of fleshless selves among whom there is personal communication requires a radically new way of seeing.

The nature of life after death, like the nature of God, transcends all of our conceptions. But New Testament theology assures us that it is not less than the happiest life of communal caring and sharing that we can now experience or conceive.

Christian Perspectives on Suicide

Suicide remains a taboo subject, even though there are about as many suicides in the nation each year as there were American deaths in the entire Vietnam war. Of the 50,000 annual suicide deaths, about half are not reported as such. Even though suicide occurs with frequency and in virtually every community, I have never heard or read a sermon on the subject. No mention is made of suicide in several books I possess that deal with Christian morality. James Clemons, in his article "Suicide and Christian Moral Judgment," rightly indicts biblical scholars, Christian ethicists and contemporary pastors for neglecting to think through suicide-related issues in a responsible manner (The Christian Century. May 8, 1985).

The Bible tells of six self-killings. The best known is that of the betrayer Judas as recorded in Matthew. A thousand years earlier, King Saul fell on his sword rather than become a captive of the Philistines who had defeated his army. Another notable suicide is recorded in the Book of Judges. Samson desired to take revenge on the Philistines who had tortured him, and so he prayed: "Please God, give me back my strength just this one time more, so that I can get even with the Philistines for making me blind." He then pushed against the pillars supporting the temple of the god Dagon and shouted. "Let me die with the Philistines!" When the building fell, Samson perished, along with many of his enemies. The biblical writers neither condemn nor commend those whom they record as having taken their own lives. Perhaps the narrators thought it was fitting for Samson, Saul and Judas to respond to their varied situations by committing suicide. (The other three biblical suicides were minor Old Testament figures.)

In early Christianity, suicide was sometimes regarded as a virtuous act. Eusebius, in his account of martyrs at Antioch (Ecclesiastical History, Book 8, chapter 12), tells of a mother who taught her two beautiful unmarried daughters to regard rape as the most dreadful thing that could happen to them. Eventually the mother and daughters were captured by a band of lustful soldiers. On realizing their plight, they modestly requested to be excused for a minute. They then threw themselves into a nearby river and drowned.

In the fourth century Bishop Augustine discussed suicide at length. Recognizing that certain Christian women had committed suicide rather than permit their bodies to be ravaged, Augustine granted that they may have done what was right in the sight of God, but in his view the women should not have assumed that rape would necessarily have deprived them of their purity. Purity is a state of mind, he affirmed, so bodily violence cannot damage it. Job kept his moral integrity amid terrible suffering and did not take his life, Augustine noted. He found it significant that at no point does the Bible make it lawful to take one’s life. The command "Thou shalt not kill" implies, he argued, that one’s own life as well as the lives of others should be preserved. Samson’s suicide was a rare exception to this rule, for he received special divine permission. Concluded Augustine: "He who knows it is unlawful to kill himself may nevertheless do so if he is ordered by God" (City of God, Book I, Sections 18-26).

Augustine’s viewpoint on suicide has heavily influenced both Roman Catholics and Protestants. Thomas Aquinas, the most outstanding of Catholic theologians, gave three succinct arguments why suicide is a sin against self, neighbor and God. First, suicide is contrary to nature: every living organism naturally desires to preserve its life. Second, it is contrary to our social obligations: the whole human community is injured by self-killing. Third, suicide is contrary to our religious rights: God alone should decide when a person will live or die. Aquinas reasoned: "To bring death upon oneself in order to escape the other afflictions of this life is to adopt a greater evil in order to avoid a lesser. . . . Suicide is the most fatal of sins because it cannot be repented of" (Summa Theologica 2-2, q. 64,5). The poet Dante, following Aquinas’s theology, placed those who take their own lives on the seventh level of hell, below the greedy and the murderous (Inferno 13). For centuries those who committed the unconfessed and therefore unforgivable sin of suicide were not buried in cemeteries that Catholic priests had consecrated.

The 17th-century Westminster Shorter Catechism, which remains authoritative for Calvinists, follows Augustine in relating one of the Ten Commandments to suicide. The Catechism asserts: "The sixth commandment forbiddeth the taking away of our own life, or the life of our neighbor unjustly, or whatsoever tendeth thereunto."

Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer also showed his indebtedness to Augustine when he wrote: "God has reserved to himself the right to determine the end of life, because he alone knows the goal to which it is his will to lead it." When that leader of the German resistance to Hitler was being persecuted -- prior to his imprisonment and execution -- he affirmed: "Even if a person’s earthly life has become a torment for him, he must commit it intact to God’s hand, from which it came" (Ethics [Macmillan, 1955], pp. 124-5).

An examination of our biblical and church heritage discloses different degrees of tolerance toward suicide. For some it is always absolutely wrong; for others it may be an appropriate response in exceptional situations. The historical discussion provides some guidance for facing current dilemmas. Modern medicine occasionally extends artificially the time of death -- a fact that has generated fresh inquiry into situations in which suicide might be acceptable. Let us consider three cases involving elderly persons.

After a 78-year-old man was admitted to a hospital, an examination revealed an erratic heart beat, an enlarged prostate, a bowel obstruction and arthritic joints. When the patient learned that surgery was being planned, he pleaded: "Listen, doctor, I don’t want to die with tubes sticking out all over me. I don’t want my children to remember their father that way. I’m old and tired and have seen enough of life, believe me. But still I want to be a man, not a vegetable that someone comes and waters every day. You see, the engine is broken down; it is time for the engineer to abandon it." Despite this eloquent request, a tube for feeding was placed down the old man’s nose into his stomach. Intravenous injections were made four times a day. Later the man was hooked up to a respirator to increase his oxygen intake. One night he reached over and switched off his respirator. For several hours the hospital staff did not realize what had happened. On the bedside table they found this suicide note: "Death is not the enemy, doctor. Inhumanity is."

Another pathetic case concerns an 80-year-old blind widow who had lived for years in a nursing home. Having endured uninterrupted pain from her cancer, she saved up morphine tablets to swallow all at once in the hope of dying. She sank into a coma, but an attendant discovered the suicide attempt. The woman’s consciousness revived after she was rushed to a hospital emergency room and injected with an antimorphine drug. She was later returned to the nursing home, where she had to suffer much longer. Had she the right to take the deadly dosage of the drug and to die undisturbed after doing so?

The third case is the much-publicized one of Elizabeth and Henry Pitney Van Dusen. Dr. Van

Dusen, age 77, was the former president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary and a distinguished Presbyterian minister. He and his wife, Elizabeth, age 80, discussed suicide with their friends and then signed a pact before taking an overdose of sleeping pills. She wrote:

We have both had very full and satisfying lives. . . . But since Pitney had his stroke five years ago, we have not been able to do any of the things we want to do . . . and my arthritis is much worse. There are also many helpless old people who without modern medicinal care would have died, and we feel God would have allowed them to die when their time had come. Nowadays it is difficult to die. We feel that this way we are taking will become more usual and acceptable as the years pass. We are both increasingly weak and unwell, and who would want to die in a nursing home? . . . "O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace."

The Van Dusens realized that some nursing homes are virtual tombs where the elderly are buried alive. They asked for God’s forgiveness in advance for any wrong they might be committing by their decision to leave this life before they needlessly suffered even more. Although they did not say so, they were probably also disturbed by the thought of the loneliness that would follow if one survived the other.

In 1980, the New York-based organization Concern for Dying convened a group of psychiatrists, philosophers and theologians who prepared a statement on suicide for the terminally ill which is relevant to the cases I have cited:

Historically, suicide has been judged as "sinful" by organized religion. . . . We do not dispute the contention that the majority of suicides represent a rejection of the "gift of life" and, as such, are evidence of severe emotional distress. We believe, however, that a person with a progressive terminal disease faces a unique situation -- one which calls for a new look at traditional assumptions about the motivation for choosing suicide. In our view, this choice might be found to be reasoned, appropriate, altruistic, sacrificial, and loving. We can imagine that an individual faced with debilitating, irreversible illness, who would have to endure intractable pain, mutilating surgery, or demeaning treatments -- with added concern for the burden being placed on family and friends -- might conclude that suicide was a reasonable, even generous, resolution to a process already moving inexorably toward death.

The Concern for Dying group that made this declaration also urges that suicide decisions of the terminally ill not be made in secret. Consultation should be encouraged with family, friends and/or trusted health-care professionals who have an intimate knowledge of the patient. Impulsive acts could thereby be curtailed; on the other hand, assistance could be given in implementing thoughtful decisions. Also, bungled suicide attempts which leave a person in a worse state of health might be avoided.

At a 1981 Concern for Dying conference, Margaret Battin, who has written texts on ethical issues in suicide, envisioned a time in the distant future when Christians would come to treat suicide as a kind of sacrament involving a serious grappling with ultimate questions. She thinks that because of their impact on the immediate family and the larger community, suicide decisions should not be treated as exclusively private matters. Families who are uninvolved can suffer debilitating guilt.

Although Battin’s hopes for a new sacrament may be unrealistic, most Christians and non-Christians will probably agree that Aquinas’s condemnation of all suicides is too harsh. Certainly there is no basis in biblical or patristic teachings for regarding suicide as the most deadly sin. As we have seen, there is no explicit prohibition of suicide anywhere in the canonical texts of Christianity. In his essay "On Suicide," philosopher David Hume comes closer than Augustine in giving a correct contextual interpretation of a law of Moses. "Resignation to Providence is indeed recommended in Scripture," he stated, "but that implies only submission to ills that are unavoidable, not to such as may be remedied by prudence or courage. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is evidently meant to exclude only the killing of others over whose life we have no authority."

Besides eschewing the traditional condemnatory stance toward all suicides, Christians need to be correctly informed about people who contemplate, attempt or carry out suicide. It is frequently asserted, for example, that suicide is the product of a diseased mind. The fact is that while psychotics are higher suicide rises than the rest of the population, most of those who commit suicide have no history of severe mental illness. Another half-truth is that suicide runs in families. The fact is that there is no evidence that genetic inheritance predisposes some people to self-destruction. It is also misleading to say that it is only depressed people who commit suicide. Not all suicidal persons have suffered from depression, and those who are in a despondent mood may lack the energy to fulfill their resolve. Many suicides occur after individuals come out of depression and are presumed by their friends to have regained mental health. It is also unsupported folk wisdom that suicide tends to be seasonal, with more suicides taking place during bad weather or at Christmastime when some people are most lonely. Some people distance themselves from those who talk about suicide, believing that there is no stopping those who have decided on that course of action. Actually, most who seem intent on suicide are ambivalent and never carry out their decision. Related to this is another half-truth: the suicide-prone are so deeply disturbed that only a professional psychotherapist should deal with them. Sensitive listening by laypersons has often reduced stress and preserved life.

Christians need to learn to be especially understanding of families that have sustained suicides. It is appalling to a family when one of its members decides that he or she would rather be dead than continue to share their company. Since no illness or accident is to blame for the killing, they are consumed with guilt. A father of a son who committed suicide said: "Everyone has a skeleton in the closet. But the person who kills himself leaves his skeleton in another’s closet." Family members tend to think: if only they had avoided those quarrels, it would not have happened. Sometimes they are so ashamed that they dread facing their acquaintances in the community. Not only do they feel socially isolated, but they may also feel spiritually alienated. Such alienation may be expressed in resentment toward God for allowing such an injustice to happen to them. Or they may feel self-hatred for having contributed to the nurture of someone who, as they see it, arrogantly took his or her life -- a prerogative of God alone: A survivor’s grief may be so severe that it can become a cause of self-execution on the part of the bereaved.

Having reflected on the usual tragedy of suicide and its horrendous impact on survivors, we must ask: Are there any situations in which it is morally right? Donne’s position is a helpful guide for facing the broad range of circumstances confronting the Christian. There may well be situations in which suicide can be a conscientious act resulting from a careful weighing of alternatives. The Van Dusens’s suicide note, for example, displays serious and rational decision-making by Christians. After the couple died, a committee of the Presbytery of New York City wisely concluded that for some Christians, as a last resort in the gravest of situations, suicide may be an act of their Christian conscience."

Darwin, the Scientific Creationist

Three basic positions on the relationship between science and theology have emerged in the modern era. Antitheological scientism is at one pole and antiscientific creationism is at the other. An outstanding example of one who held the former position is French philosopher Auguste Comte, who lived in the early 19th century. History shows, he claimed, a progressive change in the way natural happenings have been explained. In humankind’s childhood it was presumed that personal divine spirits caused the movements of nature. However, with the coming of the age of scientific maturity, speculation about divine causation is dismissed as superstition, and nature is seen as solely the interaction of impersonal forces. Comte called his philosophy "positivism," and its reductionism and atheism have had a significant impact during the past century.

At the opposite extreme is antiscientific creationism, which claims that the primary assumptions of biblical theology and natural science are mutually exclusive and that the latter must be rejected. A leading spokesman for this position is Henry Morris, director of the Institute for Creation Research. Tireless lobbying by that California-based society for the past decade is largely responsible for the introduction in a number of states of legislation that would require giving equal time in science classes to the teaching of the alleged single account of creation as recorded in Genesis.

Morris, although trained as an engineer, states quite categorically: "It is only in the Bible that we can possibly obtain any information about the methods of creation, the order of creation, the duration of creation, or any of the other details of creation." About 6,000 years ago, he affirms, creation was completed in six days, as the opening chapter of Genesis records. Even though it flatly contradicts astronomy, geology and biology, Morris attempts to defend a literal reading of his textbook on the facts of nature: "The Bible teaches that the earth existed before the stars, that it was initially covered by water, that plant life preceded the sun, that the first animals created were the whales, that birds were made before insects, that man was made before woman."

Morris bluntly concludes: "If the Bible is really the word of God . . . then evolution and its geological age-system must be completely false." Polls show that a sizable proportion of the American population agrees with Morris that scientific theories on natural origins are in conflict with revealed religion and should not be taught unless they can be supplemented by a theological corrective.

Charles Darwin rejected both the positivistic outlook and the biblical literalism that were championed in his day. Although he is usually thought of as subversive to all creation theories, an examination of his personal writings and his major work, Origin of Species, shows this view to be incorrect. He related some themes of biblical theology to natural selection in a sophisticated manner. His formal education gave him excellent preparation for the religious aspects of this endeavor, since the only academic degree he ever earned was in theology, after a three-year course of study at Cambridge University. A main text in the curriculum was written by archdeacon William Paley. Decades later Darwin recalled: "I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology. I could almost formerly have said it by heart."

At Cambridge Darwin came to know some of the sharpest thinkers in the Church of England, and from that time onward he seriously attempted to harmonize science and religion. He had been planning on a career as an Anglican minister until Professor Henslow, a biologist and clergyman, recommended him for the position of naturalist on the Beagle. In his Autobiography Darwin recalls that he was so orthodox while on board the Beagle that some of the officers laughed at him for quoting the Bible as authoritative. He also states that for a long period after his return he spent a great deal of time thinking about religion.

It was, then, over two decades before he published Origin of Species that Darwin replaced biblical literalism with a "more simple and sublime" theology, one in which God is viewed as ordaining that creation operate without interference, through the natural law that he established. In an 1837 notebook Darwin jotted down this reflection:

Before the attraction of gravity was discovered . . . astronomers might have said God ordered each planet to move in its particular destiny. In the same manner God orders each animal created with certain forms in certain countries. But how much more simple and sublime to let attraction act according to certain law.

Further, wrote Darwin in an 1842 essay, "It is derogatory that the Creator of countless systems of worlds should have created each of the myriads of creeping parasites and slimy worms which have swarmed each day of life . . . on this one globe."

Darwin’s cosmic perspective displays the impact on his thinking of Isaac Newton, who taught at Cambridge two centuries before Darwin. Newton stated his scientific creationism in this manner: "Bodies may . . . continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet . . . this most beautiful system . . . could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." Both Newton and Darwin believed that a rational God who established a law-abiding cosmos was more worthy of devotion than a capricious deity.

Darwin conceived of evolutionary law in the realm of biology as parallel to gravitational law in the realm of astrophysics. In correspondence with geologist Charles Lyell in 1861, Darwin wrote:

Astronomers do not state that God directs the course of each comet and planet. The view that each variation has been providentially arranged seems to me to make natural selection entirely superfluous, and indeed takes the whole case of the appearance of new species out of the range of science. . . . Why should you or I speak of variation as having been ordained and guided, more than does an astronomer, in discussing the fall of a meteoric stone? He would simply say that it was drawn to our earth by the attraction of gravity.

Knowing well the opposition that the Origin would provoke, Darwin attempted to head off at the outset the either/or type of illogic which barred many from integrating science and creation. He wanted to assure his readers that an open-minded exploration of his ideas need not threaten people who had a rational outlook on theology. At the beginning of his book Darwin placed three quotations that relate theology to nature. The first was written by William Whewell, a professor with whom Darwin had conversed on "grave subjects" while studying at Cambridge. That philosopher of science contributed to the Bridgewater Treatise series works designed to show "the power, wisdom, and goodness of God as manifested in creation." The opening sentence of the Origin contains these words from Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise: "Events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case. but by the establishment of general laws." Those words echo Newton’s widely accepted theology which held that God does not directly intervene in the natural order.

Darwin’s second introductory quotation affirms that the natural order presupposes a continual intelligent agent. It comes from Analogy of Revealed Religion, by Joseph Butler, the bishop of Durham. That famous defender of orthodoxy saw reason and revelation as companions, not enemies. The last quotation for launching the Origin is Francis Bacon’s plea for an endless investigation into the Bible and into nature. He claimed that no one should presume that it is possible to search too far either in the "book of God’s word or in the book of God’s works."

At a few places Darwin introduced theological comments within the body of the Origin. In chapter six this question is asked: "Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?" Darwin there reminded his readers that centuries earlier a geocentric world was intellectually more satisfying to ordinary people, but eventually the realization came that the voice of the people cannot be trusted to be the voice of God. In Darwin’s day many liked to think that God had formed the eye at the time of animal creation in a way parallel to that of an engineer making an optical instrument. The construction of a telescope, for example, is completed soon after it is designed. Darwin, however, argued that the eye is the result of complex processes that have gone on for millions of years. He asks: "May we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?" Darwin, like the prophet Isaiah, attempted to enlarge awareness of God’s greatness by rejecting a naïve identification of commonly accepted ideas with the order he established.

In the Origin’s concluding chapter Darwin appropriately states: "I see no reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone." To lower the evolution anxieties of those with religious beliefs, he quotes Charles Kingsley, a distinguished priest in the Church of England. In a letter to Darwin, Kingsley acknowledges that he has discarded the idea that God created immutable species at the beginning of time and that he "has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms." Kingsley learned from Darwin to interpret the elimination of God’s immediate control over events as heightening God’s glory, rather than reducing God’s power.

Darwin then distinguishes his "plan of creation" from the belief in "special creations" by drawing on a dual causation theory developed by Thomas Aquinas. That medieval theologian distinguished between the primary or ultimate cause, God, and the secondary or mediate cause, natural phenomena. Secondary causation does not exclude and is not in conflict with primary causation. The last paragraphs of the Origin contain this theological comment:

To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. . . . There is grandeur in this view of life . . . having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

In the final sentence of the Origin Darwin deliberately uses biblical terminology in referring to all creatures as being inbreathed by God. In regard to that sentence British scientist and theologian Arthur Smethurst rightly comments: "There seems no reason why a Christian should not entirely endorse these words. . . . It is the way of God to work in nature through consistent and regular processes which we call the principles of nature."

Throughout his life Darwin held the view that evolution does not supplant creation, but that they supplement each other. While recognizing that his competence was mainly as a scientist, he was accepting of people who overlapped the scientific and religious spheres more than he did. Once, in referring to Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist and orthodox Presbyterian whom he frequently cited in his books, he wrote: "It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist."

By rejecting a rigid either/or type of thinking Darwin was a more cautious scientist than Auguste Comte and a more profound theologian than Henry Morris. Comte myopically saw only the immediate scientific causation and was oblivious to a possible higher cause. Antievolutionist Morris is guilty of gross misuse of language in calling his position "scientific creationism." If his approach is scientific, then we are living in the Middle Ages. Darwin, however, deserves to be called a scientific creationist because he attempted to knit together scientific and theological theories in a way that affords a more unified and comprehensive view of reality. Regarding beginnings, Darwin draws on historical theology for an answer to the question of who, but on empirical science for an answer to the question of how.

When Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey a century ago, it was fitting that pallbearers, including both clergy and scientists, laid his body to rest near the grave of fellow scientific creationist Isaac Newton. Also, an appropriate anthem was composed for the occasion from words selected from Proverbs: "Happy is the man that findeth wisdom/ and the man that getteth understanding. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her! and happy is every one that retaineth her./ The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth:/ by understanding hath he established the heavens."

Why Bother to Take God Seriously?

Most people haven't any interest in religion - mainly because they haven't any interest in God. If asked as part of a survey whether they "believed in God", many would say that they did, but there be would few if any differences in their lives compared to those who deny the existence of God. For most people, the subject of God is completely irrelevant, and that is an enormous pity.

Does God exist? If so, what's he/she/it like? These are pressing questions for all who bother to think about it, but because so many of the claims made by Christians are so odd and so simplistic, many thinking people shake their heads and walk away.

It's obviously not possible to believe everything, even if it were desirable. The Internet is crammed with websites devoted to all sorts of beliefs, ranging from the sensible to the ludicrous. We don't have the time or the energy (or the inclination) to investigate most of these, and so we tend to dismiss them out of hand. The problem with religion is similar to the problem with fiction: thousands of novels are published in English each year, and without literary critics and judging panels for awards like the Booker Prize, we'd be floundering around without any idea as to what might be worth reading and what probably isn't. Just as we need guides to help us through all the books, we need some way of sorting out the reasonable beliefs from the ridiculous ones.

Only a philistine would dismiss the very idea of religion out of hand: so many people find it meaningful that to see them all as misguided would be hugely arrogant. Although truth isn't established on the basis of a show of hands, there comes a point when the number of hands raised is so great that at the very least it should give us pause for thought.

The great world religions constitute an obvious short list of potentially reasonable beliefs, but even this is too long, unless we are prepared to give all our time to becoming familiar with each of them. The only practical solution is to focus on the religion that is dominant in our own culture. Although we live in what is often called a multi-faith society, the dominant religion is clearly Christianity. So when faced with the phenomenon of Christianity, what is the interested outsider to make of it? It appears to involve believing in the existence of an invisible super-person, who made everything and who keeps an eye on everything. Stemming from this belief are all sorts of other ones, such as the belief in an immortal soul, so that when we die we simply continue in another form, and (if we're lucky) do so in a glorious place called heaven. Not surprisingly, many intelligent, thoughtful people refuse to have anything to do with any of this, mainly on the grounds that there is no evidence worth speaking of to support it. Their reaction is perfectly reasonable and raises the question whether this belief in a super-person actually is what Christianity is all about.

God is traditionally thought of as a being (albeit a very special sort of being), and if we think along those lines then he/she/it must presumably "exist", in the same way that other beings or things, like people or chairs, "exist". But there are all sorts of ways of understanding the God symbol, with many thinking of God as a sort of philosophical ideal, much as the ancient Greeks might have done.

If the only version of God some people know is the one heard in Sunday School, it may come as a surprise for them to realise that viewing God as a symbol is possible within the church context. But in all other areas of human thought we allow, even expect, development: the understanding of physics of the primary school child is very different from that of the university student. Because adolescence usually marks the end of religious education, people get stuck in a sort of time warp. The good news is that there is religious life after Sunday School; the bad news is that we have to work at it.

Perhaps the best starting point for a sceptic is not to think in terms of trying to "believe in God". To put the work about God in terms of believing is to shut off all sorts of imaginative ways of imagining God. A better starting point is the recognition that all of us have depths in ourselves, which is what is meant by the word "soul". These depths are what yearn for the profound and the glorious and are not fed by the banal or the superficial. They are what is reached when we respond to music or art or poetry - or religion, which is a way of organising our search for what is most real or significant. Although many people are able to do without religion, they would be hugely impoverished if they tried to do without any sense of the profound in their lives.

Churches need to become places where people gather, not to reinforce their certainties about a being called "God", but to share in the experience of exploring ways of trying to satisfy their mutual spiritual hunger. The future for organised religion is bleak, unless we work at re-imagining and re-creating the God symbol, so that it really does speak to the spiritual needs of our time.

Where Two or More Are Gathered: Exploring Alternative Worship Strategies

Recently, I was asked to lead a workshop on alternative worship for a statewide annual denominational gathering. The following article is a condensation of my remarks at that conference.

How would it feel to participate in an extravagantly creative worship experience? Could a service be designed that mixes church tradition with original ideas? Does alternative worship enhance or alienate the church community? How does it effect outreach? As a frequent performer in alternative worship services and leader of a monthly jazz worship service in my hometown, I am in touch with churches nationwide that are currently exploring these questions. Worship planners tell me they are challenged by the need to balance the new with the old. Consider these recent emails regarding music programming. A Minnesota pastor writes, "I'm hoping the Worship Commission will want to move toward a musical road less traveled."

By contrast, a Pennsylvania parishioner insists, "I highly recommend using old?fashioned hymns because the theology is so good." A more balanced point of view acknowledges, "In my multiracial, multicultural, intergenerational church, we use the old [hymns] as well as the new to great effect." Clearly, rethinking worship traditions isn't easy but change is inevitable if the church is to survive. As a guest performer, I've seen firsthand how well?considered worship revitalization can reinvigorate members, increase attendance and bring back to church those The Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong quippingly dubs "The Christian Alumni Association."1

What is Worship? In seeking to rethink the worship service, one might ask; What is worship? The dictionary defines 'worship' as a prayer, church service or other rite showing reverence or devotion for a deity2 - an explanation that leads us nowhere. An encyclopedia offers a more useful description with its definition of 'ceremony' as formal activity prescribed by custom, ritual, or religious belief. Ceremonies serve to unite the members of a group, strengthen shared beliefs, celebrate achievements or milestones in the lives of individuals or groups, or to facilitate discussions. Music or dancing is often incorporated into the ceremonies of many societies.3 I like the illusions to community and the arts here better. Though the Bible contains 102 references to 'worship,' nowhere does it explain what it is.

Inspiration may be found, however, in Matthew in which an unnamed woman invents her own form of worship. Since it was subsequently approved by Jesus, it seems a legitimate source from which to consider the nature of worship.

Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, There came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat. But when his disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor. When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always. For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her. (Matthew 26:6-13)4

This woman's singular act of adoration demonstrates that effective worship integrates creativity, extravagance, understanding, originality, and spontaneity in a manner that is both personal and participatory as well as community enhancing. This conclusion is based on the following observations.

1. Worship is creative. Lacking a structured setting for worshiping Jesus, she invents her own expression.

2. Worship is extravagant. Though the perfume is valuable, she pours it all out for Jesus.

3. Worship is done with understanding. Apparently, she alone understands that Jesus really is going to die. Knowing that she will not be around, she performs a funeral rite on the living.

4. Worship is original and spontaneous. She does not wait for the perfect moment to express her faith. Though she interrupts the fellowship of Jesus with the disciples, she acts on her unique expression.

5. Worship is both personal and participatory. She DOES something which leads others to participate first in protest and later by illumination from their master.

6. Worship is community enhancing. Her act of worship enhances the disciple's understanding and ultimately the continuing Christian community as Jesus predicts in the last verse.

Applications How shall we apply the lessons offered by this scripture? Here are practical suggestions towards applying the points considered above.

I. Worship is creative

"A community can be so tightly organized that the spirit has no room to maneuver. Artist's have a way of loosening up a congregation to create room for the spirit to operate."5 - Rev. James R. Adams, President, The Center for Progressive Christianity

A. Invite Professional Artists in

"Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God".6 - Johannes Brahms * They are the experts -trained and paid to create. For most, their vocational choice amounts to a calling. * They think differently. They are seekers, always inquiring "What if..." * They are not inhibited by convention but can also draw from tradition * They look for resonance -they know how to invite in the spirit. * They are skilled at accommodating the diversity of contemporary culture. * Their presence will inspire non?artists towards more creative worship. * Having made sacrifices to pursue their craft, they understand devotion.

"There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire."7 - Carl Jung

B. How to Find Them:

"That does not keep me from having a terrible need of - shall I say religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars."8 - Vincent Van Gogh

Artists are often deeply connected to the spirit if initially suspicious of institutions. To reach them, put a notice in your bulletin or newsletter, post flyers in coffeehouses, place calls to the local arts council, high school and college art and music departments. Plan and implement a training event for worship, music and the arts to introduce interested area artists to the particulars of your denominational traditions.

C. Considerations When Working With Artists

"If it sounds good, it is good."9 - Peter Schickele * Look for "good" artists. Artistic expression must first be good, then "religious" or to put it another way, divine inspiration doesn't guarantee good art. * Give artists latitude to do what they do best. Be careful about elevating taste or custom to the level of morality or your own personal taste. * Avoid censorship ? If they go too far and the members are stirred up, then do something different next time. At least they aren't bored. * Push the boundaries a little, If it doesn't work, try something else.

II. Worship is extravagant

"The secret to life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made."10 - Groucho Marx

* Pay your professionals. If you can't afford to pay them a lot, then pay them a little. The investment will be worth it when your attendance rises and the offering plate will reflect their appreciation. * Pour out your love for one another and God. It's once resource that will not run dry. Most creative people will work for peanuts or even volunteer if they feel they are appreciated. * Take chances. Do something every once in a while that people will remember 20 years from now.

III. Worship is done with understanding

"Churches that are full of God are likely to find their pews full of people."11 - Marcus Borg

* Form a music and arts ministries steering committee and give them the power to learn about and make decisions regarding worship arts. * Make sure they collaborate with clergy who can feel unsupported in trying new things (we've always done it this way). * Inform yourself with scripture and consultation from those in the know but then go for it. You don't have to be an expert to express your love for God.

IV. Worship is original and spontaneous

"What we play is life."12 - Louis Armstrong

A. Originality

* Let the services be fluid within the tradition. Think "what can we do to enhance this part of the church year or to express the point of this reading? * Form a church arts council to dream up, organize (or regulate) activities. * Try not to narrow your definition of worship. Couldn't an exhibition of landscapes celebrate God's world? What can dance tell us about the miracle of our bodies? * Organize unusual arts worship events separate from regular Sunday services such as a meditation with improvised music or a labyrinth walk with original poetry. * Rotate services ? High Mass, normal, jazz service, contemporary service.

B. Spontaneity

"Great improvisors are like priests. They are thinking only of their god."13 - Stephane Grappelli, Jazz Violinist

* Make room for the unexpected - If you're happy and you know it, shout Amen! * Ask for individual petitions both silent and aloud * Invite outward expression i.e. Red of Pentecost, work clothes for labor day. * Host a jazz service * Ask for theological questions on 3 x 5 cards with the offering and answer a few of them publicly in place of the sermon. * Invite a visual artist to improvise a canvas during a sermon * Improvise music during prayers of the people. Put in the bulletin ? "A time of corporate and personal prayer is now provided. Please improvise your own prayers and offer them silently or aloud as is indicated ? as if the music, like incense, lifts our prayers to God."

Why Jazz Is Appropriate for Christian Worship * Jazz is multi-cultural and inclusive - Jazz was born in America when African rhythm - based music met with European harmonies. Later, Latin cultures introduced a third influence. With roots in several cultures, jazz continues to be performed and enjoyed by people of diverse backgrounds to this day. Jesus was radically inclusive. * Jazz is universal - Jazz is American and we are American. It is altogether right and appropriate to worship within our own cultural context. However, jazz is now enjoyed worldwide. I've performed jazz with musicians from around the world; sometimes even when we did not share a spoken language. God is both personal and universal. * Jazz is spontaneous - The essence of jazz is its improvisation. Performing everything as rehearsed is not jazz. With jazz, you are supposed to play it "your own way." When you listen to jazz, you are hearing raw ideas being given substance even as they must adapt to the musical setting. Many musicians describe a sense of ideas flowing through them rather than from them. In this sense, jazz is sacred as is all of God's work. Jazz imitates God's creation - ever evolving. * Jazz involves cooperation - It is a community that performs and receives jazz. Each musician is expected to both support the others and shine as an individual. Listeners inspire through their reactions to complete the circle. Church is about community. Christians are a community. * Jazz has a range - Sometimes meditative, sometimes celebratory, jazz is a spectrum of emotions and feelings. Without this ability to reflect the full range of human experience, it never would have lasted. Church life reflects this range of experience from the reflective Lent season to the joy of Pentecost, from baptisms to weddings to funerals.

V. Worship is both personal and participatory

"Be still and know that I am God."14 - Psalm 46:10

A. Personal

* Model and encourage all to BE PRESENT, sing loudly, listen to the instrumental music, observe the setting, feel God's presence. * Encourage reflection and silence by framing the experience. Say or write in the bulletin, "As we prepare ourselves for worship, let us observe silence."

B. Participatory

* Plan services that invite activity from many or all rather than only a presentation. * Encourage participation. The spirit visits those who let it in but they may have to be led to it. Say or write, "In Christian fellowship, we celebrate our beliefs by singing together." Or even more strongly, "Please sing with gusto, even a little hand clapping if you feel so moved." * Invite lay readers and lay readings along with scripture * Get kids involved. They can go way beyond just lighting candles. How about a processional with hand painted kites on a feast day? Ask teens studying foreign languages in school to create banners with words from several languages for Pentecost. * Pass out plastic eggs filled with popcorn during Easter season and have congregation shake to the beat. In the sermon, mention how eggs and seeds represent new life. * Offer choices - "Please stand, sit, or kneel as is your custom for prayer." * Look within your own flock for the hidden talents: 1. Got an architect in your parish? Ask one to arrange the space for a festival day. 2. Creative writer or poet? Ask one to rethink the Christmas play or contribute a poem around a reading. 3. Could a gifted seamstress contribute with a seasonal banner or liturgical sash? 4. Ask a craft lover to lead an Advent wreath making activity. 5. Graphic or visual artists could design rotating covers for the bulletin. 6. Program a variety of musical styles in services to allow room for self?taught or untraditional musicians who may currently feel excluded. "Why should the devil have all the good music?" 15 - Martin Luther

VI. Worship is community enhancing

"When worship is functioning as it should, it can be a powerful mediator of the sacred. It can open the heart, shape the religious imagination, and nourish the spiritual life, all within the experience of community." 16 - Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew

A. Build on existing Community

* Join hands sometimes * Extend the peace * Pray out loud for each other * Provide a forum for announcements * Create pre or post worship environments for fellowship * Bring on those potluck!

B. Use Worship Arts to extend Community Outreach

* Consider how the arts can help reach out to your city or area through worship and presentations. * Grow your own artists by offering classes in painting, forming a neighborhood orchestra, opening studio or informal performance space to a theater or dance company. Result: The neighborhood arts community and their friends come to church. * Consider sponsoring an alcohol free coffeehouse for college students or after school art activities for teens when they are most likely to get into trouble * Organize a benefit concert to raise money for a church outreach or ministry program. * Organize a concert series. You already have a piano and perfect room for presenting music. It's the easiest way to begin integrating the arts.

What to Expect After Introducing Alternative Worship:

"The church will die of boredom long before it dies from controversy."17- The Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong

* Some will be deeply moved. Some will be indifferent. Some may be indignant.

* Regardless of their reaction, a lot of talk will follow. This is good. People will be thinking about their church.

* Word will spread. You may lose a few but you will gain more if the spirit is present.

* Learn from your mistakes. Follow this formula: 1. Do it. 2. Fix it. 3. Do it better.

End notes

1. From his sermon January 25, 2001 at St. Stephen's Episcopal church, Columbus, Ohio.

2. Webster's New World Dictionary

4. King James

5. From an article titled Risking Art, Risking Faith by James R. Adams, President, The Center for Progressive Christianity.

6. From The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron; Perigee Books; Putnam Publishing, NYC; (c) copyright 1992 by Julia Cameron; ISBN # 0-87477-694-5 pbk. Original source unknown.

7. From The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Original source unknown.

8. From The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Original source unknown

9. Oft quoted by Peter Schickele on his National Public Radio show Schickele Mix.

11. The God We Never Knew : Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith by Marcus J. Borg; Harper San Francisco; ISBN: 0060610352

12. From The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Original source unknown.

13. From The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Original source unknown.

14. King James

15. Also attributed to Charles Wesley, General William Booth, Isaac Watts, and Larry Norman.

16. The God We Never Knew : Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith by Marcus J. Borg; Harper San Francisco; ISBN: 0060610352

17. From his sermon January 25, 2001 at St. Stephen's Episcopal church, Columbus, Ohio. May have other sources from his numerous books.