Articles – Page 137 – Religion Online

The Black Religious Crisis

There is something tragically askew in the religious state of black Americans; namely, the near-failure of qualitative development in integrated and/or separate black middle-class churches and denominations.

That same near-failure is of course evident in every mainstream Protestant denomination, black or white, whether the criteria be lack of growth or loss of adult membership, youth participation, trained clergy, theologically alert laity, or commitment to black ecumenism. But nowhere is this reality more poignant than among black United Methodists. Not only did they shrink by 140,000 between 1940 and 1964, but their attrition from an estimated 385,000 since the 1968 decree of "no more segregated jurisdictions" has paralleled the demise of the segregated Central Jurisdiction.

A Disquieting Inertia

Since there is no significant countervailing evidence in any integrated and/or middle-class denomination, the lack of qualitative development is the issue of moment -- one that can no longer be avoided without fatal consequences for the healthy growth of black church life.

It is a multifaceted issue laced with serious questions. Is the distinctive religion of black Americans culture-bound? Is it limited to the lower class and therefore alien to the middle class? Is it inherently racial and consequently inimical to integration or to functional interaction between self-accepting and other-regarding ethnics?

That dynamism is not the dominant pattern in middle-class black churches is a virtually undisputed fact, empirically verifiable by any unbiased investigator in most communities where middle-class blacks practice religion. It is precisely because of its pervasiveness that this inertia is so disquieting.

Owing largely to the controversy over more exciting debaters’ points (i.e, What is black religion, black theology, the black church? What is uniquely black in religion or theology or the church?), this alarming situation has been allowed quietly to fester. But, however important and interesting such discussions may prove to be -- and after all, black Christian life can be interpreted in a variety of ways of which none excludes the others -- they amount to little more than whistling in the dark apart from a vibrant community of participants. What is important is that the issue of lack of quality and quantity in middle-class black religious life be rightly understood and addressed. Dealt with in those terms, it is an issue of relevance to white and black churches alike.

Black Students: In Retreat from Religion

It may be that as chairman of Afro-American studies and professor of religious studies here at the University of Virginia, and as lecturer in both fields on some 100 U.S. campuses, I have been made more acutely aware than most of my fellow religionists to what must be called a crisis in the black religious spirit. In any case, in the past three years I have witnessed the emergence of a strange phenomenon. Whether in the classrooms on this campus or the lecture halls of other colleges, I have found that surprising numbers of white students (who are nothing if not middle class) are deeply interested in the study and application of religion.

The University of Virginia is but one of many institutions whose courses in religion are attracting hundreds. For example, in 1968 the faculty of the University of Virginia’s religious studies department consisted of two full-time members; in 1974 there are 14. Concomitantly, the number of students majoring in religion has mushroomed from a handful to over 200. However, only two of these are black. At the University of Virginia as at other universities, mainline religion, while admittedly one of the black community’s most important institutions, holds the least interest for black college students.

Indeed, almost everywhere black college students are for the most part compulsively antireligious. They do join gospel choirs and (like their white peers) take part in fundamentalist movements, but these involvements call for action, not for reflection. What is worse, even such superficial concerns appeal to fewer and fewer. The point at which the black students’ retreat from religion will bottom out and start the upswing is not in sight.

The fact is that one would be hard put to find a strong, independent department of religion at any black college. Generally, religion is dealt with in the philosophy/religion department. This state of affairs speaks volumes about religion among middle-class black students, parents, alumni, professors and administrators. They all seem to view religion as unamenable to research and serious inquiry.

Interesting as it would be to explore the reasons why middle-class black and white college students respond to religion in opposite ways, to do so would lead us too far from the issue at hand. Let me say only that the paucity of black students taking courses in religion means that, if and when they decide on a church commitment, they will find themselves at a great disadvantage. This sad situation may have antiblack consequences. For the church, an institution of great influence and potential strength, can be an instrument of community.

The erosion of middle-class church membership could be explained away as just another indication that blacks are no different from whites. But that would be to underestimate the crucial importance of religion in the black community, to shake off black religion and black theology, and to disregard the portent of antireligious black youth and proreligious white youth.

Some argue that the black middle-class churches’ loss of vitality is proof of the failure of integration. They imply that at best a marginal segment of the black religious population can be brought into the wider church community, and that for each black successfully integrated, ten or a dozen will be lost to nonintegrated churches or, more often, to all churches. This line of argument leads to the conclusion that the only institution capable of appealing to the black masses is the black church independent of white denominations.

Socialization Centers

This is an argument that may have merit, but it does violence to the facts. While the black denominations do enjoy a large membership, their churches for the most part are growing neither numerically nor theologically. Why? Because in truth they are middle-class churches. They generally do not reach the masses of working people and underprivileged families who comprise the vast majority of the black population. Hence their only recourse is to take the defensive by way of black ecumenism. This would be a justifiable tactic if it could become operational. But notwithstanding their rhetoric, black Baptists or Methodists -- who enjoy the largest following and are the most middle class of all black churches -- have no incentive for uniting intradenominationally, let alone interdenominationally. A teal black ecumenism, necessarily growing out of profound theological conviction, would seek the economic, political, religious, cultural and social uplift of the great masses. Were there such a black ecumenism the crisis would not be upon us.

It will not do to blame middle-class churches for the crisis, to scold them for having lost their roots and their evangelistic fervor, to say that they have waxed too fat -- too institutional, professional and formal. The trouble with this diagnosis is that ever since Reconstruction black middle-class churches have neither intended nor pretended to be anything other than socialization centers, where charitable activities crowded out prophetic witness and community spirit (as the significant exceptions make perfectly clear).

The influx of blacks into the cities during World War II occasioned neither great growth nor sharp decline in the black middle-class church. Indeed, that church is a fixture, the quintessence of stability and respectability. What is different today is that it is no longer taken for granted as something to join. Up to the time of the civil rights movement, becoming a church member was the preferred way to gain identification and social status and to forward political action. But the civil rights movement opened up new avenues of opportunity for blacks. Hence fewer blacks of middle age and even fewer under 30 feel drawn to the black church as a place of belonging and comfort. In a functionally open society where black culture is free to flourish, the church has been edged out of the preferred status.

No wonder then that the people who look to the church tend to be the least imaginative, resourceful, intelligent, militant and dynamic. The black church continues to be the captive of the tradition-ridden.

The case of the mainline white churches is diametrically different. Their decline is in part the result of their taking the faith seriously by engaging in prophetic social action, thus making the church pew an uncomfortable place for many who had once found it easeful. Black middle-class churches, on the other hand, have generally turned a deaf ear to calls to faithfulness.

More Style Than Substance

A second reason for the decline of the mainline white churches is related to the first. Whites of the middle class (whether conservative Lutherans and Presbyterians or liberal Episcopalians) seem to "take to" theology, to such a degree that they will pay attention even to extreme interpretations of the gospel. This attitude accounts for the fact that of late many of them have moved away from the mainline churches to fundamentalist groups. To middle-class blacks, theology has been of less critical importance. They do not see Pentecostal or other fundamentalist groups as bastions of security or islands of peace. They are actually ashamed of lower-class blacks who engage in mass evangelism and media hustling. Indeed, they are apprehensive lest through such activities they be pulled back down to the level from which they so recently emerged. In short, it is not sound theology or prophetic social action but decorum and culture that black church members prize most highly. To them the church is a place neither of challenge nor of change. Its purpose is to keep alive a tradition for those who have arrived, a place where form is more important than function and style more revered than substance.

Events in the larger society, such as the civil rights movement, affect the black church only to the extent that they disturb its rhythm of automatic infusion. Otherwise the black church is relatively immune to social change. That is precisely what makes it special, different from white churches. It is like a tree planted by the waters: it will not be moved. And it is this obstinacy that has been its strength, generation after generation, and can be its strong suit in the future. But presently it serves to foster indifference.

Too Middle Class?

Another explanation of the failure of black middle-class religion is that it is too middle-class. This is a formidable argument. If the middle-class churches are to grow, they must recruit new members from among the mass of blacks, who, obviously, are lower-if not under-class. But the churches seem unable to relate to the masses. That point was brilliantly put in an address to 500 black United Methodists gathered at Atlanta in mid-December 1973. The distinguished speaker admonished his middle-class audience concerning their attitude toward poor blacks:

You will work for them but not with them. Your heart will bleed for them but not your head or your hands. You will be their advocate but not their friend. You will sponsor them in their cause, but their cause is not your cause anymore. . . because you are middle-class.

But this explanation of the black religious crisis, while excellent so far as it goes, ignores several difficulties:

First, there can be no question but that black middle-class church people must participate much more energetically in the struggle to secure economic, political and social justice for the masses. In so doing, however, they will be increasing the pool of middle-class blacks and decreasing the membership (at least relatively) of middle-class black churches; for it is common knowledge that the faster blacks become middle-class the faster they leave the church.

Second, there is the fact that lower-class blacks want to become middle-class and middle-class blacks cannot become lower-class. Yet, instead of attempts to work through this dilemma, there is a sudden switch to romanticizing the masses and damning the middle class, as if to be both middle-class and truly black contradicts black reality. Thus the Atlanta speaker declared: "You [of the middle class] will extol their folk religion as the authentic experience of an authentic people, but it is not the religion you prefer or know best."

Third, inherent in the diagnosis cited above is the assumption that the problem of dynamism in black middle-class church life is a problem of class. But if that is the case, not only is there no difference between blacks and whites but blacks must choose between race and class. Class status undoubtedly involves some knotty problems. But to say that it is so determinative that the problem is not people in their class but their class in people is to say that people cannot prevail; and it follows that class must be done away with, and therefore the human. It follows further that apart from the masses, there is nothing authentically black in religion, theology or the church. The logical conclusion is that blacks must work to keep the masses down, so that the masses can continue to endure the suffering wherein alone genuine blackness lies. Thus, black religion is bound to the poverty of black life -- the only real black culture. On this premise, to work for social and economic justice and for religious and cultural quality is to work for the end of black middle-class churches and, eventually, of all black churches.

Religion as a Means to Racial Advancement

No, it seems to me that none of these several diagnoses of the crisis in black middle-class religion gets at the underlying cause. That is to be found in the meaning and function of religion in black life. Black students are on the mark when they say that religion is what black folk do when they are not able to do anything else. For blacks, religion is a spiritual force to prime the pump of survival, a means to the end of racial advancement, not an end in itself. Experiential at best, ethical at most and ethnic in the main, it is a survival tool that can be (and is) discarded when the individual no longer feels the need of the emotional reinforcement it can provide.

In a word, religion for blacks has been sheerly pragmatic. It is one-dimensional, however creative and powerful; a religion of the downtrodden, the despised and rejected. When blacks are down and out, in slavery, religion is freedom-loving and creative (as in the spirituals). But when slavery ends, the slave songs are cast adrift from their creative source. (Today the spiritual is primarily an art form.) Those who are on the upswing, who have cut their racial moorings and learned to live by mind rather than emotion, can find a resting place neither in lower-class religion, which offers only emotion, nor in middle-class religion, which offers neither mind nor emotion.

Learning to Love and Loving to Learn

The problem of growth in black middle-class churches will not be solved by their being emotional like the folk. (That dimension must be included, but the folk can do it better.) What is needed is knowledgeable laypeople and clergy. Thus, above all, the black middle-class church must foster love of learning -- something altogether different from collecting certificates and degrees. Loving to learn and learning to love are not in conflict, and both are indispensable for the black church to be itself. The black church is the black community’s only national Institution. It exists because the black community has called it into being. It has but one task: to serve the needs of the black community -- and thereby to serve the whole community and its Lord. Being the instrument of the black community and the touchstone of the black family, it must conceive of religion as the life of learning to love and loving to learn. To this end each black church can do three things: (1) acquire the techniques and use its resources to build up in the homes of its members a sense of the value of knowledge; (2) develop learning opportunities in the church; (3) underwrite financially first-class departments of religion in black colleges (or at least in one such college). However, this third step will improve black institutions of theological education only if the love of learning (the condition for theology) prevails there and in the family and the community, where the discipline of learning to love (the work of theology) is regarded as the ultimate joy. The church can enrich its community action program, increase its social activities, make its worship more appealing; but if it does not foster learning in concrete ways, its decline is assured. There is. no other way to be and do its truth.

An emphasis on learning is the only means of securing leadership and followers among youth in numbers sufficient to reverse the present trend. It is not a short-term solution. Nothing can be done immediately by wishful thinking or assessing blame. Inculcation of love of learning is a long haul, one that only the black community can manage for itself. And in the process, the idea that religion is simply pragmatic, or a spiritual sop for the down-and-out who cannot think for themselves, will give way to the understanding of religion as the truth of imagination.

Knowledge or the love of learning is not the only power, it is the ultimate power in religion as in every other dimension. Critical knowledge of world religion and church history, thorough study of theology and the Bible, and, finally, rigorous thinking are minimal but essential means to keep a church alive and therefore respected. Such a church will be irresistible to rebellious youth and confused adults.

Let me repeat: the love of learning will not in itself ensure the growth of a black middle-class church, but without it in the equation there will be no healthy black middle-class church.

This is what the black church has to learn for itself. The love of learning has not been tried and found wanting; it has not been tried. Consequently, learning to love (theology) has yet to be tried. When that lesson comes home, nothing else of religious significance will matter any less, but learning to love will matter more.

Probing the Jewish-Christian Reality

In my last conversation with Karl Barth, in 1961 -- a conversation that was for both of us in some ways painful -- I asked him what he expected of his former students, seeing that he was so dissatisfied with what I was then doing (i.e., developing what was to be The Secular Meaning of the Gospel). Barth’s answer was that every page of his Dogmatics was in need of improvement and that we should set to work to make it better. I took him to mean that we should be devoting ourselves to writing footnotes on his work. Instead, I took another path which led to some dozen years of working in analytic philosophy of religion, and that was where I was when the 70s began.

By the end of the decade, however, I was at work at the task that Barth had asked of me, not as I then heard it, but as I now hear it. The dogmatic or systematic theological work of the church, of which Barth’s Church Dogmatics is a distinguished crown, is indeed in need of serious correction on every page, and with the years that remain, I mean to Continue the task of trying to improve it.

Administrative Tasks

My change of mind in moving from the philosophy of religion to the task of systematic theology came roughly in the middle of the decade. The first third of the decade saw my last efforts at unsnarling the puzzles of religion, taken as puzzles of language. With The Edges of Language (1972) I had reached the limits of what I could do to understand religion with the help of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I was not impressed with the results. I was not impressed with the results which others had come up with either. Some were cleverer than others, but none of them seemed to make much of a difference. Philosophers in general -- and so also philosophers of religion -- were simply writing for each other, and their results seemed to me to have little to do with the real world.

The "real world" of the first third of the ‘70s, it will be recalled, included the ever-escalating Vietnam war and the ever-degenerating language flowing out of Washington. It was the Nixon era, the one that ended with Watergate. Perhaps in some indirect way of which I was not fully conscious, the degeneracy of language (and not only language) that was so evident a feature of the last years and final collapse of the Nixon presidency sapped my enthusiasm for the battle for clarity in analyzing the workings of religious language.

I could sympathize with the moral passion of Wittgenstein in the face of a similar situation of linguistic degeneracy in the last days of Hapsburg Vienna. It was the driving power of his philosophical work. I found instead that I was becoming increasingly bored by philosophical analysis. I there. fore gave in to the urging of colleagues and accepted something I had carefully avoided all my life: administrative work. I took on the chairmanship of the religion department at Temple University in 1974.

For the next few years, I was engaged mostly with parenting: working to develop the cooperative spirit and patterns so necessary for a department of 20 specialists if we were to listen to and learn from each other in such a way that we could train graduate students together rather than at cross-purposes. Other university administrative tasks were also added, in the form of chairing a review of graduate programs in all of the colleges of the university. Teaching was reduced to a minimum and done mostly with the left hand. I found myself working almost exclusively as an academic administrator, and perhaps I would be doing that now, were it not for the fact that one particular administrative task played a central role in bringing about a change of mind.

Wrong About Israel

The first and primary job confronting me as chairman of the department was to shepherd the troops into making two appointments in Judaism to replace Jewish colleagues who had left us for other institutions. The process took us two years, and I spent a good deal of that time talking with Jewish scholars, reading about Judaism, and reading the works of and finally interviewing candidates. In the meantime, I had to make short-term appointments to keep our offerings in Judaism available for students. The first of these was Rivka Horwitz, visiting in the area from Israel. Just to see how things were working out, I visited her graduate seminar, and there I was introduced to Franz Rosenzweig’s doctrine of creation, which struck me as exceptionally exciting and clearly a step ahead of what usually is said on the matter in the Christian tradition.

Rosenzweig, importantly, but also all those other contacts with the world of Jews and Judaism opened my eyes to something I had been looking at somewhat casually all along but had never really seen: Israel, the Jewish people, the people of God, was definitely alive. "The Synagogue," "Jewish legalism," and all those old slogans of our theological tradition came tumbling down like the house of cards they were. In their place, actual Judaism, the living faith of this living people of God, came into view. I was fascinated.

I was more than fascinated. In the midst of administrative chores taking more and more of my time, I was set to thinking furiously. The Christianity I knew said that what I was coming to see so clearly simply did not exist, had not existed since Jesus Christ. What I was discovering was something of which I had heard nothing as an undergraduate, seminarian or graduate student. Yes, I knew that Barth had said some highly original and interesting things about ancient Israel and even about the continuing Jewish entity, but the latter was not real. It was but a ghost of ancient Israel, kept alive in the world as only a shadow of something else.

What I was coming face to face with, however, was no shadow, no "indirect witness to Jesus Christ," but a fully historical (certainly "warts and all") living tradition, constituting a quite direct witness to the God of Israel. If Christian theology said that this did not exist, then Christian theology, at least on this point, was simply wrong. It was wrong about Israel, the people of God, and therefore it was to that extent wrong about the God of Israel, wrong about the God and Father of Jesus Christ. I was far more than fascinated; I was back at my old discipline, wrestling with fundamental issues of systematic theology. What would Christian theology look like if it were corrected at so central a point? Would it even be recognizable as Christian theology?

Willing to Speak the Language

I thus found myself drawn deeply into the two linguistic communities of the church .and the Jewish people. Whatever my earlier difficulties in understanding the use of the word "God," I found that if I were to get anywhere with the problems now confronting me, I had to accept myself as a member of one of those two linguistic communities and therefore to speak with them of the God of whom they both spoke. My older problems did not receive any direct answers. They simply receded into the background; or rather, the position from which I had been asking them was, no longer one on which I could stand if I were to take seriously this new (or very old) problem.

Instead, seen from within this tension between the church and Jewish people, what before had been the problem of "God" now was the problem of God as the God of both of these realities. By entering into their common problem and conflict, I found myself able and willing to speak their language. All the old problems remained, but they now appeared to be philosophical problems, not half so burning as the theological ones. I had run into a paradox and an incoherence that made the philosophical ones seem positively trivial.

The task confronting me -- indeed, confronting the whole of theology and the whole of the church, if it were ever to notice it -- was therefore to understand and interpret what God had done in Jesus Christ that had resulted in the concurrent existence and history of the church and the Jewish people. Both were there, side by side. I had to understand how this had come about.

No church history I had ever been taught had so much as hinted at the real historical situation. And what was that Judaism of the post-Exilic period, which had produced not only Jesus of Nazareth but also Yohanan ben Zakkai, and which was to flower in not just patristic Christianity but also, during precisely the same centuries, in rabbinic Judaism? Clearly I had much to learn. I therefore escaped at the first decent moment, at the close of my first term as chairman, and went off to read for a year -- and think.

The last third of the decade of the ‘70s was spent digesting, digging deeper and formulating for publication the results of the change of mind that took place during the middle third. The prolegomena, or things to be said first, of the larger (and multivolume) systematic reflection on the matter, subtitled "a theology of the Jewish-Christian reality," has already appeared (Discerning the Way [Seabury, 1980]). Rather than speculate about what lies ahead, however, I would prefer to focus now on my perceptions of my context and my work, as these have been influenced by my change of mind.

The Context for Doing Theology

Let me begin with the interesting contextual situation. Here I am at present, and as a result of the change, a self-confessed Christian systematic theologian working in a large department of religion in a state university. Does that make sense? Is that any place in which to do a theology that openly addresses itself to the church? Is that appropriate to a religion department, in contrast to a school of theology or a divinity school? And is this proper, constitutionally, in a state-supported university?

I have not had to appeal to that oldest and best argument for the institution of academic tenure, the unqualified freedom of a scholar to move as his or her research and thinking lead, without being bound by past assumptions or present colleagues. As we have developed our department, we have intentionally left open the possibility that teaching about religion might be carried on by those committed to a religious tradition. Indeed, at least some colleagues outside of our department seem not at all opposed to the discussion and articulation of real theology -- in their terms, real religion -- within what is, after all, a department of religion.

My response to the question, therefore, will be more substantive. If Christian theology, which may or may not be listened to by the church, needs to be done in full awareness of Jewish theology, as I now believe, and then in due course in awareness of Islamic theology, and eventually surely also in awareness of Indian, Chinese and Japanese traditions, then where better can it be done than in a context in which it must be hammered out in constant discussion with Jewish (and then Islamic, and then Eastern) colleagues and especially graduate students, whose interests -- and in some cases commitments -- lie in these other traditions?

The history-of-religions point of view has no monopolistic right to be the only ground for the study of religion. If one is moved on theological grounds to take other traditions seriously, one has another and most fruitful approach to the study of ones own tradition in the presence of and in relation to other traditions. And where else but in such a department can a Christian theologian have the glorious if frightening responsibility of training, e.g., future Jewish theologians, as well as those who may contribute to turning the church toward new responsibilities?

As I see the matter, there is not in fact any constitutional issue at stake. When I conduct a seminar on, for example, Karl Barth’s doctrine of revelation, none of my Jewish students need fear that I am trying to convert them to Christianity. Far from it. We are, rather, asking together how well Barth really understood Torah as good news to Israel (quite well, thank you), and how well he understood the teaching of the rabbis that Torah-living by the Jewish people was living by grace (quite poorly, I’m afraid), and whether the correction of his mistake could produce a better theology for Christian self-understanding and perhaps even something helpful for Jewish theology. Mutatis mutandis, in seminars on Franz Rosenzweig or Hermann Cohen, we are asking together about the adequacy and helpfulness of their work as theology for the Jewish people, and also what Christian theology has perhaps to learn from them. Does this in any way touch the constitutional prohibition of the establishment of religion?

My students are mostly Jewish and Christian, since the relationship between these two traditions is the center of my work, but we have given much thought to the relation of our traditions to the others, especially to Islam, which stands in a special relationship to ours for both historical and theological reasons. I think I might win some agreement from my students if I expressed a tentative understanding of the matter as follows. It may be that the God of Israel, as King of the Universe, is working his purposes out also in these other traditions -- and in our situation, their reality confronts us regularly in the persons of faculty colleagues and graduate students.

We as Jews and Christians need in any case to work out our own self-understandings and understandings of God together, because we share the same name of God and largely the same canon of Scriptures, not to speak of subsequent history (although Jewish history in the world of Islam must be learned and not forgotten by Christians). We should do this, however, in such a way as to be open to the question of whether we can hear in these other traditions the voice we have been disciplined to hear by our own Scriptures. This is (with Schleiermacher and Barth) to deny the validity of the concept of natural or general religion, but (with Barth and against Schleiermacher) to learn to listen to our own Scriptures, in order (with neither Schleiermacher nor Barth) to listen to the Scriptures of other traditions with sensitive ears for the voice of the God we trust we know, perhaps even to hear a word that may correct our reading of our own Scriptures.

That, I am prepared to argue, is a fittingly scholarly investigation of religion in a department of religion in a state-supported university. May it go on elsewhere as well, but if not elsewhere, surely it can and should go forward where it is currently taking place.

A Christian, Not a Jew

To return to the theme of this series, let me conclude with three points, the clarification of which will help define how my mind has changed in the past decade. The points are that I am now a Christian, doing systematic theology, not "Holocaust theology." First, I am a Christian, not a Jew. The more I learn about Judaism and the Jewish people, the clearer it becomes that I am not a Jew, not an "honorary Jew," not a Jew by adoption or election. I am a gentile, a gentile who seeks to serve the God of Israel because as a Christian I share in the call of that God to serve him in his church, alongside, not as part of, his people Israel. As a gentile, I am bound to that God not by Torah but by Jesus Christ. That, as I see it, is not my decision but his, or it is mine only as an obedient acknowledgment of his.

Second, I have returned to the work I left off in the beginning of the ‘60s, the self-critical task of the church called systematic theology. I have now found a new lens, Judaism, through which to carry on this work, but I am finding Karl Barth once more to be a superbly stimulating and helpful teacher, especially at the points at which I must disagree with him. He is proving to be a better guide than Calvin, Luther, Thomas, Augustine, Athanasius or Irenaeus (with all of whom he was in continuous dialogue) because he was both more thorough and more rigorously systematic down to the smallest detail. He sets a standard for theological work for which we can only be grateful. When I disagree with him, he forces me to think hard and carefully. What more can one have from a teacher?

Finally, in the light of all that has gone on in the 70s, I must say that I do not in any way conceive of myself as a Holocaust theologian or a theologian of the Holocaust. The horror of the Holocaust has surely opened the eyes of many Christians to the reality of the Jewish people. I have told the story of how my eyes were opened, which was not by way of the Holocaust. What Christians need to see, in my judgment, is not the Holocaust, but that which lives after and in spite of the Holocaust, the living reality, "warts and all," of the Israel of God, the Jewish people.

What concerns me as a Christian theologian is whether Christians will come to see that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is still loved, revered and obeyed by his original love, the people of God, the Jews. And if most of them do not love and serve God, what shall we say about most of those who have been baptized? The reality of the Jewish people, fixed in history by the reality of their election, in their faithfulness in spite of their unfaithfulness, is as solid and sure as that of the gentile church. That is what I ran into and had to see, and that is what accounts, as far as I can tell, for how my mind has changed in the past decade, and my agenda for the future.

Theology Now?

Whether there can be theology here and now becomes a serious question only when the subject of theology is taken to be of the utmost seriousness. This condition has hardly characterized the religious scene in recent times. The question has therefore appeared to be not so much serious as interesting, or academic. Not knowing what to do with the matter of theology, many of us turned instead to the method of theology. But the theology whose method has been so much discussed seems to have been just more of man’s perennial conversation with himself. Can there be theology now? Our theologies all seem to be ours and about ourselves. So we have had theologies of the secular (definitely passé now), experiential theologies, all sorts of philosophical theologies, even American theologies (who needs them?), and more recently theologies of play, hope and liberation.

This parade of ‘New Theology" (already in ten volumes!), this wave of what some regard as faddism, may have had its positive side. The motive behind these swings may have been the altogether proper desire for theology now, a response that came genuinely out of our own situation. Yet hovering in the background is doubt whether our "now" is much different from all the other "nows" of human history. Theology now ought indeed to be our own response from out of our own situation, but is not theology set in the more fundamental context of something utterly final and transcendent (strange words, these!) said into our and every other human situation? Is not theology called upon to reckon with something other than one more human voice added to man’s endless talk with himself? If that is not really the setting of theology, then I fail to see on what grounds it can justifiably lay claim to our attention. Uncertainty at this point may be just the reason why theology has been so occupied with finding trendy titles for its latest up-to-the-minute variations.

If we theologians have forgotten the seriousness of our task (or have lost our nerve), if we have been uneasy about trying to lay hold on something well beyond our grasp, lest we seem foolish to an age devoted to problem-solving and conceptual clarity, events of the day are not short of reminders of seriousness for those who have eyes to see. Gone is the cheery optimism of the ‘60s. Fuel is short and tempers are shorter. The rising expectations of a decade ago are shattered on the hard, dull realities of a stagnant economy and rampant inflation. The incompetence and unwillingness of the administration to take matters in hand is matched only by the incompetence and unwillingness of a Congress of sheep and those among them whom we laughingly call "congressional leaders." The mail is slow, trains are late, the telephone doesn’t work, goods are shoddy, appliances break down, and jobs are hard to find and harder to keep. Whatever confidence we may once have had in political, economic, educational or ecclesiastical institutions as bearers and guardians of value is fast evaporating. We are, to put it simply, in a mess, a systemic mess so serious that few of us dare look it in the face and none of us dare look at it very long.

Far more serious than these matters, however, is the fact that the dying still goes on in Indochina, killing and torture and suffering paid for by your taxes and mine. We worry about our own forced shift in diet, but at least we can eat. That is hardly the case for millions in the Third World, whose situation is becoming much worse because of the drought in Africa, about which the rest of the world is doing precious little. And if fuel shortages are a bother for us, they are devastating to the poor countries; the energy crisis is widening the gap between the rich and the poor nations of this world at a terrifying pace. Meanwhile pollution approaches the danger point on land, in the air and in the oceans. As our "defense" bill approaches $100 billion per year, we stumble daily closer to the time when this earth will no longer tolerate life lived as stupidly as we insist on living it. The ‘70s are warning us of the precariousness of the human situation. The sign is there to read: memento mori!

Unaccustomed to saying such a word ourselves, we can hear from the world a cry that should sound familiar to us: "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" And from many poor souls in this world too weak and powerless to cry out comes a groan reflecting another that Christians ought to recognize: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Is it for such as these that we seriously offer our theologies of the secular, of experience, of play, even of hope and liberation? Should not such as these, if by some freak chance they should ever overhear us, just quietly vomit once (had they anything in their shriveled bellies to expel!) before breathing their last?

What then is the task of theology now? Surely what it has always been: to serve now a word spoken into the human situation. If this be a theology of hope, then it must be of other than human hope, even of other than Christian hope; for why should any of us put any trust in the hope of humans? And God knows the world has no grounds for trusting the hope of Christians! If this be a theology of liberation, then it must be of other than black liberation, women’s liberation, or even the liberation of the oppressed. Deeply as we may long for each and all of these, do we seriously expect that the almost-undreamable realization of the agendas of these movements will deliver us or them from this body of death? Can "liberation" of blacks, women, the oppressed, which leaves us in this body of death, really be the goal of history? Surely the liberation of which theology alone has any right to speak must be more radical than that. The liberation and hope of which alone theology is commissioned to speak and to serve can only be those of -- let us say it -- God! The task of theology now, in short, is what it has always been: to be radically theology, a service of a word of God.

"God," did I say? But what does theology know of God? What can it hope to do with that strange word, not to speak of the yet stranger "reality" for which it struggles to make the word do duty? Has not "God" become a problem for theology, and in just the wrong way? Indeed it has. Trusting too much in our own thought and experience, we have tried to make sense out of "God," tried to figure it out, to show it has a meaning, secularly and experientally, or eschatologically and existentially. Or we have tried to show that it had at least a function, perhaps that of marking the limits of language. And all these -- who knows? -- might indeed be possibilities. But they make of "God" still the farthest limit of our human possibilities, caught up with us just as surely within this body of death. If God can be known in what we call experiences of transcendence or ultimacy, then of course theology can talk of God, as it can of any other human concept. An adequate conceptuality of this God should be just a matter of some good, hard, clear thinking. But such a God is only a rather special aspect of our own conceiving and so an aspect of ourselves. If theology speaks of this God, it has nothing really new to say to humans, for here man speaks to himself about himself, and that is hardly news. Nor could such pretended news be good, for the world is all too aware, that it cannot rescue itself from this body of death.

How then can there be theology? If theology is to be a word about God and the service of a word of God, then theologians must be the first to insist that they know not of what they speak. That is the right way in which God is and ought to be a problem for theology. Theology’s God can only be the utterly Unknown, the radically transcendent, and therefore strictly and quite literally inconceivable. (I am quite aware that such a predication is ridiculous, for if God were literally inconceivable, we should not even have an idea of him as having this feature; namely, inconceivability. Yet if we take such a sensible route, we shall have missed the "infinite qualitative difference" [Kierkegaard] between God and man that led the early theologians of the Christian tradition to risk such paradoxical expressions.) Theologians should have no need whatsoever to. have to learn from philosophers that the concept "God" is incoherent. Of course it is! If our concept "God" is one which we know can’t do justice to, one which can only be our poor response to, that which broke in upon certain men at the Sea of Reeds, at Sinai, and in Jesus Christ, then how could it be other than incoherent, utterly inadequate to the "unreal" reality, the impossibility, to which prophets and apostles have pointed? Either theology has to take up the painful, impossible task of trying to say what can’t be said, or it had better pack up its bags and go home.

This begins to sound like the requirement that theology be theology without hyphens or adjectives, and surely that is an impossibility. We shall find names and qualifiers for any theology, which should serve to remind us that theology is always human theology, always our word and thought, and therefore part of the problem, not the answer to that problem. Any attempt to break loose from the path set out by Schleiermacher and to find a way in which to make the transcendent God our subject, rather than some aspect of ourselves, could be called an apophantic theology, standing as it does in that tradition of paradox or dialectic that marked the Cappadocian theologians and has always been a part of the theological tradition. Or we could call it a Barthian theology, for Barth remains the outstanding example of a theologian who tried to turn theology from the path chartered by Schleiermacher. We could better call it a theology of frustration, since this would be an attempt to acknowledge the frustration which must lie at the heart of every theological endeavor: trying to make clear what is beyond our powers of understanding. Faced with this frustration, the impossibility of "pure" theology, it is inevitable that such an attempt must turn out to be Christology. Yet what did he whom we call the Christ want, but that we call upon, really call upon, worship, serve and give the glory to God? We can only say to him what we must learn to say with him: My Lord and my God! We can only dare to call this man God of God, Light of Light, because he first said, "Why do you call me good? There is none good save God!"

Certainly, theology that seeks to be just theology will have its center in Christology, for Christology, the center of our response to God’s grace, is our answer out of our deepest selves and out of our truest situation. We know it is out of the deepest part of our being and from the center of our situation because that precisely is where it is shown to be by the fact of God’s grace having met us just there. That center of our selves, that place in which we really stand, is our human mess, that plodding on relentlessly into triviality, meaninglessness and death. That place is our human condition that is spelled out in Watergate; mangled bodies and land in Indochina; dry, dusty, suffering starvation in Africa; inconceivable poverty, oppression and torture in South America; humiliation and wretchedness in the slums here "at home": and all this supported by economic structures and a system which we have supported and which destroys human beings and rapes the good earth. So it goes. God have mercy on those who have time to sit around thinking up new theologies! When a certain devastating light shines upon the selves and the place from which we have to do our theology, the emptiness of both is revealed: who will rescue us from this body of death?! Not people, for sure. Not liberation movements, although who cannot stand with those who cry out in rage and frustration at the horror of what we are doing? Not Christianity. And surely not so frail and human a thing as theology, least of all a theology that wants, in all the weakness of human wanting, to be a theology of God. Only that which is impossible and incoherent, empirically meaningless and irrelevant can rescue -- only the God who is grace. It is of this that we all need to remind ourselves if there is to be theology now.

III

What has been said thus far may have needed to be said, but we have spoken only of the urgency of an impossible task in an impossible situation. Others could always come back at us with a liberal’s more balanced estimate of the context and more moderate definition of the task. Are there grounds for judging the situation and task so radically? There are indeed. The urgency of doing theology in the context of the cry "Who will deliver us from this body of death?" derives from the urgency of that cry itself, and that cry is revealed to be urgent in the light of that which is acknowledged in the shout that follows it: "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" This is the light in which the utter darkness of our situation becomes known, and known as a situation about which darkness is not the last word. The grounds for a radical view of our situation and for holding to radical transcendence is the word of Easter. Without Easter there would have been no gospel to proclaim, and of course no theology. If there is to be theology now, it must be, as it has always had to be, first and foremost, a response to Easter.

How shall we respond to Easter? Note: how shall we respond, not what shall we say. Paul’s answer was that we start walking, not talking. "Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so that we might walk in newness of life" (Rom. 6:4). Since the logos of theology is an incarnate logos, so the task of theology is to get clear about how to walk in response to Easter. I should like to develop this programmatically in the following trinitarian form: (1) God is the liberator; (2) liberation has happened in Christ; and (3) this has happened for us. Reflection on these three related theses will clarify the walking we have to do.

1.Our first response to Easter is to walk as persons who know that there is a rescuer, a Liberator, and that that one is God, not man. Whatever else Easter leads us to say, it opens us first of all to say Yes, in response to God’s Yes. In truth, beyond all our experiences, ideas, conceptions, hopes and longings, there is one greater and stranger than any thoughts or imaginings we may have had about an Absolute, a Transcendent, a Wholly Other. This one is essentially, because self-revealedly, that which would otherwise never have occurred to us -- and something quite other than has in fact ever occurred to any great thinker, poet, philosopher or other inventor of conceptions of God, the one who raised Jesus from the dead. He is the liberator in just this way: as the liberator of Jesus from this body of death and out of its death. He is the God of history in just this way, as the one who intrudes his strange finger into history with this act that is hardly an ordinary historical event, hardly an event that we can handle with historical tools. He is the God who is our God and for us in just this way, as the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

Our response to this, so far as words go (and why should there not be words, if we are people? Surely human walking leaves room for talking as we go), will therefore take the form of saying something quite extraordinary. The word which the apostolic community used and offered to us is the word "resurrection," hardly a term derived from or consonant with our usual conceptuality or our ordinary human experience, however rich and varied. As the word suggests, with this "event" we have been set free to talk in a new way about our human situation. Alongside such words as "mess" and "death," beyond "freedom" and "dignity," now come new words: "grace" and "resurrection," and with them, finally, "God." When we try to give an account of these words, to relate them logically or experientially to the rest of our language, we stumble, for these words are not our own, as though they could be seen to make sense within the framework of whatever else we may say as men and women. They are strange new words given to us as means to make a strange new response appropriate to the strange new situation to which we have been opened: Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father that we might walk in newness of life.

2. He was raised, not we. If anything be said about experiences of the transcendent, not to speak of "resurrection experiences," then let us be quite clear that we are speaking of him and his experiences. Only he is in a position to talk thus. If anything be said of liberation, above all of liberation from this body of death, then let us be quite clear that there, in him, is where this has happened, not here in ourselves or in our personal histories. We should not confuse any liberation which we might achieve in our place with the liberation which has been achieved in his place. We may and should walk as people who have seen a great light, but we are surely not that light ourselves. We are the darkness into which the light has shined. Our solidarity is with the darkness of this world and therefore with all the others in this body of death, with the unliberated -- and that not by any act of condescension, but in plain honesty. No, the dance in which we are engaged with all those who long for liberation is the dance of death. Let us not confuse our dance with a dance of the liberated, let us not call it a dance of liberation. It is a dance with death and unto death, for we dance along with all those who are not he.

The corporate, almost cosmic, but at least systemic character of our situation and condition, as seen by those who know that they are one with all who are not he, needs underscoring today. Some of us may find Marxian or neo-Marxian analyses helpful here, insofar as they help us to see that our mess is systemic, not merely individual. It is depressing, for example, to see liberals working so hard for Nixon’s impeachment, as if he were the enemy, as if changing the occupant of the White House would really begin to touch the forces and powers for whom the occupant of the White House, wittingly or unwittingly, is a mere flunky. Can any of us still believe that good old George McGovern would have solved the systemic problem of American industrial implication in Africa, Latin America, Europe or southeast Asia? A better Band-Aid is not to be shunned, of course, but let us not confuse better ways to run the system with analyses by which we seek to penetrate the sickness of the system itself. Those who believe that the analysis of a transcendent God led to measures of such incomprehensible radicality as crucifixion and resurrection can only be suspicious of any analysis that leads to a moderate view of our sociopolitical and economic situation. A milder assessment is of course open to those who can incorporate Good Friday and Easter into the framework of ordinary human experience, psychology and language. That, however, is to abandon theology for anthropology -- admittedly an easier task, but not the one we are asking about.

3. But now we must turn to the other side: what happened in him happened for us who are not he. The strange word of the apostle in response to this strange happening is: he was raised as the "firstfruits" of the dead! In Christ shall all be made alive! He was raised from the dead, that he might really be raised for those, all those, who are on their way to death. What a perverted watering-down of this it would be to think that he was raised only for those who believe in him! That is hardly what we have heard. How weak a dilution it is, further, to turn the apostolic witness into a message of individual hope in the face of individual failure. If we believe that Christ was there for all people in the mercy of the God of the cosmos, then the scope of the gospel may be more than systemic, but hardly less. How shall we regard, not just ourselves, but especially all other human beings, except as men and women over whom has been spoken a sovereign word of freedom and dignity and liberation far exceeding their or our wildest dreams of what it would be to be free men and women? If it has really happened in him, then faith cannot possibly be the ultimate and decisive dividing line among people. Faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead is at once hope for all.

Who then are "we"? We are those who have been given to see and therefore to walk. We are those who can no longer abide the death of oppression in which all people are victims, because we know what has happened to us. With our eyes open to that liberation, how could we possibly be at peace with the, death-destined and death-dealing system in which we see ourselves in the light of Easter? To respond to this situation with words only would be a betrayal of the risen Word-made-flesh. A theology that was only theology at this point would be no theology at all. Only a theology that was at once politics here could be seriously theology now.

Thus the really serious theological/political task comes into focus: to hold together in word and act, in talking and walking, what is one in the event of Easter: that the liberation of God, for us, has taken place in him. We find ourselves in this year of grace 1974 at a particular point lying between the event in him. Easter, and the final unveiling of Easter’s goal, the final liberation of all people and the whole creation. Meantime, it has been given to us to walk as well as talk, and both in a new way, a way which is at odds with our situation. In the light of Easter as it shines specifically on Christians in America in 1974, it can hardly remain hidden that this system of competition, domination and violence, of sexism and oppression, carefully programming us by the pattern of the marketplace and subliminally driven into us by advertising, inhibits, to say the least, our walking as men and women of love and hope. The apostle warned us that our fight is not with individual foes (how simple the problem and how simple the solution were Nixon the enemy, or even the men who direct the great transnational corporations that own little men like Nixon) but with principalities and powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with spiritual hosts of wickedness of a superhuman sort (Eph. 6: 12). Those who work to perpetuate this system are as much in bondage to it as any and need themselves to be liberated of their power to oppress. To walk in newness of life is to accept the call to warfare against this oppression.

No blueprint has been given us for this warfare, no plan of battle or map of the terrain. Instead we are given freedom to find our own way, to become witnesses by making use of this freedom and daring to exercise it -- freedom to discover that God’s liberation really is for men and women. My own view right now is that we need to be engaged in an intense systemic consciousness-raising effort in the light of radical transcendence. I take that to be the immediate task because the troops seem to be in a state of confusion. They seem to have forgotten, and need to be reminded, that we are here because of liberation, because Christ has already been raised by the glory of the Father, and that this has been done for us men and women, all of us. And if we get back to this serious task, then we shall have to remind ourselves again and again that the liberation in the light of which we walk is God’s doing, in no way to be confused with whatever we may hope to accomplish ourselves. What we can aim at, however, is to make it just a bit more possible for men and women to walk toward those who have seen and wait for a great light. Insofar as any engage in this task, to that extent they give positive response to the question of theology now.

Anti-Semitism: Boundary of Jewish-Christian Understanding

"Anti-Semitism" carries a great deal of emotive force. Hitler’s maniacal program of genocide, which annihilated 6 million Jews in our century, has imbued the term "anti-Semitism" with a quality of dread -- dread of an incoherent and unconditional evil which is unaccountably present in human form. However, since the end of World War II and the emergence on the world’s political scene of the State of Israel, "anti-Semitism" has often been used with reference to one’s stance vis-à-vis this 20th century nation, and thus has acquired quite new shades of meaning.

The subtleties which register in the current use of the term are rooted in history, which gives evidence of a long series of hateful and oppressive acts against Jews. To interpret this history as "anti-Semitic" is to say that Jews were persecuted simply because they were Jews. Because Christian societies have been most notably responsible for oppression of Jews, the meaning of "anti-Semitism" is particularly connected with the way in which Jews and Christians understand one another. More specifically, it often implies an anti-Jewish bias on the part of Christians. Could it be that the current use of the term indicates the true character of relations between Jews and Christians today?

Let us see. Anti-Semitism has recently been charged against the New Testament, against the film Jesus Christ Superstar and against political critics of the State of Israel. An inquiry into these three cases should show us where the boundary line of understanding between Jew and Christian lies.

Anti-Semitism in the New Testament

The "discovery" that there is anti-Semitism in the New Testament is obviously anachronistic in several senses. For one thing, as used in that connection, "anti-Semitism" draws its meaning from an assessment of recent events; that is, the present meaning of the term is falsely applied to an ancient era. Nevertheless, the charge is widely accepted as proved. Could this be seen as an attempt on the part of Christians to cope with the frightful history of Jewish suppression in Christendom? Thus the Christian who reads in, the Gospel of John, for example, that "the Jews" are opposing Jesus winces at this imputation of guilt to a whole people. Can an interpretation be found that explains both modern anti-Semitism and the apparently anti-Semitic tenor of New Testament language?

Form-critical study of the New Testament is helpful here. Form criticism claims that the final written form of the New Testament documents was greatly influenced by the struggles the young church was undergoing. In the light of that claim, it is reasonable to attribute the New Testament’s use of the phrase "the Jews" to the point of view of an era when the church was in conflict with the Jewish community, hence to conclude that the anti-Semitism in the New Testament is incidental. The anti-Semitism of subsequent centuries may be seen as related to this adventitious root. This interpretation allows us to understand the kerygma and the figure of Jesus as essentially prior to and apart from anti-Semitic tradition. Indeed, it would seem that they must be so understood if we are to retain our faith, since a Christianity which is inherently anti-Semitic is abhorrent.

The trouble with this interpretation is precisely its implied admission that the New Testament is "anti-Semitic." Thanks to historical-critical research, today’s Christian can look at the New Testament so dispassionately that he or she can acquiesce when it is made the dumping ground for 20th century garbage. In other words, modern anti-Semitism, even in the virulent form of Nazism, can be ultimately blamed on the New Testament writings.

But to explain anti-Semitism as both rooted in the New Testament and also as an excisable feature of it is surely to dispatch the problem of anti-Semitism too glibly. Moreover, theologically speaking, it is profoundly in error. The first century conflict between church and synagogue was hardly incidental. On the one hand, the New Testament does not represent Jesus’ Jewishness as peripheral. After all, Jesus is the Messiah, the fulfiller of the Torah and the prophets, the bringer-in of the kingdom and the founder of the New Israel; and the election of the Jews is now understood in terms of the election of Jesus. On the other hand, the majority of Jews refused to accept the Christian kerygma, and in time their persistent refusal became an embarrassment to the church and an apparent refutation of the Christian claim that Jesus was the Messiah. Are not Jews and Christians perennially bound together in theological conflict by the very nature of their faith, both claiming election by the one and same God? And is it not a kind of theological self-hatred for Christians to dismiss this conflict?

Theological conflict is not necessarily tantamount to "anti-Semitism"; that is, modern anti-Jewishness. The New Testament church was not repudiating Jewishness -- on the contrary! New Testament references to "the Jews" cannot be understood as a rejection of Jewishness; rather, they betoken a conflict between church and synagogue because of the church’s claim of its own Jewishness. That claim would have been vindicated by the conversion of all the Jews. Hence the church could not oppose the synagogue on the grounds of the synagogue’s Jewishness, but only on the grounds of its being an incomplete Jewishness.

It is clear, however, that the New Testament’s so-called "anti-Semitism" -- which in fact only reflects early Christian difficulties with established Judaism -- was in later times used to justify real anti-Semitism. Indeed, to condone the charge of anti-Semitism in the New Testament is to follow the lead of the real anti-Semites who first proposed this line of argument. Real anti-Semitism becomes a possibility precisely when the Jewishness of Christianity is deleted. And that happens when the historical character of Christianity is ignored in favor of a rational conception of the relation of God to humankind which applies on a universal scale without regard to historical particularities. This sort of concept is’ likely to be based on some transcendent universal such as subjective religious experience or a categorical ethical imperative. Rationalized Christianity is especially susceptible to various kinds of anthropocentric, culture-bound claims to absoluteness. Since it is inevitably subject to some cultural or sectarian imperialism, ethics in the abstract is so far from being a guarantee against anti-Semitism as actually to be the first step toward anti-Semitism.

I suggest that when Christians charge the New Testament with anti-Semitism they have rationalized their faith and are therefore highly susceptible to anti-Semitism. It would follow that Jews have far more to fear from a rationalized Christianity than from one in conflict with Judaism over the question of Christianity’s Jewishness. It might indeed be said that the so-called anti-Semitism in the New Testament is evidence of a close theological kinship between Jews and Christians which accounts for their "family quarrel" but might in the end lead them to embrace each other.

Anti-Semitism in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’

While the charge of anti-Semitism in the New Testament has generally been made by Christians’ attempt to deal with anti-Semitism, it is largely Jews who have laid the same charge against the film Jesus Christ Superstar. Their protest may surprise those who see this popular musical as a dramatization of the modern counterculture’s revolt against the establishment. The Jews, however, class this film with the tradition of the passion play, which spotlights the Jews as the real killers of Christ; and they call for the abolition of all passion plays as such. Is this a Jewish overreaction to the present in terms of past memories? Are Jews actually complaining that the kerygma itself is in poor taste?

Certainly the passion of the Christ is bedrock for Christian theology. But how genuinely are passion plays related to the historical fact of the crucifixion of Jesus? The Eucharist is the traditional and authentic dramatization of identification between believers and the crucified Lord. A passion play, however, is not a Eucharist. In a passion play one is a spectator; in the Eucharist one is a participant. The passion play obscures one’s personal responsibility for the crucifixion and affords an opportunity to put the blame on others. In the Eucharist the act of worship in confession, offering and thanksgiving identifies the participant directly and corporately with the atoning action of the crucifixion-resurrection event.

I suggest that, because they encourage a spectator role instead of personal involvement, passion plays inherently tend toward anti-Semitism. In this sense Jesus Christ Superstar can be called a passion play. It might indeed be seen as reinterpreting the role played in the crucifixion by the Jewish leaders; it seems to present them as implicated not by their Jewishness but by their being the establishment. But on the whole the film promotes an ideological reaction against all establishments rather than an understanding of oneself as personally, and inevitably, involved in society and its establishments and therefore also in the crucifixion. In thus blaming others and failing to recognize the guilt of every human being, Jesus Christ Superstar repeats the theological mistake of Christian anti-Semitism.

Of course, it is entirely possible to present the Holocaust as a Jewish passion play -- one in which the Nazis are the murderers and the 6 million the sacrificial victims. There are those who see a Luther as a precursor of Hitler and the Nails as a type of Christian. This Jewish passion play puts the shoe on the other Foot: the Nazi Christians are now killers of God.

But when the Holocaust is interpreted as an act so monstrous that it is separate and distinct from all other human evil; when the victims are understood as a special case among all other victims of oppression; when the men who did this deed are differentiated from all other men as being singularly demonic and non-human -- then there is no connection between those criminals and ourselves, no possible continuum between our sin and Nazi sin. As an expression of human revulsion at the Holocaust this denial of corporate responsibility is comprehensible, but will it suffice for a Jewish theological understanding of man? Does it not tend toward a passion-play point of view? Since the Holocaust forms the backdrop for the Jewish conception of the State of Israel, should not Jews guard against the temptation to let Zionism function as a sort of Jewish chauvinism which results from a passion-play division of humanity into guilty and righteous?

Anti-Semitism in Criticism of Israel

Political critics of the State of Israel appear to fall automatically under the ban of anti-Semitism. Even Daniel Berrigan, that stalwart champion of peace, recently discovered to his surprise that his criticism of Israeli policies had deeply offended Jewish sensitivities. Arthur Hertzberg, president of the American Jewish Congress, found Berrigan’s strictures so reprehensible that he called them "old-fashioned theological anti-Semitism" (American Report, October 29 and November 12, 1973, containing respectively Berrigan’s "Responses to Settler Regimes" and Hertzberg’s reply). Was this an attempt to smear Berrigan? Is the charge of anti-Semitism against political critics of Israel being employed as a coercive tactic?

A fair reading of Hertzberg’s piece must lead to the conclusion that he has done his utmost to misunderstand Berrigan. He deliberately misquotes Berrigan in order to bolster his own claim that the priest favors the destruction of Israel, and he totally disregards the central questions raised by Berrigan, dismissing them as "horror stories." Nevertheless, Hertzberg has some grounds for accusing Berrigan of anti-Semitism. As the Jewish leader sees it, bias is the only possible explanation for what he considers Berrigan’s perversity in posing as a "prophet" calling Israel to account. However, by citing its "Jewishness" as a ground for his criticism of Israel, Berrigan has given Hertzberg a sounder basis for the anti-Semitism charge.

The question of Israel’s Jewishness is what animates both Berrigan and Hertzberg. On the one hand, Israel is a state claiming all the rights and privileges of modern nations, so that no special conditions such as exceptional ethical requirements should be placed upon it. On the other hand, Israel is essentially and above all a Jewish state, and as such claims special status.

Berrigan thinks it fair to level against Israel the same charges of nationalism, militarism and exploitation that he has already made against other countries (especially the U.S.). But at the same time he cannot resist saying that Israel is particularly guilty because as a Jewish state it should know better (than America, for instance?). As he sees it, the State of Israel can be especially castigated for moral failure. Not only has it been an errant modern state; it has sold its birthright. Consequently, in Berrigan’s view, Zionism is a pseudo-Jewish nationalism engaged in "cold war" exploitation of humanity.

But Hertzberg holds that Israel should not be judged differently from other nations, and that in the exercise of nationalistic power Israel’s record compares quite favorably with that of other modern states. At the same time, he claims that, whatever the remaining ambiguities concerning the conflict between Israel’s rights and the rights of Palestinians, they can be morally interpreted in favor of Israel, because the State of Israel is necessary for Jewish existence. He sees Israel as fundamentally a religious community, and Zionism as a courageous affirmation of Jewish identity.

What is the meaning of this failure of dialogue between Christian and Jew? Is it not that Berrigan’s pseudo-theological indictment of Israel and Hertz-berg’s pseudo-ethical defense of Israel reflect an identity crisis on the part of both Judaism and Christianity?

Berrigan understands his Christian faith in strictly ethical terms (though Christianity is not really a religion of ethics). On the basis of this mistake he views Jewishness as ethically normative for Christianity, and consequently charges Israel with repudiating its theological inheritance because of its moral failure. Indeed, for Berrigan the true Jew is ethically pure, a "suffering servant"; and in fact he sees himself as a true Jew in that sense, which also defines Christianity for him.

Hertzberg is especially agitated about Berrigan because the latter’s ethical view of Jewishness represents the fundamental temptation for a modern Jew. The Holocaust exposed the insufficiency of interpreting Judaism as a religion of ethics. When Jews confront holocaust, they realize that there is about their existence a fearsome particularity which eludes moral categories and demands a response that is not simply ethical. Despite Hertzberg’s attempted defense of Israel on ethical grounds, his real argument for Israel is "the continuity of community." In this sense, Zionism is more profoundly rooted in theological, considerations than in ethical concerns.

I suggest that Christians can repudiate anti-Semitism by (1) supporting Zionism on theological grounds and (2) criticizing it on ethical grounds. As to the first point, Christians have a positive theological investment in a Zionism which makes for a viable Jewish state. Jews are an empirical reminder of the entire human-historical dimension of the Christian faith, inasmuch as Jews are a vital sign of the Jewishness of Jesus; that is, of his historical humanity. It is precisely the historicity of Jesus which has been dangerously obscured in Christian theological history -- an obscuring which coincides, with anti-Semitism. So far as present-day Jews by their existence signify for Christians the real humaness of Jesus, they are a reminder of the identification of the whole historical-human realm with the human existence of Jesus. For Christian faith this identification embraces all humanity as such, including Jews and their Jewishness; and the redemption of man rests directly upon this identification of God with all humanity in the historical being of Jesus. Jews, therefore, serve Christians as an inescapable witness to the historical arena as the location of God’s action in the world. Christian support of a positive Zionism in the form of a Jewish state means support for the historical continuation of Jewish existence and repudiation of an anti-Semitism that is willing to take advantage of Jewish powerlessness.

As to the second point, Christians will be in controversy with Israeli nationalism as with every nationalism. Christians are called to a suffering-servant role; they are to identify in non-ideological concern with all authentic human suffering in the name of Jesus the Christ. Therefore, Christians are called to oppose a Zionism which plays the cold war game along with the exploiters of the world. For example, a Christian must stand with the dispossessed Palestinians against those who dispossess them.

Daniel Berrigan is right when he scathingly denounces the ruthless side of Israeli policies, but he flirts with anti-Semitism when he comes close to begrudging Jews any entry into the sphere of nationalism. Arthur Hertzberg is right when he claims that the privilege of nationalism is proper and necessary for Jews, but he errs egregiously when he substitutes the charge of anti-Semitism for an explanation of Israeli complicity in oppressive policies. Berrigan inappropriately uses "Zionism" to denounce Israel, and Hertzberg just as inappropriately throws the term "anti-Semitism" at Berrigan.

Anti-Semitism and Covenant Religion

Our three case studies should contribute to an understanding of Judaism and Christianity as covenant rather than ethics religions. A look at anti-Semitism in the New Testament turned up the Christian claim to Jewishness and to historical particularity. A consideration of Jesus Christ Superstar underlined that the Christian covenant embraces all human beings -- that the atonement of Jesus as the Christ; the covenant person, includes everyone and permits no ethical divisions. And reflection on the State of Israel brought out the importance to Jews of being God’s people in the human form of a national community, and the humanness of Jesus as the Christian locus of God’s identification with human history.

As the covenant religions they are, Judaism and Christianity are close kin. But when a rationalized ethics is substituted for the covenant as the ground of faith, their identities are perverted and anti-Semitism takes root. Let Christians then see Jews as a positive sign of the historical anchorage of their faith; and let Jews see Christians as nondiscriminatory critics of nationalisms, even of Israeli nationalism. Let a Berrigan realize that Hertzberg’s Zionism is a simple desire for space to be human in a vital Jewish way, and let a Hertzberg understand Berrigan’s outcry as a courageously impartial identification with human suffering. In sum, let Jews and Christians alike appreciate the covenant nature each of the other’s faith.

I Smell the Cup

On the very rare occasions when I, a Presbyterian pastor, find myself in the pew as guest at another church’s communion service, I do a most inhospitable thing: I smell the cup. With an elegant circular gesture, I pass the cup beneath my nostrils to "test the bouquet." Actually, I am not checking to see whether the church cares enough to serve the very best whether the offering is Mogen David, Christian Brothers or some Brand X. I just want to find out for myself whether the wine is fermented or not.

No, I am not a liturgical purist. No, I am not a temperance buff. I am an alcoholic, by the grace of God now living in my 25th year of sobriety. And, given the concept of alcoholism as a disease -- thank God we don’t have to argue that any more, except with random sorts -- it is important to me that I do not ever again, intentionally or inadvertently, consume alcohol in any form: not martinis, not gin, not beer, not Geritol, and not even fermented communion wine. So, when the cup carries the suspicious aroma of fermentation, I pass it by or place it untasted in the rack.

I have met one authority who says that alcoholics can take fermented communion wine. He makes two points: first, the raw alcohol intake from a communion cup or chalice is so very small as to be harmless; second, in the communion service the alcohol -- rather than being destructive to the alcoholic -- serves a positive and even redeeming purpose. Looks good on paper, doesn’t it? However, we are not dealing with paper; we are dealing with people -- fragile and finite people. Anyway, the authority cited is not himself an alcoholic -- and I am a bit distrustful of an authority without a vested interest. The overriding consideration is: if the alcoholic drinks the fermented communion wine, he or she gains absolutely nothing and risks losing everything.

In the United States at this moment there are 10 million alcoholics -- including perhaps 1 million who are recovered male and female, young and old, black and white (alcoholism is an "equal opportunity" disease). Some of them are beyond the pale, some are sitting in the pew and some are standing in the pulpit. That communicant confronting the sacramental elements is "coming from somewhere." And that cleric holding the chalice in trembling hands is communicating nonverbally to those who can read the language.

My ministry as pastor and as staff member of an alcoholism treatment hospital brings me into close counseling contact with, well over a thousand alcoholics every year. They come from the whole Christian spectrum, and they tell a story that other Christians should think about in love. Of course, the overt behavior of the alcoholic usually gets him or her ridden out of Christendom on a rail. Other unacceptable behaviors can be better hidden, so that they do not bring disgrace to the church (there is thinly veiled anger in that statement, isn’t there?). But if we can get past the phenomenon of alcoholism to the persons involved, love is possible.

Those alcoholic Christians who belong to parishes or communions that serve "the unfermented fruit of the vine" (Methodists, for instance) report that they have no particular communion problems (except, like me, when visiting another church). But those alcoholic Christians whose churches serve only the fermented wine are forced to make difficult choices. Many of them stay away from the Lord’s table completely (and experience unresolved ambivalence in doing so). Of those who do present themselves for the sacrament, most receive only the bread, with feelings ranging from deep resentment at being left out to mild rejection. A very few report that they just touch the lips to the wine and that the smell and taste give rise to some anxiety (one person calls this practice "the kiss of death").

Jesus drank fermented wine and gave it to others. To suggest as some do, that this was unfermented "new wine" is contrary to biblical scholarship. Nonetheless, I have often wondered what our Lord would have done had one of his disciples been unable to partake. Suppose that man, on the night of the Last Supper, took Jesus aside and said, "Look, Master, I want very much to eat the feast with you, but -- you know -- every time I drink wine I end up getting drunk. So would you be offended if I sat this one out? And look, please don’t say anything to the others. I don’t want them to think badly of me."

What would the response have been? Would our Lord and Savior have said, "Aw, come on, a little one won’t hurt you"? Some might picture him, as saying, "Fake it through, just pretend to drink" Could he have said, "No, this meal is important; you go ahead and drink, and my grace will be sufficient"? Or maybe he would have said, "OK, no problem; I’ll have them send in a goblet of grape juice from the kitchen." Would he have asked the other disciples to be supportive and understanding? Would he have cast out the demon? Just what would he have done?

And today, how would he deal with a similar request from those persons of flesh and blood, feelings and frailty, who must serve the sacrament? Drum them out of the union? Pretend the problem doesn’t exist? We have no raw statistics on alcoholism among the clergy (we hide that condition even more relentlessly than we do female alcoholism -- and just imagine how unpardonable is the sin of being an alcoholic female cleric!) ; we have only a gnawing torment that clergy alcoholism is rising more rapidly than alcoholism among the general public and in the pew. One explanation: more persons of the cloth drink today than, say, 30 years ago, and unresolved feelings about whether they ought to be drinking are more intense and more frequent with them than with the general public and the laity.

A Roman Catholic priest with whom I share many meaningful moments of living and serving is a recovered alcoholic (recovered, not reformed). He tells me that he pours scarcely a teaspoonful of wine into the chalice so that a cruetful will last him for weeks. However, he is out of the woods now, for last summer the Vatican directed that a Roman Catholic priest who has been diagnosed and treated, as an alcoholic may request permission of his Ordinary on concelebrating. "to communicate only under the species of bread," or if celebrating alone "to celebrate mass with unfermented grape juice."

A United Church of Christ minister confided that he uses grape juice in his cup while the congregation receives fermented wine -- a deception he feels he cannot share with his official board or parishioners, but a necessary one following hospital treatment for alcoholism (his absence was reported as a hunting trip in Canada). A Lutheran minister follows the same practice, but he is not an alcoholic -- his father is and he is deathly afraid of becoming one. Says a former Episcopal priest who now teaches high school: "I simply could not make peace with the eucharist." A former Methodist minister, presently doing public relations work for a banking firm, made the change because his new employers could accept his drinking and will hide the fact that he is an alcoholic.

A Presbyterian pastor who had always served the "unfermented fruit of the vine" (Presbyterians have been encouraged to do so since 1895) accepted a call to a distant church without inquiring about the communion practice there. Since the church used fermented wine, he served it and decided to partake as well. Within a year, he had returned to heavy drinking and was forced out of the ministry. Now working for a government social service bureau, he makes no effort to dampen down his deep resentment that "my brothers in the Lord didn’t even try to understand."

III

Now a few questions:

Does a liturgical interest in fermented wine seem authentic when it is not accompanied by a similar liturgical interest in the unleavened loaf?

Does it not come close to liturgical arrogance to offer only fermented wine on a "take it or leave it’’ basis?

Is it not liturgically confusing to say to one communicant that partaking of a single element -- bread -- is adequate communion, while saying to other brothers and sisters that both elements are important and that the second one absolutely must have alcohol in it?

Is it not liturgically inconsistent to permit one pastor or priest to serve grape juice while at rise same time another must faithfully take and/or serve fermented wine?

Is it not liturgically insensitive to continue unexamined use of a cup that fosters divisions distinctions and deceptions?

Some of my alcoholic brothers and sisters who "love the Lord" tell me that it is not enough to "smell the cup" -- they detect a smell from the whole thing.

Last spring my presbytery executive attended a communion at a seminary commencement where liturgical renewal had prompted the serving of a fermented wine -- a departure from the school’s norm. Having been sensitized (if not utterly harassed) about alcoholism by me, he asked the officiant: "What would you have done if I had brought an alcoholic with me to this communion?" The answer was: "I never thought about that."

Do think about it. Please. On behalf of my 10 million alcoholic brothers and sisters -- in the pulpit and in the pew -- I ask all church people to think creatively about it and to pray about it, too.

In the meantime, I continue to smell the cup.

Suffering, Innocence and Love

Every person possesses some secret desire which he holds prisoner in his heart, for only there can it dwell in the sacredness which secrecy alone provides. For the virgin it is perhaps the desire to bear flesh from her flesh, for the faithful husband it is perhaps the desire to once -- just once -- be unfaithful, to taste the opposite of what has become a life style. The attraction of opposites is a mental as well as physical phenomenon. The cowed individual of religious creeds harbors a secret wish, perhaps frequently made conscious, to hurl a defiant No! into the face of God, to jam the vinegar-soaked sponge down his throat and twist the nails in his feet. We are a composite of opposites, a coniunctio oppositorum, as the old masters would say -- only they were speaking of God. We are plagued to enjoy a doomed beauty and pursue a purposeless meaning, to live a life-death into which seemingly autonomous and contradictory forces constantly intrude.

Is it possible for autonomous forces to enter into one’s life? Carl Jung, among others, would answer Yes, and say that this possibility is in fact a whole process of life in which a universal unconscious gradually makes itself known to individual lives and eventually brings a conscious insight into their meaning. He calls this individuation, the process of becoming an individual. There seems, for example, to be evidence that "religiosity" was present in peoples whose awareness on a conscious level was minimal. Even in the 20th century world in which people have disclaimed all sense of transcendence, Jung found in his experimental analysis a tendency for archetypes (symbols and myths) to reappear unconsciously in a person’s life.

Camus and Christianity

The possibility of autonomous forces’ exercising power within a concrete human life is also offered by Christianity. Kaliayev, in Camus’s The Just Assassins, says that the suffering of life separates people and that only death can reunite them. Death is their final bond in sorrow, after which there is nothing. He tells the duchess, the wife of the man he murdered, that Christ died in suffering with his fellow creatures, which is all that any man can do. The duchess replies that one always dies alone. She says that dying separates people, that only God can save and reunite them.

The alternatives offered by Kaliayev and the duchess are equally unsatisfactory. Either one suffers with God, which doesn’t make suffering worthwhile: or one ignores suffering and injustice in the hope of a spiritual salvation. Neither alternative gives a meaning to suffering, and neither is particularly Christian. Rather, a Christian alternative to these proposals might be the understanding of suffering on the concrete level, especially in the life of Jesus. and through this understanding coming to experience the autonomous creative forces of life.

Someone like Camus, in The Rebel, would say that one is basically innocent in that no matter how good he is toward others and sincere toward himself he still must die, and that the order of the world is therefore unjust. Others, however, like Camus in his later work The Fall, hold that no one is innocent. The narrator of The Fall thus explains the death of Jesus in light of an inherent human guilt: it was just as impossible for Jesus to justify his existence as it is for any one, so that the real reason why he went to his death is that he knew he was not altogether innocent. Becoming man meant that he. God, was doomed to suffer.

This particular position is developed as follows: An encounter with one’s individual death leads to an awareness of the limits of human existence. One can understand these limits (guilt/innocence. etc.) as both positive and negative: or one might approach them so as to live as if life were solely one or the other. Some opt for the former position. They recognize the ambiguity of life and, believing that one does not have the power to construe or make his life completely, conclude that he is not wholly innocent. They fail, however, to take one further step. For if one would accept that the dark and negative side of life is irretrievably present, that the human situation is inherently ambiguous, he could then go beyond the guilt associated with any attempt to construe life so as to eliminate its dark side.

From Nothingness to Being

The basic question being asked is: Why does suffering occur in an individual’s life? The life and death of Jesus -- that is, the story of God’s becoming an individual man -- is an attempt to answer this question. It is not that Jesus acts with or for all persons, but that he acts as an individual man. His life is an example of the way in which an individual life might he lived. As a man, he finds darkness and negativity in his life, but he trusts in the darkness, and his trust transforms it into light. This trust indicates that though he is looking for something greater than his individual life, he knows that this something can only be discovered within the life process. Seen in this perspective, the life of Jesus is similar to Jung’s idea of the individual life, and the risen Christ is comparable to Jung’s fully individuated man.

Jesus the man reveals Jesus the God in that he does humanly what God does. Jesus does not impose meaning on or construe his life; he allows his life to become. And in this sense the God present in Jesus can be seen as an autonomous creative force which lets life be what it is. In the way he lets his own life develop, therefore, Jesus becomes for the Christian the paradigm of the human being actively open to the creative power within him, which is God. Jesus’ individual life can be seen as the way in which all individuals inust pursue the search for their own meaning. Which is to say that the path which the individual life must take is one of growth from nothingness to being, by attempting first to understand that one’s life situation is ambiguous; second, by opening oneself up to the creative God-power within oneself and waiting for its revelation, however gradually it may come; and third, by acting upon its discovery.

Jesus reveals not that God will love a person if he acts this way or that, but that God loves humankind unconditionally. But to love unconditionally is to love the concrete, including both good and evil. The Christian must therefore attempt to understand sympathetically the life of Jesus: that is, attempt to experience his life as he experienced it, and learn from his experience. This is possible, of course, only to the extent that there is a common basis for experience in all people. And if there is such a common basis, if all people are concrete individuals, then one can complete his understanding only by returning again to his own individuality. For simply to re-enact the life of Jesus is but half the task.

The Way to Become Whole

Unconditional love, or the attempt to love unconditionally, is thus an opening of oneself to guidance in the face of life’s paradox and absurdity. In Matthew’s Gospel, for example, Jesus returns from the wilderness to begin his mission of preaching repentance and the kingdom of God. and finds that John the Baptist has been imprisoned. He thus begins by taking the place of John. But when John is put to death, according to Matthew, Jesus withdraws. Was this because he realized that he was risking death, that his "life-project" of converting Israel might fail? Perhaps. But this discovery of the possible absurdity of his task did rot cause him to abandon it. Rather, he continued to rust that there was a meaning beyond his perception, as death is necessarily beyond the perception of man. And that he died still teaching and still trusting in the darkness of this possible absurdity is clear: on the cross, we are told, he said: "Into your hands I commend my spirit." Only after his death is the man Jesus recognized as the "Lord." He saw darkness at the end of his life and trusted in it.

The insight gained from the life of Jesus is that the task of becoming a human being, as God became a man, involves death. But only if God is viewed as unconditional love is it conceivable that he would become a man and live a human life. Only in this way, too, is it possible to understand why, rather than attempting to achieve a goal -- that is, attempting to become a god -- Jesus revealed that the way to become whole is to become a person. The possibility which this revelation offers us is that the individual life is greater than any particular life project. But only if one does not give up after failure can he open himself to this insight, within which is found a creative power working through life, bringing it out of nothingness toward Being.

Martin Luther King’s Vision of the Beloved Community

Central to the thinking of Martin Luther King was the concept of the "Beloved Community." Liberalism and personalism provided its theological and philosophical foundations, and nonviolence the means to attain it. True, King’s initial optimism about the possibility of actualizing that community in history was in time qualified by Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. But the concept as such can be traced through all his speeches and writings, from the earliest to the last. In one of his first published articles he stated that the purpose of the Montgomery bus boycott "is reconciliation, . . . redemption, the creation of the beloved community." In 1957, writing in the newsletter of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he described the purpose and goal of that organization as follows: "The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . . SCLC works for integration. Our ultimate goal is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living -- integration." And in his last book he declared: "Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation . . ."

King’s was a vision of a completely integrated society, a community of love and justice wherein brotherhood would be an actuality in all of social life. In his mind, such a community would be the ideal corporate expression of the Christian faith.

A Vision of Total Relatedness

Integration, as King understood it, is much more inclusive and positive than desegregation. Desegregation is essentially negative in that it eliminates discrimination against blacks in public accommodations, education, housing and employment -- in those aspects of social life that can be corrected by laws. Integration, however, is "the positive acceptance of desegregation and the welcomed participation of Negroes in the total range of human activities." But King did not believe that the transition from desegregation to integration would be inevitable or automatic. Whereas desegregation can be brought about by laws, integration requires a change in attitudes. It involves personal and social relationships that are created by love -- and these cannot be legislated. Once segregation has been abolished and desegregation accomplished, blacks and whites will have to learn to relate to each other across those nonrational, psychological barriers which have traditionally separated them in our society. All of us will have to become color blind. As King said, desegregation will only produce "a society where men are physically desegregated and spiritually segregated, where elbows are together and hearts apart. It gives us social togetherness and spiritual apartness. It leaves us with a stagnant equality of sameness rather than a constructive equality of oneness." But integration will bring in an entirely different kind of society whose character is best summed up in the phrase "Black and White Together" -- the title of one of the chapters of Why We Can’t Wait and the theme of one stanza of the civil rights movement’s hymn "We Shall Overcome." Integration will enlarge "the concept of brotherhood to a vision of total interrelatedness."

Behind King’s conception of the Beloved Community lay his assumption that human existence is social in nature. "The solidarity of the human family" is a phrase he frequently used to express this idea. "We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," he said in one of his addresses. This was a way of affirming that reality is made up of structures that form an interrelated whole; in other words, that human beings are dependent upon each other. Whatever a person is or possesses he owes to others who have preceded him. As King wrote: "Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally ‘in the red.’ " Recognition of one’s indebtedness to past generations should inhibit the sense of self-sufficiency and promote awareness that personal growth cannot take place apart from meaningful relationships with other persons, that the "I" cannot attain fulfillment without the "Thou."

King saw the participants in the civil rights movement as representing the Beloved Community in microcosm. The people who attended the movement’s mass meetings and rallies, joined in its demonstrations, and supported its aims in many other ways came from every section of American society. The educated and the illiterate, the affluent and the welfare recipient, white and black -- men and women who heretofore had been separated by rigid social and legal codes were brought together in a common cause. Indeed, since King wanted to make the base of the movement as broad as possible, he frequently called upon whites for help in his various campaigns.

Justice for Everyone

After the March to Montgomery in the spring of 1966, several thousand marchers were delayed at the airport because their planes were late. As King tells it, he was deeply impressed by the heterogeneity yet the obvious unity of the crowd:

As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood [Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper & Row, 1967)’ p. 9]

In King’s view, the interrelatedness of human existence means that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." He believed that denial of constitutional rights to anyone potentially violates the rights of all. It is the entire national community that is the victim of electric cattle prods and biting police dogs. Discrimination against 10 per cent of our population weakens the whole social fabric. Race and poverty are not merely sectional problems but American problems. It follows that the liberation of black people will also mean the emancipation of white people. King took seriously the indivisibility of human existence. "In a real sense," he wrote, "all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly" (ibid., p. 181).

His approach to human existence led King to believe that in seeking to eliminate racial injustice, the civil rights movement was making a far larger contribution to the national life. Integration is usually associated solely with the struggle for racial equality, but King conceived of it in a much broader way. He envisioned a future society in which persons would not be malformed as a result of racial hatred or economic exploitation. That is, King was not concerned about justice for blacks as opposed to justice for whites; he was concerned about justice for everyone. And he made perfectly clear what he meant by that:

Let us be dissatisfied until rat-infested, vermin-filled slums will be a thing of a dark past and every family will have a decent sanitary house in which to live. Let us be dissatisfied until the empty stomachs of Mississippi are filled and the idle industries of Appalachia are revitalized. . . . Let us be dissatisfied until our brothers of the Third World of Asia, Africa and Latin America will no longer be the victims of imperialist exploitation, but will be lifted from the long night of poverty, illiteracy and disease ["Honoring Dr. Du Bois," in Freedomways, VIII, s (Spring 1968), pp. 110-111].

Plainly, King’s vision of justice included all the world’s poor -- blacks, whites, browns and reds: North and South Americans, Africans, Asians and Europeans. Economic justice, he held, is a right of the entire human race. He was aware too that securing this right for all would require elimination of the structures of economic injustice characteristic of capitalism.

Alleviating Economic Inequity

King’s views on this entire question grew out of his early championship of an egalitarian, socialistic approach to wealth and property. "A life," he wrote, "is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man." He repeatedly condemned the United States’ economic system for withholding the necessities of life from the masses while heaping luxuries on the few. One of our major goals, he declared, should be to bridge the gap between abject poverty and inordinate wealth. To this end he began, during the latter part of his life, to advocate a variety of economic programs, including the creation of jobs by government and the institution of a guaranteed annual minimal income. He was impatient with phrases like "human dignity"’ and "brotherhood of man" when they did not find concrete expression in the structures of society.

The point is that King believed it was God’s intention that everyone should have the physical and spiritual necessities of life. He could not envision the Beloved Community apart from the alleviation of economic inequity and the achievement of economic justice. Harvey Cox has aptly pointed out that King combined with this emphasis two traditional biblical themes: the "holiness of the poor" and the "blessed community." In the movement King led, blacks were the embodiment of "the poor" and integration represented the vision of "the holy community." Cox explains:

It is . . . essential to notice that the two elements, the holy outcast and the blessed community, must go together. Without the vision of restored community, the holiness ascribed to the poor would fall far short of politics and result in a mere perpetuation of charity and service activities’’ [On Not Leaving It to the Snake (Macmillan, 1967). P. 133].

Pilgrimage to the Promised Land

In speaking about the possibility of actualizing the Beloved community in history, King attempted to avoid what he called "a superficial optimism" upon the on hand, and "a crippling pessimism" on the other. He knew that the solution of social problems is a slow process. At the same time, he was confident that, through God’s help and human effort, social progress could be made. He said in a definitive passage:

Although man’s moral pilgrimage may never reach a destination point on earth, his never-ceasing strivings may bring him ever closer to the city of righteousness. And though the Kingdom of god may remain not yet as universal reality in history, in the present it may exist in such isolated forms as in judgment, in personal devotion, and in some group life. . . . Above all, we must be reminded anew that God is at work in his universe. lie is hot outside the world looking on within a. son of cold indifference. . . . As we struggle to defeat the forces of evil, the God of the universe struggles with us. Evil dies on the seashore, not merely because of man’s endless struggle against it, but because of God’s power to defeat it [Struggle to Love (Harper & Row, 1961). p. 64].

Thus, though acutely aware that the Beloved Community is "not yet," but in the future -- perhaps even the distant future -- Martin Luther King believed that it would eventually be actualized, and already lie saw approximations of it. That is why he worked unceasingly for the realization of his dream and never lost hope that "there will be a great camp meeting in the promised land’ His hope was rooted in his faith in the power of God to achieve his purpose among humankind within history.

The Fantasies of the New Theologians

In a provocative essay appearing in these pages a while ago, Stephen Swecker challenged religious thinking to abandon its old allegiance to conventional modes of speech and categories of meaning and to plunge into a far deeper and richer pool of experience: the murky waters of unbridled imagination, or "fantasy" (see "Toward a Theology of the Fantastic," Christian Century, January 16). Swecker points out that, when faced with free-spirited heretics in their midst, religion and science have always adopted the gambit of medieval popes and princes -- have prudently laid aside their chronic rivalries and conspired to suppress the affront to their authority. Such an affront, he argues, came in the past as it comes now from that brash and unbaptized libeler of human reason the perennial harlequin, the votary of the ridiculous, the extravagant, the "fanciful." For centuries, says Swecker, fantasy has remained an "untouchable" faculty of mind, barred from the recognized castes of philosophy and reflection. Its pariah status has been due to its capacity for overturning everyone’s comfortable world views, its ability to explode a people’s secure conceptions of reality. And because it can threaten the very unworldly or transcendental claims of church theologians as perversely as it mocks the hypotheses of hard-boiled positivists and scientists, these spiritual and intellectual leaders of society consider it a malignant power they are bound to combat.

Thus, Swecker maintains, science and theology have taken a wrong tack here. For the fact is that fantasy can vastly enrich them both, insofar as it serves uniquely to bring into view facets of reality that are normally imperceptible to the disciplined eye. Hence the need for a "theology of the fantastic" to replace the shopworn and increasingly irrelevant academic God-talk.

A Mixing of Categories

Whatever the merits of Swecker’s ideas about the role of fantasy in widening the perimeter of human insight, it remains questionable whether theology as such ought to revert back beyond its historical genesis into the primordial womb of inspiration. In one sense, "theology of the fantastic" is a contradiction in terms. Despite much confusion nowadays concerning the theologian’s true task, anyone sensitive to the root meaning of "theo-logy" knows that the word always implies the clarification and conceptualization of the mystery of theos by the logos of rational discourse. To contend that theology should abandon reason altogether is therefore to do violence to the term. And to say that theologians should shed their classic role and become a breed of lotus-eaters or mystagogues is to ask them to betray their vocation. No, Swecker mixes up his categories here.

And not only here, for he employs the terms "fantasy" and "imagination" interchangeably. He would have us believe that in responding to the world we must choose between Apollo and Dionysus, between careful analysis and emotional frenzy. Surely the choice is not that narrow. Imagination remains, and imagination is not necessarily the same as fantasy. A century and a half ago that remarkable poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge underscored the difference between the two. Imagination, he said, is "the living power and prime agent of all human perception." As such it ranks far higher than fantasy, or "fancy," which "is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space, while it is blended with, and modified by, that empirical phenomenon of the will." That is, fantasy consists in free association of images, in arbitrary rearrangement of sense impressions and of symbols of the unconscious. And the process of fantasizing is totally emotional, and is carried Out with all the abandon of a child engaged in fingerpainting. Imagination, however, is not necessarily at cross-purposes with reason. Imagination has a method. Because it heeds the contours of the world as it finds them, it creates stable forms of perception, whereas fantasy strives to annihilate all forms. The poet Wallace Stevens puts the case well: ". . . imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos. . . . reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination." Imagination, therefore, has its own logos which discerns continuities and patterns more rare than the rigid patterning of human experience in preference for the wild, grotesque or impalpable. Hence fantasy often evokes such metaphors as "blown minds" or "out of sight," metaphors that cluster around the equally slang expression, "Wow, that’s fantastic."

Imaginative constructs have served the theologian well in mapping out a universe which is recognizable to the average religious believer in the light of the meanings available to him. Perhaps it is the natural intermeshing of religious imagination and the structures of reason that prompted Anselm’s famous Fides quaerans intellectum, "Faith seeking understanding." But the job of fantasy seems to be the dismantling of common faith and understanding altogether.

The Fantasy of Theological Self-Sufficiency

To propose a theology of the fantastic may tell us more about the current embarrassment of theologians than about the future of theology. Ever since the decline of neo-orthodoxy in the early 1960s and the passing of the august generation that produced Barth, Buber, Tillich and the Niebuhrs, theology has been sinking into a morass of mediocrity. Though the tradition of solid scholarship and painstaking research still persists in some parts of academe, many of the theologians who gain national press and prestige today do so either as clever faddists or as facile exegetes of what had seemed profundities. To observe that theology in the past decade or more has undergone an identity crisis is an understatement. The scramble for the right catchword, the sure-fire phrase in the attempt to prove the theologian’s "relevance" to the modern world has resulted in a lot of silly name-gaming. In those ten years we have had, successively or concurrently, a "theology of secularity," a "theology of hope," a "theology of play," etc, etc. For another theologian to stand up now and recommend a "theology of the fantastic" only adds a tinge of irony to the fact that many of time new theologians have been feeding each on his own particular brand of fantasy for a good while.

We might call theirs "the fantasy of theological self-sufficiency." It thrives on the idea that theology perennially goes about, locating the "real." One reason why so many new theologians have lately been flirting with the miraculous, the supernatural and the subconscious -- i.e.. the "fantastical" -- may well be that they are trying to shield themselves from the devastating criticism of sociologists and political philosophers, who point out the sociocultural rootage and relativity of many of our religious symbols.

Theologians in the ‘60s, discovering that the biblicism and antiscientism of their Barthian forebears would no longer serve as a defense against secular attacks, cast: about for a preserve of true religious experience that could not be explained away as just one of many parochial perspectives on the universe. Eventually they stumbled into the fairyland of magic and mysticism and there found a new reality-principle, one that was immune to the relativizing assaults of theology’s critics. After all, were not each person’s private ecstasies irrefutably his own and therefore very real so far as he was concerned? Time was when theology held a special kind of monopoly on interpreting the social forms of reality. The theologian construed for the populace at large the complex myths and values of his culture. But the 20th century has seen the fragmentation, on a global scale, of the old social forms of reality. The once vital and integral myths of nations and religious communities are now "broken myths," as Paul Tillich said. For years theologians have been cutting themselves further and further adrift from the broader sets of meanings by which ordinary people steer their lives; yet at the same time they have clung desperately to the notion that they speak as autonomous experts, that their definitions of what is real are sufficient.

From Secularism to Shamanism

This fantasy of self-sufficiency (which is merely a reminiscence of a vanished reputation) has been justified insofar as the theologian has busied himself in hunting for "alternative" realities that clash with the social consensus in which he has ceased to share. Political theologies and theologies of social activism, coinciding as they did with the protest movements of the past decade, sought to secure a transcendent reference point for a minority cadre confronting the status quo. As the "revolution" subsequently petered out -- perhaps as much because of the lack of any real praxis among its firebrands as because of the tendency of the establishment to co-opt some of its slogans and platforms -- its place was taken by a quest for greater metaphysical truths overarching the merely political. It was of course Harvey Cox who delivered the telling blow in this process. In 1969, with the publication of his book The Feast of Fools (Harper & Row), he repudiated the position he had taken four years earlier in The Secular City (Macmillan, 1965). Now he endeavored to hitch religion to the outlandish, the unspeakable, the whimsical -- yes, the fantastic. Expectably, Cox’s conversion from secularism to shamanism actuated an avalanche of writings extolling the inward vision, the ultimacy of the personal fata morgana. Sam Keen and his comrades talked of "the new Dionysianism." David Miller and the reconstructed theologian-of-hope Jürgen Moltmann outlined a "theology of play." Play and fantasy were no longer to be seen simply as therapies for a rationalistic and hyperactivistic bourgeois culture; they were to become a new "root metaphor" for that culture (as Miller put it in Gods and Games [Harper & Row, 1971]), the source of a future reality-principle for millions of moderns emancipated by affluence for a career of creative self-mastery.

But theology’s plan for "greening" America and the rest of the earth by play and make-believe signaled little more than its utter estrangement from any coherent community of language and thought. Theology had cast its lot with the counterculture; yet its denial of the final importance of all fixed forms of communication, of semantic norms, of operable criteria of sense and nonsense, ruled out even the theoretical possibility of its being able to speak from within a distinct culture, "counter" or otherwise. In its effort to take the high road of spiritual insearch, theology abolished its own need for theology as such, since it would no longer have truck with scholarly precision or strict rules of interpretation. Cox himself wrote in The Feast of Fools that he was "mainly concerned with the life of faith, not theological method." The complete absence of method, combined with the new chic of spontaneity and reverie, has led the theologian to secede from all forms of common life, including, ironically, the vanguard of illuminati whom he claims to represent. The social consequence of such a stance is not simply elitism but a kind of licensed anarchism; and the moral consequence is an elegant self-indulgence that borders on nihilism. After all, in the utopias these spiritual solipsists project, all men get along with each other happily by skylarking in their respective sensualities.

The Opium of the High and Mighty

Perhaps the idea of a "theology of the fantastic" grows directly out of the social fantasies of a disinherited professional establishment that longs once again to define status and competence for the culture as a whole. Lacking a fertile ideological soil on which to stake a claim -- even in respect to the once fashionable ideology of liberation for the blacks, the poor, the Third World -- the theologian purports to turn his back on all ideologies and reclaim "raw" consciousness, which supposedly is free of any group or material biases. Fantasy thus becomes the philosopher’s stone that will alchemize all social contradictions and political tensions into inner peace and good feelings. "Nonseriousness," according to Miller, is the summum bonum in a new world which demands the pursuit of leisure instead of hard work. But who has the time to be nonserious? Who can afford to shake off the onus of labor? Only the person who is already surfeited with the abundant riches of a neocapitalist state.

Marx saw religion as a species of fantasizing, an "opium," foisted by the ruling classes on the proletariat in order that the latter would not be able to identify its oppressors. But in the new theological lexicon "fantasy is religion" (Miller). The historical joke on Marx may be that fantasy becomes the opium not of the lowly but of the high and mighty. Opium, as Marx discovered, produces a false consciousness of reality. But the reality-principle of the new theologians has nothing to do with the bleak realism of the downtrodden, who must scrape to make ends meet and cannot afford the luxury of uninhibited fantasy.

Where fantasy tends to split apart social worlds and to open up a Pandora’s box of illusions, imagination fosters the growth of a common self-understanding. It looks for the pearl of general truth in the oyster of experience. It is not private or esoteric, but seeks to knit together a skein of corporate, if not universal, signs and meanings. The myths and legends of archaic humanity mirrored a common experience of a people, a collective anxiety or aspiration, a shared encounter with destiny. The religious imagination of Christianity always framed its doctrines within a confessing church, a "people of God," a communion of mutual vision and comprehension. Theology, of course, need not confine its imagination to the traditional Christian cosmos. But if it begins to pronounce oracles for alien gods, it must be sure that its words ring clear for the mass of that god’s constituents. The theologian’s responsibility to an audience wider than one of bards or enthusiasts is written into his charter of expertise. Historically, he has been charged with mediating fundamental and corporate symbols to as broad a public as possible by making use of universal concepts -- a task which contrasts significantly with the privileged and sometimes even esoteric intuitions of the artist.

A Retreat from Intelligibility

The aesthetic dimension of all theologizing is grossly overplayed when it implies a retreat from intelligibility or consistency. The distinction between a theology of the imagination and a theology of the fantastic parallels that between art and mere self-expression. To bang playfully on a piano is qualitatively different from composing a symphony, and to let one’s fancy run amok is to stray far from reverent worship of God.

The peril in a "theology of fantasy" is that fantasy can take itself too seriously, can make serious business out of not being serious. History shows that "mystic, crystal revelations," such as are celebrated in the song "Aquarius," tend to degenerate into absurd orthodoxies, simply because "mystic revelations" allow no reality-testing.

The lesson may be difficult to grasp. One of Shakespeare’s characters says of Macbeth:

. . . he is superstitious grown of late

Quite from the main opinion he held once

Of fantasies, of dreams, and ceremonies.

Such seems to be the case with those who propose a "theology of fantasy." Perhaps next they will go the whole way and recommend a theology of obscurantism."

Theology and the English Language

For anyone surveying theology since the Reformation, English may seem the wrong language to examine. Surely German has been the language of theology for at least the past 400 years. But most theological work of note, in whatever language it is originally written, eventually gets translated into English, and it is through English that most of the world appropriates it, especially the theological students of North and South America and Asia. Since then the English language serves as a conveyor belt upon which ideas manufactured in Tübingen, Basel and Heidelberg -- or in Lyon, São Paulo and Uppsala -- are carried to the rest of the world, inspection of the machinery for possible faulty operation now and again might help to avert a breakdown along the way. I propose therefore to undertake at least a preliminary inspection, to offer a criticism of theology’s use of the English language.

Structures and Strictures

Language is one of those "visible and invisible" powers that we have to wrestle with. Language blesses us or enslaves us. It is a structure which makes chaos coherent, or it is a stricture which blocks the road to understanding. When the latter happens, language ceases to be the tool for transferring meaning from one person to others. No longer a basis for community, it becomes a barrier to understanding, a morass we must wade through to get to the other side. Even worse, it becomes not a tool but a weapon turned against ourselves. Such is the case of theology as presented in English today. I make no attempt to fix the blame for this situation, to say whether it lies with authors or with translators. Nor do I enter into the linguistic-analysis debate. My purpose is a much more homely one: to bring to the attention of writers and translators alike the bafflement in which their work leaves not only the American seminary student but also the besieged pastor in Bangkok or Bogotá.

This is not a call for a popularized version of theology, a Classic Comics series from Schleiermacher to James Cone. It is a call for more precision and clarity, whether in the initial work of composition or in the work of translation into English. And perhaps it is also a plea for more careful examination of why and for whom theology is currently written. As a service to the church, to the people of God? As a disguise for apologetics directed to an indifferent world? Or has theology fallen prey to the international beast that stalks all graduate schools: the desire to impress one’s colleagues and to develop a method of discourse so introverted that only the initiated can interpret it? There is more than one kind of speaking in tongues.

I take my cue from George Orwell’s "Politics and the English Language" (published in his Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, 1945). The piece is a criticism of the way politics obscures meaning through slovenly use of words. In it Orwell lays down six basic rules for writers of English:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive when you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

To present-day theological writers these rules of Orwell’s, formulated in the 1940s, may seem somewhat simpleminded and even journalistic. There is about them a certain determined bustlingness that reminds one of the cleaning woman who turns you out in order to set your house to rights. His sleeves rolled up, a kerchief round his head and a feather duster in his hand, Orwell insists on whisking away all the filmy phrases you had draped with such studied negligence over the furniture. He throws out the flowers saved from the previous decade. He shakes the accumulated dust from the rugs and perhaps does not even put them back in the accustomed places. He opens the windows wide to let plenty of light and fresh air come in. And when he is through he stomps off stoically, knowing that the job will have to be endlessly repeated as long as humans continue to occupy the house.

Two Examples

Let me then take a few tentative swipes at the more obvious messes I have found around me as a student of theology. The two examples I choose, are from sources that will be easily accessible to both American and Third World pastors.

Such a problem would lead us to suggest that the only consistent alternatives would be either a radical, a historical translation as mentioned above, or -- if the historical framework of biblical thought were to be retained -- a systematic theology where the bridge between the centuries of biblical events and our own time was found in the actual history of the church as still ongoing history of God’s people. The blueprint of such a theology could be found in that self-understanding of Israel, both new and old, which descriptive biblical theology has laid bare as the common denominator of biblical thought. Such a theology would conceive of the Christian existence as a life by the fruits of God’s acts in Jesus Christ, rather than as a faith according to concepts deduced from the teaching of the prophets, Jesus, and Paul regarding God’s acts. It would exercise some of the same freedom which Paul’s and the other NT letters do when they refrain from any nostalgic attempts to play Galilee into their theology by transforming the teaching of Jesus’ earthly ministry into a system of theology and ethics [Krister Stendahl: "Biblical Theology, Contemporary," Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (Abingdon, 1962), I, 428].

Modes of religious experience are . . . shaped by cultural patterns. When social change jars the patterns, conventional ways of experiencing the holy disappear. When the thickly clotted symbol system of a pre-urban society is replaced by a highly differentiated and individuated urban culture, modalities of religious experience shift. When this happens gradually, over a long time span, the religious symbols have a chance to become adapted to the new cultural patterns. The experience of the death of the gods, or of God, is a consequence of an abrupt transition which causes the traditional symbols to collapse since they no longer illuminate the shifting social reality [Harvey Cox, "The Death of God and the Future of Theology," New Theology No. 4 (Macmillan, 1967), p. 245].

Both these authors use a fair amount of metaphorical language -- an inevitability, since all language is in some way metaphorical. Even words that now signify the most abstract concept ("abstract" is a good example) once had quite concrete meanings. When one consciously uses concrete language to make the abstract visible or to interpret one concrete reality into another, then one is purposefully using metaphorical language. As Orwell says, "the sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image." But he goes on: "When these images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking."

Inept Metaphors

Stendahl begins by using architectural metaphors (framework, bridge, blueprint) and ends with a few miscellaneous figures (ongoing, laid bare, common denominator, the fruits, play Galilee into). In the first sentence, the main clause states that "the bridge between the centuries . . . was found [to be] ongoing." How interpret this image logically? Either the bridge has not yet been completed (which conflicts with the rest of the passage) or it is some sort of portable pontoon bridge. In the second sentence, descriptive biblical theology has "laid bare [a] blueprint [as a] common denominator." There seems to be no way of unscrambling such an image this side of Alice’s Wonderland. The next sentence contains only one clearly identifiable metaphor: "a life by the fruits of God’s acts in Jesus Christ." But just how are the fruits and the life related? Do the fruits sustain life? Are they to be cultivated? I find myself groping for meaning, especially when that phrase is juxtaposed with "a faith deduced according to concepts." Obviously (by the use of "rather than") these are meant to be polarities of Christian existence, but how and in what way?

"People who write in this manner," says Orwell, "usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying." Stendahl’s emotional meaning first peeps through with the phrase "refrain from any nostalgic attempts to play Galilee into their theology." The reader has little trouble discerning that Stendahl intends to express solidarity with the exercise of freedom represented by Paul’s letters and that he dislikes the other side. But what it is he dislikes: is obscured by its inept metaphorical presentation. "Play" in what sense? Pretend ? Reproduce electronically? Toy with? Since there is in the rest of the sentence no corresponding image to make clear which he means. we are left with only the vague feeling that Stendahl does not approve of such goings on.

Harvey Cox’s use of images suffers from the same malaise. He has social change jarring the patterns of experience. That is quite conceivable -- until we come upon the verb "disappear." Things don’t disappear because they are jarred; they get off center, perhaps they even shatter, but they don’t simply evaporate. Of course, being true to the metaphor here would mean an entire re-evaluation of the premise. Next we have a "thickly clotted symbol system," which at first seems to hold interesting possibilities. But it is being replaced by "a highly differentiated and individuated urban culture," which is not described in images at all and which completely drains the initial image of meaning. Finally, we have symbols "collapsing" because they do not "illuminate" "shifting" reality. One can imagine symbols as searchlights seeking out a fugitive reality lurking in the shadows. But if the searchlight fails, does it collapse? Again, as with the patterns disappearing because they are jarred, a desire to overstate the case lies behind the myopic use of images.

False Limbs

Orwell next attacks what he calls "operators or false limbs" -- the shoddy phrases that slip so easily from the tongue (or the typewriter) and fill such embarrassingly large blanks both in the thought processes and on paper that we actually grow rather fond of them. "Render inoperative," "militate against," "have the effect of" -- these replace the simple verb (break, stop, change) with a phrase that further dilutes the already weak, all-purpose verb it contains. Thus one avoids being labeled polemical.

Take for example Stendahl’s opening phrase, "would lead us to suggest that." This makes his assumption seem simultaneously tentative and incontrovertible. Observe also how heavily Stendahl leans on the passive voice and the subjunctive mood: was found, could be found, would conceive of, would exercise. Cox too leans on the passive: shaped by, is replaced by, become adapted. And noun groups like "religious experience," "social change," "conventional ways," "cultural patterns" have become verbal counters that can no longer be redeemed for much in the way of hard meaning.

The most obvious flaw of any specialized writing is the jargon it uses -- the insiders’ language. In certain cases jargon is necessary for the sake of precision. This is especially true in the sciences, which must coin words to describe phenomena not previously observed. DNA, for example, is most succinctly called DNA. In fact when a scientist writes for other scientists his language becomes practically incomprehensible to outsiders. But when he writes for interested nonscientists, he goes to a great deal of trouble to explain himself graphically, sometimes even picturesquely. Thus we have "the biological soup" as a description of DNA. Look now at theologians and biblical scholars. They rarely deal with new discoveries that require them to invent a specialized language. Yet they are attached to certain words and phrases, such as "timeless kerygma," that can only be explained as elitisms. Probably the worst thing about the Cox paragraph is its truckling imitation of scientific jargon. The "modes" of the first sentence become "modalities" by the middle of the paragraph. And the "modalities" shift in response to "highly differentiated and individuated urban culture." Suppose you are a black minister who does not care to swathe himself in the trappings of white theology’s pretensions to scientific clubbishness. What are you. to make of such a bloodless corpse of a phrase? What is anyone to make of it?

One problem that afflicts us Orwell was spared. Unaware of the imminent television age, he had only to worry about the degradation of the English language by newspapers, pamphlets and radio. Even in 1984 he did not foresee the sensory free-for-all that we are the battered victims of. We, however, must cope with a new type of jargon whose aim is not to demonstrate superiority but to make a splash in Media City. How do you compete with a television film showing the slaughter of villagers? You proclaim the death of God. How do you avoid being shoved into the background, or indeed off-camera, by black power? You write black theology. How do you meet the charge of the human potential movement that Christianity is all a head-trip? You "do" theology (Doing theology is not to be confused with taking up one’s cross.)

A Theological Responsibility

Lest we think that theology is absolved from responsibility for guarding the powers of language, lest we suppose that there exists no tradition we can draw upon to instruct us in this task, let us listen again to Orwell, certainly no spokesman for the church or Christianity. He translates into modern scholarly English a familiar passage:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Then he quotes the original:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The Secular Vision of a New Humanity in People’s China

To travel in China for the first time in 25 years, as I did last summer, is a profoundly moving experience. One returns to America with an altered vision. Our various crises are grim enough -- but so were China’s in the late 1940s. Signs in New York’s subways shock: "Dial 911 for Rape" and "Fight Drug Abuse." Why should New Yorkers be afraid to walk in Central Park without a dog? We walked the streets of China’s great cities at night alone, chatting freely with strangers -- and with no sense of fear. Young girls strolled arm in arm, children played games mothers cradled babies and talked quietly with neighbors, old men played chess by streetlight.

A Collective Sense of Purpose

We saw no private automobiles in China. Not having a car would seem a hardship in America; I would hate to give up the easy mobility and other personal options I take for granted. But we still have elbowroom in North America, surplus grain and resources, and surviving areas of frontier space and spirit. Thousands of acres lie fallow, or grow up in uncultivated forestland. China has four times the population of the U S. within a land area of roughly the same size. With intensive labor, scrupulous conservation of resources and recycling of human and animal wastes, the Chinese are feeding and supporting themselves without outside aid.

Without private cars, air pollution is minimal, bicycle and bus traffic flows smoothly, and China is self-sufficient in petroleum. If auto ownership in China were proportionate to that in the U.S., there would he 400 million cars alone, and 98 million trucks and buses. Some 72 million new cars would have to be built every year, and one-sixth of the work force would be building or servicing them. Eighty per cent of China’s people still live in rural villages; migration to the cities is balanced by the policy of sending youth to the countryside for a time -- over 10 million in the past six years.

China’s markets were stocked with fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, poultry, fish, pork, dried shrimps, peanuts and grain. The tomatoes were delicious -- at 2 cents a pound. Prices had not changed since 1958, an old friend in Peking told us. A Chinese visitor to the U.S. last year was shocked at our casual waste and self-indulgence, as well as at our prices. I, too, now see our profligacy with clarity. Current inflation should not surprise us.

Many visitors have described the contrasts between old and new China in standard of living and basic social securities for working people. Beyond that, one senses a new spirit, a collective sense of purpose that makes almost any goal seem possible. There is a new value system, a communitarian ethic summed up in the title of Chairman Mao’s best-known essay, "Serve the People." Surely in that ethic lies the secret of People’s China -- the mobilization of human muscle and spirit for building a new way of life.

Yet in China one continually wants to ask, What is the source of that spirit? The visitor is overwhelmed by the total secularization of a society and culture that once placed high value on religious shrines, festivals and symbols. During our visit we saw almost no evidence of surviving religious practice. Among the three major religious groups of pre-liberation China, the public practice of worship appears to have dwindled to little more than token observances.

If religion is seen as the dynamic for social cohesion and personal commitment, then is Maoism a religion? Not if you ask the Chinese: one bright, articulate college student told us that though the Chinese people have freedom of religious belief, "they also have the right not to believe, and the right to propagate atheism." Do any of the young people keep the old religious practices? I asked. "There’s no need to," she insisted. "With scientific materialism as the basis of the new society, the old superstitions were proved false." Only old people, if any, are seen worshiping in the temples. (Indeed, in the temple-museums we visited, no one was worshiping.)

But might not the young people want to talk with older religious believers "to learn from the past," as they often do learn from old peasants and workers? "Why would anyone want to discuss Buddhism?" the student asked. "What does that have to do with our new society? It simply would not interest young people. It’s irrelevant."

Self-Reliant Churches

The Sunday service in the former Bible Society headquarters on Rice Market Street in Peking reportedly has been since 1966 the only Protestant service in China attended by visitors. Sixteen persons were present the Sunday I was there, most of them members of the foreign diplomatic or student community. Three were African Christians. There were seats for about 50 persons in a second-floor meeting room furnished with a grand piano, an organ, and a chancel with lectern, altar table and cross. The service was in Chinese; worshipers followed the liturgy and hymns from mimeographed pages in English and Chinese. There was no sermon, but the pastor read three long Scripture passages from Old and New Testaments. The communion ritual, familiar to me, was conducted by Pastor K’an Hsueh-ch’ing, who was trained as a Methodist. (There are no denominational distinctions now in China.)

After the service the two Chinese pastors told me that weekly services were resumed here Easter Sunday 1972, after a five-and-a-half-year lapse during the Cultural Revolution. These Protestants have no contacts with the Roman Catholics of Peking, who hold services weekly in a church in another part of the city, using the pre-Vatican II Latin rite. Nor do they have ties with Protestants elsewhere in China. There are about 500 Protestants in Peking now, they said.

One of the pastors is on duty at the church daily to meet with Chinese Christians who work on Sundays, or who cannot come for other reasons. Pastor K’an and Pastor Yin Chi-tseng take turns on alternate weeks leading the Sunday service. Since the only Chinese present had been older persons, I asked about the young people. Few of them come to the church, I was told. "They are too busy on Sunday, and they have other interests now."

The building was in excellent condition, with repairs in progress on the tile roof. The pastors explained that the church has its own funds for repairs and maintenance, but that the government sometimes helps with major expenses.

In Nanking we spent an evening in the home of Bishop Ting Kuang-hsun, a former Anglican, and his wife, Hsiu-mei. Both had been in the U.S. for graduate studies in the 1940s and were working for the ecumenical church in Geneva when they decided to return to China in 1951, two years after liberation. Mrs. Ting is a teacher of English at Nanking University and an official of the Provincial Women’s Federation. Bishop Ting, now president of the Nanking Theological College and a deputy to the National People’s Congress, explained that the Anglican Church in China no longer exists. All denominations were merged into a single Protestant Christian Church in the early 1950s. This union made possible the church’s Three-Self Movement, with its emphasis on "self-support, self-government, self-propagation"

Bishop Ting verified our understanding that none of the 38 church buildings in Nanking formerly occupied by Protestant congregations is now used for religious services. The Christians prefer to meet in homes or in schoolrooms, he said, to avoid the stigma of the Western-style churches built during the period of mission expansion in China and linked to the period of foreign imperialist penetration. Four groups meet regularly for worship in Nanking.

The self-reliance of the churches, paralleling the nation’s self-reliant development model, is, in the bishop’s view, one of the two important changes in the Chinese church. "We have severed our dependence on materialism. We have a strong point of view regarding the relationship between the missionary movement and imperialism. Since the early post-liberation years our emphasis has been on severing all relationships with mission organizations."

The second change has been change itself: "Our society is not static; it is changing all the time. Our church cannot simply remain on the level of three-self autonomy. We are changing too. What we are witnessing now is the withering of organized religion. Protestantism is becoming more and more deinstitutionalized and declericalized; more and more it is a world view held by those who call themselves Christian, and the fellowship among them.

One can understand Chinese Christians’ reluctance to identify with that earlier period. Everywhere we went we saw evidence of the Chinese people’s pride in the self-reliance of their nation, neither exploited by nor dependent on other nations. We were told how the great Yangtze River bridge at Nanking -- the first of its kind -- had been designed and built entirely by Chinese.

Bishop Ting confirmed the fact that groups of Christians in Nanking continue to meet together for worship, and that the theological college, which suspended classes in 1966, is now searching for new and relevant ways to train young pastors. Probably they will not study together in a conventional five-year theological course as before, he said; they will more likely remain in the towns and villages to live and work among the people while they study, to avoid an elitist approach to education that would alienate them from the people. This theological program would correlate with the "open door" education now emphasized in the three universities we visited.

Museums for the People

Occasionally, driving through the streets of the cities, we saw church buildings, relics of former days, some of them broken and abandoned, some converted to use as schools, clinics, kindergartens or storehouses. In the midst of the rich green rice fields of the Hsin Min People’s Commune outside Shanghai we saw a huge stone building with a basilisk dome -- obviously a church. Anti-Confucius slogans had been painted in white across the crumbling masonry walls. Our local guide confirmed that this had once been a Roman Catholic church. No longer used, it appeared to be an embarrassment and a nuisance to the commune residents, for it occupied space in the fields needed for food crops. The building was now useful only to store grain.

We saw no functioning Buddhist temples. Some of those we visited had been converted to use as tea houses, hostels or assembly halls; others were maintained as museums. We knew from the reports of other recent visitors, specialists in Buddhism, that they had visited a dozen or more monasteries and temples with resident monks or nuns; still, that number is minuscule for a nation that was nominally Buddhist just one generation ago.

At the Tsu Miao temple in the town of Fo Shan, near Canton, we saw an 800-year-old temple, now maintained as a museum. Many Chinese visitors were viewing it with the curiosity of tourists. According to the museum director, the temple was built during the Sung dynasty by a local landlord who embezzled much of the money he raised from the people for its construction. The director’s explanation of the temple’s role in society was typical of contemporary views of the old religions we heard elsewhere. "Before liberation, this temple was a place for the people to worship the gods," he said, gesturing at the painted wooden idols grimacing in frozen postures. "It was also used by the ruling class to swindle the people with superstitious religious beliefs. After liberation, we opened it as a museum for the people. We show, on the one hand, how the ruling class used the gods to fool and cheat the people; on the other hand, we display the fine workmanship and hard labor of the working people of those times."

I asked the museum director if there are any who still maintain the old religious beliefs. A few old people do, he said. "But that’s unavoidable," he added. "They hold onto old ideas. But they don’t worship here any more. The young people, of course, see it all as superstition.

In a long conversation with the 61 year-old imam in charge of the Chinese Muslim mosque in Hang-chow, I asked about the religious life of his congregation. He indicated that from 30 to 50 persons attend religious services each Friday, and that larger numbers come together for the three festivals each year. But most of them are older persons, he noted. He confirmed the impression given to us by others that China’s young people have a new belief system, one that precludes religion. "They are too busy, and have new values. They believe in socialism and see no need for religion."

The Teaching of Moral Values

If this is true -- and our conversations with a number of the young Chinese reflected this view -- then what is the source of the communitarian values and ethics that seem to motivate China’s people today? We saw no evidence of new religious sects -- no Hare Krishna, no Sokka Gakai or Children of God. Yet the youth of China seem as disciplined and committed as adherents of any of these religious groups. We were told by the students and teachers in every school we visited -- kindergartens, primary schools, middle schools and universities -- that training in moral values is central in the entire educational task.

Organized religion -- defined in conventional terms as an institution with a priesthood or clergy, a doctrinal creed, a liturgy and theology, and a theistic belief with spiritual dimensions transcending this world -- finds no parallel in the experience of China’s youth today, at least among those with whom we talked. But the fruits of religion -- the practice of a moral life, particularly with respect to concern for one’s neighbor and for society -- are in many ways more evident in China than in the West.

Everywhere we went, particularly in the schools, I asked: "What are the moral values that are taught in China today, and how are they transmitted to the young people?" The response invariably began with a recitation of Chairman Mao’s instruction: "Our educational policy must enable everyone who receives an education to develop morally, intellectually and physically and to become a worker with both socialist consciousness and culture."

Said the chairman of the revolutionary committee of the Yangtze River Road Primary School in Nanking: "All our school work aims at transforming the ideology [i.e., values] of our pupils."

In responses of many persons, three themes recurred:

1. The central value is communitarian, a surrender of self on behalf of the community: "Serve the people"; "Fight self, repudiate revisionism" "Remember class struggle"; "Learn from the workers and peasants.

2. There is an eschatological dimension, a commitment to goals beyond self in today’s society and tomorrow’s history, a belief that one day the communist goals for all the people will be achieved at home -- and for all the working people of the world as well.

3. There is a vision of the whole person, a belief that the individual can be changed, transformed and converted, and that society will be changed in the process.

It was customary for the host group at each institution to answer questions from us 18 Americans. At the No. 5 district of the Shanghai dockyards, for example, six of the eight young men and women workers present responded spontaneously to our many questions. At the schools, students answered as readily as teachers. After many such conversations in schools, communes, factories and neighborhoods, it seemed clear to us that moral values are learned both in group study sessions and in practice. The mandatory physical labor of students and teachers in all schools -- up to three months out of each year -- serves to implement the instruction "Learn from the workers and peasants." This practice becomes a powerful instrument for instilling communitarian (proletarian) values.

The aim of the entire educational system thus is related to the teaching of moral values. A new selfless ethic is being stressed -- one aimed at preventing the formation of a class of "intellectual mandarins" who are isolated from the working people of China like the former Confucian-scholar bureaucrats. This goal seemed to be at the heart of the campaign against Confucius and Lin Piao.

The Future of Religion

Will religion survive in China? We were told repeatedly that the constitution of the People’s Republic guarantees freedom of religious belief. We knew that Chairman Mao had spoken against the use of coercion on a number of occasions. His most frequently quoted guideline is taken from his landmark speech of 1957, "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions": "We cannot abolish religion by administrative decree or force people to give up idealism, any more than we can force them to believe in Marxism. The only way to settle questions of an ideological nature or controversial issues among the people is by the democratic method, the method of discussion, of criticism, of persuasion and education, and not by the method of coercion or repression."

At the National Minorities Institute in Peking, and in other exhibitions, we saw photographs and displays of superstitious and oppressive practices of the old religions, particularly Tibetan Buddhism. To the young Chinese, nothing could be further from the spirit and style of the new China than the traditional indigenous religions. Christianity is castigated for its role in the period of imperialist penetration of China. We saw an exhibition in the Shanghai Workers’ Cultural Palace of the history of foreign imperialism, beginning with the Opium War and the "unequal treaties." One panel contained photographs documenting ways in which former Christian mission institutions purportedly practiced cultural imperialism.

Some Chinese with whom we talked were curious about religion. They were amazed to learn that educated persons in the West continue to believe and practice religion. For them, they said, the study of scientific materialism had exposed the logical fallacies and absurdities of religion.

Nonetheless, fundamental religious questions remain. How do the Chinese understand the meaning of life and death? Death is seen in materialist terms, as the termination of one’s time of service for the people. Traditional funeral rites and customs are "vestiges of the feudal superstructure." I asked the chief engineer at the Hsing An Hydroelectric Project how the question of ancestors’ graves was handled when 250,000 peasants from 40 villages were moved from the site of the new reservoir. This was a matter of political education, he said; people had to learn that bones and graves are meaningless material remains. In most cases the graves were excavated and the bones ground up for fertilizer. For those uneducable elderly people who insisted, he said, the graves were moved to new sites. The entire reservoir floor, an area of 580 square kilometers, was scraped clean before it was flooded.

We asked three doctors at the Hsin Hua Hospital in Shanghai how they dealt with cases of terminal illness. Do they practice euthanasia if such patients do not want their lives prolonged? "In China the situation is different," they explained. "Few people do not wish to live, because our social system is different from yours. We try by every means to save the patient. We do ideological work with them to raise their will to live."

What about a hopeless case, in a terminal coma? "Even for these, we do all we can to save them. Medical science keeps advancing; sometimes ‘incurable’ cases become curable. We understand the problem of the suffering of patients and family. But doctors can’t think this way. We’ll try, if there is only 1 per cent of hope.... We once saved a patient whose heart had stopped for 23 minutes. Before the Cultural Revolution we never would have tried. But we saved him by the collective efforts of all our staff, old and young."

Resolving the Contradictions

Life and death, love and grief, human sin and finitude, ultimate mysteries -- I asked the Muslim imam in Hangchow whether or not religious needs will persist in a socialist society. With regard to understanding death and coping with grief, he affirmed that religious faith is, for him, essential. He agreed that there are basic religious needs in any society, but hastened to add that, having been raised in the old society with a firm religious training, he is "half new, half old." His faith provides strength, comfort and meaning in times of personal loss or grief. But for those who have grown up under socialism, "there are contradictions."

He does not believe, however, that there is an insoluble contradiction between religion and socialism. "The integration of religious faith with social reality can be resolved by an understanding of social and scientific progress and development. We acknowledge God as omnipotent. Our religious teaching will confirm, then, that the progress and development of society is also under God’s guidance. The history of social development is inexorable. You can’t turn it around; you must comply with what God has set in motion.

The secularization process for China was, in part, a rejection of primitive superstition and social irrelevance in the traditional religions, and a repudiation of Western cultural imperialism and sterile pietism in the Christian churches. Secularization is a rejection of religious solutions for China’s human and social problems, an affirmation that in humanity alone can be found the source of salvation. This secularizing trend in China, based in the Confucian tradition, can be found in all the reformist and revolutionary movements that followed the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911.

On the other hand, there were significant new movements in both Chinese Buddhism and indigenous Christianity in the three decades prior to 1949. A religious dynamic was at the heart of peasant movements throughout Chinese history, based in chiliastic Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity (in the case of the Taiping Rebellion). Groups of believers still practice their faith in China, under the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religious belief, and the presence of these communities sustains a religious dimension that can enrich an increasingly secularized culture.